The Case of Richard Meynell Part 66

"Many thinkers," said the preacher, in his concluding pa.s.sage, while all eyes were fixed on the head sprinkled with gray, and the strong humanity of the face--"many men, in all ages and civilizations have dreamed of a City of G.o.d, a Kingdom of Righteousness, an Ideal State, and a Divine Ruler. Jesus alone has made of that dream, history; has forced it upon, and stamped it into history. The Messianic dream of Judaism--though wrought of n.o.bler tissue--it's not unlike similar dreams in other religions; but in this it is unique, that it gave Jesus of Nazareth his opportunity, and that from it has sprung the Christian Church. Jesus accepted it with the heart of a child; he lived in it; he died for it; and by means of it, his spiritual genius, his faithfulness unto death transformed a world. He died indeed, overwhelmed; with the pathetic cry of utter defeat upon his lips. And the leading races of mankind have knelt ever since to the mighty spirit who dared not only to conceive and found the Kingdom of G.o.d, but to think of himself as its Spiritual King--by sheer divine right of service, of suffering, and of death! Only through tribulation and woe--through the _peirasmos_ or sore trial of the world--according to Messianic belief, could the Kingdom be realized, and Messiah revealed. It was the marvellous conception of Jesus, inspired by the ancient poetry and prophecy of his nation, that he might, as the Suffering Servant, concentrate in himself the suffering due from his race, and from the world, and by his death bring about--violently, "by force"--the outpouring of the Spirit, the Resurrection, and the dawn of the heavenly Kingdom. He went up to Jerusalem to die; he provoked his death; he died. And from the Resurrection visions which followed naturally on such a life and death, inspired by such conceptions, and breathing them with such power into the souls of other men, arose the Christian Church.

"The Parousia for which the Lord had looked, delayed. It delays still.

The scope and details of the Messianic dream itself mean nothing to us any more.

"But its spirit is immortal. The vision of a kingdom of Heaven--a polity of the soul, within, or superseding the earthly polity--once interfused with man's thought and life, has proved to be imperishable, a thing that cannot die.

"Only it must be realized afresh from age to age; embodied afresh in the conceptions and the language of successive generations.

"And these developing embodiments and epiphanies of the kingdom can only be brought into being by the method of Christ--that is to say, by '_violence_'.

"Again and again has the kingdom 'suffered violence'--has been brought fragmentarily into the world '_by force_'--by the only irresistible force--that of suffering, of love, of self-renouncing faith.

"To that 'force' we, as religious Reformers, appeal.

"The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven do not express the whole thought of Christ. When the work of preparation is over, still men must brace themselves, as their Master did, to the last stroke of 'violence'--to a final effort of resolute, and, if need be, revolutionary action--to the 'violence' that brings ideas to birth and shapes them into deeds.

"It was to 'violence' of this sacred sort that the Christian Church owed its beginning; and it is this same 'violence' that must, as the generations rise and fall, constantly maintain it among men. To cut away the old at need and graft in the new, requires the high courage and the resolute hand of faith. Only so can the Christian Life renew itself; only so can efficacy and movement return to powers exhausted or degenerate; only so 'can these dry bones live!'"

Amid the throng as it moved outward into the bustle of Westminster, Flaxman found himself rubbing shoulders with Edward Norham. Norham walked with his eyes on the ground, smiling to himself.

"A little persecution!" he said, rubbing his hands, as he looked up--"and how it would go!"

"Well--the persecution begins this week--in the Court of Arches."

"Persecution--nonsense! You mean 'propaganda.' I understand Meynell's defence will proceed on totally new lines. He means to argue each point on its merits?"

"Yes. The Voysey judgment gave him his cue. You will remember, Voysey was attacked by the Lord Chancellor of the day--old Lord Hatherley--as a 'private clergyman,' who 'of his own mere will, not founding himself upon any critical inquiry, but simply upon his own taste and judgment'

maintained certain heresies. Now Meynell, I imagine, will give his judges enough of 'critical inquiry' before they have done with him!"

Norham shrugged his shoulders.

"All very well! Why did he sign the Articles?"

"He signed them at four-and-twenty!" said Flaxman hotly. "Will you maintain that a system which insists upon a man's beliefs at forty-four being identical with his beliefs at twenty-four is not condemned _ipso facto_!"

"Oh I know what you say!--I know what you say!" cried Norham good-humouredly. "We shall all be saying it in Parliament presently--Good heavens! Well, I shall look into the court to-morrow, if I can possibly find an hour, and hear Meynell fire away."

"As Home Secretary, you may get in!"--laughed Flaxman--"on no other terms. There isn't a seat to be had--there hasn't been for weeks."

The trial came on. The three suits from the Markborough diocese took precedence, and were to be followed by half a dozen others--test cases--from different parts of England. But on the Markborough suits everything turned. The Modernist defendants everywhere had practically resolved on the same line of defence; on the same appeal from the mind of the sixteenth century to the mind of the twentieth; from creeds and formularies to history; from a dying to a living Church.

The chief counsel for the promoters, Sir Wilfrid Marsh, made a calm, almost a conciliatory opening. He was a man of middle height, with a large, clean-shaven face, a domed head and smooth straight hair, still jetty black. He wore a look of quiet a.s.surance and was clearly a man of all the virtues; possessing a portly wife and a tribe of daughters.

His speech was marked in all its earlier sections by a studied liberality and moderation. "I am not going to appeal, sir, for that judgment in the promoters' favour which I confidently claim, on any bigoted or obscurantist lines. The Church of England is a learned Church; she is also a Church of wide liberties."

No slavish submission to the letter of the Articles on the Liturgy was now demanded of any man. Subscription had been relaxed; the final judgment in the _Essays and Reviews_ case had given a lat.i.tude in the interpretation of Scripture, of which, as many recent books showed, the clergy--"I refer now to men of unquestioned orthodoxy"--had taken reasonable advantage; prayer-book revision "within the limits of the faith," if constantly r.e.t.a.r.ded by the divisions of the faithful, was still probable; both High Churchmen and Broad Churchmen--here an aside dropped out, "so far as Broad Churchmen still exist!"--are necessary to the Church.

But there are limits. "Critical inquiry, sir, if you will--reasonable liberty, within the limits of our formularies and a man's ordination vow--by all means!

"But certain things are _vital_! With certain fundamental beliefs let no one suppose that either the bishops, or convocation, or these Church courts, or Parliament, or what the defendants are pleased to call the nation" [one must imagine the fine gesture of a sweeping hand] "can meddle." The _animus imponentis_ is not that of the Edwardian or Elizabethan legislation, it is not that of the Bishops! it is that of the Christian Church itself!--handing down the _deposition fidei_ from the earliest to the latest times.

"_The Creeds, sir, are vital_! Put aside Homilies, Articles, the judgments and precedents of the Church Courts--all these are, in this struggle, beside the mark. _Concentrate on the Creeds_! Let us examine what the defendants in these suits have made of the Creeds of Christendom."

The evidence was plain. Regarded as historical statement, the defendants had dealt drastically and destructively with the Creeds of Christendom; no less than with the authority of "Scripture," understanding "authority"

in any technical sense.

It was indeed the chief Modernist contention, as the orator showed, that formal creeds were mere "landmarks in the Church's life,"

crystallizations of thought, that were no sooner formed than they became subject to the play, both dissolvent and regenerating, of the Christian consciousness.

"And so you come to that inconceivable ent.i.ty, a Church without a creed--a mere chaos of private opinion, where each man is a law unto himself."

On this theme, Sir Wilfrid--who was a man of singularly strong private opinions, of all kinds and on all subjects--spoke for a whole day; from the rising almost to the going down of the sun.

At the end of it Canon Dornal and a barrister friend, a devout Churchman, walked back toward the Temple along the Embankment.

The walk was very silent, until midway the barrister said abruptly--

"Is it any plainer to you now, than when Sir Wilfrid began, what authority--if any--there is in the English Church; or what limits--if any--there are to private judgment within it?"

Dornal hesitated.

"My answer, of course, is Sir Wilfrid's. We have the Creeds."

They walked on in silence a moment. Then the first speaker said:

"A generation ago would you not have said--what also Sir Wilfrid carefully avoided saying--'We have the Scriptures.'"

"Perhaps," said Dornal despondently.

"And as to the Creeds," the other resumed, after another pause--"Do you think that one per cent of the Christians that you and I know believe in the Descent into h.e.l.l, or the Resurrection of the Body?"

Dornal made no reply.

Cyril Fenton also walked home with a young priest just ordained. Both were extremely dissatisfied with the later portions of Sir Wilfrid's speech, which had seemed to them tainted in several pa.s.sages with Erastian complacency toward the State. Parliament especially, and a possible intervention of Parliament, ought never to have been so much as mentioned--even for denunciation--in an ecclesiastical court.

"_Parliament!"_ cried Fenton, coming to a sudden stop beside the water in St. James' Park, his eyes afire, "What is Parliament but the lay synod of the Church of England!"

During the three days of Sir Wilfrid's speech, Meynell took many notes, and he became perforce very familiar with some of the nearer faces in the audience day after day; with the Bishop of S----, lank and long-jawed, with reddish hair turning to gray, a deprecating manner in society, but in the pulpit a second Warburton for truculence and fire; the Bishop of D----, beloved, ugly, short-sighted, the purest and humblest soul alive; learned, mystical, poetical, in much sympathy with the Modernists, yet deterred by the dread of civil war within the Church, a master of the Old Latin Versions, and too apt to address schoolgirls on the charms of textual criticism; the Bishop of F----, courtly, peevish and distrusted; the Dean of Markborough, with the green shade over his eyes, and fretful complaint on his lips of the "infection" generated by every Modernist inc.u.mbent; and near him, Professor Vetch, with yet another divinity professor beside him, a young man, short and slight, with roving, gra.s.shopper eyes.

The temperature of Sir Wilfrid's address rose day by day, and the case for the prosecution closed thunderously in a fierce onslaught on the ethics of the Modernist position, and on the personal honesty and veracity of each and every Modernist holding office in the Anglican Church, claiming sentences of immediate deprivation against the defendants, of their vicarages and inc.u.mbencies, and of all profits and benefits derived therefrom "unless within a week from this day they (the defendants) should expressly and unreservedly retract the several errors in which they have so offended."

The court broke up in a clamour of excitement and discussion, with crowds of country parishioners standing outside to greet the three incriminated priests as they came out.

The following morning Meynell rose. And for one brilliant week, his defence of the Modernist position held the attention of England.

On the fourth or fifth day of his speech, the white-haired Bishop of Dunchester, against whom proceedings had just been taken in the Archbishop's Court, said to his son:

"Herbert, just before I was born there were two great religious leaders in England--Newman and Arnold of Rugby. Arnold died prematurely, at the height of bodily and spiritual vigour; Newman lived to the age of eighty-nine, and to be a Cardinal of the Roman Church. His Anglican influence, continued, modified, distributed by the High Church movement, has lasted till now. To-day we have been listening again, as it were, to the voice of Arnold, the great leader whom the Liberals lost in '42, Arnold was a devoutly orthodox believer, s.n.a.t.c.hed from life in the very birth-hour of that New Learning of which we claim to be the children. But a church of free men, coextensive with the nation, gathering into one fold every English man, woman and child, that was Arnold's dream, just as it is Meynell's.... And yet though the voice, the large heart, the fearless mind, and the broad sympathies were Arnold's, some of the governing ideas were Newman's. As I listened, I seemed"--the old man's look glowed suddenly--"to see the two great leaders, the two foes of a century ago, standing side by side, twin brethren in a new battle, growing out of the old, with a great mingled host behind them."