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VII

RELIGIOUS EQUALITY

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A NONCONFORMING DOCTOR OF DIVINITY

AND A STUDENT OF POLITICS

I

DOCTOR. What cheer this winter's morning, Sir Student? I have not seen you these many days.

STUDENT. Well enough, Master Doctor, and none the worse that we are still free to discuss your favourite questions of ecclesiastical polity in a leisurely and academical manner.

D. In a sense I too can say it is well; for our cause, being just, will only gather more strength by delay. Time and the education of the mass of citizens will not cease to fight against an institution which violates the principle of religious equality and the fundamental doctrines of Liberalism; though I know that you, professing Liberal opinions on many things, are worse than lukewarm on this; I could say (if without offence I might) that you are no better than a Whig.

I shall not wince even if

S. Let the name pass. you utter the horrible word Erastian, supposed by

Mr. Gladstone in some magazine article to denote a creature too depraved to exist.

D. Your indifference or inconsistency puzzles me. You have avowed yourself to me, once and again, as not afraid of democracy; you have approved in principle the assimilation of our land laws to those of our English-speaking colonies and the United States; I have heard you speak with levity of the wisdom of Bishops, with scant reverence of the House of Lords, and with less than reverence of the sanctity of parliamentary oaths.

S. All this may be true. Yet am I no Disestablishment-man. My reason has the merit of simplicity, and of being convincing to myself. I fail to see the connection between Disestablishment and any principle which I accept, or which I believe to be generally accepted by Liberals.

D. Do you make no account, then, of the principle of religious equality? Or will you go about, by some sophistry not yet disclosed, to reconcile it with the maintenance of a State-established Church?

S. Pardon me if I indulge a foible common among those of my profession. I am afflicted with a certain punctiliousness about the significance of terms, and when a large question is propounded in undefined terms I am fain to nibble it piecemeal. These ideas are so familiar to you that it will doubtless appear pedantic when I turn upon you in the counterquestioner's part, and crave to be fully satisfied what you understand by religious equality, what by a State Establishment, and in what points you conceive

the latter, as existing in England, to be incompatible with the former ?

D. Religious equality, or the equality of all religions before the law, which is, in other words, the negation of a privileged form of religion, is surely a plain enough political conception. Establishment is nothing else than the conferring of privileges by the positive laws of the land on a particular form of religion, or the introduction of that which religious equality forbids.

S. Equality before the law may turn out easier to name than to define; and, at any rate, it does not involve of necessity that which I suppose you aim at -equality in the opinion of the world and in fact. Certainly we shall agree that it is false policy for the State to molest any subject for the exercise of any moral and decent form of religion in a decent manner and convenient time and place. Here are limitations already; but you will admit them needful; and, moreover, that morality and decency shall be judged by the standard of the law of the land, not that of the particular religion: otherwise we should make every sectary judge in his own cause, and might have some pious denizen of some Indian Exhibition claiming in the name of religious equality to sacrifice a goat on the Thames Embankment or swing himself on a hook on Wimbledon Common.

D. We claim not, and we have at no time claimed, any such licence; nor is it to be supposed that in a Christian and law-abiding country

S. There should be a Salvation Army. Nay,

spare your protest; it is anticipated and allowed. And though I will assuredly not seek to make you or your friends answerable for the Salvation Army, I am not concerned to deny that it has respectable advocates. But the conflicting opinions and even judicial decisions to which its proceedings have given occasion are enough to show, whatever be the true estimate of General Booth's value as an ally of the powers that make for righteousness, that the case is on the border-line.

D. If the Salvation Army break the law, the law may look to its own. It has penalties and remedies that should provide sufficient restraint.

S. Very well said, and I could not better it. So far we are at one. Religious equality is not an absolute unconditional right, but a rule of lawful liberty within bounds of order, which bounds are determined, in case of doubt, by resort to the ordinary law.

D. Agreed.

S. In a well-ordered commonwealth I do not see how any person or sect can be suffered to demand more than this; and in these realms at present I do not see that any one enjoys less. We need not make an exception, save for form's sake, of sleeping and toothless penalties, fallen into the decay of a premature and ignominious old age, which are as certainly obsolete in fact as they deserve to be repealed in terms.

D. Within the Established Church the resort is not to ordinary law and jurisdiction. That is one of

the many proofs and signs of inequality. Methinks I am not to remind you that the privileged Church is under privileged jurisdiction, and exempt from the common law.

S. The law of the Church is ultimately controlled by the common law, as well as by Parliament; and the name of privilege may be literally applicable to the condition of being subject (in addition to those universal limits of public order already mentioned) to a body of regulation and restraint which, if difficult of complete enforcement and cumbrous in operation, is in the main effectual, and for immediate practical purposes must be considered as unalterable. The law will recognise, and more, if so required it will maintain with all its powers, the constitution and ordinances of a voluntary religious community (as of any other lawful association), so far forth as they are founded in agreement, and affect valuable rights. Agreement having made them, the like agreement can dissolve or refashion them. The Church of England belongs to public law; the covenants of her officers can be released by nothing less than the commandment of the estates of the realm, even if every one of her members consented. A clerk in orders is under disabilities as a citizen, while his immunities have disappeared into the limbo of ancient legal history, after serving their turn as the "first fault" of many lay malefactors. Excuse the old Eton phrase; such things will come to one's tongue now and again. Now, from the point of view of individual freedom and equality, the privileges I

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