Politics and the Pulpit
Edmund Burke begged the clergy of England to give us all a break from the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
1790
King George III 1760-1820
© Gary Ullah, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
This marble pulpit in Worcester Cathedral was added during a restoration carried out by Sir George Gilbert Scott between 1864 and 1874. That Christianity is intensely political is evident from the martyrdom of the early Christians at the hands of the Roman imperial State: see Why Rome Persecuted the Christians. But the politics of the Church is, as the Kingdom of Christ is, ‘not of this world’. Nowhere does the New Testament urge the Christian to lobby the Government into discharging his solemn duties of prayer, justice or charity. The only favour that the Church should ask of Government (and it is subversive enough) is that which Diogenes asked of Alexander the Great, as the philosopher holidayed on a beach in Corinth: see ‘Stand out of my Sunshine!’.
Introduction
On November 4th, 1789, not yet five months into the French Revolution, Dr Richard Price delivered a sermon at the Presbyterian Chapel in Old Jewry entitled ‘On the Love of Our Country’, in which he called upon all patriotic Englishmen to support the French rebels as a matter of Christian duty. Writing to a French correspondent, Edmund Burke complained that it was grossly inappropriate.
FEW harangues from the pulpit, except in the days of your league in France,* or in the days of our solemn league and covenant in England,* have ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation than this lecture in the Old Jewry.* Supposing, however, that something like moderation were visible in this political sermon; yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day’s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.*
From ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (1790) as reprinted for the Harvard Classics series edited by Charles William Eliot (1834-1926). With acknowledgements to ‘Revolutionary Writings: Reflections on the Revolution in France and the first Letter on a Regicide Peace’ by Edmund Burke, edited (2014) by Iain Hampsher-Monk.
* The Catholic League was founded by the Duke of Guise in 1576, as a pressure group dedicated to ridding France of the Protestant community known as the Huguenots in open defiance of the more temperate policies of King Henry III of France. It was a major player in the Wars of Religion, and had the backing of Pope Sixtus V, Philip II of Spain, and the Jesuits (Society of Jesus).
* The Solemn League and Covenant (1643) was an agreement between the Scottish and English Parliaments a year into the English Civil War. It confirmed that the Established Church in Scotland was presbyterian (i.e. had no bishops) contrary to the firm convictions of King Charles I. Nonetheless, the outrageous execution of Charles I by the English Parliament in 1649 was understood by the Scottish Parliament as a breach of the Covenant, and they rallied behind his son Charles II.
* Old Jewry, a street in the heart of the City of London, acquired its name because it was here that the Great Synagogue stood and many Jewish people lived — until 1290, when a law of Edward I’s reign compelled all Jews to leave the country permanently. See Britain’s Jews.
* Richard Price’s sermon (which incidentally was delivered on a Wednesday, not a Sunday) can be read at the Internet Archive. The sermon wasn’t all bad, by any means: see On Love of Country. And in his defence, it should be said that Price died in 1791, before Louis XVI was so senselessly executed, before bishops and clergy began to be killed by mobs or executed in mass drownings (1792), before the new Government enforced its new non-Christian religious cults of Reason (1793) and the Supreme Being (1794), and before the Reign of Terror drowned Paris in blood. All this confirmed that Burke had been right to advise, Wait and See.
