Dr. Gore thinks that the supreme mistake of Christianity was placing itself under the protection and patronage of national governments. It should never have become nationalised. Its greatest and most necessitous demand was to stand apart from anything in the nature of racialism.
He mourns over an incoherent humanity; he seeks for unifying principles. The religion of an Incarnation must have a message for the world, a message for the whole world, for all mankind. Surely, surely. But unifying principles are not popular in the churches. It is the laity which objects to a coherent Gospel.
He sighs for a spiritualised Labour Party. He shrinks from the thought of a revolution, but does not believe that the present industrial system can be Christianised. There must be a fundamental change. Christianity is intensely personal, but its individualism is of the spirit, the individualism of unselfishness. He laughs grimly, in a low and rumbling fashion, on hearing that Communism is losing its influence in the north of England. "I can quite imagine that; the last thing an Englishman will part with is his property."
Laughter, if it can be called laughter, is rare on his lips, and is reserved in general for opinions which are in antagonism to his own. He laughs in this way at the makeshift compromises of statesmen and theologians and economists saying that what those men hate more than anything else is a fixed principle. He quotes with a sardonic pleasure the capital saying that a certain statesman's idea of a settled policy based on fixed moral principles is a policy which will last from breakfast-time to luncheon—he repeats the last words "from breakfast-time to luncheon," with a deep relish, an indrawing of the breath, a flash of light in the glassy eyes.
He remains impenitent concerning his first instinct as to England's duty at the violation of Belgium's neutrality. We were justified in fighting; we could do no other; it was a stern duty laid upon us by the Providence which overrules the foolishness of man. But he is insistent that we can justify our fiery passion in War only by an equal passion in the higher cause of Peace—no, not an equal passion, a far greater passion.
We lost at Versailles our greatest opportunity for that divine justification. We showed no fervour for peace. There was no passion in us; nothing but scepticism, incredulity, and the base appetite for revenge. We might have led the world into a new epoch if at that moment we had laid down our sword, taken up our cross, and followed the Prince of Peace. But we were cold, cold. We had no idealism. We were poor sceptics trusting to economics—the economics of a base materialism.
But though he broods over the sorrows and sufferings of mankind, and views with an unutterable grief the dismemberment of Christendom, he refuses to style himself a pessimist. There is much good in the world; he is continually being astonished by the goodness of individuals; he cannot bring himself to despair of mankind. Ah, if he had only kept himself in that atmosphere! But "it is very hard to be a good Christian."
As for theology, as for modernism, people are not bothered, he says, by a supposed conflict between Religion and Science. What they want is a message. The Catholic Church must formulate a policy, must become intelligent, coherent.
He has small faith in meetings, pronouncing the word with an amused disdain, nor does he attach great importance to preaching, convinced that no Englishman can preach: "Even Roman Catholics can't preach in England." As for those chapels to which people go to hear a popular preacher, he calls them "preaching shops," and speaks with pity of those who occupy their pulpits: "That must be a dreadful life—dreadful, oh, quite dreadful!" Yet he has a lasting admiration for the sermons of Charles Spurgeon. As to Jeremy Taylor, "I confess that all that turgid rhetoric wearies me."
He does not think the Oxford Movement has spent itself. On the contrary, the majority of the young men who present themselves for ordination are very largely inspired by the spirit of that Movement. All the same, he perceives a danger in formalism, a resting in symbolism for its own sake. In its genesis, the Oxford Movement threw up great men, very great men, men of considerable intellectual power and a most profound spirituality; it is not to be expected, perhaps, that such giants should appear again, and in their absence lesser men may possibly mistake the symbol for the thing symbolised, and so fall into the error of formalism. That is a danger to be watched and guarded against. But the Movement will continue, and it will not reach its fulfilment until under its pressure the Church has arrived at unity and formulated a policy intelligent and coherent.