Painted Windows Part 13

I should not like to answer this question, and yet I do not like to pa.s.s it by. Antipathetic as I find myself to Dr. Orchard, it would not be just to imply that the power of his personal influence is not a great one, and one of an entirely wholesome nature. It seems to me, then, that the nature of that which attracts the unhappy to seek his counsel is of small moment in comparison with the extent and beneficence of his good counsel. The fact that he does help people, does save many people from very unhappy and dangerous situations, is a fact which gives him a t.i.tle not only to our respect, but to our grat.i.tude.

Perhaps it is his knowledge of all this petty misery and sordid unwholesomeness which makes him disposed at times, in spite of an almost rollicking temperament, to take dismal and despairing views of the religious future.

I have heard him say with some bitterness that people do not know what Christianity is, that it has been so misrepresented to them, and so mixed up with the quarrels of sectarianism, that the heart of it is really non-existent for the mult.i.tude. He speaks with impatience of the nonconformist churches and with contempt of the Anglican church. We are all wrong together. Organised religion, he feels, is hanging over the abyss of destruction, while the nation looks on with an indifference which should complete its self-contempt.

His quarrel, however, is not only with the churches, but with the nation as well. He regards the system under which we live as thoroughly unchristian. It is the system of mammon--a system of frank, brutal, and insolent materialism. Why do we put up with it?

His religious sense is so outraged by this system of economic individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. It should be smashed.

He plunges into economics with a good deal of vigour, but I do not think he has thought out to its logical conclusion his thesis of guild socialism. Perhaps his tone is here more vehement than his knowledge of a notoriously difficult science altogether justifies.

He opposes himself to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may picture him with drawn sword--a sword tempered in inquisitorial fires--standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend it with his spiritual life.

His opinions are apt to place him among minorities. He was against the War, and during that long-drawn agony attracted to himself the mild attention of the authorities. I believe he likened the great struggle to a battle between Sodom and Gomorrah. However, he was careful not to go so far as Mr. Bertrand Russell. As he himself says, "I don't mind dying for Jesus Christ, but not for making a silly a.s.s of myself."

He occasionally writes reviews for _The Nation_, and has published a number of uneventful books. His writing is not distinguished or illuminating. With a pen in his hand he loses all his natural force. He writes, I think, as one who feels that he is wasting time. Like Mr.

Winston Churchill, he diverts his leisure with a paintbrush.

One is disposed to judge that the mind of this very fiery particle is too busy with side-issues to make acquaintance with the deeper mysteries of his religion. When he complains that people do not know what Christianity is, one wonders whether his own definition would satisfy the saints. He is a fighter rather than a teacher, a man of action rather than a seer. I do not think he could be happy in a world which presented him with no opportunities for punching heads.

Matthew Arnold, quoting from _The Times_ a sentence to the effect that the chief Dissenting ministers are becoming quite the intellectual equals of the ablest of the clergy, referred it to the famous Dr. Dale of Birmingham, and remarked: "I have no fears concerning Mr. Dale's intellectual muscles; what I am a little uneasy about is his religious temper. The essence of religion is grace and peace."

But Dr. Orchard, we must not fail to see, is quite genuinely exasperated by the deadness of religious life, and is straining every nerve to quicken the soul of Christ's sleeping Church. This discontent of his is an important symptom, even if his prescription, a very old one, gives no hope of a cure. He is popular, influential, a figure of the day, and still young; yet his soul is full of rebellion and his heart is swelling with the pa.s.sion of mutiny. Something is evidently not right. Quite certainly he has not discovered the peace that pa.s.ses understanding.

But perhaps Dr. Orchard will never be satisfied till all men think as he thinks, and until there is only one Church in the world for the expression of spiritual life, with either Bishop Herford or himself for its pope.

In the meantime he is too busy for the profound silence. The event of the day sweeps him before it.

BISHOP TEMPLE

Manchester, Bishop of, since 1921; Temple, Rev. William, M.A.; D. Litt.; President Life and Liberty Movement; Canon Residentiary of Westminister, 1919-21; Editor of _The Challenge_, 1915-18; Hon. Chaplain to the King, 1915; b. The Palace, Exeter, 15 Oct., 1881; s. of Late Archbishop of Canterbury; in. 1916, Frances Gertrude Acland, y.d. of F.H. Anson, 72 St. George's Square, S.W. Educ.: Rugby (Scholar); Balliol College, Oxford (Exhibitioner) First cla.s.s Cla.s.sical Mods., 1902; 1st cla.s.s Lit.

Hum., 1904; President Oxford Union, 1904; Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy, Queen's College, Oxford, 1904-1910; Deacon, 1908; Priest, 1909; Chaplain to Archbishop of Canterbury, 1910; President of the Workers Educational a.s.sociation; Headmaster, Repton School, 1910-14; Rector of St. James's Piccadilly, 1914-18.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BISHOP TEMPLE]

CHAPTER X

BISHOP TEMPLE

... _faint, pale, embarra.s.sed, exquisite Pater! He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those lucent match-boxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom--vaguely, and has a phosph.o.r.escence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day--but of the longer time_.--HENRY JAMES.

The future of Bishop Temple is of more importance to the Church than to himself. He is one of those solid and outstanding men whose decisions affect a mult.i.tude, a man to whom many look with a confidence which he himself, perhaps, may never experience.

He cannot, I think, be wholly unaware of this consideration in forming his judgments, and I attribute, rather to a keen and weighty sense of great responsibility than to any lack of vital courage, his increasing tendency towards the Catholic position. One begins to think that he is likely to disappoint many of those who once regarded him as the future statesman of a Christianity somewhat less embarra.s.sed by inst.i.tutionalism.

It is probable, one fears, that he may conclude at Lambeth a career in theology comparable with that of Mr. Winston Churchill in politics. Born in the ecclesiastical purple he may return to it, bringing with him only the sheaves of an already mouldering orthodoxy.

On one ground, however, there is hope that he may yet shine in our uneasy gloom with something more effective than the glow of phosph.o.r.escence. He is devoted heart and soul to Labour. Events, then, may drive him out of his present course, and urge him towards a future of signal usefulness; for Labour is a force which waits upon contingency, and moves as the wind moves--now softly, then harshly, now gently, then with great violence. Those who go with Labour are not like travellers in the Tory coach or the Liberal tram; they are like pa.s.sengers in a balloon.

I do not mean that Bishop Temple will ever be so far swept out of his course as to find himself among the revolutionaries; he carries too much weight for that, is, indeed, too solid a man altogether for any lunatic flights to the moon; I mean, rather, that where the more reasonable leaders of Labour are compelled to go by the force of political and industrial events, William Temple is likely to find that he himself is also expected, nay, but obliged to go, and very easily that may be a situation from which the Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace will appear rather romantically if not altogether hopelessly remote.

His career, then, like Mr. Winston Churchill's in politics, is still an open event and therefore a matter for interesting speculation. This fair-haired, fresh-faced, and boylike Bishop of Manchester, smiling at us behind his spectacles, the square head very upright, the broad shoulders well back, the whole short stocky figure like a rock, confronts us with something of the challenge of the Sphinx.

One of the chief modernists said to me the other day: "Temple is the most dangerous man in the Church of England. He is not only a socialist, he is also Gore's captive, bow and spear." But another, by no means an Anglo-Catholic, corrected this judgment. "Temple," said he, "is not yet hopelessly Catholic. He has, indeed, attracted to himself by his Christlike att.i.tude towards Nonconformists the inconvenient attentions of that remarkable person the Bishop of Zanzibar. His sympathies with Labour, which are the core of his being, are sufficient reason for ----'s mistrust of him. I do not at all regard him as dangerous. On the contrary, I think he is one of the most interesting men in the Church, and also, which is far more important, one of its most promising leaders."

So many men, so many opinions. Strangely enough it is from an Anglo-Catholic who is also a Labour enthusiast that I hear the fiercest and most uncompromising criticism of this young Bishop of Manchester.

"All his successes have been failures. He went to Repton with a tremendous reputation; did nothing; went to St. James's, Piccadilly, as a man who would set the Thames on fire, failed, and went to Westminster with a heightened reputation; left it for the Life and Liberty Movement, which has done nothing, and then on to Manchester as the future Archbishop of Canterbury. What has he done? What has he ever done?

"He can't stick at anything; certainly he can't stick at his job--always he must be doing something else. I don't regard him as a reformer. I regard him as a talker. He has no strength. Sometimes I think he has no heart. Intellectual, yes; but intellectual without pluck. I don't know how his brain works. I give that up. I agree, he joined the Labour movement before he was ordained. There I think he is sincere, perhaps devoted. But is there any heart in his devotion? Do the poor love him?

Do the Labour leaders hail him as a leader? I don't think so. Perhaps I'm prejudiced. Whenever I go to see him, he gives me the impression that he has got his watch in his hand or his eye on the clock. An inhuman sort of person--no warmth, no sympathy, not one tiniest touch of tenderness in his whole nature. No. Willie Temple is the very man the Church of England _doesn't_ want."

Finally, one of those men in the Anglo-Catholic Party to whom Dr. Temple looks up with reverence and devotion, said to me in the midst of generous laudation: "His trouble is that he doesn't concentrate. He is inclined to leave the main thing. But I hear he is really concentrating on his work at Manchester, and therefore I have hopes that he will justify the confidence of his friends. He is certainly a very able man, very; there can be no question of that."

It will be best, I think, to glance first of all at this question of ability.

Dr. Temple has a notable gift of rapid statement and pellucid exposition. One doubts if many theologians in the whole course of Christian history have covered more ground more trippingly than Dr.

Temple covers in two little books called _The Faith and Modern Thought_, and _The Kingdom of G.o.d_. His wonderful powers of succinct statement may perhaps give the impression of shallowness; but this is an entirely false impression--no impression could indeed be wider of the mark. His learning, though not so wide as Dean Inge's, nor so specialised as the learning of Canon Barnes, is nevertheless true learning, and learning which has been close woven into the fabric of his intellectual life.

There are but few men in the Church of England who have a stronger grip on knowledge; and very few, if any at all, who can more clearly and vividly express in simple language the profoundest truths of religion and philosophy.

In order to show his quality I will endeavour to summarise his arguments for the Existence of G.o.d, with as many quotations from his writings as my s.p.a.ce will permit.

"It is not enough to prove," he says, "that some sort of Being exists.

In the end, the only thing that matters is the character of that Being."

But how are we to set out on this quest since "Science will not allow us a starting point at all"?

He answers that question by carrying the war into the scientific camp, as he has a perfect right to do. "Science makes one colossal a.s.sumption always; science a.s.sumes that the world is rational in this sense, that when you have thought out thoroughly the implications of your experience, the result is fact... . That is the basis of all science; it is a colossal a.s.sumption, but science cannot move one step without it."

Science begins with its demand that the world should be seen as coherent; it insists on looking at it, on investigating it, till it is so seen. As long as there is any phenomenon left out of the systematic coherence that you have discovered, science is discontented and insists that either the system is wrongly or imperfectly conceived or else the facts have not been correctly stated.

This demand for "a coherent and comprehensive statement of the whole field of fact" comes solely from reason. How do we get it? We have no ground in experience for insisting that the world shall be regarded as intelligent, as "all hanging together and making up one system." But reason insists upon it. This gives us "a kinship between the mind of man and the universe he lives in."

Now, when man puts his great question to the universe, and to every phenomenon in that universe, _Why?_--Why is this what it is, what my reason recognises it to be? is he not in truth asking, What is this thing's purpose? What is it doing in the universe? What is its part in the coherent system of all-things-together?

Now there is in our experience already one principle which does answer the question "Why?" in such a way as to raise no further questions; that is, the principle of Purpose. Let us take a very simple ill.u.s.tration. Across many of the hills in c.u.mberland the way from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at short intervals. We may easily imagine a simple-minded person asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the fact--the geological history of the stones and the physiological structure of the men who moved them--give no answer. As soon, however, as we hear that men placed them so, to guide wayfarers in the mist or in the night, our minds are satisfied.

Dr. Temple holds fast to that great word that infallible clue, Purpose.

He is not arguing from design. He keeps his feet firmly on scientific ground, and asks, as a man of science asks, What is this? and Why is this? Then he finds that this question can proceed only from faith in coherence, and discovers that the quest of science is quest of Purpose.

To investigate Purpose is obviously to acknowledge Will.