Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 12

III

_PAN-ANGLICANISM_

It is an awful word. Our forefathers, from Shakespeare downwards, ate pan-cakes, and trod the pantiles at Tunbridge Wells; but their "pan" was purely English, and they linked it with other English words. The freedom of the "Ecclesia Anglicana" was guaranteed by the Great Charter, and "Anglicanism" became a theological term.

Then Johnson, making the most of his little Greek, began to talk about a "pancratical" man, where we talk of an all-round athlete; and, a little later, "Pantheist" became a favourite missile with theologians who wished to abuse rival pract.i.tioners, but did not know exactly how to formulate their charge. It was reserved for the journalists of 1867 to form the terrible compound of two languages, and, by writing of the "Pan-Anglican Synod," to prepare the way for "Pan-Protestant" and "Pan-denominational." Just now the "Lively Libertines" (as their detractors style the promoters of "Life and Liberty") seem to be testing from their labours, and they might profitably employ their leisure by reading the history of their forerunners half a century ago.

The hideously named "Pan-Anglican Synod," which a.s.sembled at Lambeth in September, 1867, and terminated its proceedings in the following December, was a real movement in the direction of Life and Liberty for the Church of England. The impulse came from the Colonies, which, themselves enjoying the privilege of spiritual independence, were generously anxious to coalesce at a time of trial with the fettered Church at home. The immediate occasion of the movement was the eccentricity of Bishop Colenso--"the arithmetical Bishop who could not forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers."

The faith of some was seriously perturbed when they heard of a Bishop who, as Matthew Arnold said, "had learnt among the Zulus that only a certain number of people can stand in a doorway at once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day; and who tells us, as a consequence, that the Pentateuch is all fiction, which, however, the author may very likely have composed without meaning to do wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer's."

Certainly the tremors of a faith so lightly overset were justly obnoxious to Arnold's ridicule; but Colenso's negations went deeper than the doorway and the pigeons; and the faithful of his diocese, being untrammelled by the State, politely dismissed him from his charge. In England steady-going Christians had been not less perturbed by that queer collection of rather musty discourses which was called _Essays and Reviews_; and the Church of England had made an attempt to rid itself, by synodical action, of all complicity in the dubious doctrine. But the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had justified the essayists, and had done its best to uphold Colenso. By so doing, it had, of course, delighted all Erastians; but Churchmen, whether at home or abroad, who believed in the English Church as a spiritual society, with a life of its own apart from all legal establishment, felt that the time had come when this belief should be publicly proclaimed. In February, 1866, the Anglican Bishops of Canada addressed a Memorial to Dr. Longley, then Archbishop of Canterbury, requesting him to summon a conference of all the Bishops of the Anglican Communion; and, after some characteristic hesitation, this was done. A Letter of Invitation was issued in February, 1867. The more dogged Erastians held aloof; but those who conceived of the Church as a spiritual society obeyed the summons; the "Conference of Bishops" a.s.sembled, and the priceless word "Pan-Anglicanism" was added to the resources of the language.

What did these good men do when they were come together? Not, it must be admitted, very much. They prayed and they preached, and debated and divided, and, in the matter of Colenso, quarrelled.

They issued a Pastoral Letter which, as Bishop Tait said, was "the expression of essential agreement and a repudiation of Infidelity and Romanism." If this had been the sole result of the Conference, it would have been meagre enough; but under this official ineffectiveness there had been a real movement towards "Life and Liberty." The Conference taught the Established Bishops of England and Ireland that the Bishops of Free Churches--Scottish, American, Colonial--were at least as keen about religious work and as jealous for the spiritual independence of the Christian society as the highly placed and handsomely paid occupants of Lambeth and Bishopthorpe.

Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury (whom the Catholic-minded section of the English Church regarded as their special champion) "thought that we had much to learn from contact with the faith and vigour of the American Episcopate"; and Bishop Wilberforce thus recorded his judgment: "The Lambeth gathering was a very great success. Its strongly anti-Erastian tone, rebuking the Bishop of London (Tait), was quite remarkable. We are now sitting in Committee trying to complete our work--agree to a voluntary Court of English Doctrinal Appeal for the free Colonies of America. If we can carry this out, we shall have erected a barrier of immense moral strength against Privy Council lat.i.tudinarianism. My view is that G.o.d gives us the opportunity, as at home lat.i.tudinarianism must spread, of encircling the Home Church with a band of far more dogmatic truth-holding communions who will act most strongly in favour of truth here.

I was in great measure the framer of the "Pan-Anglican" for this purpose, and the result has abundantly satisfied me. The American Bishops won golden opinions."

And so this modest effort in the direction of "Life and Liberty,"

which had begun amid obloquy and ridicule, gained strength with each succeeding year. The Conference was repeated, with vastly increased numbers and general recognition, in 1878, 1888, 1898, and 1908. The war makes the date of the next a.s.semblage, as it makes all things, doubtful; but already Churchmen, including some who have hitherto shrunk in horror from the prospect of Disestablishment, are beginning to look forward to the next Conference of Bishops as to something which may be a decisive step in the march of the English Church towards freedom and self-government. Men who have been reared in a system of ecclesiastical endowments are apt to cherish the very unapostolic belief that money is a sacred thing; but even they are coming, though by slow degrees, to realize that the Faith may be still more sacred. For the rest of us, the issue was formulated by Gladstone sixty years ago: "You have our decision: take your own; choose between the mess of pottage and the birthright of the Bride of Christ."

IV

_LIFE AND LIBERTY_

The t.i.tle is glorious; and, so far as I know, the credit of inventing it belongs to my friend the Rev. H. R. L. Sheppard, the enterprising Vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. Mr. Sheppard has what in newspapers we call a "magnetic personality," and no one has more thoroughly laid to heart the sagacious saying that "Sweet are the uses of advertis.e.m.e.nt." Whatever cause he adopts, the world must know that he has adopted it; and it shall obtain a hearing, or he will know the reason why. The cause to which (outside his pastoral work) he is just now devoted is that which is summarized in the phrase, "Life and Liberty for the Church of England." It is a fine ideal, and Mr. Sheppard and his friends have been expounding it at the Queen's Hall.

It was no common achievement to fill that hall on a hot summer evening in the middle of the war, and with very little' a.s.sistance from the Press. Yet Mr. Sheppard did it, and he filled an "over-flow meeting" as well. The chair was taken by the Rev. William Temple, who tempered what might have been the too fervid spirit of the gathering with the austerity which belongs to a writer on philosophy, an ex-Head Master, and a prospective Bishop. The hall was densely crowded with clergy, old and young--old ones who had more or less missed their mark, and young ones keen to take warning by these examples. There were plenty of laymen, too, quite proud to realize that, though they are not in Holy Orders, they too are "in the Church"; and a brilliant star, if only he had appeared, would have been a Second-Lieutenant in khaki, who unfortunately was detained at the front by military duties. A naval and a military chaplain did the "breezy" business, as befitted their cloth; and, beaming on the scene with a paternal smile, was the most popular of Canons, who by a vehement effort kept silence even from good words, though it must have been pain and grief to him.[*]

[Footnote *: Alas! we have lost him since.]

The oratorical honours of the evening were by common consent adjudged to a lady, who has since been appointed "Pulpit a.s.sistant" to the City Temple. May an old-fas.h.i.+oned Churchman suggest that, if this is a sample of Mr. Sheppard's new movement, the "Life" of the Church of England is likely to be a little too lively, and its "Liberty"

to verge on licence? A ministry of undenominational feminism is "a thing imagination boggles at." Here it is to be remarked that the leaders of the movement are male and female after their kind.

Dr. and Mrs. Dingo sit in council side by side, and much regret is expressed that Archdeacon Buckemup is still a celibate. But let us be of good cheer. Earnest-minded spinsters, undeterred by the example of Korah (who, as they truly say, was only a man), are clamouring for the priesthood as well as the vote; and in the near future the "Venerable Archdeaconess" will be a common object of the ecclesiastical sea-sh.o.r.e. Miss Jenkyns, in _Cranford_, would have made a capital Dean.

So much for the setting of the scene. The "business" must be now considered, and we will take the programme of "Life and Liberty"

point by point, as set forth in a pamphlet by Mr. Temple. In the first place, its leaders are very clear that they wish to keep their endowments; but it must not be supposed that they dread reform.

Their policy is "Redistribution." Those great episcopal incomes are again threatened; the Bishops are to be delivered from that burden of wealth which presses so hardly on them; and the slum parson is to have a living wage. But the inc.u.mbent, though his income may thus be increased, is by no means to have it all his own way. His freehold in his benefice is to be abolished; and, even while he retains his position, he is to have his duties a.s.signed to him, and his work arranged, by a "Parochial Church Council," in which the "Pulpit a.s.sistant" at Bethesda or Bethel may have her place. Life and Liberty indeed! But further boons are in store for us. We have at present two Archbishops, and, I hope, are thankful for them. Under the new scheme we are promised eight, or even nine.

"Showers of blessing," as the hymn says! I presume that the six (or seven) new Archbishops are to be paid out of the "redistributed"

incomes of the existing two. The believers in "Life and Liberty"

humanely propose to compensate the Archbishop of Canterbury for the diminution of his 15,000 a year by letting him call himself a "Patriarch," but I can hardly fancy a Scotsman regarding this as a satisfactory bargain.

But how are these and similar boons to be attained? The promoters of Life and Liberty (not, I fancy, without a secret hope of frightening the Bishops into compliance with their schemes) affirm their readiness to accept Disestablishment "if no other way to self-government seems feasible"; but they, themselves, prefer a less heroic method. While retaining the dignity of Establishment and the opulence of Endowment, they propose that the Church should have "power to legislate on all matters affecting the Church, subject to Parliamentary veto....

This proposal has the immense practical advantage that, whereas it is now necessary to secure time for the pa.s.sage of any measure through Parliament, if this scheme were adopted it would become necessary for the opponent or obstructor to find time to prevent its pa.s.sage. The difference which this would make in practice is enormous." It is indeed; and the proposal is interesting as a choice specimen of what the world knows (and dislikes) as Ecclesiastical Statesmans.h.i.+p.

"Life and Liberty"--there is music in the very words; and, ever since I was old enough to have an opinion on serious matters, I have cherished them as the ideals for the Church to which I belong.

From the oratory of Queen's Hall and the "slim" statesmans.h.i.+p which proposes to steal a march on the House of Commons I turn to that great evangelist, Arthur Stanton, who wrote as follows when Welsh Disestablishment was agitating the clerical mind.

"Nothing will ever reconcile me to the Establishment of Christ's Church on earth by Sovereigns or Parliaments. It is established by G.o.d on Faith and the Sacraments, and so endowed, and all other pretended establishment and endowment to me is profane." And again:

"Taking away endowments doesn't affect me; but what does try me is the inheriting them, and denying the faith of the donors--and then talking of sacrilege. The only endowment of Christ's Church comes from the Father and the Son, and is the Holy Ghost, Which no man can give and no man can take away.'"

Here, if you like, is the authentic voice of Life and Liberty.

V

_LOVE AND PUNISHMENT_

Lord Hugh Cecil is, I think, one of the most interesting figures in the public life of the time. Ten years ago I regarded him as the future leader of the Tory party and a predestined Prime Minister. Of late years he has seemed to turn away from the strifes and intrigues of ordinary politics, and to have resigned official ambition to his elder brother; but his figure has not lost--rather has gained--in interest by the change. Almost alone among our public men, he seems to have "his eyes fixed on higher lodestars" than those which guide Parliamentary majorities. He avows his allegiance to those moral laws of political action of which John Bright so memorably said that "though they were not given amid the thunders of Sinai, they are not less the commandments of G.o.d."

Now, the fearless utterance of this ethical creed does not tend to popularity. Englishmen will bear a good deal of preaching, so long as it is delivered from the pulpit; but when it is uttered by the lips of laymen, and deals with public problems, it arouses a curious irritation. That jovial old heathen, Palmerston, once alluded to Bright as "the Honourable and Reverend Member"; Gladstone's splendid appeals to faith and conscience were p.r.o.nounced "d----d copy-book-y"; and Lord Houghton, who knew the world as well as most men, said, "Does it ever strike you that nothing shocks people so much as any immediate and practical application of the character and life of Christ?"

Lord Hugh Cecil need not mind the slings and arrows of outrageous partisans.h.i.+p, so long as he shares them with Bright and Gladstone.

Just lately, his p.r.o.nouncement that we ought to love the Germans, as our fellow-citizens in the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth, has provoked very acrid criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was "medieval." For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one's enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizens.h.i.+p. Lord Hugh's doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is better than a short one.

Having thus repelled what I think a ridiculous criticism, I will admit that Lord Hugh's doctrine raises some interesting, and even disputable, points. In the first place, there is the theory of the Universal Church as the Divine Kingdom on earth, and of the citizens.h.i.+p in which all its members are united. I grant the theory; but I ask myself if I am really bound by it to love all these my fellow-citizens, whatever their conduct and character may be. Love is an elastic word; and, if I am to love the Germans, I must love them in some very different sense from that in which I love my country and my race. It really is, in another form, the old controversy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The "Enthusiasm of Humanity"

is a n.o.ble sentiment; but the action of our fellow-members of the human family may be such as to render it, at least for the moment, impossible of realization. Under the pressure of injury from without, cosmopolitanism must contract itself into patriotism. We may wish devoutly that the whole human family were one in heart and mind--that all the citizens of the kingdom of G.o.d obeyed one law of right and wrong; but when some members of the family, some citizens of the kingdom, have "given themselves over to a reprobate mind,"

our love must be reserved for those who still own the claim of righteousness. If our own country stood as a solitary champion of right against a world in unrighteous arms, patriotism would be a synonym for religion, and cosmopolitanism for sin.

And then again I ask myself this question: Even a.s.suming that Lord Hugh is right, and that it is our bounden duty to love the Germans, is love inconsistent with punishment? We postulate the love of G.o.d towards mankind, and we rightly regard it as the highest manifestation of what love means; but is it inconsistent with punishment for unrighteous action? Neither Revelation, nor Nature, nor History, knows anything of the conception which has been embodied in the words, "a good-natured G.o.d." Of Revelation I will not speak at length, for this is not the place for theological discussion; I only remark in pa.s.sing that the idea of punishment for wrong-doing is not, as some sciolists imagine, confined to the Old Testament, though there it is seen in its most startling form; in the New Testament it is exhibited, alike by St. Paul and by St. Paul's Master, as a manifestation of love--not vindictive, but remedial.

The disciplining love of a human father is used to ill.u.s.trate the Divine dealings with insubordinate mankind. About Nature we need scarcely argue. "In the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins," and rebellion against the laws of righteous living brings penal consequences which no one can mistake. And yet again, has History any more unmistakable lesson than that "for every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for l.u.s.t or vanity, the price has to be paid at last"? Froude was right.

"Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at last to them, in French Revolutions and other terrible ways."

What we believe of the Divine Love, thus dealing with human transgression, we may well believe of human love, when it is called by duty to chastise unrighteousness. I do not suppose that John Stuart Mill was actuated by hatred of Palmer or Pritchard or any other famous malefactor of his time when he said that there are some people so bad that they "ought to be blotted out of the catalogue of living men." It was the dispa.s.sionate judgment of philosophy on crime. When the convicted murderer exclaimed, "Don't condemn me to death; I am not fit to die!" a great Judge replied, "I know nothing about that; I only know that you are not fit to live"; but I do not suppose that he hated the wretch in the dock. Even so, though it may be our duty to love our enemies as our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of G.o.d, we need not shrink, when the time comes, from being the ministers of that righteous vengeance which, according to the immutable order of the world, is prepared for impenitent wrong-doing.

VI

_HATRED AND LOVE_

I lately saw the following sentence quoted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "Hatred steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do." The enlightened conscience of humanity (to say nothing of Christianity) repudiates this sentiment as ethically unsound and historically untrue; and yet, erroneous as it is, it is worth pondering for the sake of a truth which it overstates.

However little we may like to make the confession in the twentieth century of the Christian era, hatred is a very real power, and there is more of it at work in civilized society than we always recognize. It is, in truth, an abiding element of human nature, and is one of those instincts which we share with the lower animals.

"The great cur showed his teeth; and the devilish instincts of his old wolf-ancestry looked out from his eyes, and yawned in his wide mouth and deep red gullet." Oliver Wendell Holmes was describing a dog's savagery; but he would have been the first to admit that an exactly similar spirit may be concealed--and not always concealed--in a human frame. We have lived so long, if not under the domination, still in the profession, of the Christian ethic, that people generally are ashamed to avow a glaringly anti-Christian feeling. Hence the poignancy of the bitter saying: "I forgive him as a Christian--which means that I don't forgive him at all." Under a decent, though hypocritical, veil of religious commonplace, men go on hating one another very much as they hated in Patriarchal Palestine or Imperial Rome.

Hatred generally has a personal root. An injury or an insult received in youth may colour the feelings and actions of a whole lifetime.

"Revenge is a dish which can be eaten cold"; and there are unhappy natures which know no enjoyment so keen as the satisfaction of a long-cherished grudge. There is an even deeper depravity which hates just in proportion to benefits received; which hates because it is enraged by a high example; which hates even more virulently because the object of its hatred is meek or weak or pitiable. "I have read of a woman who said that she never saw a cripple without longing to throw a stone at him. Do you comprehend what she meant?

No? Well, I do." It was a woman who wrote the words.

The less abhorrent sort of hatred (if one can discriminate where all is abominable) is the hatred which has no personal root, but is roused by invincible dislike of a principle or a cause. To this type belong controversial hatreds, political hatreds, international hatreds. Jael is the supreme instance of this hatred in action, and it is only fair to a.s.sume that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had this kind of hatred in his mind when he wrote the sentence which I quoted above. But hatred, which begins impersonally, has a dangerous habit of becoming personal as it warms to its work; and an emotion which started by merely wis.h.i.+ng to check a wrong deed may develop before long into a strong desire to torture the wrong-doer. Whatever be the source from which it springs, hatred is a powerful and an energetic principle. It is capable, as we all know, of enormous crimes; but it does not despise the pettiest methods by which it can injure its victim. "Hatred," said George Eliot, "is like fire--it makes even light rubbish deadly."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perfectly right when he says that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution." If he had stopped there, I should not have questioned his theory. Again and again one has seen indolent, flabby, and irresolute natures stimulated to activity and "steeled" into hardness by the deep, though perhaps unuttered, desire to repay an insult or avenge an injury. It is in his superlative that Sir Arthur goes astray. When he affirms that hatred "steels the mind and sets the resolution as no other emotion can do," his psychology is curiously at fault. There is another emotion quite as powerful as hatred to "steel the mind and set the resolution"--and the name of this other emotion is love. It required some resolution and a "steeled" mind for Father Damien to give himself in early manhood to the service of a leper-struck island, living amid, and dying of, the foul disease which he set out to tend. It was love that steeled John Coleridge Patteson to encounter death at the hands of "savage men whom he loved, and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life." There was "steel" in the resolve which drew Henry Martyn from the highest honours of Cambridge to preach and die in the fever-stricken solitude of Tokat; and "steel" in an earlier and even more memorable decision when Francis Xavier consecrated rank, learning, eloquence, wit, fascinating manners, and a mirthful heart, to the task of evangelizing India.