HOLMAN HUNT AND PRE-RAPHAELITISM. By Delmar Harmood Banner THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE BRITISH ARMY. Lieut.-General WAR GRAVES AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH. By Major- General Sir Fabian Ware NATIONALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA. By P. V. Emrys Evans THE NATION And the PrayeR-BOOK. By The Rev A H. T. Clarke Reform of the House of LORDS. By The Rt. Hon. Viscount Astor HUMAN PERSONALITY IN DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY. By Fion McEachran CEREMONY. By W. Baring Pemberton THE POSITION OF THE LATE SIR Walter Raleigh aMONG LITERARY THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DIPLOMACY UNDER WILLIAM III. Margery Lane Percy Sykes PUBLIC SPENDING AND PRIVATE SAVING. By Sir John Marrioti, THE EQUESTRIAN DRAMA-I. By M. Willson Disher THE future of institutional Christianity is becoming uncertain. Dean Stanley once indulged the speculation whether the Christian religion was not destined to be ultimately severed from religious observances. Certainly the half-century which has elapsed since he did so has added plausibility to the notion, for the disintegrating factors which menace all settled habits and ordered institutions have gathered force, and now seem to endanger the cohesion of society itself. Not even the stoutest faith and the most resolute optimism can mistake the direction and effect of the new tendencies. Every assembly of representative Churchmen, as well Papist as Protestant, addresses itself to the disquieting symptoms of institutional decline which force themselves on its notice. The secularisation of the Lord's Day, the failure of candidates for the Christian ministry, the growing VOL. CII-No. 605 I B alienation of the educated classes, and the general repudiation of the traditional Christian morality in the cardinal matters of marriage and education constitute for the Churches of Christendom a practical problem of the utmost urgency, of which the solution is hard to find. How far the Christian religion can be said to depend on the Christian Church is a question more easily asked than answered. The distinctive morality of the Gospel appears to require expression and exercise within a congruous society, and the Church has from the first attributed to the Sacraments an importance in the Christian life which implies their permanence. Yet modern society is becoming familiar with the spectacle of individual morality, confessedly in theory and intention Christian, which has no relation to membership in a Christian Church. The history of Christianity is so full of surprises that no considering student will be disposed to dogmatise as to its probable future. Institutional Christianity may destined to exhibit fresh developments which will renew ancient harmony between the Church and the civilised munities within which it exists. For the present we contemplate a process of disintegration and decline the logical conclusion is neither pleasant to contem possible to doubt. Whether it will be arrested by the eme of new factors as yet unsuspected is a question which the futu will be able to answer. D .vil. volution, stitution in a in Sweden there still One famous type of ecclesiastical organisatibrought into prominence by the debates on and the discussions in the country The Church of England is the national Church which the experi In Russia Christianity has been ov and the Church survives as a bar State which has degraded and despoi exists an established Church, which presents many features similar to those of the Church of England, but its comparative remoteness and smallness of extent deprive its fortunes of significance. When (and who will say that the contingency is either unlikely or distant?) the Church of England shall have been disestablished and disendowed, the distinctive organisation of Christ's religion which it has exhibited will have failed in Christendom. It cannot be without interest to review the conditions under which that organisation came into existence, and the stages by which it has reached its present situation. II A national Church is a thought-provoking description. For how can a Church-which must needs express a universal religion, the religion of Christ-be brought into the category of national institutions? If the catholicity of the religion be expressed in the ecclesiastical system which embodies it, then the apparent conflict takes a concrete form. How does membership of the Catholic Church harmonise with membership of the Church which is national? Can the larger obligation consist with the nearer allegiance? When a conflict emerges, what authority is competent to decide the issue? Christian history certifies the fact and the gravity of the paradox inherent in the idea of a national Church. Christianity is a universal religion. The truths which it proclaims, and the morality which it requires, are meant for all sorts and conditions of men.' But historically Christianity has had to make its way in a human society which is almost infinitely various. Accordingly, the universal religion has come to present a strangely variegated aspect. There are certain universal factors which give it a recognisable identity, but the differences are very great, so great that the fellowship of its professors has been broken up, to all appearance irreparably. The influence of locality began to operate from the first. Distinctiveness of emphasis, tone, and habit began to mark the spiritual society. As the Church extended, this factor could not but become more important. The original influences working from the centre were weakened by distance, and by the isolation which distance necessitated. The genius loci told subtly on Christian minds, and shaped Christian habits, so that, very early in Christian history, the one Church exhibited varieties of worship, discipline, and even belief. Within the still unbroken fellowship of the imperial Church divergent types of Christianity reflected racial idiosyncrasy, specific conditions of life, distinctive political traditions, and various levels of culture. The Christianity of Rome was not identical with that of Alexandria, nor that of Antioch with that of Constantinople. These differences fitted on to all manner of secular interests, both strengthening them and receiving strength from them. Language added a potent element making for dissidence. The Eastern Church spoke Greek, the Western Church Latin; and, later, within the Latin world, the vernacular languages of modern Europe brought fresh forces of disintegration into history. From the first there was a tendency to make the ecclesiastical system conform to the existing political arrangements. Civic convenience coincided with public policy to facilitate the process. In Mommsen's striking phrase,' the conquering Christian Church took its hierarchic weapons from the arsenal of the enemy.'1 The conversion of Constantine stimulated this tendency. Eccle1 Vide Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. i., p. 349. The siastical and civil arrangements were closely conformed. organisation of the Roman State religion provided a precedent for the imperial Church, and may even have formed the framework into which the ecclesiastical system of established Christianity was fitted. How far this was the case is a disputed point among students of antiquity, but that the influence of the pagan hierarchy on its Christian successor was considerable cannot be reasonably questioned. The Papacy, as Hobbes said, is 'the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned on the tomb thereof.' The modelling of the Church on the organization of the imperial cult grew more intimate as the decades passed, and the resemblance between them stronger when the recognition of the Christian religion by the State gave the leaders of the Church more opportunities. The pagan title of Pontifex Maximus, applied in scorn by Tertullian in the beginning of the third century to an overweening bishop of Rome, was appropriated by the Christian bishop of the capital and still remains, and with it the implied claim to be the ruler over the whole religious administration of the empire. The vestments of the clergy, unknown in those early centuries -dalmatic, chasuble, stole and maniple-were all taken over by the Christian clergy from the Roman magistracy; the word Bull, to denote a papal rescript, was borrowed from the old imperial administration. It is hardly excessive to say that the imperial Church was a replica of the imperial State: and when the empire ceased to be a unit, the division of East and West, at first political, became almost inevitably ecclesiastical also. When the Roman Empire in the West fell before the attacks of the Teutonic barbarians, the ecclesiastical system was powerfully affected. The Church was feudalised as well as the State. The tribe and the nation gained suitable ecclesiastical expression. Thus the original bishoprics of the English conversion were the heptarchic kingdoms, and the see was in some instances the capital. When Theodore organised the Church of England in the seventh century, he broke up these great bishoprics, but in doing so, he followed the lines of the still existing territorial or tribal arrangements which had preceded the creation of the seven kingdoms.' 3 The tribal and national units were absorbed in the system of the medieval Church, which took the aspect of a religious version of feudal society. Over against the secular hierarchy, which had its supreme overlord in the Holy Roman Emperor, stood the spiritual hierarchy, which had its supreme overlord in the Holy Roman Pope. Christendom was literally conceived of as the Kingdom of God on earth in which Christ carried on His govern 2 Vide T. M. Lindsay, The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries, p. 353. See especially chapter viii., 'The Roman State Religion and its Effects on the Organization of the Church.' 3 Vide Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. i., pp. 224f. |