Those who go with Labour are not like
travellers in the Tory coach or the Liberal tram; they are like
passengers in a balloon.
I do not mean that Bishop Temple will ever be so far swept out of his
course as to find himself among the revolutionaries; he carries too much
weight for that, is, indeed, too solid a man altogether for any lunatic
flights to the moon; I mean, rather, that where the more reasonable
leaders of Labour are compelled to go by the force of political and
industrial events, William Temple is likely to find that he himself is
also expected, nay, but obliged to go, and very easily that may be a
situation from which the Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace will appear
rather romantically if not altogether hopelessly remote.
His career, then, like Mr. Winston Churchill's in politics, is still an
open event and therefore a matter for interesting speculation. This
fair-haired, fresh-faced, and boylike Bishop of Manchester, smiling at
us behind his spectacles, the square head very upright, the broad
shoulders well back, the whole short stocky figure like a rock,
confronts us with something of the challenge of the Sphinx.
One of the chief modernists said to me the other day: "Temple is the
most dangerous man in the Church of England. He is not only a socialist,
he is also Gore's captive, bow and spear." But another, by no means an
Anglo-Catholic, corrected this judgment.
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