I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all denominations.Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no organization at all.They think that men will eventually come together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of belief, and form a great unity.Do they see what this amounts to?
It means an equal division of intellect! It is mental agrarianism!
a thing that never was and never will be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit Voltaire." A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the illustration was neatly handled.Yes, and there is no such thing as a broad garden.It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is narrow.You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece of business.You can't make a village or a parish or a family think alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs or pad them to a single pattern! Why, the very life of an ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in the neighborhood.If the two bodies touch and share their respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself? Smith is always a Smithite.He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.He cannot do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be filled by a pint.Iron is essentially the same everywhere and always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate of iron.Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always differ from the Brownate of truth.
The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in which its knowledge is embodied.The inferior race, the degraded and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce themselves to axioms and laws.As races and individual minds must always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those who hold the smaller number.These doctrines are to the negative aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive orders of nobility.
The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that requires the use of language.Freemasonry gives an idea of such a church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where no word of his can be understood.The apostle of this church may be a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting fellow-creature.The cup of cold water does not require to be translated for a foreigner to understand it.I am afraid the only Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits, and not by their words.If you say this communion of well-doers is no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an organization that shall include all Christendom.
Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow Church, however.The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe, and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their fellow-creatures will go down.The Broad Church is on board, working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down under the hatches ever since it floated.
--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these matters.I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about outsiders and insiders!
After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty regularly to the Church of the Galileans.Still they could not keep away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of bein' married this five year.They was good boarders, both of 'em, paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.