The same emphasis on higher motives is characteristic of Christian treatment of the questions connected with property. Christianity is certainly not pledged to uphold any particular form of property as such. Whether property had better be held by individuals, or by small groups, as in the case of the primitive Teutonic villages, or of the modern Russian or Indian village communities, or again by the State, as is the proposal of Socialists, is a matter for experience and common sense to decide. But where Christian ethics steps in is, firstly, to shew that property is secondary not primary, a means and not an end. Thus, in so far as Socialism looks to the moral regeneration of society by a merely mechanical alteration of the distribution of the products of industry or of the mode of holding property, it has to be reminded that a change of heart and will is the only true starting-point of moral improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be too often asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in itself a good at all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in themselves. Their effect on character depends on the use made of them, though no doubt the responsibility of those who have property is greater, because they have one instrument the more for the purposes of life. And so, secondly, Christianity urges that if there is private property, its true character as a trust shall be recognised, its rights respected and its attendant duties performed. These truths it keeps steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object-lesson of the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those who had property sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every man according to his needs[435], an object-lesson enforced and renewed by the example of the monastic communities, with their vow of voluntary poverty, and their common purse. So strongly did the early Fathers insist on the duty, almost the debt, of the rich to the poor, that isolated passages may be quoted which read like a condemnation of all private property[436], but this was not their real drift. The obligation which they urged was the obligation of charity.
(2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity has strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which itself is one form of charity or love, the motives which make men good citizens, good property-holders, and so has supplemented the moral forces of the State, by raising the common standard of opinion and conviction on which ultimately all possibility of State-action rests. But the word charity is used not only in the wider, but also in a narrower sense, of one special form of love, the love of the strong who stoops to help the weak.
It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has been a mark of the Christian type of character, but the uniqueness of Christian charity has probably been exaggerated. The better Stoics recognised the active service of mankind, and especially of the poor and miserable, as part of the ideal of a perfect life. Their severity was crossed by pity. As Seneca puts it in one pregnant phrase, they held that 'wherever a man is, there is room for doing good[437].' And so Stoicism had, its alimentationes, or homes for orphan children, its distributions of grain, its provisions for the sick and for strangers[438]. Christianity and Stoicism, it may seem, were walking along the same road; but the difference was this, 'what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it were with the painful calculation of old age, the Church was doing, almost without thinking about it, in the plenary masterfulness of youth, because it was her very being thus to do[439].' She did it with all the ease and grace of perfect naturalness, not as valuing charity without love, for 'if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing[440],' but because love forthwith blossomed forth into charity. 'And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world.... Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judæa[441].'
And so it became the recognised and traditional duty of the Church to maintain the cause of the weak against the strong, of the poor against the rich, of the oppressed against the oppressors. The Bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries exercised 'a kind of religious tribunate[442].' In the Middle Ages, the Church urged on those in public and private stations the duties of charity, pity, humanity. The author of the latter part of the De Regimine Principum[443] ascribed to S. Thomas Aquinas lays down as one of the chief duties of a king, the care of the weak and the succour of the miserable. Nor did the Church in England in pre-Reformation times fail in her duty in this respect. She pleaded for the manumission or at least the humane usage of the serfs. She undertook through her monasteries the relief of the poor. Her prohibition of usury, however mistaken it may seem to us, was a real protection to debtors against one of the worst forms of tyranny, that of the unscrupulous creditor. Since the Reformation her record has not been so clean. The shock of the Reformation left her weak. The traditional sanctions of her authority were shaken. In the long struggle of the seventeenth century her close association with the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the stronger half of the nation. She was not independent enough to act as arbiter, and in committing herself without reserve to opposition to the national claim for freedom she was untrue to her earlier and better traditions. At the same time allowance must be made for the licence, the disorder, and the recklessness with which the claims of liberty were associated, and for the identification of the popular party with views of religion, which, whatever else may be said for them, are not those of the Church. The leading churchmen believed that its triumph meant the disappearance of that historical Church, which they rightly regarded as the only effective safeguard of English Christianity. After the Restoration the Church was stronger, and the increase of strength shews itself on the one side in greater independence of the Crown, and on the other in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable societies and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance of the charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished daughter of the Church. The 'Religious Societies' which in a quiet and unassuming way were a great influence in social life, had among their objects the visiting and relief of the poor, the apprenticing of the young, the maintenance of poor scholars at the University. Charity schools were established throughout the country: hospitals and parochial libraries founded, while societies like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge date back to the last years of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries[444]. Then as the Georgian period begins, all this vigorous life seems for a long period to die down, or only to find vent in the great Wesleyan movement which, beginning within the Church, passes out beyond it, and ultimately becomes stereotyped in more or less pronounced separation from her communion. It was the policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to keep down the Church, and they succeeded—to the grave loss of English morality. If in some degree the Church in England at the present time is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and class morality, and giving more effective witness against the luxury and neglect of their work-people, which are the besetting sins of the great English manufacturing classes, it is due partly to the revival in England of the true idea of the Church as a great spiritual society, and partly to the fact that English statesmen, from sheer inability owing to the conditions of political life to do otherwise, have left her more free to manage her own business and to develop her mission to the English people in accordance with the laws and aspirations of her own inner life.
It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such as that of modern England that the Christian law of self-sacrifice, which crosses and modifies the purely competitive tendency leading each individual to seek his own interest and that of his family, should be strongly and effectively presented. No doubt it is true that the increased knowledge of the structure and laws of social life which we possess, have made charity more difficult than in the Middle Ages: they have not made it less necessary, or a less essential feature of the Christian character. And so, in a democratic age, the protection of the weak and the oppressed will take a different colour. Whether supreme control is in the hands of one or many, it may be used tyrannically. And the most effective exercise of the tribunate of the Church will lie in guarding the rights of conscience and the great national interest of religion against hasty and unfair pressure. And this brings us to our next point.
(3) The drift of the argument has been to shew the incompleteness and inevitable limitations of the State, considered as a moral guide of the social life of mankind. But that incompleteness rises to its maximum, those limitations press most closely when we pass from morality to religion. If it is the highest duty of the State to maintain true and vital religion[445], it is a duty which of itself it is altogether incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle Ages shewed conclusively that the subordination of the State to the Church did not tend either to good government, or to the maintenance, pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion, the experience of English post-Reformation history has as conclusively shewn that the subordination of the Church to the State leads on the one hand to the secularization of the Church, and on the other to a grave danger to national life, through the loss of a spiritual authority strong enough, as well as vigilant and independent enough, to reprove social sins and to call to account large and influential classes. The conditions under which the Tudor idea of a Christian commonwealth was possible have passed away, and there seem to remain two possible conclusions from the premises.
The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that Church and State should be separate from one another, as e.g. in America, and left free to develop, each on its own lines, their respective missions in the national service—'a free Church in a free State.' The current of opinion in England in favour of disestablishment, undoubtedly a strong, though probably not at the present time an increasing one, is fed from many smaller streams. There are Agnostics who believe that religion is the enemy of progress, and that Christianity especially shackles free thought, and hinders the advance of social reformation, and to whom therefore it seems a clear duty to undermine by every means open to them the hold of Christianity on the centres of social and intellectual life, on schools and universities, families and states. They favour disestablishment as one means to this end. Two principal causes seem to move those who are primarily statesmen in the direction of disestablishment. One is the conception of the State as the great controlling and guiding organization of human life[446], supreme over all partial societies and voluntary associations formed to guard parts or sides of life, and the attempt to mould national life by this guiding idea and its logical consequences. This attempt is encouraged by the extreme simplicity of the English Constitution in its actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of Parliament[447]. The other is their practical experience that in view of the divided condition of English Christianity, the most stubborn and intractable difficulties in legislation arise from, or are aggravated by, religious differences. They suppose that these would be lessened if the State took the position of impartial arbiter between rival denominations. Among Nonconformists there are no doubt some who, looking at the Church as the natural rival of their own society, think to weaken her by disestablishment, but there are also many who believe that disestablishment would be a gain to English religion, and that the life of the Church would be more real, more pure, more governed by the highest motives, if she were freed from all direct connection with the State. Lastly, there is no doubt that the idea of the return to the looser relations between Church and State which prevailed in the earliest Christian centuries, has a great attraction for a considerable body of churchmen. They would perhaps have been willing enough to accept the royal supremacy under a religious sovereign in thorough harmony with the beliefs and modes of working of the Church, but the revolution by which the House of Commons has risen to supreme power in England, has given it, not in the theory, but in the actual working of the constitution, the ultimate control over matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling the free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of Commons is doing an injury to religion compared to which disestablishment would be a lesser evil.
On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we have the opinion of the venerable Dr. Döllinger, reported by Dr. Liddon, that the disestablishment of the Church in England would be an injury to the cause of religion throughout Europe. And so weighty an opinion may well make us carefully scrutinize those difficulties and tendencies which make for disestablishment. It is no doubt true that from one point of view the idea of the Church as a great spiritual society seems to require her entire freedom to control her own development, and therefore the absence of all formal connection with the State. But there is nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in any sense of logic in which it is near to life and therefore true, than the attempt to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral, political, social, by neglecting all its factors but one, even if it be the most important one. Nor does it follow that, because we recognise that in a certain condition of things, more harm than good will be done by a particular application of a truth which we accept, therefore we have ceased to hold that truth. It only shews that our ideal is complex.
And so from another point of view the most perfect ordering of things would seem to be one in which Church and State were two parts of one whole, recognising one another's functions and limits, and mutually supporting one another. Thus religion would be put in its true place as at once the foundation and the coping stone of national life. And the State with all its administration would be given a distinctly Christian character. The difficulty in England is to maintain this point of view in connection with the increasingly non-religious (not necessarily anti-religious) colouring of the State, and of the fierce struggles of party government which destroy the reverence which might otherwise attach to the State and its organs. As the State has become increasingly lay, its moral weight has sunk, its hold on consciences become less. But the truth remains that religion is an element in the highest national life. 'A national Church alone can consecrate the whole life of a people[448].' And a national Church can only mean an established Church, and a Church which either has great inherited wealth of its own, or is supported in part by national funds. 'Of all parts of this subject,' says Mr. Gladstone[449], 'probably none have been so thoroughly wrought out as the insufficiency of the voluntary principle.' It is insufficient (i.e. for maintaining national religion), first, because after a certain level of moral deterioration has been reached by individuals or masses of people, the demand for religion is least where the want is greatest; and secondly, because in consequence of the structure of social life there are always large classes of the community who, while just provided with the bare necessaries of life, have not sufficient means to enable them to sustain the expense of the organs of the higher life in any form. We recognise this in the case of education; we can hardly refuse to recognise it in the case of religion.
For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible conclusion from the data, viz. that it is desirable that there should be some definite and permanent connection between Church and State, but not such connection as will either subordinate the State to the Church or the Church to the State. And such a result would seem to be best attainable by some such system of relations as that between the Established Church and the State in Scotland, or the Roman Catholic Church and the State in France. Thus in Scotland, on the critical point of jurisdiction, the position is this. The Church Courts are final: there is no appeal to a Civil Court except on the ground of excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment of the Church Courts, so far as it involves civil consequences, may be enforced by application to the Civil Courts[450]. In France we have to distinguish the relations of Church and State as constitutionally defined from those relations in their actual working. No constitutional relations, however admirable, can work when the State constantly encroaches, and where its whole attitude is one of hostility to the Church. In theory, however, the position in France is, except on one point, much the same as in Scotland. There is a complete system of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Roman Catholic Church based on the Canon Law and administered by the bishops acting as judges. From their decisions there is no appeal to the Civil Courts except on the ground of abuse (appel d'abus). On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no coercive jurisdiction, nor are their sentences carried out by the Civil Courts[451]. They bind, therefore, only in foro conscientiae and this is found sufficient. There is one point worthy of special notice in the French system, that while the relations of the State to the Roman Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are regulated by a special Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies, the French Reformed Church, and the Church of the Augsburg Confession, as well as the Jewish body, are also endowed. Alongside of a system by which the Church is established there is a concurrent endowment of other Christian and even non-Christian denominations.