The Reluctant Dean
Dean Church. By B. A. Smith. (O.U.P., 30 ing Richard William Church to accept the deans' Church had been Rector of Whatley, a tiny ParP in Somerset, and he did not take at all kindlY1' his encasement in the heart of the metrol01' However, he eventually became reconciled or MR. GLADSTONE had much difficulty in pe of St. Paul's in 1871. For nearly twenty Ye/.
lot and was content to remain at St. Paul's ill death in 1890, despite attempts on Glads too', part to make him a bishop. St. Paul's was t its glory and Church worthily presided 0yetl Chapter which included Liddon,. Lig/ Gregory and Scott Holland among its mernb? He was the least flamboyant and one of the OD attractive of Victorian divines. His extrer e ticence about his own inner life does not mat e an easy subject for a biographer. He left no diet or notebooks, and there is little of substance io added to the Life and Letters, edited by daughter. Mr. Smith has inevitably drawn hea'' on that volume and on Church's own wr Of the few unprinted sources which he has only the Gladstone Papers were rewardini that chiefly in throwing some fresh light on 6P' stone's exercise of ecclesiastical patronage. l3 g' new book about Dean Church was needed Mr. Smith has done his work well. In early life. Church had played a notable Pt in the Oxford Movementand had been the clo5r of Newman's younger disciples. But he rie` wavered in his allegiance to the Church England, though he declined to make extra claims for Anglicanism or anything else. As crisis in the Church succeeded another, tic I"
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his head and refused to participate in the fa: able heresy-hunts. He was unperturbed by Gorham Judgment, by The Origin of Specie by Essays and Reviews, so that Dr. Puse' sometimes anxious about his orthodoxy. It is 111 leading to say, as Mr. Smith does, that CO `jibbed at Lux Mundi.' While he was not 11111 ritualistically inclined, he publicly opposed persecution of the ritualist clergy. He was, in a Liberal Catholic and a Christian humanist. did not suppose that, as between Catholicism Liberalism, one was right and the other wrelli Apart from the classical and charming hist` of the Oxford Movement which he wrote to old age, he expressed himself chiefly aro essays on historical and literary subjects. 01 Mr. Smith quotes from these and from ChlA correspondence happily conveys the flavour cultivated, discriminating and modest mind s as is seldom encountered nowadays in
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