Sinnett A.P. - Can the Church be Reformed

THERE is evidently a great deal to hope for in connexion with religious reform in England when the Church is leavened by such thinking as that expressed by the Rev. H. R. Haweis in the course of an article entitled “The Broad Church; or What’s Coming?” in the June number of the Contemporary Review. This is a bold and unequivocal demand for an intellectual reform in the creeds and doctrines of the Church that may bring its formularies into harmony with “nineteenth century thought and feeling”. Mr. Haweis begins by facing two facts. “Intelligent men refuse to take orders. Intelligent men refuse to attend Church.” These two facts, he says, dovetail into one another. Intelligent men will not sit in the pew because intelligent men will not stand in the pulpit. The utterances heard in church are obsolete, trivial, senseless. “The greatest proof of the essential truth of Christianity is that in spite of the twaddle talked every Sunday throughout England in the name of Christ, Christianity is still alive.” We need not follow Mr. Haweis through his analysis of the Broad Church. He argues that over every creed and formulary is written this motto: “It was true; it is true; it is true no longer”; the meaning of his paradox being, that any given dogma may once upon a time have been the best attainable expression for certain truths, that its essential idea may actually be true, while “it is true no longer” in the form of words formerly used, because the essential idea may now be apprehended better. The Broad Church policy is to embrace the old dogma in a discerning charitable spirit, quietly paring away its clumsy external expression, and bringing to light in new and more intelligent language whatever inner beauty and truth may reside in its interior meaning. With part of his essay in which he discusses whether the policy of the Broad Church is “honest”, we need not be much concerned. It must be difficult, one would think, for an intelligent man to profess, even under the shelter of equivocal phrases, belief in the dismal caricatures of religious truth embodied in some of the stock declarations of the Church. But Mr. Haweis recognises that this is the case when he acknowledges that intelligent men are, if not in all cases at all events in many, debarred from entering the Church. As for those whose interior development has taken place since they entered, there is certainly much to be said for the theory that their highest duty is to struggle for the reform of the national institution, in the midst of which they find themselves, rather than to retire from it in fastidious disgust. Again, even for them the barest external conformity with creeds and declarations, which in their literal signification are little better than blasphemies in the sight of spiritual philosophy, must 366be difficult, but there is great force in the reflection that a clergyman who becomes truly enlightened forfeits a great deal of his capacity for usefulness if he throws up his recognised position. And how is the Church to be transformed into a truly beneficent agency for the spiritualisation of the people, and to recover touch with the grand theosophic ideas which underlie its teaching, if all the best men as they rise above the level of the time-serving or unintelligent herd of mere professional clergymen should cut themselves adrift from the organisation? The question whether the Broad Church method, as now defined by Mr. Haweis, is honest or not, must remain, in fact, a problem for individual consciences in all cases. No one can safely be the judge of another’s action in such a matter.

Meanwhile, we may accept Mr. Haweis’ own attitude as establishing the fact that good, earnest, and intellectual men may remain clergymen of the Church even with the official declarations of belief and the forms of the prayer-book as they now stand. And, this being the case, it depends upon the energy and the determination with which they are supported by intelligent public opinion, whether they will be enabled in the long run to bring popular religion into something like harmony with esoteric truth. The problem is full of interest for all theosophical thinkers, who may be eager to forecast the progress of events towards that ultimate acceptance of theosophic ideas by the cultivated western world to which we may all look forward. That result seems now to be reasonably assured. The thinking of the age has been colored by these ideas during the last six or seven years to an extent which makes it highly improbable that they will again be altogether lost by the world at large. They do not always present themselves in the costume of phrases with which profound Theosophists are familiar, but the essence of theosophic truth is penetrating literature to a very remarkable degree. Novelists and essayists, even newspaper writers sometimes, in these days, echo expanded and reasonable views of nature, the source of which they would be surprised to trace if they were enabled to do so. Theosophical writers worthy of the name will be equally glad to observe this, whether they get credit for having launched these ideas or not. It is relatively of little consequence whether the theosophical language of the future links the progress of mankind with the theosophic efforts of our own time. The all-important thing is that the spirituality of the race should be developed in harmony with a more correct view than popular theology has hitherto afforded of the laws which preside over its evolution.

Now, it is conceivable that this might come to pass in either of two ways. The Church – the exoteric religion of the age – may remain what it is now, a corrupt mass of erroneous misrepresentation as far as the people are concerned, an association of pecuniary interests from the point of view of its priests, in which case it will fall more and more deeply into contempt with the wisest and best elements of the future generation, and be eventually broken up with violence when its incompatibility with the advance of spiritual science has become too glaring to be tolerated any longer; or it 367will ally itself in time with healthy currents of spiritual enlightenment, enter on a path of real internal reform, under the influence of which it will keep abreast of the great esoteric movement, and thus finally metamorphose itself into something like the pure theocratic system which has sometimes prevailed in former ages of the world, when the priests have represented the most advanced spiritual knowledge of the period, and have commanded the real and sincere reverence of all other classes, by standing before the people as the visible embodiment of all that was noblest and best in humanity. Perhaps to recover touch in the past with a state of things like that, we should have to go back to a very early period of Egyptian civilisation. In none that can be called historic times has the priesthood represented more than a false pretence of playing this part. However, there is nothing inherently inconceivable in the idea. Theosophic convictions and enlightenment, adequately possessing the hearts and minds of some people among ourselves, are enough to put back all mere personal and worldly motives of action into a subordinate place. If we can indulge in so wild a dream as to imagine the majority of the clergy at some future time coming to think the pecuniary interests of the Church, the social prestige of belonging to it, the rank and worldly honors to which it may lead up for men who are skilful in courting fashionable caprices, considerations of secondary importance compared to spiritual progress and interests lying outside this present incarnate life, then it is perfectly possible that the Church might become the great theosophical organisation of the future.

And this could of course be brought about without any surrender of its designation as the Church of Christianity. It is a common place of theosophic doctrine that in their essentials all the great religions of the world spring from the grand fountain of truth. Pure Buddhism is one presentation of that truth, pure Christianity another. The disgusting materialism of modern church creeds as taught by the explicit language of the dogmas and accepted by the vast majority, is not Christianity at all. That is the very revolting garment into which the principles of Christianity have been thrust. It has disguised the true principles so terribly, and to that extent has invested the phrase “Christianity” with so many disagreeable annotations, that the form of religion is sometimes spoken of by theosophic writers with a bitterness appropriate only to the corruptions of the modern church. But there is no reason why Christianity should not remain ad infinitum the title of religion in the western world. By the time the unity of truth shall have been appreciated by its representatives, it will no longer be looked upon as the trade mark of an exclusive monopoly. With the Christianity of the West all the ideas that have been dropped out of the modern church creeds by the clumsiness or wilfulness of authorities who have constructed them to suit the interests of their own trades union – could readily be imported from the East. There is no necessity whatever to accomplish the restoration of all important ideas that have thus been lost sight of by European nations for a while, at the expense of any 368iconoclastic revolution that should involve the loss of that traditional sentiment of devotion which clings round the nomenclature of Christianity, for so many thousands or perhaps millions of good people in Europe and America.

And that last thought seems to show that without any room for hesitation we must unmeasurably prefer to see theosophic progress accomplished through the agency of the Church if that be possible, rather than by means of a religious revolution. The interest to be safeguarded is that of the necessarily ignorant masses of the people. As far as persons of advanced culture are concerned, the Church counts as a rule for simply nothing. They may be spiritualised to that extent that all the pleasures, attractions, occupations, even what some people would think the necessaries of physical existence, are of no importance whatever compared with interior development, and yet may be attracted by no fibre of religious sentiment to any denominational church or sect. For them it would matter as little whether the Church was abolished as whether the last mirage seen in the desert was still visible. But if the Church clings to its evil ways till at last there is no reformation possible for it, then when the crash comes and it is forcibly put out of existence, an immense number of people will suffer a great shock, and be of opinion that somehow or other religion has been repudiated. Besides, all the while that we might imagine that crash approaching and growing inevitable, the influence of the Church on the hearts and minds of the people it still enslaved would be getting worse and worse. Whereas, if it entered on a real career of interior development and thoroughgoing reform it would by that hypothesis be carrying on the growth of its loyal subjects pari passu with its own. There is no question about it; if the Church can be taught religion and rescued from its worldly debasements that is a result incomparatively more to be desired than its overthrow.

Certainly its reformation would be a very great undertaking – but so is the self-conquest which each man has to perform in his own person before he can realise the potentialities of his nature. Not on that account do theosophic teachers argue – it is not worth while to attack so gigantic a task. There is more required undoubtedly than even that intellectual reform, the need of which is so sadly obvious to Mr. Haweis. A moral reform will have to be accomplished side by side with the other. The brains of the Church have been paralysed all these centuries because its conscience has been stifled. It has been primarily bent as an organisation on securing revenues and possessions, social influence and rank. It has handled doctrine merely because that was the lever with which it worked in the attainment of its worldly ends. No doubt good men may have belonged to it in all centuries and have labored for others with self-sacrifice and devotion; but the individual merit of good priests is their affair – their Karma – the Church as a whole whether Roman Catholic or Protestant has labored for itself, and with very great success, having done extremely well from a business point of view. We need not go into details at this 369moment, but the intellectual reform of the Church will only have proceeded a very little way before its reformers will begin to perceive the necessity of reviewing its budget on principles in harmony with the moral dignity of an institution chiefly designed to teach mankind the vanity of mundane pursuits, and the foolishness of the self-indulgence that would fetter them to perishable ideals. Then, of course, the intellectual reform of the Church will never be a matter of recasting dogmas. The existing dogmas could not be replaced by any other set without paving the way for new complications in the future. A real Church – a vortex of spiritual knowledge and influence – can no more sum up its acquirements of knowledge in a cut-and-dried form of words than the Royal Society could do the same thing in regard to the truths of Nature on the physical plane. The Church must provide by its constitution for its own continuous growth, and guard itself from ever being fettered by forms of words, even though forms of words may be inevitably required in its dealings with the people. One of the most wrong-headed absurdities of the Church organization as it stands, is that the clergy are requested to “subscribe” to more elaborate and fossilized professions of faith than those supplied for the use of the public. The men whose task it ought to be to develop and advance the knowledge of the Church towards the infinity of the Unknowable, are made to hamper themselves at the outset by a hard and fast profession of belief which they are thus held evermore forbidden to cross beyond! In doing this they are forced to subscribe not to the knowledge but to the ignorance of their predecessors.

However, without following the ramifications of the subject any further, we leave it for the present at the threshold where Mr. Haweis stands, demanding in very eloquent and forcible language that the Church shall enter on the great work of its own salvation. There can be no doubt from any point of view that he has sounded the right note as regards the manner in which that salvation must be commenced. It is difficult to understand how the large numbers of cultivated men who somehow or other – in spite of Mr. Haweis’ first fact, that “intelligent men refuse to take orders” – get themselves within the pale of the wonderful institution we are talking about, can bear the shame of being identified with declarations which insult intelligence so deeply as many of those which are set forth in the Prayer Book. Question them, and they answer: “No one takes the words in that literal way”. But myriads do, fully understanding that the Church requires them to. And if they, the intellectual clergy, do not, so much the worse for them if they share in the wickedness of leaving them in that deceptive and misleading form. The intellectual reform of the Church is thus not only possible now that the intelligence of the cultivated class stands ready to support it: it is supremely urgent, whether it is or is not capable of saving the institution alive for the service of still more enlightened generations in the future.

A. P. Sinnett, F.T.S.

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