Transformed religion: Matthew Arnold and the refining of dissent

Renascence, Winter 2001 by Ward, David A

This shift in approach has less to do with genre-that is, with the disparate conventions of the novel and the expository essay-than with simply a change in tactics for dealing with Dissent. Arnold, ever the advocate for "seeing things as they are," recognized that the old ways for controlling those outside the Establishment, including the Dickensian desire to effect a kind of internal exile for them in Britain, were no longer tenable. Increasingly pluralistic, British culture in the mid-Victorian years was finding a new place in its workings for previously excluded members. Some went as far as suggesting that Dissenters should be admitted to the Church and that this was the only way in which a truly "national" establishment could be achieved. In a nation extraordinarily mindful of property rights and the sanctities of ownership, granting Dissenters full use of the country's numerous Anglican church buildings and grounds was unthinkable to many-a capitulation to groups with distorted, even fanatical, views of Christianity. One speaker in the House of Lords during debate on simply allowing Dissenters the right to perform their own burial services in parish graveyards proclaimed the idea "impracticable and unjust and offensive"; it was, he declared, a "more rude invasion of the sacred precincts of the churchyard" than he had ever been called upon to consider (Hansard 615, 611).

For others, however, embracing Dissenters was simply an embodiment of the idea that the Church is not an entity distinct from the State, but merely the State in its religious aspect. According to this line of reasoning, as Owen Chadwick puts it, "if citizen and churchman are still to be the same, the church must be extended and altered to include far more of the citizens than the contemporary members of the Church of England" (1: 45). Thomas Arnold, himself an ordained Anglican cleric, had proposed this sort of plan for Church-State unity as early as 1833 in a pamphlet entitled Principles of Church Reform, in which he suggested paring down the Articles of the Church to a few fundamental doctrines framed in non-dogmatic language and allowing worship services not grounded in the Anglican liturgy. A letter of his to the Reverend J. Hearn the following year makes clear the importance he placed upon uniting believers in a single ecclesiastical institution:

I groan over the divisions of the Church, of all our evils. I think the greatest,-of Christ's Church I mean,-that men should call themselves Roman Catholics, Church of England men, Baptists, Quakers, all sorts of various appellations, forgetting that only glorious name of CHRISTIAN, which is common to all, and a true bond of union. (Stanley 1: 357)

Significantly, though, this apparent willingness to overlook the particulars of religious belief and practice that had separated these various groups for so long coexisted with a decidedly unfavorable assessment of the personality and intelligence of those outside the Church. Opening the doors of the parish to other Christians, therefore, did not necessarily mean putting Anglicanism and other forms of faith on an entirely equal footing. Non-Anglicans still had much to learn, and it was the Anglicans who would do the teaching. "Schism"-that is, willfully separating oneself from the central body of Christian believers-Arnold considered "a great evil," an action "inconsistent with the idea of the perfect Church, to which our aspirations should be continually directed." Anglicans were superior to sectarians in their moral understanding and, as a result, in their social efficacy: "what good is to be done, will be done . . . much sooner by numbers of the Church than by Dissenters" (Letter to the Reverend James Randall, September 20, 1841; qtd. in Stanley 2: 260-61). And in matters of intellect, there was simply no comparison between the two. Arnold declared himself "keenly alive to the mental defects of the Dissenters, to their "narrowness of view, and ... want of learning and a sound critical spirit" (Letter to James Marshall, January 23, 1840; qtd. in Stanley 2: 184-- 85).