London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and
complexion—rich, for the place is worth £1500 a-year at the least—he
would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly man, had he
not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a large and
influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear but not
full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can preach a
good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which can do the
man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines, and holding
views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly thought, he
has but little left him to do in his discourses but to expatiate on the
sanctity of the priestly office, and the mysterious powers possessed by
the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win the truth—to lead a
god-like life—to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem
minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with
costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching
the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who
are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose
example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles
his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that
statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have
believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement
as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction.
Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his
mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man
something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire
flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can
the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own
Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not
so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for—worth dying for; if it be so,
the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St.
Paul’s have made a terrible mistake—a mistake which the friends of pure
and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.
THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.
‘If I saw,’ wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,—‘if I saw
any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could
reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own
minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I
could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without
a word of protest against aught that is.’ Since then Wilberforce has
become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary;
Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now
raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King’s College deprive him
of the Professor’s Chair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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