Leaders of the Church
Edward Norman
Cantuar: The Archbishops and their Office Edward Carpenter (Cassell £4.201 Leaders of the Church of England Edwards (OUP £3.90) David There are those who suppose that the Church of England has fallen upon evil days; who point to a crisis of leadership as evidence of a faltering heart-beat before the extraordinary creature expires and disintegrates in front of the disinterested gaze of the public, or before the dry bones rattle together again around some chance assemblage of ephemeral convictions which many will suppose eternal verities. The quality of an institution's leadership is certainly a fair indication of its vitality. "Institutions are to be judged by their great men," as Matthew Arnold noticed. It is also true that men tend to imagine the leaders of their own age barren of greatness compared with the giants who have been before. Those ecclesiastics of the last century who in fact presided over a considerable revival were all impressed with the feeling that the great days of religious belief were past. This was a conviction quite independent of the imagined impact of evolutionary theories and all that sort of thing. It reflected a belief which time has sustained: that society was advancing into moral error and into a culture deprived of familiar reference to Divinity. They saw infidelity arising from below, from the indifference of the masses; not especially from fevered intellectuals grasping at scientific evidence. Two works by two canons of Westminster examine the past leadership of the Church. They are very different books but are structurally similar. Both consist of potted biographies. Edward Carpenter's Cantuar: The Archbishops and the Office runs through the Primates from Augustine to Ramsey. David Edwards's Leaders of the Church of England sketches twenty Churchmen who lived between 1828 and 1944. Carpenter's work has the advantage of a thematic treatment — he is out to trace the development of the office of Primate of All England. He had, as a result, the chance of lifting his book beyond the mere cataloguing of the personal characteristics of a long list of distinguished men.. Unhappily the result, despite some considerable merits, is an historical survey in which the historical interpretation is often quite wrongly drawn. Here is his summary of the nineteenth century: The nineteenth century, as a whole, witnessed the great expansionist phase in British history, realizing itself in the birth of an Empire upon which — so was the proud boast — the sun never set. The nation of shopkeepers, whose plebeian virtues provoked the contempt of Napoleon, that man of destiny, turned its energy to securing a mercantile supremacy Which the Royal Navy protected and industrialists zealously exploited.
It is hard to imagine that anything so close to a caricature of a caricature can be seriously written. The book ends with all the usual stuff about "this secular and pluralistic age." But the reader should not be put off by this. Carpenter's book may not be historically technical, but it is a very accomplished piece of writing, revealing a breadth of view and a style of presentation which deserve a good deal of attention.
It is not a book for specialists: they will be outraged by some of Carpenter's historical largesse and insist upon interpretations more attuned to their own niggling knowledge of particular episodes. It would still have been useful, however, to have seen a greater balance between the issues introduced. The question of Catholic Emancipation, for example, which so afflicted the conscience of the Archbishops under George III and his son, gets only three sentences, whereas the question of Princess Margaret and Group Captain Townsend gets a whole page. Carpenter's considerable abilities as a writer, therefore, would have been more suited to a series of archiepiscopal biographies. Edwards's abilities as an historian, on the other hand, should have led him into a thematic treatment. Instead, The Leaders of the Church of England is a collection of biographies. They are splendidly perceptive and scholarly. They are also rather a curious selection; it is difficult to see why Pusey is left out when Matthew Arnold and Hort are in. Edwards only gives a fragment of a chapter to Cosmo Gordon Lang — a few unfriendly pages. Carpenter does not like Lang either; he sees him, indeed, as 'schizophrenic.' Edwards rather dismisses him as a haughty prelate, dramatically enjoying the loftiness of his office and sucking up to the great. Since Lang was in fact a man of tortured spirituality and mysterious faith it is a pity he did not receive a more sympathetic assessment.
Most of Edwards's sketches, however, are quite extraordinarily sensitive. Occasionally he leans a little too far to accommodate modern obsessions: the
discussion about Newman's relationships with young men is not really very diverting; nor is the claim that "Gladstone was highly sexed." But these are minor lapses. The book, on the whole, is a very considerable achievement. Based entirely on secondary sources, the author still manages to bring fresh judgement and interesting perspective to twenty wellknown men. It is useful to know that Lord Shaftesbury was so oppressed by the social evils of his day that, great reformer though he was, he still supposed that only the Second Coming of Christ would contrive a real improvement in the lot of humanity. And over F. D. Maurice — who has become so fashionable in recent years, with theologians ransacking the nineteenth century to try and find somebody who said
something agreeable to the modern liberal conscience — Edwards lets the cat out of the bag: Maurice was against democratic theory and actually opposed the second Reform Bill in 1867.
Both Carpenter and Edwards see William Temple as the most gifted and most sympathetic of recent English Churchmen. Edwards, in fact, records the opinion of those who judged Temple as "among the noblest figures in the story of Christianity." Temple was in all truth a man of very enduring influence and notable personal sanctity. He was born in
the purple, the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, and grovelled on the floor of his nursery with a toy mitre; he became a card-carrying member of the Labour party. Such translations to the higher pieties are now less rare than when Temple managed it, but the example he gave, and the men he inspired, have certainly left a stamp upon the Church of England. Some of his contemporaries — people, clearly, of retarded vision — did not appreciate Temple's activism. When the Archbishop attempted a holy mediation in the general strike, Baldwin asked how the bishops woUld feel if the industrialists proposed to revise the Athanasian Creed. The question, pertinent in its day, would be meaningless if put to the modern Church of England. Temple is largely responsible.
Edwards's book ends with an Epilogue which laments the lack of leadership in the contemporary Church. The giants have departed from the earth. What he calls " the aristocratic style of leadership" has gone with them, and there is nothing, yet, to take its place. The Church of England, however, is exceedingly adept at making
virtue of necessity, and there are doubtless those who will acclaim a leaderless Church as the last word in Christianity, the very essence of the teaching of that Great Egalitarian who put down the mighty from their seats. There is, on the other hand, much to be said for the view that the quality of the Church's leadership at the present time is much what it has always been. And it can always be pointed out, as well, that the laity are ahead of the clergy in the race down the steep slope.
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