‘The story that the orphan tells to Laura, which Father Clarke calls ‘detestable, extravagant and objectionable,’ that no instructed Catholic would dream of telling to his juniors, is told by Father Law, S.J., to his younger brothers and sisters, and is given in the very interesting Life of Father Law, by Ellis Schreiber. I have only shortened it.
‘Father Clarke does not seem to have the dimmest notion of what is meant by writing in character. I had a hearty laugh over his really absurd remarks about Laura and St. Francis Borgia’s children.”
Some years later, when her feeling about the book’s reception had settled down and crystallized, she wrote in more meditative mood to her son-in-law, George Trevelyan:
“Yes, it was a good subject, and I shall hardly come across one again so full both of intellectual and human interest.... I like your ‘dear and dreadful!’ In my case it is quite true. Catholicism has an enormous attraction for me,—yet I could no more be a Catholic than a Mahometan. Only, never let us forget how much of Catholicism is based, as Uncle Matt would have said, on ‘Natural truth’—truth of human nature, and truth of moral experience. The visible, imperishable Society—the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst—no greater idea, it seems to me, was ever thrown into the world of men. Its counterpart is to be found in the Logos conception from which all Liberalism descends, and which is the perpetual corrective of the Catholic idea. But these things would take us far!”
Meanwhile, to Bishop Creighton, who had written to her far less critically than usual of her new book, she replied with a long letter, in which, after the first sheet, she reverted to the subjects which were always of the deepest interest to this pair of friends—the barriers set around the National Church, which Mrs. Ward complained kept out too many of the faithful, or at least too many of those who, like herself, would willingly proclaim their faith in a spiritual Christ.
Stocks, Tring,
August 9, 1898.
...“I have been desperately, perhaps disproportionately interested in a meeting of Liberal Churchmen as to which I cannot get full particulars—in which the great need of the day was said to be not ritual, but ‘the re-statement and re-interpretation of dogma in the light of the knowledge and criticism of our day.’ It makes me once more conscious of all sorts of claims and cravings that I have often wished to talk over with you—not as Bishop of London!—but as one with whom, in old days at any rate, I used to talk quite freely. If only the orthodox churchmen would allow us on our side a little more freedom, I, at any rate, should be well content to let the Ritualists do what they please! Every year I live I more and more resent the injustice which excludes those who hold certain historical and critical opinions from full membership in the National Church, above all from participation in the Lord’s Supper. Why are we all always to be bound by the formularies of a past age, which avowedly represent a certain state of past opinion, a certain balance of parties?—privately and personally I mean. The public and ceremonial use of formularies is another matter where clearly the will of the majority should decide. The minority may be well content to accept the public and ceremonial use, if it may accept it in its own way. But here the Church steps in with a test—several tests—the Catechism, the Creed, the Confirmation service. And the tendency of the last generation of churchpeople has been all towards tightening these tests, probably under two influences—a deepened Christian devotion, and the growing pressure of the alternative view of Christianity. But is it not time the alternative view were brought in and assimilated,—to the strengthening of Christian love and fellowship? What ought to prevent anyone who accepts the Lord’s own test of the ‘two great commandments,’ or the Pauline test of ‘all who love the Lord Jesus Christ,’ from breaking the bread and drinking the wine which signify the headship and sacrifice, and mystical fellowship of Christ? But such an one may hold it solemnly and sacredly impossible to recite matters of supposed history such as ‘born of the Virgin Mary,’ or ‘on the third day He rose again—and ascended to the Father,’ as personally true of himself. He may be quite wrong—that is not the point. Supposing that his historical conscience is clearly and steadily convinced on the one side, and on the other he only asks that he and his children may pass into the national Christian family, and join hands with all who believe in God, who ‘love the Lord Jesus’ and hope in immortality, what should keep him out? Would it not be an immense strengthening of the Church to include, on open and honourable terms, those who can now only share in her Eucharist on terms of concealment and evasion? Why should there not be an alternative baptismal and confirmation service, to be claimed under a conscience clause by those who desire it? At present no one can have his children confirmed who is not prepared to accept, or see them accept, certain historical statements, which he and they may perhaps not believe. And except as a matter of private bargain and sufferance—always liable to scandal—neither he nor they, unless these tests have been passed, can join in the commemoration of their Master’s death, which should be to them the food and stimulus of life. Nothing honestly remains to them but exclusion, and hunger—or the falling back upon a Unitarianism, which has too often unlearned Christ, and to which, at its best, they may not naturally belong.”
Mrs. Ward might, perhaps, have added that what remains to the majority of those whom these tests keep out, is a gradual loss of hunger—a making up with other things, which cannot but be a fatal loss to the National Church. But she was thinking of her own case, and to her, I think, the “hunger” for admission to the Church (though always on her own terms!) remained for long years a living force, leading her in the end to write that best and most vivid among her later books, The Case of Richard Meynell. Meanwhile her relations with Unitarianism, mentioned in this letter, remained somewhat anomalous, for while agreeing with its tenets, she was always impatient of its old-fashioned isolation, and of its neglect to seize the opportunity presented to it by the march of modern thought, which seemed to her to summon it to take the lead in the movement towards a free Christian fellowship. She was never so hard on the Unitarian body as Stopford Brooke, who once exclaimed in a letter to her that “they cling to ancient uglinesses as if they were sweethearts!” But Mrs. Ward had had a brush with them in 1893, when she wrote to the Manchester Guardian after the opening of Manchester College, Oxford, lamenting the bareness of the service, the extempore prayers, the relics of old Puritanism, instead of the appeal to colour and imagination and modern thought. Her letter provoked many answers, both public and private, and to one of these, a kind and generous argument from Dr. Estlin Carpenter, she replied with a fuller explanation of her feeling:
November 2, 1893.
...“My own feeling, the child of course of early habit and tradition, is strongly on the side of ritual throughout, though I would infinitely rather have new ritual, like Dr. Martineau’s two services, than a modified edition of the Anglican prayers, such as we have at Mr. Brooke’s. But I don’t think I should have ventured to put forward the view I did so strongly as I did, with regard to any other place in the world than Oxford. I knew Oxford intimately for fifteen years, and still, of course, have many friends there. I am convinced that Manchester College has a real mission towards an Oxford which is not yet theirs, but which ought to become so. But I am also certain that Oxford cannot be reached through the forms that have been so far adopted. You may say, as Mr. —— does in effect, in a letter to me: ‘Oxford must take us with our Puritanism as we are, or leave us.’ But surely to say this is to refuse a real mission, a real call. It is the very opposite of St. Paul’s spirit, of making himself all things to all men, ‘that I may by any means gain some.’ It is putting adherence to a form, about which there is, after all, serious difference of opinion in your own body, between you and a great future. At least that is how it looks to me, and I think I have some means of judging. The religious message, the thoughts, the conceptions that you have to give Oxford, especially to the young men, not of your own body, who may be attracted to you through the Chapel, are, it seems to me, the all-important thing, and any fears of imitating the Church, or dislike of abandoning Puritan tradition, which may hold you back from the best means of bringing those thoughts and faiths into the current life of Oxford, will be a disaster to us all. It is because I have thought so much about this settlement of yours, in the place where I myself often starved for lack of religious fellowship, that I was drawn to write with the vehemence I did. But one had better never be vehement!”