"RETURNED EMPTIES"

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 127, 30 May 1914, Page 13

"RETURNED EMPTIES"

RITUALISM AND REVIVAL ECHOES OP PAST CONFLICT. From its title and outward appearance the general reader, as distinguished from the theological student, Would not suspect that Baring Gould's latest work "The Church Revival," was as good as one of his best novels, an attractive book for momenta of leisure or for the fire« •side. The name of the author, himself a well-known novelist and story-teller, would, of course, give an inkling of tho character of the book ', but that is all. As a matter of fact," The Church Re« vival " is a fascinating work, quite as much for the reader who is not in the Anglican communion as the reader who is a member of the Church in one or other of its departments — high, low, broad, or moderate. For the New Zealander who is interested in the history of his country — a, freshly-baked, history, and almost piping hot, "The Church Revival " will prove most interesting, for, incidentally, it accounts for some things in tho turn of civil and ecclesiastical affairs in this country thab are difficult to understand at this distance of time, say, forty to fifty years ago. Baring Gould, for example, speaks much of the colonial bishop who, when ho returned to England, was known to his brethren as a "returned empty." George Augustus Selwyn was "a returned empty," for, according to the author, Selwyn was somewhat of a disappointment a« Bishop of Lichfleld, his beßt powers having been exhausted in New Zealand. But the first Anglican bishop of this land was a man head and shoulders above his brethren in the episcopate in England and, in the colonies, on Baring Gould's showing. Of the colonial sees generally, he remarks : — "They were for the most part filled with favourites of the Church Missionary Society and with home nonentities." Of Bishops who " clogged the wheels of the Church, who originated nothing, had no programme, no definite aims, no organising power, those in colonial sees were conspicuous' failures." Australia was a dumping-ground for them, and in no colony did the Church prove so feeble. These Palmerstonian prelates have happily now all dropped away, leaving not a trace behind, save volumes of charges, for which a second-hand bookseller would not give sixpence a ton." SKY PILOTS AT THE HELM. Of the Bishops of the Victorian era and their opposition, active or passive, to the revival in the Church of England, or the Ritualistic movement as it used to be called, Baring-Gould speaks most frankly. De mortuis nil nisi bonum does not influence him in .the least in saying straight out just what he thinks of most of the Bishops of, say, the sixties or thereabouts. " They led sweet and holy lives— that was all," he saya of them. " The majority of the Bishops were mediocrities, men of low intelligence, narrow views, and hearts quaking before the voice of the Press and the shout of the vulgar. They were, rightly enough, earnest for personal religion^ but they had no conception of anything beyond individualism. They' were conscientious, but their consciences were enclosed within a hazel nutshell." The revival to which the author refers is traced back to the beginning of the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement as it was called. It_ was not until the seventies i and eighties that the hostility to the High Churchmen from within and 'without tho Anglican Church was manifested in outbreaks of hoodlumism and destruction of Church property. Many men and women still counting themselves young can recall those days. Ritualistic clergymen were not only harried and worried in the streets for doing things in what they believed to be decency and order and in accordance with the rubrics of tho Church itself. Public opinion was whipped up into a froth like the white of an egg against these men ; the daily press really stirred up strife, and that brilliant caricaturist the late Sir John Tenniel was no friend of the Ritualists, whom he held up to ridicule again and again in Punch. At this date the attitude of the Bishops towards Ritualism is very hard to understand. "I do not for a moment (writes Baring-Gould) mean to imply that they (the Bishops) did not act conscientiously. I believe Annas and Caiaphas were sincerely conscientious men. Only they knew not what they did. That is their excuse." Then he goes on dealing with certain of tho Archbishops and Bishops he has known, and that with bare knuckles; nor does he admit that 'some of those of to-day are guiltless of shilly-shalling — " A great many of them (he says) do not want to lead, they do not want either to come in at the tail, but to occupy a position that exposes them to no danger or discomfort. What they look for is to be safe— safe in the middle compartment of the train, with a buffer on each side, so that whatever might befall the train in which they travel— the Church of the land — they personally trill not suffer." CHURCH AND STATE MESALLIANCE. In Australia and New Zealand ther« is no union of Church and State. People worship in the way they think best. At the same time, years ago there were, as oven to-day, squabbles among Anglicans themselves as to what is the right and proper way to conduct their services. Want of tact on both aides, and, above all, want of teaching on the part of the people, are frequent causes of friction which must, and do, impair the effi« ciency of the particular Church as a transformer of the current it' receives 1 and is required to deal with ajid distribute for the religious and social benefit of those among whom it is established. Diocesan and Ueneral Synods of the Assemblies and Conferences of Churches all afford saiety valves which in th© Established Church of England are sorely needed. Baring-Gould furnishes abundant evidence of the undesirable relationship between the Church and State in England. "I do not wonder that among the younger clergy there is growing impatience at the galling link between Church and State, and the impotence in which the Church is placed to select her own officers and manage her own affairs ; and there is a readiness to accept disestablishment almost at any price. I do not wonder at it. ■ From the English Revolution, insult and outrage have been assiduously offered to the Church, and every effort has been made to force her to work as .her taskmaster orders, in chains, and with the iron eating into her very soul." *_ To what he describes as evangelicals, as distinct from the High Churchmen, the writer concedes much for fcheir earnestness, but their bigotry he does not pass ovet at all lightly : — "True evangelicalism— real spiritual converse with God— that had never lacked in the English Church. . . . The modern evangelical party in the Church was started by the preaching of Wesley ; it speedily altered its direction from Arminianism to Calvinism. It owed its real origin, Orion-like, to Scottish, Dutch, and Huguenot invaders. The English Bishops and clergy have been oftfrn and unjustly accused of having thrust Wesley and his followers out of the Church. But it was impossible to allow the Methodist doctrines of sensible and instantaneous conversion, personal assurance, and indefectability, to rind a lodgment." A GOOD STORY TELLER. > &b_bf.V£J: »fcU'it_*l i&dftj_ffift&Jl _ft £o>.

ceived at his ordination^ Baring Gould was certainly blessed with that other divine gift, a sense of humour, and a keen scent for a good story. That is what makes "The Church Revival" such pleasant reading. Of a member of his own family he writes:— "The old lady was a sturdy churchwoman. She would stand up during prayers in church to see if any of the congregation failed to kneel. As none bub lieruelf and the clerk in tho congregation were able to lead, the latter was wont to give out tho psalm in this fashion : 'Let Madam and I sing to the praise and glory of God.' " Of his own daughter lie writes:— "I sent, a daughter once to a cookery school. She retuTned with a masterly knowledge of how to make Marchpane, almond paste, but could do nothing else, not even boil a potato. Now Marchpane is very toothsome, but when served up twice a day every day in the year it palls on the appetite. The Calvinistic Evangelicals had but one or at the outside two doctrines, and they were not of Marchpano daintiness. . . . The preachers nob only denounced flagrant sin, but also with equal energy what' they termed 'The World' : . balls, races, theatres, cards, even though no money passed ', novels, except such as were religious—in. fact all amusements; they looked askance at cricket, and with horror at football." "Most of the evangelicals whom I met and knew were formal, and smugness was the badge of all their tribe. They were all without exception men of Very nar« i-o\V i views. Religion with them was subjective, emotional, concentrated on self. 'All you care for' as someone said to Clayton, of Cambridge, 'is the saving of your own dirty soul.' , . . "When some of them became Colonial Bishops they were helpless, they could wag their tongues, but put no hands to work. Hands efficient for any constructive work they had not, only fins wherewith to propel themselves into notice— and to muddy the water in which they swam," A GLIMPSE OF SELWYN. BAring Gould describes Selwyn, first Bishop of New Zealand, as one who "saw clearly that the colonial church must be independent, an idea abhorrent to the Erastian party in England. He had the boldness to ignore the hesitation and timidity of the English bishops and tho difficulties raised by the lawyers, and motu proprio to get suffragan bishops ordained for the dioceses he constituted in New Zealand without troubling to refer home for legal permission. . . "When expatiating on bh« • independence claimed by the colonial churches, Lord Harrowby interrupted him by saying : 'You have Cut the painter !' At once Bishop Selwyn retorted : 'No ! We have not cut the painter; it has parted of itself, and we are now forging a more enduring cable, like the- invisible and immaterial bonds that anchor the planets to the sun.' " One cannot help reading "The Church Revival" without feeling that the Anglican Church in the Dominions is infinitely better off without State recognition, than is the Church of England with it. The alliance between Church and State in England so far as the High Churchmen were concerned was of such a nature as to justify divorce on the grounds of cruelty alone. Churches were invaded by mobs and the furniture smashed, and the foulest things were said about the men and worse about the ladies who were associated with* the high churches in those days. "Disraeli cast the churchmen (so Baring Gould contends) to be mangled and torn, like the Siberian father who flung his children from the sledge to the wolves, if only he could save his Jewish skin and the tinsel coronet to which he aspired." But to-day the Court of Arches is visited occasionally by the caretaker to dust its unused seats ; Lord Penzance retired- in 1899; bub the odious "Public Worship Repil»*ion Act" remains. After those m»»y years of bitterness through which the High Churchmen came with courage and credit, even if some of them were tactless and obstinate, Baring Gould feels constrained to write— THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH. " Wherever there were men and women earning their bread with the sweat of their brow, there zealous, enthusiastic church men and women are to be found. The movement has not by any means captured the class any more than as a whole it has mastered tho middle class, but it has effected a breach in tho walls of ignorance and prejudice, and every year shows progress. As. to the upper class — the nobility, the gentry, the plutocrats — they are pretty well left to stew in their own fat, to ride their polo ponies, play bridge, race over the country on Sundays in their motors, and eat and drink the best. Ib is wibh the shopkeeper and the operative that the Church Will do most. " The future of England— of the Empire — is in the hands of the working) man. : he has a vote as well as the squire, the factory hand as well as his : employer. The future of the English branch of the Catholic Church depends now, and will depend to ail increasing degree, on the horny and ' begrimed hands of ploughmen and artisans, and into these the Church must commit her cause, will she, nill she." EDWARD IRVING. Baring Gould, in his otherwise admirably drawn portraits of preachers of other days, quotes with approval the description of Edward Irving by Otto yon Rosenberg in his "Bildcr au» London," This desciption of the great Scots preacher is both unjust and unbrue. Irving was a truly " big " man in mind and physique. Baring Gould 1 could have had, as he well knows, an infinite choice of soimdc* biographical material of Irving than that contained in " Bilder aus London." Contrary to what the writer of " The Church Revival" contemptuously says, Irving did not " invent the sect that absurdly arrogated to itself the title CatholicApostolic Church."' Here, as in one of his author's own quotations from Scripture, showing that he has gone astray for want of verificabion of his references — for he describes the Church in Philadelphia (page 406) as "neither hot nor cold, only lukewarm." Now_, Philadelphia was commended, according to the writer of the Apocalypse. Baring Gould means, of course, the Church of Laodicea, and no doubt lms made a- slip of the pen ; bub this does not at any rate affect the charm of the book nor the attractive- way Baring Gould has of telling a good story— many of which in this collection have no theological complexion at all. The illustrations include cartoons in the comic papers of the period —now forgotten in possibly problems of greater moment, when men Hew at each obher's throats because, for, sooth, one- insisted upon candles on the albar and the other insisted that there should be none.

When he died Mr. David Graham Phillips, the American novelist, left seven, completed novels. Ho wae a most fertilo writer, and, indeed, few authors can hop© to have timo so well in hand. AIL except one of tho stories have now been published, and it will appear within a year. It is tremendously long, for it runs to 400,000 words. The dismissal of two workmen from the Botany brickworks occasioned a deputation 'to Mr. Griffith, N.S.W. Public Works Minister, last week. One man said that there has bcun trouble every month since the brickworks started. Mr. Griffith &aid the matter would be investigated. The whole of the State iadjMWiejß muatj fc_ mads to pa^.