[The following is a description of the Church of England, from some famous person, though I suppress the name, who long enjoyed her communion.]
There is, perhaps, no other institution in which the English have shown their love of compromise in political and social affairs so strikingly as in the established national Church. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, all enemies of Rome, were equally the enemies of one another. Of other Protestant sects the Erastians, Puritans and Arminians are also different and hostile. But it is no exaggeration to say that the Anglican ecclesiastical Establishment is an amalgamation of all these varieties of Protestantism, to which a considerable amount of Catholicism is superadded. The Establishment is the outcome of the action which Henry VIII, the ministers of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, the Cavaliers, the Puritans, the Latitudinarians of 1688, and the Methodists of the Eighteenth Century successively brought to bear on religion. It has a hierarchy dating from the Middle Ages, richly endowed, exalted by its civil position, formidable by its political influence. The Established Church has preserved the rites, the prayers and the {xxiii} symbols of the ancient Church. She draws her articles of faith from Lutheran and Zwinglian sources; her translation of the Bible savours of Calvinism. She can boast of having had in her bosom, especially in the seventeenth century, a succession of theologians of great learning and proud to make terms with the doctrines and practices of the primitive Church. The great Bossuet, contemplating her doctors, said that it was impossible that the English should not one day come back to the faith of their fathers; and De Maistre hailed the Anglican communion as being destined to play a great part in the reconciliation and reunion of Christendom.
This remarkable Church has always been in the closest dependence on the civil power and has always gloried in this. It has ever regarded the Papal power with fear, with resentment and with aversion, and it has never won the heart of the people. In this it has shown itself consistent throughout the course of its existence; in other concerns it has either had no opinions or has constantly changed them. In the sixteenth century it was Calvinist; in the first half of the seventeenth it was Arminian and quasi-Catholic; towards the close of that century and at the beginning of the next it was latitudinarian. In the middle of the eighteenth century it was described by Lord Chatham as having ‘a papistical ritual and prayer-book, Calvinist articles of faith and an Arminian clergy’.
In our days it contains three powerful parties in which are embodied the three principles of religion which appear constantly and from the beginning of its history in one form or another; the Catholic principle, the Protestant principle, and the sceptical principle. Each of these, it is hardly necessary to say, is violently opposed to the other two.
Firstly: the apostolic or Tractarian party, which is now moving in the direction of Catholicism further than at any other time, or in any previous manifestation; to such an extent, that, in studying this party among its most advanced adherents, one may say that it differs in nothing from Catholicism except in the doctrine of Papal supremacy. The party arose in the seventeenth century, at the courts of James I and Charles I; it was almost extinguished by {xiv} the doctrines of Locke and by the ascent to the throne of William III and the House of Hanover. But in the course of the eighteenth century its principles were taught and silently transmitted by the ‘non-jurors’, a sect of learned and zealous men who, preserving the episcopal succession, separated themselves from the Church of England when summoned to take the oath of fidelity to William III. In our day it has been seen to revive and form a numerous and increasing party in the Church of England, by means of the movement started by the writings entitled: Tracts for the Times, (and thence called Tractarian,) of which there is such constant mention in this book.
Secondly: the Evangelical party which maintains all the biblical societies and most of the associations for protestant missions throughout the world. The origin of this party may be traced back to the puritans, who began to show themselves in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was almost entirely thrown out of the Church of England at the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660. It took refuge among the dissenters from that Church and was expiring little by little when its doctrines were revived with great vigour by the celebrated preachers Whitfield and Wesley, both pastors of the Anglican Church and founders of the powerful sect of the Methodists. These doctrines, while creating a sect outside the established Church, exercised at the same time an important influence in the bosom of that Church itself, and developed there little by little until it formed the evangelical party, which is today by far the most important of the three schools which we are trying to describe.
Thirdly: the Liberal party, known in previous centuries by the less honourable name of Latitudinarian. It broke off from the quasi-Catholic party, or Court party, in the reign of Charles I, and was fed and extended by the introduction into England of the principles of Grotius and of the Arminians of Holland. We have already referred to the philosophy of Locke as having had an influence in the same direction. This party took the side of the revolution of 1688, and supported the Whigs, William III, and the House of Hanover. The spirit of its principles is opposed to extension and proselytism; and, although it has numbered {xxv} in its ranks remarkable writers among the Anglican theologians, it had had but few votaries until ten years ago, when, irritated by the success of the Tractarians, taking advantage of the conversion of some of their principal leaders to the Roman Church, and aided by the importation of German literature into England, this party suddenly came before the public view and was propagated among the best educated classes with a rapidity so astonishing that it is almost justifiable to believe that in the coming generation the religious world will be divided between the Deists and the Catholics. The principles and arguments of the Liberals do not even stop at deism.
If the Anglican communion were composed solely of these three parties it could not exist. It would be broken up by its internal dissensions. But there is in its bosom a party more numerous by far than these three theological ones—a party which, created by the legal position of the Church, profiting by its riches and by the institutions of its creed, is the counter weight and the chain which secures the whole. It is the party of order, the party of Conservatives, or Tories as they have hitherto been called. It is not a religious party, not that it has not a great number of religious men in its ranks, but because its principles and its mots d’ordre are political or at least ecclesiastical rather than theological. Its members are neither Tractarians, nor Evangelicals, nor Liberals; or, if they are, it is in a very mild and very unaggressive form; because, in the eyes of the world their chief characteristic consists in their being advocates of an Establishment and of the Establishment, and they are more zealous for the preservation of a national Church than solicitous for the beliefs which that national Church professes. We said above that the great principle of the Anglican Church was its confidence in the protection of the civil power and its docility in serving it, which its enemies call its Erastianism. Now if on the one hand this respect for the civil power be its great principle, the principle of Erastianism is, on the other hand, embodied in so numerous a party whether among the clergy or the laity, that the word ‘party’ is scarcely adequate. It constitutes the mass of the Church. The clergy in particular—Bishops, Deans, Chapters, Rectors—are always distinguished by their {xxvi} Toryism on all English questions. In the seventeenth century they professed the divine right of kings; they have ever since gloried in the doctrine: ‘The King is the head of the Church;’ and their after-dinner toast: ‘The Church and the King’ has been their formula of protestation for maintaining in the kingdom of England the theoretical predominance of the spiritual over the temporal. They have always testified an extreme aversion for what they term the power usurped by the Pope. Their chief theological dogma is that the Bible contains all necessary truths, and that every Christian is individually capable of discovering them there for his own use. They preach Christ as the only mediator, redemption by His death, the renewal of man by His Spirit, the necessity for good works. This great assembly of men, true representatives of that English common sense which is so famous for its good as for its evil consequences, mostly regard every kind of theology, every theological school, and in particular the three schools which we have tried to portray, with mistrust. In the seventeenth century they combated the Puritans; at the close of that century they combated the Latitudinarians; in the middle of the eighteenth century they combated the Methodists and the members of the Evangelical party; and in our own times they have made an energetic stand at first against the Tractarians and today against the Liberals.
This party of order in the Established Church has necessarily many subdivisions. The country clergy, rejoicing in great ease, in intimate relations with the county gentlemen of their neighbourhood and always benevolent and charitable, are much respected and beloved by the lower classes on account of their position, but not for the influence of their doctrine. But amongst ecclesiastics who enjoy great revenues and have not much to do (such as the members of the Cathedral chapters), many have long since deteriorated in the pursuit of their personal advantage. Those who held high positions in great towns have been led to adopt the habits of a great position and of external display, and have boasted a formal orthodoxy which was cold and almost entirely devoid of interior life. These self-indulgent pastors have for a long time been nick-named ‘two-bottle orthodox’, as though their greatest {xxvii} religious zeal manifested itself in the drinking of port wine to the health of ‘the Church and King’. The pompous dignitaries of great town parishes have also been surnamed the ‘high and dry’ school or Church.
It still remains for us to explain three words which are in opposition to each other and which will find their place in this book: High Church; Low Church; Broad Church. The last of these denominations offers no difficulty: the word ‘broad’ answers to that of ‘latitudinarian’, and by Broad Church is understood the Liberal party. But the denominations of High and Low Church cannot be understood without explanation.
The doctrinal appellation of ‘High Church’ signifies the teaching which aims at asserting the prerogatives and authority of the Church; but not so much its invisible powers as its privileges and gifts as a visible body; and, since in the Anglican religion these temporal privileges have always depended on the civil power, it happens accidentally that a partisan of the High Church is almost an Erastian; that is to say, a man who denies the spiritual power pertaining to the Church and maintains that the Church is one of the branches of the civil government. Thus, a Calvinist may be a partisan of the High Church, as was Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Elizabeth, and as was also Hooker, the Master of the Temple [Note 4], at any rate during his youth.
The Low Church is obviously the opposite to the High Church. If then the High Church party is the party which upholds the Church and the King, the Low Church party is the one which anathematises that Erastian doctrine and considers it anti-Christian to give the State any power whatsoever over the Church of God; it was thus that formerly the Puritans and the Independents preferred Cromwell to King Charles. Today, however, since the Puritans have ceased to exist in England, the denomination of Low Church has ceased to represent an ecclesiastical idea, and designates a theological party, becoming synonymous with the Evangelical party. In consequence, an analogous {xxviii} change has taken place in the meaning of the name ‘High Church’. Instead of denoting solely the partisans of the ‘Church and the King’, or the Erastians, it has come to have a theological signification and to denote the semi-Catholic party. Thus it often happens in our own days that even the Tractarians are called partisans of the High Church, although they began by denouncing Erastianism, and although, in their early days, they were violently opposed at Oxford by the High Church party or Established Church.”
