The Church of England
by J. C. Philpot
But admitting the necessity of some acknowledged form of
Christianity, and allowing certain benefits to spring out of a National
Establishment, the question arises—Whether we might not have the benefits
without the evils, and whether the Church of England does not do us,
as a nation, more harm than good. Religion, as a bond of society, would not
perish were there no endowed Establishment to maintain it. Look, for
instance, at the United States, where there is no established church. In no
country is there more regard paid to the outward observances of religion;
no, so much so, that it is hard to tell which is more ardently worshiped—the
dollar or the form of godliness.
Humanly speaking, one of the greatest barriers in this
country to every improvement is the National Church. As regards, for
instance, the great question of the present day—the education of the people,
she thwarts in every possible manner a sound and general system of
instruction by seeking to thrust upon every school her obnoxious Catechism;
by demanding that every schoolmaster should be a bona-fide member of her
pale; and by setting up a paramount claim to educate every child in her
system and creed. She thus thwarts and defeats every attempt towards a
better and more general scheme of education, and would sooner, like a
Chinese mother, that her children should not walk at all, or be cripples for
life, than that their infant feet should not be squeezed into her narrow
shoes.
Where able, too, she carries on a vast amount of
persecution and of unfair influence. The poor, especially in country places,
she sometimes buys over by presents of money, coal, and clothing, and
sometimes persecutes by excluding them from a share in those favors which
should be given indiscriminately. "To keep their church" is, in her eyes,
the greatest virtue of the poor, and to attend the meeting the greatest
crime. Nor are her power and influence limited to the poor. Those who are by
their position independent of her favors, she awes by her lordly frowns; so
that there are scarce any to be found above those engaged in trade and
manufactures who dare to be anything but Churchmen, on account of the
"vulgarity" of dissent in her aristocratical eyes. All this, we know, in the
wisdom of God, is for the good of the church of Christ, which is to be
despised and persecuted, as was her divine Lord and Master; but this no more
diminishes the sin and guilt of the proud aristocratical Establishment than,
because Christ was to be rejected of the Jews, they committed less sin in
rejecting him.
Such as have never been within her pale, or have not been
trained up at the great public schools and Universities of the Church of
England, have little or no idea of the deep-rooted, we may say, fanatical
attachment which burns in the bosom of her children—a love as blind, but as
deep and ardent, as fired the bosom of Paul for the traditions of the
Pharisees when he sat at the feet of Gamaliel or held the clothes of the
witnesses who stoned to death the martyr Stephen. Those who have been
cradled in dissent, their eyes not being blinded by this idolatrous
enthusiasm, see, and see truly, her errors and corruptions, her worldly
character and domineering spirit. Calmly and coolly comparing her with the
scriptural marks of the church of God, they perceive in her scarce one
feature of the bride of Christ; and instead of her being a chaste virgin
espoused to the Lord the Lamb, they behold her gathering lovers to her
embrace as shamelessly and as indiscriminately as Aholab and Aholibah.
Were we to judge merely from what floats on the surface,
we might think the National Church was tottering to its fall. The very world
is now crying out against the sordid avarice and shameless rapacity of her
bishops, and against the miserable evasions and subterfuges which they
employ in order to appropriate to themselves large sums beyond their
assigned incomes. Puseyism, that twin-sister to abhorred Popery, on one side
is eating as a gangrene into the very vitals of Church of Englandism; and
Infidelity, on the other, is rapidly infecting the literature of the country
and fearfully spreading among the masses. But underneath this apparent
weakness she conceals an amazing vitality and strength. Like some aged
asthmatics, who seem always dying, but gasp and cough on until ninety,
burying two or three crops of hale, hearty youths, the Church of England has
been wheezing and panting and seemingly all but expiring again and again,
and yet appears to be getting stronger and stronger every year. Churches are
rising by hundreds in every district, and the Universities can hardly supply
students fast enough to minister in them. Who can solve this enigma, that
while, for many just reasons, the Church of England is daily falling into
well-merited contempt, her power is increasing?
Without using harsh, unbecoming expressions, we think
that the streets of our great towns will afford a solution. There is a
miserable class of females who are justly condemned by the virtuous of both
sexes, but whose numbers show that their nets are not spread in vain for the
vicious. The Scripture compares a false church to a harlot. It is the easy
virtue of the National Church which makes her so generally acceptable. So
indulgent a mistress suits well the racing lord and fox-hunting squire; and
her benignant smiles, if they do sometimes cost the farmer five shillings an
acre, or his opulent landlord £50 for a new organ, yet they cheer them with
hope of heaven when they die, if they are but constant in their attentions
to her as long as they live.
The attachment, then, of worldly people to a worldly
religion is no great mystery; it is no riddle for a Samson to put forth,
or requiring a Solomon to solve. There is a greater mystery, a harder enigma
than this—how gracious men, servants of the living God, believers in and
followers of the Lord Jesus, can remain contentedly in her embrace. Toplady,
Romaine, Berridge, Hawker—what burning and shining lights were these! Yet
were they members and ministers of the National Church, and never seem to
have been troubled with doubts or scruples as to her scriptural character
and position. They lived and died honored of God, and their names are
embalmed in the hearts of his children. But they are gone, and have left
neither son nor heir; for where is there a minister now in the Church of
England who is worthy, we will not say to stand in their pulpits, but even
to open for them the pulpit door? There are a few who preach the same
doctrines; but where is the savor, and power, and, above all, the blessing
of God which clothed the ministry of those eminent servants of the Most
High? Nor indeed is it to be expected. God has worked, and still, in a
spiritual sense, does work miracles; but it is not his ordinary course of
action. A man may be found alive under a snow-wreath, or in a tomb; but we
do not expect to find many there, or that those thus found should be very
warm or very lively. Surrounded with ice and the cold damps of the
sepulcher, we need hardly wonder that there are so few living ministers in
the Church of England, and that those few manifest so little vitality or
strength.
The system is so deadening that, were it possible to
extinguish the life of God, there could be no living men in her. Some, once
known to ourselves, did appear at one time to possess life, but the event,
we fear, has proved that it was not the life of God. Sin, we know, dulls and
deadens the conscience, and few sins do this more effectually than what we
may call religious sins. Many men, it is to be apprehended, have gone into
the ministry of the Establishment with tender consciences, doubting and
fearing whether they were acting right in the step they were taking. When
the occasional services have come before them for performance, their lips,
perhaps, have faltered as they thanked God for regenerating the sprinkled
infant, or taking to himself some miserable drunkard.
But by degrees their conscience becomes less sensitive;
the words are pronounced, more glibly and boldly; inward checks are less and
less felt; and arguments arise, or are suggested by others, to keep quiet
that intruding voice which speaks so very uncomfortably. The young curate is
presented to a living; a wife is taken; and, in due time, olive branches of
greater and less dimensions spread themselves round the vicarage table.
Hedge after hedge, wall after wall are built round him as he advances onward
into middle life. By degrees he drops his Calvinistic creed, and becomes a
more acceptable preacher to the gentry and rich tradespeople. He imbibes a
little Puseyism, and talks of "our venerable church" and its "admirable
liturgy," is made a rural dean or an archdeacon, and settles down into a
thoroughly worldly man, an enemy of God and godliness, a determined hater of
all dissent, and, where he can, a persecutor of the saints.
But take another case. Let us reverse the process. In
steel engraving, the iron plate is, at one stage of the process, hardened
into steel, and at another the steel plate is softened into iron. We have
seen how the iron is hardened into steel; let us now see how the steel is
softened into iron. Take the case of a man who has entered the ministry of
the Establishment, as most do, for a piece of bread, without any breath of
divine life in his soul. Let the Lord, sooner or later, commence a work of
grace in his heart, and lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the
plummet in his conscience. Let him be brought, through convictions of sin
and distress of mind, to the Lord Jesus Christ, and have a manifestation of
God's mercy and love to his soul. Let him now worship God in spirit and in
truth, and walk before him in godly fear, will not, must not, his eyes be in
a measure opened to see and his heart be made to feel what he is surrounded
by? Lazarus dead in the sepulcher saw not its darkness, felt not its
coldness, smelt not its odor; but Lazarus, living, came forth out of them
all. But Lazarus was bound hand and foot with the grave-clothes, and his
face was bound about with a napkin, until the liberating word came, "Loose
him, and let him go." So we trust there are a few living men, whose hands
and feet are bound round with the gown, and their faces swathed about with
the surplice, but to whom, in the Lord's own time, the liberating word will
come, "Loose him, and let him go."
A man in the Establishment with the grace and fear of God
in his heart is in a very trying position. He may not have strength to come
out, and yet has a burdened conscience while continuing in. We would desire
to sympathize with such; and our desire is, that they would seek counsel of
the Lord, and neither on the one hand harden their consciences by doing them
continual violence, nor on the other take any step without beforehand well
counting the cost. To give them right counsel is most difficult, and
well-near impracticable. Suppose, for instance, we say, "Stay in," we should
seem to counsel them to continue in wrong doing; and suppose we say, "Come
out," unless we can give them grace and faith we might lead them to take a
step in the flesh. The Lord alone, the wonderful Counselor, can either show
them how to act or enable them to do what his gracious Spirit prompts.
Unless rightly brought out, they will have little comfort themselves, and be
of little benefit to the Church of God.
Among the many objectionable things in the Prayer Book,
there are few, if any, worse than what is called the Catechism. As a
compilation of Christian doctrine, it is one of the poorest, most meager
skeletons that could well be put together, and, compared with the Articles,
Burial Service, and some of the Collects, a disgrace to the Prayer Book. The
author of "The Christian Year" speaks of the "soothing influence" of the
Prayer Book. Most soothing indeed it is, and it has soothed tens of
thousands into the sleep of death! The laudanum of the Catechism is
dosed out drop by drop in every parish school; and most soothing it would be
to the poor little things who are compelled to take it, were they able to
swallow it; but its greatest advantage is, that they cannot understand it.
It is with them a mere exercise of verbal memory, and they gabble over their
abracadabra as school boys repeat by rote their Latin grammar, or the little
cathedral choristers chant the Nicene Creed.
The author of the work before us has drawn his sword very
valiantly against this misshapen idol; for, like most heathen idols, which
seem worshiped with fervor proportionate to their ugliness, the Catechism is
the great idol of the patron and patronesses of parish schools. His language
is perhaps a little too strong in places, but he no doubt felt that to root
up and hack to pieces such an idol required some vigorous and repeated
blows.