A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

Canon Henson on Anglican Narrowness.

While bound to criticise Canon Henson for this breach of good manners, I hasten to express my cordial admiration of his courtesy, courage, and Christliness in general, and especially of the power of his statement of the claims of Christian love against the Anglican custom of refusing to commune with Nonconformists. The most remarkable sermon preached by any clergyman of the Established Church during our sojourn in England was a sermon preached by him before the University of Cambridge on the text, "There shall be one fold and one Shepherd," in which he advocated the admission of Nonconformists to the sacrament. Hear him:

"The primary need of the hour is more religious honesty. In the classic phrase of Dr. Johnson, Churchmen beyond all others need 'to clear their minds of cant.' 'Let love be without hypocrisy' is the kindred protest of St. Paul. Bear with me while I bring these considerations to a very simple, indeed an obvious application. On all hands there is talk of Christian unity. Not a Conference or a Congress of Churchmen meets without effusive welcome from Nonconformists. A few weeks ago I sat in the Congress Hall at Brighton and listened to a series of speeches by prominent Nonconformists, all expressing the warmest sentiments of Christian fraternity. I reflected that by the existing law and current practice of our church all those excellent orators and their fellow-believers were spiritual outcasts; that, if they presented themselves for the Sacrament of Unity, they would be decisively rejected; that, in no consecrated building, might their voices be heard from the pulpit, though all men—as in the case of Dr. Dale, of Birmingham—owned their conspicuous power and goodness. The contradiction came home to my conscience as an intolerable outrage, and I determined to say here to-day in this famous pulpit, to which your kindness has bidden me, what I had long been thinking, that the time has come for Churchmen to remove barriers for which they can no longer plead political utility, and which have behind them no sanctions in the best conscience and worthiest reason of our time. I remembered that in my study, at work in preparation of the sermons which expressed my obligation as a Christian teacher, I drew no invidious distinctions. Baxter and Jeremy Taylor, Dale and Gore, Ramsay and Lightfoot, Döllinger and Hort, George Adam Smith and Driver, Ritschl and Moberley, Fairbairn and Westcott, Bruce and Sanday, Liddon and Lacordaire, these and many others of all Christian churches united without difficulty in the fellowship of sacred science; it was not otherwise in my devotions. Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Nonconformist were reconciled easily enough in the privacy of prayer and meditation. The two persons whom I venerated as the best Christians I knew, and to whom spiritually I owed most, were not Anglicans. Only in the sanctuary itself was the hideous discovery vouchsafed that they were outcasts from my fellowship. I might feed my mind with their wisdom, and kindle my devotion with their piety, and stir my conscience with their example, but I might not break bread with them at the table of our common Lord, nor bear their presence as teachers in the churches dedicated to his worship. It seemed to me that the love so lavishly expressed in that Congress Hall must, at least on our side, be a strangely hollow thing. It is true that the presiding bishop reminded the Nonconformists that there were doctrinal differences which could not be forgotten or minimized, but this obstacle was effectively demolished by the debates of the Congress—debates which revealed the widest possible doctrinal divergence between men who, none the less, communicated at the same altars and owned allegiance to the same church."

What Canon Henson could see in Virginia.

Such a discourse from such a man in such a place naturally created a sensation in England. It would not have done so, as to its main point, in Virginia. Why? Well, the fundamental reason is that the average Virginia Episcopalian represents a much higher type of Christianity than the average English churchman, broader, sweeter, truer. Indeed, if there are in any church anywhere people of lovelier character, truer charity, and more genuine devotion to our Lord than the evangelical Episcopalians of Virginia, many of whom it has been my good fortune to know long and intimately, I have never heard of them. I only wish the type was more common in some other parts of the country. Now, the things so trenchantly stated by Canon Henson in the foregoing excerpt are mere matters of course to the mind of your evangelical Low Churchman in Virginia. To him it is no uncommon thing to break bread with Christians of other denominations at the table of our common Lord or to hear the gospel preached by ministers of other churches from the pulpits of his own. I have heard it said that this fraternal attitude is deprecated by some of the younger clergy in Virginia of late, and that through their opposition this open recognition of other Christian people and their ministers is less common than it used to be. I should be sorry to believe it, and I know some facts which seem to disprove it. Four or five years ago I myself was invited to deliver the Reinicke Lecture to the students of the Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, Va., and did so with a feeling of as cordial welcome as I had ever received anywhere in my whole life. I have been repeatedly invited to preach in Episcopal pulpits. When the General Assembly of our church meets in Lexington, Va., next May, you may rely upon it Presbyterian ministers will be invited by the rector of the Episcopal church there to supply his pulpit on Sunday, just as they are by the pastors of the other churches. More than that, I have a friend in the Presbyterian ministry, now a pastor in Baltimore, who not long ago, by invitation of the vestry of an Episcopal church in a Virginia town, not only occupied the pulpit and preached, but also wore the surplice and administered the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

Are Virginia Episcopalians Becoming Less Liberal?

It may be true that there is a reaction going on even in Virginia against this spirit of Christian fellowship, and that things of this kind are less frequent than formerly; but, if so, I am satisfied that it is a reaction with which the Virginia laymen have nothing to do, and which they will oppose as soon as they become aware of it, [6] and I am sure, too, that clergymen will not be lacking who will make a strong stand against it.

Decreasing Attendance in the Anglican Churches in London.