'One of the clearest results of all religious history and religious psychology is that the essence of all religion is not dogma and idea, but cultus and communion, the living intercourse with the Deity—an intercourse of the entire community, having its vital roots in religion and deriving its ultimate power of thus uniting individuals, from its faith in God.... Whatever the future may bring us, we cannot expect a certainty and force of the knowledge of God and of His redemptive power to subsist without communion and cultus. And so long as a Christianity of any kind shall subsist at all, it will be united with a cultus, and with Christ holding a central position in the cultus.'[91]
From America, the last refuge of individualism, there has come a pronouncement not less drastic. Professor Royce, the author of the admirable metaphysical treatise entitled 'The World and the Individual,' has recently published a double series of Hibbert Lectures on 'The Problem of Christianity,' in which he affirms the institutionalist theory with a surprising absence of qualification. The whole book is dominated by one idea, advocated with a naïveté which would hardly have been possible to a theologian—the idea that churchmanship is the essential part of the Christian religion.
'The salvation of the individual man is determined by some sort of membership in a certain spiritual community—a religious community, and in its inmost nature a divine community, in whose life the Christian virtues are to reach their highest expression and the spirit of the Master is to obtain its earthly fulfilment. In other words, there is a certain universal and divine spiritual community. Membership in that community is necessary to the salvation of man.... Such a community exists, is needed, and is an indispensable means of salvation for the individual man, and is the fitting realm wherein alone the kingdom of heaven which the Master preached can find its expression, and wherein alone the Christian virtues can be effectively preached.'[92]
These statements, which in vigour and rigour would satisfy the most extreme curialist in the Society of Jesus, are not a little startling in an American philosopher, who, as far as the present writer knows, does not belong to any 'Catholic' Church. The thesis thus enunciated is the argument of the whole book, in which 'loyalty to the beloved community' is declared to be the characteristic Christian virtue. It is true that the satisfaction of Professor Royce's Catholic readers is destined to be damped in the second volume, where he forbids us to look for the ideal divine community in any existing Church, and expresses his conviction that great changes must come over the dogmatic teaching of Christianity. But for our purpose the significant fact is that throughout the book he insists that Christianity is essentially an institutional religion, the most completely institutional of all religions. For Professor Royce to be a Christian is to be a Churchman.
Our last witness shall be the learned Roman Catholic layman, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the deepest thinker, perhaps, of all living theologians in this country. 'It is now ever increasingly clear to all deep impartial students that religion has ever primarily expressed and formed itself in cultus, in social organisation, social worship, intercourse between soul and soul and between soul and God; and in symbols and sacraments, in contacts between spirit and matter.' He proceeds to discuss the strength and weakness of institutionalism in a perfectly candid spirit, but with too particular reference to the present conditions within the Roman Church to help us much in our more general survey. He mentions the drawbacks of an official philosophy, prescribed by authority; 'only in 1835 did the Congregation of the Index withdraw heliocentric books from its list.' He emphasises the necessity of historical dogmas, but admits that orthodoxy cherishes, along with them, 'fact-like historical pictures' which 'cannot be taken as directly, simply factual.' He vindicates the orthodoxy of religious toleration, and refuses to consign all non-Catholics to perdition, lamenting the tendency to identify absolutely the visible and invisible Church, which prevails among 'some of the (now dominant) Italian and German Jesuit Canonists.' Lastly, he boldly recommends the frank abandonment of the Papal claim to exercise temporal power in Italy. This is not so much a critique of institutionalism as the plea of a Liberal Catholic that the logic of institutionalism should not be allowed to override all other considerations. The Baron is, indeed, himself a mystic, though also a strong believer in the necessity of institutional religion.
We have then a considerable body of very competent opinion, that a man cannot be a Christian unless he is a Churchman. To the mystic pure and simple, such a statement seems monstrous. Did not even Augustine say, 'I want to know God and my own soul; these two things, and no third whatever'? What intermediary can there be, he will ask, between the soul and God? What sacredness is there in an organisation? Is it not a matter of common experience that the morality of an institution, a society, a state, is inferior to that of the individuals who compose it? And is organised Catholicism an exception to this rule? And yet we must admit the glamour of the idea of a divine society. It arouses that esprit de corps which is the strongest appeal that can be made to some noble minds. It calls for self-sacrifice and devoted labour in a cause which is higher than private interest. It demands discipline and co-operation, through which alone great things can be done on the field of history. It holds out a prospect of really influencing the course of events. And if there has been a historical Incarnation, it follows that God has actually intervened on the stage of history, and that it is His will to carry out some great and divine purpose in and by means of the course of history. With this object, as the Catholic believes, He established an institutional Church, pledged to the highest of all causes; and what greater privilege can there be than to take part in this work, as a soldier in the army of God in His long campaign against the spiritual powers of evil? The Christian institutionalist is the servant of a grand idea.
There are, however, a few questions which we are bound to ask him. First, is his idea of the Church Christian? Did the Founder of Christianity contemplate or even implicitly sanction the establishment of a semi-political international society, such as the Catholic Church has actually been? Orthodox Catholicism maintains that He did. Modernism admits that He did not, but adds that if He had known that the Messianic expectation was illusory, and that the existing world-order was to continue for thousands of years, He would certainly have wished that a Catholic Church should exist. And, argues the Modernist, if it is a good thing that a Catholic Church should exist, it is useless to quarrel with the conditions under which alone it can maintain its existence. The philosophical historian must admit that all the changes which the Catholic Church has undergone—its concessions to Pagan superstition, its secular power, its ruthless extirpation of rebels against its authority, its steadily growing centralisation and autocracy—were forced upon it in the struggle for existence. Those who wish that Church history had been different are wishing the impossible, or wishing that the Church had perished. But this argument is not valid as a defence of a divine institution. It is rather a merciless exposure of what happens, and must happen, to a great idea when it is enslaved by an institution of its own creation. The political organisation which has grown up round the idea ends by strangling it, and continues to fight for its own preservation by the methods which govern the policy of all other political organisations—force, fraud, and accommodation. There is nothing in the political history of Catholicism which suggests in the slightest degree that the spirit of Christ has been the guiding principle in its councils. Its methods have, on the contrary, been more cruel, more fraudulent, more unscrupulous, than those of most secular powers. If the Founder of Christianity had appeared again on earth during the so-called ages of faith, it is hardly possible to doubt that He would, have been burnt alive or crucified again. What the Latin Church preserved was not the religion of Christ, which lived on by its inherent indestructibility, but parts of the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies, distorted and petrified by scholasticism, a vast quantity of purely Pagan superstitions, and the arcana imperii of Roman Cæsarism. The normal end of Scholasticism is a mummified philosophy of authority, in which there are no problems to solve, but a great many dead pundits to consult. The normal end of a policy which exploits the superstitions of the peasant is a desperate warfare against education. The normal end of Roman Imperialism is a sultanate like that of Diocletian. It is difficult to find a proof of infallible and supernatural wisdom in the evolution of which these are the last terms. We read with the utmost sympathy and admiration Baron von Hügel's loyal and reverent appeals to the authorities of his Church, that they may draw out the strong and beneficent powers of institutionalism, and avoid its insidious dangers. But it may be doubted whether such a policy is possible. The future of Roman Catholicism is, I fear, with the Ultramontanes. They, and not the Modernists, are in the line of development which Catholicism as an institution has consistently followed, and must continue to follow to the end. I can see no other fate in store for the soma of Catholicism; the germ-cells of true Christianity live their own life within it, and are transmitted without taint to those who are born of the Spirit.
We must further ask the institutionalist what are his grounds for identifying the Church of God with the particular institution to which he belongs. On the institutionalist hypothesis, it might have been expected either that there would have been no divisions in Christendom, or that all seceding bodies would have shown such manifest inferiority in wisdom, morality, and sanctity, that the exclusive claims of the Great Church would have been ratified at the bar of history. This is, in fact, the claim which Roman Catholics make. But it can only be upheld by writing history in the spirit of an advocate, or by giving a preference, not in accordance with modern ethical views, to certain types of character which are produced by the monastic life of the Catholic 'religious,' It is increasingly difficult to find, in the lives of those who belong to any one denomination, proofs of marked superiority over other Christians. Of course, we know little of the real character of our neighbours as they appear in the eyes of God; but in considering a theory which lays so much stress on history as Catholic institutionalism does, we are bound to make use of such evidence as we have. And the evidence does not support the theory that we cannot be Christians unless we are Catholics. Nor does it even countenance the view that we cannot be Christians unless we are enthusiastic members of some religious corporation. Professor Royce seems to have been carried away by the idea which prompted him to write his book; but a little thought about the characters of his acquaintances might have given him pause.
The mechanical theory of devolution which assumes so much importance in some fashionable Anglican teaching about the Church need not detain us long. The logical choice must ultimately be between the great international Catholic Church and what Auguste Sabatier called the religion of the Spirit. The religion of all Protestants, when it is not secularised, as it too often is, belongs to this latter type, even when they lay most stress on the idea of brotherhood and corporate action. For with them institutions are never much more than associations for mutual help and edification. The Protestant always hopes to be saved qua Christian, not qua Churchman.
A third question which must be asked is whether institutionalism in practice makes for unity among Christians, or for division. Too often the chief visible sign of the 'corporate idea' of which so much is said, is the rigidity of the spikes which it erects round its own particular fold. The obstacles to acts of reunion (which in no way carry with them the necessity of formal amalgamation) are raised almost exclusively by stiff institutionalists. The much-discussed Kikuyu case has brought this home to everybody. But for these uncompromising Churchmen, Christians of all denominations would be glad enough to meet together at the Lord's table on special occasions like the service which gave rise to this controversy. Anglicans are well aware that the differences of opinion within their body are far greater than those which separate some of them from Protestant Nonconformity, and others of them from Home. Allegiance to this or that denomination is generally an accident of early surroundings. To make these external classifications into barriers which cannot be crossed is either an absurdity or a confession that a Church is a political aggregate. A Roman Monsignor explained, à propos of the Kikuyu service, that no Roman Catholic could ever communicate in a Protestant church, because in so doing he would be guilty of an act of apostasy, and would be no longer a Roman Catholic. The attitude is consistent with the Roman claim to universal jurisdiction; for any other body it would be absurd. The stiff institutionalist is debarred by his theory from fraternising with many who should be his friends, while he is bound to others with whom he has no sympathy. His theory is once more found to conflict with the facts.