1904

FREE THOUGHT

IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

A REJOINDER

I

THE MAIN POINT URGED IN MY ORIGINAL ARTICLE EVADED BY MY TWO CRITICS, NOTABLY BY MR. MAYNARD SMITH

Two Anglican clergymen-Prebendary Whitworth and Mr. Maynard Smith, the latter speaking expressly on behalf of the Bishop of Worcester-have replied to my recent article on Free Thought in the Church of England. I must thank them both for their freedom from that personal acrimony which so often, besides disfiguring, confuses theological controversy. Mr. Smith, however, has completely, and Mr. Whitworth has to some extent, misapprehended the object with which the original article was written by me.1

Mr. Maynard Smith, on behalf of the Bishop of Worcester, complains strongly of the manner in which I quote from the Bishop's writings. Both he and the Bishop believe, he says, 'and it is only charitable to suppose,' that I have never read them myself, but have dealt with isolated sentences supplied to me by some malicious third person, to which, torn from their context, I have imputed meanings not those of the writer. Mr. Smith complains also that besides mis-stating the opinions held by the Bishop himself, I have wronged him-it would seem in a manner yet more unpardonable-by associating these with the opinions of Dr. Sanday. Now if I have in any way mis-stated the opinions of the Bishop himself I regret my error, and propose presently to correct it; but as for the charge that I set myself to attack the Bishop, equipped with garbled quotations from him, got together for me by somebody else, I must assure Mr. Smith that, though the charge may have the support of his charity, it has not the support of fact. Farther, for deliberately associating the Bishop's opinions with Dr. Sanday's, I have a far better warrant than Mr. Smith probably suspects. Several years ago I published a small volume dealing with the position of dogma in the English Church. The Bishop of Worcester reviewed it at considerable length; and in the course of his review he administered to me the following specific information-namely, that if I wanted to understand what are the real foundations on which an Anglican's faith in miraculous Christianity rests, Dr. Sanday, with whose view of the matter he was himself in profound agreement, was the Anglican divine best fitted to tell me.

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It seems [says Mr. Smith] to have been Mr. Mallock's object to shock the orthodox by proving the Bishop a heretic, and to amuse the heterodox by exhibiting him as a fool. . . . I am reminded that Mr. Mallock has ere now written much disagreeable fiction. In future it is to be hoped that he will not associate it with the well-known name of a living man.

Of the severe, though Christian, amenity of these sentences I make no complaint except that it is not apposite. Let me explain to Mr. Smith what my object was in reality-an object which the article itself makes plain enough in every page.

I began by referring to the question which the clergy now ask so often-Why are the people of this country ceasing to go to church? And I tried to point out that the principal reason is one to which the clergy pay too little attention this being the fact that an increasing proportion of the public is ceasing to believe in that whole system of doctrines of which the Church services are throughout a solemn and challenging assertion. Such being my own reading of the actual facts of the situation, I sought to illustrate, and also in part to account for, them by reference to certain changes of belief which have taken place among the clergy themselves. In order to show what these changes are it was necessary that I should take examples; and in order that the examples should be useful it was necessary that they should be representative. The Church of England contains, however, various schools of thought. It was necessary, therefore, to look for examples in more quarters than one. Amongst the Broad Church party naturally they were easy enough to find. Canon Henson's views as to the Resurrection were sufficient for the then occasion. The filtration of similar views into the Evangelical party is a more novel feature. I illustrated this by the views of Mr. Beeby as to the Virgin Birth of Christ; but, lest Mr. Beeby's should seem merely an isolated case, I cited also a sign of the times to which Mr. Beeby himself has called attention-namely, that the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge—a body traditionally representative of popular Low Church orthodoxy-has in one of its latest publications definitely discarded the story of the Fall as a fable, valuable only as symbolising the dual nature of man. But the party in the Church whose opinions I felt to be most significant myself was the High Church or sacerdotal party, as represented by its ablest, its most scholarly, and its most influential leaders; for if the traditional orthodoxy of even ultra-conservatives such as these shows signs of disintegrating, no one can wonder if, amongst the outside public, the tendency is fast spreading to reject Christian dogma altogether. I sought to show, therefore, what the condition of that party was by taking the expressed opinions, not of any one member of it who might possibly be peculiar, but of a group of members who, considered as a group, are representative; and of this group I took the Bishop of Worcester as one, associating with him Dr. Sanday

and Dr. Driver, whom he has spoken of publicly as his own closest allies.

It must then be plain to Mr. Smith, if he will but reflect for a moment, that with the Bishop of Worcester as an individual I have no concern whatever. The one important question which I have sought to raise in this discussion is not any question as to what private conclusions a particular bishop draws from critical premisses which he avowedly shares with other divines and scholars, but what are the conclusions drawn from them, or likely to be drawn from them, by others-firstly, by his brother churchmen; and, secondly, by the general public.

Let me illustrate my meaning by a very homely analogy. The chairman of a company, which has hitherto thought itself solvent, makes a number of admissions with regard to certain of its assets which cause a number of the shareholders to suspect that they have become worthless. The chairman himself declares, however, that in spite of all these admissions he believes the business of the company to be more prosperous than ever. The honesty of the chairman's belief may be absolutely beyond suspicion; but what will concern the shareholders is not its honesty but its value. Accepting the truth of the various details he gives them, they will insist on putting them together by their own rules of common sense; and their own view of the situation may very well differ from his. In the same way the Bishop of Worcester, or any of his brother divines, may, in consequence of modern critical discoveries, make any number of admissions as to the evidences for miraculous Christianity, which would have horrified and dismayed the orthodox a very short time ago, and yet be convinced that the old dogmas themselves are just as indubitable and as well attested as ever; but the question still remains-and this was the question raised by me-of whether the general public will draw the same conclusion. Will the shareholders endorse the judgment of the chairman that, in spite of all his admissions, the business of the company is sound? Or, seeing that even the other directors do not altogether agree with him, are they not rather likely to go over the books for themselves, and come to the conclusion that the whole business is bankrupt, and must either be wound up, or, at all events, entirely reconstructed? Even Mr. Smith and the Bishop must see that, from the very beginning, this was the sole issue raised by me.

I will now consider the arguments of my two critics in detail, and restate in the light of them those originally urged by myself.

II

THE REVOLUTION IN ANGLICAN THOUGHT AS TO THE NATURE OF

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES

Let me begin with a brief sketch of the broader facts of the situation,

'The whole historical position and justification of that specific form of Christianity which is called Anglicanism is bound up,' says the Bishop of Worcester, 'with its strenuous appeal to Scripture.' Whatever may be the case now, this was certainly true once. Up to a time so recent that it still seems like yesterday, the vast majority of our clergy and laity also were unanimous in believing that the miraculous dogmas of Christianity rested on the evidence of a substantially infallible Bible. Thus Dean Burgon declared that every word of Scripture is the very utterance of the Eternal Himself'; whilst, according to Dr. Pusey, to doubt the traditional date of Daniel was equivalent to doubting the entire scheme of Redemption. Some, indeed, maintained that inspiration was plenary, not verbal; but this merely meant that the meaning of every Biblical sentence was directly supplied by God, though the grammar and the phraseology were human. But this state of opinion, which survived, till his death, in Mr. Gladstone, and survives still among churchmen of the school of Canon Webb-Peploe, is no longer dominant. It is rejected not by the Broad Church party only, but by a considerable section of the Evangelical party also; whilst those who are foremost in repudiating it are the inheritors of the Pusey tradition-men such as the Bishop of Worcester, and the other contributors to Lux Mundi. That the Biblical books are inspired in some sort of sense or other they maintain as vehemently as Dr. Pusey himself did; but, whatever inspiration in its new sense may be, they, as Mr. Smith and Mr. Whitworth admit, dismiss with a pitying contempt the idea that it even tended to protect the sacred writers from errors of the most astounding kind in science, history, and prediction. Thus neither of my critics makes any attempt to deny that their party not only regards the beginning of Genesis as mythical, but discerns in those parts of the Old Testament which can really be treated as history errors and legends like those that abound in Livy, and admits that the Gospels themselves, however true as a whole, are vitiated by mistakes due to the imperfect information, and, here and there, to the over-zealous faith, of the Evangelists.

Such, then, being the case, let me ask Bishop Gore, Mr. Whitworth, and Mr. Smith whether they can wonder that a growing number of people, if they find Dr. Pusey's successors enunciating such con

Dissertations, p. 205.

clusions as the above, should draw for themselves the inference from them which Dr. Pusey declared to be inevitable, that the whole Christian creed in its orthodox form is a delusion? It must at all events be admitted that there are prima facie grounds for such an inference, and that those who seek to maintain the old conclusions, whilst completely discarding the premisses hitherto held to be essential to them, must expect to be severely interrogated as to the precise character of their procedure, and that the doubts originally entertained will not be at once dissipated when they realise what the character of this procedure is.

For this procedure is one by which the old evidences for the miraculous are not merely modified, but are actually turned topsyturvy, and placed in an inverted order. The central doctrine of Christianity-namely, that of Christ's divinity, of His consequent power to redeem us, and of His claim on our adoration and servicewas till yesterday presented to the world as attested by a series of miraculous events beginning with the creation of mankind, leading up to and accompanying His birth, and making His life peculiar in the eyes even of those who rejected Him. That is to say, the central miracle of the Incarnation, in virtue of which Christ was God as well as an exceptional man, was supposed to be proved by a number of other miracles, the reality of which was vouched for by the testimony of an infallible Bible, and a general assent to which was the postulate of Christian argument-these other miracles, amongst them the infallibility of the Bible itself, being supposed to render the miracle of the Incarnation indubitable. But now, according to the Bishop of Worcester and his friends, it is an a priori conviction that the miracle of the Incarnation is indubitable, which alone makes such other miracles as they elect to retain believable. This is like saying that whereas in former days we believed that the English were invincible because of the history of the battle of Waterloo, we now believe that they won the battle of Waterloo because of an a priori conviction that the English arms are invincible. Surely Mr. Smith and the Bishop of Worcester must see that an attempt to inquire into the effects on the public mind of a change so profound as this cannot be adequately met by pretending that it is a personal attack on the mental and moral character of the Bishop of Worcester himself.

So much, then, for the general aspects of the matter. Let us now go on to particulars. I will first verify and complete my account of the neo-Anglican theory. I will next deal with the more important of the results which those who propound this theory themselves reach by the application of it. I will then go on to inquire how far the ordinary public, living in the critical and scientific atmosphere of to-day, are likely to draw from the premisses which the clergy give them, conclusions coincident with those drawn from them by the clergy themselves.