The English Church, as established by the law of England, offers the Supernatural to all who choose to come. It is like the Divine Being Himself, Whose sun shines alike on the evil and on the good.
J. H. Shorthouse, John Inglesant.
Mr. Shorthouse, like most people who have come over to the Church from Dissent, set an inordinate value on the principle of Establishment. He seemed (and in that particular he resembled Archbishop Tait) incapable of conceiving the idea of a Church as separate from, and independent of, the State. The words "as established by the law of England" in the passage which stands at the head of this chapter appear to suggest a doubt whether the English Church, if she ceased to be "established," could still discharge her function as the divinely-appointed dispenser of sacramental grace to the English people. Those who, like Mr. Gladstone, believe that no change in her worldly circumstances could "compromise or impair her character as the Catholic and Apostolic Church of this country," would omit Mr. Shorthouse's qualifying words, and would say, simply, that the English Church, whether established or not, offers the Supernatural to all who choose to come, and that she is, has been, and always will be, "historically the same institution through which the Gospel was originally preached to the English Nation." But this is not the place for theorization; so, for the moment, I am content to take Mr. Shorthouse's statement as it stands, and to say that a loving pride in the English Church has been the permanent passion of my life. I hold with Dean Church, a man not given to hyperbole, that "in spite of inconsistencies and menacing troubles, she is still the most glorious Church in Christendom."
I was baptized in the Parish Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Woburn, formerly a chapel dependent on the Cistercian Abbey hard by, which the first Earl of Bedford received as a gift from Henry VIII.[62] This truly interesting church was destroyed, to please an innovating incumbent, in 1864; but my earliest impressions of public worship are connected with it, and in my mind's eye I can see it as clearly as if it were still standing. It had never been "restored "; but had been decorated by my grandfather, who inherited the ecclesiastical rights of the Abbots of Woburn, and whose "Curate" the incumbent was.[63] My grandfather was a liberal giver, and did his best, according to his lights, to make the Church beautiful. He filled the East Window with stained glass, the central subject being his own coat of arms, with patriarchs and saints grouped round it in due subordination. Beneath the window was a fine picture, by Carlo Maratti, of the Holy Family. The Holy Table was a table indeed, with legs and drawers after the manner of a writing-table, and a cover of red velvet. The chancel was long; and the south side of it was engrossed by "the Duke's Pew," which was enclosed within high walls and thick curtains, and contained a fireplace. The north side of the chancel was equally engrossed by a pew for the Duke's servants. The choir, male and female after their kind, surrounded the organ in a gallery at the West End. The whole Church was pewed throughout, and white-washed, the chancel being enriched with plaster mouldings. On the capital of each pillar was a scutcheon, bearing the arms of some family allied to our own. The largest and most vivid presentment of the Royal Arms which I have ever seen crowned the chancel-arch.
Our clerical staff consisted of the incumbent (who became a "Vicar" by Act of Parliament in 1868) and a curate. Our list of services was as follows: Sunday—11 a.m., Morning Prayer, Litany, Table-prayers, and Sermon; 6 p.m., Evening Prayer and Sermon. There was Evening Prayer with a sermon on Thursdays, and a prayer-meeting in the schoolroom on Tuesday evenings. There were no extra services in Lent or Advent, nor on any Holy Days except Good Friday and Ascension Day. The Holy Communion was administered after Morning Service on the first Sunday of the month, and on Christmas and Easter Days; and after Evening Service on the third Sunday. The black gown was, of course, worn in the pulpit, and I remember a mild sensation caused by the disuse of bands. The prayers were preached; the Psalms were read; and the hymn-book in use was "The Church and Home Metrical Psalter and Hymnal"—a quaint compilation which I have never seen elsewhere. It would not be easy to describe the dreariness of the services; and the preaching corresponded to them. This is curious, for Evangelical preaching generally was rousing and effective. I remember that we heard preaching of that type from strangers who occasionally "took duty" or "pleaded for Societies"; but our own pastors always expatiated on Justification by Faith only. I cannot recall any other subject; and, even in enforcing this, "Pulpit-eloquence," topical allusions, and illustrations whether from nature or from books, were rigidly eschewed. "As dull as a sermon" is a proverbial saying which for me in early boyhood had an awful truth.
It has been stated in an earlier chapter that I discovered the Sacramental System of the Church by the simple method of studying the Prayer Book. Certainly I got no help in that direction from my spiritual pastors. The incumbent was, I should think, the Lowest Churchman who ever lived. He was a Cambridge man; a thorough gentleman; well-read; wholly devoted to his sacred calling; and fearless in his assertion of what he believed to be right. (He once refused to let Jowett preach in our pulpit, though the noble patron made the request.) He was entirely insensible to poetry, beauty, romance, and enthusiasm; but his mind was essentially logical, and he followed his creed to its extremest consequences. Baptismal grace, of course, he absolutely denied. He prepared me for Confirmation, and he began his preparation by assailing my faith in the Presence and the Succession. He defined Confirmation as "a coming of age in the things of the soul." I perfectly remember a sermon preached on "Sacrament Sunday," which ended with some such words as these, "I go to yonder table to-day; not expecting to meet the Lord, because I know He will not be there." I have seldom heard the doctrine of the Real Absence stated with equal frankness.
All my religious associations were with the Evangelical school, of which my parents were devoted adherents. My uncle, the Rev. Lord Wriothesley Russell (1804-1886), had been a disciple of Charles Simeon at Cambridge, but had completely discarded such fragments of Churchmanship as lingered in his master's teaching. My mother (1810-1884) had been in early life closely allied with "the Clapham Sect"; and our friendship with the last survivor of that sect, Miss Marianne Thornton (1797-1887), linked us to the Wilberforces, the Venns, and the Macaulays. My acquaintance with Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885) I have always esteemed one of the chief honours of my life. He combined in a singular degree the gifts which make a Leader. He had an imperious will, a perfervid temper, unbounded enthusiasm, inexhaustible energy. Any movement with which he was connected he controlled. He brooked neither opposition nor criticism. His authority was reinforced by advantages of aspect and station; by a stately manner, by a noble and commanding eloquence. But all these gifts were as nothing when compared with the power of his lifelong consistency. When he was a boy at Harrow, a brutal scene at a pauper's funeral awoke his devotion to the cause of the poor and helpless. Seventy years later, when he lay on his deathbed, his only regret was that he must leave the world with so much misery in it. From first to last, he was an Evangelical of the highest and purest type, displaying all the religious and social virtues of that school in their perfection. Yet he left it on record that he had been more harshly treated by the Evangelical party than by any other. Perhaps the explanation is that those excellent people were only kicking against the pricks of a too-absolute control.
Such were the religious associations of my early life; and I am deeply thankful for them. I have found, by much experiment, that there is no foundation on which the superstructure of Catholic religion can be more securely built than on the Evangelical confession of man's utter sinfulness, and of the free pardon purchased by the Blood of Christ. A man trained in that confession may, without sacrificing a jot of his earlier creed, learn to accept all that the Catholic Church teaches about Orders and Sacraments; but to the end he will retain some characteristic marks of his spiritual beginnings. For my own part, I hold with Mr. Gladstone that to label oneself with an ecclesiastical nickname would be to compromise "the first of earthly blessings—one's mental freedom[64]"; but if anyone chose to call me a "Catholic Evangelical," I should not quarrel with the designation.
I said in an earlier chapter that I had an inborn fondness for Catholic ceremonial, and this, I suppose, was part of my general love of material beauty. Amid such surroundings as I have described, it was a fondness not easily indulged. When I was twelve years old, I was staying at Leamington in August, and on a Holy Day I peeped into the Roman Church there, and saw for the first time the ceremonies of High Mass; and from that day on I longed to see them reproduced in the Church of England. During one of our periodical visits to London, I discovered the beautiful church in Gordon Square where the "Adherents of a Restored Apostolate" celebrate Divine Worship with bewildering splendour. The propinquity of our house to Westminster Abbey enabled me to enter into the more chastened, yet dignified, beauty of the English rite. At Harrow the brightness and colour of our School-Chapel struck my untutored eye as "exceeding magnifical"; and the early celebrations in the Parish Church had a solemnity which the Chapel lacked.
But the happiest memory of all is connected with a little Church[65] about two miles from my home. It is a tiny structure of one aisle, with the altar fenced off by a screen of carved oak. It served a group of half a dozen houses, and it stood amid green fields, remote from traffic, and scarcely visible except to those who searched for it. There an enthusiastic and devoted priest spent five and twenty years of an isolated ministry; and there, for the first time in our communion, I saw the Divine Mysteries celebrated with the appropriate accessories.
My walks to that secluded altar, in the fresh brightness of summer mornings, can never be forgotten until the whole tablet is blotted. On the sky-line, the great masses of distant woodland, half-veiled in mist, lay like a blue cloud. Within, there was "the fair white linen cloth upon the wooden table, with fresh flowers above, and the worn slabs beneath that record the dim names of the forgotten dead"; and there "amid the faint streaks of the early dawn, the faithful, kneeling round the oaken railing, took into their hands the worn silver of the Grail—
Perhaps it was just as well for a boy that these glimpses of beautiful worship were few and far between. One was saved from the perils of a mere externalism, and was driven inward on the unseen realities which ceremonial may sometimes obscure. And then, when one got up to Oxford, one found all the splendours of the sanctuary in rich abundance, and enjoyed them with a whole-hearted self-abandonment. I need not repeat what I have already said about St. Barnabas and Cowley and the other strongholds of Catholic worship. I am eternally their debtor, and the friends with whom I shared them have helped to shape my life.
But, in spite of all these enjoyments, religious life at Oxford between 1872 and 1876 was not altogether happy. A strong flood of Romanism burst upon the University, and carried some of my best friends from my side; and, concurrently with this disturbance, an American teacher attacked our faith from the opposite quarter. He taught an absolute disregard of all forms and rites, and, not content with the ordinary doctrine of instantaneous conversion, preached the absolute sinlessness of the believer. The movement which, in 1874, he set on foot was marked by disasters, of which the nature can best be inferred from a characteristic saying, "The believer's conflict with Sin is all stuff." This teaching had its natural consequences, and the movement issued in spiritual tragedy.
In the following year we were touched by the much more wholesome enterprise of Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Their teaching was wholly free from the perilous stuff which had defiled the previous mission; and though it shook the faith of some who had cultivated the husk rather than the kernel of ritualism, still all could join in the generous tribute paid by Dr. Liddon on Whitsun Day, 1876:
"Last year two American preachers visited this country, to whom God had given, together with earnest belief in some portions of the gospel, a corresponding spirit of fearless enterprise. Certainly they had no such credentials of an Apostolic Ministry as a well-instructed and believing Churchman would require.... And yet, acting according to the light which God had given them, they threw themselves on our great cities with the ardour of Apostles; spoke of a higher world to thousands who pass the greater part of life in dreaming only of this; and made many of us feel that we owe them at least the debt of an example, which He Who breatheth where He listeth must surely have inspired them to give us."[67]
When I came up to London after leaving Oxford, "the world was all before me where to choose," and I made a pretty wide survey before deciding on my habitual place of worship. St. Paul's Cathedral had lately awoke from its long sleep, and, under the wise guidance of Church, Gregory, and Liddon, was beginning to show the perfection of worship on the strict line of the English Prayer-Book.
Being by temperament profoundly Gothic, I hold (with Sir William Richmond) that Westminster Abbey is the most beautiful church in the world. But it had nothing to offer in the way of seemly worship; and, while Liddon was preaching the Gospel at St. Paul's, Dean Stanley at Westminster was delivering the fine rhetoric and dubious history which were his substitutes for theology, and with reference to which a Jewish lady said to me, "I have heard the Dean preach for eighteen years, and I have never heard a word from him which I could not accept." At the Temple, Dr. Vaughan was at the height of his vogue, and Sunday after Sunday was teaching the lawyers the effective grace of a nervous and finished style.
All Saints, Margaret Street, St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, and St. Barnabas, Pimlico, showed a type of worship refined, artistic, and rather prim. St. Alban's, Holborn, "the Mother and Mistress" of all ritualistic churches, combined Roman ceremonial with the passionately Evangelical teaching of the greatest extempore preacher I have ever heard, Arthur Stanton. St. Michael's, Shoreditch, and St. Peter's, London Docks, were outposts of the ritualistic army. The Low Church congregated at Portman Chapel, and Belgrave Chapel, and Eaton Chapel (all since demolished), at St. Michael's, Chester Square, and St. John's, Paddington. Broad Churchmen, as a rule, were hidden in holes and corners; for the bizarre magnificence of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, had not yet superseded the humble structure in which Henry Blunt had formerly preached into the Duchess of Beaufort's[68] ear-trumpet; and St. Margaret's, Westminster, had only just begun to reverberate the rolling eloquence of Dr. Farrar. At St. Peter's, Eaton Square, amid surroundings truly hideous, George Wilkinson, afterward Bishop of St. Andrews, dominated, sheerly by spiritual force, a congregation which, having regard to the numbers, wealth, and importance of the men who composed it, was the most remarkable that I have ever seen. Cabinet Ministers, great noblemen, landed proprietors, Members of Parliament, soldiers, lawyers, doctors, and "men about town," were the clay which this master-potter moulded at his will.
Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson thundered, the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up when you are called." "Don't stay at a ball till two, and then say you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to the Mission-Field." "You are sixty-five years old, and have never been confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by good example now, the harm you have done your servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only real cross—the cross of self-discipline and self-denial." These are echoes, faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful, of St. Peter's pulpit in its days of glory.
When I look back upon the Church in London as it was when I first knew it, and when I compare my recollections with what I see now, I note, of course, a good many changes, and not all of them improvements. The Evangelicals, with their plain teaching about sin and forgiveness, are gone, and their place is taken by the professors of a flabby latitudinarianism, which ignores sin—the central fact of human life—and therefore can find no place for the Atonement. Heresy is preached more unblushingly than it was thirty years ago; and when it tries to disguise itself in the frippery of Æsthetic Anglicanism, it leads captive not a few. In the churches commonly called Ritualistic, I note one great and significant improvement. English Churchmen have gradually discovered that they have an indigenous ritual of their own—dignified, expressive, artistic, free from fuss and fidgets—and that they have no need to import strange rites from France or Belgium. The evolution of the English Rite is one of the wholesome signs of the times. About preaching, I am not so clear. The almost complete disuse of the written sermon is in many ways a loss. The discipline of the paper protects the flock alike against shambling inanities, and against a too boisterous rhetoric. No doubt a really fine extempore sermon is a great work of art; but for nine preachers out of ten the manuscript is the safer way.
As regards the quality of the clergy, the change is all to the good. When I was a boy at Harrow, Dr. Vaughan, preaching to us on our Founder's Day, spoke with just contempt of "men who choose the Ministry because there is a Family Living waiting for them; or because they think they can make that profession—that, and none other—compatible with indolence and self-indulgence; or because they imagine that a scantier talent and a more idle use of it can in that one calling be made to suffice." "These notions," he added, "are out of date, one Act of Disestablishment would annihilate them." That Act of Disestablishment has not come yet, but the change has come without waiting for it. Even the "Family Living" no longer attracts. Young men seek Holy Orders because they want work. Clerical dreams of laziness or avarice, self-seeking or self-indulgence, have gone out for ever; and the English Church has in her commissioned service a band of men whose devotion and self-sacrifice would be a glory to any Church in Christendom.
An active politician, as I was thirty years ago, has not much leisure; but all through my parliamentary work I sought to bear in mind that Life is Service. I helped to found the White Cross League, and worked hard for the cause which it represents. I bore a hand in Missions and Bible-classes. I was a member of a Diocesan Conference. I had ten years of happy visiting in Hospitals, receiving infinitely more than I could ever give. And I should think that no man of my age has spoken on so many platforms, or at so many Drawing Room meetings. But all this was desultory business, and I always desired a more definite obligation.
On St. Luke's Day, 1895, my loved and honoured friend, Edward Talbot, formerly Warden of Keble, was consecrated 100th Bishop of Rochester; and the diocese at that time included all South London. As soon as he established himself there, the new Bishop, so I have already stated, asked me to come across the Thames, and do some definite work in South London. At first, that work consisted of service on a Public Morals Committee, and of lecturing on ecclesiastical topics; but gradually the field contracted in one direction and expanded in another.
It was in 1891 that Dr. Temple, then Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, being anxious to lighten the burden of preaching which lies so heavily on hardworked clergy, determined to license lay-readers to speak in consecrated buildings. It was a bold step, and of doubtful legality; but the Bishop characteristically declared that he would chance the illegality, feeling sure that, when the Vicar and Churchwardens invited a lay-reader to speak, no one would be churlish enough to raise legal objections. The result proved that the Bishop was perfectly right, and the Diocese of London has now a band of licensed lay-preachers who render the clergy a great deal of valuable aid. I was from the first a good deal attracted by the prospect of joining this band, but Parliament and Office left me no available leisure. When Dr. Talbot became Bishop of Rochester, he at once took in hand the work of reorganizing the body of Lay-Readers in his Diocese; and before long had determined to follow the example set by Bishop Temple, and to license some of his readers to speak at extra services in consecrated buildings. He made it quite clear from the first—and the point has subsequently been established by Convocation—that there was no idea of reviving the Minor Orders. The lay-reader was to be, in every sense, a layman; and, while he might speak, under proper restrictions, in a consecrated building, he still would speak not "as one having authority," but simply as brother-man to brother-men.
I was admitted to the office of a Diocesan Lay-Reader, in the Private Chapel of the Bishop's House at Kennington, on the 15th of January, 1898, and have been permitted to spend fifteen years of happy service in this informal ministry.
THE END
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