Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 1925. A BISHOP'S CENSURES

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 143, 20 June 1925, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 1925. A BISHOP'S CENSURES

Of a bishop of his own creation — '' the Bishop of Houndsditch' '—Carlyle remarked, if memory serves us rightly: "We seldom read those charges o£ his, much preferring something that is articulate." And Dean Stanley is said to have wondered why making a man a bishop deprived him of all his moral courage. Had the prophet of Chelsea or the brave Dean of Westminster been alive to-day he must have recognised that in Dr. W. E. Barnes the Church has a bishop who before his appointment to Birmingham was distinguished by his frank and fearless proclamation of what he believed to be the truth, however unpopular, and who is now displaying exactly the same characteristics in his higher station. Though he has not yet completed the first year of his episcopate, and the study and the lecture-room are more to his taste than the arena or the limelight, the Bishop of Birmingham has already made himself a conspicuous figure on the Bench by at least three-striking, contributions to the thought, not merely of the Church but of the nation. In the State of Tennessee, which has distinguished itself within the last three months by passing a law forbidding the teaching in the State schools and universities of man's evolution from lower forms of life and by making its first arrest under this law Dr. Barnes might have' landed himself in gaol by the first of the utterances to which we have referred.

As Canon of Westminster Dr. Barnes had not shrunk from affectionate references to " our cousins the apes." In the controversy whichwas provoked by his British Association sermon of 1920 on the relations of science and religion, he made this explicit statement on the subject in a letter sent to " The Times" in reply to General Booth—

The evolution of species has become an axiom of biological thought. We can no longer deny that all species have developed from primitive forms of life, and that, in particular, man is descended from the lower animals. General Booth will hardly find a competent biologist to deny these fads. Darwin, like Galif°>. !>?/» triumphed. In spite of the text, The world, also, is established, that it cannot be moved," we 'all believe that the earth moves round the sun. In spite of tho first, chapters of ■genesis, the stories of tho special creation of man by God and of the Fall have become incredible. To assert them is to renounce our intellectual heritage fri*i the 19th century. That heritage is one part of the work done by the Holy Spirit ?•;., a. tuno wllen the same Spirit called William Booth to his service.

Reversing the saying of Shakespeave— That in the captain's but a choleric word Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy— we. may say that eccentricities which pass unnoticed in the obscurity of the rank and file may attract a dangerous attention higher up, and that what in the canon is but a deplorable heresy may in the bishop be but blasphemy. Dr. Barnes has not feared to face this risk. It was as the Bishop of Birmingham that in February he made the discovery of the skull of " Anthropopitheens Australia " in South Africa the occasion for a re-afiirm-ation of his preference for Darwin to Moses as a scientific authority.

The discovery of the Taungs skull proved, he said, that the gaps'between man and his ape-like ancestors were boing bridged. It was impossible to reconcile modern knowledge with the Book of Genesis, God used evolution, extending over a hundred million years, to brin^man into existence Ho would not allow humanity fo lie destroyed.

Three-vooks ago Dr. Barnes p.nf.fim'l another hiftlily controversial (iclcl with a. startling declaration on birth control as a remedy for the ovoruiWding of iHritain. " Civilisation," he said, " is in danyer of being choked by human waste products." And now by a remarkable sermon on "Cal.holiei.sm and Ciirisl.iiinity !) be. ] la s cauyht. the ear of tin! nation and of some of tbn oversea naLiohs too, by at) ex-

Church which in its faithfulness, its candour, and its gloom recalls the eloquence of Jeremiah. " The present state of the Church of England is," he says, " causing grave anxiety." The Anglo-Catholics are belittling and deriding the value of the Eeformation doctrines and openly promoting reaction. Internal dissensions are so acute that in large cities the churches are ceasing to be parochial and becoming congregational instead. Both in number and in quality the clergy and the candidates for the ministry are declining, and by reason of the shortage the parochial system is breaking down. " The best modern theological system is ignored." Non-controversial proposals for the revision of the Prayer-book, drawn up by an official committee, were met in the House of Clergy " by a desire to give a Catholic turn to the Prayer-book."

We stand, Bishop Barnes concluded, at the cross-roads: We have seen enough recently within the Church to be gravely apprehensive. , J

In its thoroughness this sounds rather like the woe pronounced by Jeremiah upon "the shepherds that destroy and scatter the sheep of my. pasture," or of Isaiah's denunciation of the " sinful nation " that had forsaken the Lord:

th^* 1 Ai Sole of **»' £oot even nnto trie bead there is no soundness in itbut -wounds and bruises and putrefying

But even as cabled, Bishop Barnes's censures are not so fierce as these, and it is reasonable to suppose with the Dean of Bristol, whose statement on the subject we published yesterday, that their severity would be considerably mitigated by the fnU context. In what the Dean describes as "a heroic attempt to check the undiscipline of the extreme Anglo-Catholic section in his diocese," Dr. Barnes has shown faith and love as well as courage and we may be sure that these qualities did not desert him on Sunday last. On the sectarian issue it is not for a secular-journal, but in explanation of his attitude to the issue we may quote without comm®n* a Passage from the sermon which he preached to the Modern Churchmen's Conference at Oxford last year:

The earnestness and zeal of AneloS ftftr/v^ the more p^£ hill t ctr, that.'heir system is a hybrid K-ft^ m the Vict«rian era. The weiT Wo^ °f Which its f°^rs ThZr ? d " Orthily presented in this Conference j it expresses, as we berf^ tT* march of the Spirit of God. In Latin Catholicism the ancestral sacramental paganism of the Mediterranean race is veneered by Christian to the English Church is hopeless. The and the sacraments, even though "c be given that permission to sin bodily which Tyrrell, himself a.Jesuit, accJed the Jesuits of allowiav. Therein onr Engtahman, though he may b» a bad Cathtw £j. a-8? 0d C^tian, for it is certain nnr th S™ n«th6r the . command h«L^ c Sf™*? 1011- I see no reason to behave that Jesus would have found fault wiUi our national habit of mind which puts tho consecration which comes from hunger and thirst after righteousness betore the most splendid ceremonial Hn i^ £5 d?™--' God consecrates. Ho is limited to no mechanism. Our Church order is seemly and useful, bnt has no exclusive spiritual significance. The man m whom the Spirit of Christ is active is Christ's minister.

With the last four or five sentences, at any rate, we should all be able to agree.