Nationalism And The Church

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 111, 3 February 1934, Page 20

Nationalism And The Church

TO-DAY wc look round on a world in which Nationalism is agaiu supreme, and in which the fell fruits of Nationalism, hatred, monstrous popular fears, a ruinous race iu armaments, eien the crowning infamy of war, are all coming into view,” said Dr. Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, iu a recent address. “Here in England the relation between the nation and the Church is presented in a form which at once emphasises and obscures the principle at stake. The Church of England has its place in history as a national church. It was. unlike the other reformed churches, save only the Church of Sweden, reformed by the national authority ; it was reorganised on a national basis ; it was defended on the national principle. “It is bound into the national life by a thousand links, legal, historical, local, sentimental. It fills a large place in the national literature. Its sacred buildings are reckoned to be the most precious of the national monuments. Patriotism unite with piety in authenticating its claim to be the National Church. “But history never stands still, nor can its march be arrested by the hopes and fears of men. While the Established System has continued apparently unaltered, the nation has changed profoundly. .1 he conditions which, in the sixteenth century, determined the development of ecclesiastica’ nationalism, and. which alone could make it religiously respectable, have passed away; and now no idealising sentiment can renew its life. “Like a magnificent roof ravaged by the death-watch beetle, yet, masquing by its splendid appearance a fatal though unheeded weakness, our

ancient national Establishment, stripped of meaning and void of power, still dominates us by its aspect of immemorial and unalterable authority. It is a noble facade without a building behind it. The fact is certain, but we shrink, cannot but shrink, from facing it. “ ‘Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which onco was great is pass’d away.' “Nevertheless. I apprehend that it is our plain duty to face the fact that, in the circumstances of our modern world, national establishment is for Christianity unwholesome and potentially destructive “It is notorious that now Christianity may be denied, held up to scorn, and vilified even grossly with complete impunity. Secularism is edging out Christianity over the whole area of the Stales educational activity “In these circumstances our ecclesiastical Establishment has lost touch with the facts of the national life, and tends to become—if I may borrow a famous phrase from the political history of the last century—an organised hypocrisy. On the most favourable view it is irreparably anachronistic and anomalous. “I suggest to you that it is already something worse, that it is the main source of the disorder within the Church which not only gravely embarrasses her work, but also from time to time occasions scandals which lower the credit of religion, and that it obstructs many practical reforms, such, to give but a single example, as the abolition of the parson’s freehold in his benefice, which are urgently required in the interest of spiritual efficiency.”