Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

“I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the Church of England.”

“It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern. To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars.

“The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,” Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.”

The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair.

“When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited its right to be called a Christian Church.”

It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev. Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation. And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh.

“Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.

And times had. Even the Duchess realized dimly that it had become unsafe to utter aloud her sentiments of loyalty to the English Church or to the English Throne in a Church of England schoolroom, while it had ceased to be unsafe for Dr. Coles to parade openly his treason to both. His episcopal character was no secret in the theological colleges from which a steady stream of young men like the Rev. Aloysius turned their steps to the obscure Lambeth Vicarage in search of those supernatural powers which they deemed the neighbouring Archbishop had no power to bestow. In this way the whole Church was being gradually leavened, so that the time was at hand when some portion of the mysterious virtue brought from Armenia would have found its way into all the channels of ordination, and obstinate Evangelicals would be receiving Armenian Orders unknown to themselves, and would be working the great Transubstantiation miracle in which they personally did not believe.

For the sake of achieving this object Dr. Coles had put on one side the prospect of promotion in the English Church. With abilities sufficient to have raised him perhaps to the House of Lords, he had deliberately accepted the part of priest of an obscure parish, content if his underground revolution was allowed to proceed without interference. His motives were mixed, perhaps, but great revolutions are the result of mixed motives, and never of wholly small and base ones. The Vicar of St. Jermyn’s was blinded to the degrading character of his methods by the loftiness of his aims. He took the guilt of fraud and perjury on his conscience, and he did so contentedly, looking forward to the time when the Church he served would re-enter the Catholic unity, and the Body of Christ be made whole.

As soon as he had finished receiving the homage of his peculiar adherents, the old priest went up to the Duchess of Trent, for whom he had a warm regard. In spite of the theological gulf that sundered them, she commanded his sympathy far more than the vain and hysterical women who grovelled in his confessional, and her simple and unselfish piety displayed in those good works which all religions enjoin had won his gratitude and respect. Had he been able to make a convert of the Duchess he would have felt it as great a triumph as when the State-appointed Bishop of Linchester, laying aside his jewelled crozier and mitre, came and knelt in the humble study of St. Jermyn’s Vicarage to receive them again at the hands of the “Bishop of Lambeth.”