Well, having laid out this plan of work, how did the Congress address itself to it? The first session gave a rather curious illustration of the practical spirit of the assemblage; for the reverend gentlemen, by way of “bringing the doctrine and organization of the church most effectually to sanctity,” rushed straightway with hot haste into the subject of “ultramontanism and civil authority,” and pounded upon the doors of the Vatican the whole afternoon. The Rev. Francis Wharton, D.D., of Cambridge, Mass., was careful in the outset to distinguish between ultramontanism and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The mass of us, he believes, have always been loyal to the territory of whose population we form a part, but our loyalty has no connection with our religion. If we followed the teachings of our church, Dr. Wharton thinks we should be a dangerous set of people. “Ultramontanism teaches that the Pope, a foreign prince, deriving his support from a foreign civilization, is entitled to set aside governments which he considers disloyal, and to annul such institutions as he does not approve.” We confess that we do not know what Dr. Wharton means by the Pope deriving his support from a foreign civilization. If he means his physical support, then the doctor is both wrong and right; for that is derived from the faithful of the whole world. If he means that his authority is derived from a foreign civilization, then the doctor is apparently irreverent; for the papal authority is derived from the institution of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and surely a respectable Cambridge divine would not call that a foreign civilization.
As for the distinction which is drawn between American and ultramontane Catholics, let us repudiate it with all possible warmth before we go any further. Ultramontanism is an objectionable word, because it was invented to localize a school of religious doctrine which is the only catholic school—the school acknowledged all over the world; but if it be understood as defining that spirit of faith and piety which yields all love and obedience to the Vicar of Christ, accepts all the Vatican decrees gladly and without reserve, is not afraid of paying too much respect to the Holy See, or showing too much humility before God, or believing one little particle more than we are commanded to believe under pain of anathema, then the Catholics of America are ultramontane Catholics to a man. Probably there are no Catholics in any country of the world less disposed to compromise in matters of religious duty, and more thoroughly imbued with filial reverence and love for the Head of God’s church on earth, than the Catholics of the United States. The spirit of the church in Rome is the spirit of the church in America; and when Dr. Wharton asserts that “the political tenets of ultramontanism are repudiated by the leading Catholic statesmen of our land,” he makes an utterly erroneous statement, against which American Catholics will be the first to protest. It is very true that with the fictitious ultramontanism conceived of his fears and prejudices neither Americans nor any other sensible people have the slightest sympathy. But show us what Rome teaches, and there you have precisely what the church in the United States accepts. If it is true, therefore that the Pope claims authority “to set aside governments which he considers disloyal, and to annul such institutions as he does not approve,” it must be true that America upholds his pretensions. Dr. Wharton may live in the fear that His Holiness will some day send the Noble Guard to set aside the government of Gen. Grant whenever it becomes “disloyal”; while he may well feel an absolute certainty that our common-school system, our constitutional prohibition of the establishment of a state church, our laws against sectarian appropriations, and various other wicked and heretical provisions found on our statute-books, will sooner or later be “annulled” by a decree from the Vatican. He need not flatter himself that any superior enlightenment among the Catholics of America will save the Protestant community from the miserable fate in store for it. We are not a bit wiser or better than the Pope.
The possible interference of the Vatican with our Congresses and ballot-boxes Dr. Wharton evidently regards as a very remote danger. There are points, however, he thinks, where the Vatican clashes every day with the civil power, and where it ought to be resisted with all the energy at our command. And just at this part of the reverend doctor’s address we should like very much to have seen the face of Bishop Clarke. In his introductory remarks Bishop Clarke told the Congress that one of the most important subjects for churchmen to consider was the influence or authority of the church over the family relations. “The Gospel obtained hold of the family before it touched the state. How does the condition of the marriage bond stand to-day? In some of our States it is as easy to solve it as it is to join it. Is this the religion of which we have made such boast?” But here, before the echoes of the bishop’s words have fairly died away, is the Rev. Dr. Wharton on his feet denouncing as a crime the very interference which Bishop Clarke inculcated as a duty. It is one of the usurpations of ultramontanism, says the Cambridge doctor, to annul civil marriages which the state holds binding, and to treat as invalid divorces which the state holds good. This is one of the most serious conflicts between the state and the Vatican, and it is one, if we understand aright the somewhat imperfect report of his remarks, in which Protestant Episcopalians must prepare themselves to take an earnest part, remembering that, while their church is free, it is “a free church within a free sovereign state, and that this state, in its own secular sovereignty, is supreme.” Here, then, we have a distinct declaration that the family relation is not a proper subject of religious regulation. If the state sees fit to make it as easy to loose the marriage bond as to tie it, the church has no right to object; it is a secular matter, and the free sovereign state is supreme in its own secular sovereignty. If the state sanctions an adulterous connection, the Protestant Episcopal Church must revise its Bible and bless the unholy tie; it is a secular matter, and the free sovereign state is supreme in its own secular sovereignty. The sanctity of the family relation is under the protection of the church, says Bishop Clarke. No such thing, replies Dr. Wharton—that is an insolent ultramontane pretension; the Protestant Episcopal Church knows its place, and does not presume to interfere with the legislature. “The Gospel obtained hold of the family before it touched the state,” says the bishop. “Oh! well, we have changed all that,” rejoins the doctor; the glory of the Protestant Episcopal gospel nowadays is that it lets the family alone. In point of fact, Episcopalianism is not quite so bad as this hasty advocate would have us believe; for it does censure, in a mild way, the laxity of some of the divorce laws, and does not always lend itself to the celebration of bigamous marriages. But Dr. Wharton is correct in his main position—that his church leaves to the state the control of the family relation; and if she shrinks from the logical consequences of her desertion of duty, that is only because a remnant of Catholic feeling remains to her in the midst of her heresies and contradictions. The time must come, however, when these illogical fragments of truth will be thrown away, and the Protestant Episcopal Church will take its place beside the other Protestant bodies in renouncing all right to be heard on one of the most important points of contact between the law of God and the concerns of every-day life. It is impossible to allow the civil power to bind and loose the family tie at pleasure, without admitting that the subject is entirely outside the domain of ecclesiastical supervision. The attempt of the Episcopal Church to compromise on adultery is an absurdity, and in the steady course of Protestant development it will surely be abolished.
Is there any particular in which the Protestant Episcopal Church fairly takes hold of the family? We have seen that she abandons to politicians the sacred tie between the parents; what has she to do with the next domestic concern—the education of the child? Dr. Wharton holds it to be one of her distinguishing claims to public favor that she abandons this duty also to the secular power. The right to control education, according to him, is, like the right to sanction the marriage tie, one of the insolent pretensions of the Vatican usurper. The state, he thinks, is bound not only to educate all its subjects, but to decide what points a secular education shall cover, while the church may only add to this irreligious training such pious instruction as the child may have time and strength to receive after the more serious lessons are over. “The church,” he says, “concedes to the state the right and duty to require a secular education from all, while for itself it undertakes, as a free church in a free state, the right and duty to give a religious education to all within its reach.” Expressed in somewhat plainer English, this means that thirty hours a week ought to be given to the dictionary and multiplication table, and one hour to the catechism and the ten commandments. Send your children to schools all the week where they will hear nothing whatever of religion, where that most vital of all concerns will be a forbidden subject, where the idea will be practically, if not in so many words, impressed upon their tender minds that it is of no consequence whether they are Christians, or Jews, or infidels, so long as they master the various branches of worldly knowledge which promote success in the secular affairs of life; and then get them into Sunday-school if you can, for a wild and ineffectual attempt to counteract the evil tendencies of the previous six days’ teachings. This is trying to give a Christian education without the corner-stone of Christian doctrine; building a house upon the sand, and then running around it once a week with a hatful of pebbles and a trowel of mud to put a foundation under the finished structure. Dr. Wharton seems to embody in his own person a surprising variety of the inconsistencies for which the Protestant Episcopal Church has such a peculiar celebrity. For here, after he has claimed credit for his church as the champion of a secular education, he tells the Congress that secularism is one of the great dangers of the age, against which the church must fight with all her strength. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” It must be fought “by the church, and eminently by our own church. Our duty therefore is to fit ourselves for the encounter, and we must do this with the cause of religion, undertaking in its breadth and embracing all branches of religious, spiritual, and ethical culture.” Well, but, dear sir, you have just said that during the most important period of man’s intellectual development, when the mind is receiving impressions which are likely to last through life, the church ought to stand aside and let the state teach secularism without hindrance. Are you going to cultivate secularism in the young until it becomes firmly rooted, and then fight against it with sermons and essays which your secularized young men will not listen to? How do you expect to impart religious, spiritual, and ethical culture when you have formally renounced your inestimable privilege and your sacred duty as a guide and teacher of children? You propose to wait until your boys have come to man’s estate before you attempt to exercise any influence upon them; and then, when they have grown up with the idea that religious influence ought to be avoided as one avoids pestilence, you wonder and complain that they are indifferent to the church and will not hear you. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” Your way of fighting is to abandon the outposts, leave front and rear and flanks unprotected, and throw away your arms.
It was one of the peculiarities of the Congress that whatever error was promulgated in the essays and debates, somewhere in the course of the sessions an antidote was sure to be furnished—this being an illustration, we suppose, of the extreme toleration of opinion to which Bishop Clarke referred as “somewhat singular” in a church “so fixed in its doctrines.” Hence we need not be surprised to find in the second day’s proceedings a refutation of the educational theories propounded during the first. Dr. Wharton made use of the principle of secular schooling as a weapon of offence against the Vatican. But when the delegates had relieved their minds and vindicated their Protestant orthodoxy by giving the poor Pope about as much as he could stagger away with, they turned their attention to their own condition, and one of their first subjects of inquiry was what secular education had done for them. The topic of consideration on the second morning was “The Best Methods of Procuring and Preparing Candidates for the Ministry.” Dr. Schenck of Brooklyn began by stating that the supply of candidates for holy orders was not only inadequate to the needs of the church, but it was falling off—a smaller number offering themselves to-day than six or seven years ago. This, said he, should excite the gravest concern of the church; and nobody seemed disposed to contradict him. Dr. Edward B. Boggs indeed presented some uncomfortable statistics which tell the whole story. In 1871, the number of resident presbyters of the Episcopal Church in the United States was 2,566; in 1874, it was only 2,530. Here, then while the population increases the clergy are diminishing. A great many reasons were suggested for the phenomenon. One thought the question of salary was at the bottom of the evil. Another blamed mothers for not giving their boys a taste for the ministry while they were young. A third believed the trouble was too little prayer and too much quarrelling over candles and ecclesiastical millinery. And more than one hinted in the broadest terms that the ministry was discredited by having too many fools in it.[174] The truth, however, which had been vaguely suggested by some of the earlier speakers, was plumply told by Dr. Edward Sullivan of Chicago. “The church,” said he, “must learn to supply the ranks of the ministry from her own material”—that is to say, by giving the children of the church a Christian education. He lamented the exclusion of the Bible from some of the common schools as a national calamity—not, if we understand him, because he has any overweening faith in the efficacy of Bible-reading per se, but because he knows that when positive religious teaching is banished from the school, the children can hardly fail to grow up without any religious feeling whatever. “Until we establish parochial church schools,” he continued, “we can never solve this problem.” And he might have added that if the teaching of secularism is to be continued for a generation or two longer, the problem will solve itself: there will be no need of preachers when there cease to be congregations.
If such an alarming phenomenon as an actual falling off in the numbers of the clergy were noticed in our own holy church, it would perhaps occur to good Catholics to inquire whether the bishops were doing all that they ought to do for the souls of their people. But the Episcopal Congress at Philadelphia seems to have been vexed with the idea that the bishops were doing entirely too much. Looking at the assemblage from the outside, we cannot pretend to see the under-currents of opinion, or to comprehend the denominational politics; but it was plain both from the tone of the addresses in the session set apart for considering the “Nature and Extent of Episcopal Authority” and from the manner in which some of the remarks of the speakers were received, that a jealousy of episcopal authority prevailed with considerable bitterness. Dr. Vinton of Boston drew a parallel between the government of the church and the government of the state; both were ruled by executives appointed by law and controlled by law, and in each case the chief officer acted by the assumed authority of those he governed. The bishops therefore, we infer, have just as much power as the people choose to give them, and we see no reason why the congregations should not enlarge and restrict that power at pleasure—make a new constitution, if they wish, every year, and treat their prelates as the savage treats his idol, which he sets upon an altar for worship in the morning, and if things go not well with him, kicks into the kennel at night. Indeed, since the foundation of the Anglican Church the episcopate has always been treated with scant ceremony. Dr. Vinton tells us that it is a reflex of the political organization, and as that has varied a great deal in England and America, and is not unlikely in the course of time to vary a great deal more, we must not be surprised to find the system undergoing many strange modifications and holding out the promise of further change indefinitely. In the primitive church, the episcopacy was a despotism. In the Anglican Church, it is “merely an ecclesiastical aristocracy.” In the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, where the exigencies of politics have to be considered, it is—well, that is just what the Congress tried in vain to determine. For one thing, Dr. Vinton and other speakers after him laid great stress upon the fact that its authority was carefully circumscribed by statute, and that the church was a corporation—though whence it derived its charter nobody was good enough to tell us. In truth, we did not find the day’s proceedings edifying. Dr. Vinton declared that an organic evil of the church constitution, “boding more of mischief and sorrow to the body of Christ than any or all of the evils besides that our age makes possible,” was the liability of bishops to grow arrogant of power, to make their authority troublesome, to put on idle pomp, and set themselves “in conspicuous difference from the taste, the traditions, the educated and intelligent convictions which the providence of God has caused to rule in this land.” Dr. Fulton of Indianapolis inveighed with warmth against any bishop who ventured to intrude into another man’s diocese, and remarked that “some bishops were never at home unless they were abroad.” A bishop, continued the doctor, is subject to civil law. He should be tried for violation of the ninth commandment if he wilfully slander a clergyman either in or out of his own diocese. Bishops must not affect infallibility in doctrinal utterances. They must remember that in more than one respect they and their presbyters are equals. A bishop who would be respected must respect the rights of other bishops—not being an episcopal busybody in other men’s sees. Dr. Goodwin of Philadelphia thought that what our Lord meant to have was “a moderate episcopate.” Dr. Washburn of New York believed that even the powers granted to the apostles were not exclusive, and that ever since the apostolic age these powers had been gradually more and more distributed, until now, we should think, they must be so finely divided that no fragment of them is anywhere visible in the Episcopal Church.
Dr. J. V. Lewis convulsed the house with laughter by a speech in which he declared that the bishops had been so “tied hand and foot by conventions and canons that it was wonderful they had time to do anything but find out what they must not do”; and he called upon the church to “cut those bands and let the bishops loose.” We quote from the report of his remarks in the Church Journal: “What will they do? He would tell them what they would do. He had at home in his yard six chickens about half-grown. He had placed among them a turkey big enough to eat any of them up. But they all flew at him. One little fellow pecked him and spurred him savagely. The turkey looked on in perfect astonishment, apparently; but at length he spread out his wings and literally sat down upon him. From that day to this, whenever that turkey stirs, these chickens cannot be kept from following him. And this is just what will happen in the church, if we will only let our bishops loose.” All this was the cause of much innocent hilarity among the brethren; but we fear that it was to Dr. Lewis that the Churchman referred the next week in the following solemn strain: “It is a sad circumstance that the ministry has in it, here and there, a professional joker and cheap story-teller and anecdote-monger, one of the most tedious and least estimable types of foolishness that try Christian endurance and vex religious families. It is to be hoped no such melancholy-moving buffoon will ever propose himself as clown to the Church Congress; and, short of that, will it be wise to confer the award of the heartiest and loudest applause on a sort of comic pleasantry and ‘jesting not convenient’ which, at best, is outdone in its own line in whole columns of daily newspapers? We may smile, because it cannot be helped, but we can surely reserve our plaudits—if they must be given at all—for that species of superiority which manifests a chaste refinement and suits tastes that are intellectual rather than jovial.”
Clearly there was a great deal more in these essays on the limitations of episcopal authority than met the profane eye. Who are the trespassers upon other men’s sheepfolds, and the busybodies, and the slanderers, and the pompous bishops, and the infallible bishops, and the bishops who think themselves better than their presbyters, it is not for us to inquire. Neither perhaps would it be decorous to ask how the ten or twelve bishops in the Congress—none of whom opened their mouths during the debate—enjoyed the session. But there is excellent reason to believe that the presbyters had a very pleasant day, singing the opening hymn in the morning, “Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly dove,” with peculiar unction, and joyously dismissing their right reverend fathers in the afternoon with the verses, “Go forth, ye heralds, in my name.”
If the bishops are in disrepute and the inferior clergy are falling away, it can hardly be necessary to tell us that the church has no real hold upon the people; that follows as a matter of course. Accordingly, the most interesting of the debates were on the best methods of giving vitality to the work of the church—on ministrations to the laboring classes, on free churches and free preaching, on the abuses of the new system, and on the need of something equivalent to the preaching Orders and Congregations of our own church. Of all the papers read at the Congress the only one which was received with what we may fairly call enthusiasm was an essay by Mr. Francis Wells, editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, on the “Parochial System and Free Preaching,” at the close of which one of the reverend delegates jumped upon a bench and led the assembly in three cheers. We have seen no report which gives a fair abstract of Mr. Wells’ paper, or even explains what practical suggestions he had to offer, so that it is impossible to understand what it was that moved the feelings of the Congress. But if he drew a faithful picture of the average Episcopal Church of our day he may well have startled his audience. “The chief trouble,” he said, “lies in the spirit of exclusiveness which eyes the fashion of the dress and warns off strangers with a cold stare.” He was quite right in holding that the renting of pews and the expenditure of large sums of money for the adornment of the house of God are not necessarily obstacles to the influence of the church over the masses. Our own experience proves that. What poor and ragged sinner was ever repelled from a Catholic Church by imposing architecture, or gorgeous windows, or the blazing magnificence of lighted altars, or the strains of costly music? The rich have their pews—at least in this country, where it is only by pew-rents that we can meet the necessary expenses of the parish—but the most wretched beggar feels that he is welcome at all times in the splendid temple, and he may kneel there, feasting the senses, if he pleases, as well as refreshing the soul, without fear that his more comfortable neighbor will stare at his humble garments. Whatever the character of our churches, it is always the poor who fill them. It never occurs to a Catholic that the people who pay pew-rents acquire any proprietorship in the house of God, or have any better right there than those who pay nothing. The sermons are never made for the rich, and the Holy Sacrifice is offered for all indiscriminately. But in the Episcopal Church how different it is!
Imagine the feelings of a mechanic who approaches one of the luxurious Fifth-Avenue temples in his patched and stained working trowsers and threadbare coat. Carriages are setting down the haut ton at the door, every lady dressed in the extreme of fashion, every gentleman carefully arrayed by an expensive tailor. A high-priced sexton, with rather more dignity than an average bishop, receives the distinguished arrivals just inside the lobby, and scrutinizes strangers with the air of an expert who has learned by long experience in the highest circles just what kind of company every casual visitor has probably been in the habit of keeping. The interior of the church somehow suggests a Madison-Avenue parlor, furnished in the latest style of imitation antique. The upholstery is a marvel of comfort. The pleasantly subdued light suits the eyes and softens the complexions of Christians who have been up late dancing. A decorous quiet pervades the waiting congregation, broken only by the rustle of five-dollar silks sweeping up the aisles. Such a handsome display of millinery can be seen nowhere else for so little money. What is a working-man to do in such a brilliant gathering as this? He looks timidly at the back seats, and he finds there perhaps two or three old women, parish pensioners, Sunday-school boys, or young men who keep near the door in order to slip out quietly when they are tired of the services, but nobody of his class. The prosperous people all around him listen to the choir, and the reader, and the preacher, with an indescribable air of proprietorship in all of them. The sermon is an elaborate essay addressed to cultivated intellects, not to his common understanding. He goes away with the uncomfortable consciousness that he has been intruding, and feels like a shabby and unkempt person who has strolled by mistake into the stockholders’ row at the Italian Opera, and been turned out by a high-toned box-keeper. “It is indeed hard to imagine,” said The Nation the other day, “anything more likely to make religion seem repelling to a poor man than the sight of one of the gorgeous edifices in which rich Christians nowadays try to make their way to heaven. Working out one’s salvation clothed in the height of the fashion, as a member of a wealthy club, in a building in which the amplest provision is made for the gratification of all the finer senses, must seem to a thoughtful city mechanic, for instance, something in the nature of a burlesque. Not that the building is too good for the lofty purpose to which it is devoted, for nobody ever gets an impression of anything but solemn appropriateness from a great Catholic cathedral, but that it is the property of a close corporation, who, as it might be said, ‘make up a party’ to go to the Throne of Grace, and share the expenses equally, and fix the rate so high that only successful businessmen can join.”