Collections and Recollections

by George William Erskine Russell

While the prevailing tone of quiet worldliness was thus broken, here and there, by horrid scandals, in other places it was conspicuously relieved by splendid instances of piety and self-devotion, such as George Eliot drew in the character of Edgar Tryan of Milby. But the innovating clergy of the Evangelical persuasion had to force their way through "the teeth of clenched antagonisms." The bishops, as a rule, were opposed to enthusiasm, and the bishops of that day were, in virtue of their wealth, their secular importance, and their professional cohesiveness, a formidable force in the life of the Church.

In the "good old days" of Erastian Churchmanship, before the Catholic revival had begun to breathe new life into ancient forms, a bishop was enthroned by proxy! Sydney Smith, rebuking Archbishop Howley for his undue readiness to surrender cathedral property to the Ecclesiastical Commission, pointed out that his conduct was inconsistent with having sworn at his enthronement that he would not alienate the possessions of the Church of Canterbury. "The oath," he goes on, "may be less present to the Archbishop's memory from the fact of his not having taken the oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach to take it for him— a practice which, though I believe it to have been long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A proxy to vote, if you please—a proxy to consent to arrangements of estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Fly to take the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he presides—all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary indolence ever recorded in history." In this judgment the least ritualistic of laymen will heartily concur. But from Archbishop Howley to Archbishop Temple is a far cry, and the latest enthronement in Canterbury Cathedral must have made clear to the most casual eye the enormous transformation which sixty years have wrought alike in the inner temper and the outward aspect of the Church of England.

Once Dr. Liddon, walking with me down the hall of Christ Church, pointed to the portrait of an extremely bloated and sensual-looking prelate on the wall, and said, with that peculiar kind of mincing precision which added so much to the point of his sarcasms, "How singular, dear friend, to reflect that that person was chosen, in the providential order, to connect Mr. Keble with the Apostles!" And certainly this connecting link bore little resemblance to either end of the chain. The considerations which governed the selection of a bishop in those good old days were indeed not a little singular. Perhaps he was chosen because he was a sprig of good family, like Archbishop Cornwallis, whose junketings at Lambeth drew down upon him the ire of Lady Huntingdon and the threats of George III., and whose sole qualification for the clerical office was that when an undergraduate he had suffered from a stroke of palsy which partially crippled him, but "did not, however, prevent him from holding a hand at cards." Perhaps he had been, like Bishop Sumner, "bear-leader" to a great man's son, and had won the gratitude of a powerful patron by extricating young hopeful from a matrimonial scrape. Perhaps, like Marsh or Van Mildert, he was a controversial pamphleteer who had tossed a Calvinist or gored an Evangelical. Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and Monk, a "Greek Play Bishop," who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage. "Young Crumpet is sent to school; takes to his books; spends the best years of his life in making Latin verses; knows that the Crum in Crumpet is long and the pet short; goes to the University; gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews; takes Orders; becomes a bishop's chaplain; has a young nobleman for his pupil; publishes a useless classic and a Serious Call to the Unconverted; and then goes through the Elysian transitions of Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power."

Few—and very few—are the adducible instances in which, in the reigns of George III., George IV., and William IV., a bishop was appointed for evangelistic zeal or pastoral efficiency.

But, on whatever principle chosen, the bishop, once duly consecrated and enthroned, was a formidable person, and surrounded by a dignity scarcely less than royal. "Nobody likes our bishop," says Parson Lingon in Felix Holt. "He's all Greek and greediness, and too proud to dine with his own father." People still living can remember the days when the Archbishop of Canterbury was preceded by servants bearing flambeaux when he walked across from Lambeth Chapel to what were called "Mrs. Howley's Lodgings." When the Archbishop dined out he was treated with princely honours, and no one left the party till His Grace had made his bow. Once a week he dined in state in the great hall of Lambeth, presiding over a company of self-invited guests—strange perversion of the old archiepiscopal charity to travellers and the poor—while, as Sydney Smith said, "the domestics of the prelacy stood, with swords and bag-wigs, round pig and turkey and venison, to defend, as it were, the orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all the famished children of Dissent." When Sir John Coleridge, father of the late Lord Chief Justice, was a young man at the Bar, he wished to obtain a small legal post in the Archbishop's Prerogative Court. An influential friend undertook to forward his application to the Archbishop. "But remember," he said, "in writing your letter, that his Grace can only be approached on gilt-edged paper." Archbishop Harcourt never went from Bishopthorpe to York Minster except attended by his chaplains, in a coach and six, while Lady Anne was made to follow in a pair-horse carriage, to show her that her position was not the same thing among women that her husband's was among men. At Durham, which was worth £40,000 a year, the Bishop, as Prince Palatine, exercised a secular jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, and the Commission at the Assizes ran in the name of "Our Lord the Bishop." At Ely, Bishop Sparke gave so many of his best livings to his family that it was locally said that you could find your way across the Fens on a dark night by the number of little Sparkes along the road. When this good prelate secured a residential canonry for his eldest son, the event was so much a matter of course that he did not deem it worthy of special notice; but when he secured a second canonry for his second son, he was so filled with pious gratitude that, as a thank-offering, he gave a ball at the Palace of Ely to all the county of Cambridge. "And I think," said Bishop Woodford, in telling me the story, "that the achievement and the way of celebrating it were equally remarkable."

This grand tradition of mingled splendour and profit ran down, in due degree, through all ranks of the hierarchy. The poorer bishoprics were commonly held in conjunction with a rich deanery or prebend, and not seldom with some important living; so that the most impecunious successor of the Apostles could manage to have four horses to his carriage and his daily bottle of Madeira. Not so splendid as a palace, but quite as comfortable, was a first-class deanery. A "Golden Stall" at Durham or St. Paul's made its occupant a rich man. And even the rectors of the more opulent parishes contrived to "live," as the phrase went, "very much like gentleman."

The old Prince Bishops are as extinct as the dodo. The Ecclesiastical Commission has made an end of them. Bishop Sumner of Winchester, who died in 1874, was the last of his race. But the dignified country clergyman, who combined private means with a rich living, did his county business in person, and performed his religious duties by deputy, survived into very recent times. I have known a fine old specimen of this class—a man who never entered his church on a week-day, nor wore a white neckcloth except on Sunday; who was an active magistrate, a keen sportsman, an acknowledged authority on horticulture and farming; and who boasted that he had never written a sermon in his life, but could alter one with any man in England—which, in truth, he did so effectively that the author would never have recognized his own handiwork. When the neighbouring parsons first tried to get up a periodical "clerical meeting" for the study of theology, he responded genially to the suggestion: "Oh yes; I think it sounds a capital thing, and I suppose we shall finish up with a rubber and a bit of supper."

The reverence in which a rector of this type was held, and the difference, not merely of degree but of kind, which was supposed to separate him from the inferior order of curates, were amusingly exemplified in the case of an old friend of mine. Returning to his parish after his autumn holiday, and noticing a woman at her cottage door with a baby in her arms, he asked, "Has that child been baptised?" "Well, sir," replied the curtsying mother, "I shouldn't like to say as much as that; but your young man came and did what he could."

Lost in these entrancing recollections of Anglicanism as it once was, but will never be again, I have wandered far from my theme. I began by saying that all one has read, all one has heard, all one has been able to collect by study or by conversation, points to the close of the eighteenth century as the low-water mark of English religion and morality. The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a great revival, due chiefly to the Evangelical movement, and not only, as in the previous century, on lines outside the Establishment, but in the very heart and core of the Church of England. That movement, though little countenanced by ecclesiastical authority, changed the whole tone of religious thought and life in England. It recalled men to serious ideas of faith and duty; it curbed profligacy, it made decency fashionable, it revived the external usages of piety, and it prepared the way for that later movement which, issuing from Oxford in 1833, has transfigured the Church of England.

"I do not mean to say," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "that the founders of the Oxford School announced, or even that they knew, to how large an extent they were to be pupils and continuators of the Evangelical work, besides being something else.... Their distinctive speech was of Church and priesthood, of Sacraments and services, as the vesture under the varied folds of which the Form of the Divine Redeemer was to be exhibited to the world in a way capable of, and suited for, transmission by a collective body from generation to generation. It may well have happened that, in straining to secure for their ideas what they thought their due place, some at least may have forgotten or disparaged that personal and experimental life of the human soul with God which profits by all ordinances but is tied to none, dwelling ever, through all its varying moods, in the inner courts of the sanctuary whereof the walls are not built with hands. The only matter, however, with which I am now concerned is to record the fact that the pith and life of the Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our Lord to be the woof and warp of preaching, was the great gift of the movement to the teaching Church, and has now penetrated and possessed it on a scale so general that it may be considered as pervading the whole mass."