Bishop Gore, very obviously, is a better man than his party. He is a
gentleman in every fibre of his being, and to a gentleman all
extravagance is distasteful, all disloyalty is impossible. He is,
indeed, a survival from the great and orderly Oxford Movement trying to
keep his feet in the swaying midst of a revolutionary mob, a Kerensky
attempting to withstand the forces of Bolshevism.
There is little question, I think, that when his influence is removed,
an influence which becomes with every year something of a superstition,
something of an irritation, to the younger generation of
Anglo-Catholics--not many of whom are scholars and few gentlemen--the
party which he has served so loyally, and with so much distinction, so
much temperance, albeit so disastrously for his own influence in the
world, will perish on the far boundaries of an extremism altogether
foreign to our English nativity.
For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a
hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness
towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to
accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation--a miracle which, he
has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for
the change which takes place in digestion. If they were rid of his
restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his
intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these
enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian
asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and
defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of
excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and
honourable Oxford Movement.
Pages:
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37