If an observer knows anything of the history of England, he cannot deny that vast changes have been made in every department of life: domestic habits, social economics, the courts of law, the Church, the liberty of the press and of speech, in short, all the roads, whether material or mental, by which mankind travels to its ultimate purpose, have been graded, widened, solidly equipped and built. A thousand years have converted three or four races into one people,—and all that time and weather have made upon it such strong imprints that you cannot see the difference between a pyramid and a cathedral sooner than you can the distinctive nationality of England. But for that very reason you despair of it, just as you do of a cathedral which cannot be adapted to the wants of a new religious age. At the same time that you venerate the history of England, and are thankful for the great expansion which she gave to human rights, you almost quarrel with it, because at first it seems like an old stratum with its men and women imbedded; its institutions, once so softly and lightly deposited, now become a tough clay; its structures, once so curiously devised for living tenants, now crusts and shells; its tracks of warm and bleeding feet now set in a stiff soil that will take no future impression.
All this is due to the first glance you get at the hard, realistic England of to-day. You have noticed a machine clutch its raw material and twist and turn it through its relentless bowels. That is the way the habits of England seize you when you land, and begin to appropriate your personality. This is the first offence of England in the eyes of an American, whose favorite phrase, "the largest liberty," is too synonymous with the absence of any settled habits. Prescribed ways of doing everything are the scum which a traveller first gathers in England. Perhaps he thinks that he has caught the English nationality in his skimmer; and as he rather contemptuously examines these topmost and handiest traits, he grumbles to himself that these are the habits of a very old nation, that lives on an island, and keeps up a fleet, not to bridge, but to widen narrow seas. Such respect for routine and observance can nowhere else be perceived. An American is so little prepared for this that he is disposed to quarrel with it even in railway-stations, where it is most excellent. But it penetrates all forms and institutions; the Established Church itself is a specimen of complete arranging and engineering; the worshippers are classified, ticketed, and despatched safely rolling on the broad gauge of the Liturgy, in confidence of being set down at last where the conductors have contracted to take them. How accurately everybody in England knows his own place!—and he accepts it, however humble, with a determined feeling that it is inevitable. The audience is so packed that everybody remains quiet. The demeanor of the servants is as settled and universally deferential as Westminster Abbey is Gothic. Mr. Lindsay or Mr. Roebuck might forget to revile America, or Lord Palmerston, England's right hand, forget his cunning, as soon as a servant might forget his place. A thousand years have settled him in it; and you are supposed by him to have had the benefit of as many years in determining your own position and relation to him. You are electrified when a waiter first touches his hat to you; it is as if he had discharged something into you by the gesture, which is likely to exhaust him, and you expect to have to offer him a chair. But his deference is an integral part of the stability of England. When he forgets it, look for a panic in the Exchange, the collapse of credit, and the assassination of the Queen.
This mutual deference in a country that is so strictly apportioned into castes becomes an unconscious toadyism, which is saved from being very repulsive only by the frank and childlike ways of the people. If it is carried too far, they are the first to see it. The "Times" could not report a case of murder without remarking, as it described the direction of the fatal shot, "What was a very singular fact, a part of the charge, after crossing the apartment, entered a picture of her Majesty the Queen on the opposite wall";—that is, in committing the murder, the charge of powder went too far; it ought to have stuck to its business, instead of violating one of the chief proprieties of a limited monarchy. But when the Queen went down to Greenwich summer before last to embark for Belgium, an over-zealous official issued an order that no person should be admitted into the yard of the dock, no workman should cross the yard while she was in it, and no one should look out of a window until she had gone. This was his British sense of the behavior due to a Queen who was in mourning for her husband, and might dislike to be observed. But the whole press derided this order, and subjected it to indignant criticism; the officer was styled flunky and tyrant, and the Queen herself was obliged to rebuke and disavow it.
In doing everything in England, there is so little excitement, because it is felt to be irregular. The temper of the people is well kept by the smooth and even island air; the moist southwestern winds come and soothe with calm lips the check. The thermometer, like everything else, knows its place; and when once it succeeded in passing through twenty degrees in the course of a day, the oldest inhabitant of London grew anxious; it was feared that stocks, too, would fall. The thunderstorms understand propriety, and simply growl, like the dissatisfied Englishman. Vivid effects, sharp contrasts, violent exertions, cannot be sustained in that insular atmosphere. It seems as if London, like a lover of the weed, were pacified by its own smoke. I saw two huge wagons turn from opposite quarters into a narrow lane. The drivers kept their horses moving till the heads of the leaders touched; then they sat still and looked at each other. Both were determined that it was a point of honor to stay where they were. After a few words of rather substantial English had passed between them, both subsided into a dogged equanimity. A crowd gathered instantly, but with as little tumult as ants make; it regarded the occurrence as a milder form of pugilism, and watched the result with interest. A policeman passed blandly from one wagon to the other, represented the necessities of the public traffic, hoped they would settle it shortly, urged the matter as an intimate friend of the parties, till at length the man who was conscious that he turned into the lane the last gathered up his reins and backed out of it. It was a little index of the popular disposition; and I expected that as soon as the country became convinced that it had driven rashly into our civil strait, it would deliberately back out of it. And this it is now slowly engaged in doing.
The two great parties of the Church and Liberalism are blocking each other in the same manner; but in this case Liberalism has turned into the great thoroughfare of the world's movement, and finds the Church, like a disabled omnibus, disputing the passage by simply lying across it. Dr. Temple and one hundred liberal Fellows of Oxford sent up to Parliament a petition which prayed for the abolition of the subscription test. At Oxford two subscriptions are required as a qualification for academic degrees: one to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and one to the third article of the thirty-sixth Canon. Liberal clergymen and members of the Church of England find this test odious, because it constrains the conscience to accept ancient formulas of belief without the benefit of private interpretation. The conservatives desire to maintain the test, thinking that it will be a barrier to the tide of private interpretation which is just now mounting so high. The petitioners perceive that no test can prevent a man from having his own thoughts; that it is therefore obsolete; that it drives out of the Church the best men,—those, namely, who think with independent vigor, and whose activity would put a new soul into the old Establishment. When this petition came up for debate in the House of Commons, the conservative speakers accused the petitioners of wishing to set up a new school of theological belief and criticism. Mr. Gladstone made a speech, full of grace and an even vigor, to the effect that he could not conceive of religion disconnected from definite statements such as those which the Church possessed; the idea was to his mind as absurd as to conceive of manifestations of life without a body. Mr. Goschen, the new member from London, made his maiden speech on this occasion. It was very earnest and liberal, and reminded one of American styles of speaking, being less even and conversational than the style which Englishmen admire. His opinion was, that all tests should be abolished, and that inclusion was safer than exclusion: meaning that the Church ought to keep herself so organized as to absorb the best vitality of every generation, instead of turning it out to become cold and hostile. The phrase which he used is the very essence of a republican policy. It represents the tendency of the people of England, as distinguished from its ministers and the traditions of its government. That phrase will one day be safely driven clear through the highway where the omnibus is now lying; but for the present, the abolition of tests and church-rates, the recognition of every shade of dissent, and the graver political reformation which waits behind all these are held in check by the vis inertiæ of an Establishment that lies across the road.
During the exciting anti-church-rate contests of 1840, the Church party in Rochdale, which had been defeated in an attempt to levy a church-rate where for several years none had been collected, held a meeting to try the matter over again. It was adjourned from the church to the graveyard. The vicar, as chairman, occupied one tombstone, and John Bright stood upon another to make one of his strong defences of the rights of Voluntaryism. In the course of the discussion, the vicar's warden rendered an account of the dilapidations of the building which the proposed rate was to repair, and stated, with great simplicity, that "the foundations were giving way,"—a significant remark, which the meeting, though held in a grave place, received with shouts of laughter. Such a statement may well be taken as symbolical of the condition of the Establishment, when liberal criticism, represented by Colenso, Stanley, Jowett, Baden Powell, and a respectable minority, is silently crumbling the underpinning, while the full service is intoned above and the pampered ceremonial swells the aisles.
If the opponents of liberal thinking ever bring an action against a prominent dissenter from their views, the Privy Council gets rid of the case by deciding it upon the purely technical position of the Church,—as in the case of Dr. Williams, whose offence was the publication of his Essay on Bunsen, and Mr. Wilson, whose essay was entitled "Séances Historiques de Genève—The National Church." The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decide that they have no power to define what is true and what is false doctrine, but only what has been established to be the law of the Church upon the true and legal construction of her Articles and Formularies.
I. The Church does not require her clergy to believe in the inspiration of all portions of the Scriptures.
II. Nor that the Atonement operates by substitution of Christ's suffering for our sins.
III. Nor that the phrase "everlasting fire," in the Athanasian Creed, is to be received as a final and hopeless statement.