The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-07-31 00:00:00

" THE CHURCH AND THE POOR."

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.
Sin,—l have long read with interest your tempe-
rate and instructive articles on Church matters. You
have recently opened a question to which I have been
accustomed to direct my thoughts with considerable
anxiety, as it is involved most intimately with the future
progress of religion among the neglected population of
our towns. If you will permit me, I will endeavour
to expand my view of the causes which have impeded
our Church's missionary work among these classes of
the people.
It is possible that many of your readers may accuse
you of taking too gloomy a view of the present
condition of the Church of England. You may be
told that religion will never find the majority of
mankind among its real followers, and, therefore, as
the lower classes think little of appearances, still
fewer of them among its professed disciples ; that
it is not all gold that glitters, and that a Church
with a greater show of adherents but masks a larger
amount of hypocrisy and pretence. There is, doubt-
less, some truth in this. We must not expect results
of too startling a nature from any religious system.
We must be prepared to discover that the unaffected
votaries of piety will not be the many, but the few..
The Church, however, as a visible body, must, when
her work is not forcibly checked by extraneous cir-
cumstances, be judged by the extent of the external
religion which she exhibits. She is a net which must
gather of all sorts, and it is the number of her
disciples which tests her efficiency, even though that
number include a large portion of the insincere and the
wicked. Much of insufficient, and much of corrupt
motive, might avail to draw to her, or keep within
her, the majority of the poorer classes ; but a Church
which shirks the task of evangelising them, must be
well nigh forfeiting the charter of her foundation.
The fact we have to account for is, that the Church
has lost her hold upon the masses of the poor—that
the poor refuse, or neglect to wait upon her ordinances ;
and the solution, I contend, is found in this reflec-
tion, that the hold which the Church retains upon the
majority of her professed members is very defective,
that the motive of their adherence is mainly one not
likely to affect the poor ; and, therefore, a superior
motive failing to be put in their way, the Church
makes but a feeble claim to their allegiance.
It is but a trite remark, that every scheme of belief,
or religious movement, presents a tendency to a pecu-
liar form of exaggeration or perversion at the hands of
its adherents. The Christianity of the Primitive
Church was thus, in time, corrupted into Popery ; and,
in our own days we find foreign Protestantism deve-
loped into Deism, Pantheism, and infidelity of all
shades and peculiarities. Now the perversion which the
great religious Reformation of the 16th century has ex-
perienced at the hands of many of its allies is precisely
what our country is now suffering from—Sectarianism.
The Reformation was an intellectual movement. It
was a removal of certain tenets which disagreed with
the Reformers' convictions of the truth.. And, as a
popular movement, it developed itself into the denial of
certain doctrines which were embodied into a system
by a foreign Church.. Now, unfortunately, the Church
of England henceforth practically assumed• a too-
exclusively intellectual aspect. She was too exclusively
accounted as merely a branch of a great movement got
up against a doctrinal system, and it became too un-
usual to view her in the aspect stamped upon her in.
her Divine institution, and which, independently of
her relations towards other systems, is the indelible
mark of her origin and mission. Religious communi-
ties came to be looked upon only, Or chiefly, in their re-
lation to the Popiblt system, and the standard of
black comparison with the Church of .bng3..-a *o ho
the position they assumed against the Church of
Rome. Any exclusive claim for the Church was on
this principle impossible ; and if any such was ad-
vanced, the sects endeavoured to impugn:the sincerity
of her. Anti-Popish character, by declaring, that the
genius of Protestantism was Sectarianism. The
Church's relations to the Economy of grace, and her
office of binding men, in one in Christ, came to be lost
sight of, and her only claim to adherence to be the
profession of doctrines which were approved by the
intellects of her members.. She was accounted as one
among many varying religious professions,. all with
one object impressed upon them, the public assertion of
a certain system of belief, and the voluntary association
together of religionists,.who accept this belief as ac-
cording with their intellectual conclusions, convictions,
or tastes. In this theory she is a mere provisional
arrangement, whose place is recognised after, these in-
dividual conclusions have been formed, or tastes con-
tracted. Adherence to her is not a matter of princi-
ple, but of voluntary adoption; the bond of connection
is not supplied by anything she specially originates or
imposes, but by mere accidentalities presented to the
choice of the individual. She partakes, more or less,
of the nature of an accidental framework, on which is.
held forth a system of doctrines, which is the common,
property of all, which can be appreciated equally well,
apart from this platform of exhibition, and which that,
framework is only useful to hold forth extern
nally to mankind. Now, it is clear that this mera.
platform will challenge no other species of at-
tachment than, that which a: lecturer does from
those whom he harangues and that, on this
theory, no principle is provided, on which a different
adhesion can he claimed from what may be paid ta any
other framework, charging itself with the enunciation
of the truth. I. do not speak of a framework, set up
to inoculate the people with a set of tenets or opinions,
as having ornot having a "hold" upon them in thesense
in which we ought to do of the Church. I do,net con-
nect the notion of influence with a school, for.instanee,
that taught the doctrines. of PYTHAGORAS, or that
teaches the views of ROBERT OWEN, as we: do ,with the
called the Church. In the former.,
,adhe-
rence ton corporation is an idea that has no place. No
basis ofunion is supplied distinct from the individual
approval of the tenets. of the one or the- other. But
it is only in her special character, as connected with
the ministry of grace on earth, that the Church estab-
lishes a hold, among men. The Church. of Christ pre-
sents herself to mankind, not as having been originated
by the voluntary association of a number of persons
who have agreed to certain points of doctrine or ,
opinion, but in the first instance as. the divine and
corporate embodiment of an idea, coming to men from
without. Men do not make. that embodiment by
espousing that idea, but the two,are contemporaneous..
We become connected, if X, may so use the term.,
with that idea, by being taken into, that embodiment..
To achieve a hold upon mankind,, the Church comes
to them as the agent in the Economy of grace. Eer-
work is not accomplished by. merely propounding to
the individual, truths upon which his intellect is, to
decide ; she does not merely treat mankind as
fallen into a state of ignorance, and needing the
inculcation of a higher system of truths but .she
treats them as in a position of estrangement from
a Power to which they must be brought back, and
that, not by the mere appropriation of a doctrine which
she offers to their understandings, but by the prior
operation of the Power itself ; and in this sense she
says to them, "You have affairs with Heaven. I
am commissioned on GOD'S part to transact them as
His ambassador. I am sent to reinstitute the
relations which you have forfeited. lam specially
charged with a mission to you, which this special
charge alone authorises me to negotiate. lam sent
with a treaty, and to invite you to become, through
my divinely appointed agency, a party to its provi-
sions. It is evident, then, what claim for enduring
good the Church, under this notion, presents to the
allegiance of those who accept her ministry. If men
feel that the evil of their condition is a natural inabi-
lity to gain that connection with the AUTHOR of their
being, the necessity of which is stamped upon the very
constitution of that being, and that their own minds are
not sufficient to furnish a basis of restoration, but that
it is requisite for the way of restoration to be let down
from Heaven to earth, we need not inquire into the
nature of their " attachment" to the platform on
which GOD promises to descend to man, and where the
supernatural way of connection is externally wrought
out upon earth.
Now never, in the whole history of the world, did a
mere systemof doctrines establishapermanent holdupon
the masses of mankind. It was but part of an economy
rooted in the nature of man that proselytising was not
the object of our LORD'S mission upon earth, as His
Church was not yet founded. Neither were those who
accepted His teaching drawn away from the Jewish
communion until the latter was finally superseded by
that " Fellowship of the Apostles," which was hence-