Painted Windows | Page 9

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