The Church's Mission
The Church of England in the Twentieth Century. VoL 1. By Roger Lloyd, Canon of Winchester. (Longmans. 15s.) CANON LLOYD has set himself the difficult task of trying to estimate the characteristic mission of the Church in England in this age. He is not writing Church history, but meditating, as he says, " upon an Historical Theme." The Church has a nature and purpose given it by God. But it is at work in the nation, and its impact upon the nation offers the material to estimate its faithfulness, or its disloyalty, to that mission. One distinctive mark of Anglicanism lies in the fact that it relies on no leadership principle, but upon the " silent, steady, cumulative and anonymous pressure of a whole community, exercised persistently over centuries." Thus its real life is in the parishes, and its real heroes are the parochial clergy. Some of the most vivid and attractive pages of this book, which carries the story only as far as 1919, are the descriptions of life, work and worship in town and rural parishes in various parts of England. The immediate roots of this century are to be found in the Victorian age, which in the life of the Church saw " the revival of churchmanship, the recovery of the arts of worship, and the revaluation of sacraments." He also mentions the great missionary expansion of the Victorian age, but does not discuss the fact that the great dynamic of missions came from those who were less affected by the new emphasis upon Church- manship and sacramentalism.
His thesis is that the State entered the period 19oo-I4 with high hopes, and ended it with gloomy forebodings. The Church began with apprehensions, and by 1914 had acquired new confidence. This was due to a more realistic theological analysis of the problems of the period. He makes quite a savage attack upon the Edwardian age, with its signs of hysteria and violence. In the Church the great controversies centred around " Modernism "—an unfortunate and misleading name—and the Anglo-Catholic movement. Canon Lloyd is hard on the Modernists, and critical of their attempt to meet the religious difficulties of what he is pleased to call " Modern Cultivated man." Rashdall, Sanday, Streeter and Inge may have made their mistakes, but they surely saved many intelligent people from the decision which was forced in other countries between anti-clerical agnosticism and clerical conservatism. The Modernist effort has always appealed to the laity rather than to the clergy of this country, just as on the whole Anglo-Catholicism has appealed to the clergy rather than to the laity. Canon Lloyd might have given more attention to this fact than he does.
While his own sympathies are closer to Anglo-Catholicism, he is no admirer of all the activities of the movement, nor of the state- manship of many of its leaders. Theologians who saw the importance of mysticism are highly praised, and Illingworth, whose writings are too little known, is given special recognition. In discussing the work of the parochial clergy, Canon Lloyd says that the decline in numbers and quality began as far back as 1897. He describes with approval the effort of Kelham and Mirfield to overcome this problem, but fails to mention King's College, London.
The Pan-Anglican Congress and the Edinburgh Conference of 1910 are high points in the history of the period, as they led on to the Oecumenical Movement and many post-war developments. Canon Lloyd gives high praise to the S.C.M., the Church Army and the Life and Liberty Movement. He also refutes some of the accusations made against the Church for its so-called failure in the war of 1914-18. Scattered through the book are vigorous character- sketches of leading Churchmen such as Davidson, Gore, Henson and Halifax.
But the book is not quite a success. The author handles a vast amount of material, yet leaves out aspects of the subject which others will hold to be of vital significance. It is odd that he says nothing about education. His style is not always lucid, and his views are sometimes arbitrary. It is tiresome to use capital letters for emphasis or for gaining effect. There are errors in proof-reading. Dr. Iremonger is wrongly called " late Dean of Lichfield," and the Rev. A. F. Webling does not use a pseudonym. But Canon Lloyd has made a valiant attempt, even if his book only convinces one that an objective, balanced account of Church life from 1900-19 is still to
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