Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming
dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing,
wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and
venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as
impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not
pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down
such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful
of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful,
_he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of
a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and
decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the
world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.
There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were
assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making;
there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was
not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of
the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it
was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence,
in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the
common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or
mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above
all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its
theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a
remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears
continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, _Securus
judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his
life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for
years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology
and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that
Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system
which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up
dangerous thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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