.
The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions,
tastes, and prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national
ideal of character, which has long since lost its adventitious connexion
with heraldry and property in land. A love of order, seemliness, and
good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what
a seventeenth-century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the
Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen
sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of
cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church
an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy,
feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the
sixteenth century have at last become dim. A jealous love of liberty,
combined with contempt for theories of equality, produced a system of
graduated ranks in Church government which left a large measure of
freedom, both in speech and thought, even to the clergy, and encouraged
no respect for what Catholics mean by authority. The Anglican Church is
also characteristically English in its dislike for logic and
intellectual consistency and in its distrust of undisciplined
emotionalism, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
known and dreaded under the name of 'enthusiasm.' This type is not
essentially aristocratic. It does not traverse the higher ideals of the
working class, which respects and admires the qualities of the
'gentleman,' though it resents the privileges long connected with the
name. But it has no attraction for what may be impolitely called the
vulgar class, whose religious feelings find a natural vent in an
unctuous emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism. This class, which
forms the backbone of Dissent and Liberalism, is instinctively
antipathetic to Anglicanism. Nor does the Anglican type of Christianity
appeal at all to the 'Celtic fringe,' whose temperament is curiously
opposite to that of the English, not only in religion but in most other
matters. The Irish and the Welsh are no more likely to become Anglicans
than the lowland Scotch are to adopt Roman Catholicism. Whether Dissent
is a permanent necessity in England is a more difficult question, in
spite of the class differences of temperament above mentioned. If the
Anglican organisation were elastic enough to permit the order of
lay-readers to be developed on strongly