Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
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 assent 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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