THE CONGREGATIONAL POLITY.

ORGANIZATION and government are good things in themselves; no one can doubt, or at least ought to doubt, that. So completely are all well-regulated people convinced of this, that even in cases where government goes beyond its rights, and usurps the province of individual life, so that it becomes a tyranny, more or less reflection persuades them that even this is better than the absence of all government. It was of such a rule as this that St. Paul wrote: "Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers: for there is no power but of God; and the powers that be are ordained of God." That is, government is not simply a matter of human convenience and device, but of divine ordinance. It is a matter of conscience to be subject to it. The failure to remember this begets misapprehension and evil of two kinds. If the ruler forgets it, he ignores the obligation on his part to rule well and justly, which alone justifies his particular claim to rule at all. The divine sanction is given to government as a minister of God to men for good, and is not therefore of that arbitrary kind that it can be claimed for any government of whatsoever character. And if the subjects forget it, and come to think of government as a mere human convention, the sanctity and dignity, if not the authority, of government are taken away, and the obligation of obedience sits lightly upon the subjects. At the same time, it is recognized that the sphere of government is limited, and the instinct of every free community prompts it to be jealous of any undue extension of its authority beyond its province.

This jealousy of individual rights is especially strong in certain matters. And in religion more than anywhere else men claim the privilege of individual action, and are slow to merge any part of this in a body; to substitute associated action for that of the individual. Or if the social instinct, which is the complement of the individual, does lead to associated action, it is apt to be regarded as a mere convention, and the idea of authority is dissociated from it as far as possible. The history of the church as a society, or polity, is largely that of the development, conflict, and adjustment of these complementary principles; of the swaying of the body back and forth between the individual instinct on the one side and the social instinct on the other. And we may anticipate all that is to follow by saying now, that disaster has always resulted sooner or later, and is sure to follow, whenever the church NO. 69.

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fails to pursue the via media, which consists in the proper adjustment and combination of these two principles, and pays exclusive or exaggerated attention to either of them. The history of the church up to the time of the Reformation was that of the slow growth of the governmental and corporate idea, combined with an assumption of political and civil authority, until the church became one of the great world-powers, and the rights of the individual were lost and forgotten. As far as the relations of the church within itself were concerned, that power, which had become tyranny, reached its climax in the attempt of the church to legislate in regard to its dogmatic beliefs, and to enforce these by spiritual and civil penalties. We must not judge too harshly of these things; they were the growths of the times: there was no conception of government except as an arbitrary and absolute power; and there is no advance of humanity, nor even of Christianity, except as it learns the lessons of its failures. Since the Reformation, the growth has been equally sure in the opposite direction towards mere individualism and disintegration, until to-day the spectacle of a divided Christendom is almost as alarming to the thoughtful believer as that of the Papacy. At first the Reformation was a protest only against the usurpations of churchly power, while the churchly principle was retained. And many of the reformed churches have remained in this safe place. But many of them have gone further, and set up the principle of individualism as the ruling idea, with the inevitable result of disintegration. Let us thank God that the equally sure result in his church is reaction, and that this is to-day the hopeful attitude of our American Christianity. The church is evidently in a period of transition; she is casting about for the elements of a safer and larger future. And now is the time for wise men to utter the words of wisdom, and to speak in her ear the warning which the two great epochs of the church have been slowly formulating, that Christianity is preeminently the combination of the two principles of individual rights and of the social sentiments, and that to emphasize either to the exclusion of the other is sure disaster.

But it is to one special form of this pseudo-Protestant idea that I wish to call attention now. Independency is that special form of opposition to the churchly idea which carries the principle of association only the first step, and stops with the organization of the local church. Everything beyond that it considers, in the first place, unauthorized by the practice of the New Testament churches, and, in the second place, dangerous to religious liberty.

We do not wish to discuss the supposed authority of the New Testament for this form of church organization; but two brief statements about this aspect of it will not be out of order. In the first place, as a matter of fact, there is no one form of church government in the apostolic churches. Everything there is in a formative and developing condition, in which one thing after another is adopted from the synagogue, and from other forms and ideas of organization, in order to meet various exigencies as they arose in the evolution of the church's life. Persons with a denominational bias may find there the counterpart of their church polity; but scholars generally will discourage the attempt. And, in the second place, even those who find such a complete and authoritative system there do not pretend that it is revealed as a matter of prescription, but that it was developed in the natural way that we have stated, only so under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that it finally emerged a complete thing, needing no addition nor changes, any more than the Book from which it was taken. That first age, it is contended, brought things to a final shape, and we have to look within its records and teachings for the norm of church doctrine and organization. But, in this matter of church polity, is it not evident that there could have been no such complete development, that there was no time for it; and, above all, that there were not the circumstances and occasions to give rise to it? Is it not the very assumption in such a development, that changes and additions shall be made as circumstances demand them, and that it is impossible that all these developing occasions should be crowded into so short a space of time? And, as a matter of fact, since that early period, the church has entered upon one after another new set of circumstances, for which there could have been no provision in the quite different conditions of those early times.

But, laying aside this question of the authority of Independency, and coming now to the principle underlying it, is it not a little strange that it should stop just where it does in the work of organization, with the formation and government of the local church, and even deprecate as dangerous all attempts to go beyond this? Is it not, on the other hand, the flaw in Congregationalism that it does not recognize any organized church larger than the local and individual church? What is the acknowledged principle everywhere else? Civilized society has come to recognize certain natural groups of population. These are the family, the municipality, and the nation. There may be others in some in

stances, as in the United States; but these are the general groups. And there may be something yet beyond these, by which the relations of different nations to each other shall yet be determined in a peaceful and orderly way; but, so far, the nation is the ultimate form of organization. And the reasons for these organizations are equally obvious and authoritative. The nation, like the family, has divine sanctions; and the city, and in some cases the state, are the natural centres of a local and independent management that are the proper offsets to a centralized government. What is the reason that religion should ignore all these natural tendencies of men to come together in certain well-defined groups, and adopt as its limit of organization a body that has no counterpart anywhere, and which exaggerates the principle of independency to its narrowest form? Certainly it cannot be said that there is no work for the larger bodies in the kingdom of God, or that this work does not call for organization and direction. In fact, all these bodies that profess independency do organize; they have to organize for state work, for national work, and for foreign missions. But these organizations are simply confederations of independent churches, voluntary associations for the doing of certain work which these bodies recognize that they cannot do so well separately. They have no authority even in their own sphere. They simply serve to show the necessity for association and organization, even where it is formally disallowed, and the makeshifts to which in these circumstances the Congregational polity is reduced. But the point is the necessity to which they call attention, and the proof afforded by them that the city, the state, and the nation are natural lines and limits of organization, even in religious matters.

What is the raison d'être of Congregationalism, then? It is the individualism of which we have taken account already, the jealousy of anything like authority in religious matters, which in the old days of religious tyranny had something noble in it, but which in these times is merely traditional and unreasoning, and misses a real good because of the evils born of troublous times, and not of the dreaded thing itself. I say that the idea of Congregationalism is individualism. But how is individualism characteristic of this any more than of those bodies that carry the principle of association further, and organize along larger and more natural lines? Is not the idea of association recognized in both alike, and why is one more individualistic than the rest? Because in independency the individual is the starting-point, and the community in any

real, pregnant, sacred sense does not enter into its constitutive principle. This seems a serious statement; but let us look a little further and see its truth. A church in this system is a purely voluntary association of men who think alike in regard to religious beliefs. In the growth of Christianity there have been developed a great variety of views about its meaning and constitution, and these opinions are constantly receiving fresh additions. The idea of Congregationalism is that the individual exercise his freedom of choice among these differing views, and that those who hold similar opinions in any locality associate together in what they call a church. In the growth of the man, especially in a time like this, it may easily happen that his views will change, and then the purely voluntary ties that he has assumed are thrown off, and he joins another body associated in the same loose way. Nay, he may without any difficulty find himself holding opinions of a mixed and eclectic character, that leave him outside of church or denominational lines altogether, and then the principle of individualism has a chance to bear its ripened fruit: in spite of his faith, the man may find himself without any church to which he can attach himself. His chance of finding one will depend on his discovery of a sufficient number whose views happen to be like his own. But, aside from any extremity to which the theory may be pushed, this conception of the church as a purely voluntary association of men of similar views is the constructive principle of Congregationalism. And the refusal to carry out the principle of association any further arises from the fear that the larger body might legislate in such a way as to interfere with the freedom of the local church.

And, as we have seen, the original reason of this separative idea was a valid one. There was a tendency in the church to regulate everything, even to the belief of its members, and it used compulsions instead of reasons to produce this conformity. Moreover, these beliefs themselves, the creeds and rituals ordained by the church, were not of the kind to win assent. They emphasized just the things that have been the bane of religion from the beginning, and which have made it the synonym of superstition. Men could not assent to these, and so the only way open to them was the way out; a way that the church itself pointed to with emphasis. But the way proved full of dangers; the freedom that they claimed for themselves they had reluctantly to yield to others, and these to others still, until finally freedom has proved to be the cause of disintegration, and of an exaggerated indi