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

by Various

At this moment the party in the Church which is the most strongly devoted to the Establishment principle is, theologically, the most colourless. The most solid argument, as it seems to us, which sustains the Establishment platform, would lead us to regard its ministers as a kind of Levitical order—the clerisy, as Coleridge has it—which would aim at little higher than a civilising, humanizing mission to the ignorant, the vicious, and the wretched in the land. God forbid that we should for a moment speak slightingly of such a service, rendered by such men as are now at the disposal of the State for this most blessed work. But it is no longer specially clerical work. The world is busy about it by a thousand agencies, which more than compete with the clerical; and it is hardly a question whether the world at large would be prepared to maintain a costly and highly-favoured order of men to do the work which in these days is the general charge of society. But the work of the Gospel, of which St. Paul strikes the key-note in the first chapters of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, is of a widely different order. The school of which we have spoken deals chiefly with the diffused light of Christianity which is abroad in the atmosphere of a Christian state; the preacher after the Pauline type (and the world cannot spare him yet) unveils the solar light and fire. The affirmative force, the penetrating, searching fire of Christianity, has from the first been mainly with the communities which have been unable to find room within the bosom of the moderation of the Church of England for their truth and for their zeal. The moderation paled the one and chilled the other, and drove them forth into a separation which seemed to them in those days as bitter and unnatural as the violent disruption of a Christian home, so strongly did the idea of the family life of a nation possess men's hearts, so strongly did man's imagination cling to the visible unity of the Church.

Few who love the truth of the Gospel would, we imagine, be disposed to question that the higher life of the Church, that which makes its gospel the power of God unto salvation, was more fully represented in the early days of King James by men like Dr. Rainolds than by Bancroft and the party which he and Whitgift represented at the Conference at Hampton Court; by the Nonconforming clergy rather than by the Court party in the early days of the Restoration; by the Methodists rather than by the bishops and clergy of the Georgian Church; by the Free Churchmen rather than by the residue of the Established clergy of Scotland in the early days of our Queen. The affirmative side, the energy of strong belief, strong assertion, strong purpose and endeavour, has been seen mainly in the Nonconformist communities; while the Established Churchmen have on the whole cultivated, with a fair measure of energy and with conspicuous ability, the broad fields of thought and life which the energy of more enterprising and earnest communities has won. We claim for our fathers that they represented on the whole the affirmation of the Gospel; the belief which sets a man's face like a rock against the tide of worldly temptations and seductions, which so few churches find strength to stem, while it nerves his arm to wield effectually that sword of the Spirit which cuts its way most deeply into the camp of the Devil, which the Lord came to storm and to destroy. Apology and exposition have been the main strength of Anglican Church literature and activity. The words which have been the advanced guards as it were of liberty and progress; the pointed, pungent, vivid, stirring treatises which have laid hold most powerfully on the popular heart, and have been the chief auxiliaries of the Gospel in turning men from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, have come forth mainly from the Nonconformist schools. Not that there has been, or can be, any monopoly of gifts or functions in a country in which classes and orders are so happily mixed and forced into association as in England. The Church has not neglected the Sword of the Spirit, the Nonconformists have not laid by the implements of culture; but still, on the whole, taking a broad view of the character and work of the two communions, we believe that there is substantial justice in the distinctions which we have laid down.

The culture of the Church of England is a favourite topic with her apologists. And most justly. On the whole, she has probably been the most learned, polished, and politic Church in Christendom. We Nonconformists have no long list of names of the first eminence in the ranks of scholarship which may compare with the long line of able scholars and champions of the faith whom the Anglican Church has sent forth. But then the conditions of life in the Church of England are precisely those which are most favourable to this special development; and unfavourable, we think, in no small measure, to the growth and free activity of yet higher things. Our men in all generations have had in the main yet higher work on hand than theological scholarship; and work, we venture to think, still more profoundly important to the best interests of the community. The exiles in Holland in the early years of the 17th century produced works of scholarship which may compare with anything, save such a master-piece as Hooker's, which emanated from the Anglican divines of their time. Henry Ainsworth was one of the ablest Biblical scholars in Europe. He was 'living on ninepence a week and some boiled roots' as a bookseller's porter, when his master discovered his skill in Hebrew, and put him in the way of more congenial work. In Moreri's Dictionary full justice is done to Henry Ainsworth—'the able commentator on the Scriptures;' while he is carefully distinguished from 'Ainsworth the heresiarch, one of the chiefs of the Brownists;' nothing being more indubitable than that the two were the same man. John Robinson, too, was a man of large culture as well as conspicuous intellectual power. His controversial works reveal a learning, a wisdom, a breadth of view, a foresight, a large-hearted charity, joined to the most intense conviction on the points which made him a separatist, which are rarely to be found in a great theological champion in any age of the world.

But, after all, these men had higher and harder work on hand than thinking and writing as scholars, and work which the world could less easily spare. Those exiles in Holland, by their toil and their suffering, were nursing and training that spirit which created the American Republic, and which rules it still. The world probably wanted that work just then more than the rarest scholarship; though intellectual power was at a low ebb at that particular crisis in the Anglican Church. And the world found what it supremely wanted, the simplest, purest, toughest, noblest band of colonists ever sent forth from any country. In the rude, rough times which succeeded, the leaders of the great action which settled on a sure basis for ever the liberties of our country, were of the Nonconformist Schools. The men who did such work for England as the conduct of that long and tremendous struggle to its glorious issue, might well be pardoned if their culture were of a poorer type than that of their antagonists. But it is really marvellous how, during the storm of the Civil War, Nonconformist learning and intellectual ability flourished. Lord Brook and Peter Sterry, leading spirits among the Independents, were deeply tinctured with Platonic learning; they drew their large and liberal ideas from a deeper than an Arminian spring. In John Howe strong traces of the same Platonic element may be discovered. There seems to have been a certain native affinity between this young Independency and the thoughts of the great master of ideal philosophy in the ancient world. At the time of the Restoration, probably the most many-sided, variously-accomplished, and masterly man was Richard Baxter. His position in relation to the Church and Nonconformity through the most active part of his career, was not unlike the position which Erasmus held during the Reformation between Protestantism and Rome. But most certainly, despite his views 'on National Churches,' it was mainly from the Nonconformist springs that his life was nourished, and the weight of his influence was thrown practically into the Nonconformist scale.

But perhaps of all the able men who were busy about things theological and political, about the time of the Westminster Assembly, there was not one who thought so freely and wrote so liberally as John Goodwin, the Independent.[37] Far from feeling himself shut up, as we Independents hear that we are shut up, to the traditions of the elders, which were unquestionably strongly Calvinistic, he discerned and grasped whatever good there might be in the Arminian scheme of doctrine; while his views on public affairs, on political and religious liberty, on toleration, on the welfare and progress of states, were more in the key of modern ideas than anything else which is to be met with in the literature of those times. A man must have had a far sight and a brave heart who could write concerning the Scriptures in those days and in such an atmosphere, 'The true and proper foundation of the Christian religion is not ink and paper, not any book or books, not any writing or writings whatsoever, whether translations or originals, but that substance of matter, those glorious counsels of God concerning the salvation of the world by Jesus Christ, which are indeed represented and declared both in the translations and the originals, but are distinct from both.'

Passing on to the midst of the next century, the Nonconformist evangelists of the great Methodist revival were busy in other work than that which occupied the scholars and divines of the not over-earnest or spiritual Georgian Church. But it was more distinctly church work; and it lay far nearer to the heart of the true welfare and progress of the state. The men who established a strong Christian influence over those classes of the population who in times of political ferment are truly the dangerous classes, were mainly Nonconformist. What England owed, socially and politically, to the leaders and ministers of the great Evangelical revival, when the storm of the Revolution swept through Europe, has never been calculated, and never can be. The work of the evangelists among the colliers and miners, and generally among the poorest of the poor, was a grand safeguard to us when our turn of revolutionary trial came. The chief reason why the Revolution in England ran in the main a peaceful and orderly course, while in France it was convulsive and destructive, is to be found in the nexus of the classes which the great Evangelical movement established, and in the gleam of hope which it kindled in the popular heart.

And it is not a little noteworthy that the party in the Church of England which is seeking to repeat, though under widely different, and, as we judge, quite lower forms, the Methodist revival, and is striving hard, and not unsuccessfully, to bring some Christian influence (though many would deny its right to the name) to bear on the vast heathen class in our cities which perplexes and saddens all churches, is that which bears most uneasily the yoke of Establishment, and talks enthusiastically of Disestablishment as emancipation. One of its orators the other day at St. James's Hall, young and enthusiastic, no doubt, but the meeting cheered him to the echo, thus delivered himself: 'Nothing is so fatal as this Establishment, and if the suspension of Mr. Mackonochie should lead to the overturning of that rooks'-nest, so much the better.' (Tumultuous cheering.)

But it may be said, and with a specious colour of truth, that one of the chief virtues of the Establishment principle is, that it comprehends these extreme parties and keeps them under some moderating control. It seems to us that in the past it was entirely for the good of England that the Church did not comprehend the Puritan, the Nonconformist, the Methodist elements. Happily, it was not in the nature of the Church to comprehend them in any sense. Had she been capable of retaining them and subjecting them to her moderating hand, the nation would have lost its ablest leaders, and the Church the most glowing breath of its life. And the best thing that could happen now would be that the High Anglicans should be let alone, to work out in entire freedom their ideas. The State influence lends importance and power to their movement with one hand, while it maddens them by limiting and crippling their freedom of action on the other. There is a spirit working within them which, whether we like it or not, has a definite meaning and purpose, and is destined to become a power. It may be trammelled, cramped, crippled by the action of authority, but it cannot be exorcised or expelled. In the present temper of the public mind, it has a distinct vocation of its own, which it would be well for itself and for the world that it should work out freely. The sooner that it is set perfectly free to try with its own resources what its method is worth, the better for itself, and the better for the people whom it dreams that it can lead and save.

We have spoken casually of the Calvinistic and Arminian creeds. The subject is worthy of some close examination from the point of view of the present article; inasmuch as it is often urged by the advocates of the Establishment, as a strong point in its favour, that the leading Anglican divines of King James and King Charles led the reaction against Calvinism, and made room for Arminian doctrine and influence in the Established Church. It is a point which is urged in the able and temperate article on the Church and Nonconformity which appeared in the last number of the Quarterly Review, which, as well as its liberal rival, evidently feels that the question is no longer speculative but practical, and must be dealt with as one of the leading and most pressing public questions of the day. The tone of both those articles is most significant and assuring to Nonconformists. They both recognise most cordially the large service which the free churches of England have rendered to the cause of liberty and progress, though they do not, of course, yet see their way to make the principle of religious freedom supreme in the conduct of our ecclesiastical affairs. Hear the Quarterly:—'The sects of Nonconformity have been of great service to English progress; it does not follow from this that it would be a great gain to England if there were nothing but sects in which its religion could take refuge and find expression.' (Quarterly Review, No. 260, p. 234.) The change of tone surely is most significant here.

But to return to our immediate subject. King James had no sooner reached England and tested the adulation, so grateful to his coarse, vain nature, with which the Anglican prelates were ready to welcome him, than he discovered that Presbytery agreed with monarchy 'as God agreed with the devil.' Still he was a strong Calvinist, and held the Genevan doctrines in common with Whitgift and the leading doctors of the Anglican Church. He was not without shrewd native wit, and in the Hampton Court Conference, bitter and even brutal as he was to the Puritans, his strong common sense rebelled against the policy which the Bishops would have forced upon him. We owe probably to him that the Lambeth Articles were not incorporated in the formularies of the Church. But before the end of his reign he found that Calvinism agreed with monarchy as ill as Presbytery, and the Church lapsed slowly but steadily, or rose as some may prefer to call it, into Arminian doctrine. But the remarkable thing about the matter is that Calvinism declined and Arminianism rose in favour, just in the measure in which the clergy lent themselves to be ministers of the Court. As matter of history, the vaunted reaction against Calvinism was coincident and consonant with the cry, 'Church and King.' And this opens out an important truth on which it is worth our while for a moment to dwell.