and Protestantism cannot now return to the monastic priest. It retains its national Churches and its married clergy, neither of which looks very stately by the side of Catholicism, if competition with Catholicism is what the evangelical Churches desire.
Gentlemen, Protestantism is not yet, thank God, in such a bad way that the imperfections and confusions in which it began have got the upperhand and entirely stunted or stifled its true character. Even those among us who are convinced that the Reformation in the sixteenth century is something that is over and done with are by no means ready to abandon the momentous ideas on which it was based, and there is a large field in which all earnest evangelical Christians are in complete unanimity. But if those who think that the Reformation is done with cannot see that its continuance in the sense of a pure understanding of God’s Word is a question of life and death for Protestantism—its continuance has already borne abundant fruit in associations like the Evangelical Union—let them at least promote the liberty for which Luther fought in his best days: “Let the minds of men rush one against another and strike; if some are meanwhile led astray—well! that is what we must expect in war; where there is battle and slaughter, some must fall and be wounded, but whoso fights honestly will receive the crown.”
The reason why the catholicising of the Protestant Churches—I do not mean that they are becoming papal; I mean that they are becoming Churches of ordinance, doctrine, and ceremony—is so burning a question is that three powerful forces are working together to further this development. First there is the indifference of the masses. The tendency of all indifference is to put religion on the same plane with authority and tradition, but also with priests, hierarchies, and the cult of ceremonies. It puts religion there, and then goes on to complain of the external character and stationary condition of religion, and of the “pretensions” of the clergy; nay, it is capable, apparently, at one and the same moment, of mingling those complaints with abuse, of contemptuously jeering at every active expression of religious feeling, and doing homage to every kind of ceremony.
This kind of indifference has no understanding whatever for evangelical Christianity, instinctively tries to suppress it, and praises Catholicism at its expense. The second of the forces to be taken into consideration is what I may call “natural religion.” Those who live by fear and hope; whose chief endeavour is to find some authority in matters of religion; who are eager to be rid of their own responsibility and want to be reassured; who are looking for some “adjunct” to life, whether in its solemn hours or in its worst distress, some aesthetic transfiguration, or some violent form of assistance till time itself assists—all these people are also, without being aware of it, putting religion on the Catholic plane; they want ” something that they can lean upon,” and a good deal else, too—all kinds of things to stir them up and help them; but they do not want the Christianity of the Gospel. But the Christianity of the Gospel in yielding to such demands becomes Catholic Christianity. The third force I mention unwillingly, and yet I cannot pass it over in silence; it is the State. We must not blame the State for setting chief store by the conservative influence which religion and the Churches exercise, and the subsidiary effects which they produce in respect of reverence, obedience, and public order. But this is just the reason why the State exercises pressure in this direction, protects all the elements of stability in the Churches, and seeks to keep them from every inner movement that would call their unity and their “public utility” in question; nay, it has tried often enough to approximate the Church to the police, and employ it as a means of maintaining order in the State. We can pardon this—let the State take the means of power where-ever it can find them; but the Church must not allow itself to be made into a pliant instrument; for, side by side with all the desolating consequences to its vocation and prestige, it would thereby become an outward institution in which public order is of greater consequence than the spirit, form more important than matter, and obedience of higher value than truth.
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