After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  His mission to the university of Oxford was based on his belief that the Christian world-view was a coherent one, which could be defended intellectually. The approach he adopted was the same as in his book Christus Veritas (1924), to acknowledge that ‘the method of Philosophy is secure, but its result comparatively barren’. Theology, following a more ‘precarious’ method, accepts its doctrines from Religion. ‘One day, perhaps, the two’ – Theology and Philosophy – ‘will probably co-incide: but that day is not yet.’2

  The Oxford Mission was not disloyal to the intellectual requirements of the two disciplines, but in the end it was an appeal to the religious impulse. It climaxed, on the final evening, after a week’s exposition of his ‘philosophy of life’, with the singing of the hymn ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’. A huge crowd roared out the words, and then Temple stopped the singing. ‘I want you to read over this verse before you sing it. They are tremendous words. If you mean them with all your hearts, sing them as loud as you can. If you don’t mean them at all, keep silent. If you mean them even a little, and want to mean them more, sing them very softly.’ There was a dead silence while every eye was fastened on the printed hymn-sheet, and then – to hear Isaac Watt’s words whispered by the voices of two thousand young men and women was (in the recollection of one of them) ‘an experience never to be erased from my memory till the whole tablet is blotted’.3

  Were the whole realm of nature mine,

  That were an offering far too small

  Love so amazing, so divine

  Demands my soul, my life, my all

  The religious revival which took place at this time was welcomed by those who had been dismayed in 1928, when Parliament rejected a revision of the Book of Common Prayer which the Church’s own Assembly had passed. By the standards of later liturgical revisions, the new book was moderate indeed. Extreme Protestants were offended by its provision for Reservation of the Sacrament for the use of the sick – that is, keeping back some of the bread consecrated in the Communion Service. They feared it would lead to Romish idolatry. Extreme Catholics within the Church of England, Anglo-Catholics, disliked the book because it was not Romish enough and specifically did not allow them to worship or to parade the sacred bread. It may seem strange that in a Britain which was still wrestling with poverty and disease, Parliament should have concerned itself with such matters, but the pages and pages devoted to the matter in Hansard show the bewildered twenty-first-century reader that old prejudices – still alive and well in Northern Ireland to this day – remain in a national bloodstream for much longer than reasonable people would expect. It might have been supposed that, whatever their individual views about God, the Trinity, the Communion Service or ecclesiastical ceremonial might have been, the members of Parliament would have thought these things were best left to the Church itself. Winston Churchill said in the debate:

  The Church stands at the Bar of the House of Commons and waits. That to me is a most surprising spectacle. Here you have the greatest surviving Protestant institution in the world patiently listening to Debates on its spiritual doctrines by twentieth century democratically-elected politicians who quite apart from their constitutional rights, have really no credentials except good will. It is a strange spectacle, and rather repellent … In the present age the State cannot control the Church in spiritual matters: it can only divorce it.4

  This was the view of many churchmen. The Prayer Book controversy, for example, converted the arch-Tory, highly acerbic Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, one of the wittiest diarists in our language, to a belief in disestablishing the Church – making the Church of England into the Anglican or Episcopal Church, of equal status with the Roman Catholics, Christian Scientists, Jews and others. Had they done so, and had the monarch no longer been required to be titular head of the Church, then Edward VIII, instead of reigning for a mere ten months in 1936, would have been able to continue as king until his death.

  So the Prayer Book debate, esoteric as it reads today, had wider implications than the individual quirks of these parliamentarians who were involved in throwing out the Revised, or Deposited, Book, as it was called. The Duchess of Atholl, a Scottish Episcopalian, made probably the most learned speech, pointing out that her own Church had Reserved the Sacrament for 200 years without lurching to Rome. She also pointed out that the new rite contained the Epiklesis or invocation of the Spirit over the Bread and Wine – and that hitherto the old Book of Common Prayer failed to do this. The new book ‘appeals to the moderate Anglo-Catholics, to the Broad Church people and to the Low Church people, because it gives them all something for which they wish’.5 This was not enough for the diehards. Old Colonel Wedgwood got up and said it was a matter of ‘the eternal struggle between liberty and authority’. You would have supposed this was a reason for giving the Church freedom to govern its own affairs. Though, Unitarian that he was, he might not have liked the ‘bells and smells’ of High churches, might he not as a socialist have liked the fact that these churches were so often staffed and run by Christian Socialists who had found Christ in the poor and underprivileged? No – the matter sparked in Colonel Jos a gut-feeling of intolerant Protestantism:

  These symbols – the Reservation of the Sacrament, the chasubles and robes, prayers for the departed in purgatory – may all seem little things to us. They are symbols, mere symbols; but think what they meant to those people who went before. It was against those symbols that men fought in the field. It was for fear of those symbols that nations were driven across the sea. It was because of those symbols that men, women and even children were burnt at the stake.6

  The Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, one of the most pompous and ridiculous people who ever exercised that office (and that is saying something), believed it was within the remit of the Home Office in 1928 to control the liturgy. ‘Thirty years ago there were thirty churches where reservation was practised; today there are nearly 700,’ he said, adding that the new book which allowed this regrettable practice could not ‘bring peace to the Land’.7 As for the authority of Parliament to interfere in how the English said their prayers: ‘In the reign of Henry VIII, Parliament declared that the King’s consent was requisite to all canons, and in 1534, it was not the Church, but Parliament, which abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope in this land. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI were established by Parliament in 1549 and 1552. The prayers and worship of the Church have all been settled by Acts of Parliament.’8 So Joynson-Hicks with his frock-coat and striped trousers resembling one of the more orotund buffoons in Dickens, as it were a Tite Barnacle, could from his Conservative Evangelical position lead through the lobbies Colonel Wedgwood the Unitarian, Saklatvala the Parsee Communist, and a motley band of Jews, Methodists, agnostics and Presbyterians to defeat the Deposited Book. The divorce between Church and State which Churchill had said was inevitable happened, to the extent that actual churchgoers took no notice of the absurdity – even though at the time of writing, 2005, Church and State are still saddled with Establishment.

  What kept the Church of England alive was not the deliberations of Parliament, as Joynson-Hicks seemed to think, but the imaginative and spiritual needs of its members. In 1937 was published a book, edited by Father A. G. Hebert, called The Parish Communion. Its motto was ‘let your church be the church’. By making the Eucharist the chief service of the Church this book revolutionized Anglican worship for many who would never have called themselves Anglo-Catholic or worshipped in ‘extreme’ churches. It was also a time when the cathedrals of England came into their own. In Victorian England many cathedrals were only open to paying worshippers. Archibald Campbell Tait, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was when Bishop of London responsible for urging the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey to allow in some non-paying worshippers at Evensong. As late as 1940 one dean of an English cathedral reminded the congregation that they were only allowed to worship in the choir at Christmas, and that at any other time of year the Dean and Chapter would turn the
m out.9 One of the pioneers of giving the cathedrals back to the people, and of reviving their worship, was Frank Selwyn Macaulay Bennett, Dean of Chester. When he arrived in Chester in 1920, Bennett met many people who had lived their whole lives under the shadow of the cathedral and never been inside it.10 He introduced mystery to the common worship – ‘The best preparation for a great crowd in a cathedral is to burn some incense.’11 Inspired by Bennett, other dioceses began to use their cathedrals and these great buildings became popular again. Hewlett Johnson, moon-faced Stalinist Dean of Canterbury, is nowadays derided for his politics, but he was a good dean, filling the cathedral. T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral made a sensation when it was first performed at the Canterbury Festival, organized by George Bell, in 1935. The self-confidence of the national Church was further expressed in its financing and building of two giant new cathedrals – Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s magnificent one at Liverpool consecrated in 1924, and in Guildford the cathedral designed by Edward Maufe in 1932, and towering above the town like a monastic mountain-top. Maufe is a figure like Betjeman, Britten and Piper in their different fields: not an architect of the first rank,12 but one by paradox who can produce work that is more satisfying than those who are. His austere concrete cathedral, faced with brick and stone, is hauntingly atmospheric, within and without.

  Bell, incidentally, when Dean of Canterbury, had been the first to allow Canterbury Cathedral to be open to visitors between services on Sundays, and to admit female sightseers or worshippers without hats. He also, with John Reith, then general manager of the BBC, pioneered broadcast services on the wireless. George Bell was one of the most impressive Englishmen of his age, a figure wholly of the Establishment, and yet when conscience required it, utterly subversive. He was the child of a parson. He was for many years the chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson, then Dean of Canterbury, and in 1929 Bishop of Chichester. He will always be remembered as the link between Britain and the very many whom some still think of as the ‘good’ Germans. The Athenaeum Club in London, a place of limitless dullness, seems hallowed when one remembers that this was the place, between 1933 and 1935, where Bishop Bell, small and smiling in his black frock-coat, breeches and gaiters, would give luncheon to the young German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was at the time looking after the Lutheran parish in Forest Hill, South London. Bonhoeffer had first met Bell at a Church conference in Geneva in 1932. Perhaps one of the things the two men had in common was their normality. They were not religious maniacs. Bonhoeffer came from a clever, agnostic family; he was heterosexual, and far from puritanical. (He was to tell his family of his engagement to an aristocratic girl called Maria von Wedemeyer on the day of his arrest by the Nazis.) He liked spending money, having a good suit made, and, being tall and quite heavily built, he was very fond of his food. Bell, likewise, gentle and smiling, was a perfectly normal-seeming person, who belonged to neither of the ‘extreme’ wings of the national Church. Bell was probably a more or less orthodox Christian. Bonhoeffer was on a journey, moving from an admiration for Karl Barth’s view – that faith must be above reason – to a more reasoned absorption of the theology of Rudolf Bultmann: namely, that the events described in the New Testament are mythology; that Christian faith consists in making them real to yourself in an existential way. Bonhoeffer himself, when he was waiting in prison to be killed by the Nazis, foresaw a time when institutional religion itself would die, but believed that what he called ‘religionless Christianity’ would be and was eternal.

  From the very first, Bonhoeffer had seen that there could be no compromise whatever between Christianity and Hitlerism. He saw Christianity as the last, and in the end the only, bulwark against Nazism. Some Christians in Germany, as he foretold in a very early sermon in Berlin – before Hitler even rose to power – would be called to martyrdom. The one thing they could not do was to absorb the National Socialist creed, with its contempt for humanity and its discrimination between persons on grounds of race, into their own view of the world. So strongly did Bonhoeffer feel about racism, that he had turned down a good job at the Union Theological Seminary in New York because he could not in conscience live in the United States, which still practised segregation. (He and a black friend were not admitted to a New York restaurant, which was the incident which decided him.)

  One of the most sinister of possibilities, for Bonhoeffer, was that Nazism might swallow up Christianity itself. Bishop Ludwig Muller was appointed head of the German Church by Hitler. Previously the Lutherans did not have a national hierarchy. Muller was confidential adviser to Hitler when he became Chancellor, and a full Nazi. It was clear to true Christians that they must leave Muller’s Church and set up the Confessing Lutheran Church, which they did, so as not to be a party to – among other things – excluding those of Jewish or partially Jewish ancestry from their congregations. The Confessing Church was the object of particular opprobrium to the Bishop of Gloucester, Arthur Headlam, who often wrote letters to The Times praising the National Socialists, and the many supposed benefits which they were bringing to the Fatherland.

  When the very end came, and he knew he was about to be hanged, it was to Bell that Bonhoeffer sent his last message. Bell recalled:

  I knew him in London in the early days of the evil regime: and from him, more than any other German, I learned the true character of the conflict, in an intimate friendship. I have no doubt that he did fine work with his German congregation: but he taught many besides his fellow-countrymen while a pastor in England. He was crystal clear in his convictions; and young as he was, and humble-minded as he was, he saw the truth, and spoke it with a complete absence of fear.13

  It was in the Athenaeum Club that Anthony Trollope wrote some of his novels of English cathedral life. It was there one day that, overhearing two old club bores talking of his fictional battleaxe, Mrs Proudie, the bishop’s wife, he resolved to write her death scene in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Had he returned to Earth in 1934, Trollope would have seen the Athenaeum full of characters from his novels – bishops in frock-coats, their top hats adorned with rosettes and rigging; club servants in livery. So little had changed. Bonhoeffer knew that a fundamental conflict was about to engulf the world, as it had already engulfed his own country.

  It was in this club, too, that so many of the Victorian intellectual giants – Huxley, Darwin, Lyell and others – could be seen raising silver soup spoons to whiskered mouths. Their vision of a universe, where unfit species were ‘cast as rubbish to the void’, had seemed to many of their contemporaries to put to death not merely the tradition of the Church but the very God whose existence had hitherto underpinned, not only the universe of matter, but also that of value. Tennyson had seen in the relentless evidence of Lyell’s fossils a careless, heedless process at work. The ‘dragons of the prime/That tore each other in their slime’ mocked the old decencies. Now the sky was darkening outside the club windows. Just around the corner, in the stuccoed elegance of Carlton House Terrace, the German embassy was preparing for the arrival as ambassador of Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose smooth talking would bamboozle so many in London society. Now, all that remains of Ribbentrop’s stay in London is his dog’s grave, at the top of the steps in Waterloo Place. Bonhoeffer’s conversations with Bishop Bell convinced at least one sane and influential Englishman – though alas, not influential enough – that there was an enormous opposition to Hitler in Germany, that most of the Catholic South had never voted for him, that decent Germans who were pleased by the reversals of the Versailles treaty and by full employment would soon wake from their dreams. If those of good will in both countries united against Nazism, was not this the best way of averting war?

  So the two men spoke, in that atmosphere of Victorian clubland, where to all outward appearances the Church of England, by law established, was still a force of influence. And if Bonhoeffer had looked around the dining-room, and seen Lang, then Archbishop of Canterbury, or Henson of Durham in their episcopal attire, it might well have seemed to be
true.

  Of course the Church of England was not the whole story in the religious life of the 1930s. There was the growth of Christian Science, and the very fine churches which went with it, most notably the huge temple in Curzon Street, Mayfair. There was the phenomenon of Moral Rearmament, in which Frank Buchman’s ‘Oxford Group’ persuaded his often rather athletic disciples to make public confession of their sins. Some who attended the meetings were embarrassed by the sight of Rugger ‘Blues’ weeping as they acknowledged impure thoughts. Others found Buchman inspiring, with his belief that by millions of individual conversions the Holy Spirit would transform the world. ‘I thank heaven’, Buchman declared after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, ‘for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism.’

  No less startling, to a twenty-first-century eye, is the support given to violent political causes by the British branches of the Roman Catholic Church. The monks of Downside held regular novenas of prayer for the IRA, as well as for the success of Franco’s armies in the Spanish Civil War; indeed, prayers for a Franco victory were all but universal among British Catholics.14 The Order of Preachers (Dominicans) stands out among fellow Catholics for taking a bigger and more daring view of world affairs, and some of the most impressive twentieth-century exponents of Christianity have come from within its ranks. Particularly notable was Bede Jarrett, OP, a learned, holy scholar, who opened Blackfriars at Oxford exactly seven hundred years after the first arrival of the Dominicans in that place, 15 August 1221. Jarrett died on 17 March 1934, aged fifty-two.15 His mentor within the Order, Vincent McNabb (1868–1943), was a man with a wider sphere of influence. Born in a poor family in Northern Ireland, he combined the distinctive Dominican virtues of scholarship with eloquence. He was also a person of almost Tolstoyan simplicity of life, never taking public transport in London, where he chiefly worked, and where he tramped about in his medieval garb and hobnailed boots, an uncompromising soldier for Christ whose life makes some of the rather bizarre anti-Catholicism of the Parliamentary Prayer Book debate seem not merely misplaced but crazy.16 Friends with such luminaries as Belloc and Chesterton, Father McNabb was nonetheless the reverse of a socialite or intellectuals’ darling. That role was chiefly occupied by Father Martin d’Arcy, SJ, who managed to convert a number of well-known people to his faith, including Evelyn Waugh and the future Earl of Longford. ‘Are you rich and nobly born?’ asked Betjeman.