The Abbey has never since
recovered its place as a centre of Christian teaching.
Up to this time Dr. Gore's sympathy for the Oxford Movement was merely
the background of a life devoted to the mystical element and the moral
implications of the Christian religion. He was known as a High
Churchman; he was felt to be a saint; his modernism was almost
forgotten.
It was not long before his tentative movement towards modernism ended in
a profession of Catholic principles which allied him with forces
definitely and sometimes angrily ranged against the Higher Criticism. He
became a Bishop. Almost at once the caressing fingers of the saint
became the heavy hand of the dogmatist. He who had frightened Liddon by
his tremulous adventure towards the mere fringe of modernism became the
declared enemy, the implacable foe, of the least of his clergy who
questioned even the most questionable clauses of the creeds. He demanded
of them all a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous,
in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true. Every word
of the creeds had to be uttered _ex animo_. "It is very hard to be a
good Christian." Yes; but did Dr. Gore make it harder than it need be?
There was something not very unlike a heresy hunt in the diocese over
which the editor of _Lux Mundi_ ruled with a rod of iron.
I remember once speaking to Dr.
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