Painted Windows by Harold Begbie

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[Illustration: BISHOP GORE]

PAINTED WINDOWS

STUDIES IN
RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY

BY

A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER
AUTHOR OF "THE MIRRORS OF DOWNING STREET"

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KIRSOPP LAKE

_It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows
could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken,
though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light, coloured
by these reverend effigies, was none the more respirable for being
picturesque._

J.R. Lowell.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMILE VERPILLEUX

G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1922

_For the information presented in the biographical records connected
with the several chapters the publishers desire to express their
indebtedness to "Who's Who."_

FOREWORD

BY PROFESSOR KIRSOPP LAKE

No one who believes that the Christian churches have in the past been
the moral leaders of western civilization can fail to be interested in
the presentation of some of the English religious leaders by "A
Gentleman with a Duster" especially if, like myself, he have some
passing acquaintance with most of them. Nor can any neglect to regard
seriously his warning that the Church is failing as a moral leader.

What is the reason for that failure? It cannot, I think, be found in
lack of earnestness; for today all the guides of the churches in England
are serious, upright men, who would gladly lead if they could. Nor is it
because they are voices uttering strange announcements in the
wilderness; if they have a fault it is rather that they have so little
to announce. The defect which is disclosed by the pictures given by "A
Gentleman with a Duster" is primarily intellectual, and I propose to
devote to its explanation the introduction which the publisher has asked
me to write for the American edition of _Painted Windows_.

From the third century to the eighteenth the Christian Church presented
views of life and theories of the origin, weakness, and possible
redemption of human nature, which were both self consistent and
rational. It offered men an infallible guide of life, to be found in the
Church, the Bible, and the Christ. Different branches of the Christian
church emphasised one or the other, but the three formed in themselves
an indivisible trinity. Nor did the laity doubt that this presentation
was correct. The clergy were the professional and expert exponents of an
infallible revelation which they had studied deeply and knew better than
other men, and on which they spoke with the authority of experience. It
was firmly believed that to follow their teaching would lead to future
salvation; for the centre of gravity in life for seriously minded men
was the hope of attaining everlasting salvation in the world to come.

The situation today is changed in two directions. The Church, the Bible,
and even the Teaching of Jesus are no longer regarded as infallible.
History first abundantly proved that the voice of the Church was not
inerrant; then science discredited the biblical account of man's origin
and development; and finally the "kenotic" theory of Bishop Gore showed
that what were considered the _ipsissima verba_ of the Lord himself
could no longer be regarded as infallible. The _coup de grace_ to the
belief that Jesus must be followed literally was administered by
official sermons during the war. This does not mean that men and women
within or without the Church do not admire and venerate the teaching of
Jesus and regard him as the best teacher whom they know. But they are
not willing to accept _all_ his teaching; they have been forced to admit
that it is sometimes lawful to resist evil by force; they doubt whether
he is to appear as the Judge of the living and the dead; they accept
much of his teaching and try to follow it because they believe that it
is true, but they do not believe that it is true because it is his
teaching. It is therefore impossible today for educated men, even among
those who most sincerely adopt it, to settle a moral argument by an
appeal to the teaching of Jesus. The tragedy is that there are probably
as many today outside the Church who endeavour to follow Jesus, but do
not call him Lord, as there are within the church who reverse this
attitude. For good or for evil (and I think it is for evil), the Church,
especially the Church of England, seems to have decided that to say
"Lord, Lord" is the pass-word to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Equally important with this great change in thought, which has abandoned
the infallible trinity of Church, Bible, and Jesus, is the fact that the
best of our generation have shifted the centre of endeavour from the
future salvation of the individual to the present reformation of this
world for the benefit of coming humanity. The best men of our time are
troubling very little about the salvation of their own souls; not
because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe
that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not
a supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They have
relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of
forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look
forward is progressive and educational, not fixed or punitive. Moreover,
most of them would say, with complete reverence, that the work which is
set before them by the Purpose of Life, as they understand it, is to
make a better world, materially, morally, and intellectually, as an
inheritance for children who are yet unborn. They are not much disturbed
if they are told that they are not Christians, for they are supremely
indifferent to names.

Nevertheless their presence in the world today is the concrete problem
to be faced by Liberal Churchmen. To consistent Catholics such as Father
Knox it is not, I suppose, a problem at all. He would say that such men
deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but they are
not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a faith
once delivered to the saints," Father Knox is right; such men are not
Christians, but, if so, the fact that they are not is the death warrant
of the Church, for they represent progress to a higher type than that of
the Christianity of the past.

But the liberal Christian does not accept the view that the Church ought
to exist for the preservation of traditional opinions. In his heart he
feels that such men would have been accepted by Jesus as his disciples,
and therefore he believes that the Church can and ought to be reformed
so as to make room for them. For this Reformation he has no fixed and
rigid programme, but there are three things which he thinks the Church
must provide.

The first necessity is the right understanding of life. It cannot be
given by any theory of the universe which, like the biblical one, is in
glaring contradiction to the facts of modern science[1]. Nor is it
conceivable that belief can be fixed so as to be unalterable.
Intellectual correctness is relative, and Truth cannot be petrified into
Creeds, but lives by discussion, criticism, correction, and growth.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Bryan is right in maintaining that evolution and the
whole scientific concept of life is unbiblical, though wrong in thinking
that that settles the question.]

The second necessity is the purification of the human spirit. Generation
after generation of Christians on their way through the world have
endeavoured to follow the moral teaching of the Church, but the friction
and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities, the swell
of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire, which a
mere appeal to reason cannot remedy because it condemns but does not
remove the evil. In the future as in the past, the Church must find
means to satisfy men's need and desire for purification.

The third is closely allied to the second. It is "the helping hand of
grace." No organized religion is complete or satisfactory which does not
understand that when weak and erring human beings call from the depths,
the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin
and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological problem; its
existence is a fact of experience. And that same experience shows that
though grace may work apart from institutions it does in fact normally
work through them.

These are the three things which the Liberal wishes to keep in the
Church. He knows that to do this the traditional forms of church life
require great changes, but he wishes to preserve the institutional life
of the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that
Christians who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments,
the thoughts, practices, and ordinances of the past, have the right in
another generation to change these. The continuity of the Church is in
membership, not in documents.

But the Liberals fall into two groups. There is the left wing which
expresses itself with clearness and decision, which is not afraid of
recognizing that the Church in the past has often been wrong and has
affirmed as fact what is really fiction. Those who belong to it are
sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled
to yield to the practical necessities of ecclesiastical life, but their
influence is greater than their numbers. The danger which would face the
Church if they were allowed to have more prominence, is that their
plainness of speech would lead to disruption. The danger is a real one,
and the leaders of churches do right to fear it.

Over against this is the right wing of Liberals. There is probably
little difference in the matter of private opinion between them and the
left wing, but they are more concerned with safeguarding the unity of
the Church. They endeavour to do this by using the old phraseology with
a new meaning, so that, for instance, members of this party feel
justified in stating that they accept the creed, though they do not
believe in it in the sense which was originally intended. This is
technically called "reinterpreting," and by a sufficient amount of
"reinterpreting" all the articles of the creed (or indeed anything else)
can be given whatever meaning is desired. The statement that God created
the heavens and the earth becomes in this way an affirmation of
evolution; the Virgin Birth affirms the reality of Christ's human
nature; and the Resurrection of the Flesh affirms the Immortality of the
Soul. Performed with skill, this dialectical legerdemain is very
soothing to a not unduly intelligent congregation and prevents any
breach in the apparent continuity of the Church's belief. It also
prevents any undue acrimoniousness of theological debate, for debate is
difficult if words may be interpreted to mean the opposite of their
historical significance. The danger is that the rising generation will
refuse to accept this method, and that it will lead to deep and
irretrievable intellectual confusion. This is what Father Knox clearly
saw to be the intellectual sin of the "Foundationers."

Nevertheless, when all is said it is easy to criticize but difficult to
advise. As "A Gentleman with a Duster" has seen, the desire of the
church leaders whose portraits he paints is to preserve the Church
through a period of transition. I doubt the wisdom of their policy,
though I recognize the difficulty of their task and appreciate their
motives.

I doubt the wisdom of the policy because I think that though it may
satisfy the older members of the Church and so preserve continuity with
the past, it is doing so at the expense of the younger generation and
sacrificing continuity with the future. It may conciliate those who have
power to make trouble in the present; but it is only the young who are
now silently abandoning the Church, that have the power to give life in
the future. It is always safer to agree with the old, but it is
infinitely more important to convince the young; and the reason for the
failure which troubles "A Gentleman with a Duster" is that
ecclesiastical life in England is failing to convince the young. Is it
better here?

CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.,
February 5, 1922.

INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

Some of the men whose personalities I attempt to analyse in this volume
are known to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think,
represent schools of thought in which America is as greatly interested
as the people of Europe.

Therefore I may presume to hope that this present volume will find in
the United States as many readers as _The Mirrors of Downing Street_ and
_The Glass of Fashion_.

But, in truth, I hope for much more than this.

Perhaps I may be allowed to say that I think America can make a
contribution to the matter discussed in these pages which will outrival
in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the
contribution she has already made to world politics by the inspiration
of the Washington Conference.

For the American brings to the study of religion not only a somewhat
fresher mind than the European, but a temperamental earnestness about
serious things which is the world's best hope of creative action.
Moreover there is something Greek about the American. He is always
young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and AEschylus. He
is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new
paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all
things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the
exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the
dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.

Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus,
I feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any
other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of
the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human
race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and the
politics of idealism.

If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my
suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the
secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my
theory that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the
documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope
to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp
Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged
by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as
seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that
manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious
things.

Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes
of its author--a book which attempts to throw off all those long and
hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which
have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all
that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation of a
strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning to use.

INTRODUCTION

By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to
discover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the Church
in the affections of men.

My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only
religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because it
has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition
of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of
the Church to impress humanity with what its documents call the Will of
God--a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful devotion,
sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern Church.

As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a
consequence of the late War.

The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is
immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which has
for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of a
Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august
forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and
unworthy forces within his own breast--envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness--which make for world anarchy. He has never been able
to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is
in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the
most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent
conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar
disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide,
it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains."

This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the
nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of
individual man to live in love and charity with his neighbour, justifies
the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of
the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief
mercy the teaching of a science of life--a way of existence which would
bring the feet of unhappy man out of chaos, and finally make it possible
for the human race to live intelligently, and so, beautifully.

Now if this indeed were the purpose of the Incarnation, we may be
pardoned for thinking that the Church, which has been the cause of so
much tyranny and bloodshed in the past, and which even now so willingly
lends itself to bitter animosities and warlike controversies, has
missed the whole secret of its first and greatest dogma[2].

[Footnote 2: I asked a certain Dean the other day whether the old
controversy between High Church and Low Church still obtained in his
diocese. "Oh, dear, no!" he replied; "High and Low are now united to
fight Modernists."]

Therefore in studying the modern mind of Christianity, persuaded that
its mission is to teach mankind a lesson of quite sublime importance, we
may possibly arrive in our conclusion at a unifying principle which will
at least help the Church to turn its moral earnestness, its manifold
self-sacrifice, and its great but conflicting energies, in this one
direction which is its own supremest end, namely, the interpretation of
human life in terms of spiritual reality.

To those who distrust reason and hold fast rather fearfully to the
moorings of tradition, I would venture to say, first, that perilous
times are most perilous to error, and, secondly, in the words of Dr.
Kirsopp Lake, "After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but
life in scorn of consequence--a courageous trust in the great purpose of
all things and pressing forward to finish the work which is in sight,
whatever the price may be."

"_The distinction between right and
wrong disappears when conscience
dies, and that between fact and
fiction when reason is neglected.
The one is the danger which besets
clever politicians, the other the nemesis
which waits on popular preachers."
--Kirsopp Lake._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION . xi
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
I.--BISHOP GORE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II.--DEAN INGE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
III.--FATHER KNOX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
IV.--DR. L.P. JACKS . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
V.--BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON. . . . . . . . . 87
VI.--MISS MAUDE ROYDEN. . . . . . . . . . . 103
VII.--CANON E.W. BARNES. . . . . . . . . . . 121
VIII.--GENERAL BRAMWELL BOOTH . . . . . . . . 139
IX.--DR. W.E. ORCHARD . . . . . . . . . . . 155
X.--BISHOP TEMPLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
XI.--PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE. . . . . . . . . 191
XII.--ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON. . . . . . 203
XIII.--CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

BISHOP GORE

GORE, Rt. Rev. CHARLES, M.A., D.D., and Hon. D.C.L., Oxford; Hon. D.D.,
Edinburgh and Durham; Hon. LL.D., Cambridge and Birmingham; b. 1853; s.
of Hon. Charles Alexander Gore and d. of 4th Earl of Bessborough, widow
of Earl of Kerry. Educ.: Harrow, Balliol College, Oxford (Scholar).
Fellow Trinity College, Oxford, 1875-95; Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon
College, 1880-83; Librarian of Pusey Library, Oxford, 1884-93; Vicar of
Radley, 1893-94; Canon of Westminster, 1894-1902; Hon. Chaplain to the
Queen, 1898-1900; Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, 1900-1901; Chaplain
in Ordinary to the King, 1901; Editor of Lux Mundi; Bishop of Worcester,
1902-4; Bishop of Birmingham, 1905-11; Bishop of Oxford, 1911-1919.

PAINTED WINDOWS

CHAPTER I

BISHOP GORE

_He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another
will . . . attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long
discipline, that "ascent of the soul into the intelligible
world."_--WALTER PATER.

No man occupies a more commanding position in the Churches of England
than Dr. Gore. I am assured in more than one quarter that a vote on this
subject would place him head and shoulders above all other religious
teachers of our time. In the region of personal influence he appears to
be without a rival.

Such is the quality of his spirit, that a person so different from him
both in temperament and intellect as the Dean of St. Paul's has
confessed that he is "one of the most powerful spiritual forces in our
generation."

It is, I think, the grave sincerity of his soul which gives him this
pre-eminence. He is not more eloquent than many others, he is not
greatly distinguished by scholarship, he is only one in a numerous
company of high-minded men who live devout and disinterested lives. But
no man conveys, both in his writings and in personal touch, a more
telling sense of ghostly earnestness, a feeling that his whole life is
absorbed into a _Power_ which overshadows his presence and even sounds
in his voice, a conviction that he has in sober truth forsaken
everything for the Kingdom of God.

One who knows him far better than I do said to me the other day,
"Charles Gore has not aimed at harmonising his ideas with the Gospel,
but of fusing his whole spirit into the Divine Wisdom."

In one, and only one, respect, this salience of Dr. Gore may be likened
to the political prominence of Mr. Lloyd George. It is a salience
complete, dominating, unapproached, but one which must infallibly
diminish with time. For it is, I am compelled to think, the salience of
personality. History does not often endorse the more enthusiastic
verdicts of journalism, and personal magnetism is a force which
unhappily melts into air long before its tradition comes down to
posterity[3].

[Footnote 3: The genius of the Prime Minister, which makes so
astonishing an impression on the public, plainly lies in saving from
irretrievable disaster at the eleventh hour the consequences of his own
acts.]

Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was once speaking to me of the personality of
Gladstone. He related with unusual fervour that the effect of this
personality was incomparable, a thing quite unique in his experience,
something indeed incommunicable to those who had not met the man; yet,
checking himself of a sudden, and as it were shaking himself free of a
superstition, he added resolutely, "But I was reading some of his
speeches in Hansard only the other day, and upon my word there's nothing
in them!"

One may well doubt the judgment of Mr. Chamberlain; but it remains very
obviously true that the personal impression of Gladstone was infinitely
greater than his ideas. The tradition of that almost marvellous
impression still prevails, but solely among a few, and there it is
fading. For the majority of men it is already as if Gladstone had never
existed.

We should be wise, then, to examine the mind, and only the mind, of this
remarkable prelate, and to concern ourselves hardly at all with the
beauty of his life or the bewitchments of his character; for our purpose
is to arrive at his value for religion, and to study his personality
only in so far as it enables us to understand his life and doctrine.

Dr. Gore lives in a small and decent London horse which at all points in
its equipment perfectly expresses a pure taste and a wholly unstudied
refinement. Nothing there offends the eye or oppresses the mind. It is
the dignified habitation of a poor gentleman, breathing a charm not to
be found in the house of a rich parvenu. He has avoided without effort
the conscious artistry of Chelsea and the indifference to art of the
unaesthetic vulgarian. As to the manner of his life, it is reduced to an
extreme of simplicity, but his asceticism is not made the excuse for
domestic carelessness. A sense of order distinguishes this small
interior, which is as quiet as a monk's cell, but restful and gracious,
as though continually overlooked by a woman's providence.

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