The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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"When will you have found a priest to take my place temporarily?" the
Missioner asked in a chill voice. "It is unlikely that the Silchester
College authorities will find another missioner at once, and I think it
rests with your lordship to find a locum tenens. I do not wish to
disappoint my people about the date of the opening of their new church.
They have been looking forward to this Easter for so long now. Poor
dears!"

Father Rowley sighed out the last ejaculation to himself, and his sigh
ran through the Bishop's opulent library like a dull wind. Mark had a
mad impulse to tell the Bishop the story of his father and the Lima
Street Mission. His father had resigned on Palm Sunday. Oh, this ghastly
dream. . . . Father Rowley leave Chatsea! It was unimaginable. . . .

But the Bishop was overthrowing the work of ten years with apparently as
little consciousness of the ruin he was creating as a boar that has
rooted up an ant-heap with his snout.

"Quite so. Quite so, Mr. Rowley. I certainly see your point," the Bishop
declared. "I will do my best to secure a priest, but meanwhile . . . let
me see. I need scarcely say how painful your decision has been, what
pain it has caused me. Let me see, yes, in the circumstances I agree
with you that it would be inadvisable to postpone the opening. I think
from every point of view it would be wisest to proceed according to
schedule. Could not this altar or Holy Table be railed off temporarily,
I do not say muffled up, but could not some indication be given of the
fact that I do not sanction its use? In that case I should have no
objection, indeed on the contrary I should be only too happy for you to
carry on with your work either until I can find a temporary substitute
or until the Silchester College authorities can appoint a new missioner.
Dear me, this is dreadfully painful for me."

Father Rowley stared at the Bishop in astonishment.

"You want me to continue?" he asked. "Really, my lord, you will excuse
my plain speaking if I tell you that I am amazed at your point of view.
A moment ago you told me that I must either remove this altar or
resign."

"Pardon me, Mr. Rowley. I did not mention the word 'resign.'"

"And now," the Missioner went on without paying any attention to the
interruption. "You are ready to let me stay at St. Agnes' until a
successor can conveniently be found. If my teaching is as pernicious as
you think, I cannot understand your lordship's tolerating my officiating
for another hour in your diocese."

"Mr. Rowley, you are introducing into this unhappy affair a great deal
of extraneous feeling. I do not reproach you. I know that you are
labouring under the stress of strong emotion. I overlook the manner
which you have adopted towards me. I overlook it, Mr. Rowley. Before we
close this interview, which I must once more assure you is as painful
for me as for you, I want you to understand how deeply I regret having
been forced to take the action I have. I ask your prayers, Mr. Rowley,
and please be sure that you always have and always will have my prayers.
Have you anything more you would like to say? Do not let me give you the
impression from my alluding to the heavy work of entering upon the
duties and responsibilities of a new diocese that I desire to hurry you
in any way this afternoon. You will want to catch the 4.10 back to
Chatsea I have no doubt. Too early perhaps for tea. Good-bye, Mr.
Rowley. Good-bye, Mr. . . ." the Bishop paused and looked inquiringly at
Mark. "Lidderdale, ah, yes," he said. "For the moment I forgot.
Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale. A simple railing will, I think be sufficient
for the altar in question, Mr. Rowley. I perfectly appreciate your
motive in asking the Bishop of Barbadoes to officiate at the opening. I
quite see that you did not wish to commit me to an approval of a ritual
which might be more advanced than I might consider proper in my diocese.
. . . Good-bye, good-bye."

Father Rowley and Mark found themselves once more in the drive. The
episcopal standard floated in the wind, which had sprung up while they
were with the Bishop. They walked silently to the railway station under
a fast clouding sky.

CHAPTER XX

FATHER ROWLEY

The first episcopal act of the Bishop of Silchester drove many poor
souls away from God. It was a time of deep emotional stress for all the
St. Agnes' workers, and Father Rowley could not show himself in Keppel
Street without being surrounded by a crowd of supplicants who with tears
and lamentations begged him to give up the new St. Agnes' and to remain
in the old mission church rather than be lost to them for ever. There
were some who even wished him to surrender the Third Altar; but in his
last sermon preached on the Sunday night before he left Chatsea, he
spoke to them and said:

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The 15th verse of the 21st Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Saint
John: _Feed my lambs._

"It is difficult for me, dear people, to preach to you this evening for
the last time as your missioner, to preach, moreover, the last sermon
that will ever be preached in this little mission church which has meant
so much to you and so much to me. By the mercy of God man does not
realize at the moment all that is implied by an occasion like this. He
speaks with his mouth words of farewell; but his heart still beats to
what was and what is, rather than to what will be.

"When I took as my text to-night those three words of Our Lord to St.
Peter, _Feed my Lambs_, I took them as words that might be applied,
first to the Lord Bishop of this diocese, secondly to the priest who
will take my place in this Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most
poignantly of all to myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in
this moment of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I
am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in
compelling me to resign what has counted for all that is most precious
in my life on earth. And already, in saying that the Bishop has
compelled me to resign, I am not speaking with perfect accuracy,
inasmuch as if I had been willing to surrender what I considered one of
the essential articles of our belief, the Bishop would have been glad to
licence the new St. Agnes' and to give his countenance and his support
to me, the unworthy priest in charge of it.

"I want you therefore, dear people, to try to look at the matter from
the standpoint of the Bishop. I want you to try to understand that in
objecting to our little altar for the dead he is objecting not so much
to the altar itself as to the services said at that altar. If it had
merely been a question between us of a third altar, whether here or in
the new St. Agnes', I should have found it possible, however
unwillingly, to ask you--you, who out of your hard-earned savings built
that altar--to allow it to be removed. Yes, I should have been selfish
enough to ask you to make that great sacrifice on my account. But when
the Bishop insisted that I and the priests who have borne with me and
worked with me and preached with me and prayed with me all these years
should abstain from saying those Masses which we believe and which you
believe help our dear ones waiting for the Day of Judgment--why, then, I
felt that my surrender would have been a denial of our dear Lord, such a
denial as St. Peter himself uttered in the hall of the high-priest's
house. But the Bishop does not believe that our prayers here below have
any efficacy or can in any way help the blessed dead. He does not
believe in such prayers, and he believes that those who do believe in
such prayers are wrong, not merely according to the teaching of the
Prayer Book, but also according to the revelation of Almighty God. I do
not want you to say, as you will be tempted to say, that the Bishop of
Silchester in condemning our method of services at St. Agnes' is
condemning them with an eye to public opinion or to political advantage.
Alas, I have myself been tempted to say bitter words about him, to think
bitter thoughts; but at this moment, with that last _Nunc Dimittis_
ringing in my ears, _Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace_,
I realize that the Bishop is acting honestly and sincerely, however
much he may be acting wrongly and hastily. It is dreadful for me at this
moment of parting to feel that some of you here to-night may be turned
from the face of God because you are angered against one of God's
ministers. If any poor words of mine have power to touch your hearts, I
beg you to believe that in giving us this great trial of our faith God
is acting with that mysterious justice and omniscience of which we speak
idly without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall say no
more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's action, and if he should
consider my defence and explanation of it a piece of presumption I send
him at this solemn moment of farewell a message that I shall never cease
to pray that he may long guide you on the way that leads up to eternal
happiness.

"I can speak more freely of what your attitude should be towards Father
Hungerford, the priest who is coming to take my place and who is going
with God's help to do far more for you here than ever I have been able
to do. I want you all to put yourselves in his place; I want you all to
think of him to-night wondering, fearing, doubting, hoping, and praying.
I want you to imagine how difficult he must be feeling the situation is
for him. He will come here to-morrow conscious that there is nobody in
this district of ours who does not feel, whether he be a communicant or
not, that the Bishop had no right to intervene so soon and without
greater knowledge of his new diocese in a district like ours. I cannot
help knowing how much I myself am to blame in this particular; but, my
dear people, it has been very hard for me during these last two weeks
always to be brave and hopeful. Often I have found those entreaties on
my doorstep almost more than I could endure to hear, those letters on my
desk almost more than I could bear to read. So, if you want to do the
one thing that can comfort me in this bitter hour of mine I entreat you
to show Father Hungerford that your faith and your hope and your love do
not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one
way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in
your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by
hearing Mass as you have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour
in the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by your
devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate the mercies of
God, that you appreciate what it means to have Jesus Christ upon your
altar, that you are, in a word, Christians.

"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear Lord as they
apply to myself: _Feed my lambs._ And as I repeat them, I ask myself
again if I have done right, for I am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if
I ought to have given up that third altar and to have remained here. But
even as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit for
the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt. No, my clear folk,
I cannot surrender that altar. I cannot come to you and say that what I
have been teaching for ten years was of so little value, of so little
importance, of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I stand here
looking out into the future, hearing like angelic trumpets those three
words sounding and resounding upon the great void of time: _Feed my
lambs!_ I ask myself what work lies before me, what lambs I shall have
to feed elsewhere; I ask myself in my misery whether God has found me
unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave St. Agnes'
to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish angry and resentful
feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of humiliation and depression
than I have yet reached. But if I can leave St. Agnes' with the
assurance that my work here will go steadily forward to the glory of God
from the point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must have
some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some other mission to
which He intends to call me. To you, my dear people, to you who have
borne with me patiently, to you who have tolerated so sweetly my
infirmities, to you who have been kind to my failings, to you who have
taught me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have been
able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow your feelings
or my own by saying any more. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

Notwithstanding these words, the first episcopal act of the Bishop of
Silchester drove many poor souls away from God.

The effect upon Mark, had his religion been merely a pastime of
adolescence, would have been disastrous. Owing to human nature's respect
for the conspicuous there is nothing so demoralizing to faith as the
failure of a leader of religion to set forth in his own actions the word
of God. Mark, however, looked at the whole business more from an
ecclesiastical angle. He had reason to condemn the Bishop for
unchristian behaviour; but he preferred to condemn him for uncatholic
behaviour. Dr. Cheesman and the many other Dr. Cheesmans of whom the
Anglican episcopate was at this period composed never succeeded in
shaking his belief in Christ; they did succeed in shaking for a short
time his belief in the Church of England. There are few Anglo-Catholics,
whether priests or laymen, who have never doubted the right of their
Church to proclaim herself a branch of the Holy Catholic Church. This
phase of doubt is indeed so common that in ecclesiastical circles it has
come to be regarded as a kind of mental chicken-pox, not very alarming
if it catches the patient when young, but growing more dangerous in
proportion to the lateness of its attack. Mark had his attack young.
When Father Rowley left Chatsea, he was anxious to accompany him on what
he knew would be an exhausting time of travelling round to preach and
collect the necessary money to pay off what was actually a personal
debt. It seemed that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a
Church that allowed a man to perambulate England in an endeavour to pay
off the debt upon a building from ministrating in which he had been
debarred. This debt, moreover, was presumably going to be paid by people
who fully subscribed to teaching which had been officially condemned.

When Mark commented on this, Father Rowley pointed out that as a matter
of fact a great deal of money had been sent by people who admired the
practical side, or what they would have called the practical side of his
work among the poor, but who at the same time thoroughly disapproved of
its ecclesiastical form.

"In justice to the poor old Church of England," he said to Mark, "it
must be pointed out that a good deal of this money has been given by
devout Anglicans under protest."

"Yes, but that doesn't seriously affect the argument," said Mark. "You
collect I don't know how many thousands of pounds to put up a
magnificent church from which the Bishop of Silchester sees fit to turn
you out, but for the debt on which you are still personally responsible.
It's fantastic!"

"Mark Anthony," the priest said with a laugh, "you lack the legal mind.
The Bishop did not turn me out. The Bishop can perfectly well say I
turned myself out."

"It is all too subtle for me," said Mark. "But I'm not going to worry
you with any more arguments. You've had enough of them to last you for
ever. I do wish you'd let me stick to you personally and help you in any
way possible."

"No, Mark Anthony," the priest replied. "I've done my work at St.
Agnes', and you've done yours. Your business now is to take advantage of
what has happened and to get back to your books, which whatever you may
say have been more and more neglected lately. You'll find it of enormous
help to be a good theologian. I have never ceased to regret my own
shortcomings in that respect. Besides, I think you ought to spend a
certain amount of time with Ogilvie before you go to Glastonbury. There
is quite a lot of work to do if you look for it in a country parish
like--what's the name of the place? Wych. Oh, yes, quite a lot of work.
Don't bother your head about Anglican Orders and Roman Claims and the
Catholicity of the Church of England. Your business is to save souls,
your own included. Go back and read and get to know the people in
Ogilvie's parish. Anybody can tackle a district like St. Agnes'; anybody
that is who has the suitable personality. How many people can tackle an
English country parish? I hardly know one. I should like to have you
with me. I'm fond of you, and you're useful; but at your age to travel
round from town to town listening to my begging would be all wrong. I
might even go to America. I've had most cordial invitations from several
American bishops, and if I can't raise the money in England I shall
have to go there. If God has any more work for me to do I shall be
offered a cure some day somewhere. I want you to be one of my assistant
priests, and if you're going to be useful to me as an assistant priest,
you really must have some theology behind you. These bishops get more
and more difficult to deal with every year. Now, it's no good arguing.
My mind's made up. I won't take you with me."

So Mark went back to Wych-on-the-Wold and brooded upon the non-Catholic
aspects of the Anglican Church.

CHAPTER XXI

POINTS OF VIEW

Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed by his doubts of
the validity of Anglican Orders nor much alarmed by his suspicion that
the Establishment had no right to be considered a branch of the Holy
Catholic Church.

"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine of
intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that this doctrine
is a particularly dangerous one for them to play with and one that may
recoil at any moment upon their own heads. There has been a great deal
of super-subtle dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual,
and interpretative; but if you are going to take your stand on logic you
must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree for a moment
that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated Matthew Parker had no
intention of consecrating him as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining
priests in the sense in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do
the Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the time of
the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they were consecrating? Or
leave on one side for a moment the sacrament of Orders; the validity of
other sacraments is affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond
the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it may be
that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic Church should lack
the intention let us say of absolution, it _is_ a _logical_ possibility,
in which case all the faithful would logically speaking be damned. It
was in order to guard against this kind of logical catastrophe that the
first split between an actual intention and a virtual intention was
made. The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is enough; but
if we argue that a virtual intention might be ascribed to the bishops
who consecrated Parker, the Roman controversialists present us with
another subdivision--the habitual intention, which is one that formerly
existed, but of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a point very
near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety is to control Faith."

"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should ever want to
'vert over the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. I haven't
any doubts now of their validity, and I think it's improbable that I
shall have any doubts after I'm ordained. At the same time, there _is_
something wrong with the Church of England if a situation like that in
Chatsea can be created by the whim of a bishop. Our unhappy union
between Church and State has created a class of bishops which has no
parallel anywhere else in Christendom. In order to become a bishop in
England, at any rate of the kind that has a seat in the House of Lords,
it is necessary to be a gentleman, or rather to have the outward and
visible signs of being a gentleman, to be a scholar, or to be a
diplomat. Of course, there will be exceptions; but if you look at almost
all our bishops, you will find they have reached their dignity by social
attainments or by political utility or sometimes by intellectual
distinction, but hardly ever by religious fervour, or spiritual honesty,
or fearless opinion. I can sympathize with the dissenters of the
seventeenth century in blaming the episcopate for all spiritual
maladies. I expect there were a good many Dr. Cheesmans in the days of
Defoe. Look back and see how the bishops have always voted in the House
of Lords with enthusiastic unanimity against every proposal of reform
that was ever put forward. I wonder what will happen when they are
called upon to face a real national crisis."

"I'm perfectly ready to agree with everything you say about bishops,"
the Rector volunteered. "But more or less, I'm sorry to add, it is a
criticism that can be applied to all the orders of the priesthood
everywhere in Christendom. What can we, what dare we say in favour of
priests when we remember Our Lord?"

"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than
the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him. They exist to maintain the
safety of their class. They have reached their present position by
knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by
balancing their fat bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political
patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either
very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap."

"Yes," the Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are only one more
aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole of contemporary society can
be criticized in the same way. After all, we get the bishops we deserve,
just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve
and the painters we deserve."

"I don't think that's any excuse for the bishops. I sometimes dream of
worming myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop,
and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours."

"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend
fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.

These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any
further. His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the
opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and
there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of
Keppel Street. In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing
destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and
returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no
kind of work whatever. He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt
that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a
chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed to be taking his
priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his
own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his
parishioners. Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial
work, because he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him in a bitter
argument for which he would afterward be sorry. Nor was it only in his
missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to
rust. Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was
content with one on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take
walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life
beyond. On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese
of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home. He had spent the
night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been
travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously
green, prosperous and complacent. While he was eating his bread and
cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the
local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such
surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a
metropolis, he came upon the following letter:

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