The Trend of Theological Thought in England BY The Reverend R. A. ARMSTRONG O discriminate and state the Trend of Religious Thought in England at the close of the Nineteenth Century is no easy task. To make the statement in the limits assigned to this essay is harder still; and the statement when made can be no more than a very general indication, and will necessarily be tinged by the personal idiosyncrasies, beliefs and interests of the writer. My only excuse for making the attempt is a profound interest in the problem together with the fact that I have for more than thirty years made perpetual endeavour to read the signs of the times and to understand the movements of thought around me. The main difficulty lies in the complexity of the facts to be observed. There appears such confusion in the religious world. There seem to be so many cross-currents. In a caldron of seething waters it is hard to discern a stream. Yet one has seen such boiling masses in the narrows of some mighty river, and one has known that in spite of their sweltering chaos, those waters were really hurrying to the sea, and in what point of the compass that broad sea lay. To what distant ocean, then, is the religious thought of England moving, caught in the resistless undercurrent, though seeming a mere whirlpool with disordered waves flung objectless from side to side? There are some four or five obvious phenomena which have to be co-ordinated, their common measure found. First and most obvious of these is the Ritualist and Sacerdotal movement. To a somewhat superficial observer this might well seem the one characteristic religious phenomenon of our time. It is but a few years since the Protestantism of England was an incontestable fact. Paterfamilias hated priestcraft, whether he cared much for Evangelical teaching or not. Ritualism has come in with a rush. The appeal to the senses, by music, by vestment, by incense, has fairly conquered the Church of England, and even in the most moderate parishes practices are familiar now which would have scandalized almost every one a generation ago. And far graver than the Ritualism is the Sacerdotalism. Not only is spiritual doctrine symbolized to the eye, to the ear, to the nose, but the man stands between the worshipper and God, the supernaturally endowed priest, holding the keys of Heaven, and compelling the approach of the worshipper to God, and even the approach of God to the worshipper, to pass through the doorway of his own person; all other communion between God and man is barred. It is a tremendous revolution, but it is a revolution which has been ruthlessly carried out over large areas of England in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Side by side with the Sacerdotal development has proceeded the intellectual decay of Evangelicism. In spite of its scorn of "carnal reason" Evangelicism in the past has produced doughty and vigorous theologians. It is now in England without great scholars or strong thinkers. Its polemics are extraordinarily feeble, its reasoning degenerating often to mere shrewish scolding. It still gathers in its thousands and tens of thousands, still arrogates to itself the exclusive title of "orthodox", still lets the Catholic, the Ritualist, the Unitarian, the Agnostic know what it thinks of him in terms not marked by courtesy nor always by humility. But the looker on, I think sees pretty clearly that as an orthodox system it is rapidly relaxing, that where it still retains the nominal allegiance of thinking men, those men have practically slipped the creeds and fallen into certain veins of somewhat loose and formless liberalism which really present no permanent foothold for the religious life. |