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SOLEMN Sunday rest with
cessation of work came
once a week to the Bradford district. It was
preceded on Saturday by a great house cleaning,
and washing of persons likewise from the grime of
six days' labour. The many places of worship were
well attended by men, women, and children in their
best clothes. The line of demarcation between
Church and Dissent was much more broadly marked
in things civil than in matters of faith. Excluding
the recently imported Irish Roman Catholics and
some minor sects, the whole population might well
be said to wear the same decided Protestant brand.
Dissenters had to justify the continuance of separatism by exaggerating
small points of difference, manufacturing fancy grievances as soon as the
old real ones disappeared, and by carefully raking together the embers of ancient feuds which once were
of importance, but which had been, in course of
time, deprived of sensible meaning. The Church,
assailed without by the Liberation Society and its
train of strangely assorted Roman Catholic and
Secularist auxiliaries, was, at the same time,
beginning to be troubled within by the ritualism
which was, in the main, the natural reaction to
rationalism, and in some cases, too, the outcome of
individual petty arrogance or the desire to create
sensations, and to pander to the theatrical and
superstitious tastes of society ladies, or to appeal
to the element of mysticism which is strong in
speculative dreamers, and is not wholly absent
from any human mind. Ritualism found very
little of congenial soil in which to strike its roots
within the diocese of Ripon, whose then bishop,
Bickersteth, was a strong Evangelical, and one of
the most earnest preachers of his day. There should
be room for the Ritualists as well as for the Evangelicals and Broad parties in the Church of Eng-
land ; and it has to be acknowledged that they
have done much good, self-denying work in the
slums of London and other places. That rescue
work should be set off to the credit side of their
account against their priestly pretensions, their
ministering to the theatrical tastes and superficial
remorses of society sinners, and their sending to
Rome the more logical and thorough receivers of
their doctrines. The laity of the Church of Eng-
land are, taken in the mass, I verily believe, more
immovably Protestant than the Dissenters who
speak so much about the Romanising mischief done
by ritualism. The English Church people are
tolerant to an exceptional degree. They will listen
apathetically to sermons and discourses by high and
dry clergymen who refrain from, introducing innovations in worship, but they set their teeth in deadly
wrath against new priestly garments, and postures,
and genuflexions which they denounce as Popish.
If they had the right to elect their clergymen the
Evangelicals would be chosen almost everywhere.
They like good sermons, but can put up with dull
and foolish ones, because they think the Prayer
Book services sufficient for the need of Christians,
and that as long as he cannot add to or take from
these services it does not much matter what may be
the clergyman's personal views or character. The
Church of England gains breadth from theoretical
imperfections and startling contrasts. It is aristocratic and popular, rich and poor, lax in some
matters of importance, and rigorous in some small
ones, such as confirmation of children, which has no
importance beyond that of custom, and yet which
acts as a barrier against the entrance into communion
of outsiders wishing to come in from other denominations, who have ten times more of scripture
knowledge, and far deeper religious feelings than
the youngsters on whose heads bishops lay their
hands. Evangelical awakening in the Church was
so directly and unmistakably due to the eighteenth
century revival outside of it, which is connected
specially with the names of Whitefield and Wesley,
that the one thing might be considered an off-shoot
of the other. To the same pressure of external
influence must, in a large measure, be ascribed the
generating of the reforming force which, by degrees,
swept away many old abuses, such as pluralities,
absenteeism, and scandals of clerical life. Ritualism,
and the Anglican High Churchism of modern days,
must be taken as protests of religious people against
the materialism of an unbelieving age, which is
cutting away human beings from the highest
sources of inspiration and forcing them to deprive
their souls of the spiritual wings with which God
had furnished them. In sense and purpose, the
protest is commendable and timely, too. But it has
taken a form which is detestable to the majority of
English people. Many intelligent Romanists would,
if they possibly could, get gladly rid of the superstitious lumber of the Middle Ages to which our
self-styled Catholics of the Church of England
are striving to bring back a people stubbornly
Protestant, who anchor themselves on Bible and
Prayer Book, and are, in country places especially,
loyally attached to the old churches, which are
often museums of local historical monuments, and
about which the dead of many ages have been
buried. In the worsted district I found that the
Church of England was by far the strongest single
religious denomination, although it had not perhaps
a numerical majority against all the other sects,
Christian, Jewish, Secularist, when pooled together.
Out in non-manufacturing rural districts the Church
was predominant, and Dissent, in all its forms, was
weak and wavering in character and fortunes, al-
though subsidised and patronised by urban co-
religionists.
In Bradford and district, as
indeed all over
England, Old Dissent, hailing back to Commonwealth time, and in less definite form to the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, was represented by
Independents, Baptists, and Presbyterians. The
Quakers were so few that they hardly counted,
and the old English Presbyterians had, at the end
of the eighteenth century, slided into Unitarianisin,
except those of them who joined the Independents,
or Wesleyans, or slipped back into the Church of
England. With the exception of very few places,
the English Presbyterians of Baxter days, who had
the majority of the four thousand ministers expelled
from vicarages and rectories on St Bartholomew's
Day, 1662, had lost their chapels and endowments,
and all but ceased to exist as a religious denomination. But the Scotch incomers of the industrial
revolution built new Presbyterian chapels for themselves, and imported ministers from benorth the
Tweed, which, I believe, would rarely have been
done if, in the First Parliament of the Restoration,
clericals and cavaliers had not, by the Uniformity
Act, shut the door on conciliation by refusing to
recognise any but episcopal orders, and by putting
obstacles in the way of men and women of non-episcopal churches joining the Church of England.
Educated, fair-minded English Church people of
recent times regret the exclusiveness embodied in
the Uniformity Act, which is in such a contrast to
the servility of passive obedience, recognition of the
divine right of kings, and hailing such a scamp as
Charles II. with the blasphemous title of Sacred
Majesty. But the punishment came with the
endeavour of his brother and successor to make
logical use of these professions of abject servility for
reimposing the Papal yoke on Protestant England;
and the trial of the bishops brought a sort of
absolution to the self-degraded Church which all
the while had many good and learned men among
its ministers.
If James II. of England and
VII. of Scotland
had possessed half the insight and cleverness of his
gay, profligate, and wholly selfish and unprincipled
elder brother, he would never have dreamed of
forcing Protestant England England of the
Smithfield martyrs, of the Armada, and the great
Elizabethan reign and literature back into the
bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, nor would
he have placed reliance, as if bond slaves because
of their profession of the servile obedience, on the
clergy of the Established Church. The man was,
however, fatuously sincere in his religious fanaticism, while in his relations with women nearly as
immoral as the preceding Sacred Majesty. The
Church of England, by slavish professions of loyalty
on the one hand and oppressive proceedings against
Nonconformity on the other, damaged its character
in England as the willing aider of attempted royal
despotism, earned the disrespect of a blood-stained,
persecuting aggressor in Scotland, and by the Act
of Uniformity cut itself off from alliance and inter-
communion with all the Reformed Churches of the
Continent, whose existence was placed in danger by
French conquests. The fact that from such an
abyss there was a quick recovery, Jacobite plottings
notwithstanding, proved beyond dispute the strong
hold their national Church had got on the freedom-
loving English people. In the dark days before
the 1688 Revolution, the Nonconformists of all
denominations were the real champions of civil and
religious liberty, and as such they acted throughout
the next century, and as such they love to pose to
the present day, though matters are so changed
that the nominal championship slips with fatal
ease into petty persecution of foolish vicars and
rectors with swollen priestly heads, who try to
uphold prerogatives and customs, which common-
sense, or contrary laws, have consigned to the tomb
of all the Capulets.
The idea of perfect religious
liberty is a plant of
such slow growth that even yet it has not come to
flower and fruit in all civilised countries. It took no
real root at all in any land during the fierce religious
wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In
our own country the desire for toleration changed as
the three main parties into which Protestants had
become divided, changed from top or to bottom their
respective positions. Unitedly the English Protest-
ants passed through the ordeal of the Marian persecution, to get divided by different ideals in the reign
of Elizabeth. But these divided parties acted like
one in keeping down the Catholics, although the
latter acted like true patriots in defence of their
native land in the year of the Armada. It was no
double dose of original sin but greater opportunities
which made the Church of England the greater and
longer oppressor of the outside Protestant parties.
When Henry VIII. deposed the Pope he put himself
in his place as head of the English Church. That
headship principle was maintained by the succeeding
Tudor sovereigns with the exception of the much-to-be-pitied "Bloody Mary," who was as brave as any
of her remarkably strong-headed race. The Tudors
were popular despots, who attached themselves to
great national causes, and established law and order
in a turbulent time. Elizabeth got a poor law passed
which solved a long-standing difficulty, and took
care that the meanest of her subjects should get
justice against big superiors. The Puritans provoked
her by outspoken denunciation of the slack discipline and doctrines and constitution of the National
Church into capricious acts of persecution, and yet
they remained all the time her loyal subjects. When
the headship passed on to the "Scotch Solomon,"
the aspect of political and religious affairs very soon
assumed a stormy appearance. For all the pedantry
and personal oddities which made James an object
of ridicule to his English subjects, he was the farthest-
seeing, and, except in regard to unworthy favourites,
the wisest of the four Stuarts that sat on the throne
of England. Unity of Church and State on the Royal
headship accorded admirably with the kingship principles he frankly expounded in his "Basilicon Doron,"
arid which, in a later time, Hobbes more thoroughly
and logically argued out in his "Leviathan." James
had come out of Scotland with a perfect dread of the
democratic nature of Presbyterianism, and muttering "No bishop, no king." He
had laboured artfully, with patient perseverance, to pave the way for his
accession to the English throne by the creation of Scotch bishops, who at
first were without a shadow of pretension to the shadow of historical and
so-called canonical Apostolic succession, magnified in England. After he got
to a safe distance from the recalcitrant and loudly rebuking Presbyterian
ministers and the fear of their ultra-Protestant followers, and had for his
ecclesiastical design in Scotland the whole influence of the Church of
England at his back, he pushed forward the completion of his
Episcopal-Presbyterian blend. With similar artfulness and the willing help
of his bishops, he throttled the independence of the Scotch Parliament
through a juggling manipulation of the Lords of the Articles. He would never
have committed his son's error of letting Laud or any Englishman, clerical
or lay, presume to interfere, far less to dictate in the affairs of the
Scotch Kirk. His design was to bring about both ecclesiastical and
parliamentary union between England and Scotland. What marred that great
design was the kingly despotism which he intended to place on the top of it.
His son set the heather on fire in Scotland by treating
that poor, proud, and warlike country as if it had
been made a conquered province of England; and
the revolt of defiant Scotland gave the English
Parliament and the English freedom-loving patriots
their opportunity for calling Stuart despotism to
strict account.
Banded together as
Covenanters, the Scotch
Presbyterians were every whit as intolerant as their
former oppressors had ever been, or were destined
again to be during the, to the whole realm, dark-
clouded Restoration period. Throughout the whole
struggle they had an earnest desire to preserve the
hereditary kingship when it was deprived of the
despotic powers claimed and exercised by James and
his more stately yet far less astute son. They also,
in a reverse way, adopted James's policy of ecclesiastical union. He wanted by his royal power to impose
Anglican Episcopacy on Scotland. They hoped that
Presbyterianism would be voluntarily adopted by
the English Parliament and people, because, they
argued, it was the system of Church Government
which was more consistent with constitutional
monarchy. The arguments from the Scriptures and
the early records of Christianity, with which the
learned disputants of both sides belaboured one
another, had far less weight with the public, who
did not find any clearly defined and unalterable
scheme of Church Government in the New Testament, than this plain constitutional argument. It
was the force of this constitutional argument, and
the solution of very pressing difficulties, which led
so many of the English Church clergy and laity to
surmount their international prejudices against taking a lesson from Scotland and Geneva, and to avow
themselves Presbyterians. Hence the strong muster
of Presbyterians in the Long Parliament before it
was violently reduced to a mere faction. Hence the
Westminster Assembly of Divines, whose Confession
of Faith, although truly the work of the English
majority, was at once accepted in Scotland, and still
remains, nominally at least, the Confession of Faith
of the various sections into which the Kirk got
unhappily divided. The English reformers, clerical
and lay, who wished to preserve what was good in
the past, and to bring the continued Kingship under
constitutional restrictions, saw that Episcopacy had
made itself condemned not because of inherent
demerits but because Charles, Laud, and Stafford
had involved it in the discredit of having been used
as the servile drudge of a system of political and
ecclesiastical despotism to which the British people
would no longer submit.
The Congregational Puritans
hated with good
cause the Episcopal system and refused to look with
favour at the Presbyterian alternative. They had
long and nobly testified against crowned and mitred
tyranny, and manfully suffered for their testimonies.
They had a just right to look upon themselves,
especially in the Restoration period, as the torch-bearers of heavenly light in a long night of darkness
and as the standard-bearers of civil liberty. But
they had no scheme for preserving national continuity and making an orderly re-settlement come after
the upheaval. In their view every single worshipping
and faithful congregation was a perfectly organised
and divinely ordained Church. The wildly theocratic
views of some of them transcended the bounds of
reason altogether. They looked for miscellaneous
inspiration as the outcome of individual religious
fervour, and so could dispense with a learned and
regularly appointed ministry altogether. Of course,
those were the views of extremists and not of the
more sober-minded Congregationalists. But they
were views which took hold of the army, and decided
the course of public events against the larger number
who wanted to stop at constitutional reform of a
very extensive character, and to obtain an ecclesiastical system which would accord with that reform.
Although they had not so much as the shadow of a
practical reconstructive plan, the extremists, with the
help of the army, got their destructive innings. By
"Pride's purge" the Long Parliament was reduced to
a rump which would have been simply farcical if it
had not also been so tyrannical and inhumanly
intolerant. The Cromwell dictatorship then followed
as a blessing undisguised. It effectually stopped the
rapid progress of anarchy and rescued the precious
heritage of the past from irreparable damage. Abroad
it restored British prestige, and boldly vindicated
British honour and interests. At home, after war
devastations and the fierce collisions of parties and
factions, it enforced peace and order, accompanied
with a more impartial administration of justice and a
larger amount of religious toleration than England
ever enjoyed before or after under a Stuart king.
While the English
Presbyterians within a hundred
years of the death of Richard Baxter disappeared
almost entirely, by partly lapsing into Unitarianism,
and partly dispersing themselves among orthodox
dissenters or joining the Church of England, the
Congregationalists-Independents, Baptists, and
minor sects holding their one-congregation one-
church organisation views stiffly retained in cities,
towns and populous districts their historical continuity through all trials and ups and downs, until the
Reform Bill gave them their reward in the shape of
an enormous increase of their political and municipal
power. In Bradford, when the majority of the much
decayed Presbyterian body there became Unitarians,
and, by keeping the old name, managed to possess
themselves of chapel property, the orthodox minority
joined the Independents, and founded a new chapel
for themselves, which in 1860 had one of the largest
congregations in the town and whole district. This
was typical of what was earlier or at the same time
taking place at the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century in mostly all
places in England in which, at St. Bartholomew's
Day, 1662, Presbyterianism had been strong. Exteriorly it suffered from adherence to the principle of
monarchy, while not accepting the rule of bishops,
and interiorly the philosophies of the eighteenth
century and sympathy with the first promising phase
of the French Revolution hastened disintregation which only left a shadowy
and misleading simulacrum. The Congregationalists retained a large portion
of the bitter hostility of their ancestors to the Church of England,
although in other respects they professed and practised liberal sentiments
and promoted in and outside their own country philanthropic and humanitarian objects and projects. For the root thing in
which they showed an unforgiving and un-Christian
temper, they had the wrongs of many ages to plead
as a kind of justification. Hereditary hostilities
between religions long resist eliminating influences,
and are paradoxically conservative. During the
twenty years I was in the West Riding, Puritannic
doctrines among the younger ministers were obviously losing their hold, and
giving place to rationalistic, philosophical, or unmistakably evasive pulpit
eloquence and platform dissenterism. In proportion
as spiritual Puritanism decayed the Liberation Society
grew stronger in number, and so did the ambition to disestablish, cripple, and destroy the Church of England.
However purely spiritual their faith may be, and
however high their original aims, religious association
of all sorts more or less quickly harden into secular
interests that cannot help getting earth-cased and
clogged in various forms and degrees. The policy of
the Liberation Society seems to me to have brought
into unblessed prominence and suicidal activity the
little something devilish which by natural law was
always mixed up with the much which was really
divine in ancient Puritanism. Discipline had lost its
early inquisitorial severity before I went to England,
yet ministers and deacons did not neglect proper over-
sight of members and adherents of their congregations; and moreover, they made themselves helpful
in many ways to young people in search of openings,
and to widows, orphans, and disabled or afflicted
men and women of their respective communions.
They had no very large proportion of helpless ones,
or ne'er-do-wells among them; for they were to an
extent beyond ordinary companies of hard-working,
well-conducted, and generally fairly well off upper-class operatives, shopkeepers, and artisans, and their
leaders, and often their employers, were the middle-
class aristocracy of the newly enriched, who had
crows of their own to pluck with the old feudal
aristocracy. In my long residence among them,
Liberation Society policy, decay of Puritanic doctrines,
and municipal and parliamentary electioneering did
not seem to detrimentally affect the good old life
habits of the people who worshipped in congregational chapels. Their Christian ideal of duty and
their standard of morality were as high as they had
ever been.
In Bradford and its district
I found the Wesleyans, or Methodists as they preferred to call them-
selves, very numerous and still largely animated with
the enlivening spirit of the great revival movement,
which shook Christian England out of lethargic
slumbers in the eighteenth century, and had its
Calvinistic counterpart in Scotland and in Wales
also. Let evolution theory, higher criticism and
science limited to materialistic researches, do their
worst, but in spite of all, human beings conscious of
possessing immortal souls will always be seeking
spiritual connections with God, or the Soul of the
Universe, and that seeking will ever and anon after
a period of slackness become intense and burst forth
in a revival which may take a warlike shape like the
Crusades, or a monastic form, as often happened in
the Roman Catholic Church, or a doctrinal and
purifying overhauling and reconstruction like the
Reformation, or a pacific religious enthusiasm such as
that in which Wesleyanism originated. The movement began in the Church of
England; and Wesleyanism as a missionary organisation might have continued in affiliated union with and subordination to
the Church of England had not the first Cavalier
Parliament of Charles the Second fettered freedom
and furnished the hierarchy with a good excuse for
neglecting a great opportunity, and stupid rectors,
vicars, and squires with weapons of contumelious
offence and paltry persecution. John Wesley died
without ever separating himself from the communion
and membership of the Church of England. Long
after his death, the Bradford Wesleyans, although
they had a chapel and ministry of their own,
communicated only in the parish church as long as
the evangelical vicar, who deeply sympathised with
them, held the incumbency. I think it was not until
1816 that the severance was made complete.
Unlike the Congregationalists, the Wesleyans had
no hereditary roots of bitterness planted in the dust
of the Civil War and of the Restoration time. They
were dissenters by no design, or irreconcilable principles of their own, but
because the Church of England had failed to find for them a field of work
within its vineyard. If the rulers of that Church despised and neglected
them, and if some rectors, vicars, and squires despitefully treated and
abused them, others, like the vicar of Bradford, befriended them, and so did
not a few of the nobility and gentry. So far were they from objecting on
principle to the recognition of religion by the State, and from thinking
that every congregation should rule and uphold itself, that by a Deed
enrolled in Chancery they established their missionary- board scheme for
securing corporate funds and a circulating ministry. They had had their
troubles and divisions in the first half of last century. The waves of the
revival tide had broken on rocks of strife and secular interests, but for
all that I found between 1860 and 1880 there was a good deal of the old
purely religious revival force operating among the whole of them. They
accepted the Bible as their unerring guide and did not concern themselves with the controversies regarding its
composition and contents raised by what is called
the higher criticism. If their religion was emotional
it was lovable and kindly and brotherly to outsiders.
But reluctantly and slowly
the Wesleyans, as far as
their ruling and representative bodies could do it,
were drawn into the net of the Liberation Society,
and thereby placed in antagonism to their original
and natural principles, and the system by which
they had made themselves an unendowed but established denomination under the binding guarantee of
the law of the land. This conquest by the Liberation Society was not completed when I was in
England. I question whether it can ever be made
quite complete as long as the old revival spirit
continues to operate with sensible effect. |
