The London Pulpit. James Ewing Ritchie
To win the truth – to lead a god-like life – to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction. Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for – worth dying for; if it be so, the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St. Paul’s have made a terrible mistake – a mistake which the friends of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.
THE REV. F. D. MAURICE
‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840, – ‘if I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary; Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him of the Professor’s Chair.
The real difficulty – which Sterling deemed invincible – which has proved too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for it. The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years. It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like Lot’s wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service – to the law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai’s sacred head. It looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,
‘Somewhere underneath the sun,
Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.’
It made no provision for the growth of man’s free and unfettered thought. Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale, divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well. The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities. Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to it, and fewer still have done so and lived.
But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself. You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church’s truth, if you take the Church’s pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living, you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain a position.
It is easy to see how, in Maurice’s own case, what power has been thrown away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come back to the Church – to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coëxistent with the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be a power – to have the nation’s heart – to enlist the nation’s intellect on its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:
‘The builder of this universe was wise,
He plann’d all souls, all systems, planets, particles!
The plan he shaped his worlds and æons by,
Was – Heavens! – was thy small Nine-and-Thirty Articles.’
Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.
Most of our readers know Lincoln’s-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers. In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of Lincoln’s-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in. It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the consecration sermon. The walls have reëchoed to the oratory of Secker and Tillotson. The windows are of stained glass, and one of them, containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer; Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan, William Prynne, who wrote about ‘The Unloveliness of Love Locks.’ During Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.
Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any other clergyman of the day – after teaching more youth – after mixing up himself more with the working classes than almost any other man I know of – one is surprised that Mr. Maurice’s audience is not larger; and I can only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr. Maurice’s place is not the pulpit, but the professor’s chair: yet that he has a numerous class of followers, the sale of his books is an unanswerable proof – a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor – short dark hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his doctrines.
What Mr. Maurice’s opinions are he has taken full care to place before the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. ‘I have contended,’ he writes in his ‘Kingdom of Christ,’ ‘that a Bible without a Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible; that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that