(2.) Another alleged grievance, or “practical evil,” is said to be the age [28] at which young men are called on to make these important professions of their belief. I had, many years since, to encounter the same objection in another form. I met with some among the Baptists, who objected to teaching children to “say their prayers,” on the ground that they could not understand the mysterious subjects implied; and others who would not ask them to believe any thing in Religion, until they had proved it. The “practical evil” is—and I am sure that your Lordship will agree with me—altogether on the side of those who leave the young thus to make their own opinions, and find their faith how they can. The Bible is, in many respects, a more complex book than the Prayer-book; and yet I can ask my child to put entire faith in it, as God’s Word. Nor can the faithful Churchman, I believe, feel any difficulty in giving into the hands of young and old, the Formularies which have been his own comfort and help hitherto, and asking their “assent and consent” to all that which he knows to be true.
Men of ability will not take Holy Orders.
(3.) There is a “practical evil,” which has of late been greatly pressed on public notice, which Dr. Stanley thus refers to (p. 30)—“Intelligent, thoughtful, highly educated young men, who twenty or thirty years ago were to be found in every Ordination, are gradually withheld from the service of the Church, and from the profession to which their tastes, their characters, and their gifts, best fit them.”
This is an evil, the existence of which I shall not question—it is indeed too plain, and too alarming to admit of any doubt. But I deny that it has any foundation in the practice of Subscription; which has not been changed, or made more rigid, in our days. I have never known one conscientious, thoughtful young churchman kept from Holy Orders by a shrinking from Subscription. They who have shrunk have been persons who differ from the Church, and acknowledge the fact. They have been men, like my upright friend Mr. Fisher,—the author of “Liturgical Revision,”—who would not, for all the temptations that might be offered, use the entire Offices of our Church, even if ordained immediately without Subscription. Subscription keeps them out, of course. It is meant to do so, if it has any meaning at all. But if we look around us at the state of things in the Church, during the twenty or thirty years to which Dr. Stanley alludes, we shall not find it difficult to ascertain causes which have kept, and will keep, so many intelligent and conscientious minds of the higher order, from entering the ministry of the Church. Young men of ability in the last generation, if designed for Holy Orders, gave themselves to Theological study. But we all remember the panic which arose in consequence of the secessions to the Roman Church. Public patronage and popular feeling were then so successfully worked on, by the fanatical portion of the press, that the bare rumour of “Theological learning” was enough to mark any Churchman for suspicion. Parents who did not wish their more gifted sons to be victims, chose for them other callings, and found a thousand new and attractive openings in the Civil service. Youths of greatest promise saw encouragement in other professions, and rewards in the distance for successful merit; but if they began to read Theology, they soon found themselves obliged to pause. To read St. Augustine, till you began to believe the ancient doctrine of Baptism, was fatal: to study Church history, or the Liturgies, was still worse,—if men did it honestly. Hundreds, I believe, were thus beaten off. Parents and guardians and friends could not desire social and professional neglect—if not worse—for those in whom they were interested. They saw and said, that “there was but little chance for a clever man,” if he had the stigma of high ability or learning. If such a man as Dr. Mill—to whose writings men readily seek, now that the infidel is at our doors—if he died in comparative obscurity and neglect, what could others look for? The evil is done, and none now living will see it completely undone.—
To crush the principles of old Churchmanship was not, however, a task to which the rising intellect of Oxford would lend itself; it retired and left that work to others; or it strayed into German literature, whither the popular hatred had not yet learned to track it: and now the wail goes forth from “Charge” after “Charge,” that men of higher minds have fled, or turned “neologians!” Is there no Nemesis here?—A few years since, the Church’s rapid descent from her position of ancient learning was regarded with a quiet despair by some even of our most thoughtful men. A late dignitary even expressed “thankfulness” on one occasion at some moderate-looking promotion that had been made in high places, and he was remonstrated with by one who knew the entire ignorance of theology of the clergyman who had just been honoured. “Why, he is wholly ignorant of Christianity!” was, I believe, the exclamation. “Yes,” was the answer, “but he is not hostile to it.”
But will any relaxation of “Subscription”—will the destruction of the Articles, or the Revision of the Liturgy by “the Association” set up of late, bring back Theological learning, or tempt the “higher minds” into the Church’s ranks? No one can imagine it. A great misfortune has happened to us, and the way to repair it is not easily seen; but it is something to see the evil itself. The Romanizing movement was a great misfortune: we all deplore it, even those who know that it was provoked by the narrow-minded treatment which it received. But the loss of Theology and high intellect is a greater misfortune by far; and this will be yet found, when the dulness of a coming generation has to defend the Bible apart from the Church.
The Athanasian Creed.
(4.) In discussing the “practical evils” of Subscription, I observe that Dr. Stanley occasionally singles out parts of our “Formularies,” as involving special difficulty, and embarrassing “subscribers” in a more painful way than others. More than once he mentions the Creed of St. Athanasius as a peculiar hardship. In the first place, he somewhat roughly and unfairly charges falsehood on the Article for calling it St. Athanasius’s (p. 13); but surely he would not mean to charge falsehood on the Prayer-book, for speaking of the “Apostles Creed”—and yet the Apostles did not write it,—or of the “Nicene Creed,” although the latter part of it be not Nicene? The meaning is so plain and easy, that I own that I wonder at the tone of Dr. Stanley here. [32] The Creed “commonly called Athanasian” is surely a good description of a document which expresses well the truth which Athanasius defended, and the Church, by saying “commonly called,” expressly refrains from certifying his authorship. But the admission of the Creed itself is the evident grievance, and so there is anger at the very name. To this, then, I will address myself.
“As a doctrine most explicitly asserted by the Liturgy,” Dr. Stanley mentions “the condemnation of all members of the Eastern Church, as maintained by the clauses of the Athanasian Creed, which appear to declare that those who refuse to acknowledge the Holy Ghost to proceed from the Father and the Son, without doubt perish everlastingly.” An “eminent prelate” twenty years ago, we are told, expressed a devout hope that, “for the honour of human nature, no one now would deliberately aver” this! I hope I shall not seem to be harsh if I say I would here put in one word “for the honour” of common sense, which seems shocked by such treatment of such subjects. We might as fairly say, that the words, “Whosoever will be saved must thus think of the Trinity,” consign all infants, and persons of little understanding, to everlasting perdition, because they cannot “think” of it at all. It is trifling to confound the intellectual reception of a doctrine with its saving reception, and it is saying that none but very clever people will be saved. Such confusion is equivalent to a rejection of even the simplest form of Creed. Take for example the Ethiopian’s confession, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” on which he was baptized (Acts viii. 37). For the intellectual conception here demands explanation at once. In what sense is He the Son of God? Are we not all “His offspring?” Is Jesus the Son of God as man? or as God?—or both? If His Son, is He Eternal?—and soon. Such questions are inevitable, if we would really know our meaning in saying, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” But important as a right understanding of truth assuredly is, no Church ever thus taught that intellectual reception of truth could be attained by the multitude, for whose salvation we labour. If, indeed, we could look into the mind of the majority of good Christians, and see the shape which doctrines there take, we should often find the greatest amount of heresy of the intellect co-existing with orthodoxy of heart. A statement thus drawn out at length in a Creed is the Church’s intellectual exposition, as far as it goes, of the Doctrine professed. The million may not know this; but the Church tells them—“If you hold the true doctrine, this is what, consciously or not, you are holding.” The Athanasian Creed is a statement of that truth which dwells in every Christian heart. We know that God’s grace in the soul is always “orthodox;” but “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness;” but the Creed forbids the intellect to misinterpret what the heart has savingly known.—The agreement with the Eastern Church attempted at the Council of Florence illustrates this; for it was evidently on this basis. The Greeks were not told that their forefathers had all perished, but that their expression of the truth which they held was less perfect than the Latin.
It may be very easy to misrepresent what is thus said; but few, on reflection, will venture to say the opposite. Dr. Stanley would not say that no truth in Scripture is “necessary to salvation?” He would not say that no doctrine of any Creed is “necessary to salvation?” But yet he would not say that right intellectual conceptions of any truth, or of any doctrine, are “necessary to salvation?” And as he would own that some faith is necessary, or a “grace of faith” (the “Habitus Fidei” of the Schools), he must own, therefore, that saving faith, however unintellectual, is, as I said, orthodox. To “hold the Faith” is one thing; to apprehend its intellectual expression is another. And if all this be undeniable, what sad unreality it is, to write and speak, as so many do of the Athanasian Creed, as if it required a comprehension of all the terms which it uses!—instead of a pure “holding” of the Truth, which it would explain to all capable of the explanation.