The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Then Vaughan had dreamed of Benedictine monks supervising the liturgy of the new cathedral which would become a shrine that held and honoured the relics of St Edmund. Those plans, like the promise to complete the building in eight years, were not fulfilled. The building is not finished yet. It was seven years before any part of the new cathedral could be opened for prayer or to the public.

  On 7 May 1902, the first Mass was celebrated in the Chapter House. On Lady Day 1903, what was to become the Lady Chapel was made the temporary home of the local parish mission, and in early June that year, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (music by Edward Elgar and words by John Henry Newman) was performed in the still incomplete nave. The audience was not to know that what was to become the formal consecration was only weeks away: Herbert Vaughan died on 19 June 1903. ‘Into the vast space of that still unfinished church, his body was taken … for the solemn requiem which, unforeseen, was to become the opening ceremony.’14 What critics called ‘Vaughan’s Railway Station’ or ‘The Roman Candle’ became the symbol of Roman Catholicism’s permanent place in the life of England.

  In the year that Cardinal Vaughan died – confident about the unity and strength of the Church which he led – Randall Davidson was enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury and began his twenty-five-year leadership of a Church which was divided and uncertain. It faced two immediate crises which, although distinct and separate, were both the result of a reluctance to face the reality of the twentieth century. One was doctrinal – the need to establish the Church’s reaction to the new scepticism and to determine its willingness, as a broad Church, to accept the ritualism of the Anglo-Catholics. The other was the strange inability of either Canterbury or York to recognise the human needs of either priest or people.

  At the beginning of the new century there was a sharp division of opinion about the quality of applicants for ordination. One view was that the best Oxford and Cambridge graduates no longer chose to enter the Church. The other was that applicants from the new universities – Manchester and Liverpool (established in 1903), Leeds (in 1904), Sheffield (in 1905) and Bristol (in 1909) – provided valuable new clerical blood. In most early years of the century there were two hundred curates looking for incumbencies. It was therefore hardly surprising that the number of candidates for ordination began to fall, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the growing population. Many of the unemployed curates could not afford to take jobs in the new city parishes. The vicissitudes of the humble parson were described in an anonymous pamphlet published, at the turn of the century, in the parish of St Pancras. In common with the habit of the time, St Pancras had just been divided into thirty smaller parishes. The new incumbents earned between £700 and £173 a year. The average was £355 – a sum from which very considerable parish expenses had to be met. But they were the favoured and fortunate sons of the church. The St Pancras pamphlet described the lot of unattached clergy.

  Nothing could be more discreditable to the Church of England than the way she treats unbeneficed clergy. At present the almost universal qualification for a benefice is private means. Hundreds of appointments are made on this sole recommendation. The unfortunate curate who does not possess any private means cannot accept a benefice. His lot in any church but ours would be a happy and honourable one. But it is notorious that with us his career is practically over at forty years of age. The church which has impressed on him her indelible orders has no further use for him.15

  It was not only the disenchantment of the urban priesthood which conspired to detach the Church of England from the people of the growing cities. The Church Schools, which established the bond between religious and secular town life were, at the beginning of the new century, under threat. So they remained until the Education Act of 1906 provided them with support from public funds. Although the Nonconformists were outraged, the Anglican Communion – always happy to see the bonds between Church and state strengthened – concentrated its attention on its theological problems in the belief that its essential place in the social life of the nation had been made secure. Its principal duty was to fight the new heresies. The duty to lead the crusade fell to Randall Davidson – sometime dean of Windsor and confidant of Queen Victoria and, as Bishop of Winchester, attendant bishop at her death.

  Davidson was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1903, the year of Principia Ethica and the Principle of Mathematics, and twelve months before the publication of Radioactivity. But his real challenge lay inside, not outside, the Established Church. His immediate and urgent task was to hold the Church of England together in some sort of theological unity. That meant dealing, in one way or another, with the theological radicals who, like Oliver Lodge, believed that changes had to be made to accommodate the ‘higher man’ of Edwardian Britain. At the time he took up residence in Lambeth Palace, not everyone was convinced that the new Archbishop’s urbane talents were suited to preventing controversy from turning into crisis. Henry Scott Holland, Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, was told that the new Archbishop was too anxious to please the King. He refuted the charge in a way which cannot have given the Primate much pleasure: ‘Bishop Davidson’s point of danger is not the Court. He has survived its perils with singular simplicity. Rather is it to be found in the Athenaeum. There swell the sirens who are apt to beguile and bewitch him … The Athenaeum is not a shrine to infallibility. Its elderly common-sense has no prophetic afflatus.’16

  It was a harsh judgement which Holland repented with the years. But there is no doubt that Davidson believed himself to have three overwhelming obligations – to preserve the formal connection between Church and state, to avoid a schism within the worldwide Anglican Communion and to remind the Church he led that it had social as well as spiritual obligations. Holland welcomed Davidson’s emphasis on the third imperative. But he believed that the Church, and its loyal sons, had a duty which transcended all other obligations – a task which, were it not properly discharged, might result in the slow death of religion itself. Faith and Reason had to be reconciled.

  Holland saw, all around him, ‘higher men’ of the sort identified by Oliver Lodge. They were suffused by ‘an intellectual panic which is felt creeping over them like a contagion, as a plague breath that chills and unnerves and paralyses and sickens. Testimony, evidence, proof, witness – for these they anxiously, feverishly ask.’17 Holland did not believe that the sovereign remedy for all those maladies was hard to find. The infection was caused by the belief that science challenged (and perhaps even vitiated) faith. He denied that reason and revelation were in conflict with each other. Indeed, he went further. The demands of a new and more intellectual world should be met. Scientific proof should be provided for what had previously been accepted as matters of faith. Science and religion must become allies not enemies. He was not alone.

  Charles Gore, bishop first of Worcester, then of the new diocese of Birmingham and eventually of Oxford, wrote of the urgent need ‘to conciliate the claims of reason and revelation, so as to interpret the ancient catholic faith so as not to lay intolerable strain on the free intellect.’18 Gore had made his own contribution to the process back in 1891 with the essay which he had published in Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of Incarnation, that Holland had edited. The studies were intended ‘to remove unacceptable dogma in order to strengthen the faith of a scientifically minded generation’. Gore’s essay ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’ had examined the veracity of the Bible. It had concluded that the New Testament was ‘final and catholic’ but that the Old was ‘fallible and imperfect’. He did not, for example, accept the Genesis account of creation. But that required him to explain why Christ quoted the Old Testament with approval. So Gore was obliged to decide whether the Saviour of the World was dishonest or deluded. He concluded that Christ lived on earth ‘through and under conditions of true human nature. Thus he used human nature, its relations to God, its conditions and experiences, its growth in knowledge and its
limitations of knowledge. He shows no signs of transcending the science of his age.’ In short, Jesus – having acquired human form – accepted human limitations and was simply wrong about the Old Testament. Gore was surprised that his conclusion outraged the Church.

  The reconciliation of faith and reason came to be called – sometimes pejoratively, sometimes as a mark of approval – ‘modernism’. And ‘modernists’ began to appear in the most unlikely places. William Sandy, Regius Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, insisted that ‘the Saviour of Mankind extends his arms towards the cultivated modern man, just as he does towards the simple believer’.19 That was an entirely acceptable view since it amounted to no more than that the Lord’s arms were opened wide. But Sandy had begun to lose traditional faith. He told friends that he could no longer accept the Bible’s account of the miracles. Nor did he believe in either the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection.

  ‘Modernism’ began to take root. It propagated its views through its magazine, the Modern Churchman, and Ripon Hall – a theological college founded in 1897 by the essentially orthodox Bishop Boyd-Carpenter – became modernism’s breeding ground. The new theology was supported (in one form of another) by theologians, philosophers, historians and (perhaps most damaging of all) biblical scholars whose studies of the texts convinced them that all the messages of the gospels were to be found in the religious teachings of earlier faiths. All the sceptics claimed to be devout Christians who insisted that their approach to the gospels and creeds was essential if Christianity was to survive. Lowes Dickinson spoke for them all. ‘Religious truth is attainable, if at all, only by the methods of science.’20

  That was not obvious to the simple believer. Kate Jarvis (who left the Wesleyan Elementary School when she was fourteen and became nurse to the children of the wealthy) never missed a Sunday service. She recorded in her diary each chapel she attended – Englefield Green Wesleyan Chapel with Lady Southampton’s maid, Lochpilghead Chapel, the Wesleyan Chapel at Cowes and the Marlborough Road Chapel harvest festival.21 To her and people like her, much of what ‘modernism’ stood for was pure blasphemy. Canon T. K. Cheyne, Oriel Professor of Exegesis at Oxford, may have expressed himself in scholarly language, but to Kate Jarvis and her kind, his views were only heresy.

  As the critical enquiry stands at present one may reasonably hold that one extraordinary teacher and healer called Jesus incurred the displeasure of the Roman authorities and suffered the extreme penalty as a rebellious and unrecognised ‘King of the Jews’. But is it not possible that the statements of the Messianic claims of Jesus, and consequently also the intervention of the procurator, may be imaginary?22

  One challenge to both the authority of the Bible and the divinity of Christ followed another. Three months later Cheyne wrote

  It is to me much more than merely possible that Jesus of Nazareth was not betrayed by, or surrendered to, the Jewish authorities, whether by Judas or by anyone else. The Twelve Apostles are to me (and I should think to many critics) as unhistoric as the Seventy Disciples.23

  The Church of England could tolerate the questioning of its basic beliefs as long as the questions were asked by scholars. But once the same doubts were expressed by the humble clergy – men who supposedly earned their pittance by proclaiming the Word of God which the modernists challenged – punitive action was unavoidable. The Reverend C. E. Beeby, Vicar of Yardley Wood, Birmingham, gave his greatest service to the Church by offering himself as a candidate for ritual sacrifice. Mr Beeby claimed publicly that he was both morally and legally entitled to proclaim his scepticism about the Virgin Birth and the miracles, yet still retain his living.

  Perhaps Beeby thought he would enjoy the support of his bishop, Charles Gore. If so, Beeby was badly mistaken. The Bishop of Worcester, as Gore then had become, had been ranked among the Modernists who doubted the divine inspiration of the Old Testament and suggested that Jesus had endorsed its more dubious claims because of human fallibility. But Gore had begun to believe that Modernism led to secularism and that secularism was only one step away from atheism. The bishop agonised about how he should deal with his turbulent priest.

  The article was not the first example of Mr Beeby’s apostasy. He had written and published a whole book to support the view that revelation did not require the support of miracles. That, ecclesiastical lawyers told Bishop Gore, provided much clearer grounds for action than the article. But the book had been written before Gore became bishop. Gore therefore felt himself excluded from action on the evidence of its contents. So began a long and desperate correspondence between Beeby and his bishop. It was followed by a painful interview. It left Gore still uncertain how to proceed. Fortunately Beeby, being a gentleman, decided to end his bishop’s torment and resigned.

  Bishop Gore was not satisfied with a local victory. He wrote to Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with all the zeal of a convert from Modernism. ‘Can we not in Convocation do something to reassure a great number of people that the Bishops would not connive at men being ordained who did not believe in the Articles of the Creed, particularly the Virgin Birth?’ Davidson was doubtful. His worldly instincts told him that such a declaration would do more harm than good. But Convocation was with Gore and insisted that, as an absolute minimum, the two archbishops should write a pastoral letter setting out the inviolability of the Scriptures. Randall Davidson prevaricated and procrastinated. Before the letter was drafted, Armitage Robinson, the Dean of Westminster, published a scholarly examination of incarnation which made it impossible for the statement of traditional theology to be issued, since it would have been seen as a reproof to one of the Church of England’s most distinguished priests. Robinson’s preface insisted that ‘to say that the historical fact of the Virgin Birth is a cardinal doctrine of faith is to use language which no Synod of Bishops, so far as I am aware, has ever ventured to use. It is to confuse the incarnation with a special mode of incarnation in a way for which Christian theology offers no precedent.’24

  It was not only in England that Modernism was on the march. In Alsace, Albert Schweitzer published The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Its opening chapter warned, ‘We must be prepared to find that the historical knowledge of the personality and life of Jesus will not be a help, but perhaps even an offence to religion.’ The book was, at first, sentimentally described as emphasising the humanity of Jesus. In fact it made him out to be a fanatic who misunderstood his mission and his destiny. Modernism was spreading to all the denominations of the Christian Church. At the London City Temple, R. J. Campbell was preaching what he called the ‘New Theology’, defined by a critic as ‘adapting the Christian message to the minds of the generation which had elected the Parliament of 1906–10’.25 Only the Roman Catholic Church chose to act rather than attempt to accommodate. The Papal Encyclical Pascendi required all priests to swear an oath that they forswore Modernism in all its forms.

  In the Protestant churches the argument went on. In fact, it is going on still. But, as the century progressed, it became more and more about what was right and true and less and less about what was necessary to keep the faith alive. In the 1907 Braunton Lecture, Canon H. J. F. Piele admitted defeat: ‘The hope and purpose of Liberal Theology have been, and are more than ever today, to make Christianity a possible religion for the thinking man of the world. But in its further purpose of facilitating the wider acceptance of Christianity, it has largely and unexpectedly failed.’

  A year later the Church of England performed what it hoped was the last rites over the still twitching corpse of the Modernism controversy. The ceremony was typically low-key. The Lambeth Conference reaffirmed the ‘central importance of both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds’. The implications of that commitment were not discussed.

  To the Edwardian Catholics, the failure of Modernism to reinvigorate the Anglican Communion was not at all unexpected. They believed that compromise was death. G. K. Chesterton sought to gain recruits for Rome by exciting wonderment at the external mysteries which t
hey thought essential to faith. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton argued for the whole-hogging sort of Christianity which became his trademark, with images that were more vivid than apt.

  It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family, has at once (if I may put it so) been fiercely for having children and for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white like the red and white on the shield of Saint George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates the combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of philosophers.26

  The Anglo-Catholics took a similar (if more cerebral) view of the Church of England’s need to eschew theological compromise if it hoped to prosper. The antagonism of the Modernisers was only to be expected. But the Anglo-Catholics were unpopular throughout the broad Church because of what was regarded as their pagan enthusiasm for ritual. High Churchmen believed implicitly in weekly (and in some cases daily) Communion, facing eastward while conducting services and decorating their altars with candles and crucifixes. Reserved Sacrament in their churches proclaimed ‘The Real Presence’ of the living Christ. Most offensive of all, they sought to ‘enrich’ the prayer book with additions from the Catholic mass. The Protestant objection to Anglo-Catholicism is often summed up in the single word ‘vestments’. But the complaints against Anglo-Catholics were much more comprehensive and fundamental than dislike of the green and gold chasuble which their priests wore during the Eucharist. In 1904, Percy Dearmer and W. H. Frere published the English Liturgy, an attempt to demonstrate that the ‘enrichment’ was not an affront to the Anglican Communion. The book was not accepted by devotees of the Thirty-Nine Articles as proof that Catholics and Protestants could share a common form of worship.