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

by Various

So much the better, many broad Churchmen will say. The articles are the skeleton of a dead theology, it would be well if it were buried out of sight. Not so, say Sir R. Palmer and the great body of zealous Churchmen whom he represents so ably. And of the rest—the synagogue of the Libertines, we might call them—we may surely say that a Church in which all sorts of opinions are endowed and invested with such sanction and influence as a State establishment can impart, would become in time more like a synagogue of Satan than a Church.

We contend, then, strenuously for an honest liberty of thought, bounded only by the broad limits of Scripture and the teachings of the Holy Ghost; and we hold that it is only possible to realize it under our independent conditions. The attempt to square the free movements of the Christian mind of the community with the legal construction of ancient Church documents must grow increasingly impracticable, and in the end hateful to all upright, earnest, truth-loving souls.

But it is not as the minister to the intellectual progress of the community, though the progress of an age is never secure until it is keyed by its theology, that the genius of Nonconformity has rendered the most conspicuous service to the world. Its great mission in all ages has been to care for the purity and intensity of the spiritual life of society. Power to live in holier, closer fellowship as Christians, to make the Church more like what Christ meant it to be, and through the Church the world, has been the one thing which Nonconformists have striven to secure by separation, and to cherish for the help and salvation of mankind. They have done much for the light of divine truth; they have done more for the life of God in society. It may be said of them with a truth of which Lucretius little dreamed, noble dreamer as he was—

'Et quasi cursores vitäi lampada tradunt.'

And to estimate this fairly we must turn again to the past, to the fons et origo of our power.

The English Reformation differed in one most essential point, be it for good, be it for evil, from all the other Reformations of Europe. It was distinctly a constitutional movement, carried out from the commencement to the close by the constituted authorities of the land. It was not forced on the rulers by a burst of popular enthusiasm, stirred by some great preacher; nor on the other hand, and on this point we often do it scant justice, was it forced by the rulers on a careless or unwilling people. In the first and second Parliaments of Elizabeth, the House of Commons was far in advance both of the Lords and of the Queen. It was fairly the movement of the nation acting through its political organs. Hence it had a character of compromise here in England which it bore nowhere abroad. Various interests had to be conciliated, as is inevitable in government under a mixed constitution like ours. The laggards had to be thought of as well as the vanguard. Catholics as well as Puritans had to be considered in every bill that was passed through Parliament; and thus our cumbrous incoherent Church system, the child of policy and compromise, was shaped and grew.

This method was the parent of many miserable evils. The monarchical and aristocratic influence was altogether too potent. Had the House of Commons under Elizabeth been free to carry out its judgment, a Church might have grown up pure, noble, beautiful, compared with the present, and might have spared the nation some of the sorest pains of Nonconformity. A hint of what might have been possible we see in the curious account of the Church at Northampton in 1571; and still more perfectly in the first draft of the Constitution of the Hessian Church. But then the result would have been gained most probably, and none knew it better than Elizabeth, at the cost of a tremendous and premature civil war. The key of Elizabeth's policy, and the secret of the great work which she accomplished, was that beyond even Cecil she was a national politician. But on the whole, and in the long run, we are bound to confess that the evils were not without at any rate some counterbalancing advantages. It is always thus with all great human institutions and movements. More or less of evil mingles with the good in all of them; and even in those in which the evil seems largely to preponderate, there are always some elements of blessing to be set in the opposite scale.

Now this feature of our English Reformation has had one remarkable result. Being essentially a compromise, a concession to parties on this side and on that; being the fruit, not of the toil and travail of our most spiritual men, but of the politic judgment, of the average intelligence and spiritual life of the community, the purer spirits, the men of the higher order, touched with the diviner fire, were from the very first driven into opposition. Instead of resting in the movement and ruling it, they found that it stopped miserably short of what they believed to be practicable, and were sure was right. The foremost men of the nation in point of spiritual insight and power from the first were discontent, and then, as time wore on, malcontent, through the earlier days of the Puritan struggle; and then, when time brought no reform, but rather tightening of bonds, they were constrained to become Separatists. A pure and intense, if not powerful, Nonconformist party began to organize itself, of whose life and aims in the early days we could say much did our space allow, which, sealing its testimony with its tears and its blood, handed down its sacred legacy to succeeding generations. We owe it to the special constitution of the Anglican Church, the method of whose growth we have glanced at, that in all generations since the Reformation there has been a considerable, earnest, enthusiastic body of Christian men and women in England devoted to the cause of political and ecclesiastical reform.

This state of things, the coincidence of political and ecclesiastical tyranny on the one side, and of political and ecclesiastical Nonconformity on the other, due to the special organization of the National Church, has had two notable and benign results. It has identified the spiritual and the secular progress of society in England. With us the great political questions fell early into spiritual hands. The men who sympathized with the 'Millenary Petition,' were the men who commenced under James the Parliamentary struggle which was conducted to a triumphant issue under Charles. And if we contrast our own revolutionary struggles with the French, the last—dare we say the last?—the ghastliest, and most horrible act of which is but now complete, we shall estimate the full significance of the fact which we have noted. Then, and not less important, it has kept our best and most earnest men constantly in opposition—in the wilderness as it were, voices crying in the desert—whereby the purest life of the nation has been kept free from the corruption which never fails to attend on worldly prosperity and power. Thus it has been able to preserve its life pure, its light intense, to illumine the darkness and enlighten the dulness of the whole community.

We hear much of what the culture of the Church has done for Nonconformity; and we gladly acknowledge it. We hear less of what the life of Nonconformity has done for the Church. The balance of the exchange would show the largest debt, the debt of life, due to the Nonconformist side.