THE QUARTERLY REVIEW No. 481.-OCTOBER, 1924. Art. 1.—THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AS IT IS. 1. The Church of England. Primary Charge of the Bishop of Gloucester. Murray, 1924. 2. The Catholic Movement in the Church of England. By the Rev. Wilfred L. Knox. Philip Allan, 1924. AN Englishman who had lived out of touch with the National Church during the years that lie between the Primacy of Archbishop Tait and the present time, would find himself, were circumstances to renew his relationship with it, in a new and strange world. So might Erasmus have felt had he been recalled to life and revisited the England of Elizabeth; not since the 16th century has so great a revolution taken place in so short a time. To those who have lived through it, it is apt to present itself out of perspective; it must be looked at from a certain distance if its extent and significance are to be seen. It is a revolution at once economic, Social, and religious. The clergy, formerly, as a class, in easy circumstances, are impoverished; the Church counts for very much less in English life than it did a generation ago, and it has been changed out of recognition. As at the Reformation, continuity has been preserved; but this continuity is one of tenure rather than of temper; the climate and atmosphere are new. The great scholar-bishops of the Victorian age-Thirlwall, Lightfoot, Westcott-have left no the intellectual penury of modern Anglicanism must have been experienced to be believed. A Scottish divine, being told that the question of Orders was a bar to the Vol. 242.-No. 481. successors; union of the Scottish and English Churches, replied with equal truth and point, that the difference of their standards of education was a greater. It is so. "The supply of learned clergy in the Church of England is far less than it was,' says the Bishop of Gloucester. 'Moreever, there has been an unfortunate tendency in the last thirty or forty years to despise theological learning. It seems to be forgotten that, unless there continues a supply of learned clergy ready and able to grapple with the questions of the day, the Church, especially in a time of movement like the present, will inevitably be out of touch with modern thought.'* No one cause can be assigned for the increasing decline of religious observance amongst us; but, undoubtedly, a part cause is the gulf which has come to separate the clerical from the lay mind. So do the Muses revenge themselves on their despisers: L'Eglise ne marche pas dans le sens de la vie, et la vie la repousse.' In Latin Christianity the loss of intellectual prestige has advanced pari passu with the growth of Ultramontanism. Among ourselves, the development of the Oxford Movement has been attended by a similar result. The great religious movements of the past-Monasticism, the victory of Roman, or European, over Celtic Christianity, the Reformation, Puritanism even-were on the lines of life, and had the spirit of their respective ages with them; they embodied its aspirations, cravings, aims. Not so the Catholic Revival. When Pattison wrote his essay on 'Learning in the Church of England' (1863), the party whose temper and policy he criticised was still a party. It has now become the Church, but it is the Church minus the laity. Hence the mental decrepitude which has followed its victory: the clergy, says so strong a Churchman as Clarendon, 'understand the least and take the worst measure of human affairs of all mankind that can write and read.' Even to them it is a hard master. It is high-handed, and not over-scrupulous; bishops, like Agag, approach it 'delicately'; in the ingeniously contrived system of representation established * 'Charge,' p. 129. is th for under the Enabling Act-what else could have been expected ?-it has acquired the upper hand. Let us be ust. It sets us an example of zeal, and 'in this ministry of the Gospel, even when assuming forms repulsive to persons of education, no doubt the good is far greater han the error or harm.' But it bears, like the Turk, 10 brother near the throne.' Once they have served its urpose, it has no further use for its former friendshe so-called Central Party, which has played into its lands, the Life and Liberty Movement, to which it owes he Enabling Act, and on whose shoulders it has climbed o dominance in the National Assembly. Yet, like Haman, all this avails it nothing so long as one stiffneed Mordecai refuses to do it reverence. 'How long alt ye between two opinions?' 'We see no possible advantage in crying peace, peace, when there is no peace; or in pretending that the differences between Catholics and Protestants in the Church of England re matters of secondary importance. It is sheer insincere entimentality to pretend that they can be composed by a ittle amiable give and take. We believe that the Church of Ingland is part of the Catholic Church; that her divine nission has been hindered and hampered by the Lutheran eresies forced on her by the State; and that it will only be when she has entirely purged herself of these heresies that he will be permitted by Divine Providence to win England ack to the Faith. It is sheer nonsense to pretend that the wo parties can be reconciled. "The work of the Tractarians will be concluded when the Church of England as a whole has returned to its Catholic llegiance. This great end will be reached when the AngloCatholic party is a majority, and not a minority. Let us be ealists. When the Catholic influence prevails in the Church, here will be no toleration for Modernists; and the extreme vangelical will be far happier with his Free Church rethren.' t Now people who either use or excuse language of his sort should be told quite plainly that it means Disestablishment: if the Church is ill-advised enough to dopt it, it will inevitably be disestablished and the two * Jowett, 'Essay on the Interpretation of Scripture.' go together-disendowed. c Entre ion gener ex cal the arsh Dans The material loss involved would be the least part of the disaster: more important m by far would be the weakening of the higher elements both in religion and in the State which would follow it. We have seen this in Roman Catholic countries: la religion inintelligente et le matérialisme brutal, âme poétique et pure, où serait ta place?' was Renan's cry of despair. If our Anglican Ultramontanes have their way we may hear it in our own. It is strange, indeed, to remember that the Movement now represented by the Church Times' originated, to quote a contemporary 10 writer, in the appeal of a learned minority from the shallow dogmatism of the Puritan creed to the broad field of Christian history and antiquities.' He lived to be disillusioned. The minority has become a majority, and outgrown its learning. The tone of the High Church triumph becomes more vulgar, more violent, more partisan. To traduce inquiry, to hound on the mob, to hunt down the small handful of clergymen who have dared, however unsuccessfully, to put their hand h to theology-this is the absorbing passion of a party at which once sat at the feet of Dr Newman.'* Pattison wrote under the influence of Newman's personality, n from which he never entirely freed himself; and he e idealises the Tract Movement. But, in its earlier stages it was the fruit of a genuine though restricted culture; it was not till it had been broken against the dead weight of what Mr Birrell calls John Bullism'-'John Bull could not be got to assume a Catholic demeanour'that its temper became one of sheer obscurantism. It failed with the nation; it succeeded in imposing itself upon the Church, which was more impressionable; and which, in proportion as its national character was ignored, and its ecclesiasticism accentuated, assumed the temper and outlook of a sect. The tendency of politicians-8 tendency which the clergy are sufficiently short-sighted" to welcome-is to treat it as a denomination; and the Nonconformist element, so strong in recent Cabinets, supports ecclesiastical legislation of a frankly sectarian type. The Enabling Act, which was practically one of Disestablishment, was an example. The nation does not TE desire Disestablishment, but the faction now dominant in the Church does. The ecclesiastical authorities are likely to come to heel, though with misgiving—¿k@v · ἀέκοντί γε θυμῷ: those who trust their professions of moderation will find themselves deceived. The party of the 'Church Times' resents the charge of illiteracy, and complains of a policy of suppression on the part of the press. Well, general charges are general; and illiteracy is a general charge. But it is substantially justified. There is no reason, indeed, why a reactionary in religion should not be an artist, or a man of letters, or excel in the exact sciences, but he approaches critical and historical questions as a special pleader, not as an inquirer, and in the spirit of advocacy not of research. 'Mincing,' is the unkind epithet applied by Santayana to Anglican scholarship.* We shall not easily admit it; but what he means is that it does no more than dabble in fundamentals, and is desperately afraid of getting its feet wet. 'We have had a long succession of learned men, but how few creative minds there have been among them! Much of our work has been too much that of an amateur. I cannot help thinking that in our ecclesiastical and religious concep. tions we have been in danger of becoming insular and parochial.' † This is why, when an English theological work is mentioned in a foreign bibliography, the writer-mortifying as it is to admit it-is generally a member of some non-episcopal body; our approved authors are taken less seriously abroad than here. With regard to the press, it knows its own business; and it is probable that it gives Anglo-Catholic demonstrations the space to which the general interest taken in them entitles them, neither less nor more. The fact is, difficult as it is to convince enthusiasts of it, that public opinion is only moderately interested in news of this kind. The skilfully boomed Congress movement, e.g., though a sign of the times, is a less significant one than its promoters would have us think. The first of these Congresses, that of July 1923, was 'to an overwhelming extent attended by women'; and a large proportion of those who took part 'Soliloquies in England,' p. 86. † 'Charge,' p. 205. 'Times,' July 14, 1923. |