Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality — John Shaqi
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
Bishop Gore, very obviously, is a better man than his party. He is a
gentleman in every fibre of his being, and to a gentleman all
extravagance is distasteful, all disloyalty is impossible. He is,
indeed, a survival from the great and orderly Oxford Movement trying to
keep his feet in the swaying midst of a revolutionary mob, a Kerensky
attempting to withstand the forces of Bolshevism.
There is little question, I think, that when his influence is removed,
an influence which becomes with every year something of a superstition,
something of an irritation, to the younger generation of
Anglo-Catholics--not many of whom are scholars and few gentlemen--the
party which he has served so loyally, and with so much distinction, so
much temperance, albeit so disastrously for his own influence in the
world, will perish on the far boundaries of an extremism altogether
foreign to our English nativity.
For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a
hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness
towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to
accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation--a miracle which, he
has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for
the change which takes place in digestion. If they were rid of his
restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his
intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these
enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian
asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and
defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of
excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and
honourable Oxford Movement.
If any man think that I bear too hardly on these very positive
protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters
in _A Spiritual Æneid_. Father Knox was once a member of this party and
something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his
"mediæval" theology.
A member of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in
these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest
attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised,
or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual
influence which might at this time have been well-nigh supreme if the
main body of the nation had not unfortunately lost its interest for the
man in its contempt for, or rather its indifference to, the party to
which he consents to belong.
But for the singular beauty of his spiritual life, one would be tempted
to set him up as an example of Coleridge's grave warning, "He, who
begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving
his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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