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

by Various

And this great Nonconformist party has been in all generations the salt of our national life, politically as well as spiritually. The resistance of the seven Bishops to the despotic tolerating edict of King James, is often quoted by Church writers as a noble contribution of the Establishment to the cause of political liberty; and justly, though the Non-jurors must be set in the opposite scale. But we cannot but think of the nobler Nonconformists, persecuted and ground down, to whom the edict would have offered a door of escape from grievous ills, but who stood with the party of resistance, because they cared more for the liberty of the nation than for their own welfare, and preferred to suffer still if the constitutional liberties of England might thereby be sustained. This despised and persecuted band has at the critical moment ruled our revolutions, it has kindled our revivals, it has won and watched our liberties. By the stimulus it has afforded, and the confidence it has created, it has saved us the tremendous catastrophes, the cataclysms, through which alone progress has won its way in less favoured countries. And this is one of the high elements of our happy estate as a people, which we owe incidentally—no thanks, however, to the founders of the Establishment—to the special form which the Reformation assumed in England, and to the organization of our national Church.

Whether the incidental good has or has not been counterbalanced by the very grave and palpable evils which our establishment of religion generated, we have no time here to consider. But a comparison of the actual state of religion, the vigour and vitality of the religious life in England at this moment, with that of Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and Switzerland,[39] where we should say that the Reformation had at once freer course than in England and more decisive results, may suggest the question whether, looking at the matter on a large scale, and through a long day, the loss is altogether on our side.

Now, it is just this Nonconformist element, this light, this leaven, as we contend, of our national life for ages, which it is proposed by an able and influential party to bring into the national Establishment, making it thereby partaker of the fatness of the olive tree of the State Church. But if our argument is worth anything, it is just the missing this through all these ages which has been its salvation. Bring it in, make it rich and powerful, give it State props and stays, and you will rob it of all that makes its life so pungent and stimulating, and will rob the nation thereby of an element which nothing else can supply, and which it would most surely miss. Endow it, and write over its temple, 'Ichabod: The Lord has left it, the glory is gone.'

But why should it be so? Here we approach the core of the controversy between ourselves and the ablest and most liberal of our opponents, with a glance at which we shall conclude. It may be said, and is said, by the broadest of the advocates of Establishment: This spirit has done its work as Nonconformist, and done it bravely; but in that form its work is done. The time is come, we are told, when it should leave the wilderness and enter the pale of society, to work from within, inside the legal pale, at the building up of the Christian State. Surely, it is urged, there is something unhealthy in the life of a community when so much that is purest and most intense is Nonconformist; the more it can be brought in, the better manifestly for the State. On this point the real controversy with those of our opponents whom we most respect and sympathize with, hinges; and it can only be dealt with by opening a yet deeper question, out of which the true answer must come. In such a world as this, the purest spirit, the spirit of Christ, must always to a large extent be Nonconformist. It was so with the Patriarchs, it was so with the Judges, it was so with the Prophets, it was so with the Lord, it was so with the Apostles, it was so with the founders of the great Orders, it was so with all the chief leaders of Reformations and Revivals, who at critical moments have brought salvation for a nation or for the world.

And it must be so, at least, until some far off millennial day. Perfect amalgamation of elements is not possible in a world constituted like this. Unity of form, a visible body comprehending all the higher movements of the life of society, is a thing we may dream of, but shall never see. Just as spirit and flesh keep up an interior antagonism, and progression is possible only through this inward conflict, so there must be this interior discord in every human political society; and its progress will be realized by the action on its mass, its material, of some finer spirit, which must in some measure dwell apart, feeding its life from a diviner spring.

And this separation is the reverse of isolation. 'In the world, not of the world,' is the Christian rule, and it is the very opposite of that of the ascetic. It is the glory of England that there is the freest opportunity for the play of the influence of the smaller communities, which are held together by some special sympathies and beliefs, on the great community at large. And now at last the nation, by opening the Universities, has allowed to these communities the fullest advantages for the culture of their own individual life. It appears to us, to sum up the argument, that the subjection of the free Christian spirit, which seeks and strives to gather light and inspiration continually in fellowships which rest on the word of truth and watch for the guidance of the Spirit, to the regimen of legal authority, just destroys that in it which makes it mordant to the lust and the selfishness of the world around it, that which has been kept in comparative purity through all these ages by being Nonconformist, and which will remain Nonconformist, or, at any rate—for when there is no Church there can be no Nonconformity—will remain free with the freedom which reigns where the Spirit of the Lord is, while the world endures.

No doubt it is at first sight a fair vision, this inclusion of all decently orderly and decently Christian ministries in the land within one pale of order and law: one service, one liturgy, one recognised ministry, one administration of ordinances, throughout the whole country,—the whole people taught out of the same books, at the same time, and by men who have the same claim to their attention, until the nation, in the visible uniformity of its religious acts and expressions, presents a fair image of one visible Church. But it is a mere mirage, a mocking image, no more. The kind of spiritual order which would grow up under such conditions would be deathlike and not lifelike; and the visible uniformity could be maintained only by the strong repression of all that makes the life and progress of a Church.

There is, in the intellectual sphere, something very like this in France. The course of instruction for the youth of France, in all the institutions which are sustained and directed by the State, is very elaborately and admirably organized. It used to be said of a recent Minister of Public Instruction, that it was his glory to reflect that he could sit in his bureau and read from a manual on his table the lesson which was being taught at that particular moment in all the public schools in France. Now, the French Government manuals are admirable. There has been an immense improvement in our English schoolbooks since their compilers condescended to look into the schoolbooks of France. The lesson thus given at a particular hour throughout the country would probably be in every way excellent—the best of its kind. But what is the broad result of this monstrous uniformity, this par ordre supérieur, in every department of a youth's education? It turns out admirable scholars, devoted to scholarship, and admirable theoretical politicians educated in the philosophy of citizenship above every nation in the world. But when a tremendous shock, as at this moment, has broken up their accustomed order, and thrown each in a measure on his own resources to choose the wisest course in perilous emergencies, an utter want of the highest faculty—the faculty of self-guidance in emergencies—is revealed; the people have been as shepherdless sheep, and for want of the higher leadership, we may say, France has been lost.

We see, then, all that is fair in aspect in this vision of one happy, united, and prosperous Church in the country, leaving no room for Nonconformity; but we see too plainly the disastrous cost at which it would be purchased. And we turn to gaze upon another vision, fairer, nobler, more fruitful by far, which would realize our aspiration for the religious future of our land. The country full of a zealous and independent ministry of the Gospel, independent in the highest sense, which includes dependence on Christ; each community working out in entire freedom its conception of what a Church ought to be and what a Church ought to do, and under the guidance of one whom it recognises as Christ's minister, ordained for its service by the manifest unction of the Spirit: diversities of gifts, diversities of methods, diversities of operations, diversities of results; but each Christian company honouring the other and rejoicing in its work, recognising that each one is adding a contribution to a great whole which can be built up only of these independent cells of spiritual life; the whole spiritual body, the Church of England, having no visible form of unity, but manifesting itself spiritually in the whole social estate, the commercial, intellectual, and political activity of England; a fair image, it seems to us, whose grand and solemn aspect could only be parodied by the most elaborate and comprehensive pattern of a law-made National Church.

The broad truth about our times from a spiritual point of view is—and it is a truth on which both Churchmen and Nonconformists may stand—that we have utterly outgrown the power of Establishment to help us, if it ever had any; and that the spiritual conversion and education of the community must be carried on by some higher method, or abandoned in despair. We are struggling out of the pupa state of protection, when the ark of our religious estate was slung tenderly by a net-work of bands and ligatures to the government wall. Slowly, with sore effort and pain, as is the way with all these supreme acts of development, we are emerging into a higher, because freer and more spiritual stage of our religious life as a people. Anxiously and fearfully those who have been trained under the shadow of Protection watch the process. We Independents, who have been nursed in a freer school, look calmly on the pains and struggles: we have faith in the destiny of the fair, bright-winged creature which is being born.