Painted Windows | Page 8

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 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