The same may be said of the doctrine of election in its plain popular form of statement also. 'I hold,' says Whitefield, in the forcible style which so took his hearers' fancy,—'I hold that a certain number are elected from eternity, and these must and shall be saved, and the rest of mankind must and shall be damned.' A Calvinistic Puritan now-a-days must be either a fervid Welsh Dissenter, or a strenuous Particular Baptist in some remote place in the country, not to be a little staggered at this sort of expression. As to the doctrine of justification in its current, popular form of statement, the case is somewhat different. 'My own works,' says Wesley, 'my own sufferings, my own righteousness, are so far from reconciling me to an offended God, so far from making any atonement for the least of those sins which are more in number than the hairs of my head, that the most specious of them need an atonement themselves; that, having the sentence of death in my heart and nothing in or of myself to plead, I have no hope but that of being justified freely through the redemption that is in Jesus. The faith I want is a sure trust and confidence in God, that through the merits of Christ my sins are forgiven and I reconciled to the favour of God. Believe and thou shalt be saved! He that believeth is passed from death to life. Faith is the free gift of God, which he bestows not on those who are worthy of his favour, not on such as are previously holy and so fit to be crowned with all the blessings of his goodness, but on the ungodly and unholy, who till that hour were fit only for everlasting damnation. Look for sanctification just as you are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to pay, nothing to plead but Christ died.' Deliverances of this sort, which in Wesley are frequent and in Wesley's followers are unceasing, still, no doubt, pass current everywhere with Puritanism, are expected as of course, and find favour; they are just what Puritans commonly mean by Scriptural Protestantism, the truth, the gospel-feast. Nevertheless they no longer quite satisfy; the better minds among Puritans try instinctively to give some fresh turn or development to them; they are no longer, to minds of this order, an unquestionable word and a sure stay; and from this point to their final transformation the course is certain. The predestinarian and solifidian dogmas, for the very sake of which our Puritan churches came into existence, begin to feel the irresistible breath of the 'Zeit-Geist;' some of them melt quicker, others slower, but all of them are doomed. Under the eyes of this generation Puritan Dissent has to execute an entire change of front, and to present us with a new reason for its existing. What will that new reason be?
There needs no conjuror to tell us. It will be the Rev. Mr. Conder's reason, which we have quoted in our concluding essay. It will be Scriptural Protestantism in church-order, rather than Scriptural Protestantism in church-doctrine. 'Congregational Nonconformists can never be incorporated into an organic union with Anglican Episcopacy, because there is not even the shadow of an outline of it in the New Testament, and it is our assertion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles have given us all the laws that are necessary for the constitution and government of the Church.' This makes church-government not a secondary matter of form, growth, and expediency, but a matter of the essence of Christianity and ordained in Scripture. Expressly set forth in Scripture it is not; so it has to be gathered from Scripture by collection, and every one gathers it in his own way. Unity is of no great importance; but that every man should live in a church-order which he judges to be scriptural, is of the greatest importance. This brings us to Mr. Miall's standard-maxim: The Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion! The more freely the sects develop themselves, the better. The Church of England herself is but the dominant sect; her pretensions to bring back the Dissenters within her pale are offensive and ridiculous. What we ought to aim at is perfect equality, and that the other sects should balance her.
On the old, old subject of the want of historic and philosophic sense shown by those who would make church-government a matter of scriptural regulation, I say nothing at present. A Wesleyan minister, the Rev. Mr. Willey, said the other day at Leeds: 'He did not find anything in either the Old or New Testament to the effect that Christian ministers should become State-servants, like soldiers or excisemen.' He might as well have added that he did not find there anything to the effect that they should wear braces! But on this point I am not here going to enlarge. What I am now concerned with is the relation of this new ground of existence, which more and more the Puritan Churches take and will take as they lose their old ground, to the Christian religion. In the speech which Mr. Winterbotham[3] made on the Education Bill, a speech which I had the advantage of hearing, there were uncommon facilities supplied for judging of this relation; indeed that able speech presented a striking picture of it.
And what a picture it was, good heavens! The Puritans say they love righteousness, and they are offended with us for rejoining that the righteousness of which they boast is the righteousness of the earlier Jews of the Old Testament, which consisted mainly in smiting the Lord's enemies and their own under the fifth rib. And we say that the newer and specially Christian sort of righteousness is something different from this; that the Puritans are, and always have been, deficient in the specially Christian sort of righteousness; that men like St. Francis of Sales, in the Roman Catholic Church, and Bishop Wilson, in the Church of England, show far more of it than any Puritans; and that St. Paul's signal and eternally fruitful growth in righteousness dates just from his breach with the Puritans of his day. Let us revert to Paul's list of fruits of the spirit, on which we have so often insisted in the pages which follow: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.[4] We keep to this particular list for the sake of greater distinctness; but St. Paul has perpetually lists of the kind, all pointing the same way, and all showing what he meant by Christian righteousness, what he found specially in Christ. They may all be concluded in two qualities, the qualities which Jesus Christ told his disciples to learn of him, the qualities in the name of which, as specially Christ's qualities, Paul adjured his converts. 'Learn of me,' said Jesus, 'that I am mild and lowly in heart.' 'I beseech you,' said Paul, 'by the mildness and gentleness of Christ.'[5] The word which our Bibles translate by 'gentleness' means more properly 'reasonableness with sweetness,' 'sweet reasonableness.' 'I beseech you by the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ.' This mildness and sweet reasonableness it was, which, stamped with the individual charm they had in Jesus Christ, came to the world as something new, won its heart and conquered it. Every one had been asserting his ordinary self and was miserable; to forbear to assert one's ordinary self, to place one's happiness in mildness and sweet reasonableness, was a revelation. As men followed this novel route to happiness, a living spring opened beside their way, the spring of charity; and out of this spring arose those two heavenly visitants, Charis and Irene, grace and peace, which enraptured the poor wayfarer, and filled him with a joy which brought all the world after him. And still, whenever these visitants appear, as appear for a witness to the vitality of Christianity they daily do, it is from the same spring that they arise; and this spring is opened solely by the mildness and sweet reasonableness which forbears to assert our ordinary self, nay, which even takes pleasure in effacing it.
And now let us turn to Mr. Winterbotham and the Protestant Dissenters. He interprets their very inner mind, he says; that which he declares in their name, they are all feeling, and would declare for themselves if they could. 'There was a spirit of watchful jealousy on the part of the Dissenters, which made them prone to take offence; therefore statesmen should not introduce the Established Church into all the institutions of the country.' That is positively the whole speech! 'Strife, jealousy, wrath, contentions, backbitings,'[6]—we know the catalogue. And the Dissenters are, by their own confession, so full of these, and the very existence of an organisation of Dissent so makes them a necessity, that the State is required to frame its legislation in consideration of them! Was there ever such a confession made? Here are people existing for the sake of a religion of which the essence is mildness and sweet reasonableness, and the forbearing to assert our ordinary self; and they declare themselves so full of the very temper and habits against which that religion is specially levelled, that they require to have even the occasion of forbearing to assert their ordinary self removed out of their way, because they are quite sure they will never comply with it!
Never was there a more instructive comment on the blessings of separation, which we are so often invited by separatists to admire. Why does not Dissent forbear to assert its ordinary self, and help to win the world to the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, without this vain contest about machinery? Why does not the Church? is the Dissenter's answer. What an answer for a Christian! We are to defer giving up our ordinary self until our neighbour shall have given up his; that is, we are never to give it up at all. But I will answer the question on more mundane grounds. Why are we to be more blamed than the Church for the strife arising out of our rival existences? asks the Dissenter. Because the Church cannot help existing, and you can! Therefore, contra ecclesiam nemo pacificus, as Baxter himself said in his better moments. Because the Church is there; because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion are sure to come with breaking off from her; and because strife, jealousy, and self-assertion are the very miseries against which Christianity is firstly levelled;—therefore we say that a Christian is inexcusable in breaking with the Church, except for a departure from the primal ground of her foundation: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.
The clergyman,—poor soul!—cannot help being the parson of the parish. He is there like the magistrate; he is a national officer with an appointed function. If one or two voluntary performers, dissatisfied with the magisterial system, were to set themselves up in each parish of the country, called themselves magistrates, drew a certain number of people to their own way of thinking, tried differences and gave sentences among their people in the best fashion they could, why, probably the established magistrate would not much like it, the leading people in the parish would not much like it, and the newcomers would have mortifications and social estrangements to endure. Probably the established magistrate would call them interlopers; probably he would count them amongst his difficulties. On the side of the newcomers 'a spirit of watchful jealousy,' as Mr. Winterbotham says, would thus be created. The public interest would suffer from the ill blood and confusion prevailing. The established magistrate might naturally say that the newcomers brought the strife and disturbance with them. But who would not smile at these lambs answering: 'Away with that wolf the established magistrate, and all ground for jealousy and quarrel between us will disappear!'
And it is a grievance that the clergyman talks of Dissent as one of the spiritual hindrances in his parish, and desires to get rid of it! Why, by Mr. Winterbotham's own showing, the Dissenters live 'in a spirit of watchful jealousy,' and this temper is as much a spiritual hindrance,—nay, in the view of Christianity it is even a more direct spiritual hindrance,—than drunkenness or loose living. Christianity is, first and above all, a temper, a disposition; and a disposition just the opposite to 'a spirit of watchful jealousy.' Once admit a spirit of watchful jealousy, and Christianity has lost its virtue; it is impotent. All the other vices it was meant to keep out may rush in. Where there is jealousy and strife among you, asks St. Paul, are ye not carnal?[7] are ye not still in bondage to your mere lower selves? But from this bondage Christianity was meant to free us; therefore, says he, get rid of what causes divisions, and strife, and 'a spirit of watchful jealousy.' 'I exhort you by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be not divisions among you, but that ye all be perfectly joined in the same mind and the same judgment.'[8]
Well, but why, says the Dissenting minister, is the clergyman to impress St. Paul's words upon me rather than I upon the clergyman? Because the clergyman is the one minister of Christ in the parish who did not invent himself, who cannot help existing. He is not asserting his ordinary self by being there; he is placed there on public duty. He is charged with teaching the lesson of Christianity, and the head and front of this lesson is to get rid of 'a spirit of watchful jealousy,' which, according to the Dissenter's own showing, is the very spirit which accompanies Dissent. How he is to get rid of it, how he is to win souls to the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, it is for his own conscience to tell him. Probably he will best do it by never speaking against Dissent at all, by treating Dissenters with perfect cordiality and as if there was not a point of dispute between them. But that, so long as he exists, it is his duty to get rid of it, to win souls to the unity which is its opposite, is clear. It is not the Bishop of Winchester[9] who classes Dissent, full of 'a spirit of watchful jealousy,' along with spiritual hindrances like beer-shops,—a pollution of the spirit along with pollutions of the flesh;[10] it is St. Paul. It is not the clergyman who is chargeable with wishing to 'stamp out' this spirit; it is the Christian religion.
But what is to prevent the Dissenting minister from being joined with the clergyman in the same public function, and being his partner instead of his rival? Episcopal ordination.[11] If I leave the service of a private company, and enter the public service, I receive admission at the hands of the public officer designated to give it me. Sentiment and the historic sense, to say nothing of the religious feeling, will certainly put more into ordination than this, though not precisely what the Bishop of Winchester, perhaps, puts; this which we have laid down, however, is really all which the law of the land puts there. A bishop is a public officer. Why should I trouble myself about the name his office bears? The name of his office cannot affect the service or my labour in it. Ah, but, says Mr. Winterbotham, he holds opinions which I do not share about the sort of character he confers upon me! What can that matter, unless he compels you, too, to profess the same opinions, or refuses you admission if you do not? But I should be joined in the ministry with men who hold opinions which I do not share! What does that matter either, unless they compel you also to hold these opinions, as the price of your being allowed to work on the foundation: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity? To recur to our old parallel. It is as if a man who desired the office of a public magistrate and who was fitted for it, were to hold off because he had to receive institution from a Lord-Lieutenant, and he did not like the title of Lord-Lieutenant; or because the Lord-Lieutenant who was to institute him had a fancy about some occult quality which he conferred on him at institution; or because he would find himself, when he was instituted, one of a body of magistrates of whom many had notions which he thought irrational. The office itself, and his own power to fill it usefully, is all which really matters to him.