Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

During the period of the "box pew" (roughly from colonial days to the War for the Union) parochialism tended to keep the Church exclusive by the predominance of the "best people" of the community. There was piety and devotion, but the Church had not as much share in setting the community standard as one might suppose from the proportion of Churchmen who signed the Declaration, made the Constitution, and occupied the White House. Even in these personages, Church influences did not always leave an unmistakable mark. The box pew may not be a wholly sinister thing, but it may be taken to symbolize the castellated insulation of the individual soul from all vanities except the vanities within it; and of the individual parish from the Holy Catholic Church of which it was a part. Spiritual anaemia was inevitable.

In general, it was the period of courtly exclusiveness and legal formalism, varied by faint vibrations from neighboring mourning benches, or horrific thrills of rumors of "Puseyism." Against both assaults, the average box-pew was an unshaken tower.

The industrial growth of our country since the Civil War brought in a period of Church expansion. In that period the Church's net drew in shoals of people, seeking, some an easier, some a more humane religion than they had known. There were more fastidious standards of living. There were genuine aspirations for culture, for romantic atmospheres, and for humane enterprise, and for deeper currents of spiritual aspiration.

And it told in favor of beauty and order in worship. The moderate ritualist and the Broad-Church preacher found interested disciples. But the vulnerability of parochialism began to be manifest in the invasion of the nave, the vestry-meeting, and even the rectory, by the ideals that accompany commercial success. There were “fashionable churches," so-called because of dress-display; and

though this came to be toned down through the influence of better standards, the need of surpliced choirs, if only to offset the display, was soon realized.

This was a period of Church expansion, whose heroic aspect was exemplified in the stalwart figures of Tuttle, Hare, Talbot, Spalding, Stuck, Rowe, and the leadership of Potter, Satterlee, and Brent. Reflections of the popularity of their robust courage and judgment glance throughout the fiction of the nineties and later, in which Bishops, so distrusted and caricatured in early days, became familiar American figures on American landscapes. The Church grew and seemed to prosper; a kind of restrained popularity began to surround its clergy. Yet it was the Episcopal Church that always was pictured as the characteristically "worldly" church. Capitalistic control of the Church was lampooned in Churchill's "Inside of the 'Cup'." The clergy and loyal laity felt criticism keenly, and in addition to a great bulk of benevolent work, toyed gingerly, sometimes rashly, with radicalisms, seeking to deserve for the Church's sake the confidence of the poor.

But the congregational traditions of the Church, taken advantage of by money-control, made it hard for the Church to stand for anything definite, or even to discover what she stood for. Parochialism, under the control of the cult of the financially successful, ripened to corruption and exposure. Financial support depended so much upon the favor of the wealthy, that even the most democratic parishes were apt to be maintained by a perilous truce between the conflicting tastes (for it was tastes, rather than convictions, that were at issue) of a few prosperous folk on the one hand and the rank and file on the other.

The brass eagle lecturn, was of course the characteristic furniture of the period. The age was actively evangel

istic and missionary. It was soaring, it was predatory; and had even certain brazen qualities, not unlike the fixtures of the principal bank, where, most characteristically, vestry meetings were usually held.

During both the "box-pew" and "brass eagle" periods of the American Church, there were parishes that nobly used their leadership. They founded missions in their own or adjacent communities; they supported distant work; they built and supported institutional plants. But the supremacy of the parish was jealously guarded, by solid parish votes at convention on all important issues. Episcopal leadership was sometimes made difficult because of the power of a rector strongly backed by a frankly oligarchical vestry. It was the normally self-elected and self-perpetuating vestry that stood as a solid wall of inertia and legalistic tradition, or purse-pride, between the Bishop and the people, between the Bishop and the rector, and between the parish and the whole mission of the Church. Antiquarians tell us of an English church-bell, reflecting a Hanoverian horror of Wesleyanism in the inscription around it, which read: "Prosperity to the Church of England, and No Encouragement to Enthusiasm." Many a vestry showed an equal dread of fervor and devotion, combined with a similar pining for parochial prosperity.

It is precisely the kind of motto that is impossible today. The true prosperity of the Church cannot be built upon a system that automatically checks zeal and limits selfoblation.

One hundred years ago, during All Hallowtide, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society was organized by General Convention. At first, membership was voluntary, but as the logic of Christian obligation was recognized the whole Church was included in membership.

The parish being supreme, there was no way of reach

ing a parish that was not interested. There was no medium through which moral pressure could be brought to bear, unless the parish were already awake. Yet in this act of General Convention, the American Church performed its first executive act. It gave evidence of a deepseated, organic consciousness that the Church as an interrelated whole, not in isolated units, must be doing something in the world. How much there was for the Church to do in the world, and the greatness of her hindrances and disabilities; as well as the riches of grace at her disposal -the Church was not then in a position to realize. The modern situation had not unfolded as it has since.

In the past history of the Catholic Church this impulse has many a time been felt and acted upon. At Antioch, when the door of the Gentiles opened, or rather, when the Gentiles first tested the strength of the Church's net, by a violent pressing into the Kingdom; and just after, at Jerusalem, when the Church met the strain upon her net, and cast it "on the right side," into the deep of the pagan world. At Nicaea, when the Church saw that she must no longer tolerate equivocations on the Deity of Jesus, but must speak out, though she were to be racked with controversy for centuries. To hold the Church true to her own decision, Athanasius stood firm and all but alone, though even Rome tottered.

Rome herself often acted on this vital need for corporate decision: in the act that founded the Western Empire in Charlemagne, as a nucleus for Western order and culture, when the older empire had drifted east; the act that hurled Western Europe eastward in the crusades; the decisions that sent St. Augustine to Kent, St. Boniface to Germany, and St. Francis Xavier to the Pacific Coast.

It was the decisions of Gregory that restrained Augustine from still more unsympathetic policy toward the Celtic Bishops than he actually used; it was a kind of Roman

parochialism that limited the vision and the charity of St. Augustine of Canterbury, so that he lost the great opportunity of winning the shy Celtic Church to co-operation with him.

It was the executive decisions of Theodore of Tarsus that built what St. Augustine of Canterbury failed to build the English Church that was the mould that shaped the English nation. From the time when Theodore of Canterbury settled the Celtic questions, the boundaries between the English, Welsh, and Scotch nations began to be determined.

The necessity for the Church, or a national section of the Church, to place itself in a position for executive decision and action, is not a matter that can be determined always by precedents. It is a vital need that arises from the fact that the Church, however her members may be involved in the business world, is herself not of this world, and requires a certain corporate freedom and independence of action in bearing her witness and declaring her message. For it is impossible to preach the whole gospel in the world without a disturbing effect upon many of the world's habitual arrangements and conveniences. To change people's minds, to alter their habits and tastes on any considerable scale, to influence their views of value, shifting their admirations and their contempts, means somewhere disappointed calculations, wounded self-love, difficult readjustments. It is not the wont of the natural man to take kindly to the operation of influences over which he has no control, if they operate to interfere with his habitual appetites.

The world habitually prefers and praises an "unworldly" religion, meaning one that does not introduce uncertainties into its calculations, one that easily harmonizes with, or does not challenge the general course of things. A Christianity whose force is spent in divisions,

« AnteriorContinuar »