XI. Lecture laws with little regard either to general principles or to logical consistency, and who are deficient in the skill and knowledge of experts. For our own purpose, however, the most important matter to note is after all neither the merits nor the defects of the Married Women's Property Acts, but the evidence which they give of the way in which judicial may tell upon parliamentary legislation. Nor ought the care devoted to the examination of the connection between judgemade law and Acts of Parliament in the case of the Married Women's Property Acts to lead any student to suppose that the same connection is not traceable in many other departments of law. It may be illustrated by the laws governing the right of association,' by the law with reference to an employer's liability for damage done by the negligence of his servants, or by provisions of the Judicature Acts which substitute rules of equity for the rules of common law. In studying the development of the law we must allow at every turn for the effect exercised by the cross-current of judicial opinion which may sometimes stimulate, which may often retard, and which constantly moulds or affects, the action of that general legislative opinion which tells immediately on the course of parliamentary legislation. 2 1 See pp. 95-102, 190-200, 266-272, ante. LECTURE XII RELATION BETWEEN LEGISLATIVE OPINION AND GENERAL PUBLIC OPINION XII. LAW-MAKING opinion is merely one part of the whole Lecture body of ideas and beliefs which prevail at a given time. We therefore naturally expect, first, that alterations in the opinion which governs the province of legislation will reappear in other spheres of thought and action and be traceable in the lives of individuals, and, next, that the changes of legislative opinion will turn out to be the result of the general tendencies of English or indeed of European thought during a particular age. This lecture is an attempt to show that these anticipations hold good in a very special manner of that transition from individualistic liberalism to unsystematic collectivism or socialism, which has characterised the development of English law during the later part of the nineteenth century. I. As to analogous changes of opinion in different spheres and also in the lives of individuals. Let us here consider rather more fully a matter several times touched upon in the foregoing lectures, namely, the relation between legislative and theological opinion. The partial coincidence in point of time between XII. Lecture the reign of Benthamism in the field of legislation and of Evangelicalism in the religious world is obvious. The influence of each was on the increase from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and reached its height about 1834-35. From that date until about 1860 utilitarian philosophy and Evangelical theology were each dominant in England. By 1870, however, it was manifest that Benthamism and Evangelicalism had each lost much of their hold upon Englishmen. This decline of authority, when once it became noticeable, was rapid. In the England of to-day the very names of Benthamites and of Evangelicals are forgotten. Their watchwords are out of date. Many ideas, it is true, which we really owe to Bentham and his followers, or to Simeon and his predecessors, exert more power than would be suspected from the current language of the time. But as living movements Benthamism and Evangelicalism are things of the past. Have they no real inter-connection or similarity? To this question many critics will reply with a decided negative. It appears at first sight a hopeless paradox to contend that the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill had any affinity with the faith of Simeon, of Wilberforce, and of Zachary Macaulay. The political reformers were Radicals, or, in the language of their day, democrats; they were certainly freethinkers, and must sometimes in the eyes of Evangelicals have appeared infidels, if not atheists; they assuredly attached no value to any theological creed whatever; their only conception of church reform was to make the Church of England a fit instrument for the propagation of utilitarian 1 1 See pp. 320-322, ante. XII. morality. The Evangelical leaders, on the other Lecture hand, were Tories; they were men of ardent personal piety; to Bentham and his followers they must have seemed bigots; their efforts were directed to the revival, throughout the nation, of religious fervour. The only kind of church reform which enlisted their sympathy was the removal of all abuses, such as pluralism, which hindered the Church of England from being the effective preacher of what they held to be saving truth. Evangelicalism, in short, with its gaze constantly directed towards the happiness or terrors of a future life, might well be considered the direct antithesis of utilitarianism, which looked exclusively to the promotion in this world of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The difference is nothing else than the gulf which severs religion from secularism. Yet as we can now see, Benthamism and Evangelicalism represented the development in widely different spheres of the same fundamental principle, namely, the principle of individualism.' 66 1 "The Evangelical movement," writes Dr. Dale, "had its charac"teristic os or spirit, as well as its characteristic creed; and this "Oos or spirit it is not hard to discover. Its supreme care in the days of its strength was not for any ideal of ecclesiastical polity; it "contributed to the extinction among Congregationalists, and, I think, among Baptists and Presbyterians, of that solicitude for an ideal "Church organisation which had so large a place in the original revolt "of the Nonconformists against the Elizabethan settlement of the English Church. Nor were the Evangelical clergy zealous supporters "of Episcopacy; their imagination was not touched by that greatthough, as we believe-false conception of the Church which fired "the passion of the leaders of the Tractarian Revival-a Church "whose living ministers can claim to inherit, by unbroken succession, "awful powers and prerogatives attributed to the original apostles. "The Evangelical movement encouraged what is called an undenomi"national temper. It emphasised the vital importance of the Evan"gelical creed, but it regarded almost with indifference all forms of “Church polity that were not in apparent and irreconcilable antagonism Lecture The appeal of the Evangelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal of Benthamite Liberals to individual energy. Indifference to the authority of the Church is the counterpart of indifference to the authoritative teaching or guidance of the State or of society. A low estimate of ecclesiastical tradition, aversion to, and incapacity for inquiries into the growth or development of religion, the stern condemnation of even the slightest endeavour to apply to the Bible the principles of historical criticism, bear a close resemblance to Bentham's contempt for legal antiquarianism, and to James Mill's absolute blindness to the force of the historical objections brought by Macaulay against the logical dogmatism embodied in Mill's essay on government. Evangelicals and Benthamites alike were incapable of applying the historical method, and neither recognised its value nor foresaw its influence. The theology, again, which insisted upon personal responsibility, and treated each man as himself bound to work out his own salvation, had an obvious affinity to the political "to that creed. It demanded as the basis of fellowship a common "religious life and common religious beliefs, but was satisfied with fellowship of an accidental and precarious kind. It cared nothing "for the idea of the Church as the august society of saints. It was "the ally of individualism.”—R. W. Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New, pp. 16, 17. 1 Note the account of Thomas Scott's theology given about the middle of the nineteenth century by a sympathetic critic. It is clear that while Scott's autobiography, published under the title of The Force of Truth, will retain a permanent place in religious literature as a record of personal experience, his mode of reasoning must be utterly unconvincing to a thinker of to-day. It is as much out of date as the argument of James Mill's Government. It could not now be written by a man of anything like Scott's intellectual power. See Sir J. Stephen, Ecclesiastical Biography, ii. p. 121, and following. 2 When Wesley refused, though earnestly requested by his father, to leave Oxford, he wrote: "The question is not whether I could do |