ever since the conversion of the English began in the seventh
century of our era, the holder of that see has been the greatest
ecclesiastical personage in these islands, with a recognised
authority over all England, as well as an influence and dignity to
which, in the Middle Ages, the Archbishops of Armagh and St. Andrews
(primates of the Irish and Scottish Churches) practically bowed,
even while refusing to admit his legal supremacy. To be the most
highly placed and officially the most powerful man in the churches of
Britain, in days when the Church was better organised, and in some
ways stronger, than the State, meant a vast deal. The successor of
Augustine was often called a Pope of his own world--that world of
Britain which lay apart from the larger world of the European
continent. Down to the Reformation, the English primates possessed a
power which made some of them almost a match for the English kings.
Dunstan, Lanfranc, Anselm, Thomas (Becket), Hubert, Stephen Langton,
Arundel, Warham, were among the foremost statesmen of their time.
After Henry VIII.'s breach with Rome, the Primate of England
received some access of dignity in becoming independent of the
Pope; but, in reality, the loss of church power and church wealth
which the Reformation caused lowered his political importance. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, there were still
some conspicuous and influential prelates at Canterbury--Cranmer,
Pole, Whitgift, and Laud the best remembered among them. After the
Revolution of 1688, a time of smaller men begins. The office
retained its dignity as the highest place open to a subject, ranking
above the Lord Chancellor or the Lord President of the Council, but
the Church of England, having no fightings within, nor anything to
fear from without, was lapped in placid ease, so it mattered
comparatively little who her chief pastor was.
Bishoprics were in those days regarded chiefly as pieces of rich
preferment with which prime ministers bought the support of powerful
adherents. But since the middle of the nineteenth century, as the
Anglican Church has become at once more threatened and more energetic,
as more of the life of the nation has flowed into her and round her,
the office of a bishop has risen in importance. People show more
interest in the appointments to be made, and ministers have become
proportionately careful in making them. Bishops work harder and are
more in the public eye now than they were eighty, or even fifty, years
ago. They have lost something of the antique dignity and social
consideration which they enjoyed. They no longer wear wigs or ride in
State coaches. They may be seen in third-class railway carriages, or
sitting on the tops of omnibuses. But they have gained by having
countless opportunities opened up to them for exerting influence in
philanthropic as well as in religious movements; and the more zealous
among them turn these opportunities to excellent account.
Whatever is true of an ordinary bishop is true _a fortiori_ of the
Archbishop of Canterbury. He is still a great personage, but he is
great in a new way, with less of wealth and power but larger
opportunities of influence. He is also a kind of Pope in a new way,
because he is the central figure of the Anglican communion over the
whole world, with no legal jurisdiction outside England (except in
India), but far over-topping all the prelates of that communion in the
United States or the British Colonies. Less deference is paid to the
office, considered simply as an office, than it received in the Middle
Ages, because society and thought have been tinged by the spirit of
democratic equality, and people realise that offices are only
artificial creations, whose occupants are human beings like
themselves. But if he is himself a man of ability and force, he may
make his headship of an ancient and venerated church a vantage-ground
whence to address the nation as well as the members of his own
communion. He is sure of being listened to, which is of itself no
small matter in a country where many voices are striving to make
themselves heard at the same time. The world takes his words into
consideration; the newspapers repeat them. His position gives him easy
access to the ministers of the Crown, and implies a confidential
intercourse with the Crown itself. He is, or can be, "in touch" with
all the political figures who can in any way influence the march of
events, and is able to enforce his views upon them. All his conduct is
watched by the nation; so that if it is discreet, provident, animated
by high and consistent principle, he gets full credit for whatever he
does well, and acquires that influence to which masses of men are
eager to bow whenever they can persuade themselves that it is
deserved. During the first half of the nineteenth century the English
people was becoming more interested in ecclesiastical and in
theological matters than it had been during the century preceding. It
grew by slow degrees more inclined to observe ecclesiastical persons,
to read and think about theological subjects, to reflect upon the
relations which the Church ought to bear to civil life and moral
progress. Thus a leader of the Church of England became relatively a
more important factor than he had been a century ago, and an
archbishop, strong by his character, rectitude, and powers of
utterance, rose to occupy a more influential, if not more conspicuous,
position than his predecessors in the days of the Georges had done.
These changes naturally made the selection of an archbishop a more
delicate and troublesome business than it was in those good old days.
Nobody then blamed a Prime Minister for preferring an aspirant who had
the support of powerful political connections. Blameless in life he
must be: even the eighteenth century demanded that from candidates for
English, if not, according to Dean Swift, for Irish sees. If he was
also a man of courtly grace and dignity, and a finished scholar, so
much the better. If he was a man of piety, that also was well. By the
time of Queen Victoria the possession of piety and of gifts of speech
had become more important qualifications, but the main thing was
tactful moderation. Even in apostolic days it was required that a
bishop should rule his own house well, and the Popes esteemed most
saintly have not always been the best, as the famous case of Celestine
the Fifth attests. An archbishop must first and foremost be a discreet
and guarded man, expressing few opinions, and those not extreme ones.
His chief virtue came to be, if not the purely negative one of
offending no section by expressing the distinctive views of any other,
yet that of swerving so little from the _via media_ between Rome and
Geneva that neither the Tractarian party, who began to be feared after
1837, nor the pronounced Low Churchmen could claim the Primate as
disposed to favour their opinions. In the case of ordinary bishops the
plan could be adopted, and has since the days of Lord Palmerston been
mostly followed, of giving every party its turn, while choosing from
every party men of the safer sort. This method, however, was less
applicable to the See of Canterbury, for a man on whose action much
might turn could not well be taken from any particular section. The
acts and words of a Primate, who is expected to "give a line" to the
clergy generally and to speak on behalf of the bench of bishops as a
whole, are so closely scrutinised that he must be prudent and wary,
yet not so wary as to seem timid. He ought to be both firm and suave,
conciliatory and decided. That he may do justice to all sections of
the Church of England, he ought not to be an avowed partisan of any.
Yet he must be able and eminent, and of course able and eminent men
are apt to throw themselves into some one line of action or set of
views, and so come to be considered partisans. The position which the
Archbishop of Canterbury holds as the representative in Parliament of
the whole Established Church, makes statesmanship the most important
of all qualifications. Learning, energy, eloquence, piety would none
of them, nor all of them together, make up for the want of calmness
and wisdom. Yet all those qualities are obviously desirable, because
they strengthen as well as adorn the primate's position.
Archibald Campbell Tait (born in Scotland in 1811, died 1882) was
educated at Glasgow University and at Balliol College, Oxford; worked
at his college for some years as a tutor, succeeded Dr. Arnold as
headmaster of Rugby School in 1843, became Dean of Carlisle and then
Bishop of London, and was translated to Canterbury in 1868. It has
been generally understood that Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister,
suggested another prelate for the post, but the Queen, who did not
share her minister's estimate of that prelate, expressed a preference
for Tait. Her choice was amply justified, for Tait united, and indeed
possessed in a high degree, the qualifications which have just been
enumerated. He was, if it be not a paradox to say so, more remarkable
as an archbishop than as a man. He had no original power as a thinker.
He was not a striking preacher, and the more pains he took with his
sermons the less interesting did they become. He was so far from being
learned that you could say no more of him than that he was a sound
scholar and a well-informed man. He was deeply and earnestly pious,
but in a quiet, almost dry way, which lacked what is called unction,
though it impressed those who were in close contact with him. He
showed slight interest either in the historical or in the speculative
side of theology. Though a good headmaster, he was not a stimulating
teacher. Had he remained all his life in a subordinate position, as a
college tutor at Oxford, or as canon of some cathedral, he would have
discharged the duties of the position in a thoroughly satisfactory
way, and would have acquired influence among his colleagues, but no
one would have felt that Fate had dealt unfairly with him in depriving
him of some larger career and loftier post. No one, indeed, who knew
him when he was a college tutor seems to have predicted the dignities
he was destined to attain, although he had shown in the theological
strife that then raged at Oxford the courage and independence of his
character.
In what, then, did the secret of his success lie--the secret, that is,
of his acquitting himself so excellently in those dignities as to have
become almost a model to his own and the next generation of what an
Archbishop of Canterbury ought to be? In the statesmanlike quality of
his mind. He had not merely moderation, but what, though often
confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady
balance of mind. He was carried about by no winds of doctrine. He
seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory
as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be
regarded. He was, I think, the first man of Scottish birth who ever
rose to be Primate of England, and he had the cautious self-restraint
which is deemed characteristic of his nation. He knew how to be
dignified without assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without
timidity, judicious without coldness. He was, above all things, a
singularly just man, who recognised every one's rights, and did not
seek to overbear them by an exercise of authority. He was as ready to
listen to his opponents as to his friends. Indeed, he so held himself
as to appear to have no opponents, but to be rather a judge before
whom different advocates were stating their respective cases, than a
leader seeking to make his own views or his own party prevail. Genial
he could hardly be called, for there was little warmth, little display
of emotion, in his manner; and the clergy noted, at least in his
earlier episcopal days, a touch of the headmaster in his way of
receiving them. But he was simple and kindly, capable of seeing the
humorous side of things, desiring to believe the good rather than the
evil, and to lead people instead of driving them. With all his caution
he was direct and straightforward, saying no more than was necessary,
but saying nothing he had occasion to be ashamed of. He sometimes made
mistakes, but they were not mistakes of the heart, and, being free
from vanity or self-conceit, he was willing in his quiet way to admit
them and to alter his course accordingly. So his character by degrees
gained upon the nation, and so even ecclesiastical partisanship,
proverbially more bitter than political, because it springs from
deeper wells of feeling, grew to respect and spare him. The influence
he obtained went far to strengthen the position of the Established
Church, and to keep its several parties from breaking out into more
open hostility with one another. He himself inclined to what might be
called a moderate Broad Church attitude, leaning more to Evangelical
than to Tractarian or Romanising views in matters of doctrine. At one
time the extreme High Churchmen regarded him as an enemy. But this
unfriendliness had almost died away when the death of his wife and his
only son (a young man of singularly winning character), followed by
his own long illness, stilled the voices of criticism.
He exerted great influence in the House of Lords by his tact, by his
firmness of character, and by the consistency of his public course, as
well as by powers of speech, which, matured by long practice, had
risen to a high level. Without eloquence, without either imagination
or passion, which are the chief elements in eloquence, he had a grave,
weighty, thoughtful style which impressed that fastidious audience.
His voice was strong and sonorous, his diction plain yet pure and
dignified, his matter well considered. His thought moved on a high
plane; he spoke as one who fully believed every word he said. The late
Bishop of Winchester, the famous Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, was
incomparably his superior not only as a talker but as an orator, but
no less inferior in his power over the House of Lords, for so little
does rhetorical brilliance count in a critical and practical assembly.
Next to courage, the quality which gains trust and regard in a
deliberative body is that which is familiarly described when it is
said of a man, "You always know where to find him." Tait belonged to
no party. But his principles, though not rigid, were fixed and
settled; his words and votes were the expression of his principles.
The presence of bishops in the House of Lords is disapproved by some
sections of English opinion, and there are those among the temporal
peers who, quite apart from any political feeling, are said to regard
them with little favour. But every one must admit that they have
raised and adorned the debates in that chamber. Besides Tait and
Wilberforce, two other prelates of the same generation stood in the
front rank of speakers, Dr. Magee, whose wit and fire would have found
a more fitting theatre in the House of Commons, and Dr. Thirlwall, a
scholar and historian whose massive intellect and stately diction were
too rarely used to raise great political issues above the dust-storms
of party controversy.
Perhaps no Archbishop since the Revolution of 1688 has exercised so
much influence as Dr. Tait, and certainly none within living memory is
so well entitled to be credited with a definite ecclesiastical policy.
His aim was to widen the bounds of the Church of England, so far as
the law could, without evasion, be stretched for that purpose. He bore
a leading part in obtaining an Act of Parliament which introduced a
new and less strict form of clerical subscription. He realised that
the Church of England can maintain her position as a State Church
only by adapting herself to the movements of opinion, and accordingly
he voted for the Divorce Bill of 1859, and for the Burials Bill, which
relieved Dissenters from a grievance that exposed the Established
Church to odium. The Irish Church Disestablishment Bill of 1869 threw
upon him, at the critical moment when it went from the House of
Commons, where it had passed by a large majority, to the House of
Lords, where a still larger majority was hostile, a duty delicate in
itself, and such as seldom falls to the lot of a prelate. The Queen
wrote to him suggesting that he should endeavour to effect a
compromise between Mr. Gladstone, then head of the Liberal Ministry,
and the leading Tory peers who were opposing the Bill. He conducted
the negotiation with tact and judgment, and succeeded in securing good
pecuniary terms for the Protestant Episcopal Establishment. Though he
had joined in the Letter of the Bishops which conveyed their strong
disapproval of the book called _Essays and Reviews_ (whose supposed
heretical tendencies roused such a storm in 1861), and had thereby
displeased his friends, Temple (afterwards archbishop), Jowett, and
Stanley,[20] he joined in the judgment of the Privy Council which in
1863 dismissed the charges against the impugned Essayists. Despite his
advocacy of the Bill which in 1874 provided a new procedure to be used
against clergymen transgressing the ritual prescribed by law, he
discouraged prosecutions, and did his utmost to keep Ritualists as
well as moderate Rationalists within the pale of the Church of
England. He did not succeed--no one could have succeeded, even though
he had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels--in stilling
ecclesiastical strife. The controversies of his days still rage,
though in a slightly different form. But in refusing to yield to the
pressure of any section, in regarding the opinion of the laity rather
than that of the clergy, in keeping close to the law yet giving it the
widest possible interpretation, he laid down the lines on which the
Anglican Established Church can best be defended and upheld. That she
will last, as an Establishment, for any very long time, will hardly be
expected by those who mark the direction in which thought tends to
move all over the civilised world. But Tait's policy and personality
have counted for something in prolonging the time-honoured connection
of the Anglican Church with the English State.
Perhaps a doubtful service either to the Church or to the State. Yet
even those who regret the connection, and who, surveying the long
course of Christian history from the days of the Emperor Constantine
down to our own, believe that the Christian Church would have been
spiritually purer and morally more effective had she never become
either the mistress or the servant or the ally of the State, but
relied on her divine commission only, may wish that, when the day
arrives for the ancient bond to be unloosed, it should be unloosed not
through an embittered political struggle, but because the general
sentiment of the nation, and primarily of religious men throughout the
nation, has come to approve the change.
-----
[19] An admirable life of Archbishop Tait by his son-in-law, Dr. R. T.
Davidson (now Archbishop of Canterbury), and Canon Benham
appeared in 1891.
[20] They thought his public action scarcely consistent with the
language he had used to Temple in private.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE[21]
When Mr. Anthony Trollope died (December 11, 1882) at the age of
sixty-seven, he was the best known of our English writers of fiction,
and stood foremost among them if the double test of real merit and
wide popularity be applied. Some writers, such as Wilkie Collins, may
have commanded a larger sale. One writer at least, Mr. George
Meredith, had produced work of far deeper insight and higher
imaginative power. But the gifts of Mr. Meredith had then scarcely
begun to win recognition, and not one reader knew his name for five
who knew Trollope's. So Mr. Thomas Hardy had published what many
continue to think his two best stories, but they had not yet caught
the eye of the general public. Mrs. Oliphant, high as was the general
level of her work, and inexhaustible as her fertility appeared, had
not cut her name so deep upon the time as Trollope did. Everything she
did was good, nothing superlatively good. No one placed Trollope in
the first rank of creative novelists beside Dickens or Thackeray, or
beside George Eliot, who had died two years before. But in the second
rank he stood high; and though other novelists may have had as many
readers as he, none was in so many ways representative of the general
character and spirit of English fiction. He had established his
reputation nearly thirty years before, when Thackeray and Dickens were
still in the fulness of their fame; and had maintained it during the
zenith of George Eliot's. For more than a generation his readers had
come from the best-educated classes as well as from those who lack
patience or taste for anything heavier than a story of adventure. In
this respect he stood above Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, Ouida, and
other heroines of the circulating libraries, and also above such more
artistic or less sensational writers as William Black, Walter Besant,
James Payn, and Whyte Melville. (The school of so-called realistic
fiction had scarcely begun to appear.) None of these had, like
Trollope, succeeded in making their creations a part of the common
thought of cultivated Englishmen; none had, like him, given us
characters which we treat as typical men and women, and discuss at a
dinner-table as though they were real people. Mrs. Proudie, for
instance, the Bishop of Barchester's wife, to take the most obvious
instance (though not that most favourable to Trollope, for he produced
better portraits than hers), or Archdeacon Grantly, was when Trollope
died as familiar a name to English men and women between sixty and
thirty years of age as Wilkins Micawber, or Blanche Amory, or Rosamond
Lydgate. There was no other living novelist of whose personages the
same could be said, and perhaps none since has attained this
particular kind of success.