National church

For the Covenanters, the religious consequences were just as significant as the political ones.

One of the first major changes was the end of Episcopal government within the National Church.

The bishops who had been restored after the restoration no longer enjoyed government support.

And over the following months and years, the Presbyterian system of church government was gradually re-established.

It was so strong in the original Reformed Church of England that one cannot help doubting whether any settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent, and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again and causing dissension.

Well then, if culture is the disinterested endeavor after man's perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the Nonconformists, not by making churchmen provincial along with them, but by letting their popular church discipline, formerly found in the National Church and still found in the affections and practice of a good part of the nation, appear in the National Church once more, and thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again, as their greater fathers were, with the mainstream of national life? Why should not a Presbyterian or Congregational church, based on this considerable and important, though not essential principle of the congregation's power in the church management, be established with equal rank for its chiefs, with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of its ministers under a revised system of patronage and preferment to benefices side by side with the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist and Lutheran churches are established side by side in France and Germany? Such a Congregational church would unite the main bodies of Protestants who are now separatists, and separation would cease to be the law of their religious order.

Then, through this concession on a really considerable point of difference, that endless splitting into hole-and-corner churches on quite inconsiderable points of difference, which must prevail so long as separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist religious existence, would be checked.

Culture would then find a place among English followers of the popular authority of elders, as it has long found it among the followers of Episcopal jurisdiction.

And this we should gain by merely recognizing, regularizing, and restoring an element which appeared once in the reformed national church, and which is considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear there still.

So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to claim.

It leads us also to respect what is solid and respectable in their convictions, while their latitudinarian friends make light of it.

It was so strong in the original Reformed Church of England that one cannot help doubting whether any settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again and causing dissension.

Well then, if culture is the disinterested endeavor after man's perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the Nonconformists, not by making churchmen provincial along with them, but by letting their popular church discipline, formerly found in the National Church and still found in the affections and practice of a good part of the nation, appear in the National Church once more, and thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again, as their greater fathers were, with the mainstream of national life? Why should not a Presbyterian or Congregational church, based on this considerable and important, though not essential principle, of the congregation's power in the church management, be established, with equal rank for its chiefs, with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of its ministers under a revised system of patronage and preferment to benefices, side by side with the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist and Lutheran churches are established side by side in France and Germany? Such a Congregational church would unite the main bodies of Protestants who are now separatists, and separation would cease to be the law of their religious order.

Then, through this concession on a really considerable point of difference, that endless splitting into whole and corner churches on quite inconsiderable points of difference, which must prevail so long as separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist religious existence, would be checked.

Culture would then find a place among English followers of the popular authority of elders, as it has long found it among the followers of episcopal jurisdiction.

And this we should gain by merely recognizing, regularizing, and restoring an element which appeared once in the reformed national church, and which is considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear there still.

So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to claim.

It leads us also to respect what is solid and respectable in their convictions, while their latitudinarian friends make light of it.

And then...

I became very involved in the whole understanding of disability at the National Church, where it was pretty much non-existent.

Oh, I see.

So you kind

So there, in your capacity as representing, with an interest in disability, you presumably had a much wider then access to all sorts of other things.

Exactly.

And through then being on General Foo Synod and then the Archbishop's Council, I was able to therefore call for and actually succeed in getting disability on the national church's budget.

So you not only put it on the agenda, but you got funding for it, so you could actually do stuff.

The President of the United States should not be the head of the church, as it was in England, right? Or in Italy, you know, where you had the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors, right? We're like, "We're not doing that.

This doesn't end well," right? So yes, we want Christianity to influence everything we're doing, but no, we don't want an institution called the National Church run by the politicians.

And that's the separation of church and state, not keeping moral ethics and values out.

And so that's, to me, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible, but this whole confusion that academics have brought into this is just mind-boggling to me.

It didn't exclude other voices, but it gave you a reason to include them.

So, you know, if you look at somebody like John Witherspoon, who's the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, he leads the Presbyterian Church to demand, first thing they pass when they organize the National Church is God alone is Lord of the Conscience.

You know,

and changes the Westminster Confession of Faith, you know, to say from the magistrates supposed to uphold true religion to magistrates supposed to treat everybody the same.