A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is probably true that few Archbishops make a less distinct impression on lay minds than the Archbishop of York, and yet few in a long and varied career have put up such a sustained record of service in both Church and State. William Temple's impact on the lay mind was of course much more drastic. Dr. Garbett has never been the centre of any great controversy, yet in a more oblique way he has done almost as much as Temple did to set the tone of opinion, and very often he has been running against the tide. Like Temple, though again in a characteristically quiet way, he preached before the war what hag come to be called the 'social gospel.' As Bishop of Southwark between 1919 and 1932, he was as severe a critic of the consequences of laissez-faire as anyone. He once said that that diocese enclosed the largest area of unrelieved poverty in the world. Since the war it has fallen to him to strike a different note, and no one has spoken out more candidly against the encroachments of state welfare on individual responsibility. But I do not think we owe any greater debt to him than for his reasonableness and insight in the last few years over Russia and the revolutionary governments in Eastern Europe. He has done more than any churchman I can think of, here or in the U.S.A., to stop Christianity becoming one more ideology or 'the only alternative to Communism,' and he has shown a real sympathy with Christians abroad for whom the choice has sometimes seemed to be between a church supporting social injustice and a revolution persecuting Christianity.
I do not think that there is much in the idea that he is in personal relations a severe man. There is about his manner both a downrightness and a formal courtesy which in these slipshod days is apt to be mistaken for sternness; but one of his closest ex-colleagues summed the matter up to me the other day by saying that he had never known him to be angry with anyone who treated him with straightness and candour; while these qualities are absent, the Archbishop's rebuke is stern.
One of the reasons why his long career makes less impres- sion than it should on the public mind is just that it is so long. Who remembers, for example, that he was one of the pioneers of religious broadcasting?
* * *
Previous page
