Chapter XI: A Morning with St. Peter (8)

“Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?
Here, in streaming London’s central roar.
Let the sound of those he wrought for,
And the feet of those he fought for,
Echo round his bones for evermore.

“Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,
As fits an universal woe,
Let the long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low.”

We hope that Wellington was not “the last great Englishman.” If so, English greatness must indeed be “low.” But the thought is irresistible: Is not the undertaker’s hand again visible in all this? How different is it from the sad, simple, manly beauty of the lament of a poet, whose name scarcely stands in the list of English authors, for one of those soldiers who gloriously failed! Here is how Wolfe sings of the burial of Sir John Moore:

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

“We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the glimmering moonbeam’s fitful light
And the camp-fires dimly burning.”

Again, is this a worthy echo of “a people’s voice”?

“And thro’ the centuries let a people’s voice
In full acclaim,
A people’s voice,
The proof and echo of all human fame,
A people’s voice, when they rejoice
At civic revel and pomp and game,
Attest their great commander’s claim
With honor, honor, honor to him,
Eternal honor to his name.”

What wearisome and forced repetition, what commonplace allusions! This is not Tennyson. The very verse is burdened with its vulgar prose, and halts and stumbles in clumsy confusion meant for art. And here is his description in the same poem of the battle of Waterloo:

“Dash’d on every rocky square
Their surging chargers foam’d themselves away;
Last, the Prussian trumpet blew;
Thro’ the long-tormented air
Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray,
And down we swept and charged and overthrew.
So great a soldier taught us there,
What long-enduring hearts could do
In that world’s earthquake, Waterloo!”

The best expression in it, the last, is borrowed from Byron’s wonderful description of the same battle:

“Stop! for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!
_An Earthquake’s spoil_ is sepulchred below!”

Again in Byron these two lines tell the whole story, as does that other,

“The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!”

So with Tennyson’s “War Songs” and “National Songs,” published in the edition of 1830 and wisely omitted in later editions. They are not much above the level of many fledglings’ performances in a like strain. They fall dull on the heart:

“There standeth our ancient enemy,
Hark! he shouteth—the ancient enemy!
On the ridge of the hill his banners rise;
They stream like fire in the skies;
Hold up the Lion of England on high
Till it dazzle and blind his eyes.

_Chorus_: Shout for England!
Ho! for England!
George for England!
Merry England!
England for aye!”

Here are the chorus and full chorus of his “National Song”:

“For the French, the Pope may shrive ’em.
For the devil a whit we heed ’em:
As for the French, God speed ’em
Unto their heart’s desire,
And the merry devil drive ’em
Through the water and fire.
Our glory is our freedom,
We lord it o’er the sea;
We are the sons of freedom.
We are free.”

As Mr. Tennyson has been wise enough—for shame’s sake, presumably—to omit these and similar sorry pieces from his later editions, it may seem unfair to quote them against him now. We quote them, however, intentionally, to show that there is a strong streak of English narrowness and Protestant bigotry in his nature which we were happy to think dead, until within the last few years it has cropped out again. In 1852 there were probabilities of war between England and France, then under Louis Napoleon. Tennyson thought to rouse his countrymen, and the strongest appeal he can make is to religious bigotry:

“Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;
The world’s last tempest darkens overhead;
The Pope has bless’d him;
The Church caress’d him;
He triumphs; may be we shall stand alone.
Britons, guard your own.

“His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold,
By lying priests the peasants’ votes controll’d.
All freedom vanish’d,
The true men banish’d, etc.

“Rome’s dearest daughter now is captive France,
The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,
_Would unrelenting,
Kill all dissenting_,
Till we were left to fight for truth alone.
Britons, guard your own.”

And this is the gentle Tennyson! But we forbear from comment other than the verses themselves suggest, and turn at last to our more immediate object.

Whatever fault may be found here and there with Tennyson, one thing is certain: his renown was great and his fame established chiefly by his earlier and better works and by the peculiar characteristics which we have attempted to point out. The poet, however, seems not to have been satisfied. He was weary of the graceful path by which he ambled gently up to fame, and would seek by a new and rugged road a higher place than he already occupied in that temple where are gathered the mighty men who have wrought with the pen monuments more enduring than marble. In an evil hour he tempted fate, and fate gave him a severe warning. Weary of the minstrel's lute which had charmed the world, he would be what the poets of old were thought to be—a _vates_, an inspired prophet-and his vaticination was _Queen Mary_.

As that drama has been dealt with in these pages by another pen, we shall not touch on it here more than to say that never were the minds of Tennyson’s countrymen better prepared to receive and applaud a work intended, as this plainly was, to be an outcry against Rome and a picture of one of the fierce struggles between England and Rome. Mr. Gladstone had prepared the way and set all the world warring on “Vaticanism.” Tennyson could not have chosen a better time for the publication of his drama, and, were it a work of power and passion, it could not have failed to catch the heart of the people. Never, on the other hand, could he have chosen a better time for a higher duty: that of, in the words of his great master, still in his right hand carrying gentle peace “to silence envious tongues.” If the drama failed, it failed in the face of every incentive to success.

Fail it did. It was plain, even to friendly critics, that the author of _Queen Mary_ was not a dramatist, and so it was hinted generally in the mildest possible terms. What was the reason of the failure?

We have shown, we believe sufficiently, that Tennyson failed wherever he attempted to yoke the passions. His hand was too weak to curb them. His genius is reflective, introspective, descriptive. It has not the flash, the white heat of inspiration. It is always Tennyson who is singing, talking to, arguing with us, describing for us. He is a person, not a voice—a very pleasing, scholarly, refined, and in the main right-minded person—but he is for ever giving utterance to his own peculiar thoughts in his own peculiar style. The highest form of poetry, as of oratory, is not this. It is that undefinable and truest expression of feeling, of hope, of agony, of despair, of wrath, of courage, of any of the passions that lie dormant in the human breast, which at once elicits a responsive echo from the heart of humanity, so that we do not say, How sweet, how tender, how strong is this man, but, How true to nature is this thought! Thus it is that the greatest poets are the voices of all the world; their works the inheritance of all the world. In their highest heights they belong to humanity, and to no nation.

The dramatic we believe to be the highest form of poetry, because it alone attempts to portray life itself, life in action; it is not a description, however magnificently done, of life. There lies between it and all other forms of poetry the difference that exists between the painting of a hero and the hero himself. The one is the man, thinking, living, moving, breathing, speaking his thoughts, doing his deeds; the other after all is only an image, more or less vivid, of him on canvas. It may catch the color of the eye, the expression of the countenance, the texture of the dress, the shape, the form; but at the very best it is a picture, no more, infinitely removed from the reality.

If this be a right conception of the difference between dramatic and all other kinds of poetry—and it seems to us to be, although it might need more elaboration to impress it upon the reader’s mind—it will be plain that the dramatic poet needs nothing short of the highest inspiration in order to make him catch the very breathings of men’s souls and throw them into living forms, as truly as the master actor loses his own personality and lets it sink or become absorbed utterly in the various characters he portrays. No mere change of costume will effect the metamorphosis needed to impress the spectator with the reality of the change in character. In the same way no clipping of a poem into acts and scenes, and no allotting of certain lines to certain different names, will convert a descriptive poem into a drama. All the world will at once detect the fraud or the inherent defect.

A not uncommon phase of an exasperated mind is to refuse to recognize failure. Tennyson tried again, rather hastily, and in the same direction, with the satisfactory result of making a more disastrous failure than before. The blunder of _Queen Mary_ has been emphasized in _Harold_. The first named may have left some minds in doubt whether or not its author could construct a drama; the production of the second has effectually set all such doubts at rest. The critics who in the first instance were kind are in the second cruel. We have rarely seen a more general and resolutely contemptuous dealing with the pretensions of any writer at all than in the treatment which _Harold_ has received at the hands of critics of every shade of opinion, English as well as American.

_Harold_ is simply narrative throughout—spoken narrative, indeed. A drama must be _act_. Scenes prior to and leading up to the Norman Conquest of England are depicted with more or less beauty of limning, but they are loose, shifting, independent of each other. There is no secret thread to link the whole and give it a unity of purpose and of plan, without which there is no drama. There are five acts. There might have been fifty, or only two, or only one, so far as the slow working of the whole up to the catastrophe at the conclusion goes. The first act opens in London at King Edward’s palace. Almost the first twenty pages are occupied by various characters in discussing the appearance, meaning, and portent of a comet. This is, of course, the old stage trick used to knit the coming horror with troubles in the air. Shakspere uses it often, notably in _Julius Cæsar_, but with him the troubled elements obey the magic wand of Prospero and minister to man, and are but the accompaniment of great events. Tennyson’s comet is too much for his characters. They puzzle themselves about it until we grow tired of it and its three tails.

After the comet has run its course, the characters being brought together to discuss it, Harold intimates to the king his intention to go to Normandy; the king warns him not to go; then follows a lively discussion on personal matters between the queen, Harold, and his brothers, which almost ends in a fight; the comet or “grisly star” is introduced again, and the scene ends apropos of nothing in particular, unless a hint of a coming plot on the part of Aldwyth. The second scene, the best in the drama, is a very sweet piece of love-making between Harold and Edith, upon which Aldwyth again throws her shadow, and the act ends. The second act wrecks Harold at Ponthieu, whence his transition to the power of Count William of Normandy—or Duke William, as we are more in the habit of calling him—is easy. Indeed, to a dramatist there was no reason whatever for the first scene of this act, as the story of Harold’s capture might, if it were necessary, have been told in a line or two while Harold was actually in the power of William. The rest of this long act is taken up with William’s compelling Harold to swear, on the relics of the saints, to help him to the crown of England. The third act presents the death of King Edward, who wills the crown to Harold. The second scene gives another piece of love-making between Harold and Edith, not so happy as the first, and announces the invasion of Northumbria by Tostig and Harold Hardrada. The fourth act opens in Northumbria. In the first scene of it the factions of the rival chieftains are put an end to by the marriage of Harold with Aldwyth, and thus the only attempt at a shadow even of a plot is summarily disposed of. The other scenes are before and after the battle of Stamford Bridge, and the act closes with news of the landing of the Normans. The fifth act opens on the field of Senlac. Harold has a dream in his tent, too like that of Richard III. in conception. Stigand describes the battle of Hastings to Edith, and the death of Harold. Here the drama should have closed. Anything after it on the stage would certainly come tamely. But Tennyson cannot resist the temptation to search for the body of Harold, and with the finding of it, the death of Edith on it, and what in ordinary parlance would be called William’s directions for the funeral arrangements, the play closes.

Such is _Harold_—narrative, narrative, narrative throughout; very excellent narrative some of it, but no drama, no centre of interest around which the whole is made to turn. The misfortune about all historical plays is that the reader begins with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, and to make them dramatically interesting needs a most skilful adaptation of plot and counterplot, a slow unfolding of events from some necessary cause, a development of character, a silent Fate, so to say, moving in and out, and, in spite of all things, shaping events to one great end, so that, while we feel the consummation impending, we yet know not how, or when, or where, or by what instrumentality it will come. There is nothing of this in _Harold_.

It has been seen that Tennyson has no great love for the Pope. Indeed, if some of the lines quoted represent the man, he has, of late years at least, the heartiest hatred for the Catholic Church. We cannot help that, however much we may regret it. We must take men as they are, and, if Tennyson hates the Pope, why let him hate him and be happy. The Pope can exist and rule the Catholic Church, and be obeyed, revered, loved, and honored by intellects as bright at least as Mr. Tennyson’s, for all that gentleman’s hate. A true dramatist, however, sinks, or at least disguises, all his private personal feelings in depicting known characters or types of character. This is only to be true to nature, to art, and to history. Where there is question regarding the right reading of a character or a period, a writer is of course at liberty, after having consulted respectable authorities, to form his own estimate. Men who lived in the eleventh century must be true to their time. To make such men think, argue, reflect, question, doubt on most matters, particularly on matters of faith, just as do men of the nineteenth century, is a gross solecism. It is absurd and self-condemnatory on the face of it. To make eleventh-century Catholics speak of the Catholic faith, and Rome, and the pope after the fashion of the average Protestant or infidel journalist in these days, is absurd, not to characterize such practice by a harsher expression. This is what Tennyson has gone out of his way to do in _Harold_; and the only impression with which we rise from its perusal is that the writer detests Normans and Catholics. Between the Vere de Veres and the Pope Tennyson has lost his temper and his right hand has forgotten its cunning.

The drama presents no character of any special interest. Harold, Edward the Confessor, and William of Normandy, the three principal personages, are much the same first as last. In stage terms, William may be set down as the “heavy villain” of the piece, and a very heavy villain he is; Edward the Confessor as the “first old man”; and Harold as the “walking gentleman.” Edward is made—unintentionally too, it would seem—one of the silliest old men that ever walked the boards. As for his sanctity, imagine a saint speaking of himself in this style:

“And I say it
For the last time, perchance, before I go
To find the sweet refreshment of the Saints.”

Saints, in the Catholic Church at least, are not, as a rule, quite so sure about finding “the sweet refreshment of the saints.” Indeed, they have far graver doubts on this point often than sinners. But lest some of his courtiers might feel tempted to doubt the rapid transit to heaven of a man so thoroughly sure of his place beforehand, the king informs them:

“I have lived a life of utter purity:
I have builded the great church of holy Peter:
I have wrought miracles.”

True, every word of it. But it might have occurred to Mr. Tennyson that Edward the Confessor was mindful, at least, of that admonition: “Let not thine own mouth, but another’s, praise thee.” There never was a saint, to our knowledge, so fond of talking about himself, his miracles, his good deeds, his place here and hereafter. Listen to this again:

“And miracles will in my name be wrought
Hereafter. I have fought the fight and go—
I see the flashing of the gates of pearl—
And it is well with me, tho’ some of you
Have scorn’d me—ay—but after I am gone
Woe, woe to England! I have had a vision:
The seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus
Have turn’d from right to left.”

The whole thing is incongruous. It smacks rather of a converted “brother” giving his “experiences” and how he “got religion” before a highly-wrought meeting of “Christian workers.” Had the “devil’s advocate” only caught scent of any such expressions in the life of the real Edward, it is to be feared he would never have been canonized. Saints are not in the habit of canonizing themselves. The only thing that occurs to us as on a par with Mr. Tennyson’s picture of a saint is one by Mr. William Cullen Bryant in a short and remarkably silly poem recently published by him. It is entitled “A Legend of St. Martin,” and the saint, while still in the flesh, speaks as follows:

“Thus spake the saint: 'We part to-night;
_I am St. Martin_, and I give you here
The means to make your fortunes.’”

The author’s favorite churchman is Stigand, who, whether Catholic or heretic, no man who had read the history of the time carefully and honestly could by any possibility hold up for admiration. Mr. Tennyson, however, may consider himself excused on points of historical accuracy, inasmuch as he informs us in his dedication that “after Old-World records—such as the Bayeux tapestry and the Roman de Rou—Edward Freeman’s _History of the Norman Conquest_,” and Bulwer Lytton’s historical romance treating of the same times, “have been mainly helpful” to him “in writing this drama.” But he cannot be excused for such culpable negligence in searching out authorities when attempting to depict in a truthful manner a most important historical epoch. Had he taken the easy pains of going a little deeper into history and authorities, it would probably have been better for himself and his drama, or perhaps, with his evident bias, he would not have written it at all. He loves Stigand, a thoroughly bad prelate, simply because Stigand was against the pope. If Tennyson selects his Catholic heroes from all men who have been against the pope, he will find his hands full of very queer characters, some of them worse than Stigand. Imagine even Stigand saying, in the exact tone of a modern unbeliever:

“... In our windy world
What’s up is faith, what’s down is heresy.”

Certain modern Anglican prelates and ministers, or any man who acknowledges no unchangeable deposit of divine truth, might speak in just such a strain. The words, if they mean anything, mean simply that there is no such thing at all as real faith or doctrine. Stigand knew better than that. His peculiar vice was a very English one—an overdue and unscrupulous regard for this world’s goods. This Catholic prelate tells Harold of a sum of money which he keeps concealed at the other’s service, to be asked for at his “most need,” in the following eloquent style:

“Red gold—a hundred purses—yea, and more!
If thou canst make a wholesome use of these
To chink against the Norman, I do believe
_My old crook’d spine would bud out two young wings
To fly to heaven straight with_.”

Tennyson doubtless considers this very English and spirited. Stigand may have disliked the Normans, and doubtless did. With all our hearts! But this mode of expressing his dislike is, in the mouth of a Catholic and a prelate, surely not in character.

Again he asks:

“... Be there no saints of England
To help us from their brethren yonder?”

As though a Catholic or Christian could dream of the saints warring in heaven or of affixing nationality to sanctity! Tennyson’s Edward, with a solitary gleam of intelligence, rebukes him thus:

“Prelate,
The Saints are one, ...”

yet immediately falls into the absurd blunder he rebukes by adding:

“But those (Saints) of Normanland
Are mightier than our own.”

While witnessing the battle of Hastings Stigand cries out in an ecstasy of admiration at Harold’s prowess: “War-woodman of old Woden!” Could any Christian man, Catholic or non-Catholic, couple a Christian warrior’s name with the detestable deity of the pagan North?

The character of Harold, too, is incongruous. He is represented as a most brave, wise, and honorable man, incapable of fear or falsehood: “broad and honest, breathing an easy gladness.” He weakens in many places. We cannot here go into a historical inquiry respecting the alleged oath of Harold on the relics of saints to help William to the crown of England. Much is made of it by Tennyson; so let us take all the facts for granted. A man such as Harold is here represented to be would rather have died than taken the oath, if he never meant to keep it. On the other hand, once taken, and knowing it to be false, we doubt whether the resolute Saxon soldier would have troubled himself much about the matter. He acts as a coward throughout while in William’s power. A strong man would not rail in secret at William for forcing him to take an oath which the swearer knew to be a lie. He would take it or not take it with the best grace possible. “Horrible!” exclaims Harold when the relics on which he has sworn are exposed. Harold was sufficiently man of the world—a man who had passed his life in camp and court—to have uttered no such weak cry. In the first place, if he swore falsely, such an exclamation showed at once that he never intended to keep his promise. In the second place, it would have been perfectly plain to William that he could place no reliance on the oath of such a poltroon. The same failure to apprehend the character of the man is apparent in the womanish tirade into which Harold breaks after William has left him: “Juggler and bastard—bastard: he hates that most—William the tanner’s bastard! Would he heard me!” A moment before he might have heard him, but Harold dared not speak his thoughts. Certainly the man who never lost a battle save the one in which he lost all—the man who conquered Wales, crushed the terrible invasion of Harold Hardrada and Tostig, braved his own sovereign, seized on the English throne with a grasp that only death could shake off, and died so gloriously on Hastings—never “played the woman with his eyes and the braggart with his tongue” in this poor fashion. Here again speaks the reader of modern infidel literature in the mouth of the unspeculative soldier of the eleventh century:

“I cannot help it, but at times
They seem to me too narrow, _all the faiths_
Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye
Saw them sufficient.”

“_All_ the faiths!” We wonder how many “faiths” Harold knew of or contemplated. Indeed, it seems to us that Mr. Tennyson here speaks for himself, and in a manner that causes some suspicion of his having lost something of his own earlier and more robust belief. Harold continues:

“But a little light!—
And on it falls the shadow of the priest;
Heaven yield us more! _for better Woden, all
Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla,
Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace;
The Holiest of our Holiest one should be
This William’s fellow-tricksters_; better die
Than credit this, for death is death, or else
Lifts us beyond the lie.”

Which is heathenism and atheism beautifully combined. He goes on, still in his atheistic vein, when Edith bids him listen to the nightingales:

“Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!
Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross
Their billings ere they nest.”

And again, when Gurth brings news of the pope’s favoring William’s cause, Harold laughs and says of it:

“This was old human laughter in old Rome
Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d
Call’d itself God—a kingly rendering
Of 'Render unto Cæsar.’”

Harold must have lately risen from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet on _Vaticanism_ when he spoke thus, so we pardon his aberration. That pamphlet is too strong for weak intellects.

“The Lord was God and came as man—the Pope
Is man and comes as God,”

he continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Edith that love “remains beyond all chances and all churches”—a dictum and doctrine that would be strange even in a Protestant Harold. “I ever hated monks,” he says in another place, which may account for his having founded Waltham Abbey. He grows more and more Protestant towards the end, and the saintly relics over which he was so terrified at having sworn a false oath he terms the “gilded ark of mummy-saints.” And here is his final legacy to England:

“... And this to England,
My legacy of war against the Pope
From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,
Till the sea wash her level with her shores,
Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

This is Tennyson’s legacy, not Harold’s. It seems strange that it should have fallen into careless hands; not ours, but those of the poet’s coreligionists. The fact is that the world is growing weary of little anti-papal tooters. Great enemies of the papacy it applauds and tries to excuse; but at the mouthings of the little people it yawns. If Tennyson has shown anything in this as in his other anti-Catholic effusions, it is that when moved by rancor he can descend to all the small bitterness of a common and weak order of mind. We cannot go further into an examination of _Harold_, and, indeed, the task is not worth while. He has failed in the one character which, to a true dramatic genius, offered magnificent opportunities—William of Normandy, who was perhaps the greatest and the wisest sovereign that England has as yet known. A gallant soldier; a wary yet bold and successful general; an astute statesman; a lover of learning; a resolute if severe ruler; a man who could bide his opportunity, then move on it with the flash and fatality of the lightning, yet withal a man of almost ungovernable passions, with the old taint running in his blood and through all his successful life—this was a character that it is as great a pity Shakspere did not draw as that Tennyson should have been rash enough to attempt to draw. In what ought to be the chief scene of the play, the battle of Hastings, there is no battle at all. The weak device is resorted to of setting a description of it as it proceeds in the mouth of Stigand, who watches the field from “a tent on a mound.” Norman and Saxon, Harold and William, are not brought together for the final death-grip. Shakspere's battle-scenes are more vivid than those of any painter. They illuminate history and print themselves indelibly on the mind. Cut the battle-scenes out of _King John_, _Henry IV._, _Henry V._, _Macbeth_, _Julius Cæsar_, _Henry VI._, and you mutilate the plays. Stigand’s description of the battle of Hastings might be dropped from _Harold_ and not missed. Why should not Harold die as Hotspur dies, or as Macbeth, or Brutus, or any of the others—his face to the victorious foe, the fitting ending of the tragedy? Mr. Tennyson was not equal to the task, either in this scene or at Stamford Bridge. The last clash and conflict of human passion he can only look at from afar off and reflect upon when it is over. He cannot take it in hand and present it. He would do well to retire from the field where empires, and men and events that make or unmake empires, are the subjects of song, and go back to the pretty scenery, the calm truth, and the graceful verse that have made his name dearly loved and justly honored.

ANGLICANISM IN 1877,
AS AFFECTED BY THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

We should feel inclined to apologize to our readers for again introducing the English Establishment to their notice, were it not that since, a year ago, we considered Anglicanism in connection with the “Old Catholic” conference at Bonn, the increasing agitation within the state church cannot but have continued to attract the thoughtful attention of those who, from the bark of Peter, watch the weary tossing of the Anglican craft and the mutinous condition of a portion of her crew.

Since the period to which we allude, the fact that the whole tendency of the Alt-Catholic movement is rationalistic and anti-Christian is beginning to be understood by all really religious Protestants, and we now see the better part of them holding aloof from the movement, and even the Ritualist journals condemning whatever advances were made towards it. The cause is now advocated only by the Broad-Church party, which distinguished itself by its emphatic encouragement of the apostate Loyson, one of the apostles of the new sect, who went last summer to London to enlighten the English public on ecclesiastical questions. On the other hand, the High-Church movement is, if anything, in the direction of the Catholic Church, while Alt-Catholicism is a distinct counter-agitation, and thus anything like a cordial fraternization between the two is impossible. The attempts of the High-Church party to obtain at least as much as a recognition of the validity of their orders from the Orientals—attempts which were renewed at the Bonn conference—have again signally failed. One of the “Unionist” leaders himself laments that “the Oriental Church stands entirely aloof from the Church of England, sweepingly and roundly condemns all its members, denies the validity of their baptisms and ordinations, and practically refuses to aid them in any shape or form.”

There is no doubt that at the present moment a tremendous struggle has arisen in the Establishment between the would-be Catholic and the Protestant elements; the latter not only pleading its three centuries’ possession, but also, and truly, declaring itself to be the very basis and _raison d’être_ of the schism. This claim is urged at the present time with a vehemence and jealous irritation aimed ostensibly at the “Romanizing practices” of their brethren, but the venom of which betrays itself to be especially called forth by the ceaseless, active, self-denying energy of these incorrigible early risers—an irritation not difficult to comprehend on the part of those who, with all their professions of Evangelical piety, have, generally speaking, an exceeding shyness of hard work, detest the Counsels of Perfection in general and the practice of self-denial in particular, take up the pen much more readily than the cross, and prefer bridling their neighbor’s tongue rather than their own. Nevertheless, with regard to a certain class among the Evangelicals, and these the more earnest, it is only just to say that their condemnation of Ritualists and their practices is sincerely a matter of principle. They regard the one as the guides and the other as the direct means to “idolatry”—a term which they have all their lives been taught to consider as synonymous with the Catholic religion.

When St. Edward the Confessor lay on his death-bed in the palace of Westminster, he foretold to his queen, St. Edith, and to Stigand that, in punishment for the sins of the land, God would permit the enemy of mankind to send a mission of wicked spirits into it, who should sever the Green Tree of Old England from its root, and lay it apart for the space of three furlongs; but that the tree should after a due time return to its root and revive, without the help of any man’s hand. The traditional interpretation of this prophecy has been that the English Church would be cut off for the space of three centuries from its parent stem, but that, after that time, the severed church should return to its ancient allegiance.

And what do we now see? Movement, awakening, and life where for three centuries have reigned the gloom and chillness of the tomb.

From the time of Elizabeth downwards not only the teaching but the general aspect of what is called the Church of England was intensely anti-Catholic. A brighter day first dawned for England when she hospitably received and succored the exiled priests of France. The precious leaven of their holy teaching and example never has been lost. Later, in 1829, the emancipation of the Catholics of the British Empire, under George IV., marked a fresh epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in England. The discussions which attended the passing of this act helped to increase a knowledge of her tenets, and prepared the way for their better appreciation; besides which, the restoration of some of the most illustrious families of the realm to their ancient and hereditary seats in the House of Lords, together with the admission of Catholics into the Lower House, tended further to the removal of many prejudices. Since Newman and Pusey, in 1833, recalled their brethren to the study of the Fathers of the church, many steps have been taken in the Establishment in the direction of the ancient paths—steps which Catholics have noted with interest and hope, though they perceive that but too often men who have been attracted towards the truth rest apparently contented with a bad imitation of its external manifestations and a garbled or “adapted” representation of its doctrines, forgetting that truth distorted ceases to be truth, and often is a lie. They marvel also that the invariable opposition of the pseudo-episcopate does not help these men, who are the present life of their system, to see that their imaginary “Catholicity” is wholly unauthorized and unrecognized by their ecclesiastical superiors, and that the hierarchy of their church is as consistently and persistently anti-Catholic as the constitution of that body itself. They are resisted and condemned by their bishops, and from their bishops they have no appeal except to a lay tribunal whose interference _in sacris_ they repudiate.

By the terms of a new Appellate Jurisdiction Act, recently passed in both Houses of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council has been transferred to a new Court of Appeal. It was then provided that episcopal assessors should in future sit on the bench with the lay judges; and though it is by the latter that the judgment is pronounced, the bishops are allowed to make remarks on what is passing. They are to sit in rotation in the new court. The two archbishops and the Bishop of London are also to sit in turn, _ex officio_, and the rest in quarternions, beginning with the junior four (Chichester, St. Asaph, Ely, and St. David’s). It is impossible to say what may be the results of this equivocal assessorship, with regard to which the London _Morning Post_ disrespectfully observes that “the plan offers no security whatever that the assessors shall be fit for their office beyond the fact that they are bishops”; calmly adding that “since the purpose for which their presence is required is the imparting to the judges of a certain kind and quality of information when desired, it is a serious defect to the scheme that it provides no guarantee that the prelates who sit shall possess any proper aptitude for their position.”[21]

Footnote 21:

The following from the London _Weekly Register_ may tend to show
whether this doubt is reasonable or otherwise: “The vicar of St.
Barnabas, Leeds, is fatigued with parochial work and wishes to take a
little rest. He asks his Lordship of Ripon to let him name a clergyman
who shall take his duties for a few weeks or months. His lordship
replies that he cannot do so, because—but the language is too
episcopal to be misquoted: 'If there is truth in the reports which,
from time to time, appear in the public papers, you are in the habit
of breaking what you must know to be the law.’ His Lordship of Ripon
reads the papers, and, finding it inconvenient to leave his palace at
Ripon and make a call upon a clergyman in Leeds, he refuses leave of
absence to that clergyman, on account of newspaper reports.” The
church-wardens take up their vicar’s cause, and, in a very proper
“memorial,” represent the needs of his case to his paternal diocesan.
But all is useless. “The law, the law,” says the bishop, and remains
comfortably in his palace, while he forbids his hard-working vicar to
take a holiday, though he does not even condescend to specify his
offence. And yet the Anglican bishops do not apparently object to a
due amount of repose for themselves, if we may judge from the fact
that at the very time we write there are no fewer than fifteen of the
“missionary bishops” of the Establishment who, after a few years of
absence, and even these years agreeably diversified with visits to
their friends in England, have returned thither “for good,” and are
now settled with their wives and families in comfortable rectories at
home—an arrangement more convenient for croquet-parties than
“conversions.”

Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business? In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by _Presbyter Anglicanus_ that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before three—_according to the statutes of the ancient canons_.” Again: “It was a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”

The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church, described, just before his conversion, the present condition of ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining, absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the Anglican communion.

Nor is this all; not only is it now the case that secular law courts decide what may or may not be taught and practised in the Anglican Church, but they also claim to decide who shall and who shall not be admitted to its rites and sacraments. Lawyers are thus not only the doctors and _ceremoniarii_ of Anglicanism, suspending or depriving ecclesiastics at pleasure, but they are also to be, in the last resort, the stewards of Anglican sacraments.

A case was lately pending before the Judicial Committee in which the action of a “priest” in refusing communion was reviewed and judged by the court. A parishioner of a Ritualist pastor having declared that he did not find in the Bible sufficient evidence for the existence of evil spirits to incline him to believe in the devil, the clergyman prohibited his coming for communion until he did believe in the devil. The parishioner wrote a complaint to the bishop, and the latter took his part against his parish “priest” and for the devil. The matter being referred to the Judicial Committee, the bishop’s verdict was confirmed in favor of the sceptical parishioner and of his Infernal Majesty.

Nor can any individual cases of this kind be matter of surprise when we reflect to what the doctrinal decisions of the supreme courts of the Anglican Establishment have, with the consent of her entire episcopate, as expressed in their famous “allocution” on the Public Worship Act, pledged her clergy. According to the final and irreversible authority acknowledged by that episcopate, the Church of England holds, 1, that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is an open question; 2, that it is an open question whether every part of every book of Scripture is inspired; 3, that there is no “distinct declaration” in the formularies of that church on the subject of everlasting punishment, and that the words “everlasting death” in the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer given in the catechism “cannot be taken as necessarily declaring anything touching the eternity of punishment after the resurrection”; 4, that Anglican bishops are the creatures of English law and dependent on that law for their existence, rights, and attributes.[22]

Footnote 22:

See _Christianity in Erastianism_. A letter to Cardinal Manning. By
_Presbyter Anglicanus_.

“The Church of England,” said Dr. Stanley, the Protestant Dean of Westminster, in a sermon recently preached at Battersea, “is what she is by the goodness of Almighty God and of his servant Queen Elizabeth.” If he had said, “of Henry VIII. and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth,” we could have agreed with him, particularly as the riper years of the Establishment continue so suitably to fulfil the promise of such parentage; but to Catholics there is a revolting profanity in classing together the goodness of God with that of one of the most implacable persecutors of his church—a persecutor, not from conviction of the justice, but the iniquity, of her cause, and from a persistent determination to extinguish in her realm the ancient faith, whose very existence was a condemnation of the state religion arranged by her father and Cranmer, improved by her brother and his Genevese assistants, and re-fashioned to her own liking by herself. The sentence pronounced by the Protestant historian Chalmers upon this powerful and unprincipled queen is that “she was a woman without chastity, a princess without honor, and a sovereign without faith”; and, as if by way of a satanic parody on the vision of the Immaculate Virgin in the Book of Revelations, we see Elizabeth, the offspring of an adulterous union, trampling under her despotic foot the Bride of Christ.

“The Church of England,” continued the dean, “was, it is true, a compromise,” and “he was not a true son thereof who used it as a weapon for promoting this or that doctrine, but, _after the example of Elizabeth_, and for the interests of the nation, used it as a broad shield under which he might work for good,”[23] etc., etc. The sense of which, in plain English, appears to be that the said church prefers general indifference to doctrinal truth, the “interests of the nation” to the glory of God, and the “example of Elizabeth” to purity of faith and life.

Footnote 23:

Hentzner furnishes us, by the way, with a singular testimony to
Elizabeth’s “goodness” when, among other things of the same nature, he
tells us that, in the latter years of her reign, executions for high
treason (this being the term applied to denial of the royal supremacy
in the church fully as much as in the state) were so frequent that he
counted at one time on London Bridge no fewer than 300 heads. She
herself on one occasion pointed out to the French ambassador the same
ghastly trophies adorning the gates of her own palace.

But Dean Stanley represents one only of the four principal sections into which the Church of England has divided itself; and however complacently the “Broad” and even “Moderate High” Churchmen may regard the marshy nature of the ground in which the foundations of their faith, if faith it can be called, are laid, and congratulate themselves on the fact that it is neither land nor water, but something of both, there are earnest men who have no fancy for being amphibious, and who spare no pains and toil to drain away the stagnant waters from their morass, in the sincere conviction that beneath the miasma-breeding mosses there lies, for those who dig deep enough to find it, the imperishable rock.

Of this number seems to be the Rev. Arthur Tooth, vicar of St. James’, Hatcham, who is now in prison because he chooses to act upon the principle of “no compromise.” We honor a man who is willing to suffer for conscience’ sake, and to uphold the right of the church to decide in ecclesiastical causes, but at the same time we cannot but feel that Mr. Tooth is more conscientious than logical, and that by his present opposition he is breaking the solemn promise and oath which, as a clergyman of the state church, he took, at his ordination, to a state-church bishop.

Mr. Tooth, on account of certain ritualistic practices—_i.e._, the use of “Catholic” vestments, conducting the communion service so as to make it resemble as much as possible Holy Mass, having “a crucifix in the chancel, little winged figures on the communion-table, lighted candles on a ledge where he had been ordered not to place them, etc., etc.—was, by order of Lord Penzance and with the approval of his own bishop, Dr. Claughton of Rochester, interdicted from officiating again in the diocese. The writ of inhibition was served him on a Sunday morning before the commencement of the service; he not only took no notice of the writ, but also on the following (Christmas) day publicly resisted his substitute. Canon Gee had been appointed by the bishop to read the service in the place of Mr. Tooth, but, on his arriving at the church, the latter gentleman, backed by about forty of his male parishioners, met him at the door and refused to allow him to enter, upon which Canon Gee, after protesting against this insubordinate proceeding on the part of his refractory brother, was forced to retire. Having thus disposed of the episcopal delegate, the vicar proceeded to display an unusual pomp in the ceremonial. Six splendid banners were carried in procession, on one of which was embroidered the monogram of Our Blessed Lady, surrounded by the words, _Sancta Dei Genitrix_.” The church was crowded to suffocation, partly with worshippers, and also very largely by people who had come from curiosity, as was evident by their behavior no less than by their murmured expressions of ridicule or indignation; a crowd, not only of “roughs,” but numbering many well-dressed people, had assembled outside. On one occasion, the 14th of January, in particular, the scenes both within and without were disgraceful. “Inside,” we are told, “there was a good deal of fighting and scuffling, especially at the lower end,” while outside the crowd, besides breaking down the fences, shouting “No popery,” yelling, and in various ways demonstrating their inclination to break the laws as well as the parson did, had they not been kept in some abeyance by a strong body of three hundred police, joined in singing loudly the national anthem, vociferating with especial emphasis and vigor the line “Confound their knavish tricks”—improved by some to “popish tricks” in honor of the occasion. Some time after the service was over, so as to give the mob time to thin, the sight of Mr. Tooth issuing from the church under the protection of “twenty stout policemen of the F Division” had in it something almost ludicrous to those who reflected that all this commotion arose from the fact of his having spurned the “secular arm.”

When, on the 20th of January, the Rev. R. Chambers, who has been appointed curate in charge of the parish of Hatcham by the Bishop of Rochester, went, accompanied by the bishop’s apparitor, and, producing his license, requested Mr. Tooth to hand over to him through the church-wardens the possession of the church, the vicar replied that he refused to take any notice of the document or the application. He was therefore committed for contempt of court, and is now lodged in Horsemonger Lane jail.

It is not necessary to give more than two portions of the very temperate explanations with which Lord Penzance has accompanied his judgment—namely, those portions which are aimed at the delusions supposed to be most important in the controversy. These delusions are, in brief, 1st, that the new Public Worship Act was an innovation upon Anglican custom, and an invasion of its rights; 2d, that obedience should be rendered to an ecclesiastical and not to a lay superior. The answers of Lord Penzance to these assumptions are, substantially, as follows:

“1. It would be well if those who maintain these propositions were to read the statutes by which the ritual of the Church of England at the time of the Reformation was enforced—I mean the statutes establishing the two successive prayer-books of King Edward VI. and the prayer-book of Queen Elizabeth, which regulated the ritual of the reformed church for the first hundred years after its establishment. They would there find that a clergyman departing in the performance of divine service from the ritual prescribed in the prayer-book was liable to be _tried at the assizes by a judge and jury_ (the bishop, _if he pleased_, assisting the judges), and, if convicted three times, was liable to be _imprisoned for life_. The intervention, therefore, of a temporal court to enforce obedience in matters of ritual is at least no novelty; the novelty, as far as the Church of England is concerned, is rather in the claim to be exempt from it.