Painted Windows | Page 7

of pain and defeat shows in the face of Dr. Gore. But his look is the look of one who has not conquered and who expects further, perhaps greater disaster.
He has told us that "a man must be strong at the centre before he can be free at the circumference of his being," and in support of this doctrine he quotes the words of Jesus, "It is better to enter into life halt or maimed rather than having two hands or two feet to go into hell." Has he reached strength at the centre, one wonders, by doing violence to any part of his moral being? Is his strength not the strength of the whole man but the strength only of his will, a forced strength to which his reason has not greatly contributed and into which his affections have not entirely entered? Is this, one asks, the reason of that look in his face, the look of bafflement, of perplexity, of a permanently troubled conscience, of a divided self, a self that is both maimed and halt?
How is it, we ask ourselves, that a man who makes so profound an impression on those who know him, and who commands as no other teacher of his time the affectionate veneration of the Christian world, and who has placed himself whole-heartedly in political alliance with the militant forces of victorious Labour, exercises so little influence in the moral life of the nation? How is it that he suggests to us no feeling of the relation of triumphant leadership, but rather the spirit of Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow?
We learn from his teaching that no one can be a Christian without "a tremendous act of choice," that Christ proclaimed His standard with "tremendous severity of claim," that "it is very hard to be a good Christian," and that we must surely, as St. Peter says, "pass the time of our sojourning here in fear." All of which suggests to us that the Bishop has not entered into life whole, even perhaps that sometimes he looks back over his shoulder with a spasm of horror at the hell from which he has escaped only by the sacrifice of his rational integrity.
Let us recall the main events of his history.
He was educated at Harrow and Balliol, and exercised a remarkable spiritual influence at Oxford, where he remained, first as Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon College and then as Librarian of Pusey House, till he was forty years of age.
During these years he edited the book called Lux Mundi in which he abandoned the dogma of verbal inspiration and accepted the theory that the human knowledge of Christ was limited. This book distressed a number of timid people, but extended the influence of Dr. Gore to men of science, such as Romanes, as well as to a much larger number of thoughtful undergraduates.
For a year he was Vicar of Radley, and then came to London as a Canon of Westminster, immediately attracting enormous congregations to hear him preach, his sermons being distinguished by a most singular simplicity, a profound piety, and above all by a deep honesty of conviction which few who heard him could withstand. Weller, the Dean's verger at the Abbey, has many stories to tell of the long queues at Westminster which in those days were one of the sights of London. The Abbey has never since recovered its place as a centre of Christian teaching.
Up to this time Dr. Gore's sympathy for the Oxford Movement was merely the background of a life devoted to the mystical element and the moral implications of the Christian religion. He was known as a High Churchman; he was felt to be a saint; his modernism was almost forgotten.
It was not long before his tentative movement towards modernism ended in a profession of Catholic principles which allied him with forces definitely and sometimes angrily ranged against the Higher Criticism. He became a Bishop. Almost at once the caressing fingers of the saint became the heavy hand of the dogmatist. He who had frightened Liddon by his tremulous adventure towards the mere fringe of modernism became the declared enemy, the implacable foe, of the least of his clergy who questioned even the most questionable clauses of the creeds. He demanded 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,