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The Case of Richard Meynell

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




Presently, Mary disengaged herself. Her hat was not what it had been; her
hair had escaped its bounds, and must be rigorously put to rights. She
sat there flushed and bareheaded, her hands working; while Meynell's
eyes devoured her.

"It is January, Richard, and the sun is sinking."

"In your world perhaps, dear, not in mine."

"We must go back to mother." She laid a hand on his.

"We will go back to mother!" he said, joyously, with a tender emphasis on
the word, without moving however. "Mary!--next to you I love your
mother!"

Mary's sweet face darkened a little; she buried it in her hands. Meynell
drew them tenderly away.

"All that affection can do to soften the differences between us, shall be
done," he said, with his whole heart. "I believe too that the sense of
them will grow less and less."

Mary made no reply, except by the slight pressure of her fingers on his.
She sat in an absorbed sadness, thinking of her mother's life, and the
conflict which had always haunted and scorched it, between love and
religion; first in the case of her husband, and then in that of her
daughter. "But oh! how could I--how could I help it?" was the cry of
Mary's own conscience and personality.

She turned with painful eagerness to Meynell. "How did you think
her?--how does she strike you?"

"Physically?" He chose his words. "She is so beautiful! But--sometimes--I
think she looks frail."

The tears sprang to Mary's eyes. She quickly threw herself upon his
misgiving, and tried to argue it away, both in herself and him. She dwelt
upon her mother's improvement in sleep and appetite, her cheerfulness,
her increased power of walking; she was insistent, almost resentful, her
white brow furrowed with pain, even while her hand lay warm in Meynell's.
He must needs comfort her; must needs disavow his own impression. After
all, what value had such an impression beside the judgment of her daily
and hourly watchfulness?--the favourable opinion too, so she insisted, of
their local doctor.

As they walked home, he startled her by saying that he should only have
three days in the valley.

"Three days!" She looked her remonstrance.

"You know the trial begins next week?"

Yes, she knew, but had understood that the pleadings were all ready, and
that a North-Western train would take him to London in six hours.

"I have to preach at St. Hilda's, Westminster," he said, with a shrug,
and a look of distaste.

Mary asked questions, and discovered that the sermon would no doubt be
made the opportunity for something like a demonstration; and that he
shrank from the thought of it.

She perceived, indeed, a certain general flagging of the merely combative
forces in him, not without dismay. Such moments of recoil are natural to
such men--half saints, half organizers. The immediate effect of her
perception of it was to call out something heroic and passionate in
herself. She was very sweet, and very young; there were eighteen years
between them; and yet in these very first hours of their engagement, he
felt her to be not only rest, but inspiration; not only sympathy, but
strength.

When they neared the little ivy-covered house, on their return home, Mary
broke from him. Her step on the gravel was heard by Catharine. She came
quickly to the door and stood awaiting them. Mary ran forward and threw
herself into the tender arms that drew her into the shadows of the
passage.

"Oh, mother! mother!--he does love you!" she said, with a rush of tears.

If Catharine's eyes also were dim, she only answered with a tender
mockery.

"Don't pretend that was all he said to you in these two hours!"

And still holding Mary, she turned, smiling, to Meynell, and let him
claim from her, for the first time, a son's greeting.

For three blissful days, did Meynell pitch his tent in Long Whindale.
Though the weather broke, and the familiar rain shrouded the fells, he
and Mary walked incessantly among them, exploring those first hours of
love, when every tone and touch is charged, for lovers, with the whole
meaning of the world. And in the evenings he sat between the two women in
the little cottage room, reading aloud Catharine's favourite poets; or in
the familiar talk, now gay now grave, of their new intimacy, disclosing
himself ever more fully, and rooting himself ever more firmly in their
hearts. His sudden alarm as to Catharine's health passed away, and Mary's
new terror with it. Scarcely a word was said of the troubles ahead. But
it was understood that Mary would be in London to hear him preach at St.
Hilda's.

On the last day of Meynell's visit, Catharine, greatly to her surprise,
received a letter from Hester Fox-Wilton.

It contained a breathless account of an evening spent in seeing
Oedipus Rex played by Mounet Sully at the Comédie Française. In this
half-sophisticated girl, the famous performance, traditional now through
two generations of playgoers, had clearly produced an emotion whereof the
expression in her letter greatly disquieted Catharine Elsmere. She felt
too--a little grimly--the humour of its address to herself.

"Tell me how to answer it, please," she said, handing it to Meynell with
a twitching lip. "It is a language I don't understand! And why did they
take her to such a play?"

Meynell shared her disquiet. For the Greek conception of a remorseless
fate, as it is forever shaped and embodied in the tale of Oedipus, had
led Hester apparently to a good deal of subsequent browsing in the
literature--the magazine articles at any rate--of French determinism; and
she rattled through some of her discoveries in this reckless letter:

"You talked to me so nicely, dear Mrs. Elsmere, that last evening at
Upcote. I know you want me--you want everybody--'to be good!'

"But 'being good' has nothing to do with us.

"How can it?--such creatures, such puppets as we are!

"Poor wretch, Oedipus! He never meant any one any harm--did he?--and
yet--you see!

"'_Apollo, friends, Apollo it was, that brought all these my woes, my
sore, sore woes!--to pass_.'

"Dear Mrs. Elsmere!--you can't think what a good doctrine it is after
all--how it steadies one! What chance have we against these blundering
gods?

"Nothing one can do makes any difference. It is, really very consoling if
you come to think of it; and it's no sort of good being angry with
Apollo!"

* * * * *

"Part nonsense, part bravado," said Catharine, raising clear eyes, with
half a smile in them, to Meynell. "But it makes one anxious."

His puckered brow showed his assent.

"As soon as the trial is over--within a fortnight certainly--I shall run
over to see them."

* * * * *

Meynell and Mary travelled to town together, and Mary was duly deposited
for a few days with some Kensington cousins.

On the night of their arrival--a Saturday--Meynell, not without some
hesitation, made an appearance at the Reformers' Club, which had been
recently organized as a London centre for the Movement, in Albemarle
Street.

It was no sooner known that he was in the building than a flutter ran
through the well-filled rooms. That very morning an article in the
_Modernist_ signed R. M. had sounded a note of war, so free, lofty, and
determined, that men were proud to be on Meynell's side in such a battle.
On the following Tuesday the Arches Trial was to begin. Meynell was to
defend himself; and the attention of the country would be fixed upon the
duel between him and the great orthodox counsel, Sir Wilfrid Marsh.

Men gathered quickly round him. Most of the six clergy who, with him, had
launched the first Modernist Manifesto, were present, in expectation of
the sermon on the morrow, and the trial of the following week. Chesham
and Darwen, his co-defendants in the Arches suit, with whom he had been
in constant correspondence throughout the winter, came to discuss a few
last points and understandings; Treherne, the dear old scholar in whose
house they had met to draw up the Manifesto, under the shadow of the
Cathedral, pressed his hand and launched a Latin quotation; Rollin, fat,
untidy and talkative as ever, could not refrain from "interviewing"
Meynell, for a weekly paper; while Derrick, the Socialist and poet,
talked to him in a low voice and with eyes that blazed, of certain
"brotherhoods" that had been spreading the Modernist faith, and Modernist
Sacraments among the slums of a great midland town.

And in the voices that spoke to him, and the eyes that met his, Meynell
could not but realize a wide and warm sympathy, an eagerness to make
amends--sometimes a half confessed compunction for a passing doubt.

He stood among them, haggard and worn, but steeped in a content and
gratitude that had more sources than they knew. And under the kindling of
their faith and their affection, his own hesitations passed away; his
will steeled itself to the tasks before him.

The following day will be long remembered in the annals of the Movement.
The famous church, crowded in every part with an audience representing
science, literature, politics, the best of English thought and English
social endeavour, was but the outward and visible sign of things inward
and spiritual.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"

As Meynell gave out the text, there were many who remembered the picture
of Oxford hanging in Newman's study at Edgbaston, and those same words
written below it.

"_Can these dry bones live_?"--So Newman had asked in despair, of his
beloved University, and of English religion, in the early years after he
had deserted Anglicanism for Rome. And now, more than half a century
afterward, the leader of a later religious movement asked the same
question on the eve of another contest which would either regenerate or
destroy the English Church. The impulse given by Newman and the
Tractarians had spent itself, though not without enormous and permanent
results within the life of the nation; and now it was the turn of that
Liberal reaction and recoil which had effaced Newman's work in Oxford,
yet had been itself wandering for years without a spiritual home. During
those years it had found its way through innumerable channels of the
national life as a fertilizing and redeeming force. It had transformed
education, law, science and history. Yet its own soul had hungered. And
now, thanks to that inner necessity which governs the spiritual progress
of men, the great Liberal Movement, enriched with a thousand conquests,
was sweeping back into the spiritual field; demanding its just share in
the National Church; and laying its treasures at the feet of a Christ,
unveiled, illuminated, by its own labour, by the concentrated and
passionate effort of a century of human intelligence.

Starting from this conception--the full citizen-right within the Church
of both Liberal and High Churchman--the first part of Meynell's sermon
became a moving appeal for religious freedom; freedom of development
and "variation," within organized Christianity itself. Simpler Creeds,
modernized tests, alternative forms, a "unity of the spirit in the bond
of peace,"--with these ideas the Modernist preacher built up the vision
of a Reformed Church, co-extensive with the nation, resting on a
democratic government, yet tenderly jealous of its ancient ceremonies, so
long as each man might interpret them "as he was able," and they were no
longer made a source of tyranny and exclusion.

Then, from the orthodox opponent in whose eyes the Modernist faith was a
mere beggarly remnant, Meynell turned to the sceptic for whom it was only
a modified superstition. An eloquent prelude, dealing with the
preconceptions, the modern philosophy and psychology which lie at the
root of religious thought to-day--and the rest of the sermon flowed on
into what all Christian eloquence must ultimately be, the simple
"preaching of Christ."

Amid the hush of the crowded church Meynell preached the Christ of our
day--just as Paul of Tarsus preached the Christ of a Hellenized Judaism
to the earliest converts; as St. Francis, in the Umbrian hills preached
the Lord of Poverty and Love; as the Methodist preachers among the
villages of the eighteenth century preached the democratic individualism
of the New Testament to the English nascent democracy.

In each case the form of the preaching depended on the knowledge and the
thought-world of the preacher. So with Meynell's Christ.

Not the phantom of a Hellenistic metaphysic; not the Redeemer and Judge
of a misunderstood Judaism; not the mere ethical prophet of a German
professorial theology; but the King of a spiritual kingdom, receiving
allegiance, and asking love, from the free consciences of men; repeating
forever in the ears of those in whom a Divine influence has prepared the
way, the melting and constraining message: "This do in remembrance of
me."

"'Of me--and of all the just, all the righteous, all the innocent, of all
the ages, in me--pleading through me--symbolized in me! Are you for
Man--or for the Beast that lurks in man? Are you for Chastity--or
Lust? Are you for Cruelty--or Love? Are you for Foulness or Beauty?
Choose!--choose this day.'

"The Christ who thus speaks to you and me, my brethren, is no longer
a man made God, a God made man. Those categories of thought, for us,
are past. But neither is he merely the crucified Galilean, the
Messianic prophet of the first century. For by a mysterious and unique
destiny--unique at least in degree--that life and death have become
Spirit and Idea. The Power behind the veil, the Spirit from whom issues
the world, has made of them a lyre, enchanted and immortal, through which
He breathes His music into men. The setting of the melody varies with the
generations, but the melody remains. And as we listen to it to-day,
expressed through the harmonies of that thought which is ourselves--blood
of our blood, life of our life--we are listening now, listening always,
as the disciples listened in Nazareth, to the God within us, the very God
who was 'in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.'

"Of that God, all life is in some sense, the sacramental expression. But
in the course of ages some sacraments and symbols of the divine are
approved and verified beyond others--immeasurably beyond others. This is
what has happened--and so far as we can see by the special will and
purpose of God--with the death-unto-life--with the Cross of Christ....

"The symbol of the Cross is concerned with our personal and profoundest
being. But the symbol of the Kingdom is social, collective--the power of
every reformer, every servant of men....

"Many thinkers," said the preacher, in his concluding passage, while all
eyes were fixed on the head sprinkled with gray, and the strong humanity
of the face--"many men, in all ages and civilizations have dreamed of a
City of God, a Kingdom of Righteousness, an Ideal State, and a Divine
Ruler. Jesus alone has made of that dream, history; has forced it upon,
and stamped it into history. The Messianic dream of Judaism--though
wrought of nobler tissue--it's not unlike similar dreams in other
religions; but in this it is unique, that it gave Jesus of Nazareth his
opportunity, and that from it has sprung the Christian Church. Jesus
accepted it with the heart of a child; he lived in it; he died for it;
and by means of it, his spiritual genius, his faithfulness unto death
transformed a world. He died indeed, overwhelmed; with the pathetic cry
of utter defeat upon his lips. And the leading races of mankind have
knelt ever since to the mighty spirit who dared not only to conceive
and found the Kingdom of God, but to think of himself as its Spiritual
King--by sheer divine right of service, of suffering, and of death! Only
through tribulation and woe--through the _peirasmos_ or sore trial of the
world--according to Messianic belief, could the Kingdom be realized, and
Messiah revealed. It was the marvellous conception of Jesus, inspired by
the ancient poetry and prophecy of his nation, that he might, as the
Suffering Servant, concentrate in himself the suffering due from his
race, and from the world, and by his death bring about--violently, "by
force"--the outpouring of the Spirit, the Resurrection, and the dawn of
the heavenly Kingdom. He went up to Jerusalem to die; he provoked his
death; he died. And from the Resurrection visions which followed
naturally on such a life and death, inspired by such conceptions, and
breathing them with such power into the souls of other men, arose the
Christian Church.

"The Parousia for which the Lord had looked, delayed. It delays still.
The scope and details of the Messianic dream itself mean nothing to us
any more.

"But its spirit is immortal. The vision of a kingdom of Heaven--a polity
of the soul, within, or superseding the earthly polity--once interfused
with man's thought and life, has proved to be imperishable, a thing that
cannot die.

"Only it must be realized afresh from age to age; embodied afresh in the
conceptions and the language of successive generations.

"And these developing embodiments and epiphanies of the kingdom can only
be brought into being by the method of Christ--that is to say, by
'_violence_'.

"Again and again has the kingdom 'suffered violence'--has been brought
fragmentarily into the world '_by force_'--by the only irresistible
force--that of suffering, of love, of self-renouncing faith.

"To that 'force' we, as religious Reformers, appeal.

"The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven do not express the
whole thought of Christ. When the work of preparation is over, still men
must brace themselves, as their Master did, to the last stroke of
'violence'--to a final effort of resolute, and, if need be, revolutionary
action--to the 'violence' that brings ideas to birth and shapes them into
deeds.

"It was to 'violence' of this sacred sort that the Christian Church owed
its beginning; and it is this same 'violence' that must, as the
generations rise and fall, constantly maintain it among men. To cut away
the old at need and graft in the new, requires the high courage and the
resolute hand of faith. Only so can the Christian Life renew itself; only
so can efficacy and movement return to powers exhausted or degenerate;
only so 'can these dry bones live!'"

Amid the throng as it moved outward into the bustle of Westminster,
Flaxman found himself rubbing shoulders with Edward Norham. Norham walked
with his eyes on the ground, smiling to himself.

"A little persecution!" he said, rubbing his hands, as he looked up--"and
how it would go!"

"Well--the persecution begins this week--in the Court of Arches."

"Persecution--nonsense! You mean 'propaganda.' I understand Meynell's
defence will proceed on totally new lines. He means to argue each point
on its merits?"

"Yes. The Voysey judgment gave him his cue. You will remember, Voysey was
attacked by the Lord Chancellor of the day--old Lord Hatherley--as a
'private clergyman,' who 'of his own mere will, not founding himself upon
any critical inquiry, but simply upon his own taste and judgment'
maintained certain heresies. Now Meynell, I imagine, will give his judges
enough of 'critical inquiry' before they have done with him!"

Norham shrugged his shoulders.

"All very well! Why did he sign the Articles?"

"He signed them at four-and-twenty!" said Flaxman hotly. "Will you
maintain that a system which insists upon a man's beliefs at forty-four
being identical with his beliefs at twenty-four is not condemned _ipso
facto_!"

"Oh I know what you say!--I know what you say!" cried Norham
good-humouredly. "We shall all be saying it in Parliament presently--Good
heavens! Well, I shall look into the court to-morrow, if I can possibly
find an hour, and hear Meynell fire away."

"As Home Secretary, you may get in!"--laughed Flaxman--"on no other
terms. There isn't a seat to be had--there hasn't been for weeks."

The trial came on. The three suits from the Markborough diocese took
precedence, and were to be followed by half a dozen others--test
cases--from different parts of England. But on the Markborough suits
everything turned. The Modernist defendants everywhere had practically
resolved on the same line of defence; on the same appeal from the mind of
the sixteenth century to the mind of the twentieth; from creeds and
formularies to history; from a dying to a living Church.

The chief counsel for the promoters, Sir Wilfrid Marsh, made a calm,
almost a conciliatory opening. He was a man of middle height, with a
large, clean-shaven face, a domed head and smooth straight hair, still
jetty black. He wore a look of quiet assurance and was clearly a man
of all the virtues; possessing a portly wife and a tribe of daughters.

His speech was marked in all its earlier sections by a studied liberality
and moderation. "I am not going to appeal, sir, for that judgment in the
promoters' favour which I confidently claim, on any bigoted or
obscurantist lines. The Church of England is a learned Church; she is
also a Church of wide liberties."

No slavish submission to the letter of the Articles on the Liturgy was
now demanded of any man. Subscription had been relaxed; the final
judgment in the _Essays and Reviews_ case had given a latitude in the
interpretation of Scripture, of which, as many recent books showed, the
clergy--"I refer now to men of unquestioned orthodoxy"--had taken
reasonable advantage; prayer-book revision "within the limits of the
faith," if constantly retarded by the divisions of the faithful, was
still probable; both High Churchmen and Broad Churchmen--here an aside
dropped out, "so far as Broad Churchmen still exist!"--are necessary to
the Church.

But there are limits. "Critical inquiry, sir, if you will--reasonable
liberty, within the limits of our formularies and a man's ordination
vow--by all means!

"But certain things are _vital_! With certain fundamental beliefs let no
one suppose that either the bishops, or convocation, or these Church
courts, or Parliament, or what the defendants are pleased to call the
nation" [one must imagine the fine gesture of a sweeping hand] "can
meddle." The _animus imponentis_ is not that of the Edwardian or
Elizabethan legislation, it is not that of the Bishops! it is that of the
Christian Church itself!--handing down the _deposition fidei_ from the
earliest to the latest times.

"_The Creeds, sir, are vital_! Put aside Homilies, Articles, the
judgments and precedents of the Church Courts--all these are, in this
struggle, beside the mark. _Concentrate on the Creeds_! Let us examine
what the defendants in these suits have made of the Creeds of
Christendom."

The evidence was plain. Regarded as historical statement, the defendants
had dealt drastically and destructively with the Creeds of Christendom;
no less than with the authority of "Scripture," understanding "authority"
in any technical sense.

It was indeed the chief Modernist contention, as the orator showed, that
formal creeds were mere "landmarks in the Church's life,"
crystallizations of thought, that were no sooner formed than they became
subject to the play, both dissolvent and regenerating, of the Christian
consciousness.

"And so you come to that inconceivable entity, a Church without a
creed--a mere chaos of private opinion, where each man is a law unto
himself."

On this theme, Sir Wilfrid--who was a man of singularly strong private
opinions, of all kinds and on all subjects--spoke for a whole day; from
the rising almost to the going down of the sun.

At the end of it Canon Dornal and a barrister friend, a devout Churchman,
walked back toward the Temple along the Embankment.

The walk was very silent, until midway the barrister said abruptly--

"Is it any plainer to you now, than when Sir Wilfrid began, what
authority--if any--there is in the English Church; or what limits--if
any--there are to private judgment within it?"

Dornal hesitated.

"My answer, of course, is Sir Wilfrid's. We have the Creeds."

They walked on in silence a moment. Then the first speaker said:

"A generation ago would you not have said--what also Sir Wilfrid
carefully avoided saying--'We have the Scriptures.'"

"Perhaps," said Dornal despondently.

"And as to the Creeds," the other resumed, after another pause--"Do you
think that one per cent of the Christians that you and I know believe in
the Descent into Hell, or the Resurrection of the Body?"

Dornal made no reply.

Cyril Fenton also walked home with a young priest just ordained. Both
were extremely dissatisfied with the later portions of Sir Wilfrid's
speech, which had seemed to them tainted in several passages with
Erastian complacency toward the State. Parliament especially, and a
possible intervention of Parliament, ought never to have been so much as
mentioned--even for denunciation--in an ecclesiastical court.

"_Parliament!"_ cried Fenton, coming to a sudden stop beside the water in
St. James' Park, his eyes afire, "What is Parliament but the lay synod of
the Church of England!"

During the three days of Sir Wilfrid's speech, Meynell took many notes,
and he became perforce very familiar with some of the nearer faces in the
audience day after day; with the Bishop of S----, lank and long-jawed,
with reddish hair turning to gray, a deprecating manner in society, but
in the pulpit a second Warburton for truculence and fire; the Bishop of
D----, beloved, ugly, short-sighted, the purest and humblest soul alive;
learned, mystical, poetical, in much sympathy with the Modernists, yet
deterred by the dread of civil war within the Church, a master of the Old
Latin Versions, and too apt to address schoolgirls on the charms of
textual criticism; the Bishop of F----, courtly, peevish and distrusted;
the Dean of Markborough, with the green shade over his eyes, and fretful
complaint on his lips of the "infection" generated by every Modernist
incumbent; and near him, Professor Vetch, with yet another divinity
professor beside him, a young man, short and slight, with roving,
grasshopper eyes.

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