But I
cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial
upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one
does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of
distrust one may feel in his strength--not of character--but of
personality. He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a
man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it
would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat? I am not sure. On
the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might
have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not
been born in the episcopal purple.
By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great,
but who has the seeds of greatness in him. Events may prove him greater
than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be. A crisis, either
in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break
through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather
blurs the individual outline of his soul. But, even with the dissipation
of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul
would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition. He does
not, at present, convince one of original force.
Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of
the Church, and so perhaps of the nation.
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