Chapter of Autobiography

by W. E. Gladstone

"That we may give Mr. Gladstone his revenge, we will state concisely our own views respecting the alliance of Church and State....

"We consider the primary end of Government as a purely temporal end, the protection of the persons and property of men.

"We think that Government, like every other contrivance of human wisdom, from the highest to the lowest, is likely to answer its main end best, when it is constructed with a single view to that end....

"Government is not an institution for the propagation of religion, any more than St. George's Hospital is an institution for the propagation of religion. And the most absurd and pernicious consequences would follow if Government should pursue as its primary end, that which can never be more than its secondary end: though intrinsically more important than its primary end. But a Government which considers the religious instruction of the people as a secondary end, and follows out that principle faithfully, will we think be likely to do much good and little harm."

These sentences, I think, give a fair view of Lord Macaulay's philosophy of Church Establishments. It has all the clearness and precision that might be expected from him. But I own myself unable to accept it as it stands. I presume to think that perhaps Lord Macaulay, like myself, made, from a limited induction, a hasty generalisation. The difference was, that his theory was right for the practical purpose of the time, while mine was wrong. Considered, however, in the abstract, that theory appears to me to claim kindred with the ethical code of another writer, not less upright, and not less limpid, so to speak, than Lord Macaulay himself, I mean Dr. Paley. And the upshot of it may be comprised in three words: Government is police. All other functions, except those of police proper, are the accidents of its existence. As if a man should say to his friend when in the country, "I am going up to town; can I take anything for you?" So the State, while busy about protecting life and property, will allow its officer of police to perform any useful office for the community, to instruct a wayfarer as to his road, or tell the passer by what o'clock it is, provided it does not interfere with his watching the pickpocket, or laying the strong hand upon the assassin. I doubt if it is possible to cut out, as it were, with a pair of scissors, patterns of policy, which shall solve for all time and place the great historic problem of the relation of the civil power to religion.

It seems to me that in every function of life, and in every combination with his fellow-creatures, for whatever purpose, the duties of man are limited only by his powers. It is easy to separate, in the case of a Gas Company or a Chess Club, the primary end for which it exists, from everything extraneous to that end. It is not so easy in the case of the State or of the family. If the primary end of the State is to protect life and property, so the primary end of the family is to propagate the race. But around these ends there cluster, in both cases, a group of moral purposes, variable indeed with varying circumstances, but yet inhering in the relation, and not external or merely incidental to it. The action of man in the State is moral, as truly as it is in the individual sphere; although it be limited by the fact that, as he is combined with others whose views and wills may differ from his own, the sphere of the common operations must be limited, first, to the things in which all are agreed; secondly, to the things in which, though they may not be agreed, yet equity points out, and the public sense acknowledges, that the whole should be bound by the sense of the majority.

I can hardly believe that even those, including as they do so many men both upright and able, who now contend on principle for the separation of the Church from the State, are so determined to exalt their theorem to the place of an universal truth, that they ask us to condemn the whole of that process, by which, as the Gospel spread itself through the civilised world, Christianity became incorporated with the action of civil authority, and with the framework of public law. In the course of human history, indeed, we perceive little of unmixed evil, and far less of universal good. It is not difficult to discern that (in the language of Bishop Heber) as the world became Christian, Christianity became worldly; that the average tone of a system, which embraces in its wide-spreading arms the entire community, is almost of necessity lower than that of a society which, if large, is still private, and into which no man enters except by his own deliberate choice, very possibly even at the cost of much personal and temporal detriment. But Christ died for the race: and those who notice the limited progress of conversion in the world until alliance with the civil authority gave to His religion a wider access to the attention of mankind, may be inclined to doubt whether, without that alliance, its immeasurable and inestimable social results would ever have been attained. Allowing for all that may be justly urged against the danger of mixing secular motives with religious administration, and above all against the intrusion of force into the domain of thought; I for one cannot desire that Constantine in the government of the empire, that Justinian in the formation of its code of laws, or that Charlemagne in refounding society, or that Elizabeth in the crisis of the English Reformation, should have acted on the principle that the State and the Church in themselves are separate or alien powers, incapable of coalition.

But there are two causes, the combined operation of which, upon reaching a certain point of development, relaxes or dissolves their union by a process as normal (if it be less beneficial) as that by which the union was originally brought about. One of these is the establishment of the principle of popular self-government as the basis of political constitutions. The other is the disintegration of Christendom from one into many communions. As long as the Church at large, or the Church within the limits of the nation, is substantially one, I do not see why the religious care of the subject, through a body properly constituted for the purpose, should cease to be a function of the State, with the whole action and life of which it has, throughout Europe, been so long and so closely associated. As long as the State holds, by descent, by the intellectual superiority of the governing classes, and by the good will of the people, a position of original and underived authority, there is no absolute impropriety, but the reverse, in its commending to the nation the greatest of all boons. But when, either by some Revolution of institutions from their summit to their base, or by a silent and surer process, analogous to that which incessantly removes and replaces the constituent parts of the human body, the State has come to be the organ of the deliberate and ascertained will of the community, expressed through legal channels—then the inculcation of a religion can no longer rest, in full or permanent force, upon its authority. When, in addition to this, the community itself is split and severed into opinions and communions, which, whatever their concurrence in the basis of Christian belief, are hostile in regard to the point at issue, so that what was meant for the nation dwindles into the private estate as it were of a comparative handful—the attempt to maintain an Established Church becomes an error fatal to the peace, dangerous perhaps even to the life, of civil society. Such a Church then becomes (to use a figure I think of John Foster's), no longer the temple, but the mere cemetery, of a great idea. Such a policy is then not simply an attempt to treat what is superannuated and imbecile as if it were full of life and vigour, but to thwart the regular and normal action of the ruling social forces, to force them from their proper channels, and to turn them by artificial contrivance, as Apollo turned the rivers of Troas from their beds, to a purpose of our own. This is to set caprice against nature; and the end must be that, with more or less of delay, more or less of struggle or convulsion, nature will get the better of caprice.

But does it follow from all this, that the tone of moral action in the State should be lowered? Such a fear is what perplexes serious and sober men, who are laudably unwilling to surrender, in a world where falsehood has so wide a range, any portion of this vantage-ground of truth and right. I, who may have helped to mislead them by an over-hasty generalisation, would now submit what seems to me calculated to re-assure the mind. I make an appeal to the history of the last thirty years. During those years, what may be called the dogmatic allegiance of the State to religion has been greatly relaxed; but its consciousness of moral duty has been not less notably quickened and enhanced. I do not say this in depreciation of Christian dogma. But we are still a Christian people. Christianity has wrought itself into the public life of fifteen hundred years. Precious truths, and laws of relative right and the brotherhood of man, such as the wisdom of heathenism scarcely dreamed of and could never firmly grasp, the Gospel has made to be part of our common inheritance, common as the sunlight that warms us, and as the air we breathe. Sharp though our divisions in belief may be, they have not cut so deep as to prevent, or as perceptibly to impair, the recognition of these great guides and fences of moral action. It is far better for us to trust to the operation of these our common principles and feelings, and to serve our Maker together in that wherein we are at one, rather than in aiming at a standard theoretically higher, to set out with a breach of the great commandment, which forms the groundwork of all relative duties, and to refuse to do as we would be done by.

It is, then, by a practical rather than a theoretic test that our Establishments of religion should be tried. In applying this practical test, we must be careful to do it with those allowances, which are as necessary for the reasoner in moral subjects, as it is for the reasoner in mechanics to allow for friction or for the resistance of the air. An Establishment that does its work in much, and has the hope and likelihood of doing it in more: an Establishment that has a broad and living way open to it, into the hearts of the people: an Establishment that can commend the services of the present by the recollections and traditions of a far-reaching past: an Establishment able to appeal to the active zeal of the greater portion of the people, and to the respect or scruples of almost the whole, whose children dwell chiefly on her actual living work and service, and whose adversaries, if she has them, are in the main content to believe that there will be a future for them and their opinions: such an Establishment should surely be maintained. But an Establishment that neither does, nor has her hope of doing, work, except for a few, and those few the portion of the community whose claim to public aid is the smallest of all: an Establishment severed from the mass of the people by an impassable gulph, and by a wall of brass: an Establishment whose good offices, could she offer them, would be intercepted by a long unbroken chain of painful and shameful recollections: an Establishment leaning for support upon the extraneous aid of a State, which becomes discredited with the people by the very act of lending it: such an Establishment will do well for its own sake, and for the sake of its creed, to divest itself, as soon as may be, of gauds and trappings, and to commence a new career, in which, renouncing at once the credit and the discredit of the civil sanction, it shall seek its strength from within, and put a fearless trust in the message that it bears.