working institution, together with a frank statement of the actual problems that encounter her in the way of her duty; that we should do this from the standpoint of loyal Anglicans, men who believe with entire conviction in the worth and vigour of Anglicanism, who, while fully conscious of the difficulties which now gather about an established Church, desire to preserve the historic position of the Church of England, as the Church of the English people, recognised to be such by the law and constitution of the Realm, and holding by that title the ancient religious endowments of the nation. I stipulated for no further agreement, and I desired no more. This expresses and exhausts the measure of our common responsibility. Every writer is answerable for his own contribution and for nothing more. The Editor is responsible for the plan of the volume, and the choice of subjects and authors. I regret that the pressure of his public duty has hindered Lord Selborne from writing the article which in the first announcement of this volume was assigned to him. His Lordship's loyalty to the English Church is so well known and proved that special value would have attached to his co-operation. I have to thank my friend Mr. Whitmore for undertaking the article on "Disendowment" instead of Lord Selborne. Also I have to thank my friend and neighbour the Rev. S. Kirshbaum, M.A., of Barking, for finding time, in the midst of arduous parochial work, to prepare an index, which will, I think, be found convenient to readers. ST. MARY'S HOSPITAL, ILFORD, February, 1900. H. HENSLEY HENSON. CHURCH PROBLEMS TH I. The Church of England BY THE REV. H. HENSLEY HENSON HE Church of England is the most perplexing of institutions. It provokes the most various sentiments, and lends itself easily to the most contradictory descriptions. Foreigners find it very unintelligible, and, it must be confessed, very uninviting, but their hardest sayings could be paralleled from the pages of domestic critics. Ignatius von Döllinger, in days when he was still reckoned a pillar of the Roman Communion, has described the Church of England in language of fervid scorn, which may be taken to represent the attitude of many cultivated foreigners : "There is no Church that is so completely and thoroughly as the Anglican the product and expression of the wants and wishes, the modes of thought and cast of character, not of a certain nationality, but of a fragment of a nation, namely, the rich, fashionable, and cultivated classes. It is the religion of deportment, of gentility, of clerical reserve. Religion and the Church are then required to be, above all things, not troublesome, not intrusive, not presuming, not importunate. . . . Its insulated character, also, its separation from every other Christian community suits the national taste, and is a popular feature of the Anglican Church. The Englishman, especially B of the higher ranks, finds it quite in the proper order of things that he should have a Church exclusively to himself, in which no other nation has any share; a Church, too, which, while it has all the accommodating spirit, the reserve, and the exclusiveness of Continental Protestantism, on the other hand assumes, by means of its Episcopacy and its more liturgical character, an aspect of more dignity and importance." * The accomplished author of these bitter sarcasms lived to understand the Church of England better, and nowhere else is his memory held in such veneration as in the communion which he had so grievously insulted. We reproduce his words here not merely as illustrating the opinion of cultivated foreigners, but, as pointing out, though with unfair emphasis, characteristics of the Church of England which, however they may be mitigated and neutralised by other elements, do arrest notice and alienate support. A more discriminating and better-informed view is that of the Rev. Mark Pattison, late Rector of Lincoln College, originally put forward in the year 1863:— "Anglicanism is not, as is often repeated by ill-informed assailants, an artificial creation of Laud and the courtier-bishops of Charles I., but the legitimate and necessary form which the Church intelligence of England took, as soon as it had time to repose from the turbulence and volcanic upheaving of the religious revolution. Thus it is that Anglicanism has always been the religion of the educated classes exclusively. It has never at any period been national and popular, because it implies more historical information and a wider political horizon than can be possessed by the peasant or the artisan. The masses require an intuitional religion, such as is provided by the grosser forms of Dissent in Great Britain, or a ceremonial of drill and parade, such as the Latin and Greek Churches offer to their subject populations." † The Church and the Churches, translated by W. B. MCCABE, pp. 145-6. [London, 1862.] † Essays, p. 267. [Oxford, 1889.] |