The Sun.
London, England, 1861-02-11 00:00:00

THE CHURCH 1N DANGER.

(From the Dispatch.) '
The author of our State religion is called the
Prince of Peace. To show his loyalty to his spiritual
Sovereign, the Rev. J. S. Brockhurst, Fellow of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gives the Rev.
Edward Dodd, Vicar of St. Giles s, " a sound thrash-
ing with a horsewhip." The offence of his rev.
brother in the Lord was that of showing a delicate
respect to the feelings of a Jew. Dr. M'Caul and
his metropolitan clerical associates feel their Chris-
tian sympathies " outraged " by the authors of the
Oxford Essays and Reviews having thought proper
to think differently from themselves. Of course
they at once discover that they are " infidels," and
unanimously pray the Bishop of London to reveal
the true Christian spirit by prosecuting, degrading,

and cashiering them
Behold how good a thing it is and how exceeding well,
Together such as brethren are in unity to dwell I
The meeting of Sion College, London-wall, would
seek to ungown the Essayists in the spirit of the
illustrious foreigner, "for their good, for all their
goods"—and chattels into the bargain. We wonder
which of the three travellers Dodd or Auriol really

thinks was the neighbour of the man who fell among
thieves ? The Samaritan was notoriously unsound
in his doctrine—the priest and Levite were never
caught tripping in their catechism.
We are coming, we think, to "the beginning of
the end" of our present system of ecclesiology. The

country opens its understanding to the discovery
that there is a wide distinction betwixt the making
a legal provision for the religion of a country and
the endowment of a creed, or the subsidising of a

sacerdotal corporation. It at last sees that the piety
of a people may be perfectly promoted without the
enforcement of doctrinal conformity. It finds that
religious affections have no necessary connexion
with extravagant sinecures to a privileged hierarchy,
in the view of bribing them all to think alike; and
that the monopoly of the loaves and fishes conceded
to the clergy of the Anglican Establishment od the
assumption that they are the safest depositories of
Divine truth, is an extortion of the public money
under false pretences.
Pray, can any man tell us why the rector of the
empty parish church should be paid a thousand a
year by the nation, while the minister of the
crowded Methodist chapel should get nothing ? Is
there any reason why the fashionable temple before
which hundreds of private carriages of the rich draw
up every Sunday, should be supported out of the
hard earnings of the many poor who never enter it,
while the poor conventicle in the back street,
wherein the pinched Baptist preacher labours to
reclaim the bare and ragged to society, virtue and
Heaven, should have to be maintained out of the

hard-earned farthings of the needy ? These queries
do not imply the adoption of the voluntary prin-
ciple. There is nothing in our apprehension for
which a State would' get a better return for its

money than an ample provision for the ordinances
of public worship. We pay a million out of the
miscellaneous estimates for education—what [is
religious culture but tuition in Divine things ? But
the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath. An Establishment is for the nation, not
the nation for the Establishment. The State has
no right to say—there is no sense in its saying—
to its subjects, that they are to worship this, and
not to believe in that. Faith by Act of Parliament,
a statutable creed, is an intolerable and transparent
absurdity. A temple and a priest inside, with all
the worshipping assembly outside or over the way,
is a spectacle to gods and men. Only think of the
shepherd nightly huddled up in the fold, and the
sheep straggling all over the moor, bleating in help-
less bewilderment ! Why, good heavens, what is
the pen or the shepherd for but to feed and fold the
flock ? If they will neither be grazed nor sheltered,
why pay for what has no function without them ?
We say that the endowment of conformity, even
if it could effect its purpose, is an inherent absurdity.
Who can say with prevailing authority that George
Fox or John Wesley, Joseph Priestley or Robert
Hall, were all wrong, taught what was heterodox
and false, and that Jeremy Taylor or Tillotson alone
were in the right ? Even if a Protestant Pope
could be found at Lambeth, clothed with a political
assumption of spiritual infallibility, what would be
the use of his unerring authority if the people
obstinately refused to recognise it ? If the Popish
liturgy, the Arminian clergy, and the Calvinistic
creed of Anglicanism were as theologically perfect
as they certainly are not, what avails it that even
" absolute wisdom" goeth about the streets, if no
man regarded her ?
The whole of our ecclesiastical economy, it is
quite plain, is founded upon a quite untenable
hypothesis—that belief is to follow the endowment,
not that the endowment is to go to the belief. A
Church Establishment, in fact, means distinctly
that the souls of men are to frame their faith by
tithes and church rates, not that the mint, and
anise, and cumin are to refresh with their fragrance
the souls of men. Do not Wesleyans, Independents,
and Baptists need. salvation as well as Episco-
palians ? Are they not the Queen's subjects, alike
members of the same society ? Is not the sole
intelligible pretext for a State ecclesiastical provi-
sion that it will promote religion among the people ?
Is that end to be best secured by subsidising
spiritual ministrations they have abandoned, or by
suppdtting those they follow ? The question
answers itself, and to us no proposition can be
plainer than this, either that the revenues of the
Establishment should be confiscated for secular
purposes, or that they should be applied rateably,
not to a favoured denomination, but to every war-
', shipping assembly according to its numbers:
The time has arrived when Parliament and the
people can no longer evade the settlement of this
question. Conformity, orthodoxy, articles, creeds,
and standards of faith have become an imposture,
an expensive sham. "Under which King, Bezonian?
Speak ! or die !" What is the Anglican faith ?
What is it that we have endowed ? For which
creed is it that we pay ? What articles are to be
pensioned off? High Church, Low Church, or
Broad Church, Anythingarians, Nothingarians,
Arians, Trinitarians, or Unitarians ? Which of the
two Newmans are to be followed—are we to go to
mass with Archdeacon Denison, or Exeter Hall
with Dean Close ; to worship with Bishop Hamp-
den, or excommunicate him with his dean and
chapter. Which is the supralapsarian, the Bishop
of Exeter or Mr. Gorham ? Where shall we go to
be saved—Saint Paul's, Knightsbridge, the Temple
Church, Saint George's-in-the-East, or Saint
Matthew's, Bethnal-green ?
We put these questions specifically on this account
—that the Quarterly reviewers, who agree in
nothing else, and, least of all, with the metropolitan
clergy, are unanimous in the expression of their
opinion that 'the Oxford essayists can no longer,
consistently with the opinion they express, continue
in communion with the Church of England. The
National. the Westminster, the Quarterly, and the
Edinburgh are all perfectly clear in the conviction
that it would be inconsistent with fair dealing that
these able men should remain in an office, the dis-
charge of whose functions to which they
th hound_
themselves, they have virtually ignored. We
inhoer
lt:
e
these strictures to be dictated by
squeamish prudery of a spurious scrupulosity.
Listen.
Subscription to the standards ofhtuhreci?hasurachcoinsdain.
obligation imposed, not by
tion of Christian communiotnhf.o,erbeouffit
obey. the secular
Legislature as a qualification
and the
P
; and we hold
tract betwixt the Stet
xiseect:uotive Government is silent
that so long as the
other party who has any
on the subject, ther:
title to interfere, because none other was entitled
to, or did, in fact,
exact the conditions of official
institution. The obligation of conformity is neither
moral nor spiritual, but legal. It is a statutable
qualification, and must be interpreted strictly by
the letter of the Act of Parliament. It is not a
question of degree. There is no dilates doctrine
in the Act. Not one jot or tittle of the law can
pass away—all must be fulfilled. He that offends
in one is guilty of all—Falsum in uno, falsuni in
omnibus. No latitude is given by the Act. You
must swallow the whole articles, services, homilies,
canons--accept them ex animo. You are not per-
mitted to stray into Calvinism, but warned to avoid
Popery. You are not allowed to blink the Atha-
nasian Creed, but prohibited from hinting a doubt
of the Mosaic account of the creation. It is not
open for Dr. M'Caul to say, " Oh, the doctrine of
baptismal regeneration is of no consequence, but
that of election or reprobation is." A legal obliga-
tion, involving civil penalties, must be interpreted,
not discretionaily, but strictly and literally.
Now, if that be true, and if no clergyman should