“2. But suppose this claim, for the sake of argument, to be admitted; what, then, are the ecclesiastical courts to whose judgment the Ritualists would be willing to defer? Unless every clergyman is to settle the form of worship for himself, and there are to be as many forms of worship as there are parishes in the land, who is it that, in his opinion, is to determine what the rubrics of the prayer-book enjoin?—for we suppose him to consider himself bound by the directions of the prayer-book. What is the court to which he is willing to render obedience? Is it the court of his bishop? If so, he must surely be aware that by the ecclesiastical law of this country, as well before the Reformation as since, an appeal from the bishop’s court lies, and has always lain, to the court of the archbishop, this Court of Arches, whose jurisdiction he now denies. What question, therefore, is there of a secular court, or an invasion of the rights of the Church of England?[[24]]” And the judgment passed by Lord Penzance was contained in the following words: “Applying these powers as I am bound to do, I have no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Tooth to be contumacious, and in contempt for disobeying the inhibition pronounced by this court, and I direct the same to be signified to the queen in chancery, with a view to his imprisonment.”
And now the strife of tongues which preceded this climax was comparative calm to that which at present rages. All the winds of Æolus, each trying which can blow the hardest, seem let loose at once in the distracted Establishment. By the Ritualist party the confessor for disobedience in Horsemonger Lane jail is already dubbed “the martyr, Tooth”; while another party rejoices that, by the contumacy of this “parson in revolt,” the state church is “forced into a clear, practical assertion of her old and hitherto unquestioned right to restrain and punish disobedient and delinquent 'clerks.’” Further, the London Times, dilating after its own infallible fashion upon Mr. Tooth and “his pranks,” dares to aver that “to parade a banner calling the Virgin Mary the 'Mother of God’ is little less than sheer blasphemy.”
At a large meeting of the “English Church Union” it became evident that the changes in law procedure produced by the Public Worship Regulation Act are producing a murmur in favor of “disestablishment” within the Church of England herself. One of the reverend speakers at this meeting said that “the issue had now merged from one about the color of a stole to a question of church and state,” and the honorable chairman agreed that “establishment might cost too dear.” Archdeacon Denison declared that this case of “dear Arthur Tooth” would prove to be “a life-and-death struggle with Protestantism,” thus making the old mistake of putting mere ritualism in the place of the Catholic Church. Canon Carter moved that “the Church Union denies that the secular power has authority in matters purely spiritual,” upon which a journal reminds him that, from the days of the Reformation, it has been one of the conditions on which the state church enjoyed the emoluments and privileges of establishment that her clergy should perform certain duties in a way laid down by law. Whether, as in the case of Mr. Tooth, they have or have not done so is a matter which the law leaves a particular court to decide. If Mr. Tooth does not relish the action of these tribunals, two courses are open to him, and only two. Either he may give up those practices which they declare obnoxious within the pale of the Established Church, or he may leave the Establishment and continue them elsewhere. The latter step would entail the sacrifice of the endowment, or, as the Ritualists would say, it would involve the guilt of schism; in which case the whole matter resolves itself into a choice of sins: the clergyman must either commit the sin of obeying Lord Penzance, and so retain the endowment, or he must commit the sin of “schism” and fling the endowment away. Thus the Church Unionists are by no means logical in comparing their present position to that of Chalmers, Buchanan, Guthrie, Cunningham, and other leaders of the Free Kirk of Scotland previously to 1843; for these men gave up all thought of state endowment, or even of ministering in buildings dependent on the state, and purchased the independence of their ministrations at the cost of all state temporalities. This is a very different matter from attempting to have the temporalities and the independence together.[[25]]
Another observation made by Canon Carter was, though not in itself more true, yet, for him, much more to the point—namely, that “the only persecution now carried on in England is against the High-Church party.” It is on this fact that the Ritualists stand triumphant. They can honestly plead that they, the High-Church party, have done more than all the other parties put together for the revival of faith and devotion in England. They can also plead that they are men of education, of courage and energy and self-denying zeal, and that to them is due whatever residuum is left of Catholic sentiment and tradition in the Establishment. The marvel is that any of these really earnest men should continue so blind to their anomalous position.
On the same day that the English Church Union held its assembly a meeting of the ultra-Protestant school took place at the Wellington Hall, Islington, where about one hundred and twenty clergymen and laymen partook of breakfast, after which they proceeded to deliver themselves of a large amount of the peculiar and incoherent insipidities with which the readers of the Rock must be painfully familiar. One specimen will suffice, which, as our readers will perceive, is not lacking in the unctuous accusations in which the “Evangelicals” are apt to excel: “As in Germany,” they said, “the Jesuits devoted all their self-denying energies to opposing the spread of the true doctrines, so here in England there was an able and resolute body of men who opposed themselves to the true principles of religion, and who, by services rendered attractive to the eye and ear, appealed by the senses to the understanding. Many of these men were no doubt sincere, and were thus unconsciously doing the work of Satan. This was the powerful opposing force with which the Evangelical body of the Church of England had to contend.”
Now, we must beg leave to observe that for these “Evangelical” gentlemen to talk of Ritualists as unconsciously doing the work of Satan is simply absurd. Did not the “beam in their own eye” blind them, we would ask them to take a glance backward and think of forty years ago, when, through the length and breadth of the land, they locked up their churches from Sunday afternoon to the following Sunday morning, and sometimes even longer; for the writer can recall three villages (there may or may not have been many more) in Leicestershire alone where, less than forty years ago, there was only one service on the Sunday, and that alternately in the morning and afternoon. We have heard of the wag who chalked on the church door of an Evangelical rector, “Le Bon Dieu est sorti: Il ne reviendra que dimanche prochain.” And truly, if the good God did come back, it would not be, in many instances, to find his house “swept and garnished.”
Forty years ago! Sitting in the old family pew in the chancel of A ... stone church, through the long, monotonous sermons of the worthy rector, whose favorite subjects were “saving faith” and abuse of popery, what a help it was to patient endurance to watch the merry, loud-voiced sparrows fluttering in and out of the broken diamond panes of the chancel windows, through which long sprays of ivy crept and clung lovingly up the poor old walls, bare of everything but whitewash, of the once Catholic church—walls that the damp of many an autumn and winter had dyed with streaks of green, deeper and brighter in hue than the faded, ink-stained rag of moth-eaten green baize that covered the rickety wooden table standing where, in old days, the most holy Sacrifice had been offered upon a Catholic altar. Childhood, before opportunities for comparison have been afforded, is not hard to please, and we used to think that that verdant chancel might have been in the mind of the sweet Psalmist of Israel when he sang, “The sparrow hath found her a house, and the swallow a nest, where she may lay her young: even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts!” And yet our worthy rector (a rich pluralist with a large family) was a kind-hearted, easy, amiable man, and not in any way addicted to the hunting and drinking practices of certain of his clerical neighbors; his house was the perfection of refined not overloaded luxury, and the well-kept gardens of that most pleasant of rectories were a paradise of smooth lawns, gay parterres, and shady shrubberies sloping down to the banks of the winding Soar. The rector led a mildly studious life when in the country (for half his year was spent in London), visited much among the “county families,” and shyly and rarely entered the cottages of the village; but religion in that village was well-nigh dead. If amiable clergymen of this stamp are not “unconsciously doing the work of Satan” themselves, they at any rate give Satan plenty of time and opportunity to do his own work himself among their flock, and to do it very effectually, too.
Yet it is the descendants of men like these who are foremost in groaning down and persecuting the self-denying, hard-working clergy who are always at their posts! The preachers of sentiment are furious against the upholders of the necessity of dogmatic truth. The idlers in family and social circles are desperate against enthusiasts who at least try to hear confessions and to be priests. We cannot admire the consistency of the Ritualists—for unhappily it does not exist—but the inconsistency of their “Evangelical” accusers is simply “the impeachment of energy by twaddle.”
A correspondent of the London Times calls attention to the fact that while Mr. Tooth, who is perfectly orthodox as regards the creeds of the church, is prosecuted for extremes in ritual, a brother clergyman is allowed to preach open infidelity from the pulpit unmolested. “The Public Worship Bill,” he writes, “has been passed to repress crimes so grave as over-magnificence in the services, but does not deign to meddle in so small a matter as that of vindicating the Divinity of our Saviour, which is fearlessly impugned in a pulpit which the Bishop of London himself has condescended to occupy.”
It is much to be doubted whether the Anglican bishops, when they obtained from Parliament the Public Worship Regulation Act, had the remotest idea of the tempest which, Prospero-like, they were summoning around them, but which, unlike Shakspere’s magician, they would be powerless to allay. And if this is the result obtained by the act just mentioned, a still more recent one, the “Scotch Church Patronage Act,” another measure intended by Lord Beaconsfield as an additional buttress to ecclesiastical establishments, has produced similar storms in the North. It has led to proceedings in connection with the “settlement” of a parish clergyman at New Deer in Aberdeenshire which recall the furious battles between the “intrusion” and non-intrusion parties that split the Established Church of Scotland into fragments thirty-four years ago, and has besides almost succeeded in uniting three-fourths of Scotland into a solid disestablishment phalanx. The Presbyterian Kirk, moreover, in addition to subjects of contention presented from without, has certain characteristic squabbles of its own. A question having recently arisen on the subject of unfermented wines in the celebration of what is called communion, the session has maintained that it “has a right to change the elements of communion, and in so doing is discharging its proper functions.” Why not? If local churches can make their own doctrines, what, we should like to know, is to hinder them from making their own sacraments as well?