THE HIGH-CHURCH SCHOOLBOY.
THERE is a healthy tendency towards the schoolboy type in all English—and for that matter all Teutonic—politics. Prince Bismarck himself, with all his astuteness and all his reserve, has a good dash of the schoolboy in him ; indeed it is that which secures him so much popularity, and which serves as so complete a veil for his deeper plans. In England we have plenty of political schoolboys and not a few ecclesiastical schoolboys, though the latter are not very apt to come to the front. Indeed there is something in rather narrow and definite ecclesiastical systems which subserves very much the true schoolboy type of character,—that confident, bold, heedless, happy-go-lucky, tussle-loving spirit which may be said to constitute our ideal of a schoolboy. The late Henry Drummond (M.P. for West Surrey), who was the pillar of the Irvingites, and the darling of the Conservatives below the gangway, was a capital example of a political schoolboy nourished on a very definite ecclesiastical diet. Every one remembers his challenge to a Member of the House of Commons who had brought in a Bill to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister, to "marry his grand- mother like a man," and not come whining for permission to nibble at the ecclesiastical law of the country, instead of boldly breaking it. Bat the best example we have ever had, perhaps, of the genuine ecclesiastical schoolboy is the Arch- deacon of Taunton. There is nothing in the world he likes so much as a good ecclesiastical lark." Not that there is any- thing of levity about it. He believes as thoroughly in his own side of every fight he gets into as any schoolboy,—would secretly think himself a bit of a sneak if he shirked the set-to,—and pelts with his hard words or harder jokes with as serious a sense of upholding the right as any Tory squire's son who might let off a squib among a Radical mob with an intense feeling of delight that his love of his father's principles and of his own mischief should pull so admirably together. There is no more harm, too, in Archdeacon Denison's wrath than in such a school- boy's. He would be sorry directly, if he saw he had inflicted more than that legitimate and temporary pain which is the accepted weapon of all English tussles. But, like a school- boy, he lives under the impression that all strong convictions must deal hard blows of some sort, and also under the rather childish but agreeable delusion that all convictions which deal hard blows are strong. The logic which leads to this quaint but widely spread opinion is very like that of Lord Dundreary's celebrated riddle, "Why does a dog wag its tail ? Because the dog is stronger than its tail ; if the tail were stronger than the dog, the tail would wag the dog." So the Venerable Archdeacon seems to us to reason,—" Why are my Church principles such knock-down opinions ? Because my Church principles are stronger than other people's. If other people's principles were stronger than mine, they would knock me down, which they don't." The Vene- rable Archdeacon calls 'the Conscience Clause' the work of the Devil,' with just the same mixed feeling of enjoying a strong demonstration, and of settling and strengthening his own mind by making it, which is of the essence of the school- boy's pleasure in classing his acquaintances as confounded humbugs' and regular bricks.' But we have seldom had the Archdeacon hitting out in better form than in the letter which has been printed this week, to an unlucky Government inspector of schools who wrote word that he was directed to inspect the Archdeacon's own school at East Brent :—
"East Brent, Highbridge, March 25, 1872.
" Sir,—I am sole manager of the East Brent Parochial School, and I do not admit a Government inspector inside the school. I have no 'conscience clause' of any kind, nor ever shall have. I have nothing to do with the 'Elementary Education Act,' except to denounce it as irreligious. If I am called upon to pay a school rate,' I shall refuse to pay it ; and the amount will have to be levied on my property under a distress warrant. If you think it worth your while to inspect the school from the outside, that is for yourself to decide upon. If you decide so to inspect the school, I shall be happy to give you luncheon, provided that no word is said to me about the school. I can make no answer to the queries contained in the paper enclosed, and return it. Nor can I answer any other letter on the subject of the school, and request that none other be written to me. I send your letter and this
reply for publication.—Faithfully yours, (Signed), The Rev. H. B. Barry. GEORGE A. DrausoN."
That generous offer to give Mr. Barry lunch if he should decide on inspecting "the school from outside," "provided that no word is said to me about the school," would have done credit to the Archdeacon's spirits if he had been seven- teen, instead of something like seventy; and proves satisfactorily that these evil days which he is always bewailing,—the days when :As own University by abolishing tests has become "an irreligious body," from whose books it was necessary to erase his name,—have not robbed him of that old schoolboy springi- ness which goes out to battle with "a light heart."
And for our own part, we quite believe that this cheery pugnacity and lightheartedness of the Archdeacon's has been directly nourished by the gritty High-Churchiness of the system to which he has clung with so much of the fractious fidelity of youth. One would think (and very justly) that an old man whose soul was grieved at the obstinate disloyalty of the existing generation to his Church, and who was resisting to the last, though without hope, the invasion of the solvent ideas of his time, would hardly have the heart to "get a rise" out of his enemies by offering them an ironical lunch on humiliating conditions, and promising not to impede them in the inspection of "the outside" of his school buildings. But that is just our point ; the Venerable Archdeacon's soul is not really sore at the heresy of his time. He does not feel in the least as the spiritual High-Church party—Keble, for instance—certainly felt about the indifference of the world to the new Church principles. The Archdeacon is no more sad at the knowledge of the world's levity, than was Henry Drummond when he invited the honourable member who wanted to get leave for marriage with "a deceased wife's sister" to marry his grandmother like a man, and have done with it. Archdeacon Denison obviously composed his retort on the School Inspector with real appetite, and sent his letter to the papers with genuine glee. He is no more " incon- solable " than that forlorn, funereal widow whom Charles Lamb caught hiding a smile when somebody sat down where a chair was not, and of whose consolability he made an imme- diate note. He is " shocked " to any extent at the decline of the old principles and the horrible prevalence of the new, but it is a kind of shock which tends, like a cold bath, rather to invigorate his system than to paralyse it. There is a certain sort of High-Churchism which entirely accommodates itself to this state of mind and temperament. It is one which de- fines doctrines very sharply, insists much on external rites, and draws very lightly on the spiritual and meditative nature. What is it makes most schoolboys so happy, except the dis- tinctness of their life, the definiteness of their tasks, the sim- plicity of their enjoyments, the sharp divisions between one school camp and another, the complete absence of doubt and hesitation about all their modes of life,—all of them incidents of existence which prevent any exhausting drain on the animal spirits? The High-Church School to which Archdeacon Denison belongs seems to us to have many of the same sort of recommen- dations. It solves theological problems by the plea of autho- rity, but without overawing the imagination into accepting ' authority into its very heart of hearts after the manner of the Roman Catholic Church. The authority it uses is like the authority of a schoolmaster,—final to cut short diffi- cult questions for purposes of action (unless the naughty rebellious instinct should prompt to taste the sweets of secret rebellion), but not final for the interior heart, not of a kind to sink into the soul and reach the very life of the affections. There is a High-Churchism (and if Archdeacon Denison's be not of that type, we have altogether misread it) which is prompt, punctual, magisterial, ritual, exact, and therefore buoyant, which stimulates the spirits with the sense of accurately discharged duties and faithfully fought battles, and which thus manages to give to the mind of its disciples the spring and the cheerful glow of all perfectly well-de-
fined practical activity. This sort of High-Churchisna diverts the minds of its disciples from the bases of belief, terminates all such questions with some sharp little word of command, and concentrates all its energy on definitely assign- able tasks and traditionary forms. It seems to us to combine Tery happily all the lightheartedness which is derived from a system of authority discouraging the scrutiny of ulti- mate assumptions, with the easy, cheerful fit of private opinions, —for while it is just authoritative enough to bar the deeper doubts, it is not authoritative enough to impose a perpetual yoke in relation to those many attitudes of thought belonging to the system which sit so uneasily on minds not bred up from the first under the strict discipline of a watchful Church. 'The ritual of the High Church is external enough to test the practical ardour of practical men, and to satisfy the demand or actual religious performances occupying a sufficiently im- portant position in both space and time, without being backed up by that permanent claim on the obedience of the mind and heart which subdues the spirits of Roman Catholics, and gives their cheerfulness a much lower key than that of our good Archdeacon's stentorian ecclesiastical jollity. The Archdeacon enjoys nothing so much as leading a forlorn ecclesiastical hope. He is to battle in Convocation, we see, for every jot and tittle of the Athanasian Creed, damnatory clauses and all ; and it will probably be just to the same extent nuts to him to consign his opponents on that subject to the tender mercies of the creed itself,—while lunching affably with them in private, if not asking them to lunch,—as it was to invite publicly Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools to that impossible lunch in East Brent vicarage. To that chivalrous but rather dry High-Church, which ore rotundo pronounces the Conscience Clause to be "the work of the Devil," damna- tion does not exactly imply spiritual agony, but a kind of portentous forfeit imposed by divine arbitration for not playing a very big game according to the rules ; hence the contempla- tion of it, and of the world that is to suffer under it, does not make a comfortable dignitary sit in sackcloth and cast ashes on his head (except on the day appointed in the Church's Calendar, and then only in decent metaphor), but leaves him quite elastic enough to ponder practical jokes which, when published in the daily papers, bring the laugh on his side,— leaves him, in short, brimming over with the effervescing mis- chief of a sixth-form boy. It is really a pleasant picture, in its way. There are few religions which seem to promise an old age of brighter and more buoyant cheerfulness than the high Anglicanism of Archdeacon Denison,—at all events, when combined with a jolly British temperament, a good living, and an archdeaconry.
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