Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

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But with the member of a Nonconforming or self-made religious
community how different! The sectary's eigene grosse Erfindungen, as
Goethe calls them,--the precious discoveries of himself and his
friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable
in peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has voluntarily
chosen them, and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole
mind. He is zealous to do battle for them and affirm them, for in
affirming them he affirms himself, and that is what we all like.
Other sides of his being are thus neglected, because the religious
side, always tending in every serious man to predominance over our
other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and tyrannous
by [xxiv] the condition of self-assertion and challenge which he has
chosen for himself. And just what is not essential in religion he
comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times the more readily
because he has chosen it of himself; and religious activity he
fancies to consist in battling for it. All this leaves him little
leisure or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he has no
great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities
connected with the national Establishment, to invite him; but only
such institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion,
he may have invented for himself, and invented under the sway of the
narrow and tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have
seen. Thus, while a national Establishment of religion favours
totality, hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive
popular word) inevitably favour provincialism.

But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal friends along with
them, have a plausible plan for getting rid of this provincialism,
if, as they can hardly quite deny, it exists. "Let us all be in the
same boat," they cry; "open the Universities to everybody, and let
there be no establishment of [xxv] religion at all!" Open the
Universities by all means; but, as to the second point about
establishment, let us sift the proposal a little. It does seem at
first a little like that proposal of the fox, who had lost his own
tail, to put all the other foxes in the same boat by a general
cutting off of tails; and we know that moralists have decided that
the right course here was, not to adopt this plausible suggestion,
and cut off tails all round, but rather that the other foxes should
keep their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one.
And so we might be inclined to urge that, to cure the evil of the
Nonconformists' provincialism, the right way can hardly be to
provincialise us all round.

However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised. For the Rev. Edward
White says that probably, "when all good men alike are placed in a
condition of religious equality, and the whole complicated iniquity
of Government Church patronage is swept away, more of moral and
ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action
of statesmen." We already have an example of religious equality in
our colonies. "In the colonies," says The Times, "we see religious
communities unfettered by [xxvi] State-control, and the State
relieved from one of the most troublesome and irritating of
responsibilities." But America is the great example alleged by those
who are against establishments for religion. Our topic at this
moment is the influence of religious establishments on culture; and
it is remarkable that Mr. Bright, who has taken lately to
representing himself as, above all, a promoter of reason and of the
simple natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of the
growth of intelligence,--just the aims, as is well known, of culture
also,--Mr. Bright, in a speech at Birmingham about education, seized
on the very point which seems to concern our topic, when he said: "I
believe the people of the United States have offered to the world
more valuable information during the last forty years than all Europe
put together." So America, without religious establishments, seems to
get ahead of us all in culture and totality; and these are the cure
for provincialism.

On the other hand, another friend of reason and the simple natural
truth of things, Monsieur Renan, says of America, in a book he has
recently published, what seems to conflict violently with [xxvii]
what Mr. Bright says. Mr. Bright affirms that, not only have the
United States thus informed Europe, but they have done it without a
great apparatus of higher and scientific instruction, and by dint of
all classes in America being "sufficiently educated to be able to
read, and to comprehend, and to think; and that, I maintain, is the
foundation of all subsequent progress." And then comes Monsieur
Renan, and says: "The sound instruction of the people is an effect of
the high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the
United States, have created a considerable popular instruction
without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate
this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of
manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general
intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to
believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we
ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright always has in
his eye what he calls "a commendable interest" in politics and
political agitations. As he said only the other day at Birmingham:
"At this moment,--in fact, I may say at every moment in the history
of a free country,--there is nothing that is so much worth discussing
as politics." And he keeps repeating, with all the powers of his
noble oratory, the old story, how to the thoughtfulness and
intelligence of the people of great towns we owe all our improvements
in the last thirty years, and how these improvements have hitherto
consisted in Parliamentary reform, and free trade, and abolition of
Church rates, and so on; and how they are now about to consist in
getting rid of minority-members, and in introducing a free breakfast-
table, and in abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments, and much more of the
same kind. And though our pauperism and ignorance, and all the
questions which are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves
upon his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the great
towns, and the Liberals, and their operations for the last thirty
years. It never [xxix] seems to occur to him that the present
troubled state of our social life has anything to do with the thirty
years' blind worship of their nostrums by himself and our Liberal
friends, or that it throws any doubts upon the sufficiency of this
worship. But he thinks what is still amiss is due to the stupidity
of the Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and
intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going on
gloriously with their political operations as before; or that it will
cure itself. So we see what Mr. Bright means by thoughtfulness and
intelligence, and in what manner, according to him, we are to grow in
them. And, no doubt, in America all classes read their newspaper and
take a commendable interest in politics more than here or anywhere
else in Europe.

But, in the following essay, we have been led to doubt the
sufficiency of all this political operating of ours, pursued
mechanically as we pursue it; and we found that general intelligence,
as Monsieur Renan calls it, or, in our own words, a reference of all
our operating to a firm intelligible law of things, was just what we
were without, and that we were without it because we worshipped our
machinery [xxx] so devoutly. Therefore, we conclude that Monsieur
Renan, more than Mr. Bright, means by reason and intelligence the
same thing as we do; and when he says that America, that chosen home
of newspapers and politics, is without general intelligence, we think
it likely, from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and
that, in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all,
falls short.

And,--to keep to our point of the influence of religious
establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,--
we can surely see reasons why, with all her energy and fine gifts,
America does not show more of this development, or more promise of
this. In the following essay it will be seen how our society
distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and
America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and
the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk
of the nation;--a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the
pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all
the more to himself and to have his full swing! And as we have found
that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was
the [xxxi] Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its
Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious
that the people of the United States issues from this class, and
reproduces its tendencies,--its narrow conception of man's spiritual
range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, and back
again, all America Hebraises. Difficult as it is to speak of a
people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may,
without much fear of contradiction say. I mean, when, in the United
States, any spiritual side in a man is wakened to activity, it is
generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way.
Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and
have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at
schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a
harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many
sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling
themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion,
which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American
revivalist, has lately, at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle, been refreshing
our memory with. Now, if America thus [xxxii] Hebraises more than
either England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence of
religious establishments has much to do with it? We have seen how
establishments tend to give us a sense of a historical life of the
human spirit, outside and beyond our own fancies and feelings; how
they thus tend to suggest new sides and sympathies in us to
cultivate; how, further, by saving us from having to invent and fight
for our own forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to
steady our view of religion itself,--the most overpowering of
objects, as it is the grandest,--and to enlarge our first crude
notions of the one thing needful. But, in a serious people, where
every one has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline
of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his
mind, his first crude notions about the one thing needful do not get
purged, and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then,
making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace.

I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town of the Midland
counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago,
the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent
[xxxiii] chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally
divided, with sharp contests between them. I said, that seemed a
pity. "A pity?" cried he; "not at all! Only think of all the zeal
and activity which the collision calls forth!" "Ah, but, my dear
friend," I answered, "only think of all the nonsense which you now
hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not
been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!" The more
serious the people, and the more prominent the religious side in it,
the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out forms
for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spreading till it
swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts and absorbs all
nutriment which should have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant
in us and Hellenism stamped out.

Culture, and the harmonious perfection of our whole being, and what
we call totality, then become secondary matters; and the
institutions, which should develope these, take the same narrow and
partial view of humanity and its wants as the free religious
communities take. Just as the free churches of Mr. Beecher or
Brother Noyes, with their provincialism [xxxiv] and want of
centrality, make mere Hebraisers in religion, and not perfect men, so
the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell, a really noble monument of his
munificence, yet seems to rest on a provincial misconception of what
culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce miners, or
engineers, or architects, not sweetness and light.

And, therefore, when the Rev. Edward White asks the same kind of
question about America that he has asked about England, and wants to
know whether, without religious establishments, as much is not done
in America for the higher national life as is done for that life
here, we answer in the same way as we did before, that as much is not
done. Because to enable and stir up people to read their Bible and
the newspapers, and to get a practical knowledge of their business,
does not serve to the higher spiritual life of a nation so much as
culture, truly conceived, serves; and a true conception of culture
is, as Monsieur Renan's words show, just what America fails in.

To the many who think that culture, and sweetness, and light, are all
moonshine, this will not appear to matter much; but with us, who
value [xxxv] them, and who think that we have traced much of our
present discomfort to the want of them, it weighs a great deal. So
not only do we say that the Nonconformists have got provincialism and
lost totality by the want of a religious establishment, but we say
that the very example which they bring forward to help their case
makes against them; and that when they triumphantly show us America
without religious establishments, they only show us a whole nation
touched, amidst all its greatness and promise, with that
provincialism which it is our aim to extirpate in the English
Nonconformists.

But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture, as I have
said, teaches us. We have seen the narrowness generated in
Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and we propose to
cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main
current of national life. Here we are fully at one with the Dean of
Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school
to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he
and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a
character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible;
availing themselves for this [xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of
tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the
Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans: "Come all
of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment." But to
say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course
of history, or of the strength of men's feelings in what concerns
religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach itself to
points of religious order and discipline merely. When the Rev.
Edward White talks of "sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity
of Government Church patronage," he uses language which has been
forced upon him by his position, but which is, as we have seen,
devoid of any real solidity. But when he talks of the religious
communities "which have for three hundred years contended for the
power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,"
then he talks history; and his language has behind it, in my opinion,
facts which make the latitudinarianism of our Broad Churchmen quite
illusory. Certainly, culture will never make us think it an
essential of religion whether we have in our Church discipline "a
popular authority of elders," as Hooker calls [xxxvii] it, or whether
we have Episcopal jurisdiction. Certainly, Hooker himself did not
think it an essential; for in the dedication of his Ecclesiastical
Polity, speaking of these questions of Church discipline which gave
occasion to his great work, he says they are "in truth, for the
greatest part, such silly things, that very easiness doth make them
hard to be disputed of in serious manner." Hooker's great work
against the impugners of the order and discipline of the Church of
England was written (and this is too indistinctly seized by many who
read it), not because Episcopalianism is essential, but because its
impugners maintained that Presbyterianism is essential, and that
Episcopalianism is sinful. Neither the one nor the other is either
essential or sinful, and much may be said on behalf of both. But
what is important to be remarked is that both were in the Church of
England at the Reformation, and that Presbyterianism was only
extruded gradually. We have mentioned Hooker, and nothing better
illustrates what has just been asserted than the following incident
in Hooker's own career, which every one has read, for it is related
in Isaac Walton's Life of Hooker, but of which, [xxxviii] probably,
the significance has been fully grasped by not one-half of those who
have read it.

Hooker was through the influence of Archbishop Whitgift appointed, in
1585, Master of the Temple; but a great effort had just been made to
obtain the place for a Mr. Walter Travers, well known in that day,
though now it is Hooker's name which alone preserves his. This
Travers was then afternoon-lecturer at the Temple. The Master whose
death made the vacancy, Alvey, recommended on his deathbed Travers
for his successor, the society was favourable to him, and he had the
support of the Lord Treasurer Burghley. After Hooker's appointment
to the Mastership, Travers remained afternoon-lecturer, and combated
in the afternoons the doctrine which Hooker preached in the mornings.
Now, this Travers, originally a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
afterwards afternoon-lecturer at the Temple, recommended for the
Mastership by the foregoing Master, whose opinions, it is said,
agreed with his, favoured by the society of the Temple, and supported
by the Prime Minister,--this Travers was not an Episcopally ordained
clergyman at all; he was a Presbyterian, [xxxix] a partisan of the
Geneva church-discipline, as it was then called, and "had taken
orders," says Walton, "by the Presbyters in Antwerp." In another
place Walton speaks of his orders yet more fully:--"He had
disowned," he says, "the English Established Church and Episcopacy,
and went to Geneva, and afterwards to Antwerp, to be ordained
minister, as he was by Villers and Cartwright and others the heads of
a congregation there; and so came back again more confirmed for the
discipline." Villers and Cartwright are in like manner examples of
Presbyterianism within the Church of England, which was common enough
at that time; but perhaps nothing can better give us a lively sense
of its presence there than this history of Travers, which is as if
Mr. Binney were now afternoon-reader at Lincoln's Inn or the Temple,
were to be a candidate, favoured by the benchers and by the Prime
Minister, for the Mastership, and were only kept out of the post by
the accident of the Archbishop of Canterbury's influence with the
Queen carrying a rival candidate.

Presbyterianism, with its popular principle of the power of the
congregation in the management of [xl] their own affairs, was
extruded from the Church of England, and men like Travers can no
longer appear in her pulpits. Perhaps if a government like that of
Elizabeth, with secular statesmen like the Cecils, and ecclesiastical
statesmen like Whitgift, could have been prolonged, Presbyterianism
might, by a wise mixture of concession and firmness, have been
absorbed in the Establishment. Lord Bolingbroke, on a matter of this
kind a very clear-judging and impartial witness, says, in a work far
too little read, his Remarks on English History:--" The measures
pursued and the temper observed in Queen Elizabeth's time tended to
diminish the religious opposition by a slow, a gentle, and for that
very reason an effectual progression. There was even room to hope
that when the first fire of the Dissenters' zeal was passed,
reasonable terms of union with the Established Church might be
accepted by such of them as were not intoxicated with fanaticism.
These were friends to order, though they disputed about it. If these
friends of Calvin's discipline had been once incorporated with the
Established Church, the remaining sectaries would have been of little
moment, either for numbers or [xli] reputation; and the very means
which were proper to gain these friends, were likewise the most
effectual to hinder the increase of them, and of the other sectaries
in the meantime." The temper and ill judgment of the Stuarts made
shipwreck of all policy of this kind. Yet speaking even of the time
of the Stuarts, but their early time, Clarendon says that if Bishop
Andrewes had succeeded Bancroft at Canterbury, the disaffection of
separatists might have been stayed and healed. This, however, was
not to be; and Presbyterianism, after exercising for some years the
law of the strongest, itself in Charles the Second's reign suffered
under this law, and was finally cast out from the Church of England.

Now the points of church discipline at issue between Presbyterianism
and Episcopalianism are, as has been said, not essential. They might
probably once have been settled in a sense altogether favourable to
Episcopalianism. Hooker may have been right in thinking that there
were in his time circumstances which made it essential that they
should be settled in this sense, though the points in themselves were
not essential. But by the very fact of the settlement not having
then been effected, of the [xlii] breach having gone on and widened,
of the Nonconformists not having been amicably incorporated with the
Establishment but violently cast out from it, the circumstances are
now altogether altered. Isaac Walton, a fervent Churchman, complains
that "the principles of the Nonconformists grew at last to such a
height and were vented so daringly, that, beside the loss of life and
limbs, the Church and State were both forced to use such other
severities as will not admit of an excuse, if it had not been to
prevent confusion and the perilous consequences of it." But those
very severities have of themselves made union on an Episcopalian
footing impossible. Besides, Presbyterianism, the popular authority
of elders, the power of the congregation in the management of their
own affairs, has that warrant given to it by Scripture and by the
proceedings of the early Christian Churches, it is so consonant with
the spirit of Protestantism which made the Reformation and which has
such strength in this country, it is so predominant in the practice
of other reformed churches, it was so strong in the original reformed
Church of England, that one cannot help doubting whether any
settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent,
[xliii] and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again,
and causing dissension.

Well, then, if culture is the disinterested endeavour after man's
perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the
Nonconformists, not by making Churchmen provincial along with them,
but by letting their popular church discipline, formerly found in the
National Church, and still found in the affections and practice of a
good part of the nation, appear in the National Church once more; and
thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again, as their greater
fathers were, with the main stream of national life? Why should not
a Presbyterian or Congregational Church, based on this considerable
and important, though not essential principle, of the congregation's
power in the church management, be established,--with equal rank for
its chiefs with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of
its ministers, under a revised system of patronage and preferment, to
benefices,--side by side with the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist
and Lutheran Churches are established side by side in France and
Germany? Such a Congregational Church would unite the main bodies of
Protestants who are now separatists; and [xliv] separation would
cease to be the law of their religious order. Then,--through this
concession on a really considerable point of difference,--that
endless splitting into hole-and-corner churches on quite
inconsiderable points of difference, which must prevail so long as
separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist's religious existence,
would be checked. Culture would then find a place among English
followers of the popular authority of elders, as it has long found it
among the followers of Episcopal jurisdiction; and this we should
gain by merely recognising, regularising, and restoring an element
which appeared once in the reformed National Church, and which is
considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear
there still.

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