THE BRISTOL CATHEDRAL QUARREL. T HE quarrel about the figures erected
over the North Porch of the Bristol Cathedral is not a creditable one to any party concerned. Undoubtedly, the architect who decked out Gregory L, the great reformer of his day and the missionary bishop who was the first of his line to make a sincere effort for the conversion of England,—with a Papal tiara, centuries before Papal tiaras were "known, and committed the strange anachronism of painting St. Jerome with a cardinal's hat, made a blunder or two which were very well calculated to call forth a burst of ignorant horror and prejudice. If the Dean of Bristol had done his duty in attending to the proposals made for the restoration of his Cathedral, instead of taking " singular care," as he confesses he did, to avoid dis- cussing the new works with the Committee superintending the restoration, he would, of course, have objected to these his- torical anachronisms ; and as no one is found to defend them, the most irritating of the causes of the outbreak against the restorations would have been removed. But the Dean of Bristol, it seems, had been originally averse to the new works, and had given his consent to them with some re- luctance. The consequence was that he felt disposed, he tells us, to leave the new works as much as possible in the hands of the Committee appointed by the subscribers to carry them out, and elaborately ignored all the detailed plans. lie sanctioned as long ago as 1867 some plans in which vague saints' figures were included,--asserting that he took them to be inlOnded for figures of the four Evangelists, though in forming that impression he must have taken "singular care " to be careless about its grounds, since the number of figures which he had thus sanctioned in the rough was six, and not four, and all the en- gravings of the intended restorations had shown these six figures. Having given this sanction to plans including undefined figures, as to the intended detail of which he asked nothing, he went to Nice to spend last winter, and there in February of this year first heard, from a copy of the Bristol Times sent to him by post, that the four great Latin Fathers, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory, were among the figures on the North Porch ; and he learnt also that the papal tiara and the Cardinal's hat were given respectively to Gregory and Jerome, while St. Augustine, as the author of the "Confessions," was represented as holding
a bleeding heart, and Ambrose was armed with the triple scourge. Again, the adoration of the infant Christ on the Virgin's lap by
the Magi had been substituted for a group formerly sanctioned., as it seems, by the Dean, representing St. Augustine of Canter. bury preaching to Ethelbert. As the scream of horror from the Evangelicals had already been heard at Bristol, it may be assumed that the Dean's feeling on the subject of the proposed sculpture was now very different from what it had been when he first dis- played his "singular care" in avoiding any discussion on the subject of the restorations proposed. He telegraphed at once to Canon Norris to suspend the execution of these sculptures, if they had not been already completed, but it was apparently too late. Of course the Dean of Bristol is not himself aware of it, but no one who reads his own account of the matter will doubt for a moment that it was the attitude of the Bristol public which made him devote at least as much care to taking distinctions in February as he had devoted to avoiding discussion in the years before. Otherwise, there was really no reason at all why he should have sanctioned as a subject for sculpture the preaching of St. Augustine to Ethelbert in 1867, and yet have objected so bitterly in 1876 to admitting an effigy of the man who sent Augustine. Any real distinction is simply absurd. If the statue of Gregory L,—great reformer of his age as he was,—was not a fit subject for the decoration of Bristol Cathedral, neither was the statue of St. Augustine, whom he sent to England, a fit subject. If the latter was fit because it represented a very important scene in the ecclesiastical history of the English Church, so was the former, because it represented the man who made that scene possible. The Dean of Bristol must be deceiving himself, if he fancies that at the time he sanctioned the representation of the preaching of St. Augustine' to Ethelbert, he would have vetoed an effigy of Gregory L as inappropriate to the decoration of an English Cathedral. The diatribe in which he indulges against the selection of Latin doctors for such a purpose as the decoration of an English Cathedral is evidently suited to the temper of 1876 rather than to that of 1867. At that time, before the Vatican Council, before Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets, and before the Ritualist panic, it does not seem at all likely that Dean Elliot felt any anxiety at all about the dangers on which he is now so eloquent. Moreover, he contra- dicts himself. While sanctioning all Scriptural subjects, and even demanding that all the figures shall be Scriptural, he objects vehe- mently to the subject of the Adoration of the Magi, and this, as far as we can see, not on the ground that the event was possibly unhistorical,—that the early chapters of Matthew and Luke are not very easily reconcilable on the subject,—a ground he would probably object to take even if he admitted the doubt,—but on the ground that the delineation of this scene on the porch of a Cathedral is likely to encourage Mariolatry, and to lead to idolatry. Surely he might just as well contend that a statue of Simon Peter would encourage Popery. If the Dean accepts the account of the adoration of the Magi as true Scripture history, as our National Church, we suppose, does, he can have no better reason for objecting to its artistic representa- tion than he could have for objecting to the representation of the scene in which our Lord declared Simon Peter the rock on which he would build his Church. Both accounts may have led to false and superstitious practices. But why object to the de- lineation of one Scriptural incident because it has led to super- stition, more than to another which has also led to superstition? The Dean's distinctions will not hold water for a moment, and we very much fear that he had a great deal of difficulty indeed, in drawing any distinctions which would at once satisfy the popular cry and seem even plausible to educated men.
Well, the Dean having thus taken up with the panic-monger party, instead of having quietly invited the architect and the Restoration Committee to remove the unhistorical and objectionable symbols connected with some of the figures, of course Bristol burst into a flame of Philistine excitement, and on April 8 one of the absurdest meetings that British citizens ever attended was held in the Colston Hall to protest against these images. Sillier and more violent speeches were probably never pronounced even in Exeter Hall. Colonel Savile, who took the chair, told the meeting—accord- ing to the Bristol Daily Post—that "it is the vain conceit of Popery to point us to Jesus as a child on the lap of its mother, thus leading her followers to look upon the mother as exercising influence over the child ; and hence the Mariolatry of the present day, culminating in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, whereby a creature is endowed with the attributes of the Creator, and whereby is brought in again the old worship of the Queen of Heaven. It is evident that this figure pre- eminently tends to idolatry." For our own parts, we should have supposed that in a Protestant country the delineation of Christ as a child on his mother's lap would be far more likely to foster Unitarianism than the worship of the Virgin ; indeed, it is not at all clear what Colonel Savile regards as the re- medy for the obviously very dangerous statements of the Gospels as to the facts of our Lord's birth and childhood. Would he suppress these statements altogether, or would he only avoid any illustration of them through sculpture and paint- ing? If the first, he must mutilate the Bible ; if the second, he had better draw up a list of subjects of which any sort of artistic illustration is likely to lead to Roman Catholic errors, and we hardly know where he would be able to atop. It is clear, for instance, that he must not permit any illustration of our Lord breathing on his Apostles, and saying, " Receive ye the Holy Ghost," which would at once suggest Apostolic succession. It would never do to illustrate the request of Mary that Jesus should provide wine for the marriage feast, for there is another germ of Mariolatry. The Crucifixion could never be illustrated without suggesting all the abuses of the crucifix, nor the Last Supper without recalling Transubstantiation. In short, no more ridiculous principle than this of excluding all subjects with which Roman Catholic " development" has been specially busy, ever entered a sane man's head. But even Colonel Savile was quite outdone by many of the speakers who followed him. The Philistinism exhibited at the meeting could not have been more concisely or wittily described than in the words of last Wednesday's Guardian :— "We have sometimes been asked the meaning of the cant word ' Philistinism.' We can only now say, if you wish to make acquaint- ance with the British Philistine,' full-bloom—rampant—unmitigated, read the account of the Bristol meeting. He is an ideal personage, in whom a certain accumulation of heavy prejudice stands for common- sense, the articles of his family newspaper—perhaps a religious one— for history, platform oratory for argument, and nothing at all for poetry, taste, sentiment, learning, or wit. He would prefer being at peace. But if ho moves, it will be on the pressure of a crowd more aggressive than himself, which ho imagines himself to lead—borne forward help- lessly on the crest of a popular wave, like a barrel which is too empty to sink and too ponderous to float."
That was the sort of Philistinism which was rampant throughout the meeting, excepting that Dr. Percival (the Principal of Clifton College) made a manly and able attempt to show up the unmeaning- ness of this discreditable panic, and was interrupted and called a Papist for his pains,—though a stronger Protestant does not live. And then, as the issue of all this superstition, the Dean and Chapter, instead of giving notice that the statues objected to would be removed, if the Restoration Committee did not them- selves remove them with all care, went about the work with indecent speed, and injured greatly, it is said in the process, the carvings of the sculpture removed.
Whether any human being will be in thought, word, or deed less guilty of idolatry in future, on account of these discreditable proceedings, we exceedingly doubt. To our minds, idolatry means,—in modern days, at all events,—allowing a lower image of God to take the place of worship in our soul, where we have the knowledge and the spiritual power, if we will but collect our- selves, to attain to something higher ; and if that be so, the idolatry is on the part of those who, knowing better, are really giving in to the superstitious notion that it is acceptable to God to destroy statues in connection with religious buildings, unless in- deed they happen to be statues either of Scriptural characters (the mother of Jesus and her child alone excepted), or statues of the heroes of the Reformation. We should call it a distinct act of idolatry to foster the miserable fanaticism that unmeaning sac- rifices of this kind are in any way acceptable to Him.
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