Painted Windows Part 1

Painted Windows.

by Harold Begbie.

INTRODUCTION

By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to discover a reason for the present rather ign.o.ble situation of the Church in the affections of men.

My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because it has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of the Church to impress humanity with what its doc.u.ments call the Will of G.o.d--a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful devotion, sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern Church.

As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a consequence of the late War.

The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which has for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of a Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and unworthy forces within his own breast--envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness--which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love G.o.d because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-a.s.sertion which makes for war. History and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of individual man to live in love and charity with his neighbour, justifies the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief mercy the teaching of a science of life--a way of existence which would bring the feet of unhappy man out of chaos, and finally make it possible for the human race to live intelligently, and so, beautifully.

Now if this indeed were the purpose of the Incarnation, we may be pardoned for thinking that the Church, which has been the cause of so much tyranny and bloodshed in the past, and which even now so willingly lends itself to bitter animosities and warlike controversies, has missed the whole secret of its first and greatest dogma[2].

[Footnote 2: I asked a certain Dean the other day whether the old controversy between High Church and Low Church still obtained in his diocese. "Oh, dear, no!" he replied; "High and Low are now united to fight Modernists."]

Therefore in studying the modern mind of Christianity, persuaded that its mission is to teach mankind a lesson of quite sublime importance, we may possibly arrive in our conclusion at a unifying principle which will at least help the Church to turn its moral earnestness, its manifold self-sacrifice, and its great but conflicting energies, in this one direction which is its own supremest end, namely, the interpretation of human life in terms of spiritual reality.

To those who distrust reason and hold fast rather fearfully to the moorings of tradition, I would venture to say, first, that perilous times are most perilous to error, and, secondly, in the words of Dr.

Kirsopp Lake, "After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence--a courageous trust in the great purpose of all things and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight, whatever the price may be."

"_The distinction between right and wrong disappears when conscience dies, and that between fact and fiction when reason is neglected.

The one is the danger which besets clever politicians, the other the nemesis which waits on popular preachers."

--Kirsopp Lake._

CHAPTER I

BISHOP GORE

_He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will ... attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that "ascent of the soul into the intelligible world."_--WALTER PATER.

No man occupies a more commanding position in the Churches of England than Dr. Gore. I am a.s.sured in more than one quarter that a vote on this subject would place him head and shoulders above all other religious teachers of our time. In the region of personal influence he appears to be without a rival.

Such is the quality of his spirit, that a person so different from him both in temperament and intellect as the Dean of St. Paul's has confessed that he is "one of the most powerful spiritual forces in our generation."

It is, I think, the grave sincerity of his soul which gives him this pre-eminence. He is not more eloquent than many others, he is not greatly distinguished by scholars.h.i.+p, he is only one in a numerous company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is absorbed into a _Power_ which overshadows his presence and even sounds in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken everything for the Kingdom of G.o.d.

One who knows him far better than I do said to me the other day, "Charles Gore has not aimed at harmonising his ideas with the Gospel, but of fusing his whole spirit into the Divine Wisdom."

In one, and only one, respect, this salience of Dr. Gore may be likened to the political prominence of Mr. Lloyd George. It is a salience complete, dominating, unapproached, but one which must infallibly diminish with time. For it is, I am compelled to think, the salience of personality. History does not often endorse the more enthusiastic verdicts of journalism, and personal magnetism is a force which unhappily melts into air long before its tradition comes down to posterity[3].

[Footnote 3: The genius of the Prime Minister, which makes so astonis.h.i.+ng an impression on the public, plainly lies in saving from irretrievable disaster at the eleventh hour the consequences of his own acts.]

Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was once speaking to me of the personality of Gladstone. He related with unusual fervour that the effect of this personality was incomparable, a thing quite unique in his experience, something indeed incommunicable to those who had not met the man; yet, checking himself of a sudden, and as it were shaking himself free of a superst.i.tion, he added resolutely, "But I was reading some of his speeches in Hansard only the other day, and upon my word there's nothing in them!"

One may well doubt the judgment of Mr. Chamberlain; but it remains very obviously true that the personal impression of Gladstone was infinitely greater than his ideas. The tradition of that almost marvellous impression still prevails, but solely among a few, and there it is fading. For the majority of men it is already as if Gladstone had never existed.

We should be wise, then, to examine the mind, and only the mind, of this remarkable prelate, and to concern ourselves hardly at all with the beauty of his life or the bewitchments of his character; for our purpose is to arrive at his value for religion, and to study his personality only in so far as it enables us to understand his life and doctrine.

Dr. Gore lives in a small and decent London horse which at all points in its equipment perfectly expresses a pure taste and a wholly unstudied refinement. Nothing there offends the eye or oppresses the mind. It is the dignified habitation of a poor gentleman, breathing a charm not to be found in the house of a rich parvenu. He has avoided without effort the conscious artistry of Chelsea and the indifference to art of the unaesthetic vulgarian. As to the manner of his life, it is reduced to an extreme of simplicity, but his asceticism is not made the excuse for domestic carelessness. A sense of order distinguishes this small interior, which is as quiet as a monk's cell, but restful and gracious, as though continually overlooked by a woman's providence.

Here Dr. Gore reads theology and the newspaper, receives and embraces some of his numerous disciples, discusses socialism with men like Mr.

Tawney, church government with men like Bishop Temple, writes his books and sermons, and on a cold day, seated on a cus.h.i.+on with his feet in the fender and his hands stretched over a timorous fire, revolves the many problems which beset his peace of mind[4].

[Footnote 4: Concerning modernising tendencies, Father Ronald Knox says, "I went to a meeting about it in Margaret Street, where crises in the Church are invested with a peculiar atmosphere of delicious trepidation."]

Somewhere, in speaking of the Church's att.i.tude towards rich and poor, he has confessed to carrying about with him "a permanently troubled conscience." The phrase lives in his face. It is not the face of a man who is at peace with himself. If he has peace of mind, it is a Peace of Versailles.

One cannot look at that tall lean figure in its purple ca.s.sock, with the stooping head, the somewhat choleric face, the low forehead deeply scored with anxiety, the prominent light-coloured and gla.s.sy eyes staring with perplexity under bushy brows, which are as carefully combed as the hair of his head, the large obstinate nose with its challenging tilt and wide war-breathing nostrils, the broad white moustache and sudden pointed beard sloping inward; nor can one listen to the deep, tired, and ghostly voice slowly uttering the laborious ideas of his troubled mind with the somewhat painful p.r.o.nunciation of the elocutionist (he makes _chapell_ of Chapel); nor mark his languorous movements and the slow swaying action of the attenuated body; one cannot notice all this without feeling that in spite of his great courage and his iron tenacity of purpose, he is a little weary of the battle, and sometimes even perhaps conscious of a check for the cause which is far dearer to him than his own life.

One thinks of him as a soul under a cloud. He gives one no feeling of radiance, no sense of a living serenity. What serenity he possesses at the centre of his being does not s.h.i.+ne in his face nor sound in his voice. He has the look of one whose head has long been thrust out of a window gloomily expecting an accident to happen at the street corner.

FitzGerald once admirably described the face of Carlyle as wearing "a crucified expression." No such bitterness 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 circ.u.mference 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 h.e.l.l." 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 leaders.h.i.+p, 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, "pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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-Princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sent 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, 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.