ITS MOUTHINGS OF THE PAST HAD BECOME ITS MUMBLINGS OF THE PRESENT.
It was very distressing--very disappointing! The bishop would neither
institute proceedings against the rector of St. Chad’s nor state plainly
if it was his intention to proceed against that clergyman. When some
people suggested very delicately--the way ordinary people would suggest
anything to a bishop--that it was surely not in sympathy with the
organization of the Church for any clergyman to take advantage of his
position and his pulpit to cast sometimes ridicule, sometimes abuse,
upon certain “scriptural characters”--that was their phrase--who had
hitherto always been regarded as sacred, comparatively sacred, the
bishop had brought the tips of the fingers of one hand in immediate,
or almost immediate, contact with the tips of the fingers of his
other hand, and had shaken his head--mournfully, sadly. These signs of
acquiescence, trifling though they were, had encouraged the deputation
that once waited on his lordship--two military men (retired on the
age clause), an officer of engineers (on the active list), a solicitor
(retired), and a member of the London County Council (by occupation an
ironmonger), to express the direct opinion that the scandal which had
been created by the dissemination--the unrebuked dissemination--of the
doctrines held by the rector of St. Chad’s was affording the friends
of Disestablishment an additional argument in favor of their policy of
spoliation. At this statement his lordship had nodded his head three
times with a gravity that deeply impressed the spokesman of the
deputation. He wondered if his lordship had ever before heard that
phrase about the furnishing of an additional argument to the friends
of Disestablishment. (As a matter of fact his lordship had heard it
before.)
After an expression of the deputation’s opinion that immediate steps
should be taken to make the rector of St. Chad’s amenable to the laws of
the Church,
His lordship replied.
(It was his facility in making conciliatory replies that had brought
about his elevation in the Church):
He referred to (1) his deep appreciation of the sincerity of the
deputation; (2) his own sense of responsibility in regard to the
feelings of the weaker brethren; (3) his appreciation of the value of
the counsel of practical men in many affairs of the Church; (4) the
existing position of the Church in regard to the laity; (5) the friendly
relations that had always existed between himself personally and the
clergy of his extensive diocese; (6) his earnest and prayerful desire
that these relations might be strengthened; (7) the insecurity of a
house divided against itself; (8) the progress of socialism; (9) the
impossibility of socialism commending itself to Englishmen; (10) the
recent anarchist outrages; (11) the purity of the Court of her
Majesty the Queen; (12) the union of all Christian Churches; (13) the
impossibility of such union ever becoming permanent; (14) the value of
Holy Scripture in daily life; (15) his firm belief in the achievement
of England’s greatness by means of the open Bible; (16) the note of
pessimism in modern life; (17) the necessity for the Church’s combating
modern pessimism; (18) the Church’s position as a purveyor of healthy
literature for the young; (19) his reluctance to take up any more of
their valuable time, and (20) his assurance that the remarks of their
spokesman would have his earnest and prayerful attention.
The deputation then thanked his lordship and withdrew.
But still the bishop made no move in the matter, and the friends of the
Rev. George Holland felt grievously disappointed. They had counted on
the bishop’s at least writing a letter of remonstrance to the rector of
St. Chad’s, and upon the publication of the letter, with the rector’s
reply in the newspapers; but now quite two months had passed since
the appearance of “Revised Versions,” the bishop had returned from the
Engadine, and still there were no indications of his intention to make
the Rev. George Holland responsible to the right tribunal--whatever that
was--for his doctrines. They counted on his martyrdom within six months;
and, consequently, upon his election to a position of distinction in the
eyes of his fellow-country-men--or, at least, of his country-women. But
the bishop they found to be a poor thing after all. They felt sure that
what the people said about his being quite humble in the presence of his
wife was not without some foundation; and they thought that, after all,
there was a great deal to be said in favor of the celibacy of priests
compulsory in the Church of Rome. If the bishops of the Church of
England were not very careful, they might be the means of such a going
over to Rome as had never previously been witnessed in England.
George Holland may have been disappointed, or he may have been pleased
at the inactivity of the bishop. He made no sign one way or the other.
Of course he was no more than human: he would have regarded a letter of
remonstrance from the bishop as a personal compliment; he had certainly
expected such a letter, for he had already put together the heads of
the reply he would make--and publish--to any official remonstrance that
might be offered to him. Still he made no sign. He preached at least
one sermon every Sunday morning, and whenever it was known that he would
preach, St. Chad’s was crowded and the offertory was all that could be
desired. The bishop’s chaplain no longer held a watching brief in regard
in regard to those sermons. He did not think it worth while to do so
much, George Holland’s friends said, shaking their heads and pursing out
their lips. Oh, yes! there could be no doubt that the bishop was a very
weak sort of man.
But then suddenly there appeared in the new number of the _Zeit Geist
Review_ an article above the signature of George Holland, entitled “The
Enemy to Christianity,” and in a moment it became pretty plain that
George Holland had not in his “Revised Versions,” said the last word
that he had to say regarding the attitude of the Church of England in
respect of the non-church-goers of the day. When people read the article
they asked “Who is the Enemy to Christianity referred to by the writer?”
and they were forced to conclude that the answer which was made to such
an inquiry by the article itself was, “The Church.”
He pointed out the infatuation which possessed the heads of the Church
of England in expecting to appeal with success to the educated people
of the present day, while still declining to move with the course of
thought of the people. Already the braying of a trombone out of tune,
and the barbarous jingle of a tambourine, had absorbed some hundred
thousand of possible church-goers; and though, of course, it was
impossible for sensible men and women--the people whom the Church should
endeavor to grapple to its soul with hooks of steel--to look, except
with amused sadness, at the ludicrous methods and vulgar ineptitude of
the Salvation Army, still the Church was making no effort to provide
the sensible, thinking, educated people of England with an equivalent
as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the
requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who
played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones. Thus it is
that one man says to another nowadays, when he has got nothing better to
talk about, “Are you a man of intelligence, or do you go to church?”
Men of intelligence do not go to church nowadays, Mr. Holland announced
in that article of his in the _Zeit Geist_; many women of intelligence
refrain from going, he added, though many beautifully dressed women were
still frequent attenders. There was no blinking the fact that the
crass stupidity of the Church had made church-going unpopular--almost
impossible--with intelligent men and women. The Church insulted the
intelligence by trying to reconcile the teachings of Judaism with the
teachings of Christianity, when the two were absolutely irreconcilable.
It was the crass stupidity of the Church that had caused it--for its
self-protection, it fancied--to bitterly oppose every truth that was
revealed to man. The Church had tortured and burned at the stake
the great men to whom God had revealed the great facts of nature’s
workings--the motion of the earth and the other planets. But these
facts, being Divine Truth, became accepted by the world in spite of the
thumb-screws and the fagots--the arguments of the Church against Divine
Truth. The list of the Divine Truths which the Church had bitterly
opposed was a sickening document. Geography, Geology, Biology--the
progress of all had, even within recent years, been bitterly opposed
by the Church, and yet the self-constituted arbiters between Truth and
falsehood had been compelled to eat their own words--to devour their
own denunciations when they found that the Truth was accepted by the
intelligence of the people in spite of the anathemas of the Church.
The intelligence of the Church was equal only to the duty of burning
witches. It burned them by the thousand, simply because ancient Judaism
had a profound belief in the witch and because a blood-thirsty Jewish
murderer-monarch had organized a witch hunt.
And yet with such a record against it--a record of the murder of
innocent men and women who endeavored to promulgate the Divine Truths
of nature--the Church still arrogated to itself the right to lay down
a rule of life for intelligent people--a rule of life founded upon that
impossible amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity. The science of
the Church was not equal to the task of amalgamating two such deadly
opponents.
Was it any wonder, then, that church-going had become practically
obsolete among intelligent men and women? the writer asked.
He then went on to refer to the nature of the existing services of
the Church of England. He dealt only casually with the mockery of
the response of the congregation to the reading out of the Fourth
Commandment by the priest, when no one in the Church paid the least
respect to the Seventh Day. This was additional proof of the absurdity
of the attempted amalgamation of Judaism and Christianity. But what he
dealt most fully with was the indiscriminate selection of what were very
properly termed the “Lessons” from the Hebrew Bible. It was, he said,
far from edifying to hear some chapters read out from the lectern
without comment; though fortunately the readers were as a rule so
imperfectly trained that the most objectionable passages had their
potentiality of mischief minimized. He concluded his indictment by a
reference to a sermon preached by the average clergyman of the Church of
England. This was, usually, he said, either a theological essay founded
upon an obsolete system of theology, or a series of platitudes of
morality delivered by an unpractical man. The first was an insult to
the intelligence of an average man; the second was an insult to the
intelligence of an average schoolgirl.
His summing up of the whole case against the Church was as logical as
it was trenchant. The Church had surely become, he said, like unto the
Giant Pagan in “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” who, when incapable of doing
mischief, sat mumbling at the mouth of his cave on the roadside. The
Church had become toothless, decrepit either for evil or for good. Its
mouthings of the past had become its mumblings of the present. The
cave at the mouth of which this toothless giant sat was very dark; and
intelligent people went by with a good-natured and tolerant laugh.
This article was published in the _Review_ on Tuesday. Phyllis read it
on the evening of that day. On Wednesday the newspapers were full of
this further development of the theories of the writer, and on Thursday
afternoon the writer paid a visit to Phyllis.
As he entered the drawing room he found himself face to face with
Herbert Courtland, who was in the act of leaving.