LECTURE VI.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, AS A NATIONAL

INSTITUTION.

ENDOWMENTS.

1 COR. ix. 13, 14.

Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple? and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the allar? Even so hath the Lord ordained, that they which preach the gospel, should live of the gospel.

THE second point of contact to be noticed between the church and the state in England, is that which results from the Endowments of the church; a subject on which perhaps more mistake and misrepresentation prevails at the present moment than on any other within the whole range of our inquiries, and which yet it is impossible for a minister of the church even to approach, without the certainty of subjecting himself to censure as an interested advocate of ancient abuses, destructive to the spirituality

of that holy religion, the temporalities of which he is 'described either as eagerly intent to grasp, or tenaciously resolved to hold.

It is besides, a most unwelcome task to have to wrangle for that as the great apple of discord, the great origin and end of controversy, (for so it now both is and is asserted to be,) which in rude ages, and when the reciprocal benefit conferred was unspeakably less, was scarcely thought worth attention: silver and gold having been accounted but as the dust and mire of the streets in comparison of the husks, or at best the germ and bud of religion, whereas the contributions requisite for the suitable maintenance of divine worship, must now be wrung out like the heart's blood, in pitiful recompense for the richest clusters of religious privilege; nay, the minished remnants of holy things, which the devotion of early Christianity had dedicated to God, are daily held forth as the lawful prey of worldly selfishness and cupidity.

I know that these acts of avarice and spoliation are sanctified in the eyes of many by the pretext of a zeal for the reformation of abuses, and for the spiritual interests of the church herself: but when did Satan lack a pretext, or even a perverted passage of scripture, wherewith to bait his temptations and beguile the unwary? The thing is to be desired to make us wise-we shall be as gods if we may but gain it-God shall give His angels charge over us the stones shall be made bread-the kingdoms of the world shall be ours-if we will but do His bidding.

It is no modern complaint that "to make such actions less odious, many colourable shifts and inventions have been used, as if the world did hate only wolves, and think the fox a goodly creature. The time, it may be, will come, when they that either violently have spoiled or thus smoothly defrauded God, shall find that they did but deceive themselves. In the meanwhile, there will be always some skilful persons who can teach a way how to grind the church with jaws that shall scarce move, and yet devour more in the end than they that come ravening with open mouth, as if they would worry. the whole in an instant."" And lest covetousness. alone should linger out the time too much, and not be able to make havoc of the house of God with that expedition which the mortal enemy thereof doth vehemently wish, he hath by certain strong enchantments so deeply bewitched religion itself, as to make it in the end an earnest solicitor, and an eloquent persuader of sacrilege, urging confidently, that the very best service which men of power can do to Christ, is without any more ceremony to sweep all, and to leave the church as bare as in the day it was first born; that fulness of bread having made the children of the household wanton, it is without any scruple to be taken away from them, and thrown to dogs; that they which laid the price of their lands as offerings at the apostles' feet, did but sow the seeds of superstition; that they which endowed churches with lands poisoned religion; that tithes and oblations are now in the sight of God as

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the sacrificed blood of goats; that if we give Him our hearts and affections, our goods are better bestowed otherwise; in a word, that to give unto God is error: reformation of error, to take from the church that which the blindness of former ages did unwisely give. By these or the like suggestions, received with all joy, and with like sedulity practised, in certain parts of the Christian world, they have brought to pass, that the best things have been overthrown, not so much by the puissance and might of adversaries, as through defect of counsel in them that should have upheld and defended the

The lapse of nearly three centuries has unhappily not weakened the truth or force of these remarks: but to come to the modern arguments for the confiscation of state endowments, it will doubtless startle those who see in the voluntary payment of their pastors the grand preservative of the purity of Christian doctrine and discipline, to be told that it is to the irregularities of the voluntary system, that the abuses now so loudly complained of in relation to church revenue, are mainly to be attributed; and that, though a state provision for the clergy of the established religion be one of the most essential features in the very idea of an establishment, the state in England has in fact done little beyond confirming such provision when voluntarily made by individuals, and has been much more characterized by the imposition of checks and curtailments on the

HOOKER ECCL. POL. Bk. viii. Sec. 79.

redundance of voluntary bounty, than by its own contributions to the general fund of the church.

To make this plain, as well as to illustrate the whole subject of our ecclesiastical endowments, I propose, first, to set before you an outline of their history; and then to offer such explanatory remarks as may be suggested by the several questions at present in agitation respecting them.

I. For the first, we must go back to the times when this island was in much the same situation with respect to Christianity as New Zealand and the isles of the South Sea are at present, on which, through the tender mercies of our God, the dayspring from on high is at length by our instrumentality beginning to dawn, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide their feet into the way of peace.

Whatever opinion may be formed as to the scriptural claims of diocesan episcopacy, which will hereafter be examined, we trace it in the earliest notices of British Christianity; and no one doubts that in this form, the church of Christ presented itself to our Saxon forefathers, towards the close of the sixth century. The mode of its propagation appears to have been this. The bishop, accompanied by a body of clergy, fixed on some spot where there was a disposition to receive his message, or at least to allow him with his missionary family to perform their religious offices unmolested; and from this spot as the centre of his charge, himself, with his brethren, itinerated in all directions, preaching the