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[Illustration: BISHOP GORE]
PAINTED WINDOWS
STUDIES IN
RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY
BY
A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER
AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF DOWNING STREET"
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KIRSOPP LAKE
_It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows
could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken,
though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light, coloured
by these reverend effigies, was none the more respirable for being
picturesque._
J.R. Lowell.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMILE VERPILLEUX
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1922
_For the information presented in the biographical records connected
with the several chapters the publishers desire to express their
indebtedness to "Who's Who."_
FOREWORD
BY PROFESSOR KIRSOPP LAKE
No one who believes that the Christian churches have in the past been
the moral leaders of western civilization can fail to be interested in
the presentation of some of the English religious leaders by "A
Gentleman with a Duster" especially if, like myself, he have some
passing acquaintance with most of them. Nor can any neglect to regard
seriously his warning that the Church is failing as a moral leader.
What is the reason for that failure? It cannot, I think, be found in
lack of earnestness; for today all the guides of the churches in England
are serious, upright men, who would gladly lead if they could. Nor is it
because they are voices uttering strange announcements in the
wilderness; if they have a fault it is rather that they have so little
to announce. The defect which is disclosed by the pictures given by "A
Gentleman with a Duster" is primarily intellectual, and I propose to
devote to its explanation the introduction which the publisher has asked
me to write for the American edition of _Painted Windows_.
From the third century to the eighteenth the Christian Church presented
views of life and theories of the origin, weakness, and possible
redemption of human nature, which were both self consistent and
rational. It offered men an infallible guide of life, to be found in the
Church, the Bible, and the Christ. Different branches of the Christian
church emphasised one or the other, but the three formed in themselves
an indivisible trinity. Nor did the laity doubt that this presentation
was correct. The clergy were the professional and expert exponents of an
infallible revelation which they had studied deeply and knew better than
other men, and on which they spoke with the authority of experience. It
was firmly believed that to follow their teaching would lead to future
salvation; for the centre of gravity in life for seriously minded men
was the hope of attaining everlasting salvation in the world to come.
The situation today is changed in two directions. The Church, the Bible,
and even the Teaching of Jesus are no longer regarded as infallible.
History first abundantly proved that the voice of the Church was not
inerrant; then science discredited the biblical account of man's origin
and development; and finally the "kenotic" theory of Bishop Gore showed
that what were considered the _ipsissima verba_ of the Lord himself
could no longer be regarded as infallible. The _coup de grâce_ to the
belief that Jesus must be followed literally was administered by
official sermons during the war. This does not mean that men and women
within or without the Church do not admire and venerate the teaching of
Jesus and regard him as the best teacher whom they know. But they are
not willing to accept _all_ his teaching; they have been forced to admit
that it is sometimes lawful to resist evil by force; they doubt whether
he is to appear as the Judge of the living and the dead; they accept
much of his teaching and try to follow it because they believe that it
is true, but they do not believe that it is true because it is his
teaching. It is therefore impossible today for educated men, even among
those who most sincerely adopt it, to settle a moral argument by an
appeal to the teaching of Jesus. The tragedy is that there are probably
as many today outside the Church who endeavour to follow Jesus, but do
not call him Lord, as there are within the church who reverse this
attitude. For good or for evil (and I think it is for evil), the Church,
especially the Church of England, seems to have decided that to say
"Lord, Lord" is the pass-word to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Equally important with this great change in thought, which has abandoned
the infallible trinity of Church, Bible, and Jesus, is the fact that the
best of our generation have shifted the centre of endeavour from the
future salvation of the individual to the present reformation of this
world for the benefit of coming humanity. The best men of our time are
troubling very little about the salvation of their own souls; not
because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe
that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not
a supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They have
relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of
forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look
forward is progressive and educational, not fixed or punitive. Moreover,
most of them would say, with complete reverence, that the work which is
set before them by the Purpose of Life, as they understand it, is to
make a better world, materially, morally, and intellectually, as an
inheritance for children who are yet unborn. They are not much disturbed
if they are told that they are not Christians, for they are supremely
indifferent to names.
Nevertheless their presence in the world today is the concrete problem
to be faced by Liberal Churchmen. To consistent Catholics such as Father
Knox it is not, I suppose, a problem at all. He would say that such men
deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but they are
not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a faith
once delivered to the saints," Father Knox is right; such men are not
Christians, but, if so, the fact that they are not is the death warrant
of the Church, for they represent progress to a higher type than that of
the Christianity of the past.
But the liberal Christian does not accept the view that the Church ought
to exist for the preservation of traditional opinions. In his heart he
feels that such men would have been accepted by Jesus as his disciples,
and therefore he believes that the Church can and ought to be reformed
so as to make room for them. For this Reformation he has no fixed and
rigid programme, but there are three things which he thinks the Church
must provide.
The first necessity is the right understanding of life. It cannot be
given by any theory of the universe which, like the biblical one, is in
glaring contradiction to the facts of modern science[1]. Nor is it
conceivable that belief can be fixed so as to be unalterable.
Intellectual correctness is relative, and Truth cannot be petrified into
Creeds, but lives by discussion, criticism, correction, and growth.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Bryan is right in maintaining that evolution and the
whole scientific concept of life is unbiblical, though wrong in thinking
that that settles the question.]
The second necessity is the purification of the human spirit. Generation
after generation of Christians on their way through the world have
endeavoured to follow the moral teaching of the Church, but the friction
and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities, the swell
of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire, which a
mere appeal to reason cannot remedy because it condemns but does not
remove the evil. In the future as in the past, the Church must find
means to satisfy men's need and desire for purification.
The third is closely allied to the second. It is "the helping hand of
grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not
understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths,
the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin
and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its
existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that
though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact normally
work through them.
These are the three things which the Liberal wishes to keep in the
Church. He knows that to do this the traditional forms of church life
require great changes, but he wishes to preserve the institutional life
of the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that
Christians who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments,
the thoughts, practices, and ordinances of the past, have the right in
another generation to change these. The continuity of the Church is in
membership, not in documents.
But the Liberals fall into two groups. There is the left wing which
expresses itself with clearness and decision, which is not afraid of
recognizing that the Church in the past has often been wrong and has
affirmed as fact what is really fiction. Those who belong to it are
sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled
to yield to the practical necessities of ecclesiastical life, but their
influence is greater than their numbers. The danger which would face the
Church if they were allowed to have more prominence, is that their
plainness of speech would lead to disruption. The danger is a real one,
and the leaders of churches do right to fear it.
Over against this is the right wing of Liberals. There is probably
little difference in the matter of private opinion between them and the
left wing, but they are more concerned with safeguarding the unity of
the Church. They endeavour to do this by using the old phraseology with
a new meaning, so that, for instance, members of this party feel
justified in stating that they accept the creed, though they do not
believe in it in the sense which was originally intended. This is
technically called "reinterpreting," and by a sufficient amount of
"reinterpreting" all the articles of the creed (or indeed anything else)
can be given whatever meaning is desired. The statement that God created
the heavens and the earth becomes in this way an affirmation of
evolution; the Virgin Birth affirms the reality of Christ's human
nature; and the Resurrection of the Flesh affirms the Immortality of the
Soul. Performed with skill, this dialectical legerdemain is very
soothing to a not unduly intelligent congregation and prevents any
breach in the apparent continuity of the Church's belief. It also
prevents any undue acrimoniousness of theological debate, for debate is
difficult if words may be interpreted to mean the opposite of their
historical significance. The danger is that the rising generation will
refuse to accept this method, and that it will lead to deep and
irretrievable intellectual confusion. This is what Father Knox clearly
saw to be the intellectual sin of the "Foundationers."
Nevertheless, when all is said it is easy to criticize but difficult to
advise. As "A Gentleman with a Duster" has seen, the desire of the
church leaders whose portraits he paints is to preserve the Church
through a period of transition. I doubt the wisdom of their policy,
though I recognize the difficulty of their task and appreciate their
motives.
I doubt the wisdom of the policy because I think that though it may
satisfy the older members of the Church and so preserve continuity with
the past, it is doing so at the expense of the younger generation and
sacrificing continuity with the future. It may conciliate those who have
power to make trouble in the present; but it is only the young who are
now silently abandoning the Church, that have the power to give life in
the future. It is always safer to agree with the old, but it is
infinitely more important to convince the young; and the reason for the
failure which troubles "A Gentleman with a Duster" is that
ecclesiastical life in England is failing to convince the young. Is it
better here?
CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.,
February 5, 1922.
INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
Some of the men whose personalities I attempt to analyse in this volume
are known to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think,
represent schools of thought in which America is as greatly interested
as the people of Europe.
Therefore I may presume to hope that this present volume will find in
the United States as many readers as _The Mirrors of Downing Street_ and
_The Glass of Fashion_.
But, in truth, I hope for much more than this.
Perhaps I may be allowed to say that I think America can make a
contribution to the matter discussed in these pages which will outrival
in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the
contribution she has already made to world politics by the inspiration
of the Washington Conference.
For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat
fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about
serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action.
Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always
young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and Æschylus. He
is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new
paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all
things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the
exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the
dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.
Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus,
I feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any
other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of
the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human
race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and the
politics of idealism.
If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my
suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the
secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my
theory that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the
documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope
to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp
Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged
by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as
seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that
manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious
things.
Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes
of its author--a book which attempts to throw off all those long and
hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which
have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all
that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation of a
strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning to use.
INTRODUCTION
By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to
discover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the Church
in the affections of men.
My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only
religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because it
has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition
of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of
the Church to impress humanity with what its documents call the Will of
God--a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful devotion,
sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern Church.
As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a
consequence of the late War.
The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is
immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which has
for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of a
Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august
forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and
unworthy forces within his own breast--envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness--which make for world anarchy. He has never been able
to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is
in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the
most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent
conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar
disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide,
it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains."
This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the
nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of
individual man to live in love and charity with his neighbour, justifies
the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of
the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief
mercy the teaching of a science of life--a way of existence which would
bring the feet of unhappy man out of chaos, and finally make it possible
for the human race to live intelligently, and so, beautifully.
Now if this indeed were the purpose of the Incarnation, we may be
pardoned for thinking that the Church, which has been the cause of so
much tyranny and bloodshed in the past, and which even now so willingly
lends itself to bitter animosities and warlike controversies, has
missed the whole secret of its first and greatest dogma[2].
[Footnote 2: I asked a certain Dean the other day whether the old
controversy between High Church and Low Church still obtained in his
diocese. "Oh, dear, no!" he replied; "High and Low are now united to
fight Modernists."]
Therefore in studying the modern mind of Christianity, persuaded that
its mission is to teach mankind a lesson of quite sublime importance, we
may possibly arrive in our conclusion at a unifying principle which will
at least help the Church to turn its moral earnestness, its manifold
self-sacrifice, and its great but conflicting energies, in this one
direction which is its own supremest end, namely, the interpretation of
human life in terms of spiritual reality.
To those who distrust reason and hold fast rather fearfully to the
moorings of tradition, I would venture to say, first, that perilous
times are most perilous to error, and, secondly, in the words of Dr.
Kirsopp Lake, "After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but
life in scorn of consequence--a courageous trust in the great purpose of
all things and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight,
whatever the price may be."
"_The distinction between right and
wrong disappears when conscience
dies, and that between fact and
fiction when reason is neglected.
The one is the danger which besets
clever politicians, the other the nemesis
which waits on popular preachers."
--Kirsopp Lake._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION . xi
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
I.--BISHOP GORE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II.--DEAN INGE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
III.--FATHER KNOX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
IV.--DR. L.P. JACKS . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
V.--BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON. . . . . . . . . 87
VI.--MISS MAUDE ROYDEN. . . . . . . . . . . 103
VII.--CANON E.W. BARNES. . . . . . . . . . . 121
VIII.--GENERAL BRAMWELL BOOTH . . . . . . . . 139
IX.--DR. W.E. ORCHARD . . . . . . . . . . . 155
X.--BISHOP TEMPLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
XI.--PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE. . . . . . . . . 191
XII.--ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON. . . . . . 203
XIII.--CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
BISHOP GORE
GORE, Rt. Rev. CHARLES, M.A., D.D., and Hon. D.C.L., Oxford; Hon. D.D.,
Edinburgh and Durham; Hon. LL.D., Cambridge and Birmingham; b. 1853; s.
of Hon. Charles Alexander Gore and d. of 4th Earl of Bessborough, widow
of Earl of Kerry. Educ.: Harrow, Balliol College, Oxford (Scholar).
Fellow Trinity College, Oxford, 1875-95; Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon
College, 1880-83; Librarian of Pusey Library, Oxford, 1884-93; Vicar of
Radley, 1893-94; Canon of Westminster, 1894-1902; Hon. Chaplain to the
Queen, 1898-1900; Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, 1900-1901; Chaplain
in Ordinary to the King, 1901; Editor of Lux Mundi; Bishop of Worcester,
1902-4; Bishop of Birmingham, 1905-11; Bishop of Oxford, 1911-1919.
PAINTED WINDOWS
CHAPTER I
BISHOP GORE
_He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another
will . . . attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long
discipline, that "ascent of the soul into the intelligible
world."_--WALTER PATER.
No man occupies a more commanding position in the Churches of England
than Dr. Gore. I am assured in more than one quarter that a vote on this
subject would place him head and shoulders above all other religious
teachers of our time. In the region of personal influence he appears to
be without a rival.
Such is the quality of his spirit, that a person so different from him
both in temperament and intellect as the Dean of St. Paul's has
confessed that he is "one of the most powerful spiritual forces in our
generation."
It is, I think, the grave sincerity of his soul which gives him this
pre-eminence. He is not more eloquent than many others, he is not
greatly distinguished by scholarship, he is only one in a numerous
company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But
no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more
telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is
absorbed into a _Power_ which overshadows his presence and even sounds
in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken
everything for the Kingdom of God.
One who knows him far better than I do said to me the other day,
"Charles Gore has not aimed at harmonising his ideas with the Gospel,
but of fusing his whole spirit into the Divine Wisdom."
In one, and only one, respect, this salience of Dr. Gore may be likened
to the political prominence of Mr. Lloyd George. It is a salience
complete, dominating, unapproached, but one which must infallibly
diminish with time. For it is, I am compelled to think, the salience of
personality. History does not often endorse the more enthusiastic
verdicts of journalism, and personal magnetism is a force which
unhappily melts into air long before its tradition comes down to
posterity[3].
[Footnote 3: The genius of the Prime Minister, which makes so
astonishing an impression on the public, plainly lies in saving from
irretrievable disaster at the eleventh hour the consequences of his own
acts.]
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was once speaking to me of the personality of
Gladstone. He related with unusual fervour that the effect of this
personality was incomparable, a thing quite unique in his experience,
something indeed incommunicable to those who had not met the man; yet,
checking himself of a sudden, and as it were shaking himself free of a
superstition, he added resolutely, "But I was reading some of his
speeches in Hansard only the other day, and upon my word there's nothing
in them!"
One may well doubt the judgment of Mr. Chamberlain; but it remains very
obviously true that the personal impression of Gladstone was infinitely
greater than his ideas. The tradition of that almost marvellous
impression still prevails, but solely among a few, and there it is
fading. For the majority of men it is already as if Gladstone had never
existed.
We should be wise, then, to examine the mind, and only the mind, of this
remarkable prelate, and to concern ourselves hardly at all with the
beauty of his life or the bewitchments of his character; for our purpose
is to arrive at his value for religion, and to study his personality
only in so far as it enables us to understand his life and doctrine.
Dr. Gore lives in a small and decent London horse which at all points in
its equipment perfectly expresses a pure taste and a wholly unstudied
refinement. Nothing there offends the eye or oppresses the mind. It is
the dignified habitation of a poor gentleman, breathing a charm not to
be found in the house of a rich parvenu. He has avoided without effort
the conscious artistry of Chelsea and the indifference to art of the
unæsthetic vulgarian. As to the manner of his life, it is reduced to an
extreme of simplicity, but his asceticism is not made the excuse for
domestic carelessness. A sense of order distinguishes this small
interior, which is as quiet as a monk's cell, but restful and gracious,
as though continually overlooked by a woman's providence.
Here Dr. Gore reads theology and the newspaper, receives and embraces
some of his numerous disciples, discusses socialism with men like Mr.
Tawney, church government with men like Bishop Temple, writes his books
and sermons, and on a cold day, seated on a cushion with his feet in the
fender and his hands stretched over a timorous fire, revolves the many
problems which beset his peace of mind[4].
[Footnote 4: Concerning modernising tendencies, Father Ronald Knox says,
"I went to a meeting about it in Margaret Street, where crises in the
Church are invested with a peculiar atmosphere of delicious
trepidation."]
Somewhere, in speaking of the Church's attitude towards rich and poor,
he has confessed to carrying about with him "a permanently troubled
conscience." The phrase lives in his face. It is not the face of a man
who is at peace with himself. If he has peace of mind, it is a Peace of
Versailles.
One cannot look at that tall lean figure in its purple cassock, with the
stooping head, the somewhat choleric face, the low forehead deeply
scored with anxiety, the prominent light-coloured and glassy eyes
staring with perplexity under bushy brows, which are as carefully combed
as the hair of his head, the large obstinate nose with its challenging
tilt and wide war-breathing nostrils, the broad white moustache and
sudden pointed beard sloping inward; nor can one listen to the deep,
tired, and ghostly voice slowly uttering the laborious ideas of his
troubled mind with the somewhat painful pronunciation of the
elocutionist (he makes _chapell_ of Chapel); nor mark his languorous
movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot
notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and
his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, and
sometimes even perhaps conscious of a check for the cause which is far
dearer to him than his own life.
One thinks of him as a soul under a cloud. He gives one no feeling of
radiance, no sense of a living serenity. What serenity he possesses at
the centre of his being does not shine in his face nor sound in his
voice. He has the look of one whose head has long been thrust out of a
window gloomily expecting an accident to happen at the street corner.
FitzGerald once admirably described the face of Carlyle as wearing "a
crucified expression." No such bitterness of pain and defeat shows in
the face of Dr. Gore. But his look is the look of one who has not
conquered and who expects further, perhaps greater disaster.
He has told us that "a man must be strong at the centre before he can be
free at the circumference of his being," and in support of this doctrine
he quotes the words of Jesus, "It is better to enter into life halt or
maimed rather than having two hands or two feet to go into hell." Has he
reached strength at the centre, one wonders, by doing violence to any
part of his moral being? Is his strength not the strength of the whole
man but the strength only of his will, a forced strength to which his
reason has not greatly contributed and into which his affections have
not entirely entered? Is this, one asks, the reason of that look in his
face, the look of bafflement, of perplexity, of a permanently troubled
conscience, of a divided self, a self that is both maimed and halt?
How is it, we ask ourselves, that a man who makes so profound an
impression on those who know him, and who commands as no other teacher
of his time the affectionate veneration of the Christian world, and who
has placed himself whole-heartedly in political alliance with the
militant forces of victorious Labour, exercises so little influence in
the moral life of the nation? How is it that he suggests to us no
feeling of the relation of triumphant leadership, but rather the spirit
of Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow?
We learn from his teaching that no one can be a Christian without "a
tremendous act of choice," that Christ proclaimed His standard with
"tremendous severity of claim," that "it is very hard to be a good
Christian," and that we must surely, as St. Peter says, "pass the time
of our sojourning here in fear." All of which suggests to us that the
Bishop has not entered into life whole, even perhaps that sometimes he
looks back over his shoulder with a spasm of horror at the hell from
which he has escaped only by the sacrifice of his rational integrity.
Let us recall the main events of his history.
He was educated at Harrow and Balliol, and exercised a remarkable
spiritual influence at Oxford, where he remained, first as
Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon College and then as Librarian of Pusey
House, till he was forty years of age.
During these years he edited the book called _Lux Mundi_ in which he
abandoned the dogma of verbal inspiration and accepted the theory that
the human knowledge of Christ was limited. This book distressed a number
of timid people, but extended the influence of Dr. Gore to men of
science, such as Romanes, as well as to a much larger number of
thoughtful undergraduates.
For a year he was Vicar of Radley, and then came to London as a Canon of
Westminster, immediately attracting enormous congregations to hear him
preach, his sermons being distinguished by a most singular simplicity, a
profound piety, and above all by a deep honesty of conviction which few
who heard him could withstand. Weller, the Dean's verger at the Abbey,
has many stories to tell of the long queues at Westminster which in
those days were one of the sights of London. The Abbey has never since
recovered its place as a centre of Christian teaching.
Up to this time Dr. Gore's sympathy for the Oxford Movement was merely
the background of a life devoted to the mystical element and the moral
implications of the Christian religion. He was known as a High
Churchman; he was felt to be a saint; his modernism was almost
forgotten.
It was not long before his tentative movement towards modernism ended in
a profession of Catholic principles which allied him with forces
definitely and sometimes angrily ranged against the Higher Criticism. He
became a Bishop. Almost at once the caressing fingers of the saint
became the heavy hand of the dogmatist. He who had frightened Liddon by
his tremulous adventure towards the mere fringe of modernism became the
declared enemy, the implacable foe, of the least of his clergy who
questioned even the most questionable clauses of the creeds. He demanded
of them all a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous,
in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true. Every word
of the creeds had to be uttered _ex animo_. "It is very hard to be a
good Christian." Yes; but did Dr. Gore make it harder than it need be?
There was something not very unlike a heresy hunt in the diocese over
which the editor of _Lux Mundi_ ruled with a rod of iron.
I remember once speaking to Dr. Winnington Ingram, Bishop of London,
about the Virgin Birth. He told me that he had consulted Charles Gore on
this matter, and that he agreed with Charles Gore's ruling that if
belief in that miracle were abandoned Christianity would perish. Such is
the fate of those who put their faith in dogmas, and plant their feet on
the sands of tradition.
Dr. Gore's life as a Bishop, first of Worcester, then of Birmingham, and
finally of Oxford, was disappointing to many of his admirers, and
perhaps to himself. He did well to retire. But unfortunately this
retirement was not consecrated to those exercises which made him so
impressive and so powerful an influence in the early years of his
ministry. He set himself to be, not an exponent of the Faith, but the
defender of a particular aspect of that Faith.
Here, I think, is to be found the answer to our question concerning the
loss of Dr. Gore's influence in the national life. From the day of the
great sermons in Westminster Abbey that wonderful influence has
diminished, and he is now in the unhappy position of a party leader
whose followers begin to question his wisdom. Organisation has destroyed
him.
Dr. Gore, in my judgment, has achieved strength at the centre of his
being only at the terrible cost of cutting off, or at any rate of
maiming, his own natural temperament. Marked out by nature for the life
of mysticism, he has entered maimed and halt into the life of the
controversialist. With the richest of spiritual gifts, which demand
quiet and a profound peace for their development, he has thrown himself
into the arena of theological disputation, where force of intellect
rather than beauty of character is the first requirement of victory.
Instead of drawing all men to the sweet reasonableness of the Christian
life, he has floundered in the obscurities of a sect and hidden his
light under the bushel of a mouldering solecism--"the tradition of
Western Catholicism." It is a tragedy. Posterity I think, will
regretfully number him among bigots, lamenting that one who was so
clearly
. . . born for the universe, narrow'd his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
For, unhappily, this party in the Church to which, as Dean Inge well
puts it, Dr. Gore "consents to belong," and for which he has made such
manifold sacrifices, and by which he is not always so loyally followed
as he deserves to be, is of all parties in the Church that which least
harmonises with English temperament, and is least likely to endure the
intellectual onslaughts of the immediate future.
It is the Catholic Party, the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians,
which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power
to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal
deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, a marked ability in
superstitious ceremonial, a not very modest assertion of the claims of
sacerdotalism, a mocking contempt for preaching, and a devotion to the
duties of the parish priest which has never been excelled in the history
of the English Church.
Bishop Gore, very obviously, is a better man than his party. He is a
gentleman in every fibre of his being, and to a gentleman all
extravagance is distasteful, all disloyalty is impossible. He is,
indeed, a survival from the great and orderly Oxford Movement trying to
keep his feet in the swaying midst of a revolutionary mob, a Kerensky
attempting to withstand the forces of Bolshevism.
There is little question, I think, that when his influence is removed,
an influence which becomes with every year something of a superstition,
something of an irritation, to the younger generation of
Anglo-Catholics--not many of whom are scholars and few gentlemen--the
party which he has served so loyally, and with so much distinction, so
much temperance, albeit so disastrously for his own influence in the
world, will perish on the far boundaries of an extremism altogether
foreign to our English nativity.
For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a
hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness
towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to
accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation--a miracle which, he
has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for
the change which takes place in digestion. If they were rid of his
restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his
intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these
enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian
asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and
defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of
excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and
honourable Oxford Movement.
If any man think that I bear too hardly on these very positive
protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters
in _A Spiritual Æneid_. Father Knox was once a member of this party and
something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his
"mediæval" theology.
A member of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in
these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest
attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised,
or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual
influence which might at this time have been well-nigh supreme if the
main body of the nation had not unfortunately lost its interest for the
man in its contempt for, or rather its indifference to, the party to
which he consents to belong.
But for the singular beauty of his spiritual life, one would be tempted
to set him up as an example of Coleridge's grave warning, "He, who
begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving
his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all."
I find him in these late days no nearer to Rome, not an inch nearer,
than in the days of his early manhood, but absolutely convinced that
Christ founded a Church and instituted the two chief sacraments. He will
sacrifice nothing in this respect. His whole mind, which is a very
different thing from his whole spirit, leans towards authority, order,
and coherence. He must have an organised society of believers, believers
in the creeds, and he must have an absolute obedience to authority
among these believers.
But he is a little shaken and very much alarmed by the march of
modernism. "When people run up to you in the street," he said recently,
and the phrase suggests panic, "and say, 'Oh! what are we to do?' I have
got no short or easy answer at all." A large, important, and learned
body of men in the Church, he says, hold views which are "directly
subversive of the foundations of the creeds." He calls this state of
things evidence of "an extraordinary collapse of discipline." But that
is not all. He is alarmed; he is not content to trust the future of the
Church to authority alone. "What are we to do?" He replies:
"First, we must not be content to appeal to authority. We must teach,
fully teach, re-teach the truth on grounds of Scripture, reason,
history, everything, so that we may have a party, a body which knows not
only that it has got authority, but that it has got the truth and reason
on its side."
The claim is obviously courageous, the claim of a brave and noble man,
but one wonders, Can it be made good? It is a long time since evolution
saw Athanasius laid in the grave, a long time since the Inquisition
pronounced the opinions of Galileo to be heretical and therefore false.
"It is very hard to be a good Christian." Did Athanasius make it easier?
Did the Inquisition which condemned Galileo make it easier still?
Dr. Gore thinks that the supreme mistake of Christianity was placing
itself under the protection and patronage of national governments. It
should never have become nationalised. Its greatest and most necessitous
demand was to stand apart from anything in the nature of racialism.
He mourns over an incoherent humanity; he seeks for unifying principles.
The religion of an Incarnation must have a message for the world, a
message for the whole world, for all mankind. Surely, surely. But
unifying principles are not popular in the churches. It is the laity
which objects to a coherent Gospel.
He sighs for a spiritualised Labour Party. He shrinks from the thought
of a revolution, but does not believe that the present industrial system
can be Christianised. There must be a fundamental change. Christianity
is intensely personal, but its individualism is of the spirit, the
individualism of unselfishness. He laughs grimly, in a low and rumbling
fashion, on hearing that Communism is losing its influence in the north
of England. "I can quite imagine that; the last thing an Englishman will
part with is his property."
Laughter, if it can be called laughter, is rare on his lips, and is
reserved in general for opinions which are in antagonism to his own. He
laughs in this way at the makeshift compromises of statesmen and
theologians and economists saying that what those men hate more than
anything else is a fixed principle. He quotes with a sardonic pleasure
the capital saying that a certain statesman's idea of a settled policy
based on fixed moral principles is a policy which will last from
breakfast-time to luncheon--he repeats the last words "from
breakfast-time to luncheon," with a deep relish, an indrawing of the
breath, a flash of light in the glassy eyes.
He remains impenitent concerning his first instinct as to England's duty
at the violation of Belgium's neutrality. We were justified in fighting;
we could do no other; it was a stern duty laid upon us by the Providence
which overrules the foolishness of man. But he is insistent that we can
justify our fiery passion in War only by an equal passion in the higher
cause of Peace--no, not an equal passion, a far greater passion.
We lost at Versailles our greatest opportunity for that divine
justification. We showed no fervour for peace. There was no passion in
us; nothing but scepticism, incredulity, and the base appetite for
revenge. We might have led the world into a new epoch if at that moment
we had laid down our sword, taken up our cross, and followed the Prince
of Peace. But we were cold, cold. We had no idealism. We were poor
sceptics trusting to economics--the economics of a base materialism.
But though he broods over the sorrows and sufferings of mankind, and
views with an unutterable grief the dismemberment of Christendom, he
refuses to style himself a pessimist. There is much good in the world;
he is continually being astonished by the goodness of individuals; he
cannot bring himself to despair of mankind. Ah, if he had only kept
himself in that atmosphere! But "it is very hard to be a good
Christian."
As for theology, as for modernism, people are not bothered, he says, by
a supposed conflict between Religion and Science. What they want is a
message. The Catholic Church must formulate a policy, must become
intelligent, coherent.
He has small faith in meetings, pronouncing the word with an amused
disdain, nor does he attach great importance to preaching, convinced
that no Englishman can preach: "Even Roman Catholics can't preach in
England." As for those chapels to which people go to hear a popular
preacher, he calls them "preaching shops," and speaks with pity of those
who occupy their pulpits: "That must be a dreadful life--dreadful, oh,
quite dreadful!" Yet he has a lasting admiration for the sermons of
Charles Spurgeon. As to Jeremy Taylor, "I confess that all that turgid
rhetoric wearies me."
He does not think the Oxford Movement has spent itself. On the contrary,
the majority of the young men who present themselves for ordination are
very largely inspired by the spirit of that Movement. All the same, he
perceives a danger in formalism, a resting in symbolism for its own
sake. In its genesis, the Oxford Movement threw up great men, very great
men, men of considerable intellectual power and a most profound
spirituality; it is not to be expected, perhaps, that such giants should
appear again, and in their absence lesser men may possibly mistake the
symbol for the thing symbolised, and so fall into the error of
formalism. That is a danger to be watched and guarded against. But the
Movement will continue, and it will not reach its fulfilment until under
its pressure the Church has arrived at unity and formulated a policy
intelligent and coherent.
So this great spirit, who might have given to mankind a book worthy to
stand beside the _Imitation_, and given to England a new enthusiasm for
the moral principles of Christianity, nurses a mechanistic dream and
cherishes the hope that his Party is the Aaron's rod of all the
Churches. Many would have followed him if he had been content to say
only, "Do as I do," but he descended into the dust of controversy, and
bade us think as he thinks. Nevertheless, in spite of this fatal mistake
he remains the greatest spiritual force among the Churches of England,
and his books of devotion will be read long after his works of
controversy have fallen into that coldest of all oblivions, the oblivion
of inadequate theologies.
DEAN INGE
INGE, Very Rev. WILLIAM RALPH, D.D., C.V.O., 1918; Dean of St. Paul's
since 1911; b. Crayke, Yorkshire, 6th June, 1860; s. of late Rev.
William Inge, D.D., Provost of Worcester College, Oxford and Mary, d. of
Ven. Edward Churton, Archdeacon of Cleveland; m. 1905, Mary Catharine,
d. Ven. H.M. Spooner, Archdeacon of Maidstone, and g.d. of Bishop Harvey
Goodwin; three s. two d. Educ.: Eton, King's College, Cambridge, Bell
Scholar and Porson Prizeman, 1880; Porson Scholar, 1881; Craven Scholar
and Browne Medalist, 1882; Senior Chancellor's Medalist, 1883; 1st Class
Classics, 1882 and 1883; Hare Prizeman, 1885; Assistant Master at Eton,
1884-88; Fellow of King's, 1886-88; Fellow and Tutor of Hertford
College, Oxford, 1889-1904; Select Preacher at Oxford, 1893-95, 1903-5,
1920-21; Cambridge, 1901, 1906, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1920; Bampton
Lecturer, 1899; Hon. D.D., Aberdeen, 1905; Paddock Lecturer, New York,
1906; Vicar of All Saints' Ennismore Gardens, S.W., 1905-7; Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge,
1907-l1; Hon. Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and of Hertford
College, Oxford; Academic Committee Royal Soc. of Literature; Gifford
Lecturer, St. Andrews, 1917-18; Romanes and Hibbert Lecturer, 1920; Hon.
D.Litt., Durham, 1920.
[Illustration: DEAN INGE]