The latter, however, the Anglican Church, has reconciled these two concepts of opposite origins, the Oriental idea of a “Church,” and the Occidental idea of the State. For it is not only a religious, but a national and a social tradition.
This, I take it, was Disraeli’s attitude. By temperament he was theocratic. He believed in the original spirituality of his race; but he also believed in the great destiny of the nation to which he belonged, and in her Church he descried the naturalised power of Semitic ideas, the only form in which they could become nationally operative, the sole political means in a political country of sanctifying the secular. “The Church,” he once said, “is one of the few great things left.” The Church ever found him a wise and enthusiastic supporter. The fact is, as he put it in a speech of 1860, “the Church is a part of England.” Nor would he ever allow that mere differences of opinion negatived her comprehensiveness. She was still Anglican. What he recoiled from was the hard-and-fast narrowness of Puritanism, the fiercer fanaticisms of which, he always maintained, had undone Ireland. Sectarianism is not strength, for strength resides in national discipline. He regarded a “national Church” as the best pledge for religious liberty to even those outside her communion, as a national refuge from bigotry and a national rampart against priestcraft.
The Church’s “nationality” is proved even by the peculiar character of her property. It is territorial. It is (as he emphasised in a speech of 1862) “... so distributed throughout the country, that it makes that Church, from the very nature of its tenure, a national Church; and the power of the Church of England does not depend merely on the amount of property it possesses, but in a very great degree on the character and kind of that property. Then I say that the Church, deprived of its status, would become merely an episcopal sect in this country. And in time, it is not impossible it might become an insignificant one. But that is not the whole, nor, perhaps, even the greatest evil, that might arise from the dissolution of the connection between Church and State, because in the present age the art of government becomes every day more difficult, and no Government will allow a principle so powerful as the religious principle to be divorced from the influences by which it regulates the affairs of a country. What would happen?... The State of England would take care, after the Church was spoiled, to enlist in its service what are called the ministers of all religions. They would be salaried by the State, and the consequences of the dissolution of the alliance between Church and State would be one equally disastrous to the Churchman and to the Nonconformist. It would place the ministers of all spiritual influences under the control of the civil power, and it would in reality effect a revolution in the national character....”
De Tocqueville has proved that the French clergy were the staunchest upholders of civil liberty before the Revolution; but he has also acutely shown that the Roman priesthood, devoid of domestic ties, looks to the Church as its sole fatherland, unless it can itself become a proprietor of the soil. The French Revolution disempowered it for that purpose, and evicted it from its heritage. The English clergy, on the other hand, are linked to civil life both by the land and the home. Contrast for one moment the landscape of a French village with that of an English, and the difference becomes typified. In the one the church stands aloof and dominates the hamlet. In the other it nestles among the cottages, and helps the daily life around it.
What was present to Disraeli’s mind was not only that, in such a case, the ancient landmarks of parish life, the ancient trusts of education, the ancient equality of social intercourse between clergy and laity, the ancient duties and intimacies, the ancient openness to the poorest of career in the Church and of residence on the land, would be swept away; but that, as he expressed it when discussing the “Cowper-Temple Amendment” in 1870, “you will not entrust the priest or the presbyter with the privilege of expounding the Holy Scriptures ... but for that purpose you are inventing and establishing a new sacerdotal class.” “My idea of sacerdotal despotism,” he said in 1863, “is this, that a minister of the Church of England, who is appointed to expound doctrine, should deem that he has a right to invent doctrine. That ... is the sacerdotal despotism I fear....” The State would suffer; and it would suffer doubly. Not only would religion cease to be an official element of order, but the ministers of religion might be unduly strengthened in civil affairs—might be over-politicised. “Whether that is a result to be desired,” he remarked ten years afterwards, “is a grave question for all men. For my own part, I am bound to say that I doubt whether it would be favourable to the cause of civil and religious liberty.”
In his novels he emphasises his belief that society is inconceivable without religion, and that “without a Church there can be no true religion, because otherwise you have no security for the truth,” although he also distinguishes between differing “orthodoxies” and real religion. At the same time, the Church as a polity must have dogmas—“No Church, no creed”—“no dogmas, no deans, Mr. Dean.” The human craving, the passionate instinct for religion, he ever based—from the date of Contarini Fleming and Alroy to that of Coningsby and Tancred, and from that of Tancred to that of Lothair—on the fact that “man requires that there shall be direct relations between the created and the Creator, and that in those relations he should find a solution of the perplexities of existence.”—“The brain that teems with illimitable thought will never recognise as his Creator any power of nature, however irresistible, that is not gifted with consciousness.... The Church comes forward, and without equivocation offers to establish direct relations between God and man. Philosophy denies its title and disputes its power. Why? Because they are founded on the supernatural. What is the supernatural? Can there be anything more miraculous than the existence of man and the world? Anything more literally supernatural than the origin of things? The Church explains what no one else pretends to explain, and which every one agrees it is of first moment should be made clear.”
Of the two passions which moved Disraeli, the one for mastery, the other for the mysterious, the last was perhaps the strongest. The mysteries that fascinated him were real, and did not render him a mystic, still less a quietist. It is a mistake so to regard him. His strength alike and his weakness resided in the practical energy of his imagination. The whole of existence was for him a standing miracle. “Contarini” finds his fate by a vision in a church; “Venetia” receives a miraculous answer to her prayer of agony. He delights to depict, even in the short biography of his father, providential coincidences. What is deemed bizarre in his works, is really the sense of magic wonder in all we experience. His irony, too, contrasting show with substance and words with things, works by paradox.[93] That man is a spirit on earth was his firm conviction. We find it accentuated from his earliest utterances to his latest. “... There are some things I know,” said the Syrian in Lothair, according with the Syrian in Tancred, “and some things I believe. I know that I have a soul, and I believe that it is immortal....”[94] The riddle of life is not to be solved by theories, however true or ingenious of the processes of development, still less by the fashionable “prattle of protoplasm,” or the glib triflers with their “We once had fins, we shall have wings.” He was quite sincere and consistent in his famous “Ape or Angel” dilemma. He believed, both passionately and dispassionately, that man was divine. Science confesses that its discoveries are merely of recurrent facts called laws; it does not profess to account for them.
“Science may prove the insignificance of this globe in the scale of creation,” said the stranger, “but it cannot prove the insignificance of man. What is the earth compared with the sun? A mole-hill by a mountain; yet the inhabitants of this earth can discover the elements of which the great orb exists, and will probably, ere long, ascertain all the conditions of its being. Nay, the human mind can penetrate far beyond the sun. There is no relation, therefore, between the faculties of man and the scale in creation of the planet which he inhabits.... But there are people now who tell you there never was any creation, and therefore there never could have been a creator.”—“And which is now advanced with the confidence of novelty,” said the Syrian, “though all of it has been urged, and vainly urged, thousands of years ago. There must be design, or all we see would be without sense, and I do not believe in the unmeaning. As for the natural forces to which all creation is now attributed, we know that they are unconscious, while consciousness is as inevitable a portion of our existence as the eye or the hand. The conscious cannot be derived from the unconscious. Man is divine.... Is it more unphilosophical to believe in a personal God omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence? Goethe, a Spinozist who did not believe in Spinoza, said he could bring his mind to the conception that in the centre of space we might meet with a monad of pure intelligence. Is that more philosophical than the truth first revealed to man amid these everlasting hills,” said the Syrian, “that God made man in His own image?” ... “It is the charter of the nobility of man ... one of the divine dogmas revealed in this land; not the invention of councils, not one of which was held on this sacred soil; confused assemblies first got together by the Greeks, and then by barbarous nations in barbarous times.”—“Yet the divine land no longer tells us divine things,” said “Lothair.” “It may, or may not, have fulfilled its destiny,” said the Syrian. “‘In my Father’s house are many mansions,’ and by the various families of nations the designs of the Creator are accomplished. God works by races,[95] and one was appointed in due season, and after many developments, to reveal and expound in this land the spiritual nature of man....”
This quotation may suffice, though many others, even from the biography of Lord George Bentinck, might have been offered. These ideas are perhaps best summarised in the Preface to Lothair. Disraeli really believed in the sacredness of the Syrian soil and air, the peculiar genius of the Semite for communion with God, as of the Hellene for communion with nature and origination of art; in the special religious revelation vouchsafed to Semites alone and consummated in Christianity, which he ever held was the fulfilment of Judaism. The dogma of the Atonement he received literally. It was a divine mystery enacted by a prince of Israel. Disraeli’s sense of mystery was, let me repeat, literal, and never explained through emblems. There was nothing of Gothic symbolism in his nature. From these convictions flowed his sanguine confidence in himself and his mission; in destiny, which he has himself said may be but the exertion of our own will. From these flowed his sympathy with the heroic, his turn for the adventurous; his disrelish, too, of modern rationalism, modern materialism,[96] and even of modern metaphysics.[97] From these flowed his faith in the revelations of conscience—“I worship in a Church where I believe God dwells, and dwells for my guidance and my good; my conscience;”[98] in a word, from these flowed his bias towards a natural Theocracy. But, as I have already said, he recognised that the English Church had alone, as the depository of these racial ideas, attuned them to the national refrain of England, embodied them in living Western flesh. Just as for him Government meant organised authority, and Party organised opinion, so the Church meant organised belief; nor did he ever cease to point out that if the national Church were disestablished, if that form of Protestant religion, resting on popular sympathies and popular privileges, which had grown with the growth of England and had leavened her life, her civil society, her public education, and even her pastimes, were divorced from the principle of authority, not only might the competition of sects cause a bigoted intolerance, but the State itself would certainly be the loser.
I will choose another most pertinent passage from his speech on the Irish Church Bill, delivered in March, 1869. He had discussed “disendowment,” and he opposed it with all his might, as the plunder of the Church in English history had always gone into the coffers of the land, although it was a trust for the poor.