PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. URING the eight or nine months which have elapsed since the first edition of these Lectures issued from the press, a great number of Journals and Reviews have honoured the work with their notice. All these criticisms, whether favourable or unfavourable, have received the best attention that I could give them. And I feel bound to acknowledge the courtesy and candour with which, for the most part, my views and statements have been canvassed. Such courtesies form the sole gleam of light which irradiates the dark and dreary horizon of interminable theological dispute. For how can disputes ever terminate so long as prejudice holds people apart from each other, and causes (it would seem) the very meaning of words to become obscured and misunderstood? I do not doubt that some words, which are used by Dissenters in a way perfectly intelligible to themselves — such as 'church,' 'church,' 'spiritual,' 'equality,' 'public-money,' and a great many more,are often much misunderstood by Churchmen. But I am sure that a great many more words, as they are commonly used by Churchmen, are totally misunderstood by Dissenters 1. Nay, when men are once separated and partitioned off from each other into sects and coteries, the very tones and cadences in which a sentence is meant to run are often entirely mistaken by the reader, a phenomenon which has probably occurred. to most people, in corresponding with friends whom 1 Cf. p. 233, note 42, on Baptismal Regeneration'; and p. 236, note 45. time, distance, or circumstances have (temporarily perhaps) estranged. Thus, more than one critic of these Lectures has imagined that, by calling the last three centuries an 'age of prose,' I intended in some way to cast a slur upon Nonconformists 2. Nothing, however, was farther from my thoughts. I have distinctly included Churchmen in the allegation: and I think a very little candid attention would shew, both that the allegation was true, and also that it was general in its sweep 3. Meanwhile, it is a curious but (it seems) a frequent answer to make to this supposed charge, that 'it demands far more imagination to worship God in a Quakers' meetinghouse than in a Roman Catholic cathedral 4.' But this is precisely what a Churchman says. The Quakers' Meeting gives one's imagination no aid at all. Again, it is rather angrily demanded, in a criticism of the following passage: 'want of instruction as to the Church's meaning has arrayed people in hostility against her: there is not, it would seem, to this hour, any intelligent-that is to say any real-aversion either to her doctrines or her system:' who then 'are the "instructors" that have failed?' and 'is it really so that more than half the Church-going people of England are not only "unintelligent," but false in their avowals of real aversion?' Can it be necessary to answer these questions? The 'instructors' that have failed are our own clergy, through their grievous sin, neglect and ignorance,—as I had, I thought, sufficiently confessed throughout these pages. And, surely, if an 'aversion' is occasioned by a misunderstanding of any object, as when you mistake your dearest friend for a robber,— there is no real aversion; but the avowal of it is not therefore 'false' or insincere. 2 E.g. The Congregationalist, Sept. 1872, p. 560; British Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, P. 32. 3 Cf. pp. xi, 269, 290, 404. 4 British Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, p. 33; cf. Theological Review, Oct. 1872, p. 499. 5 On this expression, see infra, p. 112, note 61. 6 British Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, p. 51. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xxiii Once more, it has been vehemently objected-though how this can be possible I am at a loss to comprehend— that I 'affirm that the attitude and language of the Church throughout its history have presented the aspect of a friend sincerely and anxiously desirous to be reconciled'. My words were these: 'Thanks be to God, that the Church of England presents at this moment, as she has repeatedly done during the long course of her history-the aspect of a friend... The attitude of our Church to most of the denominations is now distinctly conciliatory. And in many a preceding page I had endeavoured-some people have thought with an excessive candour-to depict the darker shades of the Church's portrait, to confess that she was 'brought by slow degrees at last to see that force and persecution were the weapons of Antichrist, to own that 'the leaders of the Church at that time thrust out the Wesleyans 10, to acknowledge that 'the great Churchmen of former days lent themselves far too readily to the merely political purposes of the State 11,' and to profess that of the persecutions which the Quakers underwent, we (to speak for ourselves) are heartily sorry and repentant 12 And then I added, that 'the reparation to be made for all such past mistakes is clear... There is need that we acknowledge, heartily and ungrudgingly, the present full political citizenship of all Englishmen alike; that we determine to leave no wrong unredressed, no artificial restriction unabated, no civil or religious disability unrepealed; and even more than this, that we resolve to heal, as far as possible, every social wound 13' Not one word of all this do I wish to blur or retract. I would willingly multiply such confessions and such resolves, if it were necessary. And therefore I would fain hope that these passages, here brought under view. together, may disarm any future critic who shall be tempted to resent an imaginary statement on my part, that all the amenities are on the one side and all the discourtesies on the other 14' The discourtesies-be it remembered began from the Nonconformist side; and they soon reached a virulence of invective, which no one could believe possible till he had studied early Puritan literature. But alas! these coarse and brutal attacks were soon met with an equal coarseness on the part of some Churchmen: and God forbid, that we should now-a-days rake up, on either side, missiles that should never have been used at all. Again, one word is necessary on another subject. No writer should be accused, without extremely good reason, of unfairly abbreviating his quotations. Abbreviation of some sort there must obviously be,-from the simple necessities of typography. But my sincere endeavour has been, in every case, not only to give a fair sample of the author's meaning, but also (by asterisks and by careful references) to offer the means of verification to any one who might choose that course. And I must here take leave to say, that no single instance of unfair quotation has been successfully made out against me. The passage most commonly fixed upon has been the citation, on p. 83, from Dr. R. Vaughan's English Nonconformity 15 But that quotation I neither alter nor withdraw. And, appealing to any impartial reader, I say once more that a stronger instance of a good and able man, 'de seditione querentem,' could hardly anywhere be found. The circumstances in New England, which call forth his indignant demand for 'strong coercion' from the magistrate, are precisely and in every point parallel to those which, occurring in Old England amid the political and social ferment of Queen Elizabeth's reign, had awakened his indignant protests against such coercion. From Wesleyan Reviewers, and especially from an able and candid writer in the London Quarterly Review, I have 14 British Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, P. 5. 15 E. g. in The Congregationalist, Oct. 1872, p. 630; British Quarterly PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. XXV to acknowledge courtesy almost invariably, and sometimes even sympathy. The concluding words of that writer, which have touched my own heart profoundly, I must crave his permission here to quote for the eyes of my brother-Churchmen. 'Methodism is not so entirely gone over to Dissent-using the word in the technical meaning he [the Bampton Lecturer] assigns to it—as he seems to fear. Earnest, conscientious, and thorough Dissenters there have always been, and will always be, in the Methodist community; but there is every guarantee that the heart of Methodism will always remember whence it came, the amount of its obligations to the Mother Church, and the sacred duty of doing nothing to widen a breach already wide enough 16' These words give one some encouragement to hope, not that Wesleyans will one day surrender at discretion. to the Church,-a thing which for my part I neither expect nor desire, but that, as religious men, deeply interested in the lower orders, and not afraid of Churchorganization on the grand scale, they will erelong recoil from the Puritan crusade; will refuse to harass the Church of England out of her schools, her endowments, and her time-honoured places of worship; and will remember that the leveller has already cast a jealous eye on the massiveness of the Wesleyan body, and candidly proclaims that 'its vast organic growth, the inordinate accumulation of its material property, and the unity and strength of its wonderful organization make it, at this moment, one of the most perilous possibilities of our ecclesiastical and social life 17.5 What, however, this last writer apparently means. to say is, a truth to which both every Wesleyan and every Churchman would heartily assent,—that organization on the grand scale is always accompanied by certain special and well-known dangers. There is danger of a petrified officialism or bureaucracy creeping in; there is danger of a despotism emerging; there is danger of local self-government, and the moral 16 London Quarterly Review, Oct. 1872, p. 213. 17 British Quarterly Review, Jan. 1873, p. 19. |