Читать книгу The London Pulpit - James Ewing Ritchie - Страница 5

St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, has done what it is a very hard thing to do, created a sensation in this our phlegmatic and eating and drinking and money-making and merry-making age. It professes to be a Puseyite, and not a Protestant, place of worship. Puseyism, says a red-haired Saxon, foaming with indignation, is next door to Roman Catholicism, and a Puseyite Church is half-way to Rome. True, my perturbed brother – true. But what of that? Some are inclined to think that Church of Englandism is akin to Roman Catholicism, and that all its churches are halfway to Rome. That brutal old tyrant, Henry the Eighth, was a Roman Catholic at heart, and had faith in himself as an infallible Pope. His genuine daughter did the same. Laud, who lacked the discretion of that strong-minded woman whose

is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the vexata questio of transubstantiation, – I question whether Charles James Bloomfield, Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning response, – died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat Popery at St. Paul’s, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my brother’s words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State Church is a chaotic mass of heterogeneous materials – so long as it has no definite voice, nor law – so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at times with himself, – for we may have here a Puseyite, there an Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine, – there must be everywhere heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself. But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists by letting the Puseyites remain. I don’t know that. Papacy is alien to human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline. Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome. Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker’s Apology made him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm, in all priests.

I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the crime of a pretty woman in an assembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various. Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love, you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the simple genuine feeling of the heart – if you make no provision for that – if you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form it is the better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at St. Paul’s is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant. Neither is mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words worship. What a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is true people do not make love, or do business, or address each other in music, in real life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great. So it is with the Church of England service. Intoned it may be unintelligible or theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is not natural, but what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin, yearning for peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself in broken sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony – from even the sublime liturgy of the Church of England, as poor, and cold, and vain, inadequate to the expression of its hopes and fears. But why those who go to church as a form find fault with the people of St. Paul’s because their form is a little more attractive than their own, I confess I cannot understand.

But I have forgotten the Hon. and Rev. R. Liddell, M.A., a man of small mental calibre, who has done the next best thing to achieving greatness, and has achieved notoriety. In a letter he wrote to the late Bishop of London (in which he wickedly told his lordship if he had ‘any distinct wish upon the subject, he is ready to comply with it,’ as if Charles James ever had any distinct wish with reference to Church matters), he styles himself a loyal son of the Church. At any rate, he is a brother of Lord Ravensworth, and perhaps that is almost as good. His public career is now of about twenty years’ standing. Originally, he was curate of Barking, Essex; thence he removed to Hartlepool; and when it was found desirable to send Mr. Bennett to Frome (not Rome), Mr. Liddell was selected to fill his vacant place. It is questionable whether any successor could have been appointed more agreeable to Mr. Bennett. Mr. Liddell has certainly followed most religiously in the steps of his predecessor. St. Barnabas is what it was pretty nearly in Mr. Bennett’s time. In St. Paul’s a little more discretion is shown, and if you are struck with any difference in the manner of performing divine service at St. Paul’s to that used in other places, you draw a comparison in favour of the former. The congregation is exceedingly wealthy and aristocratic. You are struck as much with its air of high life as with its High Church appearance, and having thus a double charm, I need not add that St. Paul’s is crowded in every part. If success be a true test, Mr. Liddell is most indisputably in the right.

As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and complexion – rich, for the place is worth £1500 a-year at the least – he would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly man, had he not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a large and influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear but not full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can preach a good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which can do the man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines, and holding views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly thought, he has but little left him to do in his discourses but to expatiate on the sanctity of the priestly office, and the mysterious powers possessed by the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win the truth – to lead a god-like life – to bring back man, the wanderer, to heaven and to God, seem minor matters at St. Paul’s, so long as the pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but in a wrong direction. Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for – worth dying for; if it be so, the minister and the ‘highly educated’ and devout congregation at St. Paul’s have made a terrible mistake – a mistake which the friends of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.