DR. W.E. ORCHARD
_O, you poor creatures in the large cities of wide-world politics,
you young, gifted, ambition-tormented men, who consider it your
duty to give your opinion on everything that occurs; who, by thus
raising dust and noise, mistake yourselves for the chariot of
history; who, being always on the look-out for an opportunity to
put in a word or two, lose all true productiveness. However
desirous you may be of doing great deeds, the profound silence of
pregnancy never comes to you. The event of the day sweeps you along
like chaff, while you fancy that you are chasing it_.--NIETZSCHE.
Until quite the other day I looked upon Dr. Orchard as a person unique
in his generation. But I am now told by an authority in the
nonconformist world that there are "two others of him"--one, I think, in
Birmingham, the second in Clapham.
I am still permitted to think, however, that to Dr. Orchard belongs the
distinction of being the first person of this erratic trinity, and
therefore we may still regard him with that measure of curiosity which
is the tribute paid by simple people to the eccentric and the abnormal.
But let me warn the reader against expectations of an original genius.
Dr. Orchard does not create; he copies. His innovations are all made
after visits to the lumber-room. It is by going back such a long
distance into the past that he startles, and by coming round full circle
that he appears to surprise the future.
But where originality is rare, eccentricity must not be discounted.
Dr. Orchard is a ritualist in the midst of nonconformity; the first Free
Churchman, I believe, to entertain exalted ceremonial aspirations, and
to kneel for his orders at the feet of an orthodox bishop. One might
almost hazard the conjecture that he remains in the Congregationalist
Communion, as so many Anglo-Catholics remain in the Establishment,
solely to supply the fermentation of an idea which will shatter its
present constitution. One thinks of him as a repentant Cromwell
restoring "that bauble" to its accustomed place on the table of
tradition.
In his heart of hearts he would appear to be a fervent institutionalist,
a lover of ceremonial, and a convinced sacerdotalist. To hear him use
the word Catholic is to make one understand how the Church of Rome
dazzles certain eyes, and to hear him claim that he is in the
apostolical succession is to make one realise afresh how broad is the
way of credulity.
One may understand his dislike of the hideous and pretentious
architecture which disgraces non-conformity, and sympathise with his
desire for more beautiful services in nonconformist chapels; but it is
not so easy, while he remains a nonconformist, to understand, or to
feel any considerable degree of sympathy with, his tendency towards
practices which are the very antithesis of the nonconformist tradition.
All the same he is a person of whom we should do well to take at least a
passing notice, for he witnesses, however extravagantly, to a movement
in the Free Churches which is not likely to lose momentum with the next
few years--a movement not only away from sectarian isolation but towards
the idea of one catholic and apostolic Church. There is certainly unrest
in the Free Churches, and Dr. Orchard is a straw which helps us to
understand if not the permanent direction of the wind, at least the fact
that there is a breeze blowing in the fields of religious freedom.
Not long ago I asked one of the greatest figures in the Anglican Church
what he thought of Dr. Orchard. He replied by raising his eyebrows and
exclaiming rather disdainfully: "A ritualistic Dissenter! What is it
possible to think of him?" I said that he attracted a good many people
to his services in the King's Weigh House Church, and that I had heard
Mrs. Asquith was sometimes a member of his congregation. "_That_,"
answered the dignitary, "would not make me think any higher of Dr.
Orchard."
For many people, it must be confessed, he is a slightly ludicrous
figure. He presents the spectacle of a sparrow stretching its wings and
opening its beak to imitate the eagle of catholic lecterns. And he has a
singularly nettling manner with some people which must add, I should
think, to this unpopularity. He seems sweepingly satisfied with himself
and his opinions, which are mostly of a challenging nature. He does not
discuss but attempts to browbeat. His voice is an argument, and the
expression on his face and the fire in his eyes suggest the street
corner. He would have greatly distressed a man like Matthew Arnold, for
the only method against such didactics is to send for the boxing gloves.
All the same he is a man of no little force, perhaps a scattered and
dispersed force, as I am inclined to think; and he is a fighter whose
blows, if not a teacher whose opinions, are more worthy of attention
than his sacerdotal pretensions might lead one to suppose.
In appearance he may be compared with Dr. Clifford, but Dr. Clifford
reduced to youthfulness and multiplied by an infinite cocksureness; a
small, eager, sandy-haired, clean-shaven, boyish-looking man, with
light-coloured eyes behind shining spectacles, the head craning forward,
the body elastic and restless with inexhaustible energy, the whole of
him--body, mind, and spirit--tremulous with a jerkiness of being which
seems to have no effect whatever on his powers of endurance.
One misses in him all feeling, all tone, of mellowness. His mind, at
present, shows no lightest, trace of the hallowing marks of time; it
suggests rather the very architecture he takes so savage a pleasure in
denouncing--a kind of mock Gothic mind, an Early Doulton personality.
He has a thin voice, rather husky, and a recent accent.
In his most vigorous moments, when he is bubbling over with epigrams and
paradoxes, ridiculing the dull people who do not agree with him, and
laughing to scorn those who think they can maintain the Christian spirit
outside the mysterious traditions of the Catholic Church, or when he is
describing a recent church as a Blancmange Cathedral, and paraphrasing
an account, given I think by Mr. James Douglas, of the building of a
certain tabernacle in London--first it started out to be a Jam Factory,
then a happy idea occurred to the builder that he should turn it into a
Waterworks, then the foreman suggested that it would make an ideal
swimming-bath, but finally the architect came on the scene and said,
"Here, half a minute; there's an alteration wanted here; we're going to
make it into a church"--at such moments, Dr. Orchard might be likened to
a duo-decimo Chesterton--but a Chesterton of nonconformity. For he is a
little crude, a little recent; a mind without mellowness, a spirit
without beauty, a soul which feeds upon aggression.
He makes an amusing figure with a black cloak wrapped round his little
body in Byronic folds, and a soft hat of black plush on his head, a
Vesta Tilley quickness informing both his movements and his speech, as
he nips forward in conversation with a friend, the arms, invisible
beneath their cloak, pressed down in front of him, his body leaning
forward, his peering eyes dancing behind their spectacles.
Nevertheless, those who most find him only amusing or worse still
thoroughly dislikeable, who are antipathetic to the whole man, and who
thus cannot come at the secret of his influence, must confess that there
is nothing about him either of the smooth and oily or of the adroit and
compromising. He is the last man on earth to be called an opportunist.
This is in his favour. His aggressiveness must put all but the toughest
against him. He is tremendously in earnest. It would be difficult I
think to exceed his sincerity.
But not to mind whose toes one may tread on is hardly in the style of
St. Francis; and, after all, it is possible to be tremendously earnest
about wrong things, and consumingly sincere in matters which are not
perhaps definitely certain to advance the higher life of the human race.
Humility is always safest; indeed, it is essential to all earnestness
and sincerity, if those energies are not to repel as many as they
attract.
Dr. Orchard's manner, which can be extraordinarily nettling in
conversation, as I have suggested, is evidently of a very soothing
character in the confessional--if that is the proper term. He has a
remarkable following among women, and it is said that "if he put a brass
plate on his door and charged five guineas a time" he might be one of
the richest mind-doctors in London. He himself declares that his real
work is almost entirely personal. I have heard him speak with some
contempt of preaching, quoting the witticism of a friend that "Anglican
preaching is much worse than it really need be," or words to that
effect. He likes ceremonial and private confidence. He has the instincts
of a priest.
His patients appear to be the wreckage of psychoanalysis. It is said
that "half the neurotics of London" consult him about their souls. I
have no idea of the manner in which he treats these unhappy people, but
I am perfectly sure that he gives them counsel of a healthy nature.
There is nothing about him which suggests unwholesomeness, and much that
suggests sound strength and clean good sense. Also among his penitents
are numerous shopgirls who have lost in the commercial struggle whatever
piety they possessed in childhood and in their craving for excitement
have gone astray from the path of safe simplicity--gambling on horse
races and often getting into serious trouble by their losses. Dr.
Orchard may be trusted to give these weak, rather than erring daughters
of London, advice which would commend itself to the Free Church Council,
for with all his sacerdotal aberrations the basis of his moral life is
rooted in Puritanism.
It is an entirely good thing that there should be a minister of religion
in London who attracts people of this order, particularly a minister
whose moral notions are so eminently sane and so steadily
uncompromising. London is stronger and less disreputable for Dr.
Orchard's presence in its midst--no doubt a very vulgar, degrading, and
trivial midst, but all the same a great congestion of little people, one
where the solemn note of the old morality sounds all too seldom across
the tinkle of bells in the caps of so many fools.
This moral influence, however, may appear questionable in the eyes of
strong-minded and unsentimental people. Would he exercise such personal
power, it may be asked, if he were not regarded as a "novelty," if the
eccentricity of his position in the nonconformist world had not so
skilfully advertised him to a light and foolish generation ever ready to
run after what is new? Of an Anglican clergyman's popularity I have
heard it said, "Who could not fill a church with the help of the band of
the Grenadier Guards?"
I should not like to answer this question, and yet I do not like to pass
it by. Antipathetic as I find myself to Dr. Orchard, it would not be
just to imply that the power of his personal influence is not a great
one, and one of an entirely wholesome nature. It seems to me, then, that
the nature of that which attracts the unhappy to seek his counsel is of
small moment in comparison with the extent and beneficence of his good
counsel. The fact that he does help people, does save many people from
very unhappy and dangerous situations, is a fact which gives him a title
not only to our respect, but to our gratitude.
Perhaps it is his knowledge of all this petty misery and sordid
unwholesomeness which makes him disposed at times, in spite of an almost
rollicking temperament, to take dismal and despairing views of the
religious future.
I have heard him say with some bitterness that people do not know what
Christianity is, that it has been so misrepresented to them, and so
mixed up with the quarrels of sectarianism, that the heart of it is
really non-existent for the multitude. He speaks with impatience of the
nonconformist churches and with contempt of the Anglican church. We are
all wrong together. Organised religion, he feels, is hanging over the
abyss of destruction, while the nation looks on with an indifference
which should complete its self-contempt.
His quarrel, however, is not only with the churches, but with the nation
as well. He regards the system under which we live as thoroughly
unchristian. It is the system of mammon--a system of frank, brutal, and
insolent materialism. Why do we put up with it?
His religious sense is so outraged by this system of economic
individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those
who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole
body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness,
the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which
informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot
be patched. It is anti-Christian. It should be smashed.
He plunges into economics with a good deal of vigour, but I do not think
he has thought out to its logical conclusion his thesis of guild
socialism. Perhaps his tone is here more vehement than his knowledge of
a notoriously difficult science altogether justifies.
He opposes himself to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth
century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His
contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only
the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may
picture him with drawn sword--a sword tempered in inquisitorial
fires--standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend it with his
spiritual life.
His opinions are apt to place him among minorities. He was against the
War, and during that long-drawn agony attracted to himself the mild
attention of the authorities. I believe he likened the great struggle to
a battle between Sodom and Gomorrah. However, he was careful not to go
so far as Mr. Bertrand Russell. As he himself says, "I don't mind dying
for Jesus Christ, but not for making a silly ass of myself."
He occasionally writes reviews for _The Nation_, and has published a
number of uneventful books. His writing is not distinguished or
illuminating. With a pen in his hand he loses all his natural force. He
writes, I think, as one who feels that he is wasting time. Like Mr.
Winston Churchill, he diverts his leisure with a paintbrush.
One is disposed to judge that the mind of this very fiery particle is
too busy with side-issues to make acquaintance with the deeper mysteries
of his religion. When he complains that people do not know what
Christianity is, one wonders whether his own definition would satisfy
the saints. He is a fighter rather than a teacher, a man of action
rather than a seer. I do not think he could be happy in a world which
presented him with no opportunities for punching heads.
Matthew Arnold, quoting from _The Times_ a sentence to the effect that
the chief Dissenting ministers are becoming quite the intellectual
equals of the ablest of the clergy, referred it to the famous Dr. Dale
of Birmingham, and remarked: "I have no fears concerning Mr. Dale's
intellectual muscles; what I am a little uneasy about is his religious
temper. The essence of religion is grace and peace."
But Dr. Orchard, we must not fail to see, is quite genuinely exasperated
by the deadness of religious life, and is straining every nerve to
quicken the soul of Christ's sleeping Church. This discontent of his is
an important symptom, even if his prescription, a very old one, gives no
hope of a cure. He is popular, influential, a figure of the day, and
still young; yet his soul is full of rebellion and his heart is swelling
with the passion of mutiny. Something is evidently not right. Quite
certainly he has not discovered the peace that passes understanding.
But perhaps Dr. Orchard will never be satisfied till all men think as he
thinks, and until there is only one Church in the world for the
expression of spiritual life, with either Bishop Herford or himself for
its pope.
In the meantime he is too busy for the profound silence. The event of
the day sweeps him before it.
BISHOP TEMPLE
Manchester, Bishop of, since 1921; Temple, Rev. William, M.A.; D. Litt.;
President Life and Liberty Movement; Canon Residentiary of Westminister,
1919-21; Editor of _The Challenge_, 1915-18; Hon. Chaplain to the King,
1915; b. The Palace, Exeter, 15 Oct., 1881; s. of Late Archbishop of
Canterbury; in. 1916, Frances Gertrude Acland, y.d. of F.H. Anson, 72
St. George's Square, S.W. Educ.: Rugby (Scholar); Balliol College,
Oxford (Exhibitioner) First class Classical Mods., 1902; 1st class Lit.
Hum., 1904; President Oxford Union, 1904; Fellow and Lecturer in
Philosophy, Queen's College, Oxford, 1904-1910; Deacon, 1908; Priest,
1909; Chaplain to Archbishop of Canterbury, 1910; President of the
Workers Educational Association; Headmaster, Repton School, 1910-14;
Rector of St. James's Piccadilly, 1914-18.
[Illustration: BISHOP TEMPLE]