Low Church

“ The events which had occurred during the seventeenth century had tended to excite an almost morbid dread of extravagance both in the direction of High Church and Low Church principles—according to the nineteenth, not the eighteenth, century's acceptation of those terms. The majority of the clergy shrank, not unnaturally, from anything which might seem in any degree to assimilate them either to Romanism or to Puritanism. ”

“ The Low Church party need not be considered, because they can have no sentiment about what they regard as relics of superstition and Broad Churchmen could hardly complain at the logical development of their own principle. ”

“ Ever since in my boyhood, under the ministerial teaching of my rector, the celebrated Hugh M'Neile, at Albury for many years, I closed with the Evangelical religion of the good old Low Church type, I have by my life and writings excited against me the theological hatred of High Church, and Broad Church, and No Church, and especially of the Romanizers amongst our Established clergy. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the Broad Church come out victors, the Low Church would, in course of time, find itself drawn into an understanding, confessed or acknowledged, with its older antagonist in favour of the principle of specific doctrine, which would bode no good to a latitudinised Irish Church. ”

“ Lumme. These excellent parents had a high regard for Teddy, whom they considered likely to make his mark in the world.
I was taken to the bishopric (sic) , and discussed with the most venerable Lumme, senior, many points of interest to a foreigner.
Note of a conversation with Bishop of Battersea, taken down from memory a few days after: Myself. “What is the difference between a High Church and a Low Church?”
Bishop. “A High Church has a high conception of its duties towards mankind, religion, the apostolic succession, and the costume of its clergymen. A Low Church has the opposite.” ”

“ There are High-Church and Low-Church seminaries, where a man, to graduate from the one, will be looked upon inimically, at least with suspicion, by the other. There is a High-Church “Society for the Increase of the Ministry,” where the principal thing accomplished is the maintenance of the secretary of the said society in a large brick house in a fashionable city, while he claims to support a few students on two meals a day; and a Low-Church Evangelical Society, where they require the beneficiary to subscribe to certain articles of Low-Churchism before they will receive him. ”

“ Very real abuses in the Church, which were undoubtedly largely responsible for the low spiritual state of the people at large, were those of pluralities, non-residence, and lack of properly qualified preachers, although the number of clergy holding more than one living has been exaggerated. ”

“ So no one can express in reality and detail a practical belief in their Catholicity, in their equality (setting one thing against another) with us as Christians, without being suspected of what such belief continually leads to—disloyalty to the English Church. Yet such belief is nevertheless well-grounded and right, and there is no great hope for the Church till it gains ground, soberly, powerfully, and apart from all low views of proselytising, or fear of danger. ”

“ The rector was still calm and deliberate, but tremendously in earnest, as he replied:
“You can close the doors of your church in the faces of God’s poor if you wish, gentlemen. They will not come if they find they’re not wanted; you can rest assured of that. But the moment you refuse to welcome them, the moment you make it openly manifest that ours is a church exclusively for the rich and the well-to-do, that moment you deprive the Church of its life and soul, you separate it wholly from Jesus Christ, whose message and whose mission was primarily to the humble and the poor.” ”

“ Trust the people and they will trust you.' Briefly, it may be said that while the democratic toryism claimed to differ from radicalism in its jealous regard for the throne, the church, the House of Lords, and the constitution, it asserted at least an equal interest in political and social reform. ”

“ Aloysius, reputed to be dangerously “High,” because its curates wear coloured scarves; the Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul; the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern culture, and proclaims a less exacting gospel, and faintly trusts the larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its elemental fires. ”

“ The congregations are too largely black-coated and white-collared, and the lay officers of the churches much too solemnly sleek and serenely solvent to attract the weak, the unfortunate, the sorrowing, and the sinner. The mere appearance of the congregation in a prosperous Protestant church in an American city is a mockery of Christianity. ”

“ O it hurts one to have a fellow Christian ask in the quiet evening at her own house, "Would you object to our bringing out the cards?"—"I could not touch them," was all the answer, and the drawer stayed shut. But I wish a Nonconformist Church could rise up in these days. We are so busy calling ourselves Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, that we seem to forget the old far-better name which should include all. ”

“ In July 1692 he returned to America as governor of Virginia. Here he encouraged education, founded William and Mary College, promoted manufactures and agriculture, and made himself generally popular. He, however, quarrelled with the colonial church authorities, and through the influence of Dr. Blair, the Bishop of London's commissary in Virginia, was recalled in 1698. In 1704 he was appointed governor of Jersey, which office he held till 1706. ”

“ Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?—God is against the clergy. Chapter 34 is a burning arraignment of ecclesiasticism. It is to be taken in a dual sense as concerning the clergy's treatment of God's true people, the true Church on the spiritual plane, and of the Jews on the earthly plane, both of whom the self-appointed shepherds, the clergy, have neglected, abused and scattered. ”

“ And I do think it strange, that if so much is doing for the lower classes, the working men, who form the mass of the lower classes, are just those who scarcely feel the effects of it; while the churches seem to be filled with children, and rich and respectable, to the almost entire exclusion of the adult lower classes. A strange religion this!" I went on, "and, to judge by its effects, a very different one from that preached in Judea 1800 years ago, if we are to believe the Gospel story."
"What on earth do you mean? Is not the Church of England the very purest form of Apostolic Christianity?" ”

“ When we are fain to pull down every building of God that does not square with our own ecclesiastical plans, we do not apprehend “what is the breadth!”
We draw close about us the walls of Christ’s wide house, as if to confine Him in our single chamber. We call our particular communion “the Church,” and the rest “the sects”; and disfranchise, so far as our word and judgement go, a multitude of Christ’s freemen and God’s elect, our fellow-citizens in the New Jerusalem—saints, some of them, whose feet we well might deem ourselves unworthy to wash. ”

“ Here is one out of many extracts we might have given. After complaining that most of the gentry had 'thrown away all regard for religion and morality,' and that 'the ignorance and immorality of the lower class of the people was pitiful, owing to the slothfulness and neglect of many of the clergy,' he thus proceeds:
'As for the clergy, such of them as still enjoy the remaining emoluments of the Church might do some good in their generation if they were so disposed. ”

“ It is terrible to think what the churches do to men. But if one imagines oneself in the position of the men who constitute the Church, we see they could not act differently. The churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed—the one excludes the other. ”

“ Is it not because we are the Church of capital rather than of labour? The Church ought to be a community in which religion works upward from below. The Church of England expresses that point of view which is precisely not that which Christ chose for His Church. The incomes of the bishops range them with the wealthier classes; the clergy associate with the gentry and not with the artisans. We must acknowledge with deep penitence that we are on wrong lines. For himself, the Bishop admits that he has 'a permanently troubled conscience' in the matter. ”

“ It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. I am speaking the words of truth and soberness. The Church was dumb in the North, but not in the West. A marked distinction exists between the history of the New School of Presbyterian churches in the West and the Congregational churches, the Episcopal churches, the Methodist and Baptist churches in the North and East. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the churches were absolutely dumb. ”

“ And the perhaps undue conservatism commonly associated with Cathedral circles represents too the chief reproach which can be brought against churches—their tendency to preserve stability at the expense of novelty, to crystallize, to cling to habits and customs which no longer serve a useful end. In this a church is like a home; where old bits of furniture have a way of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd, endure. Yet both the home and the church can give something which is nowhere else obtainable by us, and represent values which it is perilous to ignore. ”

“ Take away facilities for hearing and even for seeing the preacher, and the vitality of a Protestant service is destroyed, and the end for which the people assemble is utterly defeated. Moreover, you destroy the sacred purposes of a church if you make it so expensive that the poor cannot get sittings. Nothing is so dull, depressing, funereal, as a church occupied only by prosperous pew-holders, who come together to show their faces and prove their respectability, rather than to join in the paeans of redemption, or to learn humiliating lessons of worldly power before the altar of Omnipotence. ”

“ Nowadays the kirk is just a job like anything else; men go in for it for the loaves and fishes mostly, and their prayers never get past the roof. And as for the congregation, the kirk is just a respectable sort o' society. I tell ye, dominie, that releegion is deid. At least, Christianity is deid. That was bound to come; flowers, folk, hooses, trees, horses, aye, and nations, have a birth, a youth, middle age, auld age, and then death. It's the law o' nature, and a religion is no exception. ”

“ Without dwelling on the possibility—which I do not myself, however, for a moment doubt—of an honest clergyman's being able actually to prevent the entrance among his congregation of persons leading openly wicked lives, could any subject be more vital to the purposes of your meetings than the difference between the present and the probable state of the Christian Church which would result, were it more the effort of zealous parish priests, instead of getting wicked poor people to come to church, to get wicked rich ones to stay out of it? ”

“ There is, no doubt, much vice among the clergy every where, for they are frail, like all of us. Probably the vicious men in the church of England, are not at all more numerous, than those of every established church necessarily must be, with the temptations to enter it for the possession of rich livings. ”

“ And, finally, is not a revival much required to banish the estrangement, coldness, envy, which exist between the clergy of different Churches? There are delightful exceptions, where genuine Christian goodwill and love exist. But, alas! we sadly miss the want of that manly, truthful maintenance of what appears to us to warrant our own church organisation, with that just appreciation of the sense, principle, and judgment of those who have no sympathy with our views. ”

“ In neighborhoods without churches, without school houses, without settled roads, among a population of disorganized and heterogeneous material, he had exhorted from house to house, labored individually with one after another, till he had, in place after place, brought together the elements of a Christian church. Far from all ordinances, means of grace, or Christian brotherhood, or coöperation, he had seemed to himself to be merely the lonely, solitary "voice of one crying in the wilderness," as unassisted, and, to human view, as powerless. ”

“ They are responsible for every corruption that has crept into the Church, for every blot that defiles the purity of the Creed. They are not Christians, and they never have been, for they cannot be what they are and followers of Christ at the same time. They and the wealthy clergy of all the churches are responsible for the unfaith, tacit and avowed, of what we are pleased to call the lower classes; the classes who compose the majority of Christ's Congregation ”

“ The small value attributed to all outward and special forms of service, and the want of any sympathetic craving for the communion of saints, saved the deists from attempting to found a free-thinking church, a creedless communion. They seem generally to have inclined to a quietistic accommodation to established forms of faith, till better times came. ”