"How the Church Stands To-Day"

How the Church Stands To-Day
The Speaker,  October 27, 1900



The Crisis In The English Church. By the Rev. W. E. Bowen. With an Introduction by the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies. London: Nisbet and Co.

Mr. Bowen's book is a typical and almost symbolic publication. It is calculated to impress on the mind the irrevocable conviction that the Church crisis has reached a stage in which no alternative remains except that between disestablishment and a sudden and disturbing irruption of Christian charity. Between these two neither side is likely to hesitate and the Establishment is, we fear, doomed. We say we fear it because it is not without regret that we see any historic compromise which has long subsisted on common sense giving way under the assaults of logic. But, however much one may defend an anomaly so long as it is sympathetically and rationally interpreted, it is ridiculous to sound the praises of its practicality while a host of insane mathematicians are busily engaged in working it to a reductio ad absurdum. Mr. Llewelyn Davies, in an able introduction which he contributes to Mr. Bowen's volume, says plausibly in reply to the charge of "persecution" brought against Protestants:-

"I have always thought that the comprehensiveness of our Church consisted not in its being a Liberty Hall in which every clergyman was free to deprave its doctrine and discipline as he pleased, but in the fact that its doctrine and discipline were themselves comprehensive."

The distinction is sound and logical, but we doubt whether it is accurate or complete in the particular case. It is not true that the Anglican form is a lucid and systematic latitudinarian scheme marked out in wide but clear divisions. The problem chiefly arises from the complex mosaic of forms found in the Prayer-book. Upon the whole, the nobler and more popular parts of our Prayer-book are rather High Church than Low. But it is foolish to maintain (as is done by some ritualists) that the Prayer-book is entirely Tractarian when the greatest of the Tractarians defended their acceptation of certain Articles by interpretations which they did not pretend were natural or obvious. And the liberty of the Church has not, as a matter of fact, rested on a scientific scheme of comprehensiveness, but on a compromise founded on the impossibility either of altering or of pressing too hard an august and beautiful but archaic and perplexing system. All sections have felt their position anomalous in something and the proverbial pot and kettle have been our chief vessels of salvation. Now it is obvious that one of these English compromises of ours cannot exist an instant after two formidable sections set to work to argue about it. If a Judge were to insist on the bodily appearance of John Doe and Richard Roe, nothing would remain to be done except to explain to him the unique and delicate character of those gentlemen and to remove them from our legal system. If the Queen, in the exercise of her indisputable legal rights, were to pardon all the murderers and make them peers, nothing could be done except to abolish the Monarchy. It does not follow, however, that we should not regret having to do so; and we may all as Englishmen look back with pride at the great experiment of a tolerant National Church, even if it has failed at last.

Mr. Bowen's book, which is written from the moderate Protestant standpoint, is a peculiar example of what we may be permitted without offence to call degeneration in the course of 300 pages. It opens with an estimate of the good and evil in the Oxford Movement, which is not only just and thoughtful, but genuinely original; its thesis that Tractarianism was in its highest function a somewhat austere moral movement, an almost Puritanic protest against slovenly and luxurious religion, is a ray of honest historic daylight. But instead of pursuing the high and fruitful work of disentangling the spiritual and essential from the irrelevant and malicious in this controversy, he turns the latter part of his book into the familiar Kensit catalogue of horrible revelations in high life, a mass of barren and bitter anecdotes which only serve to remind us, if they are untrue, that there are a great many liars in the world, if they are true, that there are a great many repulsive lunatics. There may be "Catholics" (we leave the matter to the police) who flog nuns almost to death, but that is no reason for flogging the subject to death also, as if it had anything to do with the two theories of ecclesiastical history. There may be "Catholics" who teach children that the Dissenters found "little sham churches" which the Holy Ghost never inspires, but we are prevented from admitting this into the Church controversy by our firm conviction that Canon Gore or Canon MacColl would regard the view of Dissenters with as much contempt as we do. Our own definite and even earnest opinion is that this discussion will never have either profit or solution until each party respectively abandons identifying Protestantism with Mr. Kensit or Catholicism with the idiots above mentioned, and, frankly, admits the really interesting historic fact that Catholicism and Protestantism are two moral and intellectual forces standing for tendencies that are as old as life and equally worth living. Catholicism stands for the instinct, for clothing the unutterable in noble systems, enduring images and worthy language, Protestantism for the recurrent necessity of rending the loveliest veils and refreshing human nature in the terrible simplicity of monotheism. But from this view one very obvious deduction follows, which has a very clear bearing on a book like that of Mr. Bowen. It is not common sense to suppose that the adherents of Protestantism, the glory of which is in a certain impatience of formulae, will be as good authorities upon rites and ceremonies as the people who regard them as of vast importance. A plain man is within his rights in expressing an indifference to heraldry, but if he begins to argue about it it is not improbable that he will put metal on metal and call a chevron a bend. Now the evil genius of most Protestants in this discussion has been ignorance: they do not understand the facts of the case as the party who are immersed in ecclesiastical history understands them. And this has given rise to the fault which hag-rides the work of Mr. Bowen and Mr. Llewelyn Davies, a fault that has dwarfed and vulgarised militant Protestantism to a degree inconceivable, and which we will venture to call the idolatrous tendency of Protestantism. The ignorant Protestants and the ignorant Catholics are the only people who worship stocks and stones, for the former think a dead stick diabolic and the latter holy. If the gods of the heathen are stone and brass the same must be said of the devils of Mr. Kensit. This extraordinary tendency to quote material objects as if they were sinful in themselves, to whisper in an awe-struck voice a rumour of the presence of certain candles or pictures as if the candles were stolen or the pictures pornographic is one of the worst results of the grotesque seriousness of which we speak. Mr. Llewelyn Davies, for example, says in his preface not that there is confession in the Church, but that there are "confessional-boxes," and from the manner in which these objects are often spoken of, one would imagine that a confessional-box was something like a musical-box, an ingenious piece of clock-work which confessed and absolved a man by machinery, and without which it was impossible for a confessor to ply his trade. As a matter of fact, a confessional-box bears the same relation to confession that a bathing-machine bears to bathing; it makes it slightly safer and more decorous. As bathing would exist everywhere if there were no machines, so confession would, as things stand, exist if there were no boxes. The real trouble is that those who embark on the genuinely necessary work of attacking the evils of ritualism get no further than these material symbols, and never realise the real problem. The real problem of confession, for example, may be stated in three short sentences, and it has nothing to do with boxes. The Prayer-book leaves the matter entirely to the layman, saying that, if he is unable to quiet his conscience, he shall come to confession. This obviously does not contemplate, and by implication discourages, the idea of universal systematic confession. But, if there be a strong movement among the laity for such systematic confession, how can such systematic confession be stopped in a free country? No one has any right to say that every member of a vast crowd is not at a particular psychological crisis. If any Protestant writer can really solve this problem of the letter and the spirit, he will do more than we can.

Let us take another example from Mr. Bowen's pages- the passage which he quotes from the letters of Pusey, in which that great man discusses self-flagellation, describes a scourge "of a very sacred character" with five lashes, discusses the parts of his anatomy, lungs, &c., on which it was safe to employ it, and goes into the matter of hair shirts like a man choosing waistcoats. The passage is, to a healthy man, somewhat emetic. But we think that Mr. Bowen is yielding again to Kensitite materialism in imagining that it is the mere use of a rod that seems unworthy of Pusey. His self-discipline was probably neither more voluntary nor more painful than that of an ordinary young man who nearly bursts a blood-vessel in his college boat. What disgusts us is the lower spirit of Catholicism, the spirit of mysteries and minutiae, the solemn treatment of inane details, the tendency of all doors to lead inwards and none outwards. Pusey discussing various expedients of bodily discomfort represents the ugly side of poetic and inexhaustible Catholicism, just as the ugly side of the simplicity and centrality of Protestantism is represented by the cant and monotony of the ecstatic bore who asks innumerable strangers if they have found Jesus. Nothing will ever come of this controversy until these two religious tendencies are recognised as things that are essential always, and which on the highest plane are not even inconsistent. When a voice from the Bible says, "Will God be pleased with the fat of rams .... shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" in that voice speaks the highest spirit of Protestantism. When a voice says, "Shall I offer to the Lord that which costs me nothing?" in that voice speaks the highest spirit of Catholicism. And if Mr. Bowen and his friends grow impatient with such hymnal phraseology as "O, Sweet Sacrament!" just as his opponents grow impatient with, "Give us the blood of the Lamb!" can they not both remember that religion is a secret passion audaciously made public; it is not strange if its hymns have something of the splendid folly of love-letters? Can we not make one more effort to solve this riddle by the introduction of Christianity?