Outspoken Essays

by William Ralph Inge

The conclusion is that 'the various presbyterian and congregationalist organisations, in dispensing with the episcopal succession, violated a fundamental law of the Church's life.'[30] 'A ministry not episcopally received is invalid, that is to say, it falls outside the conditions of covenanted security, and cannot justify its existence in terms of the covenant.'[31] The Anglican Church is not asking for the cause to be decided all her own way; for she has much to do to recall herself to her true principles. 'God's promise to Judah was that she should remember her ways and should be ashamed, when she should receive her sisters Samaria and Sodom, and that He would give them to her for daughters, but not by her covenant.'[32] The 'covenant' which the Church is to be content to forgo in order to recover Samaria and Sodom (the 'Free Churches' can hardly be expected to relish this method of opening negotiations) is apparently the covenant between Church and State. 'In the future the Anglican Church must be content to act as, first of all, part and parcel of the Catholic Church, ruled by her laws, empowered by her spirit.' The bishops are to be ready to maintain, at all cost, the inherent spiritual independence which belongs to their office.

Such a theory of the essentials of a true Church necessarily requires, as a corollary, a refutation of the Roman Catholic theory of orders, which reduces the Anglican clergy to the same level as the ministers of schismatical sects. Bishop Gore answers the objection that the Roman Church is the logical expression of his theory of the ministry, by saying that Roman Catholicism is not the development of the whole of the Church, but only of a part of it; and moreover, that spiritually it does not represent the whole of Christianity as it finds expression in the first Christian age or in the New Testament.[33] The Roman Church is a one-sided outgrowth of the religion of Christ—a development of those qualities in Christianity with which the Latin genius has special affinity. It has committed itself to unhistorical doctrines, involving a deficient appreciation of the intellectual and moral claim of truth to be valued for its own sake no less than for its results. Much of its teaching can only be explained as the result of an 'over-reckless accommodation to the unregenerate natural instincts in religion.'[34] The fact that the largest section of Christendom has become what Rome now is, is no proof that theirs is the line of true development. We can see this clearly enough if we consider the case of Buddhism. The main existing developments of Buddhism are a mere travesty of the spirit of Sakya Muni.[35] In this way Dr. Gore anticipates and rejects the argument since then put forward by Loisy, and other Liberal Catholic apologists, that history has proved Roman Catholicism to be the proper development of Christ's religion. In short, the Anglican Church, which indisputably possesses the Apostolic Succession, has no reason to go humbly to Borne to obtain recognition of her Orders.

So far, in reviewing Bishop Gore's published opinions, we are on familiar High Anglican ground. But what is the Bishop's seat of authority in doctrine? He has shown himself willing, within limits, to apply critical methods to Holy Scripture. He has very little respect for the infallible Pope. And he would be the last to trust to private judgment—the testimonium Spiritus Sancti as understood by some Protestants. Where, then, is the ultimate Court of Appeal? Bishop Gore finds it in the two earliest of the three Creeds, 'in which Catholic consent is especially expressed;' and in a half apologetic manner he adds that this Catholic basis has been 'generally understood' to imply 'an unrealisable but not therefore unreal appeal to a General Council.'[36] No revision, therefore, of the Church's doctrinal formularies can be made except by the authority of a court which can never, by any possibility, be summoned! The unique sanctity and obligation which Bishop Gore considers to attach to the Creeds have been asserted by him again and again with a vehemence which proves that he regards the matter as of vital importance. 'There must be no compromise as regards the Creeds.... If those who live in an atmosphere of intellectual criticism become incapable of such sincere public profession of belief as the Creed contains, the Church must look to recruit her ministry from classes still capable of a more simple and unhesitating faith.'[37] And, again, in his most recent book: 'I have taken occasion before now to make it evident that, as far as I can secure it, I will admit no one into this diocese, or into Holy Orders, to minister for the congregation, who does not ex animo believe the Creeds.'[38] Dr. Gore has not spared to stigmatise as morally dishonest those who desire to serve the Church as its ministers while harbouring doubts about the physical miracle known as the Virgin Birth, and one of his clergy was a few years ago induced to resign his living by an aspersion of this kind, to which the Bishop gave publicity in the daily press.

Now it has been generally supposed that the Anglican clergy are bound to declare their adhesion not only to the Creeds, but to the Thirty-nine Articles, and to the infallible truth of Holy Scripture. Bishop Gore, however, holds that when a new deacon, on the day of his ordination, solemnly declares that he 'assents to the Thirty-nine Articles,' and that he 'believes the doctrine therein set forth to be agreeable to the word of God,' he 'can no longer fairly be regarded as bound to particular phrases or expressions in the Articles.'[39] And further, when the same new deacon expresses his 'unfeigned belief in all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments,' 'that expression of belief can be fairly and justly made by anyone who believes heartily that the Bible, as a whole, records and contains the message of God to man in all its stages of delivery and that each one of the books contains some element or aspect of this revelation.'[40]

The Bishop himself has affirmed his personal belief that some narratives in the Old Testament are probably not historical. It may fairly be asked on what principle he is prepared to evade the plain sense and intention of a doctrinal test in two cases while stigmatising as morally flagitious any attempts to do the same in a third. For it is unquestionable that a general assent to the Articles does not mean that the man who gives that assent is free to repudiate any 'particular phrases or expressions' which do not please him. A witness who admitted having signed an affidavit with this intention would cut a poor figure in a law court. And it is difficult to see how adhesion to the antiquated theory of inspiration could be demanded more stringently than by the form of words which was drawn up, as none can doubt, to secure it. These things being so, either the accusation of bad faith applies to the treatment which the Bishop justifies in the case of the Articles and the Bible, or it should not be brought against those who apply to one clause in their vows the principle which is admitted and used in two others.

There are some honourable men who have abstained from entering the service of the Church on account of these requirements. But there are many others who recognise that knowledge grows and opinions change, while formularies for the most part remain unaltered; and who consider that, so long as their general position is understood by those among whom they work, it would be overscrupulous to refuse an inward call to the ministry because they know that they will be asked to give a formal assent to unsuitably worded tests drawn up three centuries ago. Dr. Gore himself would probably have been refused ordination fifty years ago on the ground of his lax views on inspiration; and the Bishops who approved of the condemnation of Colenso, who condemned 'Essays and Reviews,' and who would have condemned 'Lux Mundi,' were more 'honest' to the tests than their successors. But an obstinate persistence in that kind of honesty would have excluded from the ministry all except fools, liars, and bigots. Again, it might have been supposed that the laity also, who at their baptism and confirmation made the same declaration of belief in 'all the articles' of the Apostles' Creed, and who are bidden by the Church to repeat the same Creed every week, are in the same position as the clergy. But the Bishop again attempts to draw a distinction. 'The responsibility of joining in the Creed is left to the conscience of the layman,' but not to the conscience of the clergyman, nor, we suppose, of the choir.[41] This plea seems to us a very lame one. The Church of England has never thought of imposing severer doctrinal tests on the clergy than on the laity, and assent to the Creeds is as integral a part of the baptismal as of the ordination vows.

No loyal Christian wishes to impugn a doctrine which touches so closely the life of the Redeemer as the account of His miraculous conception, which appears, in our texts, in two books of the New Testament. If the tradition is as old as the Church, which is very doubtful, it must, from the nature of the case, rest on the unsupported assertion of Mary, the mother of Jesus; for Joseph could only testify that the child was not his. It is therefore useless to reinforce the Gospel narrative by appealing to 'Catholic tradition,'[42] as if it could add anything to the evidence. It is significant, however, of the Bishop's own feelings about tradition, that he quietly sets aside the plain statement of the Synoptic Gospels that Joseph and Mary had a large family of four sons and more than one daughter by their marriage. This statement, which is doubtless historical, became intolerable to the conscience of the Church during the long frenzy of asceticism, when marital relations were regarded as impure and degrading; and in consequence the perpetual virginity of Mary, though contradicted in the New Testament, became as much an article of faith as her conception of Jesus by the Holy Ghost. We have no wish to criticise the arguments for the Virgin Birth which Dr. Gore has collected in his 'Dissertations.' But when a strenuous effort is made to exclude from the ministry of the Church all who cannot declare ex animo that they believe it to be a certain historical fact, it becomes a duty to point out that, on ordinary principles of evidence, the story must share the uncertainty which hangs over other strange and unsupported narratives. The Bishop expresses his doubt whether those who regard this miracle as unproven can be convinced of the Divinity of Christ. This only shows how difficult it is for an ecclesiastic in his high position to induce either clergy or laity to talk frankly to him. To most educated men there would be no difficulty in believing that the Son of God became incarnate through the agency of two earthly parents. The analogy of hybrids in the animal world is not felt to apply to the union of the human and divine natures, except by persons of very low intelligence. We should have preferred to be silent on this delicate subject, but for the fact that some men whom the Church can ill spare have been advised officially not to apply for ordination, on account of their views about this miracle. Fortunately, the practice of demanding more specific declarations than the law requires has not been adopted in most dioceses.

The question of the miraculous element in religious truth has indeed reached an acute stage. The Catholic doctrine is and always has been that there are two 'orders'—the natural and the supernatural—on the same plane, and distinguishable from each other. The Catholic theologian is prepared to define what occurrences in the lives of the Saints are natural, and what supernatural. Miracles are of frequent occurrence, and are established by ordinary evidence. Three miracles have to be placed to the credit of each candidate for canonisation before he or she is entitled to bear the title of saint, and the evidence for these miracles is sifted by a commission. This theory has been practically abandoned in the English Church. There are few among our ecclesiastics and theologians who would spend five minutes in investigating any alleged supernatural occurrence in our own time. It would be assumed that, if true, it must be ascribed to some obscure natural cause. The result is that the miracles in the Creeds, or in the New Testament, are isolated as they have never been before. They seem to form an order by themselves, a class of fact belonging neither to the world of phenomena as we know it, nor to the world of spirit as we know it. From this situation has arisen the tendency, increasingly prevalent both in the Roman Church and in Protestant Germany, to distinguish 'truths of faith' from 'truths of fact,' The former, it is said, have a representative, symbolic character, and are only degraded by being placed in the same category as physical phenomena. This contention is open to very serious objections, but it at least indicates the actual state of the problem, viz. that to most educated men the miraculous element in Christianity seems to float between earth and heaven, no longer essentially connected with either, while on the other hand the majority of religious people, including a few men of high intelligence, find it difficult to realise their faith without the help of the miraculous. Supernaturalism, which from the scientific point of view is the most unsatisfactory of all theories, traversing as it does the first article in the creed of science—the uniformity of nature—gives, after all, a kind of crude synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of spirit. But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided. And it is in this literal sense that Bishop Gore requires all his clergy to assent to the miracles in the Creeds.

The fact is that the Catholic party in the Church are in a hopeless impasse with regard to dogma. They cannot take any step which would divide them from 'the whole Church,' and the whole Church no longer exists except as an ideal—it has long ago been shivered into fragments. The Roman Church is in a much better position. The Pope may at any time 'interpret' tradition in such a manner as to change it completely—there is no appeal from his authoritative pronouncements; but for the High Anglican there is no living authority, only the dead hand, and a Council which can never meet. It is much as if no important legislation could be passed in this country without a joint session of our Parliament and the American Congress. It is difficult to see any way of escape, except by accepting the principle of development in a sense which would repudiate the time-honoured 'appeal to antiquity.'

We have next to consider Bishop Gore as a Church Reformer. We have seen that he desires an autonomous Church, which can legislate for itself. The dead hand, which weighs so lightly upon him when it forbids any attempt to revise the formularies of the faith, seems to him intolerably heavy when it obliges the Church to conform to 'the laws, canons, and rubrics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which it cannot alter or add to.'[43] The only remedy, he thinks, is a really representative assembly, of bishops, presbyters, and laymen. In the early Church, as he points out, the laity were always recognised as constituent members of the government of the Church. In a democratic age, the laity as a body should exercise the powers which in the Middle Ages were delegated to, or usurped by, 'emperors, kings, chiefs and lords.' The parish ought to have the real control of the Church buildings, except the chancel; the Church servants ought to be appointed and removed by the parish meeting. It would be a step forward if these parish councils could be organised under diocesan regulation, and invested with the control of the parish finances, except the vicar's stipend; the right to object to the appointment of an unfit pastor; and some power of determining the ceremonial at the Church services. The diocesan synod should become a reality; there should also be provincial synods, which could become national by fusion. But in the last resort the declaration of the mind of the Church on matters of doctrine and morals ought to belong to the bishops.[44]