The late Dr Quinn, the late Oscar Clayton, are men who have improved the status of their calling by their social services and gifts, and have helped to extend the authority of the physician over every department of life. We have long since shaken off the rule of priests. Some may think we have already placed ourselves under a despotism of doctors, who by their word can make or mar the reputation of places and climates if not of characters and of men; and on whom the obligations of professional etiquette seem at least equal to their sense of responsibility to the public.[106]
CHAPTER XXIX
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
The vicissitudes of religious thought in the Victorian age illustrated by the quaint saying of an Oxford verger. Changes in the organization of the Church of England during the present reign. The revival of Convocation; the Ecclesiastical Commission. Facts and figures illustrating the results of these and the progress made at home and abroad. Activity and efficiency of other religious bodies, Protestant and Papist. Special influence of individuals in the Churches. In the Anglican, Dean Arthur Stanley, Professor Jowett, Professor Mansel. In the Nonconformist bodies, R. W. Dale, and C. H. Spurgeon. A friendly critic on the abuse of religious liberalism. How this re-acts, even on the new High Church critics, e.g. Lux Mundi and The Sermon on the Mount.
A verger at St Mary’s Church, Oxford, during the sixties used devoutly to thank his Maker that after having heard University sermons for thirty years, he still remained a Christian. Conflicts within, attacks without, at least as severe as any to which either was exposed during the Georgian epoch, have been the lot of the Christianity whose depository is the Church of England during the Victorian age. Neither Christian faith, nor the Church that is its national expression, has come forth maimed or weakened from that ordeal. Modern scepticism scarcely aims at substituting for a Divine Being any tangible object of faith. It retires from the discussion with the remark that high and invisible things are beyond human knowledge. Hence nothing in agnosticism, however hostile its tendency to, need be inconsistent with, Revelation. The mere statement of difficulties in the way of belief and of purely abstract alternatives to belief makes no proselytes.[107]
Freethinkers of the last century appealed, and were limited, to the rich. The secularists who are their successors since 1840 pose as the friends of the poor. Neither school can consider itself a power. The Victorian age is in fact above all others an age of religious revival. This has been largely due to the influence of the Court. From the entourage of the later Georges and of William IV. the best of their subjects held aloof. Had the year of Revolution come then instead of in 1848, the English throne, whose possessor lacked all personal hold of the people, might have shared the fate of continental crowns.
The Queen saw nothing of any Court until she presided over a transformed Court of her own. Her subjects no sooner knew their fresh ruler than they were powerfully impressed by the contrast of her blameless life and society to anything of which they had read, heard, or seen. Under such a sovereign, a change in the whole spirit of the nation’s religious life naturally followed. Thinking minds had indeed long been in a state of spiritual ferment. The Tractarian movement had begun with Keble’s Assize Sermon five years before the Queen’s accession. Its full results were not to be seen till 1846.
Meanwhile, in the third year of the reign the idea of reviving Convocation, which since 1717 had been suspended, of which Burke had said that it was without functions save to pay compliments to the king and then dissolve, took form; since 1850, that body has met. Unreformed this clerical parliament still remains. As in 1864 it declared Essays and Reviews heretical, but could not punish the men whom it branded, so, to-day, a canon of Convocation, though approved by the Crown, has no binding power. But the days when the Times, long since convinced of its Erastian errors, could sneer at Convocation as ‘a clerical debating society with a long name’ are altogether gone by.