Painted Windows | Page 8

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