Same to the Same.
Octa is so interested in the Sanitary Committee of the C.O.S.... All the men who have worked from the beginning are there and many others besides. It is not wonderful that Octa should be among them, and able continually to say a word in season. Dear child, the mantle has fallen on her.[[68]]
QUESTION OF REMAINING IN THE CHURCH
14, Nottingham Place, W.,
December 15th, 1872.
To Mrs. Nassau Senior.
As to the points on which you and I equally differ from so many clergymen and churchmen, if we think Maurice’s interpretation of the creeds the true and simple one, is it not doubly incumbent upon us to uphold it in the Church? Leaving it would be like saying we could not honestly stay in it. Then does not all the best, most thorough, most convincing, most peaceful reform of any body come from within? in family, in business, in nation, in Church? Does not all growth and reform come from those who remain with the company in which they find themselves? Is there not almost always a right at the root of the relationship, which may be asserted and vindicated, and on the recognition of which reform depends? That body must be corrupt indeed, which must be left by earnest members of it. Surely there are abundant signs of growing healthy life and reform in the Church; all the vigorous and new things nearly are signs of good. Why should you set up the decidedly old-fashioned interpretation of doctrine, and that held by a certainly decreasing number in the Church, and feel hardly honest in differing from it and remaining in the Church?
Don’t think I am special-pleading. Except for the sake of the Church, I don’t care where you are. While you are what you are, you are safe everywhere; for you will find grace and goodness in all things; and God’s Church certainly comprehends those not in the Church of England. If you are sure that the services do not speak to and with you in words that help; if there is a lurking sense of want of courage or candour in remaining, which is real, not fancied; if you have a sense of antagonism and alienation, not support and fellowship, why not leave the Church? Those who love and know you would never feel you further from them; and, if you found support and peace greater from other teaching and other services, why not go where you would have it? To me, of course, the old services, which first opened to me the sight of how things are, and how they should be, come home to me with a gathered force almost weekly. To me there open continually new visions of how our Church will expand and adapt itself to the large comprehensiveness and new needs of the time. I believe the men who are now in her will cling on, with passionate affection, to the creeds and services; but that they will link themselves more with the outer world, and see with clearer eyes; and that the Church will insensibly grow with and by their growth.
I see in such movements as Mr. Fremantle’s Church Council, open to people of all creeds by election, a sign of much deeper and wider faith than churchmen have hitherto recognised as possible in the Church. I see in it, also, much ground of hope in the added responsibility and interest possessed by laymen. The new permission to use churches for lectures on secular subjects seems to me another sign of the breaking down of formal distinctions, and recognition of life as holy.
14, Nottingham Place, W.,