With the richest of spiritual gifts, which demand
quiet and a profound peace for their development, he has thrown himself
into the arena of theological disputation, where force of intellect
rather than beauty of character is the first requirement of victory.
Instead of drawing all men to the sweet reasonableness of the Christian
life, he has floundered in the obscurities of a sect and hidden his
light under the bushel of a mouldering solecism--"the tradition of
Western Catholicism." It is a tragedy. Posterity I think, will
regretfully number him among bigots, lamenting that one who was so
clearly
. . . born for the universe, narrow'd his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
For, unhappily, this party in the Church to which, as Dean Inge well
puts it, Dr. Gore "consents to belong," and for which he has made such
manifold sacrifices, and by which he is not always so loyally followed
as he deserves to be, is of all parties in the Church that which least
harmonises with English temperament, and is least likely to endure the
intellectual onslaughts of the immediate future.
It is the Catholic Party, the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians,
which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power
to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal
deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, a marked ability in
superstitious ceremonial, a not very modest assertion of the claims of
sacerdotalism, a mocking contempt for preaching, and a devotion to the
duties of the parish priest which has never been excelled in the history
of the English Church.
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