The Case of Richard Meynell Part 15

Meynell advanced, and the Bishop came to meet him. Over both faces, as they approached each other, there dropped a sudden shadow--a tremor as of men who knew themselves on the brink of a tragical collision--decisive of many things. And yet they smiled, the presence of the child still enwrapping them.

"Excuse these domesticities," said the Bishop, "but there was such woe and lamentation just before you came. And childish griefs go deep.

Bogies--of all kinds--have much to answer for!"

Then the Bishop's smile disappeared. He beckoned Meynell to a chair, and sat down himself.

Francis Craye, Bishop of Markborough, was physically a person of great charm. He was small--not more than five foot seven; but so slenderly and perfectly made, so graceful and erect in bearing, that his height, or lack of it, never detracted in the smallest degree from his dignity, or from the reverence inspired by the innocence and unworldliness of his character. A broad brow, overshadowing and overweighting the face, combined, with extreme delicacy of feature, a touch of emaciation, and a pure rose in the alabaster of the cheeks, to produce the aspect of a most human ghost--a ghost which had just tasted the black blood, and recovered for an hour all the vivacity of life. The mouth, thin-lipped and mobile to excess, was as apt for laughter as for tenderness; the blue eyes were frankness and eagerness itself. And when the glance of the spectator pursued the Bishop downward, it was to find that his legs, in the episcopal gaiters, were no less ethereal than his face; while his silky white hair added the last touch of refinement to a personality of spirit and fire.

Meynell was the first to speak.

"My lord! let me begin this conversation by once more thanking you--from my heart--for all the personal kindness that you have shown me in the last few months, and in the correspondence of the last fortnight."

His voice wavered a little. The Bishop made no sign.

"And perhaps," Meynell resumed, "I felt it the kindest thing of all that--after the letters I have written you this week--after the meeting of yesterday--you should have sent me that telegram last night, saying that you wished to see me to-day. That was like you--that touched me indeed!" He spoke with visible emotion.

The Bishop looked up.

"There can be no question, Meynell, of any personal enmity between yourself and me," he said gravely. "I shall act in the matter entirely as the responsibilities of my office dictate--that you know. But I have owed you much in the past--much help--much affection. This diocese owes you much. I felt I must make one last appeal to you--terrible as the situation has grown. You could not have foreseen that meeting of yesterday!" he added impetuously, raising his head.

Meynell hesitated.

"No, I had no idea we were so strong. But it might have been foreseen.

The forces that brought it about have been rising steadily for many years."

There was no answer for a moment. The Bishop sat with clasped hands, his legs stretched out before him, his white head bent. At last, without moving, he said:

"There are grave times coming on this diocese, Meynell--there are grave times coming on the Church!"

"Does any living church escape them?" said Meynell, watching him--with a heavy heart.

The Bishop shook his head.

"I am a man of peace. Where you see a hope of victory for what you think, no doubt, a great cause, I see above the melee, Strife and Confusion and Fate--"red with the blood of men." What can you--and those who were at that meeting yesterday--hope to gain by these proceedings? If you could succeed, you would break up the Church, the strongest weapon that exists in this country against sin and selfishness--and who would be the better?"

"Believe me--we sha'n't break it up."

"Certainly you will! Do you imagine that men who are the spiritual sons and heirs of Pusey and Liddon are going to sit down quietly in the same church with you and the eighteen who started this League yesterday? They would sooner die."

Meynell bore the onslaught quietly.

"It depends upon our strength," he said slowly, "and the strength we develop, as the fight goes on."

"Not at all!--a monstrous delusion!" The Bishop raised an indignant brow. "If you overwhelmed us--if you got the State on your side, as in France at the Revolution--you would still have done nothing toward your end--nothing whatever! We refuse--we shall always refuse--to be unequally yoked with those who deny the fundamental truths of the Faith!"

"My lord, you are so yoked at the present moment," said Meynell firmly--the colour had flashed back into his cheeks--"it is the foundation of our case that half the educated men and women we gather into our churches to-day are--in our belief--Modernists already. Question them!--they are with us--not with you. That is to say, they have tacitly shaken off the old forms--the Creeds and formularies that bind the visible, the legal, church. They do not even think much about them.

Forgive me if I speak plainly! They are not grieving about the old. Their soul--those of them, I mean that have the gift of religion--is travailing--dumbly travailing--with the new. Slowly, irresistibly, they are evolving for themselves new forms, new creeds, whether they know it or not. You--the traditional party--you, the bishops and the orthodox majority--can help them, or hinder them. If you deny them organized expression and outlet, you prolong the dull friction between them and the current Christianity. You waste where you might gather--you quench where you might kindle. But there they are--in the same church with you--and you cannot drive them out!"

The Bishop made a sound of pain.

"I wish to drive no one out," he said, lifting a diaphanous hand. "To his own master let each man stand or fall. But you ask us--_us_, the appointed guardians of the Faith--the _ecclesia docens_--the historic episcopate--to deny and betray the Faith! You ask us to a.s.sent formally to the effacing of all difference between Faith and Unfaith--you bid us tell the world publicly that belief matters nothing--that a man may deny all the Divine Facts of Redemption, and still be as good a Christian as any one else. History alone might tell you--and I am speaking for the moment as a student to a student--that the thing is inconceivable!"

"Unless--_solvitur vivendo_!" said Meynell in a low voice. "What great change in the religious life of men has not seemed inconceivable--till it happened? Think of the great change that brought this English Church into being! Within a couple of generations men had to learn to be baptized, and married, and buried, with rites unknown to their fathers--to stand alone and cut off from the great whole of Christendom--to which they had once belonged--to see the Ma.s.s, the cult of Our Lady and the Saints, disappear from their lives. What change that any Modernist proposes could equal that? But England lived through it!--England emerged!--she recovered her equilibrium. Looking back upon it all now, we see--you and I agree there--that it was worth while--that the energizing, revealing power behind the world was in the confusion and the dislocation; and that England gained more than she lost when she made for herself an English and a national Church in these islands, out of the shattered debris of the Roman System."

He bent forward, and looked intently into the Bishop's face. "What if another hour of travail be upon us? And is any birth possible without pain?"

"Don't let us argue the Reformation!" said the Bishop, with a new sharpness of note. "We should be here all night. But let me at least point out to you that the Church kept her Creeds!--the Succession!--the four great Councils!--the unbroken unity of essential dogma. But you"--he turned with renewed pa.s.sion on his companion--"what have you done with the Creeds? Every word in them steeped in the heart's blood of generations!--and you put them aside as a kind of theological bric-a-brac that concerns us no more. Meynell!--you have no conception of the forces that this movement of yours, if you persist in it, will unchain against you! You are like children playing with the lightning!"

Denunciation and warning sat with a curious majesty on the little Bishop as he launched these words. It was with a visible effort that Meynell braced himself against them.

"Perhaps I estimate the forces for and against differently from yourself, Bishop. But when you prophesy war, I agree. There will be war!--and that makes the novelty of the situation. Till now there has never been equality enough for war. The heretic has been an excrescence to be cut away. Now you will have to make some terms with him! For the ideas behind him have invaded your inmost life. They are all about you and around you--and when you go out to fight him, you will discover that you are half on his side!"

"If that means," said the Bishop impatiently, "that the Church is accessible to new ideas--that she is now, as she has always been, a learned Church--the Church of Westcott and Lightfoot, of a host of younger scholars who are as well acquainted with the ideas and contentions of Modernism--as you call it--as any Modernist in Europe--and are still the faithful servants and guardians of Christian dogma--why, then, you say what is true! We perfectly understand your positions--and we reject them."

Through Meynell's expression there pa.s.sed a gleam--slight and gentle--of something like triumph.

"Forgive me!--but I think you have given me my point. Let me recall to you the French sayings--'Comprendre, c'est pardonner--Comprendre, c'est aimer.' It is because for the first time you do understand them--that, for the first time, the same arguments play upon you as play upon us--it is for that very reason that we regard the field as half won, before the battle is even joined."

The Bishop gazed upon him with a thin, dropping lip--an expression of suffering in the clear blue eyes.

"That Christians"--he said under his breath--"should divide the forces of Christ--with the sin and misery of this world devouring and defiling our brethren day by day!"

"What if it be not 'dividing'--but doubling--the forces of Christ!" said Meynell, with pale resolution. "All that we ask is the Church should recognize existing facts--that organization should shape itself to reality. In our eyes, Christendom is divided to-day--or is rapidly dividing itself--into two wholly new camps. The division between Catholic and Protestant is no longer the supreme division; for the force that is rising affects both Protestant and Catholic equally. Each of the new divisions has a philosophy and a criticism of its own; each of them has an immense hold on human life, though Modernism is only now slowly realizing and putting out its power. Two camps!--two systems of thought!--both of them _Christian_ thought. Yet one of them, one only, _is in possession_ of the churches, the forms, the inst.i.tutions; the other is everywhere knocking at the gates. 'Give us our portion!'--we say--'in Christ's name.' But _only our portion!_ We do not dream of dispossessing the old--it is the last thing, even, that we desire. But for the sake of souls now wandering and desolate, we ask to live side by side with the old--in brotherly peace, in equal right--sharing what the past has bequeathed! Yes, even the loaves and fishes!--they ought to be justly divided out like the rest. But, above all, the powers, the opportunities, the trials, the labours of the Christian Church!"

"In other words, so far as the English Church is concerned, you propose to reduce us within our own borders to a peddling confusion of sects, held together by the mere physical link of our buildings and our endowments!" said the Bishop, as he straightened himself in his chair.

He spoke with a stern and contemptuous force which transformed the small body and sensitive face. In the old room, the library of the Palace, with its rows of calf-bound folios, and its vaulted fifteenth century roof, he sat as the embodiment of ancient, inherited things, his gentleness lost in that collective, that corporate, pride which has been at once the n.o.blest and the deadliest force in history.

Meynell's expression changed, in correspondence. It, too, grew harder, more challenging.

"My lord--is there no loss already to be faced, of another kind?--is all well with the Church? How often have I found you here--forgive me!--grieving for the loss of souls--the decline of faith--the empty churches--the dwindling communicants--the spread of secularist literature--the hostility of the workmen! And yet what devotion, what zeal, there is in this diocese, beginning with our Bishop. Have we not often asked ourselves what such facts could possibly mean--why G.o.d seemed to have forsaken us?"

"They mean luxury and selfishness--the loss of discipline at home and abroad," said the Bishop, with bitter emphasis. "It is hard indeed to turn the denial of Christ into an argument against His Gospel!"

Meynell was silent. His heart was burning within him with a pa.s.sionate sense at once of the vast need and hungry unrest so sharply dismissed by the Bishop, and of the efficacy of that "new teaching" for which he stood. But he ceased to try and convey it by argument. After a few moments he began in his ordinary voice to report various developments of the Movement in the diocese of which he believed the Bishop to be still ignorant.

"We wish to conceal nothing from you," he said at last with emotion; "and consistently with the trial of strength that must come, we desire to lighten the burden on our Bishop as much as we possibly can. This will be a solemn testing of great issues--we on our side are determined to do nothing to embitter or disgrace it."

The Bishop, now grown very white, looked at him intently.

"I make one last appeal, Meynell, to your obedience--and to the promises of your ordination."

"I was a boy then"--said Meynell slowly--"I am a man now. I took those vows sincerely, in absolute good faith; and all the changes in me have come about, as it seems to me, by the inbreathing of a spirit not my own--partly from new knowledge--partly in trying to help my people to live--or to die. They represent to me things lawfully--divinely--learnt.

So that in the change itself, I cannot acknowledge or feel wrongdoing.

But you remind me--as you have every right to do--that I accepted certain rules and conditions. Now that I break them, must I not resign the position dependent on them? Clearly, if it were a question of any ordinary society. But the Christian Church is not an ordinary society! It is the sum of Christian life!"

The Bishop raised a hand of protest, but without speaking. Meynell resumed:

"And that Life makes the Church--moulds it afresh, from age to age. There are times--we hold--when the Church very nearly expresses the Life; there are others when there are great discordances between the Life, and its expression in the Church. We believe that there are such discordances now because--once more--of a New Learning. And we believe that to withdraw from the struggle to make the Church more fully represent the Life would be sheer disloyalty and cowardice. We must stay it out, and do our best.