J. Ewing Ritchie,
author of “
british senators,” “
the night side of london,”
etc., wrote in his book the Religious Life Of
London in 1870 that man is undoubtedly a religious animal. It seemed that at the time he was living in
England at any
rate the remark hold good.
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| St. Alban's, Golders Green Parish Church in Barnet, London (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
No one who ignores the
religious element in our history can rightly understand what
England was, or how she came to be what she is. The fuller
is our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the more
minute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in all
minds that religion has been for good or bad the great moving
power, and, in spite of the teachings of Secularism or of
Positivism, it is clear that as much as ever the questions which
are daily and hourly coming to the front have in them more or
less of a religious element.
The author knew it were not often foreigners
who perceived this. Several foreigners mastered the English habits and
ways, all that the English called their inner life; yet, to Louis Blanc for example, the
English pulpit was a piece of wood — nothing more.
According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred fire has
ceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; church
attendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has little
to recommend it. There is beauty in desolation — in
life changing into death —
“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;”
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| Logo of the Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Not even of this beauty could the
Church of England boast. Dr. Döllinger — a more
thoughtful, a more learned, a more laborious writer — was not
more flattering, according to Ritchie.
The Church of England, he tells us, is
“the Church only of a fragment of the nation,” of
“the rich, cultivated, and fashionable
classes.” It teaches “the religion of
deportment, of gentility, of clerical reserve.”
“In its stiff and narrow organization, and all want of
pastoral elasticity, it feels itself powerless against the
masses.”
In the 19° century London the patronage was mostly in the hands of the
nobility and gentry, who regarded it as a means of provision for
their younger sons, sons-in-law, and cousins.
Our latest
critic, M. Esquiros, writes in a more favourable strain, yet even
he confesses how the city operative shuns what he deems the
Church of Mammon, and draws a picture of the English clergyman,
by no means suggestive of zeal in the Master’s service or
readiness to bear His yoke. Dissent foreigners generally
ignore, yet Dissent is as active, as energetic as the State
Church, and may claim that it has practically realized the
question of our time—the Free Church in the Free
State.
Life
to most of the people living in the 19°century Britain was hard, and it would have been harder still
if after a
day’s toil Paterfamilias had to discuss the three births of
Christ, or His twofold nature, the Æons of the Gnostics,
the Judaism of the Ebionites, the ancient Persian dualism which
formed the fundamental idea of the system of Manes, or the windy
frenzy of Montanus, with an illogical wife, a friend gifted with
a fatal flow of words, or a pert and shallow child. We like
those with whom we constantly associate. They are wise men
and sound Christians. They are those who fast and pay
tithes, and are eminently proper and respectable. As to the
heretics—the publicans and sinners, away with them.
Let their portion be shame in this life, perdition in the
next. Thus it is heretics have got a bad name. Church
history has been written by their enemies, by men who have
honestly believed that a man of a different heresy to their own
would rob an orphan, and break all the commandments.
The
Rev. Mr. Thwackem “doubted not but all the
infidels and heretics in the world would, if they could, confine
honour to their own absurd errors and damnable
deceptions.”
When looking at English literature of the 19° century I may think we mostly are confronted with classical Christian families, mostly belonging to the mainstream protestant churches England still has to day. The Church of
England being the most common denomination.
At that time it was no different probably than today that people would easily say of others they where heretics.
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| Free Church of England (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
According to the Articles of the English Establishment,
“the Church of Christ is a company of faithful
people among whom the pure Word of God is preached and the
Sacraments rightly administered according to Christ’s
institution.”
But on this very matter we also did find the
Church divided.
Low Churchmen tell us that the ritualists
do not rightly administer the Sacraments, and the latter say the
same of their opponents. The Record suggests that
Bishop Colenso is little better than one of the wicked, and
charitably insinuates that the late Dean Milman is amongst the
lost. Dr. Pusey places the Evangelicals in the same
category with Jews, or Infidels, or Dissenters, and has strong
apprehensions as to their everlasting salvation. Dr. Temple
was made Bishop of Exeter, and Archdeacon Denison set apart the
day of his installation as one of humiliation and prayer.
Yet all these are of the Establishment.
I am not quite sure if there were more non-trinitarians or unitarians in the 19° century, but we can read about the attitudes taken to such beleivers.
Dr. Parr gladly
associated with Unitarians, and went to Unitarian chapels to hear
Unitarian ministers preach. Would Dean Close do so?
Yet Dr. Parr, as much as Dean Close, was of the Church as regards
solemn profession, and deliberate assent and consent. Mr.
Melville believes Dissent to be schism, and one of the deadly
sins, while the Deans of Westminster and Canterbury hold out to
Dissenters friendly hands.
When Ritchie wrote his books there were Ebionites who regarded
Christ as a mere man and Gnostics whom considered Jesus as
superhuman; but in that capacity as one of a very numerous
class.
The author considered the
Monachians, who were divided respectively into
Dynamistic and Modalistic as possible heretic. As the latter held that the
whole fulness of the Deity dwelt in Christ and only found in him
a peculiar mode of manifestation, it was assumed that the natural
inference was that the Father himself had died on the
Cross.
Hence to these heretics the name of Patripassians
was applied by the orthodox. Sabellius, who maintained a
Trinity, not of divine Persons but of successive manifestations
under the names Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was one of the chief
Patripassians. The Arian controversy, as Dean Stanley
shows, turned on the relations of the divine persons before the
first beginning of time.
There was also a lot of division in the many denominations.
If we take the Articles, the
Church Establishment is as orthodox as the firmest Christian or
the narrowest-minded bigot can desire; if we turn to its
ministers, we find them as divided as it is possible for people
professing to take their teaching from the Bible can be. If
there be any grace in creeds and articles, any virtue in signing
them, if their imposition be not a solemn farce, it is impossible
that heresy should exist within the Established Church. It
is in the wide and varied fields of Dissent that we are to look
for heresy.
Though he considered the Church of England to be tolerant, to a certain extent, of
heresy. The judicious Hooker writes,
“We must
acknowledge even heretics themselves to be a maimed part, yet a
part, of the visible Church. If an infidel should pursue to
death an heretic professing Christianity only for Christian
profession’s sake, could we deny unto him the honour of
martyrdom? Yet this honour all men know to be proper unto
the Church. Heretics, therefore, are not utterly cast out
from the visible Church of Christ. If the Fathers do,
therefore, anywhere, as often they do, make the true visible
Church of Christ and heretical companies opposite, they are to be
construed as separating heretics not altogether from the company
of believers, but from the fellowship of sound
believers. For where professed unbelief is, there can be no
visible Church of Christ; there may be where sound belief
wanteth. Infidels being clean without the Church, deny
directly and utterly reject the very principles of Christianity
which heretics embrace, and err only by misconstruction,
whereupon their opinions, although repugnant indeed to the
principles of Christian faith, are notwithstanding by them held
otherwise and maintained as most consistent
therewith.”
The Privy Council by its Judgment of
“Essays and Reviews” has decided that a Churchman may
hold heretical opinions.
In popular language, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the
Presbyterians are orthodox; the Quakers, the Methodists,
Wesleyans and otherwise, are orthodox; for our purpose popular
language is sufficient.
Ritchie wrote.
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Continues with: 19° century London and Unitarians
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