[23] In the small islands round our coast increase has ceased for some decades. The vital statistics of these islands furnish an excellent illustration of automatic adjustment to a state of supersaturation.
BISHOP GORE AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
(1908)
The strength and the weakness of the Anglican Church lie in the fact that it is not the best representative of any well-defined type of Christianity. It is not strictly a Protestant body; for Protestantism is the democracy of religion, and the Church of England retains a hierarchical organisation, with an order of priests who claim a divine commission not conferred upon them by the congregation. It is not a State Church as the Russian Empire has[24] a State Church. That is a position which it has neither the will nor the power to regain. Still less could it ever justify a claim to separate existence as a purely Catholic Church, independent of the Church of Rome. A community of Catholics whose claim to be a Catholic and not a Protestant Church is denied by all other Catholics, by all Protestants, and by all who are neither Catholics nor Protestants, could not long retain sufficient prestige to keep its adherents together. The destiny of such a body is written in the history of the 'Old Catholics,' who seceded from Rome because they would not accept the dogma of Papal infallibility. The seceders included many men of high character and intellect, but in numbers and influence they are quite insignificant. The Church of England has only one title to exist, and it is a strong one. It may claim to represent the religion of the English people as no other body can represent it. 'No Church,' Döllinger wrote in 1872, 'is so national, so deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with the institutions and manners of the country, or so powerful in its influence on national character.' These words are still partly true, though it is not possible to make the assertion with so much confidence as when Döllinger wrote. The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions, tastes, and prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character, which has long since lost its adventitious connexion with heraldry and property in land. A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth-century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy, feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the sixteenth century have at last become dim. A jealous love of liberty, combined with contempt for theories of equality, produced a system of graduated ranks in Church government which left a large measure of freedom, both in speech and thought, even to the clergy, and encouraged no respect for what Catholics mean by authority. The Anglican Church is also characteristically English in its dislike for logic and intellectual consistency and in its distrust of undisciplined emotionalism, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was known and dreaded under the name of 'enthusiasm.' This type is not essentially aristocratic. It does not traverse the higher ideals of the working class, which respects and admires the qualities of the 'gentleman,' though it resents the privileges long connected with the name. But it has no attraction for what may be impolitely called the vulgar class, whose religious feelings find a natural vent in an unctuous emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism. This class, which forms the backbone of Dissent and Liberalism, is instinctively antipathetic to Anglicanism. Nor does the Anglican type of Christianity appeal at all to the 'Celtic fringe,' whose temperament is curiously opposite to that of the English, not only in religion but in most other matters. The Irish and the Welsh are no more likely to become Anglicans than the lowland Scotch are to adopt Roman Catholicism. Whether Dissent is a permanent necessity in England is a more difficult question, in spite of the class differences of temperament above mentioned. If the Anglican organisation were elastic enough to permit the order of lay-readers to be developed on strongly Evangelical lines, the lower middle class might find within the Church the mental food which it now seeks in Nonconformist chapels, and might gain in breadth and dignity by belonging once more to a great historic body.
The Church of England, then, can justify its existence as English Christianity, and in no other way. It began its separate career with a series of (doubtless) illogical compromises, in the belief that there is an underlying unity, though not uniformity, in the religion as well as in the character of the English people, which would be strong enough to hold a national Church together. The dissenters from the Reformation settlement were numerically insignificant, and their existence was not regarded as a peril to the Church, for it was recognised that in a free country absolute agreement cannot be secured. The Roman Catholics, after some futile persecution, were allowed to remain loyal to their old allegiance in spiritual matters, while the Independents and similar bodies were anarchical on principle, and upheld the 'dissidence of Dissent' as a thing desirable in itself. But the defection of the Wesleyan Methodists was another matter. This was a blow to the Church of England as irreparable as the loss of Northern Europe to the Papacy. It finally upset the balance of parties in the Church, by detaching from it the larger number of the Evangelicals, particularly in the tradesman class. It gave a great stimulus to Nonconformity, which now became for the first time an important factor in the national life. Till the Wesleyan secession, the Nonconformists in England had been a feeble folk. From a return made to the Crown in 1700, it appeared that the Dissenters numbered about one in twenty of the population. Now they are as numerous as the Anglicans. Their prestige has also been largely augmented by their dominating position in the United States, where the Episcopal Church, long viewed with disfavour as tainted with British sympathies, has never recovered its lost ground, and is a comparatively small, though wealthy and influential sect. Within the Anglican communion, the inevitable religious revival of the nineteenth century began on Evangelical lines, but soon took a form determined by other influences than those which covered England with the ostentatiously hideous chapels of the Wesleyans. The extent of the revival has indeed been much exaggerated by the numerous apologists of the Catholic movement. The undoubted increase of professional zeal, activity, and efficiency among the clergy has been taken as proof of a corresponding access of enthusiasm among the laity, for which there is not much evidence. In spite of slovenly services and an easy standard of clerical duty, the observances of religion held a larger place in the average English home before the Oxford Movement than is often supposed, larger, indeed, than they do now, when family prayers and Bible reading have been abandoned in most households.
The Oxford Movement claimed to be, and was, a revival of the principles of Anglo-Catholicism, which had not been left without witness for any long period since the Reformation. The continuity is certain, as is the continuity of the Ritualism of our day with the Tractarianism of seventy years ago; but the development has been rapid, especially in the last thirty years. Those who can remember the High Churchmen of Pusey's generation, or their disciples who in many country parsonages preserved the faith of their Tractarian teachers whole and undefiled, must be struck by the divergence between the principles which they then heard passionately maintained, and those which the younger generation, who use their name and enjoy their credit, avow to be their own.
In the Tractarians the Nonjurors seemed to have come to life again, and one might easily find enthusiastic Jacobites among them. Unlike their successors, they showed no sympathy with political Radicalism. Their love for and loyalty to the English Church, which found melodious expression in Keble's poetry, were intense. They were not hostile to Evangelicalism within the Church, until the ultra-Protestant party declared war against them; but they viewed Dissent with scorn and abhorrence. They would gladly have excluded Nonconformists from any status in the Universities, and opposed any measures intended to conciliate their prejudices or remove their disabilities. Archdeacon Denison, in his sturdy opposition to the 'conscience clause' in Church schools, was a typical representative of the old High Church party. But still more bitter was their animosity against religious Liberalism. Even after the feud with the Evangelicals had developed into open war, Pusey was ready to join with Lord Shaftesbury and his party in united anathemas against the authors of 'Essays and Reviews.' The beginnings of Old Testament criticism evoked an outburst of fury almost unparalleled. When Bishop Gray, of Cape Town, solemnly 'excommunicated' Bishop Colenso, of Natal, and enjoined the faithful to 'treat him as a heathen man and a publican,' for exposing the unhistorical character of portions of the Pentateuch, he became a hero with the whole High Church party, and even the more liberal among the bishops were cowed by the tempest of feeling which the case aroused. In the same period, many Oxford men can remember Bishop Wilberforce's attack upon Darwinism, and, somewhat later, Dean Burgon's University sermon which ended with the stirring peroration: Leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I leave you yours in the Zoological Gardens!' From the same pulpit Liddon, a little before his death, uttered a pathetic remonstrance against the course which his younger disciples were taking about inspiration and tradition.
Reverence for tradition was a very prominent feature in the theology of the older generation. They spent an immense amount of time, learning, and ingenuity in establishing a catena of patristic and orthodox authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently infallible, as long as the Church remained undivided. Thus the earlier General Councils, before the schism between East and West, may not be appealed against, and the Creeds drawn up by them can never be revised. Since the great schism, the infallible inspiration of the Church has been in abeyance, like an old English peerage when a peer leaves two or more daughters and no sons. This fantastic theory condemns all later developments, and leaves the Church under the weight of the dead hand. On the question of the Establishment the party was divided, some of its members attaching great value to the union of Church and State, while others made claims for the Church, in the matter of self-government, which were hardly compatible with Establishment. Their bond of union was their conviction of 'the necessity of impressing on people that the Church was more than a merely human institution; that it had privileges, sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ Himself; that it was a matter of highest obligation to remain united to the Church.'[25]
As compared with their successors, the Tractarians were academic and learned; they preached thoughtful and carefully prepared sermons; they cared little for ecclesiastical millinery, and often acquiesced in very simple and 'backward' ceremonial. Their theory of the Church, their personal piety and self-discipline, were of a thoroughly medieval type, as may be seen from certain chapters in the life of Pusey. They fought the battle of Anglo-Catholicism, at Oxford and elsewhere, with a whole-hearted conviction that knew no misgivings or scruples. Oxford has not forgotten the election, as late as 1862, of an orthodox naval officer to a chair of history for which Freeman was a candidate.