The Case of Richard Meynell

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"Certainly you will! Do you imagine that men who are the spiritual sons and heirs of Pusey and Liddon are going to sit down quietly in the same church with you and the eighteen who started this League yesterday? They would sooner die."

Meynell bore the onslaught quietly.

"It depends upon our strength," he said slowly, "and the strength we develop, as the fight goes on."

"Not at all!—a monstrous delusion!" The Bishop raised an indignant brow. "If you overwhelmed us—if you got the State on your side, as in France at the Revolution—you would still have done nothing toward your end—nothing whatever! We refuse—we shall always refuse—to be unequally yoked with those who deny the fundamental truths of the Faith!"

"My lord, you are so yoked at the present moment," said Meynell firmly—the colour had flashed back into his cheeks—"it is the foundation of our case that half the educated men and women we gather into our churches to-day are—in our belief—Modernists already. Question them!—they are with us—not with you. That is to say, they have tacitly shaken off the old forms—the Creeds and formularies that bind the visible, the legal, church. They do not even think much about them. Forgive me if I speak plainly! They are not grieving about the old. Their soul—those of them, I mean that have the gift of religion—is travailing—dumbly travailing—with the new. Slowly, irresistibly, they are evolving for themselves new forms, new creeds, whether they know it or not. You—the traditional party—you, the bishops and the orthodox majority—can help them, or hinder them. If you deny them organized expression and outlet, you prolong the dull friction between them and the current Christianity. You waste where you might gather—you quench where you might kindle. But there they are—in the same church with you—and you cannot drive them out!"

The Bishop made a sound of pain.

"I wish to drive no one out," he said, lifting a diaphanous hand. "To his own master let each man stand or fall. But you ask us—us, the appointed guardians of the Faith—the ecclesia docens—the historic episcopate—to deny and betray the Faith! You ask us to assent formally to the effacing of all difference between Faith and Unfaith—you bid us tell the world publicly that belief matters nothing—that a man may deny all the Divine Facts of Redemption, and still be as good a Christian as any one else. History alone might tell you—and I am speaking for the moment as a student to a student—that the thing is inconceivable!"

"Unless—solvitur vivendo!" said Meynell in a low voice. "What great change in the religious life of men has not seemed inconceivable—till it happened? Think of the great change that brought this English Church into being! Within a couple of generations men had to learn to be baptized, and married, and buried, with rites unknown to their fathers—to stand alone and cut off from the great whole of Christendom—to which they had once belonged—to see the Mass, the cult of Our Lady and the Saints, disappear from their lives. What change that any Modernist proposes could equal that? But England lived through it!—England emerged!—she recovered her equilibrium. Looking back upon it all now, we see—you and I agree there—that it was worth while—that the energizing, revealing power behind the world was in the confusion and the dislocation; and that England gained more than she lost when she made for herself an English and a national Church in these islands, out of the shattered débris of the Roman System."

He bent forward, and looked intently into the Bishop's face. "What if another hour of travail be upon us? And is any birth possible without pain?"

"Don't let us argue the Reformation!" said the Bishop, with a new sharpness of note. "We should be here all night. But let me at least point out to you that the Church kept her Creeds!—the Succession!—the four great Councils!—the unbroken unity of essential dogma. But you"—he turned with renewed passion on his companion—"what have you done with the Creeds? Every word in them steeped in the heart's blood of generations!—and you put them aside as a kind of theological bric-à-brac that concerns us no more. Meynell!—you have no conception of the forces that this movement of yours, if you persist in it, will unchain against you! You are like children playing with the lightning!"