CURTEIS ON DISSENT AND THE CHURCH.

Dissent in its relation to the Church of England. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford in the year 1871, on the foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton, M.A. By George Herbert Curteis, M.A., late Fellow and Sub-Rector of Exeter College; Principal of the Lichfield Theological College, and Prebendary of Lichfield, &c. Second Edition. London: Macmillan & Co. 1873.

WE are not surprised that these Lectures have reached a second edition; the subject treated being just now of special interest, and the manner in which it is handled more popular than usual. The laudable purpose of the author, "to spare no pains in endeavouring to make of his Lectures a volume useful and interesting to persons of average intellectual culture not only at the University but elsewhere," has certainly been crowned with success. He puts into our hands a readable book, which scholars and theologians will treat with respect, and those who are neither scholars nor theologians will appreciate. A marked contrast this, to the average of these annual volumes, which, since 1789, stand in long rows upon the shelves of our Divinity Libraries, but are not too often disturbed by even theological readers. What Oxford man of the past generation, as he sat listening in St. Mary's Church to the Bampton Lecturer of the year, has not been reminded many a time of Pope's lines in the Dunciad:

"Then mount the clerks, and in one lazy tone
Through the long heavy painful page drawl on,
Soft creeping words on words the sense compose,
At every line they stretch, they yawn, they doze."

And how often has he felt that Oxford still sacrificed to the Goddess of Dulness as effectually as the poet describes her doing in 1727:

"For thee, we dim the eyes, and stuff the head
With all such reading as was never read—
For thee, explain a thing till all men doubt it,
And write about it, Goddess, and about it.

So spins the silk-worm small its slender store,
And labours till it clouds itself all o'er."

We do not pretend to say that this time-honoured tradition of the University pulpit is as yet quite worn out, and that traces of it may not be detected even in the volume before us. The genius loci has a very potent spell upon the most gifted of Oxford's theological sons, and they find it hard to be natural, out-spoken, and untrammelled. Yet no one who can look back

half a century, and compare the present with the past, but must be struck with the very decided change for the better in this respect; and it is not too much to hope that, if each succeeding Lecturer will take as much pains as Mr. Curteis to make his sermons "useful and interesting" to general readers, the annual volume of Bampton Lectures may be looked forward to as eagerly by the public, as the new Edinburgh or Quarterly used to be in their palmy days, or Mudie's latest favourite

now.

The "eight Divinity Lecture Sermons" before us come, we presume, under that clause of Canon Bampton's will which directs the preacher "to confirm and establish the Christian faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics." The great danger to religion from the unhappy divisions of the Christian Church in England has, on several former occasions, suggested to the Lecturers this theme of discourse. We need only mention Mr. Le Mesurier's Lectures in 1807, "On the Nature and Guilt of Schism;" Dr. J. H. Spry's, in 1816, "On Christian Unity;" Dr. G. Fausset's, in 1820, "On the Dangers to the Church from Schism and Indifference ;" and Mr. H. B. Wilson's, in 1851, "On the Communion of the Saints: an attempt to illustrate the true principles of Christian Union;" to show that the subject has from time to time received a certain amount of attention. The present volume differs from those which have preceded it, in the fuller and more detailed historical review of the principal Dissenting denominations; in the courteous, and even respectful treatment of their various peculiarities; in the remarkably frank acknowledgment of the Church's own faults of the past towards the Nonconformists; and in an apparent willingness to make concessions up to a certain point, with a view to closer union with them, if not to comprehension. Those who are accustomed to the hard, "raspy" tone of the old-fashioned Churchman, or to the sneering spirit and sometimes pious horror of the modern Anglican, in reference to Dissenters, will be pleased at the contrast presented by the moderation, candour, and conciliatory spirit of this Lecturer. He gives himself no superb Ecclesiastical airs; does not affect to look down from the "templa serena" of sweetness and light upon dissident Philistia; and to a great extent endorses Hooker's well-known saying, that three words uttered with charity and meekness shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainful sharpness of wit." We have not read the criticisms from the opposite camp upon the first edition of the work, and are somewhat surprised at misconceptions of the author's words on the part of some critics (of which he complains in the Preface to his Second Edition), as though he had intended "to cast a

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slur upon Nonconformists." Whatever may be thought of his stand-point and of his arguments, his theories of history or his proposed basis of reconciliation, we are at a loss to account for such a charge as this. Differing widely, in some respects, from his Church views, as we shall have occasion to show, and not in the least believing in the soundness of the Eirenicon he proffers, we think Nonconformists must be hard indeed to conciliate if they can take offence at his language. If his "precious balms" break any heads at all, they are those of his Evangelical fellow-Churchmen; to those outside the camp he certainly holds forth, with the very best intentions, the olivebranch of peace.

He states in the preface that he has had a threefold end in view. First to show that, from the Apostle's time downwards, internal dissensions have always existed in the Church, which, if rightly managed, may be kept within bounds, and even made to minister to its life and movement; but if ill managed, will "become a wasting fever instead of a healthy warmth," and nullify by mutual jealousy and friction the very purposes for which the Church was instituted.

Secondly to give a clear idea of what the Dissenting denominations really are; what they do, what they teach, and why they are combining at present to bring the Church of England, if possible, to the ground.

Thirdly: "to point out some few indications of the deplorable misapprehensions which have clothed the Church of England, to the eyes of Nonconformists, in colours absolutely foreign to her true character; have ascribed to her doctrines absolutely contrary to her meaning; and have interpreted her customs in a way repellent to the Christian common sense of her own people."

The attentive reader of the work, however, will, we think, come to the conclusion that, of these ends in view, the second has been attained with far more success than either the first or the third. The six chief Dissenting denominations in England are described in a clear and interesting manner, and this historical sketch really forms the staple of the whole book, and its main value. The author's first position is far too scantily and vaguely established to make much impression upon students of Church History, while the stand-point which he takes as a maintainer of what he calls "the Old Catholic system of the Church," and his manifest prejudice, amounting to antipathy, against Calvinism and Puritanism, prevent his testimony to Church of England doctrines and their misinterpretation from having any considerable weight with those familiar with the real facts of the case. Indeed, in a work professing to be, and clearly intended to be fair, candid, and impartial, it is a little

perplexing, and at times almost ludicrous, to see what we may call the results of the writer's "theological groundwork" cropping up ever and anon in little spiteful diatribes against his two-headed bête noir. The Dissenting brethren who are to be caught by this fisher of men will hardly be attracted to the bait when so much of the hook is discernible beneath it; and so long as "Calvinistic articles," and a very influential body of Calvinistic clergy and laity, have an undisputed standing-place in the Church of England, it is idle for a well-meaning gentleman, in the teeth of these sturdy facts, to evolve a Church out of the depths of his own consciousness, and present it to Dissenters as the home wherein they may all dwell together in unity. Those who know the Church of England far better from her own authorized documents and formularies than from such imaginary representations of her, will be the first to say to our Anti-Calvinistical Church Peace-Maker, "First cast this beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote from thy brethren's eye."

The truth is, this writer, though with broader sympathies than is usually the case with his party, belongs to that school of theology of which Dr. Pusey is the great modern exponent. By the elimination of all that is distinctively "Protestant" in the English Church, and by "explaining" (as it is called) her doctrines to be identical with those of the "undivided Church of the first centuries," it is fondly hoped that she may be made the basis of union on which the great Church of the future is to be constructed. "The well-known anticipations of De Maistre " may then, it is expected, be fulfilled. The Church of England will, on the one side, reconcile herself to the best men and the clearest thinkers amongst the Protestant sects; and on the other, as the leader of the Northern and Teutonic Churches, stretch forth the hand of reconciliation to the East and the West; and so receive that special benediction which the Lord has reserved for the peace-makers'" (p. 33). Dr. Pusey's famous "Eirenicon" in 1865 led the way in this direction, and since then a continuous procession of writers has been marching along, all singing the same song, and anticipating the same glorious consummation. It must be confessed that recent events in the Roman Church have, to a certain extent, encouraged this view of things. The "Old Catholic" movement has excited great, even extravagant, hopes in the hearts of many. Certain friendly intimations also from leading men in the Eastern and Greek Churches have been eagerly caught up as implying on their part a disposition for accommodation. But the cardinal fallacy of all writers of this school is the assumption that their party is, and always has been, the Church of England; and the difficulty of difficulties they feel to press

upon them, in their efforts at universal reconciliation, is to make the disguised and unprotestantised Church of their ideal as acceptable to the Reformed as they too rashly hope it may prove to be to the Unreformed Churches. But the more industriously they bend their wits to "explain" our formularies in a "Catholic sense," the less palatable they make them to Nonconformists at home and Protestants abroad; and as their sole hope of acceptance with the Greek and Latin Churches is in the bold assertion of substantial identity in doctrine with them, not one step are they able to take in a really Protestant direction. Yet, with the innocent simplicity of children, they persist in offering the olive branch all round, believing that if all keep the commandment of peace and love, "explanation-if it were possible, mutual explanation"-will be "the solvent which shall relax our hostilities, and perhaps convert our present conscientious opponents' into the staunchest and most conscientious supporters of our Church."* But these amiable people must be reminded that facts are stubborn things: that "explaining" and "explaining away" are two very different processes; and that looking at an object through rose-coloured spectacles does not really make it rose-coloured, for, as the Chinese (a shrewd nation) remind us, in one of their proverbs, "after a hundred millions of explanations, subtilties, and sophisms, the smallest truth remains precisely what it was before."

We will endeavour to give our readers some idea of the author's position, from his own words, and leave it to them to judge how far his painstaking endeavour to adjust Dissent in an amicable relation with the Church of England is likely to prove successful.

First of all, his admissions of the Church's shortcomings for the last three hundred years are so unusually frank and ample as almost to excite a doubt whether her whole career since the Reformation may not have been one series of blunders, negligences, and crimes quite sufficient to warrant the perpetual protests of Nonconformists against her! "In many a page," as the writer himself confesses, he has endeavoured-"some people have thought with an excessive candour-to depict the darker shades of the Church's portrait."+ Indeed, take which century we please, the shades are invariably dark in all. Thus, to use his own words (p. 409), "As there is no doubt, I suppose, that she erred under the guidance of the Popes in the Middle Ages, so she erred under the guidance of Cranmer and others at the Reformation." "I do not acquit her bishops and leading men in times past, and especially amid the confusions which inevitably followed upon the Reformation in the sixteenth century, of acting occasionally a most unworthy part, and preparing the way for the present contemptible, if it were not also Page 428, Lect. viii. + Preface to 2nd edit., p. xxiii.