Twentieth-Century Church
THE quality emerging most plainly from the second volume (1919- 1939) of Canon Lloyd's skilful and scholarly book is the vitality of the Church of England. Emphasis is necessary, for many still have the impression of a Church dwindling alike in numbers and in influence ; and yet, as Canon Lloyd well shows, the charge can hardly be sustained. In the twenty years of which he writes, Randall Davidson, Cosmo Lang, William Temple and Cyril Garbett were the Archbishops of the two Provinces, men whose leadership of any Church in any age Would have been distinguished. Among theologians were penetrating and original thinkers like Quick, Hoskyns, Thornton and Streeter ; among religious, Frere, Talbot, Kelly and Mother Maribel. There were priests like Dick Sheppard, Studdert-Kennedy and Basil Jellicoe ; and in the literature of religion the names of Evelyn Underhill, T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers were, and are, known far outside any narrow ecclesiastical circle. Such men and women—statesmen, priests, thinkers and writers—would not be found in a dying or decadent society.
A further thought suggested by Canon Lloyd's book is the fidelity with which the Church has reflected the mood of the nation. The suspicions and disillusionment which followed the First World War were in Church as well as in State. There were the young men back from France, and there was the Old Gang entrenched in positions of authority. So life and liberty presently gave place to the impatience of a parson, the inspiration of the appeal to all Christian people was .lost in quagmires of negotiation, and the Church became whipping-boy for all who had once hoped for too much and were not as truly thankful as they should have been for what they received.
But they received a lot, and the years of frustration, as Canon Lloyd rightly insists, were also years of significant accomplishment. Over Reunion the actual progress seems little enough. Malines, Kikuyu and the work of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius read like stories of failure but a sense of fellowship, absent from Christendom since A.D. 500, was re-born, a conviction that the divisions, however deep, were wrong and that unity, however diffi- cult, was right. Or there was the development of the idea of the redemption of society, of the union of sacramentalism and sociology. William Temple was its doughtiest champion in thought and Basil Jellicoe of the St. Pancras Housing Society in action. The growth in quality and qbantity of the overseas missions, to receive so remarkable a vindication in Japanese-occupied territories during the last war, the extraordinary revival of Bible-reading through the Bible-Reading Fellowship, the new ordering of the cathedrals were other symptoms of vigour and enterprise.
The true life of the Church, however, is always in the parishes. To deal adequately with these, without either losing the wood in the trees or the trees in the wood, might appear an almost impossible task ; but Canon Lloyd keeps a fair balance, first giving a general picture, then taking two or three typical parishes, and so showing the valiant effort to meet the need of times in which the priest with a diminished income was called upon to encounter growing demands. Indeed, Canon Lloyd scarcely allows enough for the financial revo- lution in those years. :The Church of England used to be wealthy and now, stripped of tithe and mineral royalties, is poor. That in such circumstances she should have attempted more and not less is to her credit.
On the other hand, he is surely right to emphasise—though some may think he over-emphasises—the increase of unity within the Church. He believes the old quarrels out-dated, the wrangling of Anglo-Catholic, Protestant and Modernist a thing of the past, the flaring up over the Prayer Book being " the bright flicker of a dying flame." He shows the Church of today as a synthesis of the best in the three parties, moving on now from bygone sterile con- troversies to her larger task—" the re-founding of the Christian doctrine of man in twentieth century society." J. G. LOCKHART.
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