British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV / July and October, 1871

by Various

We cordially adopt the definitions and allegations of the great Anglican. He describes perfectly the necessity which has constrained and the spirit which has animated the great party, which seems at length to stand on the very borders of that Canaan of religious liberty and equality towards which for three centuries it has been struggling through the wilderness, and in which it hopes to find rest and the free play of its life at last.

'Schism is separation—cutting off; cutting ourselves off from that to which we ought to be united. The root of schism is the separation of man from God. He is thereby out of harmony with the universal and ruling system of things. In this way he is out of harmony with all that remains under that presiding system. And the crime of schism lies in this; that it is a contest with Him who has instituted that system—that it arises out of our repugnancy to Him, or (to take the lowest view of it) out of our want of understanding of the principles which he has established for the unity of the world which He has made.'—(A. J. Scott, 'Discourses,' p. 230.)

Schism, then, is separation from that with which God made us to be united. The only schism about which we need be anxious is separation from the truth which can make Divine order in our lives; to which by inward affinities we are related; to which we are bound to attach ourselves, or rather to maintain our attachment, under penalty of perpetual unrest, harm, and loss. The fundamental question of schism is truth—the truth which God has made known as the one basis of the vital fellowships and activities of mankind.

The only principle which could fairly rob us of the justification which the Anglican Archbishop's words afford to us would be, that the State is absolutely the highest expression of the Lord who made and who rules the world, as to the conduct of man's life in the spiritual as well as in the secular sphere. There are secular sects in Europe who lay down this dogma as the fundamental principle of the constitution of society. The State, in their view, has the sole right and the sole power to organize everything, from industry to worship, and there is no higher will than that of the community known to or knowable by man. But this principle presupposes the abolition of the spiritual. Worship and the whole region of man's religious activity must have been already relegated to the domain of senseless superstition, before such an idea could reign. Religion ceases to be an intrusive and disturbing element in the secular realm under such conditions, because it has already ceased to have an independent life. We have no need to spend time in controverting this position. Amongst Christian politicians, lay or ecclesiastical, there can be no need to demonstrate the falseness of a principle which would make Christ and His Apostles the chief schismatics of the world. Even Mr. Arnold, who is as hard upon Nonconformity as a man can be, allows that there are things which may compel separation; and where those are found, by Laud's own definition, the word schism can no longer apply.

Man, like all things, animate and inanimate, is made in concord. There are relations with beings and with things, with the world, with man, and with God, in which his nature moves freely and all his powers are drawn forth to their full strain of work. The secret of free movement in the universe is equipoise. It is not otherwise with man. He is made to sustain certain relations, to exchange certain influences, to fulfil certain functions. There is a condition conceivable in which man would be in entire harmony with all things around him, would move with perfect freedom, and give full expression to all the functions and possibilities of his life. Out of that condition he has fallen; to it he hopes and aspires to return. Schism is that which breaks the harmony, which places him in a wrong relation with all around him, and sets him at war with himself. The first, the fundamental schism, as we have seen, is sin. The Archschismatic, the father of schism, is the Devil. Next, that is of the essence of schism which prevents man struggling back into the harmony; which introduces any unnatural limitations or compulsions into the movements of his soul with regard to that Being, the righting of his relations with whom sets him right with himself and with all the world. Whatever hinders the free movement of man's spirit in relation to God, or limits or thwarts the relations with his fellow-men into which he is drawn by the Spirit; whatever, in fact, makes an order which is not spiritual in the sphere of his duties and life, is schismatic. The first condition of the higher order, the order of the Spirit, is liberty; the free movement of the spiritual element, the free play of the spiritual life, is the essential condition of that unity of the Church for which the Saviour prayed, and for which the Spirit is striving still. When human orders or forms are established as essential bases of communion, schism is inevitable, simply because no human arrangement of man's relations can be co-extensive and conterminous with the plan by which the Spirit is working out the unity of the Church, and which is realizable only through the entire freedom of the movement of His energy in individual human hearts. The cause of schism, adhering to Laud's definitions, is inherent in the very constitution of a system like that of our national Established Church. It is but the repetition, within the limits of a nation, and under national auspices, of the Roman endeavour to found and to govern a church which should be conterminous with Christendom. That which broke up the Roman system and shattered the Roman idea of the Church, was the development of a true national life in the countries of the west, which, speaking roundly, we may date from the thirteenth century. The national development of France in that century really broke up the Mediæval idea of unity, whether conceived of, as by the nobler spirits, under the form of the Holy Roman Empire, or by the commoner under the form of the Holy Roman Church. The great Papal schism which immediately followed, and the seventy years' captivity at Avignon, were the beginning of the end. The dream was dreamed out. The vision of the unity of Christendom under a visible vicar of Christ vanished for ever.

The vision which has replaced it is that of a Federal Christendom—a confederation of national churches, each under its national head, establishing in the spiritual some such order as the Commune dreams of establishing in the political sphere. But it is the same enterprise. We wish our able advocates of Establishment would consider it. It is the endeavour to build the Church on a basis of authority, whether external to the nation, as the Pope, in the ages in which Christendom was conceived of as a visible kingdom, or internal to the nation, as is necessary when the nation rises to the consciousness of individuality, and the assertion of the independence of the national life. It is an aiming at a kind of order in Christ's kingdom which has the root of all disorders in the heart of it; and it has for three centuries blocked the way of the true successor to the Mediæval idea of the unity of Christendom, a unity of spirit unexpressed in formularies or organizations, reigning in all the provinces of man's social, political, and national life.

The Mediæval idea of the unity of the Church was a noble and beautiful vision; far nobler and more beautiful, broader, deeper, grander, than anything that is proposed or that can be proposed under the conditions of a Law-established National Church. The movement of the Reformation both in England and in Germany was a grand step of progress as regards the actual condition and relations of men. The overthrow of the Roman System, the branding it as of the Devil and not of Christ, was an unspeakable gain and progress. But, yet as regards the idea of the Church, in the form which the Reformation assumed in both countries, we hold that it was distinctly a fall. That which England had to substitute for the idea of a Church co-extensive with the Christian name, ruled by a power which professed and was believed to rest its rights and to draw its influence from a sphere beyond this world, perpetuating in Christendom the tradition and the right of apostolic rule, was a miserably narrow, shallow, and selfish assertion of the right of a class to represent Christ in legislating or the Church, and of a James I. to represent Him in ruling it. The inner life of the Church System which the Reformation established in England shines brightly only against the background of Roman atrocity; it is dark enough against any conception of Christ's Kingdom inspired by the Spirit or drawn from the word of God.

If the Establishment principle, as some of its passionate advocates seem to imagine, is to be the permanent form of church life which is to supplant in Christendom the idea which the Roman Church enshrined, but marred and murdered in embodiment, then we say deliberately, Europe, in the long run, will have lost immensely by the Reformation; then the hope of the establishment of a Kingdom of Christ, in which the weary heart of humanity shall realize the fulfilment of the hope which poets and prophets have kept bright before the mind of the world, will be forever dead.

The words Dissenter and Non-conformist are in one sense ugly words; and Protestant must be put in the same category. They define unhappily by negation, that which in its essential nature is strongly affirmative, that which has the spirit of the 'Everlasting Yea' in it as fully as any belief which has ever been formulated by or promulgated among men. It is most unfortunate that the creeds and principles which are most closely related to the political and industrial, as well as to the spiritual progress of mankind, have by accident, as it were, assumed this negative shape in their proclamation of themselves to the world. It is their aspect to their opponents which has become their definition; and this has affixed to them a kind of stigma which has acted most injuriously on their progress. We little realize how this negation has stood in our way. The 'Dis' or the 'Non' is the essential part of us in the estimation of a large number of Churchmen; while the Romanist still finds in the word Protestant a perpetual justification of his antipathy, and a mark for the shafts of his scorn. We have in all generations been regarded as a dissatisfied and dissident race; strong only in opposition, and living by envy and hatred of that which commands the support of the great majority of mankind. It has been believed, in fact, that we rather nurse our grievances, and make the most of them, lest if they were to cease, our raison d'être would at once expire. We believe that this has been to a very large extent the popular notion of us among the members of the Establishment; and the main reason for the impression, were it probed, would be found to be the negation implied in our name. To this day the term Protestant is perhaps the gravest difficulty in the way of the spread of Evangelical ideas and of the Evangelical spirit among the Latin nations of the West.

But in truth the 'yea' is with us rather than with our opponents. The Establishment is the natural home of the true 'Negative Theology.' 'The moderation of the Church of England' is the chief boast of her children—that is, of those who are most loyal to her principle of Establishment, and to whom the term Erastian conveys nothing of which they feel the slightest disposition to be ashamed. And it describes something which is very characteristic of her policy, and which fills a large place in the various 'Apologies' which several schools of Essayists have recently given to the world. Moreover, it seems to us to set forth something which must be maintained if the Established Church is to endure. Just in the measure in which Church parties feel themselves possessed by very positive convictions, and inspired by burning zeal, so the limits of the system grow irksome; while the strongest parties which have arisen within her communion, those with the most intense convictions and the most spiritual aims, have been driven to develope themselves outside her pale.