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"Down with the Church" a Conspiracy Unmasked

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D OwN WITH THE i^riUK\^n A ConspiraLcy Unmasked THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES "DOWN WITH THE CHURCH" "DOWN WITH THE CHURCH" A CONSPIRACY UNMASKED BY J. L. WALTON, BA. SECOND EDITION LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & SONS 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD 1908 [AH rights reserved] Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &^ Co. At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 3X CONTENTS PAOK Foreword I What is the Free Church Council ? 13 A Political Campaign . 23 Have Dissenters a Grievance? 36 Passive Resistance 47 Unconcealed Venom . 66 Scandals on the Clergy . 84 The Reliability of Statistics . 103 Shall it be Secularism? . 1x8 The Results of Secularism 129 Is Dissent Decaying ? . 146 Inconsistency 161 Nonconformist Protests . 179 Must Christian Education Go ? 201 What is Undenominationalism? 217 The Apostacy of Dissent . 226 Do Nonconformists Stand for Liberty 235 Is a Solution Possible ? . 246 Are the Free Churches Free? 256 What the Church has Done for Education 264 Afterword 272 Appendices 277 Index 28Q ;2 " Perhaps it is the very strangeness of the tactics which are used against them which make Churchmen bhnd to the dangers which surround them now. "There are the efforts perpetually made by Dissenters to appropriate in a greater or less degree the educational institutions of the Church. "The attack has been conceived with terrible ingenuity, and will doubtless be carried on with all the energy the enemies of the Church know how to command. Its results will depend upon the spirit which Churchmen shall display. Dissensions may open to it the door of success, and pro- duce calamities of which no man living shall see the close. Union and energy, and a subordination of every other motive to the one great end, will baffle it for ever." The above sentences are taken from an article in the Quarterly Review of July 1865. Its author, it is now known, was an earnest Churchman and a great statesman — the late Lord Salisbury. DOWN WITH THE CHURCH FORKWORD Ir is always difiicult to bring oncsell to face unpleasant facts, and where religion is con- cerned one naturally hesitates to ascribe to others conduct and behaviour which does not appear in consonance with Christian principles. On these grounds, Churchmen have ever been loth to realise that amongst the body of Dis- senters around them, who were obviously in serious earnest as Christian members of the community, there has always existed a hostility against the Church —a hostility so deep and bitter as to entertain for its iinal cause the —absolute destruction of the National Church " Down with the Church ; down with it, even unto the ground." It is so to-day. By way of olTering some excuse for this strangelv unchristian spirit, a book was com- piled by Rev. C. Silvester Home in 1903, which he entitled " A History of the Free Churches" —a book which is not history at all, but only an ex parte statement intended to show that Dissenters have all along from the days of their origin been the champions of civil and religious liberty against the narrow repression and cruelty of an overweening Church. A 2 Down with the Church On the other hand, it does not require much knowledge of history to show indisputably that Dissenters have never been on the side of free- dom, except freedom for themselves. They have never waged a magnanimous warfare ; they have never struggled for their country's good ; their views have never been liberal and generous, but always narrow and selfish. At such times as they were in the ascendant, so far from according to others that civil and religious liberty for which they professed to have struggled, they exhibited to all who dif- fered from them a refinement of cruelty and tyranny that has no parallel in the history of religion, unless it be the Roman Inquisition in the darkness of the Middle Ages. The fact cannot be controverted : twenty years of dominance caused the Dissenters literally to stink in the nostrils of the nation. When they had the opportunity to grant to others that civil and religious freedom and liberty for which they professed to have struggled, they mani- fested on all hands such intolerable bigotry and exclusiveness that the people, instead of hailing them as the saviours of the nation, rose up and hurled them from place and power, and eventu- ally placed them under legal ban as pests and nuisances to their fellow-men. Nothing will ever clean from off the scutcheon of Dissent the blots of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century little is heard of them, save as stragglers ; but when we reach the enlightenment of the nineteenth century, with the removal of disabilities. Dissent rises from its ashes, only, however, to oppose the Church. The principal feature of Church activity in the Foreword 3 first half of the nineteenth century was the keen struggle on behalf of the education of the children of the working classes — an activity opposed at every turn by the obstruction of Dissent. The extraordinary commercial prosperity that dawned upon the country with the advent of Queen Victoria to the throne, resulted in an abnormal exodus from the country side to the various manufacturing centres. Vast aggre- gates of people came together completely para- lysing the efforts of a half-awakening Church. It was the Dissenters' opportunity ; and they must have every credit for doing vast work for souls in a thousand humble ways. But they no sooner became conscious of their growing strength than there broke out the old birth sin of hostility to the Church. They could not rest content to work in their own vineyard in their own free way, but must needs peer over the hedge at their neighbours' vines, and seized with desire to destroy the walls thereof, and the winepress therein, they meet together under the presiding genius of one called Miall, a member of the Parliament of Westminster. An association was formed in 1844, entitled the " Anti- State -Church Association," Mr. Miall, the founder, affirming that to destroy the Church of England " and give the dust of it to the four winds of heaven, is the sacred mission of Protestant Dissenting ministers." The title of this association was subsequently improved into the " Liberation Society " —in which specious title it still delights to revel. The only thing really noticeable about the Society is that it has never been a success ; its 4 Down with the Church coffers h;ive never overflowed ; its numbers have never swelled unduly ; but it has dragged through a lingering and violent existence, which, at any rate, has served to keep alive the flame of hostility to the Church in the ever-increasing ranks of Protestant Dissenting leaders. Its chief signs of life since its ques- tionable nativity have been crass misrepresenta- tion, and unconscionable virulence. Its financial status has by no means been commensurate with the ambitious nature of its programme, which was set out in full in the pages of the Financial Reform Almanac for the year 1885. A reference to Appendix " A " will show that its aims constitute a resurrection in detail of the self-same spirit of wholesale robbery, plunder, and oppression that disgraced for ever the transactions of that unconstitutional and persistent Puritan assembly known in our history as the Long Parliament. The spirit of the whole programme is, " Down with tiie Church ; down with it, even to the ground." The direct assault upon the Church proved a failure at every turn ; but failure only seemed to brace the nerves for another and more subtle form of attack. It became evident that so long as the Church had the children, she had the country in the hollow of her hand. The atmosphere of the Elementary Schools predisposed the youthful mind to look up to the Church as the lawful representative of religion, and to regard Dissent as something outside, unnecessary and wrong. It must be remembered that the education of the children of the working classes during the Foreword 5 first seventy years of the nineteenth century had been left almost entirely to the care and energy of the Church, upwards of 73 per cent, of the children attending school being under her guardianship, when the momentous Bill of 1870 was brought into Parliament. Now it is to be noticed that Mr. Forster's attempt to establish something like a national system of education with due facilities and privileges to supplement and complete the work of the various voluntary associations, was met with unrelenting opposition on the part of Dissenters, and a strenuous effort was made to secure that the education offered in the State Schools should be on lines entirely secular. Failing in this, they managed to secure a pro- vision that in the religious instruction that was provided there should be no use of any formu- lary or catechism distinctive of any religious body. What the Government intended by this provision was made perfectly clear by the late Lord Salisbury in a speech delivered in the Limehouse Town Hall on March 21, 1895, and there is reasonable ground for supposing that if the provision had been carried out in accordance with the genuine intentions of the Government, an amicable working arrangement would have been reached which should have given satisfaction to Churchmen and Dissenters alike. But the Dissenters' opportunity had arrived. They suddenly developed a hitherto carefully-concealed passion for education, and everywhere struggled for seats on the Council of the School Boards : everywhere they began to agitate for the creation of School Boards even in districts where, owing to the ample facilities 6 Down with the Church afforded by the Voluntary Schools, no further provision was required.
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