Painted Windows | Page 9

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 ?neid_. Father Knox was once a member of this party and something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his "medi?val" 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 thing an Englishman will part with is his property."
Laughter, if it can be called laughter, is rare on his lips, and is reserved in general for opinions which are in antagonism to his own. He laughs in this way at the makeshift compromises of statesmen and theologians and economists saying that what those men hate more than anything else is a fixed principle. He quotes with a sardonic pleasure the capital saying that a certain statesman's idea of a settled policy based on fixed moral principles is a policy which will last from breakfast-time to luncheon--he repeats the last words "from breakfast-time to