CHANGES OF ORTHODOXY IN ENGLAND.

WHAT looks like chance is often an important part of the machinery of evolution. We have a remarkable illustration of this fact in the drift of religious thought, especially in England and in the English Church. When we compare theological with philosophic thought, we are at once struck by the extraordinary difference between them. Philosophy is constantly progressing through the voluntary efforts of its votaries. Every great philosopher, every humble student, sets himself to correct, to develop, to carry further, the thoughts of those who have gone before him. In theology, on the contrary, there is but little voluntary movement, and that little is generally in a backward direction. Among the clergy, as a rule, there is no desire for advance. Retrogression is their ideal. To believe what St. Augustine, or Calvin, or Luther believed, to wear the same clothes and perform the same rites as obtained in the reign of Edward VI., to go back to some by-gone age and stop there—this for hundreds and thousands of clergymen is the summum bonum. But just as matter, in spite of its own inertia, is always moving, so there is really a progressive drift in religious thought; although the clergy, with but few exceptions, are doing their best to remain stationary. The drift of thought, chiefly unconscious and involuntary, which is taking place in the Church of England, I purpose now to investigate.

There is not one single doctrine or ceremony in regard to which the clergy are agreed. The views which they hold are divergent oftentimes to the point of contradiction. Some of the clergy, for instance, adopt the expiatory view of the atonement, and believe that Christ's vicarious suffering "satisfied the justice of God," and so saved us from hell. Others look upon this theory as no better than a "doctrine of devils." Some, again, think that the Saviour's connection with the Father was unique not only in degree but in kind, and they speak of his human exist

ence as the incarnation. Others-one or two--speak of it merely as the incarnation, that is, the incarnation par excellence; for they hold that all men are incarnations more or less. As to the Trinity, some adopt the formula "three persons in one God" in the vulgar acceptation of those terms-in the sense, namely, of three individual gods in the Godhead. A few interpret "person" according to its original meaning of "character," and understand by the persons of the Trinity only different manifestations of one indivisible God. In regard to miracles, some acknowledge an indefinite number, including even the theosophical; some, though doubtful of theosophy, believe in the miraculous power of the saints; some restrict themselves to the miracles mentioned in the Bible; some draw the line at the New Testament; some believe only in the miraculous conception and physical resurrection of Christ; while some regard even these stories as after-growths, and are ready to subscribe to the famous dictum of Prof. Jowett, "Men will in time give up miracles as they have already given up witchcraft." With reference to prayer, some assert that we may ask for health, wealth, fine weather, and all the good things of this life, with a considerable likelihood of getting them, even at the cost of a violation of the laws of nature; others relegate prayer entirely to the spiritual sphere, and maintain that the only gifts we can receive in answer to it are faith, hope, "grace," and the like; while others tell us that even here the effect is subjective rather than objective-that we are made better, not by any direct action of the Deity, but simply by our own desire for improvement. As to the sacraments, some believe in "baptismal regeneration," and think that an infant is really "born again" when a few drops of water are sprinkled on it by a priest; while others look upon this dogma as a vain, not to say blasphemous, superstition. And regarding the eucharist, some are transubstantiationists, acknowledging the real physical presence of Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine; others, preferring Luther's idea of consubstantiation, believe that his spiritual presence goes along with the elements; and others adopt the Zwinglian view that the effect of the bread and wine is merely to stimulate the imagination of the communicants. As to future punishment, some declare that a large proportion of the race

are predestined to damnation, and that by no conceivable effort can the reprobate avert their doom; others say that salvation is provided for all men, and that they can be lost only by their own voluntary rejection of it; and others again assure us that there is no such thing as being lost, in the vulgar sense, and that hell is but a name for punishment, the purpose of which is in reality to save us, if not here, at any rate hereafter. As to the Bible, some believe that it was "written by God," and must therefore be infallible throughout; others restrict its infallibility to moral and spiritual subjects; others again state that even in these matters its teaching is often degraded, and that much of what it says about right and wrong and about the nature of the Deity is utterly false and profoundly pernicious. As for the Prayer Book, some profess to accept the thirty-nine articles and all the rest of it while to others it seems a very unsatisfactory compilation, often flatly contradicting both the Bible and itself. And the ceremonies of the Church of England vary no less than the doctrines. Its ritual ranges from the baldest evangelicalism, where the sole vestments are a surplice and "decent tippet," and where the dreary monotony is relieved only by a choir singing out of tune, to the most advanced Puseyism, where you find chasubles, copes, mitres, acolytes, incense, confession, and everything that has ever received the sanction of Rome. Finally, there is not complete agreement among the clergy even in regard to the value and importance of the Christian religion; for one well-known divine-Canon Taylor-emphatically asserts the superior efficacy, under certain circumstances, of the religion of Mohammed.

Now the priests of the Church of England, holding these different doctrines and practicing these different rituals, are all successors of the apostles "; at least they have all received episcopal ordination, and they must all, therefore, be in possession of the advantages which such ordination confers. Some of them, no doubt, would be ready to accuse the others of having “fallen from grace"; but, fallen or not, they continue to be members of the Church and to minister as priests at its altars. The efforts which are occasionally made to turn them out are almost always unsuccessful, and at the present moment there is every possible diversity both of opinion and practice among those who are act

ually holding the priestly office. This may be regarded—no doubt it often is—as an unpleasant fact; but its unpleasantness does not make it any the less real. Whether people like it or not, the fact remains that in the English Church, as at present constituted, the priesthood is open to men altogether irrespective of the doctrines they believe and the ceremonies they practice. Neither doctrines nor ceremonies have anything to do with our church as such. In the language of logicians, they are merely its accidents, not part of its essence.

Prosecutions for heresy, when they fail, as they generally do, and sometimes even when they partially succeed, bring this fact into striking relief-an irony of retribution which must be very galling to the prosecutors. In the judicial decision given in connection with the "Essays and Reviews," it was laid down that the books of the Bible may be subjected to the fullest and freest criticism, and that a clergyman is within his rights even if he accuses an inspired author of willful and deliberate dishonesty. We are legally debarred, it is true, from denying the canonicity of any of the Scriptures; but the greatest heretic in the world can never feel tempted in that direction. For to be canonical and to be in the Bible are synonymous expressions. The books of the Bible are the books of the Bible, and no sane man would ever dream of saying they are not. What occurred some years ago in Manchester affords a still more remarkable illustration of the fact that theological prosecutions serve only to emphasize our church's indifference to theology. In that town were two priests, named respectively Green and Knox-Little, who both professed the same "high" creed and both practiced the same elaborate ritual. The former, being the less popular of the two, was less expensive to prosecute; he was therefore selected for that purpose by the Church Association, and was condemned to a term of imprisonment. While he was still in jail, Knox-Little was promoted to a canonry. Here was a reductio ad absurdum of the opinion that our church concerns herself with creeds or rituals. It was shown to be the falsest of delusions. For of two men whose creeds and rituals were identical, the one was placed in a cathedral stall and the other found himself in an ecclesiasti* See the report of the Williams and Wilson trial.

cal dungeon. The punishments and rewards of the Church of England are administered with sublime disregard for the doctrines and ceremonies of their recipients.

Even in past generations the clergy differed to a very considerable extent from the Prayer Book and from one another, but up to the year 1865 they went on quietly making a subscription which implied that they were all agreed. The declaration contained these words: "I, A. B., declare my unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything prescribed in and by the Book of Common Prayer." We should probably be required to sign the same subscription to-day but for the intervention of the late Dean of Westminster, from whom it received its death blow. I may mention, however, that two ineffectual attempts to relax the subscription had been previously made, the one in 1772 by Archdeacon Blackburn and the other in 1862 by Bishop Stanley, father of the Dean. But in 1862 the late Dean of Westminster addressed a protest to the Bishop of London, and pointed out the extreme absurdity of flying in the face of facts, and the gross immorality of exacting a subscription which could only be a lie. The Dean said that the clergy could not assent to the literal and dogmatic meaning of the six hundred propositions, on the most intricate and complex subjects, which the articles embody; they could not assent to the literal and dogmatic meaning of all the sentences in the liturgy, many of which are poetic and devotional in form, but which must be received, according to a strict subscription, in their most matter-of-fact signification; still less could they assent to both these sets of propositions, emanating from ages unlike each other and each no less unlike our own. And the Dean further showed that, even supposing the clergy could assent to all and everything contained in the Prayer Book, as a matter of fact they did not. The sixth article, for example, to take one of his illustrations, "understands by 'Holy Scriptures' those canonical books of the Old and New Testaments of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church." Taken literally, subscription to those words would exclude from the clerical profession all who receive as Holy Scripture the epistle to the Hebrews, the Apocalypse, the second epistle of St. Peter, the epistles of St. James and St. Jude, and the second