Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

by George William Erskine Russell

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 practitioners, 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 assembled 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" assembled, 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 latitudinarianism. My view is that God gives us the opportunity, as at home latitudinarianism 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 assemblage, 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 title 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 advertisement." 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' assistance 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.[*]