Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

A layman might reply simply, On the truth, and Shorthouse, as we shall see, had such an answer to make, though couched in more circuitous language. But not so the Tract:

I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built—OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.

That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which united the claims of the imagination with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical development led the way to Rome. In the Church at large, the new leaven worked its way slowly and confusedly, but in the end it created a tripartite division, which threatened for a while to bring the whole establishment down in ruins. The first of these, the High Church, is indeed essentially a continuation, and to a certain extent a vulgarisation, of the Oxford Movement. What had been a kind of epicurean vision of holy things, reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made the vehicle of a wide propaganda. The beautiful rites of the ancient worship were a powerful seduction to wean the rich from worldly living and no less a tangible compensation for the poor and outcast. At a later date, under the stress of persecution, the leaders of the party formulated the so-called Six Points on which they made a final stand: (1) The eastward position; (2) the eucharistic vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water mingled with the wine in the chalice; (5) unleavened bread; (6) incense—without these there was no worship; barely, if at all, salvation. The Low Church was, in large part, a state of pure hostility to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was loudly Protestant, confining the virtue of religion to an acceptance of the dogmas of the Reformation, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the imagination, and finding the truth too often in what was merely opposition to Rome. Contrary to both, and despised by both, was the Broad Church, which held the sacraments so lightly that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined in communion with Unitarians, and which treated dogma so cavalierly that, with Maurice, it thought a subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles the quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot see that this boasted freedom did much more than introduce a kind of license in the interpretation of words; it transferred the field of battle from forms to formulæ.

From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it possessed its giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the English language. I have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the chief aspects of the controversy, because only as the result of a profound and, in many respects, violent national upheaval can the force and the inner veracity of John Inglesant be comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell on this point; indeed, it would appear from her record that the noise of the dispute reached her husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of composition he was dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw of the Oratory, where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal Newman resided, having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts to authority. The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through which he had come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was during these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the banners of the English Church Union and the Church Association. The activity of this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express purpose of "putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the fact that at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some $250,000 for the sake of attacking High Church clergymen through the processes of law. Not without reason was it dubbed the Persecution Company limited.

Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of argument—Laud himself had aforetime made such an attempt—to regard the Battle of the Churches as a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialism is due to the fact that it was concerned, not with the truth, but with what men had held to be the truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able to write a book which is in a way the direct fruit of this conflict, and which still contains so much of the universal aspect of religion, came, I think, from his early Quaker training and from his Greek philosophy. It would be a mistake to suppose that, on entering the Church of England, he closed in his own breast the door to that inner sanctuary of listening silence, the innocuæ silentia vitæ, where he had been taught to worship as a child. At the time of the change he could still write to one who was distressed at his decision: "I grant that Friends, at their commencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the most important truth of this system, the indwelling of the Divine Word." In reality, there was no "perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence to this principle, both before and after his conversion; only he would place a new emphasis on the word "indwelling." The step signified to him, as I read his life, a transition from the religion of the conscience to that of the imagination, from morality to spiritual vision. This voice, which the Quakers heard in their own hearts alone, and which was an admonition to separate themselves from all the false splendours of the world, he now heard from stream and flowering meadow and from the decorum of courtly society, bidding him make beautiful his life, as well as holy. Henceforth he could say that "all history is nothing but the relation of this great effort—the struggle of the divine principle to enter into human life." And in the same letter in which these words occur—an extraordinary epistle to Matthew Arnold, asking him to embody the writer's ideas in an essay—he extends his Quaker inheritance so far as to make it a cloak for humour, a humour, as he says, in "a sense beyond, perhaps, that in which it ever has been understood, but which, it may be, it is reserved to you to reveal to men." One would like to have Mr. Arnold's reply to this divagation on Don Quixote. Mr. Shorthouse had, characteristically, adapted the book to his own spiritual needs as a representation "of the struggles of the divine principle to enter into the everyday details of human life."

It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to George Fox and to Plato which preserved Mr. Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement while permitting him to be faithful to the Church. In the Introduction to the Life an ecclesiastical friend distinguishes him from the partisan schools as a "Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confess in general to a strong dislike for these technical phrases, which always savour a little of an evasion of realities, and bear about the same relation to actual human experience as do the pigeonholes of a lawyer's desk; but in this case the words have a useful brevity. They show how he had been able to take the best from all sides of the controversy and to weld these elements into harmony with the philosophy of his inheritance and education. The position of Mr. Shorthouse was akin to that of the Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanising tendencies and his distrust of priestcraft, but he differed from them still more essentially in his recognition of the imagination as equally potent with the moral sense in the upbuilding of character. To the Broad-Churchman he was united chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One of his few published papers (reprinted in the Life) is a plea for The Agnostic at Church,—a plea which may still be taken to heart by those troubled doubters who are held aloof by the dogmas of Christianity, yet regret their lonely isolation from the religious aspirations of the community:

There is, however, one principle which underlies all church worship with which he [the agnostic] cannot fail to sympathise, with which he cannot fail to be in harmony—the sacramental principle. For this is the great underlying principle of life, by which the commonest and dullest incidents, the most unattractive sights, the crowded streets and unlovely masses of people, become instinct with a delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become the "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in heart.... Kneeling in company with his fellows, even if all recollection of a far-away past, with its childhood's faith and fancies, has faded from his mind, it is impossible but that some effect of sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness, should mollify and refresh his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that consciousness of intellect which, natural and laudable in itself, may perhaps be felt by him at moments to be his greatest snare.

But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely masses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice than for the brotherhood of charity or the association of men in good works. In his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he differed from that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as the equal foes of religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its historic symbolism and its national acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, the ministration of the priest. He thus extended the meaning of the word far beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism. "This sunshine upon the grass," he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance and of love." When, in his early days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home, there arose in his mind a poignant strife between his loyalty to created and to uncreated beauty. In a stanza composed for a lady's autograph album he gave this expression to his hesitancy:

There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.
'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,
With unattached and lonely step to rove
O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot.
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.

No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse during his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited Church as the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their approach to God, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on the ocean waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he saw it at the altar table.