A Great Churchman
Dr. Charles Gore, who died on Sunday at the age of seventy-eight, will be widely mourned. From his youth up he was prominent and influential in the High Church party. But his heart was in the social work of the Church rather than in ritualistic controversy. Pusey House in the Oxford of forty or fifty years ago attracted young men because of the Christian Social Union which Dr. Gore and other ardent Anglicans promoted. It was characteristic of the late Bishop that, when he was appointed to the unwieldy diocese of Worcester, he should hasten to divide off Birmingham and to assume that immense responsibility for himself. As Bishop of Bir- mingham from 1905 to 1911, Dr. Gore was seen at his very best, for he had full scope for all his efforts to recon- cile the masses to the Church by showing what the Church could do for their welfare. Dr. Gore served the cause of religion in a still wider sphere by his long series of memor- able books, in which High Anglican doctrine was combined with advanced criticism. It is strange to recall the excite- ment occasioned by Lux Mundi, which Dr. Gore edited a generation ago. That the English Church has adjusted itself more and more successfully to modern thought was in no small degree due to the saintly Bishop who is now dead.
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