The Case of Richard Meynell

Case of Richard Meynell, The

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Title: The Case of Richard Meynell
Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward
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THE CASE OF RICHARD MEYNELL
BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
1911

TO THE MEMORY OF A BELOVED CHILD

A FOREWORD
May I ask those of my American readers who are not intimately
acquainted with the conditions of English rural and religious life to
remember that the dominant factor in it--the factor on which the story
of Richard Meynell depends--is the existence of the State Church, of
the great ecclesiastical corporation, the direct heir of the
pre-Reformation Church, which owns the cathedrals and the parish
churches, which by right of law speaks for the nation on all national
occasions, which crowns and marries and buries the Kings of England,
and, through her bishops in the House of Lords, exercises a constant
and important influence on the lawmaking of the country? This Church
possesses half the elementary schools, and is the legal religion of the
great public schools which shape the ruling upper class. She is
surrounded with the prestige of centuries, and it is probable that in
many directions she was never so active or so well served by her
members as she is at present.
At the same time, there are great forces of change ahead. Outside the
Anglican Church stands quite half the nation, gathered in the various
non-conformist bodies--Wesleyan, Congregational, Baptist,
Presbyterian, and so on. Between them and the Church exists a
perpetual warfare, partly of opinion, partly of social difference and
jealousy. In every village and small town this warfare exists. The

non-conformist desires to deprive the Church of her worldly and
political privileges; the churchman talks of the sin of schism, or draws
up schemes of reunion which drop still-born. Meanwhile, alike in the
Church, in non-conformity, and in the neutral world which owes formal
allegiance to neither, vast movements of thought have developed in the
last hundred years, years as pregnant with the germs of new life as the
wonderful hundred years that followed the birth of Christ. Whether the
old bottles can be adjusted to the new wine, whether further division or
a new Christian unity is to emerge from the strife of tongues, whether
the ideas of modernism; rife in all forms of Christianity, can be
accommodated to the ancient practices and given a share in the great
material possessions of a State Church; how individual lives are
affected in the passionate struggle of spiritual faiths and practical
interests involved in such an attempt; how conscience may be enriched
by its success or sterilized by its failure; how the fight itself, ably
waged, may strengthen the spiritual elements, the power of living and
suffering in men and women--it is with such themes that this story
attempts to deal. Twenty-two years ago I tried a similar subject in
"Robert Elsmere." Since then the movement of ideas in religion and
philosophy has been increasingly rapid and fruitful. I am deeply
conscious how little I may be able to express it. But those who twenty
years ago welcomed the earlier book--and how can I ever forget its
reception in America!--may perhaps be drawn once again to some of
the old themes in their new dress.
MARY A. WARD

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES E. BROCK
"'My dear fellow! No woman ought to marry under nineteen or twenty'"
The Rectory
"Meynell, as he hesitatingly advanced, became the spectator of a scene
not intended for his eyes"
"He shook hands with the Dean"
"'I wonder whether she's ever had any