m^ 1" *,;'";' '■ il'illirJu] I 'l' l;i!l|i!;ll:ii^'' m lllillilliil'i!i'i*!'M!i!t'i:hii:;' tihvaxy of Che trheolojvcal ^eminarjo PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY PRESENTED BY Princeton University Library BX 5933 .W44 1922 Whitehead, Henry St. Clair, 1882- The garden of the Lord Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2009 witin funding from Princeton Tiieological Seminary Library littp://www.arcliive.org/details/gardenoflordOOwliit THE GARDEN OF THE LORD REV. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD N m 'Lu i^G/CALSBV> I THE GARDEN OF THE LORD THE REV. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD, M. A. Publishers DORRANCE Philadelphia pill iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Copyright 1922 OoRRANCE & Company Inc PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO GEORGE PEABODY GARDNER, ESQ. INTRODUCTION Five of the following Chapters (Chs. V, VIII, IX, X, and XI) have been published as separate articles in The American Church Monthly. To the publisher of that periodical, Mr. Edwin S. Gorham, the author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce them here. This book is not addressed primarily to the clergy, but rather to that large public which, at least in the Anglican Communion, vigorously asserts its interest in the Church and in her clergy and lay workers. It is neither a theolog- ical treatise nor a handbook on parochial ef- fectiveness, although it necessarily treats of theological matters and is concerned chiefly with parochial affairs, and methods of Church work. It attempts to bring together and present as a cognate whole the various facts, conditions, and objects of criticism which are listed near the end of Chapter I. It is intended to be wholly practical, and to deal primarily with matters not commonly touched upon even by writers of handbooks. If it shall serve to stim- ulate in the direction of the reforms which are indicated, it will have succeeded in its purpose ; and it is offered to its readers in the single hope that in however inconsiderable a fashion, it may contribute to the furtherance of clear thought about problems connected with God's Holy Catholic Church. Henry S. Whitehead CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, BOSTON, LENT, 1922. CONTENTS PAGE I. Cultivating the Loed's Garden... 13 II. A Neglected Source of Information 28 III. On ^'Efficiency" 40 IV. Knowing One's Sheep 50 V. On Church-Going 63 VI. The Question of Clerical Marriage 77 VII. Ceremonial in the Anglican Re- vival 93 VIII. Work Among Foreigners 108 IX. The Implications of an Ancient Rhyme 118 X. The Cheer-Up Philosophy 128 XI. God, the Clergy, and Some Modern Writers 137 XII. A Task for Seminarians 148 XIII. Sample Christians 160 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD THE GARDEN OF THE LORD I Cultivating the Lord's Gabdbn One of the fables which was rarely left out of old-fashioned children's '' Headers" told of a king who summoned his sages into his presence, and, selecting two of the wis- est, sent out the first to make a tour of his kingdom, to take note of all the flowers he might see, and report at the end of the year. The second was commissioned to report on all the weeds and noxious vegetable growths at the same time as his fellow. When the king re- ceived the two sages at the end of the year, he asked the first if he had observed anything of interest besides flowers which he might wish to include in his report. ''Sire," replied the sage, "so occupied was I in carrying out thy behest that after the first few days I saw noth- ing but flowers. Verily this is a right glorious kingdom, for there is no valley that is not carpeted with flowers, no mountain-side which does not glow in the rays of the declining sun, as they reflect innumerable glories of rich color from the masses of flowering shrubs. ' ' A similar question was put to the other sage. "Sire," replied he, sadly, "it is with me even 13 14 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD as with my brother, save that I marvel greatly at his report. For truly I saw none of the glories he describes! Throughout this whole land there is naught but a great curse of weeds, which the high gods have sent upon us, doubt- less for our sins. Through the length and breadth of the kingdom nothing did I see but poisonous and ugly weeds, choking the good soil and making wretched the lives of the hus- bandmen. ' ' Now it is sufficiently obvious that both these views, widely held about the Lord's garden, the Church, are wrong. The modern mind sees little in the fable beyond the lesson which the king learned — that preoccupation often lies at the root of unconsciously warped opinions. In a real garden there are always both weeds and flowers and homely vegetables, as well as certain negative growths, like grass. The cul- tivation of a garden, as a constructive art, can- not be carried on effectively without the cor- respondingly destructive process of rooting out the weeds. In the perfect gardener there must be an ideal combination of the construc- tive — planting — faculty, with the destructive — the weed-uprooting — faculty. The more the gardener desires to produce, however enam- oured he may be of the constructive side of his art, the more must he devote himself to the destruction of weeds and noxious growths. This part of the work is the distressful part. It is not 'inspiring" to dig out weeds, nor is it an easy or congenial task, especially for one who looks ahead towards the greater and finer results of the task as a whole. But it must be CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 15 done or the garden will not flourish and the successive crops will be less and less useful and lovely. To anyone who pauses to look about him in the Garden of the Lord, in the intervals of his deputized gardening, the weeds must always be an object of interest. There they are with their ugly heads showing, their harsh stems bristling to choke out the good plants, their deep, quick-spreading roots sucking out the nourishment from the ground all about, and getting tangled with the roots of the good plants. It is a nasty job to root them out, a back-breaking job, sometimes; but out they must come, for the good of the garden. Perhaps as good a way as any to get abruptly to the task is to remember that a question like this is often posed in a public way: ''Do you want to make Anglicans out of the whole world?" This question is apt to be put in one form or another every so often. There are two points about it worth noting. First, that from its nature, it is the typical question put by one who does not dislike weeds, who thinks that weeds should be allowed to grow and even to be fostered (or, at the very least, let alone), and that such effort as might be stimulated by the presence of weeds should be directed to understanding the uses to which weeds may be put. Secondly, this question invariably stuns its hearers into a reflective silence from which, reluctantly, it may be, emerges the hesitating answer, **No, of course not." The answerers subside into a sad apathy, which affords oppor- 16 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD tunity to the questioner to rise in his place and propound his ism or his panacea unhindered. Analysis of the reason why hearers are always stunned into acquiescence reveals some- thing like this: The question automatically drives out of mind the ideal Anglicanism which is in the hearts of our mother Church's loyal sons and daughters, and there arises in the place of that noble mental monument a pur- view of Anglicanism as it appears when seen piecemeal in its harrowing details. Visions rise before the mind's eye of parish rows, duf- ferism and ineptitude, ''parochialism," groups of gossiping old women of both sexes, mean- ness, lay popes, struggling parsons with strug- gling gentlewomen for wives and groups of precariously educated and nourished children, «ung mat tins, local ministerial associations, and the bitter cry, ''how long, Lord, how long!" All these, and countless similar details of Anglicanism as it appears on the surface to be, arise, we see, before the mind's eye of the hearer of the question, and then, inescapeably, the reluctant answer rises to tired minds and comes out of wearied lips, "No, no, of course not that." The ingrained human sense of the grotesque comes along to help out the reluc- tant conclusion. The imagination deals frag- mentarily with things like Hottentots or bol- shevists converted to something like the sum of the details which have passed through the mind. One imagines Esquimaux engaged in a cake sale to buy a new carpet for the church. Latins stand up in Jerry-built wooden barns of meeting houses while a group of caballeros CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 17 and seiioritas render Caleb Simper's Te Deum in E-flat at Morning Prayer, somewhere in Ar- gentina. The mental processes reach after and attempt to visualize a large group of Greek peasants engaged in stultifying themselves at a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon conducted by Captain Papadopoulos of the Peloponnesus Division of the Church Army. The imagina- tion fails, breaks — ''No, no, a thousand times, no." Of course, it is absurd to try to convert the world to Anglicanism — abysmal, funny! But, approached from another viewpoint, this proposal appears less and less absurd. It begins in fact to grow upon one when one puts the question like this: What expression of Christianity is better than Anglicanism f If we believe it to be right that there should be one fold, as there is one Shepherd, just what fold must it be, or is there to be a new Church? The "new church" idea is impossible, of course, "that way" — as Nineteenth Century Novelists were so fond of saying — "that way, madness lies !" If there is to be one fold, quite clearly it will have to be a fold, however ex- panded and rebuilt, which is already on its foundations, and the task of determining which fold is the less difficult as one applies reason and common sense to the problem. It is clear enough that there are not so very many existing folds to choose from. Sectarian- ism has them a-plenty, of course, but the choos- ing of any one of these and holding it up, as a prospective fold for the world, is ipso facto a reductio ad ahsurdtim. One has only to imagine the world — it is a large order — Anglican, 18 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD Roman, ''Orthodox/' Protestant, and non- Christian, all joining the Baptists or the "Dis- ciples" or the "Wee Frees" to get a kaleido- scope picture so madly eccentric as to paralyze the faculties of reason. It must be obvious enough that no one variety of Protestantism is adequate for a uni- versal fold for mankind. It cannot be that the Shepherd desires to gather all His sheep into such as this. There remain four possible folds : ] . The Pan-Protestant fold ; 2. the Roman Cath- olic fold; 3. The "Orthodox" fold; 4. the Ang- lican fold. Among these the pragmatist in the subject of Christian Unity must, perforce, choose. Let us take them up in order and examine them, as pointedly and briefly as possible. 1. The Pan-Protestant plan may almost be dismissed off hand, because there is no such fold in existence. It is, at best, a chimera. It is the name of a hope, and a hope not even necessarily connected with world-folding. At its very best it is only a panacea on paper with a universe of discourse confined to certain Christians cut off from historic Christianity and desiring no more than to attain a workable uniformity of administration among themselves despite internecine differences, which have proved, up to the present, insuperable. We may dismiss that first possibility from any present discussion. 2. Roman Catholicism has very much to com- mend it at first sight. It has great numbers of adherents ; it is the largest of the Christian communions; it has an admirable executive CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 19 system ; it possesses a high degree of efficiency among its administrators from highest to low- est; it is committed to an intensely definite system of theology and administration; its ad- herents are well taught in the tenets of their faith and are, in general, and with certain not- able national and racial exceptions, entirely loyal to their system. On the other hand, in spite of all these enormous advantages, the Roman Catholic system does not commend itself to Christians of other varieties of the faith because of certain broad, general facts, which are as follows : It has patently added certain definite doc- trines to the faith, a thing unparalleled else- where in Christendom, which the rest of Chris- tendom, in the nature of things, cannot accept. The chief of these additions is the phenomenon known as the Papal Claims, whereby the Bishop of Rome claims to be the Vicegerent of God on earth, both with respect to spiritual and tem- poral affairs, and to be infallible when pro- nouncing, officially, on questions of faith or morals. The Roman Catholic system, viewed as a whole, does not conform to the test of Holy Scripture, even when reverent and due allow- ance is sympathetically made for the normal development which Christ promised under the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. Herein again there is absolute consensus of opinion among the spiritual and intellectual leaders as well as among the rank and file of the rest of Christendom. The general position of the Roman Catholic 20 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD Church is one which history, as an inevitable test, shows to be unwarranted and incorrect. 3. The Eastern Orthodox Communion, made up of many Churches, as of the Greeks, Rus- sians, and other nationalities, while it has pre- served the faith and is in other respects, so far as can be judged with discretion and sympathy, otherwise fit to be the one fold, possesses cer- tain characteristics which preclude other Chris- tians from finding in it a comforting home. It is distinctly oriental in its general purview. Its services are enormously elaborate which makes them unnecessarily difficult for the life of the Western Hemisphere to adapt itself to. It is rigid. Its liturgical languages, which vary, are all such as to be understood only by the respective hierarchies. An Eastern Ortho- dox cleric passing from one national Church to another is unable to celebrate the mysteries, in many cases, because the language outside his own Church is unknown to him. Even the litur- gical Greek, which is the language of a large section of Eastern Orthodoxy, is a tongue not generally understood even among the erudite outside certain portions of the Orthodox East. 4. The Anglican Communion has often, and justly, been called the communion which prof- fers to the rest of Christendom the best meet- ing place for reunion. It possesses all the characteristics of a Catholic Communion, i. e., a scriptural religion, the Catholic Creeds, a valid ministry, and a sound liturgy. It pos- sesses also a certain flexibility, a learned clergy, a laity combining, in general, broad-mindedness and orthodoxy, and uniformly imbued with that CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 21 peculiar quality of culture which is called pro- gressive and "AVestern;" which is making its way around the world and attracting to it, as the secular philosophy which most strongly com- mends itself, the leaders of the nations of the world. It is committed to the principle of liturgical expression which is locally under- stood; it is firm in the faith and at the same time adaptable to the spiritual needs of all men whatever their distinctive characteristics, na- tionally, racially, or otherwise. Any one of these four possible folds for man- kind can be criticised both favorably and ad- versely from an internal point of view as well as by an outsider. Even a list of the subjects- matter for such criticism would make a fair- sized book. It would be idle here to attempt even a summarization of such points. But while Pan-Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy have each one or more qualities which can be urged against them as insuperable difficulties in the way of regarding any one of them as the fold for humanity; the fourth, Anglicanism, is not, necessarily, open to that criticism. At least in the view of an Anglican, it may be held, and conscientiously, that if Anglicanism could be brought up nearer to its own ideal; if its norm could be even a little more fully realized in practice, it would inevitably, as a valid communion of the Holy Catholic Church, emerge more and more clearly into the position of the ideal fold for the scat- tered sheep of Christendom as well as for the other sheep which are wholly without the fold. Is it reasonable, then, seriously to propose 22 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD to one's fellow Anglicans, and through them to the rest of Christendom, that the ''Basis of Unity" which shall be contended for by Ang- licans is to be Anglicanism itself? One may find in the Eoman Catholic attitude, conspicuous for its uncompromising quality, a precedent for answering "Yes." It is not pro- posed that the answer, ' ' yes, ' ' be based on any- thing like the same ground that makes the Roman Catholic adhere so rigorously to his own proper panacea — submission to the See of Rome. We have no alleged Vicegerent of God in Anglicanism ; we could not, if we would, base our contention on any such ground as the Roman reason. But it is fair to point out here that there is a precedent for the attitude sug- gested, and that a conspicuous and well-recog- nized one. Other kinds of Christians, when they submit as individuals to the Church of Rome, do so, necessarily, because they are willing to accept the papal claims in return for what they are accustomed to name ''certainty and unity," forgetting or shutting their eyes to, or not being aware of, the very powerful forces within the Roman Church which make for uncertainty and disunity when one scratches the surface. But those many who come into the Anglican Communion do so, in general, because they want a valid Church connection which will include what has been dear to them in one or another kind of Protestantism ; or else, if they have been Romans, to find a valid Church connection which will be free from the characteristic CULTIVATING THE GAEDEN 23 Roman evils, such as need not, here, for any good purpose, be even enumerated. With this safeguard to our thought pro- pounded, we may go on to examine the facts which make the Roman claim to the allegiance of the rest of Christendom so attractive to many souls. First, the uniformity, external though it be, of the Roman Church. This apparent indica- tion of internal harmony, of singleness and definiteness of purpose makes a tremendous appeal to the seeker after spiritual rest and peace. Second, the efficiency of a regulated system. Third, the definite claim to be right. Fourth, the real uniformity (even though it be somewhat cut and dried and, to the more truly Catholic mind of Anglicanism, inclusive of various tenets which are no integral part of the depositnm, of faith) of the teaching. All these claims of the Roman Church are sound, psychologically, and as such, apart from their Roman source, are worthy of examination by any other communion which is desirous of making a strong appeal to prospective con- verts. The fact that they are characteristic of the Roman Church has in it nothing to invali- date them. This merely indicates that the Roman Church (and who doubts it?) is wise in its generation. We can see, if we put prejudice aside, how excellent a thing it is to possess uni- formity of practice and teaching, to adhere to a well-regulated and efficient system, and to be- lieve in our system so strongly as to be will- ing to put forward our claim in a positive man- 24 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD ner; and we can see this, as it happens, not only by the processes of thought, but by a dem- onstration of how it works, when used, as it is by the Roman Communion, in spite of what seem to others the glaring inconsistencies and obvious errors of that system. We do not, as a communion of the Holy Catholic Church, need to go to Rome to learn how to make ourselves externally and in prac- tice what we are ideally and in theory, and par- tially in fact ; but there is no sound reason why we should ignore these various means to the best of good ends merely because Rome uses them so successfully. And when we say, as we often do, that Rome must reform herself be- fore others will listen to her, it is only just to apply this test to ourselves. In order to make anything like the appeal to the ignorant and the indifferent, to the millions upon millions of persons who are unchurched or untaught, or mistaught, it is primarily neces- sary that Anglicanism should realize its nor- mal self -consciousness, stop fighting internally, close up the ranks, and agree upon its work- ing principles; and then express these in its practice. To bring about that desideratum, it is clearly essential that one of the high points of the pro- cess is to develop efficiency among the leaders : the clergy and the church workers, and the laity who are in a position to exercise influence in the countless way which can make for the extention and the general betterment of the Kingdom of God. This fact is the justification for any attempt at internal betterment, and CULTIVATING THE GAEDEN 25 what is involved is both critical and construc- tive teaching and constant warfare against weeds. These blemishes in the Anglican portion of the Lord's Garden, some of which are here dis- cussed under the figure of weeds, are manifold and various, and undoubted. A list of them would be formidable, and a list which one lover of Anglicanism might make, would probably be widely different from a list made by another. It is a task whicli, when undertaken by any one person, can be accomplished only by the use of his own judgment, and in the hope of persuasion and of securing agreement. The writer attempts herein to take note of what appeal to his judgment as peculiarly noxious weeds, and to deal with each kind as best he can, in the same hope of being able to persuade and of securing agreement about them ; and of suggesting, as kindly and pleasantly as he may, the remedies indicated by his own judgment. Many doubtless, will not agree with that judg- ment ; some, perhaps, may be assisted. Such a list would include, he thinks, what to him appear to be outstanding blemishes in the Anglican portion of the Garden, and a chapter is devoted to the discussion of each. These are : 1. A certain smug satisfaction with something vague understood as the Reformation Settle- ment. 2. Being a Jack of All Trades in the Ministr3^ 3. The widespread substitution of what may be called the Sidewalk Ministry for the Ministry of the Sanctuary. 4. The still more widespread ignorance among lay people of the reason for church attendance. 5. The 26 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD unwillingness to recognize the mind of the Church with respect to clerical marriage; and eyes being closed to the fact that this vital ques- tion is primarily economic and temperamental, rather than a question of ' ' churchmanship. " 6. The deplorable ineptitude in the matter of the art of public worship which still prevails in our communion. 7. The misunderstandings related to work among the foreign-born, and especially the prepossession in favour of basing such work chiefly upon what is called Social Service. 8. The toleration of that insidious process called ' ' M odernism ' ' which seeks to replace the Christian Religion within the Church with an emulsion of panaceas. 9. The particular ab- surdity^, prominent in such "Modernism," of substituting an ideal, called Happiness, for the ideal of knowing and loving God, and serving Him because He is known and loved. 10. The literary tendency, with its reaction upon the popular mind, to make the popular conception of Almighty God into something fundamentally heretical, and to represent the clergy as being uniformly afflicted with a kind of softening of the brain. 11. The over-emphasis upon purely academic subjects in the Church's seminaries, and the corresponding neglect of practical training in the routine duties of the parish clergyman. 12. The outstanding peculiarities of the clerical character and of that of church workers in general, which might, to the advan- tage of all concerned, be minimized to the point of negligibility. When our Lord spoke His parable of the tares, and laid down the principle that these CULTIVATING THE GAEDEN 27 must be allowed to grow with the good grain until such time as the Head Gardener should be ready to separate and garner His wheat, He was not dealing with wrong conditions ; He was dealing with wrong people. This teaching of our Lord's is often urged against various kinds of criticism, but it is an open question whether or not such urgency is merely a pious cloak for inertia. Our Lord's counsel on this point deals with the tendency of puritanism to de- stroy him with whom the puritan finds himself out of agreement, rather than with the pro- priety of correcting manifest abuse. He was outspoken when it came to characterizing the Pharisees, and vigorously active when, in the zeal of His Father's House, He drove out the money changers and them that sold cattle and doves, and cleansed the Temple. It is only in a spirit of profound humility, therefore, that anyone may venture to set forth a body of criticism which shall be concerned with the members of His Body, even in the light of His own great example, and of the precedents He set for the renewal of God's planting. n A Neglected Source of Information If anyone desires to learn anything, there are, in a broad, general way, three sources open to him: the past, the present, and the future. For example, if one desires to know all there is to be known of aviation, it must be taken for granted that although much has already been accomplished in this marvellous field, the great work of the fliers lies in the future. Predic- tions are especially valuable here. The aspir- ant in aviation must ''look into the future" — he must have vision. The Wright brothers and the others who have succeeded these pioneers in practical flying had vision, and therefrom they derived much of their inspiration and even something of their technic. For a convinc- ing exposition of this seemingly singular point of view, anyone who might be at first inclined to question the saneness of that statement may be referred to chapter one, "Forecasting the Future," in Mr. H. G. Wells' "What Is Com- ing." If engineering, or especially manufacturing and business administration, be the object of serious study, the present is the great time wherein to find the sources for such study, because these things appear to-day to be at their crest of accomplishment. 28 NEGLECTED INFORMATION 29 But there are many things — most, in fact, considering the whole subject quantitatively — which can only be learned by looking intelli- gently into the past. The great matter of Gothic architecture is one of these; staining glass, a concomitant minor art, is another. If it be held that Anglicans do not need to learn from the Church of Rome, devotion and disci- pi lue, and how to do things ecclesiastically, it is a far cry from holding that there is not much to be learned from the great past of our own communion. We have in the Anglican Communion a definite life and a definite development, such as it is; very strong in some respects, lamentably weak in others, and this life and this develop- ment both have their roots deep in the past. It is not enough to go back merely to the period of the Reformation. It is well known that the processes of the English Reformation did not — the berserker personality of Martin Luther being fortunately lacking — irremediably dam- age the ship of the Church when its barnacles were forcibly scraped off. Luther removed the barnacles from the German ship effectually, and he ripped away many a good plank with them. In the storm and stress of the English Reformation, however, very much dropped out of sight which has only very gradually emerged since. It is possible that a brief estimate of that which was bad, defective, and inefficient in the pre-reformation English Churcli, followed by another summary of what was good, admir- able, and effective might do something towards clearing the ground for those of us who desire 30 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD to play our parts in the process of legitimate restoration and improvement. It is impossible here to do more than very briefly to touch upon these associated abuses and admirable qualities of the mediaeval Church in England; but with- out any attempt to be exhaustive, enough may be included in such summaries to demonstrate that there is something here worth understand- ing. Beginning, then, with the bad side of things, we take up and examine cursorily certain con- ditions in mediaeval Anglicanism which stand out prominently; and then proceed to enumer- ate certain others, pausing only to note, in ad- vance, that most if not all of the outstanding bad conditions have been effectively reformed or at least alleviated. 1. English dioceses in the Middle Ages were so huge that the bishops, even if they had been so disposed, could hardly have done their full duty. But the bishops, as a rule, were unwill- ing to have them divided. Most of the higher clergy were occupied at least in part with sec- ular activities. They used their church offices as sources of revenue and so far as their per- sonal attention was concerned, appear to have neglected much of what we, looking backward, see might have been done. Many, of course, were non-residents. Even ordinations seem to have been regarded by some as of less impor- tance than secular affairs and the ever-present question of their incomes. Simony and plural- ism flourished broadcast. 2. There were unquestionably cases of abuse of the celibacv which was the rule for the NEGLECTED INFORMATION 31 clergy, regular and secular alike. In many in- stances ignorant men were ordained, and thou- sands never advanced beyond the minor orders, which, because of the Privilege of Clergy, at- tracted the unfit, the worldly, and the schemers. 3. Private chapels such as were scattered over the land in great numbers especially near the end of the Middle Ages were chiefly served by clergy so little trained and so unspiritual that even to-day the term "chantry priest" connotes something bad, defective, and ineffi- cient. 4. The See of Rome claimed ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England, and for a period in the heart of the Middle Ages it held England also as a temporal dependency. Its influence on England and the English Church was very bad in many respects. The papacy seems to have exercised little fostering care over the English Church. Nevertheless, it demanded obedience. It filled a large proportion of English Church offices with foreigners, many of whom drew their revenues while performing none of the duties or functions of the offices. It exacted immense sums of money in Aids, Annates, Fees for Investitures, and various legal fees. It caused exasperating delays in the issuance of judgments and wasted the time and the re- sources of litigants in painful and expensive journeys to and from Rome. The subtlety and hypocrisy of its decisions were not in general accord with the robust English conception of justice. At the worst, it may be said that the papacy was, in its relations with England, grasping, dishonest, and insatiable. At best, 32 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD it may be held that it laid too much stress upon its usurped jurisdiction in temporal mat- ters to have been otherwise than unfit to serve as a proper spiritual head for the Church of England. 5. Monasticism may be called the heart of English church life in the Middle Ages. And monasticism possesses a very definite bad side which must be included in this summary — a side which did much to counterbalance its well- known features of excellence. As early as the XII century a great number of monasteries be- came imbued with the type of secularity de- rived from and peculiar to the feudal system under which the great orders flourished. Great religious houses, at the time of their highest prosperity, in the XIII century, controlled as much as one-third of the land in England, which, in many instances, was administered selfishly as monastic decay began to set in. The essence of such decay is found in the phenomenon of the order coming to regard itself as an end to be served, rather than as a very important means of serving the Church and God's people. One of the first and most obvious results is to be seen in the administra- tion of the real property held by the order. It must also be admitted that a greal deal of time was wasted in the monastic life, which might have been devoted to something more spiritually construcitve than the overlong and many-times-multiplied services, and the gross over-emphasis upon the practices of asceticism in which much of the energy of really sincere and devoted men was dissipated. NEGLECTED INFORMATION 33 The monasteries got into their control a great deal of the revenue which should have been secured to the parish churches, and as a con- sequence the secular clergy became less and less adequately supported, and great numbers of fjarishes received a relatively inadequate sup- ply of spiritual ministrations. The exemption from episcopal visitation and control enjoyed by many great religious houses — the well-known rights of religious apart — became in England a fertile source of evil. For the exempt monasteries were naturally in close alliance vriih. the papacy, whence the privilege of exemption was derived, and this division of allegiance could not help but make for harm and disunion. Rivalry between various orders and houses was not lacking, but instead of this rivalry taking the sound form of vieing with each other in spirituality and good works, the contests were only too frequently over the acquisition or retention of wealth or distinction, high posi- tion, privilege, and power. Thus secularity had many opportunities to grow apace even in these strongholds of God, and public confidence VN'aned correspondingly. 6. The decline of the friars, beginning near the end of the XIII century, was paralleled by the spiritual decline in the monasteries, but in all probability it demoralized the people to a greater extent than the monastic deterioration alone could have accomplished, because the friars had gradually grown to be closer to the people than had the monks. The influence which these once fervent evangelists and re- 54 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD formers of everyday life had acquired was un- doubtedly very powerful among the common people. Their terrible lapse into petty pilfer- ers and peddling privilege-mongers is, without question, closely allied with the contemporary decline in popular piety. The salt was begin- ning to lose its savour and it was not long be- fore it was to be cast out and trampled under- foot of men. 7. Allied with the curses of papal domina- tion and the decadence of the religious life, was the curse of dirt. Sanitation, as we understand the term to-day, was undreamed of in the Mid- dle Ages and long afterwards. Cleanliness was no conspicuous virtue, and dirt covered human- ity, layman and cleric alike. This is a general condition, of course, and as such could by itself have no particular bearing upon the good and bad sides of Anglican church life. Such bear- ing lies in the fact that vermin and muck came to be regarded as adjuncts of asceticism. Lords of the realm, bishops, priests, and scullions, court ladies, and kitchen knaves reeked with unwholesome filth, which may have helped to keep out the cold, but which at the same time invited the pestilence. It is true that the Eng- lish Church was neither better nor worse than her Continental contemporaries in failing to perceive and denounce this horror. While we may, and justly, commend as wholesome the philosophy of the hair shirt, and reverence its godly wearers for what they were (and are), we can hardly fail to shudder over the condi- tion of the great and good Becket's body when with loving care his clergy stripped the costly NEGLECTED INFORMATION 35 outer fabrics away from the gaping wounds, and, finding their late Lord Archbishop swarm- ing with vermin beneath, praised God amain that here indeed was a true saint ! We turn joyfully to the consideration of some of the outstanding good points of the mediaeval English Church. 1. The Church was so effectively established as the religion of the English people that no- where in the land could a spot be found wherein its beneficent influence was not active. Among the thousands of parishes into which the great dioceses were divided, and whose glorious ar- chitectural fabrics are the inspiration and the despair of modern church builders, there were distributed probably as many as twenty thou- sand clergy. These, unhampered by many of the secondary interests which absorb so much of the time of the modern clergy, spent their lives, their energies, and such learning as they possessed in guiding the spiritual lives of the people. Undistracted by sectarian rivalries, aided by the vast momentum of national enthu- siasm for the Church, supported by the animat- ing spirit of a ''Church unity" so thorough- going as to have elicited no descriptive phrase, these clergy, many of them trained in the uni- versities, guided their flocks from the cradle to the grave. 2. It may safely be averred that the English clergy were more virtuous than their Conti- nental brethren. Even the higher clergy, for all their preoccupation with secular affairs and their political activity, were not only very good examples of political honesty, but also, on the 36 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD whole, superior in piety to the clergy of other lands, who had, more than the English Church dignitaries, tlie disadvantage of earlier and longer exposure to continental culture, and closer relations with the papacy. 3. The Church conserved and fostered learn- ing. To a preponderating extent the education of the young was in the hands of the clergy, and here, above all things else in immediate practical importance, we might with profit look back five or six centuries and learn something greatly to the advantage of the Christian Religion. 4. Side by side with its educational preoccu- pation and intertwined with it, was the practice of the fine arts, which the Church of England in the Middle Ages fostered with gracious care. The breach between the Church and the fine arts to-day is perhaps the widest of the clefts which time and ineptitude have together suc- ceeded in making, to the infinite disadvantage of both the Church and the arts, to say nothing of the artists. The average Church building to-day is, most unhappily, a meretricious monu- ment to this divorce, while in many quarters ' * artist ' ' and ' ' pagan ' ' are terms which go hand in hand. This is not to say that there are no godly artists or no artistic Churches ; but both, most unfortunately, are conspicuous by their singularity. 5. Until their decadence — which was a rela- tively slow process — had made great inroads in the religious life, the monasteries offered a peculiarly effective means of serving God. Among other things the monasteries were re- NEGLECTED INFORMATION 37 sponsible for caring for innumerable travelers and sick persons, supplying the places now held by the hotels and the hospitals. The religious life needs no commending phrases to demon- strate that it is, in itself, the finest flower of Christ's religion. The monasteries were full of faith which expressed itself in a multiplicity of beautiful lives and effective good works. 6. Widespread individual and corporate piety supplied the material needs of the Church, and the Church, transmuting these gifts by her alchemy into spiritual benefits, gave them back with a generous hand to the people. It is espe- cially notable, for example, that just after the Norman Conquest, when the last of the long series of racial amalgamations was taking place in England, the monasteries formed the back- bone of the Church, fortifying the religious character of the English people so that, cen- turies later, it was able to withstand the ter- rible stress of the reformation movement which swept Europe like a tornado, and come through that violent upheaval nearly unscathed. The general character of the English Church and the English people, which may be described as full-blooded, rugged, honest, earnest, and inde- pendent, owes an incalculable debt to the re- ligious life as it was lived in the monasteries of the XI, XII, and XIII centuries. Clergy and people took their religion seriously. 7. The missionary activity of the friars — at its height in the early part of the XIII century — besides bringing a renewed spirituality to the people at large, must also be regarded in the light of its tremendous power for stimulating 38 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD the secular clergy. The parochial clergy were aroused by emulation to express themselves in a great amount of instruction and catechizing among their people. A lively renewal of faith was the natural outcome. 8. Among the characteristic modes of medi- aeval expression in ecclesiastical England, it is unnecessary to do more than merely state that the high point in the art of church building was reached in this period. The very best that the most skilful builders can accomplish in this field to-day is to imitate the churches of the Middle Ages more or less successfully. It is difficult to imagine a parish priest of this period neglecting some of his routine duties because by their performance he might possibly give offense to some of his parishion- ers ! It was an age of faith, of faith inevitably expressed in practice, and so the religion of Christ lived in the hearts and showed itself in the lives of men and women and children. The age had its glaring faults, but while we depre- cate any resumption of these, or acquiesce in the historic rejection of them which the refor- mation partially accomplished, we should be indeed very short-sighted if we should fail to realize how much we might learn from the ex- ample and practice of our own Church at a time when it possessed in marked degree the very sense of discipline and devotion and of "knowing how," the lack of which is its chief weakness to-day. If it be kept in mind that here is the source whence we may derive the methods for much or most of our reconstructive work, there need NEGLECTED INFORMATION 39 be no disposition among us to feel that we are constrained either to let these matters go by the board, or to learn them from the current practice of an alien and hostile communion. In the reformation which took place in the affairs of our own communion, the activity of the reformers took the wise form of getting rid of real abuses, so far as might be, and retain- ing as much as possible of what they believed to be good, and sound, and workable. They made an infinitude of minor mistakes in the light of the present, and not a few major errors, but they did not fail, as the various Continental reformers failed, to conserve the catholicity of the Church, and that fact is enough to cover a multitude of ineptitudes. In the light of this universally acknowledged truth, it is, perhaps, not too much to ask, even of those who seem to believe that all later development was estopped by something called the Reformation Settlement, that they should very seriously con- sider doing, or allowing to be done, the restor- ative work of the present in the same spirit which actuated the historical reformers them- selves. This is a very simple principle. It in- volves no more than willingness not to reject everything in the life and spirit of Anglicanism which flourished before the day of the second of the Tudor kings of unwholesome memory. There is higher authority than Cranmer's for the precept which enjoins us who have Christ's Body in our keeping to ' ' hold fast to that which is good." Ill On ** Efficiency " All clergy are professional Christians, liv- ing by the gospel. And all professional per- sons, doctors, lawyers, dentists, pilots, actors, have to consider the opinions of the people they serve. Only the great ones of earth can ordi- narily afford to ignore public opinion, and some even of these have fallen grievously because of such an attitude. This general truth has laid such hold upon the clergy that many of them, it is to be feared, forgetting that their professional status differs fundamentally from all others because it is a vocation, and failing it may be to keep con- stantly before their eyes that their responsibil- ity is to God, have framed their lives upon the principle that the people must be pleased. The result is what has often been called the ''good mixer," or something equally banal and inept, in far too many cases. A ''good mixer," or the like, is very apt to be incompetent in his profession because he is prone to rely upon what he likes to call his personality ! There ought to be at least a sense of balance in this matter. When anyone is suffering from an agonizing toothache what he wants is a skilful dentist, not at all the no- toriously pleasant practitioner whose reputa- 40 ON ''EFFICIENCY" 41 tion depends almost wholly upon the slapping of people 's backs in a hearty manner and play- ing eighteen holes of golf with neatness and dispatch. A pastor's peculiar work is done with souls for materials, and what he is for is to bring men and women and children to know, to love, and to serve God. The processes involved in this work are not simple. Rather, they are ex- traordinarily variable, diverse, and complex. So far as personality is concerned in this kind of work, whatever views on that subject may be held by anyone, it may still be taken as axiomatic that however well versed a clergy- man may be in the duties of his office, an ugly disposition must give at least some people the idea that God Himself is grim and dour and difficult of approach. When a clergyman is con- fronted with the tragedies of life, the great simple things like birth and death, and the great complicated things like anguish and neur- asthenia, no amount of attractive playfulness, tact, or even such matters as successful boy- scouting mil be able to help him very much in dealing with them, nor will they be of any par- ticular value to his dying or sin-racked par- ishioner. It is altogether reasonable for a professional Christian to cultivate his personality and to make himself as well-informed, agreeable, and presentable as he can. But if he is to accom- plish the burdensome task which has been laid upon him — the saving of immortal souls — ^if he is to persevere under the ever-increasing load which bows the backs and thins the hair of true 42 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD shepherds of God's flock, he must be more, infinitely more, than personally delightful; more even, than '* consecrated;" more than an upright citizen who can look any man in the face. He must be professionally skilful, or he is very likely to turn out a failure, an unprofit- able servant. It may be that the clergyman or the candi- date for Holy Orders is a kind of natural pastor. One meets, occasionally, such a man. That is a legitimate subject for congratulation. God and His Church need many just such persons, fitted naturally for pastoral work. But even this kind of man must needs learn how. And this must be said, plainly : that no candidate is very likely to learn very much of the technic of his pastoral office in his seminary. Some semi- naries ignore nearly everything, in the purview of the pastoral office, except ''scholarship." Others try to accomplish more, but it is rightly enough felt by trustees and faculty that the young men preparing academically for ordina- tion must be gr'ounded in the prescribed subjects in the all-too-scant three years at the disposal of the faculty. We must admit that most men come to the diaconate with the academic por- tions of their capabilities well enough developed and reasonably disciplined, but with only very general ideas of the detailed daily work of their sacred profession. An appreciable number of men emerge from seminaries fairly well prepared for the prac- tical work of the priesthood, and most of what they know they have picked up, perhaps before getting as far as the seminary, in the parish ON "EFFICIENCY" 43 wherein they derived the first intimations of a vocation. Eefuge against accusations of in- effective, practical preparation on the part of the seminary is commonly taken in the tacit understanding that the deacon will pick up what he may need to know during the curacy which the Canons contemplate ; and often he does so, but too often he has to depend upon himself, and too often he has no opportunities of the kind save to serve tables, which is entirely scriptural and orthodox, and which would be entirely effective if the young man were to continue in the office and doing the work of a deacon for the rest of his life. Here is the place, it would appear, to say something about the wooden Anglican policy of keeping a man from Holy Orders until he is just finishing at the seminary, and then send- ing him out as a deacon to do parish work "for the space of a whole year. ' ' If such an one were invariably sent into a parish under at least one trained priest, it is possible that in the course of the year he might learn the fundamental duties which he will be called upon to perform for the remainder of his ministry as a priest. But even at that, the system is needlessly in- efficient. There is no good reason at all why (as in the case of most dioceses and at least in accordance with the policy of all but one American seminary) the young man should not come out of the seminary a priest equipped for the work of a priest. So far as anyone can see, the only practical differences between a deacon and a lay reader are that the deacon can assist in the administration of the Holy Communion, 44 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD perform a legal marriage, and baptize in the absence of a priest, while a lay reader may not. When it is considered, too, that deacons coming out of the seminary are more often than not placed in charge of missions or even parishes, — although, of course, not canonically as rec- tors, that being impossible — the ineptitude of this plan becomes more apparent. One might, save for the prestige of having a person who can write *' Reverend" before his name, almost as well have a lay reader in charge as a deacon. On the other hand, the order of deacons might well have a place in the work of the Church which no one, apparently, thinks of according to it. There are any number of men who ought to be deacons because they are doing the characteristic work of deacons, to say noth- ing of the women so employed. There seems to be no good reason why positions of the ad- ministrative and secretarial class which are commonly filled by lay people of both sexes, should not, and preferably, be filled by men in deacons' orders. An increase in the number of deacons would also release a great many priests from executive positions not in any way requiring priests to fill them. Of professional ineptitude it would be very easy to give a catena of examples. It is unneces- sary, however, in that or in any other way to emphasize that the Anglican Communion's weakest point is her discipline. It may fairly be asked how many clergy at graduation and first ordination have as clear an idea of their duties as, say, a newly doctored medico step- ping into his first hospital appointment. ON ''EFFICIENCY" 45 One gathers that there are very few, and one reaches this conclusion because of the very scant attention paid to technic by the clergy as a body. There is perhaps nothing in the whole range of professional skill so variable as the ability to do their work among Anglican clergy- men. It is not, of course, in the slightest degree desirable that there should be any diminution in the seminary emphasis upon Greek and He- brew, and especially Church History, and the other subjects chiefly taught. Let us Anglicans conserve at any reasonable cost of effort our hardly-earned status as a Church with a learned clergy, and not make practical efficiency either a shibboleth or an alternative to sound academic learning. But for practical purposes pastoral theology ought to have much greater emphasis than it is getting in our schools. This should be done, and the other not left undone. Mere studiousness is not enough in a clergyman. Many a clergyman is a monument of learning and does not know how to hear a confession. Many a clergyman's parochial work might be compared justly to a great burst of accompani- ment with hardly any song. Many a one knows, as it were, all that is known of dendrology and silviculture and the exact points of differences between these two branches of forestal science, as well as all that is to be known of the history of implement-making from the Assyrian period down through history to the present day, — and could not drive a nail into a plank with a ham- mer to save his life and the roof over his head. This academic dufferism is positively en- 46 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD trenched in some parts of the Church, and espe- cially in England among the country clergy with benefices and hobbies. It is not fair to God, and it bears very hard on God's people. Not the least damaging effect of this sort of thing is that the people become habituated to it, expect no more, even admire their pastor for his great learning, and so, spiritually, fall into a kind of creeping paralysis. The writer had several years of intimate con- tact, some time ago, with a very able young priest who had come into the Anglican from the Roman Communion and whose exact knowledge of certain workings of both communions was illuminating, and not infrequently amusingly pointed in its expression. He was accustomed to sum up one of his dissertations with some- thing like this: ''The Romans have got to learn from us how to make their people use their heads, and that there is such a thing as history. But — I get rather wild when I think — what a lot we've got to learn from them about disci- pline and devotion and how to do things ! ' ' One can understand, and to some extent sym- pathize with, this viewpoint. It is very often maddening to contemplate the helplessness of the average group of clergy discussing some problem and how to get it done ; bewailing the lethargy of their congregations; or disputing learnedly enough about this or that. One can, in particular, feel pleased at the first part of the statement. It is true that the Romans might find it hard to procure a better school- master than the Anglican consciousness when it came to learning how to use their heads and ON ''EFFICIENCY" 47 that there is such a thing as history. In con- troversy, the Anglican prevails over the Roman with a regularity and effectiveness which is almost monotonous, because the Anglican knows how to use his head and is familiar with his- tory. But it may be a source of comfort, when we realize how far behind Rome we are in the results of our efforts towards building up dis- cipline and devotion and practicality, to remem- ber that there is an Anglican norm, however in any given place it may appear to have become obscured. We do not need to learn these things from Rome, although it may be wholesome for us to look over at Rome and see how efficient she is. For history is pretty definitely fixed and settled, and no one has ever attempted to lower the standard of Anglican learning; but the ideal discipline, devotion, and pastoral effi- ciency of Anglicanism is a very different ideal from the Roman ideal. We have, for example, very definitely aban- doned or repudiated such working tools as in- dulgences, and enforced penances, and an infal- lible pope. All of these are excellent tools, if one can use them, but Anglicans cannot use them, for they are plying a different though re- lated trade. Roman Catholic Church law is tremendously efficient law, but ours is different. Ours is not derived from forged decretals or a spurious ' ' donation. ' ' Our working system ap- pears to be a somewhat milder, more reason- able, honester, more scriptural, and less drastic system. And the best thing about it is that it is entirely effective, when anyone takes the trouble to find out about it and use it. The 48 THE GARDEN OF THE LOED seminary is the natural place to learn about it, of course. It would be hard to find a better application ■of the rule ''by their fruits ye shall know them," than the efficiency of what is generally known as the Anglican "advanced" Catholic Parish. Without saying a word about ' ' Church- manship" in this connection, one may freely refer to the "Advanced" Parish simply because it works so well. The secret of that obvious efficiency — shown in regular attendance, spiri- tual lives well led, material results accomplished out of all relation to the proportion of wealth commonly found in such parishes when com- pared with the richer places wherein other types of Churchmanship prevail — is definite, painstaking, skilful, intelligent, informed, par- ish work on the part of the clergy. The one intelligent accusation ever brought against such pastoral work is that it is "mechanical." But in fact it only resembles that. Nothing that is alive — like an "Advanced" Parish — is merely mechanical. Like other similar movements the current trend of thought towards efficiency has gathered about it much that is crude and even laughable. Efficiency is too often overdone and grotesquely overdone. Humorous tales have even appeared in magazines with "efficiency" as their motif. "Efficiency Edgar" may pass into the language as a synonym for a certain type of enthusiast who was very amusing to those who read about him in the late current publications. But leav- ing out of account this modern over-emphasis which threatens to grow into a cult, the fact ON ''EFFICIENCY'' 49 remains that the word's opposite "inefficiency," is to be always condemned and surmounted by workers who desire to accomplish anything worth while. If "efficiency" is overdone in the fields of business administration and scientific pedagogy, there is no good reason to acquiesce in its neglect by the Church of God. It need not be underdone. One may even take "Effi- ciency Edgar" in all his crudity and ludicrous- ness, and hold him up as an example, with these words in his mouth: "Let them make fun of me as much as they want to. I'm the one who gets the laughs when the pay envelope comes 'round!" This is the gist of "Edgar's" justi- fication for his practice of the cult. And this, curiously enough, will bear a certain comparison with another speech made nearly twenty cen- turies ago and recorded of a certain employed man w^ho had not been timid about using his brains and managing with all his skill a certain trust reposed in his efficient hands. The words of this speech are: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." IV Knowing One's Sheep The writer once knew a clerg\^man, rector of a New England parish, who went about without a hat because, said he, the Founder of Chris- tianity went about with no covering for His head. It is quite clear that this is an absurd thing to do without any analysis or assigning of reasons ; but, upon analysis, several reasons do stand out as grounds for the patent absurd- ity. Thus: the act was an imitatio Christi based upon a purely external and unimportant cir- cumstance, and even on this low plane it was an inadequate imitation. It did not go far enough. The imitator should have copied the various articles of dress in question and worn them. A better imitation would have been to wear the ordinary garments of one's day and generation, precisely as the Lord did. Any imitation should concern itself with things of more importance than wearing apparel. Going about without a hat is silly in the winter climate of New England. *'And so ad infinitum.^' The fact, however, that absurdities can be, and are, based upon this and kindred pious motives, should not of course be taken as pre- cluding a legitimate imitatio Christi. Clearly 50 KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 51 enough His example should, in every such case, be carefully noted. Anyone, one would imagine, would concede that much. Very well! It is a fact that there is no recorded instance of His entering a dwelling — the divine prototype of the modern pastoral call — except when he was invited, or sent for, or when He was seeking entertainment. As in the conspicuous case of Zacchaeus, He did, from time to time, seek out entertainment for Him- self and His followers, and His great works were often incidental to the opportunities so afforded; witness the conversion of the Chief Publican of Jericho with all his house. Although no one, surely, would care to press this analogy too far, this precedent is not with- out its value. It would be as absurd as the incident of the hat to allege, for example, that because Christ did not write — except once in the sand at His feet — Christ 's ministers should not write. That interpretation would cut both ways. I would, on the one hand, have pre- vented this book from appearing, and Cyrus Townsend Brady and Ralph Waldo Emerson would have been constrained, for self-expres- sion, to the limitations of the pulpit and the lecture platform. And there would be no Gul- liver, and, alack! no Ralph Connor. On the other hand, various bookshelves would have been free for all time from Collections of Sermons, the Institutes of Calvin, and the col- lected Works of the late E. P. Roe. It is reasonable, and true, to say that Christ did not exercise His ministry by means of the written word, and that, by this analogy, we 52 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD should not be justified in making the production of letters, books, articles, pamphlets, and other literary productions a panacea in the exercise of the ministry to-day. Christ's ministry, whatever social conse- quences may justly be adduced from it, was wholly personal and intimate, and yet the fact remains, the significant fact, that He did not make what could be compared with the modern parish call. It is contended, therefore, that so far as the light of this consideration leads us, we ought to be able to see that the parish call is a secondary and subordinate means of recon- ciling the people to God. With peculiar force the axiom, "These things ye should have done and not left the other un- done," applies to the proper relationship be- tween a minister's calling, and the performance of his other necessary pastoral duties, some of them fundamental. And it ought to be unmistakable that in ap- plying the axiom the terms must not get them- selves reversed. With many clergymen, calling is a panacea, an obsession. They seem to apply the axiom thus: "Call anyhow, and get the other things done if you can squeeze them in!" That appears to be very different from Christ's methods of "reaching people." It does not seem to be the reasonable nor the efficient method, and probably it can be shown how it fails to get the results desired by the good pastor either in terms of spiritual or material values ; because it is a clear case of putting the cart to pull the horse. It must be admitted that this question of KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 53 pastoral calling is one of the vexed questions — not only in the art of Pastoral Theology, but in the minds of practically everybody who belongs to a church — and there are still a good many left in these days. There may be said to be two camps, sharply divided over this question. Ex- tremists on the one hand hold that the parish clergyman has too much otherwise to do, to permit of his calling on his people at all except when sent for or invited. The other side con- tends that ''pulling doorbells" will, in time, cure all the ills to which flesh is heir. There are five possible kinds of calls : 1 . The sick call. 2. The "functional" call. 3. The social call. 4. The ''round of calls" call. 5. The "doorbell "call. 1. The sick call requires no discussion in this place, because it is one of the central, funda- mental duties of the pastor. Such visits must and should be made whatever else may or may not be done. 2. By the "functional" call is meant every kind of visit for which there is ' ' efficient cause, ' ' i. e., reasonable necessity, and a definite object in communicating with a parishioner. Par- ochial efficiency may frequently be greatly en- hanced by deputizing this kind of call, or by substituting for if one of the various time- saving devices at the disposal of modern peo- ple, such as the use of the telephone. For in many cases the "function" is discharged quite as well or even better by mere communication, or by someone other than the clergyman. The continued, unexplained absence of a child from the Church School is a proper occasion for a 54 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD call of this kind. The clergyman thus desires to know why the child is absent. The teacher of the child's class will ordinarily fulfill this function to perfection, and, if the occasion of the absence is such as to require the clergy- man's presence ( although he would probably have been sent for in most cases, as in illness) the teacher's report to that effect will make it possible for him to save time and energy by making his call prepared to minister such con- solation as is indicated. An objector might say at this point: "Yes, all very well! But can the average minister manage to train his Churcli School teachers to be efficient like thati" The answer is, "He cannot, if he spends all his time rushing about the streets himself! " 3. The social call is not, except very inci- dentally, a pastoral visit. It may be any kind lOf a call, and discussion of it does not belong here, except enough summarily to dismiss it from consideration in this connection. 4. The "round of calls" on the whole group of parishioners, made periodically, is happily obsolescent. Its basis in reason, so far as it ever had one outside the works of George Her- bert of fragrant memory, is on the supposition that the pastor must in this way keep in touch with his parishioners. But the custom, where it survives, has degenerated into the merest concession to prejudice, which has as its basis the idea that if one person is visited the others will probably be upset, and won't come to church! In any event, its use implies a parish wherein the people do not come to church or otherwise take their parts in the parish life ; a KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 55 group of people who have to be "jollied along" or they won't play. This custom is and always has been an abysmal bore both to pastor and people, an occasion for heartburnings, and even, by a strange surviving simian twist of the corporate parochial mind, a test of the ex- cellence of the pastor. The "round of calls" long ago fell out of relationship with any basis worthy the consideration it may once have had in reason. Those who continue to make it are holding on to a moribund tradition without theological groundwork or any sound ecclesias- tical custom to back it up ; much less any basis which should appeal in the slightest degree to modern people. Even in the case of a parish canvass, for financial or other reasons, which might he thought of as transforming the "round" into a "functional" matter, it falls to the ground, because such canvasses are, in accordance with the best modern usage, nowa- days always made by committees of laymen or laywomen. In a sizable parish the "round" means hard, unnecessary work for the clergy, probably serves no good purpose whatever, and serves to keep alive and crystallize a thoroughly un- sound tradition in the minds of the people. 5. The "doorbell" call is English rather than American, and bound up with "The Establish- ment." There is, however, a certain amount of the home-grown article in these United States. In its perfection it belongs to an Established Church, wherein the clergy are regarded as state officials with certain "rights of visita- tion." Its process, in the pure state, appears 56 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD to be for the visitor to take his ''district" street by street, and call at every house irre- spective of the ecclesiastical status of the families thus visited. It is hard to see why anyone should even think of making this kind of call in the United States, where the Church, D. g., is not Established, and where the pas- tor is not regarded as an official of the state. With that classification out of the way, it appears chiefly desirable to comment on the point of view of tlie obsessed caller. It ought to be. sufficiently obvious that the duties of a parish clergyman who wishes to attend to work for which he is paid (he knows what he is going to get, pretty well, before he enters the ministry, so that point need not be stressed) are such as to occupy most of his available time. Any such parish clergyman is constrained to choose between doing all his specified duties with some degree of adequacy, and substituting for such a normal course of procedure a policy of general calling. He can- not do both; not with only twenty-four hours in the day, and the absolute necessity of sleep- ing and eating once in a while. There is a kind of man in the ministry whose disposition is such that if he were not a clergy- man, he would consider no employment except an "outside job." Salesmen, gas-meter in- spectors, postmen, policemen, men on ice wagons — these work at "outside jobs," quite distinct in jjeure from the vocations which keep a man within doors during business hours, such as the work of clerks and shop- hands, bankers, dentists, and druggists. KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 57 Such an one in the ministry, one shrewdly suspects, is simply following his predilection when he insists upon basing his pastorate on calls. It is psychological, like so much else! He is insisting on an "'outside job" for him- self. Like the person in secular life who would rather drive an automobile truck than be a bank clerk, he simply will not work in- doors, and, being in the trusted class of pro- fessions, he indulges himself. He evades that major portion of his proper work which lies indoors because, temperamentally, he does not enjoy it. He persuades himself that he makes up for this self-indulgence by pounding the streets and by going up and down steps. It is not hard for him to lapse into a settled philosophy over this matter. The obsessed caller — because it is human, and a most in- sidious tendency at that, to justify oneself — makes a virtue of a desirability. He has a great deal to say about what he calls "dili- gent, painstaking, consecrated parish visit- ing." As he approaches middle age he begins to think of himself, it may be, and of his peri- patetic activities, as rather praiseworthy on the whole, and he deprecates those who do not see eye to eye with him. He also, and quite naturally, flocks with his own kind, much like a beekeeper or a certain kind of golfer ! Think, too, of what the caller par excellence misses, and of what his congregation is de- prived because of this self-indulgence of his. A pastor should, if he is to present God's messages through the medium of himself, study. He ought really to study a great deal. 58 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD and to read as largely and as broadly as pos- sible. He should — he is more or less obliged to — prepare somehow a good many addresses and sermons. He ought, of course, to do this particular work painstakingly; and that means the devotion of much time to ii. He must plan a great many things for other people, many of them important as affecting other people's lives — people who look to him as their guide. It is a responsibility ! He must inaugurate in- immerable activities, supervise them, and fre- quently take an active part in their perform- ance. He must write many letters ; think, occa- sionally at least; sleep a reasonable number of hours ; eat his meals with a certain regularity, for his health is worth something at least; he must attend meetings within and without his parish; he must see people who make appoint- ments to call upon him: he must make his "functional" and certainly his sick calls; he must keep his parish books as a rule ; he must officiate at a good many services, both stated and occasional ; he very often is obliged to plan the affairs of his church school, and at least keep an eye upon it; if he have a family he must give at least some time to it and to its affairs ; he will probably belong to at least one or two clerical associations, or organizations of secular character; one hopes that once or twice a year he will make some kind of "re- treat" for the good of his own soul and its refreshment; he must go about more or less to preach or take part in conferences ; every so often he ought, for all sakes, to get quite away from people for a vacation. KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 59 But in addition to these practically fixed duties, for they all fall into the strait category of duty, he must, if he be in any wise a notable person apart from his parish status, contribute of his time and effort to the general good out- side his parish in one or more fields of expres- sion; and if he is not naturally a very foolish and unteachable person, he ought to make time, if necessary, for a modicum of wholesome amusement and relaxation in addition to his free time on vacation. Therefore! If he spends the bulk of his time walking the streets of his pastoral cure because he likes an "outside job," he will either be obliged to neglect all these necessary things or to choose among them, leaving out some ; or else make a heated effort to keep all or certain of them up in a scrappy, inadequate fashion. Such a process, either alternative, would prob- ably be w^orse than if he frankly abandoned them all in favour of what he will call senten- tiously, "knowing his sheep." That is his fav- orite phrase. It is his shibboleth, to use a bib- lical term since we are considering parsons! He has it on his lips a good part of the time ; for this kind of pastor is usually, like the man in the Bible, "willing to justify himself." Pastoral work is really a very delicate and exact art. It requires for performance a high degree of acquired skill, no matter how much natural aptitude moved the pastor to become a clergyman; and the attainment of such desir- able competence demands exacting preparation, attention, and devotion. In the spirit of this elevating idea, let us sum up the credit and 60 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD debit of the two opposite views which should have emerged about pastoral calling. On the credit side it must be admitted that the pastor who bases his ministry upon call- ing, as very many pastors do, will have one powerful working tool forged by himself as he walks about the streets of his city, town, or village. He will have personal, intimate knowl- edge of his people and their affairs. He will, in truth, know his sheep. This, in itself, is magnificent. In the course of a reasonably long pastorate he will have, if he be possessed na- turally of any kindly qualities, a large group of intimate acquaintanceships and close friend- ships. But even here, on this high plane, shelter cannot be legitimately sought under the aegis of the Lord's command. It was "feed My sheep" that He enjoined upon Peter and the other Apostles. It was of Himself that He said: "I knoiv My sheep, and am known of Mine ; " so that, however great may be the force of the example followed, and it is the very best possible example, it has not the direct force of a divine command. On the debit side, however, it may fairly be contended that the pure caller loses infinitely more than he can possibly gain by adherence to his peculiar course. When he dies or leaves his parish for another he will take along with him all the intimate, valuable data so labor- iously accumulated and built up along with his friendships, but he will not necessarily have built up his parish, either as a spiritual entity or as an eleemosynary corporation. He will have made the work of his successor, any sue- KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 61 cesser, exceedingly difficult, even though an- other ' ' caller ' ' succeed him. He may even have hurt his health — in spite of all the fresh air he has been breathing all these years — because of the stress to which he has subjected himself in the doing of his minimum of routine other than calling. He may have atrophied his scholarly faculties. In all probability his records will approach the chaotic, for the typical ''caller" carries his facts in his head (and heart) where they are not, unfortunately, accessible to his successor. Besides all this, the parish will have become accustomed to the minimum of routine work being done, and much of this, on the fringe about its irreducibility, by the hands of others than the pastor. The owners of these hands will have become habituated to the perform- ance of duties which the pastor should have at- tended to but which he could not do — and call. These may not all be pleasant people. There was a child who prayed every night, we may remember, that God would make all bad peo- ple good, and all good people nice ! Certain of those good people who have still to become ' ' nice, ' ' will have got hold upon a certain quasi- authority, and the new pastor must perforce, choose between ineffective and slipshod meth- ods continuing in many cases, and what in com- mercial life is called a "shake-up" at the most inopportune possible time — just after his ar- rival on the scene. This unfortunate man's only possible "third alternative" is the exer- cise of tons of tact, a process exhaustingly de- bilitating to all concerned! 62 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD It would constitute, perhaps, another for- ward movement for the church as a whole if the ''callers" would take a leaf from the book of that humanitarian colleague, the physician. It is an educative absurdity to imagine a suc- cessful medico spending the bulk of his precious time dropping in on sick and well at frequent intervals, building up personal friendliness through uninvited social contacts, and offering gratuitous advice during the discussion of oc- casional symptoms, to say nothing of the price of gasoline these days. That is essentially a modern problem! V On Church-Going The question of church attendance, which probably affects four-fifths of the population of these United States, has received treatment at many hands, and the answers when thrown to- gether make curious reading. There are two camps of those who have tried to formulate answers to the question, Why Do Not People Go to Church? There are those who believe that the reason is internal, that the Church itself is at fault. On the other hand, many be- lieve that the reason is outside the control of the Church altogether and must be looked for externally. Characteristic explanations based upon fault- ing the Church are these : 1. The churches have continued to recite creeds which have lost their meaning, and the inconsistency arising from this concession to tradition has driven thou- sands of honest-minded men and women out of sympathy and touch with organized religion. 2. Social justice was the essence of Christian- ity's original message to the world, and since this vital aspect of Christianity is almost totally neglected in the churches, the masses have re- belled against them. 3. The very core of Chris- tianity is the healing of sickness. It is central in the gospels, and its practice was the univer- 63 64 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD sal credential of the primitive church. Its abandonment has prompted the exodus of the people from the churches. 4. Individual purity is the gist of Christ's message. The modern Church is so taken up with extraneous matters that the practice of piety and the ethical beauty which once crowned Christian fellowship in the Church have been crowded out so tliat the mass of people are no longer attracted to imitate conspicuous examples of personal excellence, and the whole Church has suffered depletion. 5. Church services are too long and wearisome nowadays. People tired by the week's work find them a bore and prefer to get their religion ' * out in the fields with God. ' ' On the other hand, there is a whole group representative of the other school: 1. People want rest and relaxation on Sunday, the natural holiday. In former days there was nothing else to do on Sunday except to go to church. But nowadays cheap amusement has put relax- ation and pleasure within the reach of all, what v/ith moving pictures admitting a family of five for the cost of a balcony seat for a play, long trolley rides out into the country, and the un- precedented cheapness of automobiles. People who used to be in church now like to go off for the day in their machines. 2. Beginning with Tom Paine and Ingersoll there has been a steady discrediting of the Bible and the Church. The Church rests upon the authority of the Bible, and the attacks of critics, once outside, now inside the Church itself, in breaking down the authority of the Bible have naturally weak- ened the foundations of the Church so that the ON CHURCH-GOING 65 man in the street, not knowing what to think of the whole process, has cut the Gordian knot of his difficulties and abandoned a discredited institution. 3. It is quite possible to live a good life without going to church. Why should a man equipped with "The World's Best Ser- mons" and a daughter who can play and sing hymns for him, trouble about church wdiicli cuts into his only day of rest! One pays one's bills and lives respectably; what more could one do if he spent all of every Sunday in church? Besides, people outside organized religion who never go to church are more charitable and de- cidedly pleasanter companions for the average person. 4. "I was forced to go when I was a child. Every Sunday my father made us all get ready, there was no escape. We had to sit through tv»ro hours of it mornings, get home, eat a cold lunch, and go back in the afternoon. How I hated it ! Now that I am a man, I never go myself, and I wouldn't have my children go through what I endured for anything in the world." 5. Certain persons, regular attendants at church, are hypocrites or otherwise show an inconsistency between their Sunday regularity and prominence in church and their weekday practice in business and private life. People who know all about them are unwilling to be identified with the same course of procedure, and they stay at home. It is hardly necesssary to comment on the various grades of mentality and personal atti- tude to religion revealed in these answers. Their diversity shows how widespread the question has become. People of all kinds are 66 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD busily engaged in making excuses for not going to church and the same people are asking why church attendance falls off. If any one of these solutions were the one true answer, the others would be relatively unimportant. If all were reasonably sound the whole matter could be reduced to a discussion about the relative importance of internal and external reasons for not going to church. One side would hold that there exists a kind of impersonal conspiracy against the churches and that the age of modern inventions and cheap transportation had struck its powerful blow in the age-long battle between science and religion, while the other would hold to the view that, considering the uncertainty of the various seekers in finding good reasons coupled with the fact that the falling away in church attendance is very modern, the fault must lie with the churches themselves. The fact is that there is a grave fault in every one of the solutions already noted. With respect to creeds, this objection applies only to the quantitatively inconspicuous minority of persons who are at once highly intellectual and at the same time out of sympathy with credal orthodoxy. Numerically, their defection would hardly be noticeable. Moreover, creedless churches are not immune from the disease of empty pews. The social justice argument for staying away from church is about contempora- neous with the emergence of that doctrine into the modern light of day. The abandonment of any widespread effort by the Church at healing bodily sickness could be dated much nearer the post-apostolic age than the period of its very ON CHURCH-GOING 67 modern emphasis. It is "the saints" of every congregation who are chiefly interested in the fascinating and valuable practice of personal purity, and these have received their quoted designation because they never miss a service. It is not "the saints" that have left the churches. The whole tendency in the conduct of church service for the past thirty or forty years, too, has been to make it short and "bright," even sometimes at the expense of other qualities. Upon examination, the "external" arguments suffer the same fate. A Sunday morning trolley ride is a rarity indeed. Even in places where Sunday "movies" are tolerated, the perform- ances do not begin until afternoon. In spite of the laudable efforts of Mr. Henry Ford the proportion of the Christian population pos- sessed of automobiles remains relatively very small, while in countless instances, especially in the country, the automobile has made it possible for people at a distance to attend church more regularly than ever before. The arguments based on IngersoU, criticism of the Bible, living a good life away from church, childhood disgust therewith, and the hypocrite argument are hardly worth while lingering over. They answer themselves, and they were all flourishing in the days when every respect- able person went to church as a matter of course. Probably those who hold that the Church itself is to blame for the decline in church attendance have the better of it, but the general futility and unsatisfactory nature of all the 68 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD characteristic solutions leave much to be desired. One feels instinctively that they do not touch the root of the matter. In general their exponents reveal three fundamental misconceptions of Christianity, and they are at one in agreeing to ignore what is perhaps the most striking fact connected with the whole question. First, there is the widespread idea of those Avho have tried to explain why people have stopped going to church, that Christianity is taken up with the past at the expense of the present and the future. A fair sample is the question, based on a false antithesis, recently asked by a clergyman very conspicuous in the social service activities of New York City, addressing a large religious convention in New England: "When the burning question of to- day is how to get more wages, how can you be satisfied with reciting creeds?" Perhaps if there were more Church historians and corre- spondingly fewer enthusiasts about the "new" ideas which flourished in the second century and died (apparently) in the fourth, Chris- tianity would be more intelligently understood and less lightly contemned. Surely the lineage of a church has the same bearing upon the life of its present and future activities as the lineage of a horse, say, has upon its appear- ance, usefuhiess, quality and value. Secondly there is the curious obsession that orthodoxy is rather stupid and pithless. The prepossession in favor of heretical views marches with the modern revolts against tradition, even the best, and against definitions. ON CHURCH-GOING 69 This spirit has produced free verse, feminism, cubism, futurism and Protestantism. Free versifiers, feminists, cubists, futurists, and Protestants are impatient of what is orthodox. But curiously enough each more or less vaguely has produced or is producing an orthodoxy peculiar to itself. The logical outcome of this process is to defeat the end of every one of these movements by diffusion of force. The cycles from inception to lassitude vary in length. The force concentrated in the art, literature, religion, and normal domestic life of the civil- ized world permeated its civilization and mel- lowed it into the soil from which the sweet and kindly things of life have drawn their inspira- tion, and from this source, too, has been derived the vigor characteristic of every one of the radi- cal movements. Thus the language which the free versifiers seem so curiously to distort is the language which the sound literature of the ages has built up. The vigor of the old type of militant suf- fragette w^as derived from generations of an- cestors vigorous from the acquiescent usage of a system the militant suffragette did her violent best to destroy before she became tired. The whole cubist and futurist programme is nega- tive, a protest against the normal content of art produced by laborious generations of creative craftsmen whose work will endure for the satis- faction and emulation of men long after the mushroom art of the radicals has decayed and been forgotten. Protestantism falls into the same category, only in this case the cycle is longer. Queen Victoria's carriage was not 70 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD mobbed by suffragettes, the free versifiers are already subsiding save for a spasmodic utter- ance now and then, but as recently as the year 1917 somebody remembered the four-hundredth anniversary of Tetzel's indulgence auction at Wittenberg and the inception of Luther's cru- sade; and pageants followed. The third characteristic misconception of Christianity springs from the confusion of ethics with religion. It expresses itself in a widely held vicAv that people go to church to be good and in the curiosity contradictory parallel opinion that membership in a church must be preceded by the attainment of a certain stan- dard of goodness ! In the face of all this massed testimony to the superficiality of those who have tried to explain why people do not go to church, it is less diffi- cult to understand how they have, one and all, managed to ignore a fact which, once appre- hended, floods the church attendance problem with light. It is that Catholic Christians have not ceased going to church. The church-going question is purely a Protestant problem. The statement that Catholic Christians have not ceased going to church is not limited to the popular definition of "Catholics." It includes not only Catholics of the Roman obedience but the Eastern Orthodox and the Anglicans as well. Normal Russia is not behind Ireland as a church-going country, and the truth of the statement is strikingly illustrated by contem- plating the diversity in this respect between the Anglican schools. Anglican Catholics are con- vinced Catholics ; they attend church with per- ON CHURCH-GOING 71 sistent regularity, while, in general, the other kinds of parishes suffer as badly from the empty pew disease as do the avowed Sectarians themselves.^ To those who profess and call themselves Catholics, God is emphatically not a vague, leni- ent deity who does not care particularly what goes on among mankind so long as bills are paid and respectable lives lived. Rather, He requires the constant co-operation of men that His pur- poses for them may be effected. Catholic peo- ple would as soon expect God's love to operate in them without their intimate and constant co-operation, which involves steady worship in church, as to expect the city power station to boil water, toast bread, and light the cellar without wires and the necessary apparatus Avhich the householder must provide. Common worship, more particularly Eucharistic worship involving sacrifice as instituted by the Founder of Christianity Himself, is regarded as the very essence of co-operation with God. The convic- tion of Catholics that this kind of worship, in which everybody takes active part, is absolutely necessary, is the reason why people of this per- suasion continue to go regularly to church. Lacking such worship and the conviction that it is vitally necessary, the Protestant lacks the compelling desire to go to church. Among Cath- olic people sermons are important for the pur- poses of teaching and exhorting to conversion and good works, but they are subordinate to the central corporate act of worship. Textual and literary criticism of the Scriptures is im- portant as affecting the exact meaning of the 72 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD great book which the Church itself produced early in its history and which is used devotion- ally and to prove what the Church continues to teach. Creed revision or elimination is not an issue v/ith Catholic people. To them the creeds form useful summaries of what they believe and frame their lives upon. They are not impa- tient of the limitations of exact definition. The object of religion to the Catholic is the ultimate attainment of union with God and the preserva- tion of this union, which is broken by sin and restored again by penitence, a sacramental mat- ter. Religion is not merely "being good," although this is a very important part of it. Eucharistic worship is a constant reminder of social service on a large scale. The Incarnation is an inspiration to justice, personal and social, and health goes hand in hand with the good morals which flow from Eucharistic worship — like streams from a perennial spring. Individ- ual purity, too, is entirely consistent with con- stant reminders of the purest life ever lived. The individual Catholic has as much, usually, as he can manage preserving his sense of union with God, without much critical attention to the morals and conduct of his fellow Christians. Catholic children notoriously do not "hate church." Emphatically, too, the religion of Catholic people is not mechanical. Nothing that lives can rightly be called mechanical, although there is in true efficiency much that suggests the mechanical — smoothness, ease, and rhythm. In the worship of Catholic people, beauty seems to belong as of right, and art in noble fabric and glorious sound plays it.s enhancing part. ON CHURCH-GOING 73 When Protestantism is compared with this kind of religion, and especially when the wide- spread laxity and indifferentism of Protestant people in the matter of church attendance is compared with the conspicuous loyalty of those of the various Catholic foUowings, the conclu- sion that Protestantism has nearly completed its cycle of activity and usefulness, seems not too drastic, and logically allied with the fate of the other radical movements with which it has been compared. For Protestantism is tired, it has burned itself out, and it is nearly spent as a true religious force. To-day it is very largely concerned with matters which would have been outside the thought of its many founders. The body of teaching in most first-rate Protestant theological seminaries differs widely from what the founders of the various denominations would have considered central and vital. When this or that denomination was founded, certain doctrines or one doctrine received emphasis and much of the teaching of the Mother Church was minimized or discarded; then in course of time new ideas began to find room in the denomina- tion, reactions occurred, and new points for emphasis. In many cases the emphasis passed wholly away from doctrine, leaving the denomi- nation logically without excuse for existence. A new type of minister and a new type of layman grew up. In some cases the reactions were in the direction of alignment with abandoned us- age or practice, in others the reaction went the other way; sometimes the original emphasis was wholly abandoned, often new needs were 74 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD met by the denomination by radical changes of polity. Paralleling these varied processes has been the crystallization of all Protestant thought into certain fixed principles common to the denomi- nations and uniformly opposed to the general trend of Catholic thought, tradition, and de- velopment. By this process, in spite of its in- ternal, denominational diversities, there have grown up in Protestantism the common ideas of an unornate worship; of the preponderating importance of the prophetical, there being no priestly, office; of individual liberty of scrip- tural interpretation; the very modern emphasis on ^'works'' so obvious in the Y. M. C. A. ideals and the subject matter of interdenominational conferences. Finally, it is unquestionable that from the very beginning Protestantism has cherished and fostered the view that the Bible is the final authority in all matters of doctrine, discipline, and worship. Such a substitution of a book 's authority for the authority of a living organism, the Church, was the inevitable result of the radical separation germane to every na- tional and local reformation except the English. To the Catholic, therefore, however greatly he may love his Protestant friends and how- ever he may admire their attainments, worth, and respectability, it seems certain that Protes- tantism has nearly spent itself. He finds gen- erally in Protestantism a lack of real interest in the vital things of the kingdom and on all sides he hears the complaint: Why Do Not People Go To Church? He thinks he can tell why, too, as he looks about him and sees where ON CHURCH-GOING 75 from Ms owai point of view his Protestant friends and neighbors have managed to get far away from the norm of Christianity, whose pri- mal verities of worship, faith, conduct, order, and authority he sees efficiently exemplified in his own branch of the Catholic Church. If he happens to recall the Montanists, the Sabellians, the Apollinarians, and other of the early fol- lov\ings which came out of the Mother Church and perished, he will be inclined to believe that he sees history repeating itself. He begins to realize why people are not attracted to churches which have discarded the sacramental idea and the commissioned priesthood and the soul-satis- fying Eucharistic worship. He sees among these churches disunion and the beginnings of the disintegration which the fulfilling of the cycle involves. He investigates the faith and practice of his friends, and intellectual and social equals, and he observes that in too many instances their religion is merely intellectual and chilly. He contemplates that large portion of the American middle class which is the back- bone of Protestantism and he finds that emo- tionalism has largely replaced for them much of the sober common sense, the bread and meat of the gospel, and in many quarters the com- monplace, deadly obsession of teetotalism re- placing vigorous, normal, self -restrained living, the ban on the dance, and the horror at cards bound up with neglect of the weightier matters of the law. He reads the circuit rider narra- tives of Corra Harris and compares the attitude revealed in them of Protestant people to their ministers with his own love and respect for his 76 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD pastor, and then, turning to the modern min- ister he finds him and his modern church busily engaged, when at their best, in all kinds of ex- traneous things, forgetting that neighborhood entertainments and manual training and danc- ing classes (in the liberal denominations) and even successful boy-scouting have little to do with making God the centre of the universe and leading all men into union with Him. He finds churches pervaded with a musty chill, where the majesty of God is dwarfed and His splendor pale. He listens to the renditions of self-con- scious quartets, he listens to the more intellec- tual parsons holding forth on such subjects as Pragmatism in Maeterlinck, and the Color Val- ues in the Work of Robert Hichens; and he notices grape juice, and melodeons, and insup- erable prejudice against "Catholics." He sees and hears all these things, and, taking thought, he becomes very unhappy, but in the process he acquires an illuminating insight into the reason why people do not go to church. VI The Question of Clebical Marriage All religious organizations have burning views on the question of the marriage of their ministries. Among Christians of all kinds this is a subject of perennial interest. Protestant denominations in general regard the marriage of a minister as the ordinary condition of his respectability and are inclined to look askance upon one who has managed to keep single. The Eastern Orthodox must marry before ordina- tion. Roman Catholics, with certain exceptions, are not allowed to marry. Anglican clergy may do as they please about it. This summary in- cludes all kinds of Christians, but because of the Roman and Eastern rulings and the Prot- estant, crystallized, public opinion, the real question — so far as it is open to discussion — is limited to Anglicans. Among Anglicans the usual discussion about the marriage of the clergy is often colored by insistence on what may be termed the Spiritual Argument, and is forced into the terms of churchmanship. But it need not be placed on these grounds nor so distorted and complicated, for overwhelmingly it is an economic and tem- peramental problem, chiefly economic. There are probably as many married clergy of the Catholic school of thought among Anglicans as 77 78 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD there are among the other types of churchmen ; and conversely, there are unquestionably as many unmarried clergy of other schools as among the members of the Catholic school. Quantitatively at least this is not a question of churchmanship at all. It is interesting to note, in this connection, however, that to the typically Modernist mind in Anglicanism, to which the personal example of the Man, Jesus, is paramount and human ex- pediency the ultimate test, the Spiritual Argu- ment is anathema. And yet this is curiously inconsistent. There is a group in Anglicanism which char- acteristically centralizes such matters as Fem- inism, the ''Social Leadership of Jesus," the New Morality, the destructive type of biblical criticism, and social service. The lips of these persons frame readily the word ''modem." They deprecate as mediaevalisms such matters as a serious Christology, penance, sacraments, and sacerdotalism (horrid fetich!) and who, having long abandoned belief in the deity of Jesus, have been led by their mental processes far in the direction opposite to the tendency in the Papal Church which sought to emphasize our Lord's divinity by the bad theology of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is to these that the example of the Man Jesus can be held up with propriety, because from it they claim to derive their peculiar sys- tem. Of course according to their reasoning much tliat our Lord said must be rejected as not squaring with the tji^ical bias of the Modernist; m.uch that He did must be reinterpreted. But CLEEICAL MARRIAGE 79 even the lazy Modernist who has not yet real- ized that eschatology is out of date and Guild Socialism the only panacea, must realize that there is one course of conduct pursued by our Lord which no speciously destructive criticism can obscure or pervert. The great Precursor of the Social Revolution, the person who uttered the Call of the Carpenter, remained unmarried! To the orthodox of all Christian cults it is de- voutly obvious why God Incarnate did not, could not, marry. But to those who deny His identity with God, it remains at once an insol- uble mystery and an insurmountable stumbling- block that He did not. It is proposed to discuss briefly the problem of clerical marriage, in the only field where it is logically open for discussion — the Anglican Communion — from the point of view of the question: What is the mind of the Church in this question of clerical marriage^ It may be asserted summarily that on grounds of barest efficiency a Church in which most of the clergy are married is thereby ipso facto debarred from doing its best work; be- cause of the nature of that work; because the married priest cannot live easily with slum- dwellers at home or in the mission field as he should to reach them; because he and his wife cannot live anj^vhere on the stipend which would be just enough for him alone ; because he cannot give to his children educational and other opportunities such as they are normally entitled to; because, in general, he is inhibited from giving his entire energy to his priestly work when he is obliged of necessity to devote a 80 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD great deal of it to his wife and his own family affairs. What is here called the Spiritual Argument, if considered at all, also tells against clerical marriage. Those who hold that for spiritual reasons a priest should not marry understand that he is wedded to his sacred office, the cause of Christ Whose servant he is, and Whom he is constrained, in this respect, to imitate. It would appear that this whole argument is spoiled by its inconsistency. For if Christ's servant should refrain from marriage because He was not married, he should refrain from liv- ing in a rectory or clergy house because He had not where to lay His head; he should exercise either a peripatetic ministry, which would inter- fere "with the whole system of Church organiza- tion, or else he would be constrained to rely upon the hospitality of his parishioners. It seems strained. There are not lacking, however, among the protagonists of this argument even the extreme views that marriage, in the case of a priest, is a violation of the spirit of ordination vows, and that marriage is morally wrong. Historically the claim is made that the whole Catholic Church discountenances the marriage of priests the modern exceptions being the Anglicans since the Reformation, and the Uniats. It is held that the custom of the Eastern Church cannot be cited against this claim because the marriage of its clergy takes place before ordination, and a priest-widower may not remarry. It is con- ceded that an Anglican priest possesses the right to marry which was specifically secured CLERICAL MARRIAGE 81 for him at the Reformation Settlement, but it is thought that he should not take advantage of that right. Even if it be pointed out that St. Peter himself had a wife, as witness Holy Writ, it is made clear that he had her before he be- came an Apostle and well before the Cliristian ministry was inaugurated and its principles de- fined. No objection is made to a man already married seeking Holy Orders. Having cleared the ground as much as possible, we come to the practical side of the question. Here we would plead that no clergy- man or prospective clergyman and no woman ought, in fairness to the Church and to them- selves, to consider getting married to each other without grave consideration of the responsibili- ties peculiar to the state they contemplate. The considerations which do occur to the clergy, and their prospective spouses are often wide of the mark. Mr. Newbury Frost Read, in the American Church Monthly for May, 1918, estimated that the average gross income of the clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church from ecclesiastical sources of all kinds was $974.60 per annum. It ought clearly to be understood beforehand that marriage, on merely economic grounds and apart from the personalities involved, frequently presages the vitiation of the clergyman's highest usefulness to the Church and the subjection of a gentlewoman to drudgery. In spite of such instances of the abuse of clerical ceUbacy of the enforced variety as may be brought forward per contra, it is fair to ask if the unquestionable eflficiency of the Church of the Papal Obedience is not very 82 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD largely due to the concentration of its officials upon their specific work, and their entire free- dom from domestic preoccupations such as are inevitable in the life en famille. In the matter of temperament mingled with household economics, it might be very interest- ing to subjoin a few examples taken from acquaintance and actual observation. Unfor- tunately this cannot be done. The present writer is a human being and weak and refuses to sacrifice his peace of mind for the rest of his life in this world for the excellent purpose of illustrating what he desires to convey to his readers out of his experience in contact with a host of married clergy and their wives and families. For among these he numbers many of his best and most valued friends. Therefore purely hypothetical cases will have to serve in lieu of "true stories," but they are presented in the reasonably confident hope that these thumbnail sketches are true enough to life to be at once recognized as fair examples. So, then, we will begin with Smith, a godly and learned parson who has been rector of a well-to-do parish in a conservative New Eng- land town for the past thirty years. He receives $2500, annually, though he must not be thought of as having enjoyed such an income all through his pastorate there. His wife is a splendid person with every imaginable good quality including that of being a good mother. Between her and Smith there is established an ideal companionship. She knows the parish better than anyone else and the parish approves of her. She is a parochial necessity to Smith. CLERICAL MARRIAGE 83 If she should die, he would be all at sea in his work, and the parish never could replace her. Smith has an enormous area to cover, extending for several miles in every direction from the ''Center" where the Church property is located. For many years he has seen that extension work should be undertaken, but it could not be done without a curate. He cannot afford even a small motor because his children (and they are dears) John and Margaret, Sallie, Edward, and Edith, have kept him busy scraping and grinding for many years. If Smith had not married when he came to that parish thirty years ago he would have missed a great deal of domestic joy, but by being immersed in family cares he has found it impossible to know that other and perhaps deeper joy of a worthy task adequately fulfilled. Of course the loss to the parish, in thirty years of incessant preoccupations with the family which have absorbed the bulk of its rector's time and energy, is simply incalculable. If he had remained unmarried, and missed what he could never have realized in the matters of domestic life, he could have had that curate long ago; he could have studied more, that is, ade- quately. On his salary, two priests, even three at a pinch, could have been accommodated in the rectory, and they could have lived better than the seven members of his family have ever been able to live. It costs much less to keep three men than seven persons, five of them with the variations of growing appetites to say nothing of schooling and shoe leather. And with the many more people who might have 84 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD been brought to know and love God and to active Church membership, it is highly probable that more funds could have been raised. It is also fair to use the imagination upon how much more efficient Smith might have become if he had been obliged to do his pastoral work him- self instead of leaving a great deal of it to his splendid, self -immolating wife. There are also many lines in Smith's kindly, fifty-five year old visage which were not put there by the anxieties of his parochial cure, and we need not blame Smith if he asserts mentally, as he looks fondly at his sweet wife 's lined face and his five robust progeny, that he would not change places with his classmate Robinson, who remained unmar- ried, though a year older, and has built up an enormous work in a Southern Missionary Dis- trict and is about to be made a bishop ! There is Jones and his wife. Mrs. Jones re- tains her attractive appearance, but she has never been strong, and several years ago Jones gave up the ministr^^ so that as a bond salesman he might earn enough to pay her doctor 's bills, live, and gradually reduce his debts. Jenkins, situated likewise, sticks to the work of the ministry for which he was solemnly or- dained, although some of his wife's relatives consider him rather heartless for doing so. He is heavily in debt, and he does his poor, discour- aged best to keep up and not let his parish slip through his fingers. Mr. Bings, the local banker and his senior warden, rules the parish with a rod of iron, and would like to have a younger man who w^ould do more with the young people and preach snappier sermons, as he calls them. CLERICAL MARRIAGE 85 Jenkins is tied hand and foot because Mr. Bings holds the purse-strings in that parish and he could not go elsewhere even if he were invited, because Mattie thinks she does well in the Wil- kinston climate and would not hear of moving to another parish. It is obvious enough why certain laymen with the Bings disposition pre- fer married rectors. Tubbs' wife is of another sort. She has al- ways been very well indeed. She is full of en- ergy and is a very superior person. The mem- bers of the Ladies' Society are a little inclined to resent this but that does not trouble Mrs. Tubbs in the slightest degree. There is no one, really, for her to associate with in Pencilville anj^^ay, and she cannot understand why Gerald should pay so much attention to the people who are always in his mind. Mrs. Tubbs, capable person, is, in fact, a Lady Rector. She knows a great deal more than Tubbs about everything, and whether she is liked or not by the parish- ioners is a matter supremely indifferent to her ; so she says, and it must be true. Although she talks a great deal and sometimes gets ''Mr. Tubbs," as she calls him, into tight places, he is very devoted to her and admires her strength of mind. In fact, Tubbs came close to severing a friendship of many years' standing not long ago when a visiting clergyman told the story of the bishop's wife who wrote to one of her clergy: "We do not ordinarily confirm in Au- gust"; and Mrs. Tubbs spoke what was in her mind and said she would not have that man in her house another time. Gibbs, a born cracker-barrel philosopher, was 86 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD doing really wonderful work in tlie Middle West and was accounted the most effective man in tlie strategic Missionary District where his capabilities had full scope. But Mrs. Gibbs was bent upon coming East, and did so at the first opportunity, bringing Gibbs with her. And now Gibbs, rector of a, small "fashionable" parish, may be seen any day swinging along the well- kept roads of his suburban cure, dodging auto- mobiles, and stretching his legs as he calls it in that smug countryside. Gibbs is tongue-tied in the presence of his smart vestrymen whose cocktails and cigarettes and country club he heartily despises. And while Mrs. Gibbs, happy in her intimacy with the somewhat overdressed wives of these small stock brokers, flits like a pleasant butterfly from tea to dinner, and from dinner to dance at the club, Gibbs, gnawing his weather-hardened lip, ruminates in his slovenly study over his old buckboard and his seven mission stations in Wiscota, and the almost imperceptible, reminiscent odor of roasting prairie chickens. Mrs. Nobbs, too, has the social bee buzzing steadily under her becoming toque. (Even a serious writer may keep abreast of current nomenclature in millinery.) She did not find it necessary to take the long step from West to East, like Mrs. Gibbs, to land her in an environ- ment where she would be properly appreciated. Mrs. Nobbs lived all her own adolescent life in the suburbs. Her particular desire was to get permanently into the great city, tantalizingiy familiar through occasional theatre and supper parties cut short too oft by the necessity of CLERICAL MARRIAGE 87 catching the last train to the paternal villa at Bumblewood. Now, married to Nobbs, curate in a great metropolitan parish, she has daily access to these cates and mummeries, and Nobbs wonders if he can possibly keep the apartment going next year on the same salary which made many a substantial gift to Eleanor possible in the days before his marriage, when he was ensconced in the commodious clergy house at St. Enurchus'. Leaving the temperamental side of our dis- cussion, and delving into the economic aspects of clerical marriage, we discover that one sali- ent fact stands clear. This is that whatever may have been the mind of the Church at the time her clergy were first allowed to marry or remain single as they saw fit, there can be little question (when one looks below the surface) as to her present attitude. Overwhelming evi- dence that it is unfavorable is found when one examines the statistics of clerical support. It is perfectly obvious that the salaries provided for clergymen are large enough, taking an average, to live on with reasonable comfort, with all the necessities and some of the desirabilities of life — as single men. And $974.60 per year, es- pecially in these days, is not enough to support a family in the way a clergyman is expected to live; even though the clergy reverted to the charming XVIII century custom of taking wives from the classes habituated to household labor and accustomed to a relative privation, as were those who sat below the salt and whom the parson married when the squire commanded — a fine old custom with much to commend it to 88 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD penniless seminarians with designs on young gentlewomen without private incomes. The exceptionally large clerical salaries are very small when compared with the financial rewards of the various non-clerical professions and the kind of work done by those socially and educationallj^ the equals of the reverend clergy. And these, such as they are, are rather strictly confined — there are a very few, sporadic exceptions — to great parishes not usually in the pastoral charge of clergy of the ordinary mar- rying age. Moreover, there can be little ques- tion as to the relative effectiveness parochially of, say, five unmarried clergy living together in a clergy house, and two married clergy living in separate establishments. The cost for each combination w^ould be about the same. Therefore, the laity being, of course, pos- sessed of common sense, both the clergyman and the lady with whom he is engaged in a mat- rimonial conspiracy have this dilemma to face when they contemplate getting married: are the laity merely stingy; or, is it the "mind of the Church" that its financial support is in- tended for the needs of unmarried clergy? Either there is a well-nigh universal conspiracy to starve out the clergy and their families — which is patently absurd — or the facts compel the admission that the Church does not want her clergy to be married or she would provide support for their families and take chances on getting Lady Rectors and Di-Rectors mixed in with the charming ladies who usually preside over rectorial and curatial dinners, lunches and breakfasts. CLERICAL MARRIAGE 89 The writer is not unmindful of the Blind God, or, if a Christian designation be preferred, of that which St. Paul intimates rhapsodically to be greater than the mighty virtuesi of faith and hope. True love transcends material con- siderations, is independent of reason, and ele- vates the lives it touches with its caress to planes suffused with a glory as of perennial sunrise. And yet — it is peculiarly irritating to contemplate the spectacle of an engaged semi- narian who, having kept the faith, comes near the end of his course, and dickers wildly for a job that will support a wife! One feels that those boys lack discipline. When St. Paul said, "Let the deacon be the husband of one wife," he meant one wife. He desired that the clergy should never take advantage of the legal oppor- tunity to be polygamous in an oriental environ- ment Avhere such procedure was rather freely countenanced. Propinquity and the will-to-love are the fac- tors which lead up to a marriage. Both can be controlled, as being in a given place and any ordinary state of mind may be, rather easily, controlled. Intending Benedicks and young (and all) ladies who aspire to preside over rectory tables and nurseries might well ask themselves pertinent questions like these: Is it fair for me to subject the woman I want to marry to what is in store for her? Is it wise for me to risk diminishing the pastoral effec- tiveness of the man I want to marry? The point of view which must have emerged as being held by the writer is sometimes thought of as a selfish one. But really it is not. It 90 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD should be thought of, rather, as one of sacrifice. It is self-sacrifice not for a profession but for a cause. One balances the cause against what one desires as a private individual — in this case, marriage. It is, of course, by the principle of sacrifice applied, that great steeps are sur- mounted, great obstacles overcome, great works accomplished. Sacrifice involves mysterious compensations, and these leaven a worthy life lived for a great cause. Thus, by putting away pride, a workable humility is attained ; by cast- ing off reposeful ease, the hard effectiveness of mind and soul and body are gained; by the deliberate sacrifice of domestic joy in the mari- tal state, the ends of God are often best served. These considerations are presented because, although they are related to a vital, indeed, a burning question, they are rarely discussed. And they ought to be discussed. It ought to be clear enough that while a clergyman is morally as well as canonically free to marry, too many clergy marry as a matter almost of routine. In particular the apparent feeling among many preparing for the ministry that ordination and marriage normally go hand in hand is on its merits to be deprecated. Very many married clergymen would have been more profitable servants if they had been willing to sacrifice domestic life and give themselves unreservedly to the work of their vocation, exercising deliber- ately the principle of self-sacrifice in view of the fact that ordination does not expunge the qualities of manhood, and that marriage is the normal life for a normal man. It is certain that the laity as a whole are not stingy in the CLERICAL MARMAGE 91 matter of clerical support, as evidenced by their enormous subscription of some eight million dollars to the Church Pension Fund, but one is forced to the conclusion that the standard of clerical support abundantly confirms the con- tention that the Church as a whole does not desire a married clergy. Public utterance on this subject is usually avoided for the obvious reason that few care to risk getting themselves disliked. When the "anti" side is presented it is usually by one of that inconspicuously tiny minority in the Church which holds to the Spiritual Argument, and whose contentions are regarded as the ful- rainations of medisevalists, hence negligible. More has been written and spoken on the other side. Many times, for example, it has been alleged, and taken for granted, too, that the Church would have been better off and the course of human progress advanced if the West- ern clergy had been enabled through many gen- erations to bequeath offspring to the Church and the world, to inherit their carefully segre- gated culture, and hand on their worthy tradi- tion. But this quite gratuitously assumes that the early and mediaeval priesthood would have possessed, as men of family, the great tradition and carefully nurtured gifts which were the very fruit of that self-sacrifice which kept them unmarried ; the great tradition and gifts which blossomed forth in the lives and influence of the pastors, saints, and doctors of the past. It also overlooks the great army of spiritual progeny begotten by those who devoted their entire en- ergies to the service of God. Also it ignores 92 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD atavism, which may account for the proverbial "cussedness" of minister's sons! The writer is also inclined strongly to agree with those who believe that the women are the chief sufferers in clerical marriages. Cer- tainly if selfishness is to be spoken of at all, it is extremely selfish for a young clergyman without material prospects other than the very moderate financial expectations germane to his vocation to ask a young woman with character to share with him certain poverty and a sordid struggle, thereby estopping her from an alli- ance with some layman who could enable her to live her life in normal surroundings. If both parties to a matrimonial engagement, clearly understanding what is in store for them" are utterly willing to make this kind of sacrifice and equally unwilling to make the other kind, perhaps the only consideration which can be presented to them is the hope that in fulfilling their own wishes they may not too greatly hin- der a cause of infinitely greater importance than their own personal happiness in each other — the cause of Him Who subordinated all else to the task of saving humanity, and Who per- sisted until He met His death upon that cross which has become the symbol of the highest self-sacrifice. VII CEEEMONIAIi IN THE AnGLICAN ReVIVAL There is no lack of persons who deprecate altogether any discussion of ceremonial, seeing therein nothing but a waste of time. But if the Holy Scriptures are in any sense the word of God, such a view must be wrong, because much of the text of Holy Scripture is devoted to ceremonial directions. Moreover, mankind's estimate of its importance may be discovered in any lodge room or at any civilized dinner table. Everyone capable of self-expression is a ceremonialist of one kind or another, from the bushman standing motionless on one leg to the Caucasian gentleman who removes his hat when he meets a woman he knows in a public place. It is only when religious ceremonial is in ques- tion that there ever seems to be any question about the matter whatever; and perhaps the most curious bit of psychology connected with the question is found in the fact that those who most loudly aver that it is of no importance, anyhow, are the very same who throw them- selves most vigorously into any campaign against it. It is a commonplace of recent history that the leaders of the Oxford Movement placed no emphasis whatever on the outward and visible. They laid afresh the foundations of most that 93 94 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD is soundest in Anglicanism to-day, but they for- bore to cultivate the art of public worship, and these leaders have always had, and still have, a following which was and is in accord with their teaching, but which was and is so conserv- ative as to be chary of allowing their doctrinal catholicity to show in any overt act. This ultra- conservative churchmanship is likely to be scholarly, but the results of its scholarship seem never to have advanced beyond the academic stage; while at its worst, it is a kind of book- case religion which has little effect upon the lay people who happen to live under its aegis. It appears to be a kind of complacent, intellectual position, strongly held, but rarely or never used. The effort to get into general acceptance and practice the principles of the Book of Common Prayer which were forced into recognition by the Oxford Movement is one well worth making. These principles as well as the principle of uni- formity of practice have received great empha- sis from the war. Acceptance has been secured for auricular confession, reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and prayers for the dead among Churchmen of various stripes and schools who had been previously aligned against these practices in the bitter controversies which only yesterday raged about them. The need for such practices is not confined to the American and British Churchmen who carried on the war as members of tlie military and naval forces of their countries ; it is being increasingly felt by the wliole Anglican Communion. Therefore, CEREMONIAL 95 the ground is happily shifting away from acad- emic discussion and written controversy. There is apparent a strong desire, as yet in great part unexpressed outwardly, among an ever-increasing number of the Church's people tliat the Catholic truth, so long obscured, sliould be brought to light and translated out of acad- emic expression into parochial practice. It is felt by many w^ho have never been taught the whole truth that the whole truth should be pre- sented to all. They think that it will, if given the opportunity, fill the hearts and meet the urgent needs of people who are really weary of the negative and partial systems to which they have of necessity become habituated, but of which they are far from enamoured. The mere use of the phrase, "our incomparable liturgy," no longer thrills the average Angli- can ; if he is to get a thrill, he must be allowed to see the wonders of that incomparable liturgy and to take his awed part in its highest and lo»veliest expression. The negative and partial systems have sur- vived at all only because of inertia, or because of the deadlj^ power of that tradition which holds that change, any change, might offend someone. That change for the better, even if necessary without regard to anyone's private prejudices or preferences, might be pleasing to God, is an opinion which has been very slow in laying hold upon many leaders in the Anglican Communion. The obvious catholicity of the Book of Common Prayer greatly needs popu- larization, and to effect this, a certain uniform- ity of practice in public worship is clearly the 96 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD first essential. The widespread neglect of the art of ecclesiastical ceremonial is the chief con- tributory factor to the present condition of the Anglican Communion in this respect, because it is through the ceremonies of the Church that the Church expresses her liturgical mind. Many dissatisfied Churchmen, having studied somewhat the Church's position, and realizing the insufficiency or the destructiveness of the churchmanship to which they have been sub- jected, make the considerable temperamental leap required and become members of the near- est available parish of the "advanced" type. Others , who realize the inadequacy of the churchly system in which they have been nur- tured are deterred from making such a change for family or other similar sentimental reasons, but when one puts himself into the place of these, it is easily seen why such good people remain where they are, parochially, despite their dissatisfaction: It is because they are convinced that the other kind of parish has about it something Roman! The tales of Ro- man Catholics who have gone ignorantly into " High- Anglican " Churches and not known the difference, laughable as they appear, have, nev- ertheless, their substantial foundation in fact. This is entirely because of outward appear- ances. What is most obvious is how the divine liturgy is celebrated, the altar arranged, and things done in general. When the generation which followed the orig- inal Oxford reformers began to build Churches — such as Mr. Hubbard's princely gift to God of St. Alban's, Holborn — and to put into prac- CEREMONIAL 97 tice the doctrines of the movement, there were few sources available from which they could have derived the ceremonial through which to express that teaching. It was felt that there was nothing else to do but to approximate the usage of the Church of Borne, adapting this to the liturgy as set forth in the Book of Common prayer. Humanly, it is easily understood why there was a storm of protest. Even the un- speakable Kensit is explicable when we remem- ber the shock which this "Romanizing" caused to be felt throughout Anglican circles, insignifi- cant as were the detailed practices so adopted. The one source from which the ''Puseyites" — as Maehonochie and the other members of this group were, most irrationally, named — could have derived a fairly pure Anglican usage was the Coronation Service ; but there was no coro- nation until many years later, when Queen Victoria's death brought Edward VII to the throne; and presumably it was never thought of in this connection. In the United States, the Roman Catholic "Baltimore Directory" and later the "Ritual Notes," published in England, formed the chief sources for the ceremonial inaugurated by the followers of the Oxford reformers, until "The Ceremonies of the Mass" by McGarvey and Burnett made its appearance in 1905. The authors, both first-rate liturgical scholars, made their researches among the works of the fore- most liturgiologists. They worked out in detail the application of the best and soundest known ceremonial, in principle and practice, to the Communion Office of the American Book of 98 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD Common Prayer, producing a scholarly hand- book of directions. This book, published under the auspices of the Clerical Union for the Main- tenance and Defense of Catholic Principles, put a stamp of quasi-official approval upon a type of ceremonial which was much like the modern Roman ceremonial as codified under Piux IX, because worked out from the same sound sources; and it has done much, without any question, to crystallize this usage in the Ameri- can Church. Now it is a fact that apart from the causes, or from the psychology involved, there is among people not of the Papal obedience a very mde- spread and deep-seated dislike for, and preju- dice against, the Roman Church. This dislike, founded in certain well-known reasons, is, like most similar conditions of mind, unreasoning, and is very likely to be stupid, and stupidly expressed. Because both Pius IX and the for- mulators of the accepted ceremonial usage had access to the same sources, the ceremonies evolved naturally and inevitably have much in common ; and because of this fact, the stupidity just referred to was unable to discriminate be- tween sound ceremonial usage as such, and the fact of the similarity. Much suspicion and dis- like was foste|:ed by this lack of discrimination on the part of the critics, whose proudest boast was to the effect that they did not understand ceremonial and did not want to understand it! It is as though a large portion of the American people should object to the United States mili- tary and naval forces wearing uniforms, be- cause the German forces are accustomed to CEREMONIAL 99 wear very similar uniforms. Adverse critics of Anglican revival and self-expression have found common ground for their attacks in this accident of similarity, and the observer may readily perceive how in this matter a common ground of ignorance and stupidity makes, like politics, strange bedfellows. Thus, Roman Catholics habitually scoff at what they say we have * ' stolen ' ' from them ; sectarian people are supplied with a never-failing fund of material for drastic criticism; ''Modernists" sneer; ''Evangelicals" hold up pious hands in horror; and ' ' Connecticut Churchmen ' ' are certain that the atmosphere of the "advanced" parish is much too rarefied for them! Although the first edition of The Rev. Percy Dearmer's "Parson's Handbook" appeared in April, ] 899, it was some years before it became very well known in the United States. Even now it is not widely known. Anglicans who realize the very great importance of sound cere- monial are pretty thoroughly committed to the standardized type, and even though the Dear- mer ceremonies had been of such nature as to appeal to them, these were not known in America until well after the McGarvey and Burnett ceremonies had taken a firm hold on the practice of the "advanced" parishes. Prob- ably no advocate of Dr. Dearmer's system would attempt or even wish to have it replace the ceremonies now generally in use, which the Anglican Communion has an unquestionable right to use, and for which right many saintly men have endured bitter persecution. But there is, on the other hand, something 100 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD to be said about the common attitude towards the book in which the classical Anglican cere- monies are set forth by Dr. Dearmer. This is usually dismissed by its many critics as the work of a clever scholar which is ruined and rendered academic and impracticable by the author's pronounced archaeological obsession. But even one holding such a view must admit two things, viz. : that Dr. Dearmer has put for- ever beyond question the legitimacy of Angli- cans in their services making use of every requisite of Catholic ceremonial ; and that on grounds drastically conservative, Anglican, and even anti-Roman. There can never again be any serious question, on the part of any person capable of understanding a finished demonstra- tion, about the facts of Anglican ceremonial, because Dr. Dearmer has set them out from exclusively Anglican sources. And except for differences in petto (e. g., the method of swing- ing a censer, and similar matters), this classical Anglican ceremonial is, in every salient partic- ular, concerned with the same ornaments and the same actions, and the same materials used in connection with the ceremonial of the "ad- vanced" parishes. The differences are alto- gether differences in details; the legitimacy of using lights, incense, and all the other ''points" of ceremonial in an Anglican Church is demon- strated. The second point is this: that Dr. Dearmer has supplied, through recourse to archaeology (though not having to go back very far as an archaeologist would count the time), a system so almost aggressively "Anglican" that logically CEREMONIAL 101 it should appeal to all those who dislike the ceremonial in current use (because it seems to them "Eoman"). Many of these desire im- provement in ceremonial matters because they have realized how very destructive and un- worthy is the prevalent carelessness in such matters outside the field covered by the "ad- vanced" parishes. In "moderate" and "low" parishes, it is submitted, Dr. Dearmer's cere- monial, if adopted, and adapted, would consti- tute a really enormous improvement over the long-settled state of muddle about public wor- ship which prevails in these parishes, wherein ceremonial has not been eliminated, but rather mixed up, wrongly emphasized, and execrably performed. Dr. Dearmer's recourse to archae- ,'ology is, of course, a necessity, as in the case of anyone who would re-state and codify the Anglican pre-Reformation customs and prac- tices. He resorts to it, perforce, in his desire to conserve and revive a liturgical heritage which had long been obscured by the degenerate type of services which the XVIII Century brought to their high point of meretriciousness and which the "safe" parishes have kept em- balmed. Dr. Dearmer has painstakingly ex- amined the various sources and authorities on the Anglican Rite. He makes his chief appeal not primarily in the matter of ceremonial (which is really incidental to his purpose) but against the muddle of that degenerate Churchmanship just referred to, which has starved the souls of its adherents this long time into a state of negative respectability. His outstanding pleas are in favor of the reunion of the Church with 102 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD art, the sweeping away of cobwebs, the empha- sizing of salient things, and the restoration and renewal of spiritual living. The kind of services commended by Dr. Dear- mer to the Church are simple, reverent and dig- inified. Their use would provide much aid to worship, and should do much to destroy the killing tediousness of the cut and dried ' ' Morn- ing Service" in backw^ard parishes. It wholly replaces with a cogent scheme the liturgical improprieties which have persisted to absurdity in all too many places. It is an elastic, homo- geneous, and complete system intended for practical use; and it is armed at every point against the sneers of our Roman brethren and the persistent state of disturbance among cer- tain of our own people based on the supposition that Anglicans, other than the "Morning Prayer" kind, are on the high road to Rome! The people who need such a system of wor- ship and parochial conduct the most, do not, in general, know^ anything about it. It deserves popularization by study and experiment. There remain two jjoints, one of particular, the second of general bearing in the ceremonial question, which need clearing up. The first is that the Dearmer system of ecclesiastical effi- ciency is too elaborate for practical use. This is an erroneous view. It rests upon the fact that Dr. Dearmer has collected ancl made avail- able so vast an amount of material that it could not, possibly, be used all together at one time and in one place. But Dr. Dearmer points this out himself in the introduction to "The Par- son's Handbook." He mentions the wealth of CEREMONIAL 103 material, and speaks clearly about how to use from it what is needed in any particular place. The second point concerns the common mis- understanding of what is meant by the term: "Western Use." In its large sense, this ex- pression may be taken to mean the general line of development taken in the ecclesiastical West, and as distinct from ''Eastern Use." In this sense, the term "Western Use" would include all the various ceremonial uses of the West, and vary internally in point of periodic develop- ment, as well as in the details of the various minor differences national and otherwise; and, in this light, "Dearmerism" would be a "West- ern Use" equally with the strict Modern Roman use, and the use in general practice among "High Church Anglicans." But in its stricter meaning, the term has an entirely different con- notation. Too often it is spoken of as though there were only one "Western Use" and that the Modern Roman. There are, of course, at least two "Western Uses" in this sense of the term, one being the use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. But it should be under- stood that not only is the term "Western Use" incorrectly used as an euphemistic synonpn for the Modern Roman, but that there are numer- ous other Roman uses besides the one that those who favor this term have in mind. In fact, in order to witness what is commonly meant by "Western Use" in the Roman Cath- olic Communion itself, one m.ust go to the Churches of the Jesuits, Redemptorists, or Ora- torians; to certain of the newer Churches in France; to parish Churches in Rome and cer- 104 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD tain other towns and cities in Italy, Germany and Austria, or to the Churches in England and the United States. Even within the compara- tively narrow field of the strictly modern, official usage of the Roman Church, there will be found two distinct kinds of ceremonial: that of the popular types of Churches just indicated; and the more restrained usage of the greater Ro- man basilican Churches.* Then, besides the strictly modern Roman Rite, and in addition to the Book of Common Prayer, there are in current use in the West several other rites, and these not the least cor- rect and desirable on their intrinsic merits. Thus, throughout the great Archdiocese of Mi- lan, and even beyond its borders, the ancient Ambrosian Rite serves more than a million souls. In the great diocese of Lyons, the Lyons Rite continues to be used. In certain places in Spain the Mozarabic Rite is still current. In Portugal (on hearsay) the Rite of Braga is still used. The older orders, Carthusian, Domini- can, and Cistercian, all use their proper rites. There remain, then, not only the various cere- monial systems which accompany these rites, but there are more than these in the heart of the Papal obedience. In Spain, despite the modernized text of the service books, the old Spanish ceremonial remains in use to so wide an extent as to justify the guess that it is some- what better known and more familiar to clergy and people than the official Modern Roman use. * Vid., e. g., Modern Western Use, F. C. Eeles, in Alcuin Club Collections, No. XIX, p. 25.— A. R. Mowbray & Co. CEREMONIAL 105 This Spanish ceremonial, like that accompany- ing the Dominican, Carthusian, and Amobro- sian Rites, is curiously like the classical Angli- can Use as set forth by Dr. Dearmer. Two women, one a Swedish Lutheran, the other a Czecho-Slovakian Roman Catholic, once told the writer, without collusion, and within a week of each other, that the services conducted in a ' ' Dearmerite " parish in the United States so closely approximated their own services as to be almost indistinguishable from them to the worshipper. Local uses also remain in Venice, in parts of Germany and Austria, in a number of French Churches, and in Belguim. These are all ** liv- ing" uses, and it may be said that an under- standing of the diversities of usage under the Papal obedience, which the survival and even the popularity of these various uses clearly in- dicate, ought to do something towards dissi- pating the intellectual mirage of Roman uni- formity which has deceived so many dissatisfied Anglicans. Such, a view of modern Roman practice in the conduct of public worship might also do another thing. It might, when made in its proper set- ting — in a parish Church wherein is revealed the craftsmanship of the machine embroiderer, the tinsmith, the housepainter, and the artful worker in plaster images — also do something towards demonstrating how much better Angli- cans manage such things than Romans, at least in this country. The ''High Anglican" Church is the school, par excellence, for the artistically aspiring Roman Master of Ceremonies, who un- 106 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD doubtedly goes away from an Anglican High Mass in despair, greatly edified! With respect to what has been alluded to as the strictly Modern Roman, official usage, which is due to Pius IX, this much may be said : Pius IX was a person of isms, and his chief ism was ultramontanism. His panacea was the institu- tion of a rigid, external uniformity in the Churches which acknowledged his sway. It was the applicalion of this panacea which introduced to the Roman Catholic w^orld the enforcement of the modern, official, Roman usage. Pius IX had a powerful grip upon the Church in France. He was able to impose his will in this matter upon certain Churches and orders, but unable to force the hand of those above noted as still carrying on their traditional rites and the cere- monial proper to these. In France he managed to destroy the diocesan uses, almost entirely, and the French Church has been neither health- ier nor happier since. The theological learn- ing of this Church is no longer pre-eminent and of w^orld-wide renown. Individuality has been crowded out of the French Church, and the irrepressible national feeling of the people, turned out of its normal ecclesiastical channel for self-expression, found an outlet in the bitter attacks upon religion which resulted in the Con- tinental Modernism so oppressive to the souls of the later popes. With such an example in mind it is not hard to see how very disastrous insistence upon a rigid uniformity might become. But, bad as that is, it can hardly be much worse than the intrenched deprecation of uniformity which in CEREMONIAL 107 certain Anglican circles regards almost any suggestion to improve upon the current state of ceremonial confusion as a calamity! The accepted Catholic type of ceremonial in An- glicanism is sufficiently well established and elastic and uniform to need no word of com- mendation here. But those who are unacquaint- ed with the necessary technicalities of this im- portant subject, and who nevertheless realize the reverential, didactic, and strategic import- ance of proper ceremonial, and who are unwill- ing for whatever reason to take up that which is currently accepted as the Anglican norm, might do much worse than to turn to the Dearmer directions for the fulfilling of their need. vni Work Among Foreigners No Churchman can fail in these days to be enormously interested in the question of how the Church to which we owe our allegiance shall meet the problem which the great influx of for- eigners into the United States has brought be- fore us. In more than one way this is th& Church problem of the day. Many othQr ques- tions must be faced and are being faced with varying degrees of success, but this is a pecu- liarly insistent one. The question is no longer : *' Shall we do sometliing for the foreigners?" Rather it takes the more advanced form : ' ' How shall we take care of the foreigners!" Statis- tics, especially in New England, show a ratio of increase which is startling when examined for the first time. New England has already become New Europe, and the rest of the country is not far behind. Indifference to the problem is suicidal. In actual personal dealing with the foreign element in any parish, a task which is still to be begun by many, and which is shrunk from because it appears new and strange and un- familiar, a great deal of unnecessary panic can be saved if the uncertain parson or Church worker will remember how rapidly foreigners' children become Americanized. One has only 108 WORK AMONG FOBEIGNERS 109 to look about to see the children and grand- children of uncouth peasants newly landed twenty to thirty years ago, taking prizes in high school, delivering one 's groceries, playing half- back on the local college eleven, or ringing up fares on the trolley. "Foreign "-named good Americans are thick on the country's honor rolls. The difficulty of approach is greatly exagger- ated in many minds, just as the difficulties of a missionary's approach to feathered savages which characterized one's adolescent concep- tion of that problem, lingers, it may be, up to the very point of making such an approach oneself — through the medium of a matter of fact Mission Board and under actual circum- stances almost humdrum. True, it requires of a certain kind of man a certain kind of courage to "go down into ' ' the polyglot foreign quarter of a moderate sized city and make converts, but the actual work of fitting foreigners into the mould of the Church usually works out as a less direct and less distracting task. Two points must be kept in mind by the priest who would do his duty by a community in his pastoral charge in which there are foreigners to reach. These two con- siderations tend to neutralize each other, and call for a sense of balance in dealing with peo- ple of alien traditions. First, the foreigner of any racial stripe possesses certain traditional characteristics which should be understood as well as possible by the person who desires to win him for God and the Church. Thus, Italians do not like men, even priests (some of them will lay especial emphasis on priests in this con- no THE GARDEN OF THE LORD nection), to call upon their womenfolk in their absence. Syrians expect to extend a kind of oriental courtesy which is more or less elaborate, and very apt to be almost ritualistic, and they expect reciprocation. The honored guest in a Syrian abode must play the game. Bohemians, especially in country places, are suspicious of strangers who make free with short cuts over the precious, fenced-in land. Racial character- istics, broadly speaking, must be more or less understood, and the pastor who would not block his own Avay to the regard of these people as he goes in quest of wandering sheep for God's fold, must have a sympathetic understanding. Secondly, foreigners, so to speak, do not want to be treated as foreigners. Racial peculiarities apart, they feel instinctively that they are at least beginning to be Americans when once they have broken the national tie and ventured out into the land of promise. They even frequently have managed to acquire exaggerated or dis- torted ideas of American freedom and equality, and they resent, sometimes almost subcon- sciously, being regarded as alien to the thought and custom of their adopted land. Between this Scylla and Charybdis the per- son who aspires to do "work among foreign- ers" must steer his course. The ice of first acquaintance being once broken, his task is easier, for he will, if he be interested and in- telligent, rapidly acquire necessary knowledge of national or racial characteristics by actual experience, and at the same time he will be building up his friendship with his new acquain- tances and convincing them, if he is wise, that WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 111 he regards them precisely as he does any other friends or parishioners. The Church, when adequately presented, nat- urally attracts foreigners, because the prepon- derating majority of Christian foreigners are of either the Catholic or the Lutheran tradition, and to both these groups the Church makes a natural appeal. Her ordered service and liturgical spirit appeals to the Lutheran, while to the foreigner of Catholic tradition who has iiot made connection with the Roman Catholic parish in his new home, there is much, if not everything, of the very best in his own churchly knowledge, ready for him to enter into and worship with and live by. It would appear that some of the methods of approach which seem to appeal to many who are interested in how to meet the problem made by the presence of foreigners are hope- lessly inadequate. Chief among these is the naked idea of '* social service." It is argued, of course, that social service work among for- eigners is excellent as a means of approach, a good strategic movement of the Church to at- tract those of foreign birth or the children of such persons, and that, having attracted them, the next step is to bring them into the Church on the basis of aroused interest in the organiza- tion wdiich has been doing for them what it could in the way of supplying amusement and instruction, and with all the force of the confi- dence inspired in them through the interest dis- played in their welfare. But here again it must be kept in mind that foreigners not only possess distinctive characteristics but also that they 112 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD rapidly acquire the American point of view. In the winter of 1914-1915 the writer attended a conference of Churchmen, chiefly clergy, at which work among foreigners was authorita- tively discussed, and in particular had im- pressed upon him the statements of two rectors of parishes in large cities, each of whom had studied and worked over the foreign problem for many years. One of these clergymen has made a conspicuous success of his work among foreigners, the other has largely failed in his. The clergyman who has been pre-eminently suc- cessful approaches all his work from the Cath- olic point of view. His panacea in dealing with foreigners was revealed at the meeting. He said that, making reasonable allowance for racial characteristics, he aimed to treat all his foreign-born parishioners exactly as he would treat anyone else. The other clergyman, a '* modernist" of pronounced tendencies, said that he pinned his faith to social service and exact study of the racial characteristics, and of these he enumerated a remarkably well pre- pared list. He paid special attention to the Italians among whom much of his foreign work was being done, and if he had considered that his pro and con list of Italian characteristics was exhaustive, he came very near the truth in that supposition. He analyzed the Southern European character in masterly fashion, but in spite of this he concluded his address with an expression of regret that after so much care- fully planned work, he must admit that very little had been accomplished. The one point which he left out of consideration was that the WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 113 people with whom he was trying to work have had a continuous tradition of Catholicism for almost exactly nineteen hundred years. When the social service efforts of an organ- ization interested in foreigners — and especially in those of the Catholic tradition, as Italians — are understood by the beneficiaries to proceed from a religious society of Protestants, it is inevitable that their suspicions should be aroused; and wdien that organization is the Church, allowing the beneficiaries to suspect a Protestant source of activity is only the plac- ing of a rather unnecessary and very difficult stumbling block in the way of conversion, which is the chief, if not the sole legitimate end of the preliminary work of such social service. Here then, appears a means for dealing with foreigners of the quantitatively overwhelming Catholic tradition which in reason and because of common sense and practicality if for no other motives, should not be neglected. If the catholicity of the Church means anything, it means that the Church is an R\]-inclusive organ- ism. That it is not aW-including can hardly be questioned. If the catholicity of the Church — as the writer has heard more than one, even of the clergy, assert — means that it is all-includ- ing, then there is not, and never has been, a Catholic Church. Nor indeed will there ever be a Catholic Church Militant until every human being alive on earth shall have been numbered among those who have accepted the faith and been baptized into it. That the Church, how- ever, is Catholic because all-inclusive is a position it has maintained since St. Paul settled 114 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD that question and made it clear that all persons without distinction of race might accept Christ as their Saviour and be baptized. The Church is Catholic therefore on the broadest basis because it teaches all truth and is by its very nature capable of taking into itself all kinds of people, black, white, and yellow, red and brown, high and low, wheat and tares ; and its task is to mould these people into men and women acceptable in the sight of God, to feed their souls, and to make them capable of working out their destiny of ultimate union with God. If the Anglican Communion is nothing more than a rather unwieldly Protestant denomina- tion, it is difficult to see why it should continue its existence at all, because on all sides of it and in many dresses there are religious bodies very much more truly representative of the general principles of Protestantism. And that Avork on a Protestant basis among foreigners who have the Catholic tradition brings out in them their worst characteristics is reasonably obvious to all who will examine such work. To be more specific, the foreigner with such tradition in his blood and bones, who is, along with this good tradition, racially endowed with the instincts of Machiavelli — ready to lie, will- ing to acquire what he can get his hands on, suspicious , trained in duplicity — views that wdiich names itself ''Protestant" as a thing in which he has, naturally, neither part nor lot, and inevitably he simply takes what is offered in the way of material advantages, but normally goes no farther. Nowhere in the modern world, recent history WOKK AMONG FOEEIGNERS 115 gives clearest evidence, is there more pro- nounced hostility to papal absolutism than among the Italian people themselves. Great numbers of these people live at our very doors, to all intents and purposes unchurched. The wretched history of Roman tyranny in modern times is the life history of these Italians. All iof them know this history because they are part of it. Many of them are intelligent and even intellectual. They know about Minocchi, for example, and why he left the Church. They know how the modernists of the city of Rome felt when they turned with acclamation to their Jewish mayor with an address of congratula- ion after his anti-clerical speech of September 20, 1910. Some of them have read the words of that address, where it said: *'The Vatican, which has stifled . . . Christianity, has no right to speak in the name of the Church, because the best part of the Church in Italy has no wish to co-operate in the papal program. ' ' * These people look upon the political papacy and the curial autocracy as subversive of liber- ty, enlightenment, and religion. But they love the Church. They are, above all things. Cath- olics; beyond all things they fear and dislike Protestantism. And when anyone, however desirous of holding out the hand of Christian fellowship to these childern of an ancient civili- zation who flock to our hills and farms and factory towns and great cities, goes to them in the name of the despised Protestant religion, * Quoted by Sullivan in his Letters of a Modernist, to His Holiness, Pius X. 116 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD he commits a strategic blunder the consequences of which are so far-reaching as to bring tears to the eyes of anyone who knows even a little of this fundamental trait of the Italian. The opportunity of the Anglican Church in America for work among foreigners is unique. And the factor which makes it unique is that we possess something which we can present which meets with acceptance, where tried, at face value, other things being equal. This something is a Catholic Church, Catholic funda- mentally, Catholic in theology, in doctrine, in everything in fact, except, as in many instances, the outward and visible signs of the catholicity inherent in it. It is, so to speak, "just what foreigners want," but they cannot, in the nature of tilings, know tliis unless they are shown it clearly, unmistakably. And they cannot be shown by means of social service alone, however well meant, nor by the outward appearance and terminology of Protestantism. It is high time that we realized two things: first, that most of the people we have to deal with as new citizens and as prospective Church- men — our future source of supply in many and widespread centers of population — are not seeking in the Anglican Church for an attract- ive Protestantism, but rather for something which is truly Catholic within and without ; but not of the papal obedience, dominated by a crafty hegemony and largely devoted to exploi- tation ; and that if such a Church as they desire is offered to them they will normally be eager to grasp what is offered. Secondly we would do well to realize, especially in our work among WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 117 the foreign-born and their descendants, that the practice of a timid moderation which has held us back, corporately, ought to be dropped once for all. This policy has kept us back from our normal expansion; it lays us open to the imputation of ''Anglican pusillanimity" which our religious neighbors are not slow to bestow ; it has kept us from openly and honestly pro- claiming ourselves for what we are — not a hy- brid, a hodge-podge of conflicting views which will not even emulsify into a reasonable com- prehensiveness — ^but as what we know ourselves to be, God's Catholic Church for the English- speaking peoples. When we do that corporate- ly, we cannot keep ourselves from growing rap- idly into a position of commanding respect and influence, and we shall not totter along on our tracks. The way to accomplish this corporate desideratum is to assert it; and so we shall, God grant, lead these brothers from beyond the seas out of their muddle of papal obscurantism into the clear light of God's truth, the truth of the Catholic Church of these United States, the land of promise and of hope. IX The Implications of an Ancient Rhyme There is always a certain element of truth in proverbs or similar sayings because these are statements of crystallized opinion, and an opin- ion held so widely as to result in a proverb is extremely likely to be near the centre of things. Such a statement is that rather thin, doggerel triplet wliich attempts to summarize the characteristics of the three Anglican schools of churchmanship : ''High and Crazy; Low and lazy; Broad and hazy. ' ' That brilliant oddity, Ronald A. Hilary Knox, ex-priest of the Church of England, and now of the papal obedience, in an article written for the Dnblin Revieiv shortly after his seces- sion, in the summer of 1918, pointed out that there are, actually, no less than seven varieties of Anglican churchmanship. As we gaze about us and take thought, we can hardly help finding that Knox erred on the side of conservatism. We wonder why, if he were going to apply his firework mind to a critical summarizing of the Anglican schools of thought, he should have stopped at expanding the traditional number 118 IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 119 three into the mj^stical number seven. "VVe can- not help thinking that such limitation is alto- gether too conservative; but healthful reaction brings us, like a bee to the landing-board, to the conclusion that, generally speaking there are three, and just three such schools, and that the triplet lines ending in ''azy" describe them pretty well. Really deep thought will be likely to confirm this view. Now there are certain dangers in telling the naked truth, as everyone knoAvs. And these dangers are not limited to the social errors involved, nor to the apparent absurdities which this unfortunate habit so frequently lands one in. There are the subtler dangers, such as are being so constantly braved b}^ an incurable truth-teller like Mr. Chesterton: the danger of being thought a purveyor of comic articles ; the danger of not being taken seriously ; the danger of being considered insincere ; the great danger of degenerating in the public mind, into a dealer in paradoxes, for it is not until one gets down to an apparent contradiction (as that great teacher Brooke Foss Wiestcott used to warn his pupils), that you can be reasonably certain of being on the right track. Even a clever essayist like Mr. Chesterton loses heavily because the reading public — even essay readers — can be quite readily shocked and surprised by the appearance of naked truth. Therefore a clumsy person must make his at- tempt at telling the truth with a foregone cer- tainty that his excursion into that fantastic realm where things are stated as they are, will be over a stonv road. 120 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD It seems to the writer that the words crazy, lazy, and hazy do pretty well describe the in- ternal situation with which we have to deal in that portion of the Holy Catholic Church legally described as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Prob- ably everyone who has ever heard this simple rlijTne was at once impressed with the fact that it did describe the three kinds of churchman- ship. Probably every reader will agree with the writer that the author of this jingle was a person of insight who knew what was apt and what was meet. So far, good. But to look ahead and face the results of applying these tests of character, crazy, lazy, and hazy, in a serious and truthful way — ah! that is a horse of another color. We begin, then, with the high and crazy. Crazy here, obviously means not so much lop- sided, as in ''crazy quilt," or as the word would be applied to a scarecrow with its inherent lack of symmetry, or to a very old house which has wilted and fallen out of plumb so as to present many irregular angularities, as it does dement- ed, possessed, queer in the head. The plain in- tention of the author of the line of verse is that High churclimen are not queer in their angles or physical postures, but queer in their rela- tion to what approximated the established order in the days when these lines were given to the world. In other words, a High churchman is a kind of fanatic. This is true, and may all who are denominated High thank God devoutly for it ! The High churchman is, plainly, a different kind of churchman from his lazy and hazy fel- IMPLICATIONS OF A EHYME 121 low Anglicans. He goes at the things concerned in churchmanship — his worship particularly — in a manner which is unusual and hence comic. Therefore he is crazy. He does not jog along in the cut-and-dried, traditional Anglicanism of the eighteenth century; he desires a restoration to the activities and practices of an era which was not cut-and-dried, and as this appears new and strange, the High churchman, who for some inexplicable reason likes it that way, is crazy. He rakes up a number of usages which it would be much less trouble to let alone, and when he has them resurrected and in working order they resemble somewhat, on the surface, the outward and visible performances of those ir- rational and inexplicable Romanists, and clear- ly he is crazy. He breaks away from the wor- ship of a comfortable, good-natured deity, who has grown rather sleepy, and who is perfectly satisfied, of course, with the old cut-and-dried mumble of services, and the old, easy-going semi-disregard of himself, and the entirely cut- and-dried, respectable, middle-class lives of his mundane adherents ; all of which is a great deal of trouble and quite unnecessary; and so the High churchman is crazy. He substitutes a quite different God as the object of his worship, he frames his life upon the principle of union with Him, he is abundantly careful to do Him honor by frequent, elaborate, and appropriate services, lives lived in a carefully preserved state of grace, costly fabrics and furniture as well as growing good taste in houses of wor- ship; he allies himself with the long-neglected 122 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD arts; he goes to work for God — indubitably lie is crazy as he can be. He is a fanatic. Now it is just this fanaticism for God, like Ihat of the "High" churchman, that seems to be needed. The external evidence is that the lazy and hazy metliods have failed every time they have been tried. As far back as history takes us, the cut-and-dried methods of the hide- bound religionist like Seeker and the fanciful inadequacies of the inexact or semi-believing religionist like Paul of Samosata have failed, as indeed they deserved to fail. Always it is the fanatic who succeeds. David, Mohammed, The Mahdi, Dolling, Savonarola, Wesley, Ig- natius Loyola, the Tai Ping group (not to mul- tiply instances) — all these got somewhere in and with their religion. As soon as the fanati- cism of the fervent believer — for it is a matter of belief — has evaporated, then haziness or lazi- ness sets in, and there is a let-down, succeeded by formalism, professionalism, decadence — fin- ally death, quiet, uninteresting, and unmourned. The lazy come next under our consideration for a brief examination. There is no necessity for a definition. Lazy is lazy. But it is pos- sible for a person to be lazy in part and in part otherwise. A man may be a lazy churchman and a highly successful plumber. Or he may be, in the case of a minister, of the type of the Fox-Hunting Parson lamented by the late James Anthony Froude. It is something like the latter or his more modern descendant that was in the mind of the author of our jingle. He must have meant the kind of churchman who cared so little for his religion that he contented IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 123 himself with going througli the motions, the minimum of motions. He had in mind the com- fortable, socially presentable, somewhat world- ly, easy-going parson; and the comfortable, socially presentable, somewhat worldly, easy- going congregation of that parson. These, he says, are the low. It is extremely difficult to understand just wliat the attraction can be in this word ' ' low. ' ' It were invidious to suggest comparison of the connotations of this word, the opposite of ''high," with the latter 's glorious connotations, but in "low" churchmanship there is no sug- gestion of an oriflamme, of a standard raised, no glory, no noble appeal — in short, no rom- ance. At best, being "low" in churchmanship is a negative position, a set of opinions calling loudly for explanations, for an apologetic. And that apologetic has never been written. Save for fulminations against the "high" based on inconclusive evidence that those so denominat- ed were betrajdng the Church over to an alien government, and hugely suggestive of panic, and a somewhat nervous sense of fellowship enforced mth the broad and hazy, there is no appreciable platform for lowness in the Angli- can Communion. Nevertheless much is to be said for low and lazy individuals. Their laziness is not always of the sitting-and-taking-it-easy kind. Prob- ably the laziness of the "low" today would bet- ter be described as an unwillingness to learn liow to do things for God, a laziness with re- spect to methods. For the "low," like the ' ' high, ' ' are believers. So far as their laziness 124 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED is an intellectual quality, it consists in the com- placency with which they hold to the opinions and convictions involved in the Christian Faith, and their inability or unwillingness to put that faith into practice. There is in mind the case of a very prominent Low churchman who an- swered in the public press some years ago cer- tain attacks upon the Anglican Communion which had been given great prominence and which emanated from a foreign papist at large in this country and coruscating mightily about Henry VIII, Anglican Orders, and other similar controversial matters. The reply was crushing and effective. The learned papist was silenced and well silenced, but to accomplish this desid- eratum the prominent ^'low" churchman had to write from the ''high" standpoint throughout and use "high" arguments. This he did with commendable thoroughness, although he had to leave his work on the Prayer Book Papers Com- mittee to do it. Then he went back to his work on his Prayer Book Papers, a series of publi- cations aimed against the "high" in his own communion, and based upon a point of view which even the papist could not have used be- cause it would have been inexplicable to him as a man of some learning, and doubtless an adequate knowledge of the Christian Faith and what that involves. The "broad" and hazy have somewhat out- grown their haziness. They are, as it were, a group of persons going through a fog. They started from a clear bit of weather into the fog ; and were well in when the author of the jingle described them. They are emerging today, but IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 125 they are coming out on the other side of the bank of fog. The Broad churchman today dis- likes the Christian Religion, and seeks to sub- stitute for it something else of his own inven- tion. The haziness which characterizes him to- day is the haziness which grows out of a lack of partisan unity, but that haze too is clearing off. The "broad" is getting quite clear in his mind what it is that he wants to substitute for the Christian Religion. This is a kind of com- plex emulsion which is very pleasant to his taste. It has no very definite taste, for there are too many ingredients, and, being an emul- sion, it has to be constantly shaken, lest it re- solve itself into its elements again and cease to please. This shaking process keeps those called "broad" very busy indeed. The emulsion has many ingredients, each purporting to be " Chris- tian," and the "broad" wants to include the "low" and leave out the "high." He is cer- tain that the traditional laziness of the one will cause it to emulsify beautifully, and equally positive that the craziness of the other would make lumps in his pleasant emulsion which he agitates so energetically and sniffs so agree- ably. As in the original little rhyme, it may easily be seen that the High and the Low are contigu- ous, and the Low and the Broad are contiguous. Laziness and haziness mingle more or less easily, since haziness readily absorbs laziness. Craziness and laziness do not mix so easily. In the nature of the terms, craziness must dominate laziness, because since anything will dominate that which is lazy, and as craziness is 126 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD a very active quality, a fortiori laziness, the at- tribute of the "low," must yield. It is an axiom. The question which concerns all three is: Shall the lazy yield to the crazy or to the hazy! The latter is a process about which the lazy need take no thought. They can be en- veloped in the haze of tliat emulsion without any effort, and that way many of them are drifting, since, being lazy, they have little vital- ity by themselves. But the former would be a stimulating process. It is just that element of fanaticism which involves hard work and self- sacrifice which would mould the easy-going "lows" into something with fibre, which Avould electrify a rather spineless school into some- thing that God could use and that God would want to use. And it would be too bad if the "lows" should be too lazy to see this before they are entirely absorbed into the emulsion, for those of them who remain with us believe in the Christian Religion (even though they may not practice it all) just as do the crazy and just as the hazy do not. In one respect, it is a very good thing for us Anglicans that Pius IX, of fragrant memory, condemned our orders so emphatically. For the Roman controversialist, quaerens quern devoret, is thus substantially estopped from using his best argument against us, i. e., that although we have all the marks of a Catholic Church, we vitiate our position by not putting these to any perceptible use, or, rather, that we have no inherent unity of usage and conduct. Of course, if we have no orders in the Catholic sense, we have nothing ; we do not exist as a Church, and IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 127 the ground is cut from under the feet of the Roman controversialist. And this official Roman view, the hazy, while professing to dislike Rome and alleging that the crazy are Rome's Anglican adherents, asserts himself, specifically, when- ever — and it is often — he belittles the orders and standing of his own communion as a valid part of the Church Universal. In this view, the lazy, while he is too lazy to assert it, seem- ingly acquiesces, whenever — and it is almost always — he lists himself as indistinguishable from one of the Protestant Denominations save for our incomparable liturgy ! It remains for the "high" — and crazy — to hold up the standard of his faith; to assert, in spite of multiform antagonisms without and in- sidious treachery within, hazily originated, the truth of his position by his conduct. And be- cause he is crazy — a fanatic for God, and not merely respectable and lazy, or hazily machinat- ing — ^he succeeds; he grows like a great tree, although he was no larger than the mustard seed not so very long ago. Is it too much to hope that overcoming his laziness and using the faith that is truly in him, the ''low" may awaken out of his sleep, and, bestirring himself to gain that certain fanaticism which accomplishes God's results, escape the ultimate entombment of dissolution in a constantly agitated emulsion? The Cheer-Up Philosophy The writer is not a socialist because he be- lieves that Christianity — which is quite another matter — and not socialism is the panacea for the sufferings of the world.- But if socialism had done nothing else it would still be worthy a certain respect because it lias driven home the important truth that palliatives are useless be- cause they do not go to the roots, but rather foster and abet the evils they are meant to alleviate. Most of us see to-day that the effect of a mere palliative is somewhat akin to the effect of Christian Science, which may be said to intensify the ravages of disease by lulling the sufferer into the dangerous belief that as there is no disease there can be no suffering, thereby affording the disease every chance to increase and consume the body. It is an attitude like this uncompromising one of the socialists against all schemes which will not fit four-square with their own that is here set forth against a prevailing popular philosophy, a system which expresses itself in terms of the human disposition, a favorite sub- stitute of the "Modernist" for orthodox Chris- tianitv which he dislikes — the philosophy of "Cheer Up." This philosophy is unsound because it is en- 128 THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 129 tirely subjective, ignores causes, and seeks to inspire an unreasonable contentment. The ut- terances of its propagandists are like this: "Never mind old man, keep on smiling even though you are getting the worst of it. Don't commit the unforgiveable sin of trying to change your luck, simply change yourself into a smiler. Concentrate on your frame of mind and make that cheerful. Grin and bear it. Never repine. Smile through your tears! Of course its true, as you say, that the girl who pretended she cared for you and played with your honest affection and allowed you to buy her a wrist watch, has dropped you like a hot cake and is going with George Brown now. But that's all right. Never say die. Cheer up and forget it! Don't get angry at her; don't let yourself get ruffled, old fellow. When you see her treat her as though nothing had happened, for if you act as though you cared you'll be a Grouch, and the world hates a Grouch. That will make lines in your face. Learn to spread sunshine, dear boy. Look on the bright side, too. Just suppose you had married her. She might have slipped on the front steps on her way from her father's front hallway to the nuptial automobile and broken her neck, and then you ivould have had something to worry over. Don 't let the little things worry you. Re- member how Mrs. Wiggs found cause for com- fort in not having a harelip. Remember Polly- anna and her "glad game." Remember — 130 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD "The year's at the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God 's in his heaven — All 's right with the world. ' ' ' ' What are you in comparison with the whole world! Think of that lark and that snail that meant so much to Robert Browning, and — why, why— come, dear fellow, CHEER UP!" "Never mind if your razor handle did snap and now you can't strop the miserable thing because it wobbles sideways! Shem didn't bother with razors in the ark. I'd never let a little thing like a razor bother me." "What difference does it make if it did rain every day for thirty-eight days and now your old garden seeds have all rotted in the ground f Remember what Riley says : ' When God sorts out the weather and sends rain Wtiy, rain 's my choice. ' ^^ That's the way to look at it old man. CHEER UP! ! !" The main trouble with these and other simi- lar characteristic provocations to manslaughter is that there is no sympathy in them. Instead the person who receives the ' ' cheer up ' ' advice is, in effect, told that his grief or natural an- noyance is unimportant ; and, since it is to him immediately and touchingly important, the ad- THE CHEER-TJP PHILOSOPHY 131 vice, if he be a simpleton, simply stuns him, which does no good ; or, if he possess a mind, strikes him as irritating impertinence. In either case it fails. Or, it may be, that the professional optimist conveys the impression that the fault is with the sufferer, otherwise it couldn't have happened. This form of consola- tion probably antedates the author of the Book of Job by some eras. Job himself recalls to mind an excellent example of trouble. One suffering from a painful boil — and none of us is immune — is not helped either by being told that there are greater things than boils — which only makes him think of carbuncles and writhe harder — or that boils do not exist. He knows better. He needs either s^nnpathy or relief, that is, either a kind hearted friend to say *'m-m-m- M-M-urrrrph!" or a skilful surgeon with a sharp lancet. Professional optimists, one suspects, are in- sincere. It is quite possible to admire Elizabeth Barrett Browning's quality when she assures us beautifully that she lost the little cares that fretted her ''out in the fields with Grod." But it is beyond a doubt that Mrs. Browning (a rather sensible woman), would have had thoughts and a facial expression like the rest of us if on the way back from the fields she had been obliged to drive a pair of heifers a mile along a road flanked with much brush and many gateways. Or one can quite safely predicate the same imagined warmth of James Whitcomb Riley or even of that incurable optimist Josh Billings if one imagine either of these worthies dropping the soap in mid wash and having to 132 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD fish it out, with wet and grubby hands, dusty and nasty from under the bathtub. There are worse things than ''grouches" — insincerity for instance, or an unsympathetic disposition. Even the man with a chronic grouch deserves sympathy. In all human prob- ability he has got that way because someone has done something outrageous to him, or per- haps, he suffers from stomach trouble, or in- herited it and doesn't know it himself. If the promoters of the Cheer Up Philosophy really desire to accomplish something constructive and useful — they are the kindest hearted people im- aginable — they could take courses in Sympa- thetic Pedagogy and offer sympathy to the afflicted and wholesome chastisement to those addicted to wronging their friends and acquain- tances — an enormous field of effort much un- dermanned. The object of these worthy people is to pro- mote happiness. The large literature they have produced witnesses, if only by its commercial success, to the large room for the exercise of efforts in this direction. The need for some- thing of the kind is apparent to anyone who possesses five or more acquaintances. The only question has to do with the means. Shall it be the long, hard process of the Christian Life or shall it be the pastoral theology of the "Mod- ernists ' ' which is identical with the ' ' Cheer Up Philosophy"! Recourse must be had to some- thing. The kind of happiness which the * ' red-blood- ed, ' ' hearty variety of practising ' ' Modernists ' ' attempt to produce within their victims is a THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 133 negative thing, secured, if ever, by inducing a mental state which ignores actual troubles. Sin is not overcome by a fight, it is ignored, denied. Psychologically, of course, this type of happi- ness is only a mental attitude, a purely subjec- tive condition. If its end could be universally attained uniformity of mental state would make it possible to ignore circumstance and people would be indifferent to hunger and cold, pain and grief, and all the other evils which harrow the souls of men, because their souls would be asleep. Such a state of spiritual coma would bear the same relation to normal human happi- ness that the religion of Mithra bears to that of Christ. The apparatus would be nearly the same, the results might appear almost identical, at least externally, but one would have some- thing actual back of it, while the other rested on a product of human imagination. Christ is Real ; Mithra is a myth. Christianity teaches that true human happi- ness is to be found in union with God through Jesus Christ. This involves a lifelong struggle called the Christian Life, otherwise expressed as the soul's warfare w^ith sin. Sin, broadly considered, may be defined as the centralizing of the universe in self and thinking, talking, and acting accordingly. Such an attitude is humanly natural, hence the specific doctrine called Original Sin, a perfectly clear and sound doctrine which has become greatly obscured by the concentration of men's minds upon the Hebrew tale of its origin by the ancestors of the human race in Eden which has a religious rather than an historical significance. 134 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD The Christian Life possesses the tremendous merit of practicability to commend it to those whose dispositions trouble themselves and those about them. But the Christian Life is a difficult process (called theologically the salvation of the soul), like .every thing" else which leads to a great reward. The effort required to liberate a soul from its humanly inherited ("original"), sel- fishness, the turning of it Godward, and the keeping of it thus directed, naturally and in- evitably involves the sweetening of the disposi- tion. This is another truth which has been al- lowed to become obscure, and it is rarely thought of or is passed over by the many who prefer a short-cut to happiness. A person with a sour disposition — the kind of person at whom the literature and exhortations of the "Cheer Ups" is launched — is not living the Christian Life or is making a sorry failure of it. Saint- hood is the quality of a Christian, not respect- ability, not fastidiousness, not merely such things as commercial honesty. And the known saints did not and do not have grouches. People commonly get this fact confused with another and we have the phenomenon of professional religionists, saturated with bad theology, tell- ing us that Christianity needs well and happy people to live it and appreciate it, and the logically associated phenomenon of social serv- ice replacing the bread and meat of the gospel instead of occupying its true place as a product of the digestion of that bread and meat. If one approach consideration of the * ' Cheer Up Philosophy" from the Christian point of view, it will be clear to him how far off. the THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 135 track are those who tell us to cheer up in order to be happy. They have the sequence wrong. The cart is set to pull the horse and the horse sleeps standing. For one does not cheer up in order to be happy. One is cheerful because he is happy, and the kind of happiness derived from cheering up is abnormal and delusive be- cause it is the result of habitual auto-hypnosis. To people in normal health on a sea voyage a whiff of dinner cooking in the galley puts a finishing touch on an appetite derived from the tang of salty breeze stiffly blowing. Not so the sufferer from seasickness. No amount of Job's comfort avails to raise him up, it even makes him worse. His state is the opposite of cheer- ful. In mental disease it is the same. Depression is the most typical form of mind sickness. The melancholic insane cannot cheer up because they are not happy, and they are not happy because their malady has destroyed or suspended their capacity for happiness by casting into their mental machinery a monkey wrench of obses- sion. Wise alienists charged with their cure do not merely attempt to cheer up their patients. Rather they seek to remove the wrench from the machinery and then to patch up the ma- chinery. If this can be done the capacity for happiness resumes its function, and the patient, restored to happiness, becomes cheerful. The same principle applies to sickness of the soul. A person spiritually ill, that is, suffering from the disease of sinfulness, has no relish for the simple pleasures in which those enjoying spiritual health find delight. He loathes inno- 136 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD cent enjojonent, which has the same effect on him that seeing others playing a game has on the depressive insane, or the sight of people eating heartily upon the seasick. The sight of a cheerful sick man who is not a Christian is both remarkable and stimulating because it is both abnormal and attractive like a black eyed child with golden hair. Similar but more pathetic is the sight of a lunatic displaying a grin, which is ghastly. But the spectacle of one morally bad in the aspect of good cheer transcends the singularity of a pleased invalid and the horror of a maniac's laughter, for it forces upon the sight of the shuddering beholder an image of the Father of Lies. XI God, the Clergy, and Some Modern Writers Unbiased thought and examination reveal that God does not change and that the clergy are not, necessarily, queer. The clergy are much the same as other members of their race, the human. Like the Apostles, mostly rugged fishermen, many of them are even robust. Now- adays they are climbing Mount McKinley, in the trenches, coaching football teams or writing books the same as other men. There comes to mind that notable figure of "muscular Chris- tianity," Moses, the negro monk of the Thebaid who is alleged to have captured and bound four brigands who attacked him in his lonely cell, and, slinging them in pairs over his shoulders, carried them several miles across the sand to the nearest church where he flung them down before the altar as a preliminary to their con- version ! Moses of Nitria antedated Stephen Langton and Alcuin of York by several centuries. These later decadent persons performed no feats greater than to frame Magna Charta and regu- late Charlemagne. Neither would have been able to manage the four brigands. But anyone who chose to form his opinion of the clergy of today by reading about them in the works of modern writers would inevitably acquire the 137 138 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD idea that the degeneracy herewith indicated had progressed more rapidly than either the prob- abihties or the facts would justify. The cleric of modern literature is a curious personage. Sometimes he is a crank, sometimes merely an imbecile, often only wooden and inert, abnormal and untrue to life. He is afraid of cows. Less manly than the feminists themselves, he lan- guishes at things called pink teas, and does moderately well at croquet. The silly young parson in "Penrod" is an excellent example. The Rev. Mr. Kinosling is- not only an ass, he is an impossible ass. He is the only abnormal character in that charming and popular book. One gets the same impres- sion from the books of Victor L. Whitechurch, widely read in England, and in which all the clergy seem gratuitously overdrawn. Out of several dozen clerical characters which have appeared in the fiction of several great w^eeklies during the past seven or eight years I recall only two who are natural limnan beings. The first is the hero in one of Dr. Rowland's tales in the Saturday Evening Post who was a clergy- man only in name, he having allowed liimself to be made a deacon in the Episcopal Church out of gratitude to the missionary society which had paid for his education ! And the second is Margaret Deland's wholly delightful ''Dr. Lavandar," under wdiose beneficent sweetness of character one would like to have been brought up, and who is as real a clergyman as can l3e found in literature. The hero in ''The Liside of the Cup" is almost as thoroughgoing an ass as Hall Caine's "Christian" the Rev. GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 139 John Storm, or as any of the other bewildering types of clerics in that tale of religious par- anoia. Isaac Sykes, the clergyman in Mr. John Gor- don's book, "Broken Shackles," is a person of another kidney altogether. Sykes is not precisely a comic clergyman ; but it is by virtue pf the literary device of the "Comic Relief" only that he is introduced into the book at all ; and his author very properly has made him a very Poor Stick indeed. He is the pastor of a church in a mill town, whose function is to "save the souls of the well-to-do." It is not even clear what "denomination" he belongs to. He has some small candles grouped near his pulpit, but subordinated to the large candle which stands just by it. He also has "canticles" in his church ; and Mr. Gordon, for what reason is not clear, has equipped this small-town non- descript with the title of a Dean! He is the "Very Reverend Sykes," goodness knows why. This writer, probably in his desire to lampoon the practice, also refers to his clergyman as "Reverend Sykes," the enormity of which phraseology, w^hen used seriously — as it is every day, especially in newspapers — becomes fully apparent when it is compared to its exact equiv- alent, "Honorable McGoogin," as a definitive, titular description of, say, an Alderman! The candles, the canticles, and the "Very" would seem to indicate a kind of degenerated Episcopalian ; although the fact that Sykes con- ducts his services "from the pulpit" is a dis- tinct 2Jer contra piece of internal evidence that he is one of our sectarian brethren. One "pays 140 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD one's money" for this book — and gets an ex- cellent story — but is constrained to ' ' take one 's choice" as to the denominational affiliation of its clerical mud-turtle. This tendency to make clergymen absurd is comparatively recent. The clergy of earlier authors are not thus conspicuous. Stiggins is perhaps the best known of the earlier types. Stiggins was not a member of the Establish- ment, it is true, and his eccentricities are such as belong to his date and type, but he does not stand out conspicuously from the other Pick- wickians. Winkle is an exaggerated adolescent, Tupman an exaggerated old beau, Snodgrass an exaggerated literary bluffer, the elder Wel- ler a very epitome of fat coachmen. Pott and Slurk overdo their rhetoric, their cowardice, and their defiance; and Stiggins is no more overdrawn than they; he fits into the tale ex- actly. But Kinosling does not fit into the ''Penrod" story exactly because he is the only exaggerat- ed character in the book. He is a burlesque parson, while the barber is an every-day bar- ber, and is comic just because he talks and acts exactly like an every-day barber. Marjorie Jones is a normal little girl with beaux, Mr. Schofield a normal businessman. The things done by Sam Williams, Rupe Collins, Bartet the dancing master, and Delia the cook are rea- sonable things, while Kinosling is abnormal and unreasonable. The things the other char- acters say might have been taken from dicta- phones ; but no mortal lips of a live parson ever framed the effervescent inanities which pour in GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 141 one continuous stream from the mouth, of Mr. Tarkington's clerical saphead. He is as appro- priate in the story as a slapstick would be in a delicate comedy. It is true that a clergyman may be odd, ped- antic, wicked, crazy, or comic, but so also may be a jockey, a grocer, a plumber, a doctor of medicine, or a vegetable pedlar. There is noth- ing in the dress, manners, conversation, or gen- eral appearance of the clergy as a class to mark them off as especially amenable to the kind of literary treatment they almost invariably re- ceive. The clergy are not addicted to practices which are unusual and therefore, by good psy- chology, ridiculous, like the wearing of mon- ocles. They do not habitually give utterance to strange cries in public as do the uncouth col- lectors of rags and old iron. Even the clerical silk hat when worn is not vivid scarlet like the hat of the rotund negro who advertises second- floor dentists' offices on the avenues of great cities. Most educated men, such as are capable of w^riting books, are familiar with the clergy. Mr. Tarkington, by his portrayal of the minor character Ladew in "The Conquest of Canaan" has demonstrated that he understands clergy- men; and yet Kinosling crops up in ''Penrod!" Mr. Winston Churchill is a Churchman of prom- inence and yet the central character in ''The Inside of the Cup" is unlike a real clergyman. After ten years'^ active parochial work he does no know how to make a parish call. Mr. White- church, more than any of the others, should know his subject, for he is an ecclesiastical 142 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD writer. His books bear the same relation to the Church as those of Eden Philpotts to Dart- moor or W. W. Jacobs to sailormen. Yet Mr. AVhitechurch 's numerous clergymen are absurd images while his other characters are natural and sane. This phenomenon of undue exaggeration may be explicable on the ground that it lies in the same plane as the general impression that if a talking woodchuck should be discovered it would be in Winsted, Conn., or that every resident of Hackensack, N. J., habitually goes about in overalls and chin whiskers — except, of course, the women, who are equipped with sunbonnets and gingham aprons, and invariably carry milk pails. As a matter of fact Winsted is a fac- tory town in a prosaic, industrial district, the last place to look for the marvels of natural history so familiar to the constant readers of metropolitan dailies; while Hackensack is a suburban town almost entirely populated by city businessmen and their families. In other words the phenomenon may be due to the fact that a crystallized literary technique has been unquestionably accepted by modern writers. All this could have only such value as at- taches to it as a fact in the general field of literary criticism if it were not accompanied by a kindred technical point of view regarding God. The years since the opening of the twen- tieth century have seen produced notable work from a whole group of writers who are inter- ested in God as a subject for literary composi- tion, and in this time a great deal has been published in which God has been prominent. GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 143 Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, G. Lowes Dickinson, G. B. Shaw, Donald Hankey — it would be easy to make a long list — have ''fea- tured" God in their books. So has a great host of poets and versifiers of every known school and description. The Great War, cut- ting abruptly into this period of renewed pro- duction, greatly enhanced the literary value of God to the writers because it turned the minds of the reading public away from froth to actu- alities. God, the Central Actuality of the universe, has been thrust upward and forward into hu- man consciousness, and hence into the open light of intellectual consideration for the whole educated world. Therefore we see the unpre- cedented phenomenon of popularity accruing to writers who present in verse and essay and even in fiction the various subjective gods of their own variant intellects. God has been, as it were, explained; pantheistically, transcenden- tally, deistically, and by the various kinds of agnostics. Every imaginable half-fonned, speculative, reconstructed, and impossibly idi- otic kind of god that the queer minds of men can transmute into the objective of modernistic appreciation through the medium of literary expression has been rushed into print, from the god of Rabindranath Tagore to the god of Donald Hankey. In fact it becomes more and more surprising the more one thinks of it, that a cubist has not given this weary world another prod by producing a purple and green portrait of the god of Remy de Gourmont; or an agile torsionist a bust of the tutelary divinity 144 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD of Ezra Pound done in a medium of cigar ashes and honey. Mr. Wells seems to have made the deepest and widest impression with his god — the god of Britling, the Invisible King, the Animator of the Soul of a Bishop — that curious, limited tri- partite deity which Mr. Wells himself and most of his public believe he has discovered but who really is an old acquaintance to the delver into the lore of the Early Spring of Christianity. It is, however, in his chapter on "The Reli- gious Revival," a matter of fifteen pages in "Italy, France and Britain at War" that Mr. Wells in undertaking again the role of a reli- gious prognosticator has done me the favor of corroborating a favorite idea — the theory that people seem to employ two distinct intellects when they attempt to think. One of these is a workable intellect used for the everyday affairs of life, such as raising babies, purchasing boots, or constructing silo tanks. The other is a flabby thing devoted exclusively to the consid- eration of religious matters. In the book just referred to Mr. Wells takes up various aspects of the War with the master- ly reasoning and cultivated prophetic propensi- ties and acute sense of balance derived from many years of literary craftsmanship and leaves his reader stirred, or convinced, or intel- ligently hostile as he always does. But when the reader reaches the little chapter on religion he might suppose it had been interpolated by one of Mr. Wells' enemies to destroy the book as a work of art, just as one might, with similar intent, crudely introduce a putty image, moulded GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 145 by a house painter, among the Elgin Marbles. What has happened is only that Mr. Wells has, for these fifteen pages, shut off the splendidly- running, high-powered engine of his trained in- tellect, and while this rests, he uses his other intellect, which might be described in the argot of the garage as a "one-lunger." With his god at the back of his mind, Mr. Wells discusses the religious aspects of the War. He speaks of three definite things: 1, The late Pope's Attitude to the War; 2, Essex ladies asking Co-operation of the Wells House- hold in Prayer; 3, An Address of the Bishop of London on Tower Hill in Justification of His Salary of Ten Thousand Pounds. The pope is dismissed in a very few words, which is all his attitude on the war seems to deserve. Then Mr. Wells tells his readers that he ''civilly re- pulsed" the ladies. He wanted a satisfactory ending to the War; that is why he wrote the book about it. He tells us in it that he believes in God and urges people to be loyal to God. But when some ladies of his home parish in "blue dresses and adorned with large, white crosses," also believing in God, come to his house to request that prayer be made to God about the common desire of all concerned, Mr. Wells contemptuously dismisses the whole mat- ter as being ' ' in the nature of a magic incanta- tion." Then he closes his chapter on the reli- gious aspects of the Great War in the belief that the religious activities of the Bishop of London are limited to the justifying of his stipend. It seems not to occur to Mr. Wells when he scarifies the "Genteel Whigs" for 146 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD their apathy to Britain's cause, that he mani- fests an equally inexcusable apathy to Britain 's religion. He admits being a "lapsed Anglican." He perpetrates the verbal distinction between "Anglicans" and "Catholics," a looseness of diction probably unparalleled elsewhere in his entire published w^orks. The text, ' ' What are we up to ? " runs through all the books in the manner of ' ' Marriage ' ' and "Tono Bungay" — the phase of Wells just pre- ceding his trilogy of books about God. Mr. Wells has reasoned out and defined almost every human issue of modern interest except religion itself, and here he seems to hold with the other revivers of God in modern literature that the things of religion must and should remain in a kind of dim, individualistic liaze. It is interest- ing to watch this keen thinker floundering help- lessly among the elementary matters of reli- gion, and one naturally wonders what he thinks he is up to. He can say: "Now sex, like diet, is a department of conduct and a very import- ant department, hut it isn't religion!" (Italics his.) But one wonders what the content of religion can be to Mr. Wells when within a few lines of this he condemns prayer as a "magic incantation. ' ' The god of Mr. Wells appears to be the off- spring of compelling emotions, to be evolved from within, to have been thrust up through many strata of consciousness, like the subjec- tive camel of the German savant, and set down in travail of soul for Mr. Wells' readers to scrutinize. It would appear that this god is final, and entirely satisfactory to Mr. Wells, GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 147 and that to it must religious expression conform or be forever discredited. But Mr. Wells has not created this god. He has only refurbished the demiurge of the Gnostics. XII A Task fob Seminaeiai^s Many of us, both in England and America, took heart from one aspect of Wartime, to wit : that bread and meat had replaced the dallying with unwholesome sweets with which we had, speaking religiously, become somewhat sur- feited. Under that desperate stress we all got down to bed-rock and worked on the things that counted in winning the war. Now, however, we are in the trough of a reaction corresponding to the extraordinary exertions of that desperate period, and the least pessimistic of us realizes that things are not going on as well as we had hoped they would. Many of us had hoped that the un- ornamented gospel would have received such emphasis for its practicability that reconstruc- tion, when it necessarily came, would follow the lines of getting down to business. But it has not been so, at least to the degree which some of us had anticipated for the re- newal among the English-speaking peoples. The same banalities are still with us, and have even, in many quarters, received a new lease of life from the policy of the American Church to express itself so largely in punditism, ''field- secretaryism, " committees, minor movements, panaceas, muddle, and the immense amount of 148 A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 149 talk which it has recently been uttering through the Nation-Wide CampaigTi as interpreted in many quarters. In England it is necessary to fight against conditions which allow a Welsh dissenter to select the Bishops of God's Church, the in- trenched type of fogeyism, plain dufferism, sinecures, barter of advowsons, unequal dis- tribution of funds — many matters of that kind. Our o\\ni problems in the Church are different in kind, as indeed our whole national problem is different, and we might sum up our diffi- culties in a broad, general way, as consisting of the ecclesiastical vice of timidity, the pas- sion for substitutes, and the wrong emphasis on what is to be taught in the Church's semin- aries. These tend to handicap us with the de- sire to compromise issues, the presence of lead- ers addicted to panaceas, and a body of clergy less efficient than they might well be. Back of these and of all the wrong conditions in Anglicanism is a padded cross. What is always needed in religious revival or renewal is to get back to Christ, a good phrase, w^hich had been popularized by the somewhat under- equipped theologians who wish to re-write our theology for us. As soon as anyone gets to see that it is necessary to go straight back to Christ, the Source of the Christian Religion and of life, he is, at the very outset, confronted by a cross. It is inescapeable. He may ignore it, but the price of that is to have his effort auto- matically and effectually vitiated. There stands the cross, looming blackly down through the Christian centuries, and God Incarnate is hang- 150 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD ing on it, suffering; fighting a silent, bitter fight, against sin, the powers of darkness, and death. That is why there is so much of ro- mance in being a sacramentalist; and so little in being a Modernist; why the Bishop of Zan- zibar, for all his sternness, is so engaging, and why the Bishop of Hereford, brilliant creature though he is, is so uninteresting; why catholic- ity is so greatly feared and respected by the world, and why the general public is so abys- mally indifferent to ecclesiastical ''attrac- tions." Very many have attempted to meet what they call "The Challenge of the Times" with sub- stitutes for the plain gospel. The efforts to take up the "Challenge" with Field Secre- taries, Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, Pan- Protestantism, inviting assorted sectarians to address the people during Lent, "Men and Re- ligion Forward Movements," Lifework Con- ferences, etc., etc., etc., will doubtless continue to be made by the many who do not trust the Christian Religion as we have it from Christ, and will continue to fail because fads will not do the work of the Christian Religion. The only wonder is why anyone can possibly sup- pose that they will ! The only perceptible effect of such activities is to make the existing confusion of thought and practice wdthin the Church many times worse confounded. The energy which should and could be concentrated on the essentials is dissipated among a multiplicity of minor and unrelated activities, manv of which are no more A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 151 logically connected with normal Christianity than they are with Judaism. It is, of course, the gist of the gospel which must necessarily be presented, if there is to be any song at all sung to the more or less elab- orate accompaniment which we hear all about us. This gist must be animated and vivified by the lesson of the cross, the medicine of the world. Christianity's central activity is to conduct its age-long warfare against sin, the enemy of mankind. This is carried on within the Church both by the individual as such and by the pastorally-guided corporate conscious- ness of the people according to their units in parish, and diocese, and national Church; it is carried on by Christians duly baptized, con- firmed, constantly purified by penance from the guilt of sins, fortified by the sacraments, pay- ing God His worship due by participation in the Great Sacrifice which is Christ's own service. It is, of course, the neglect of these central matters of the Christian life which makes all the generally-recognized trouble. It ought, for example, to be a commonplace that Christian- ity, never having been adequately tried, had not ceased to operate adequately as the re- ligion of the world. Yet there are numerous persons within and without the Church who continue to ask, "Has the Church failed?" or even, taking the failure for granted, put their query in the form, "Why has the Church failed?" Christianity has not failed. Chris- tianity has not been tried except in a very small way, relatively speaking. 152 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD Here, then, is another problem for the lead- ers — the clergy. And why, we may pertinently ask, just why, does a skilled mechanic receive $1.20 per hour and a clergyman of the Epis- copal Church 35c per hour (figuring an eight- hour day) in return for work done and paid for by employers? Simply because a skilled mechanic's services are valued at that figure and a clergjTnan's at this. And just why so? Clearly, because the activities of the skilled mechanic are restricted to the performance of his proper work as such, while the clergyman spends his time in the performance of a variety of functions many of which are only remotely related to his profession, and which are valued at a low market price because that is the wage of the Jack-of -all-trades. It is only a great river that can be both broad and deep at the same time ; and it is only a very great man who can spread his activities over varied fields and at the same time sustain a character of really adequate ability throughout all or even in a few of, the essentials. As in other professions, the reverend clergj'- are all kinds of men, and only a few are truly great. It is also fact that the curriculum of the aver- age seminary of the Church includes so much that must be ' ' covered ' ' during the three years that the tendency is to turn out men half- taught in a large selection of subjects rather than well-taught in the several essentials. This condition if true is, at least in part, due to the seminarians themselves, and the worst result of it is that the lay people to be served by those clergy in future years will be apt not A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 153 to get the essentials of a normal pastorate. When in the course of his pastoral career the priest realizes, as frequently he does, that he cannot, as a Jack-of-all-trades, get the results which his early idealism demanded of him, he is, in turn, apt to go the wrong way about the remedy, and to spread himself wider and cor- respondingly ever thinner over his parish, rather than to regulate his affairs so that he can pick up the neglected threads and re-make himself along useful lines of development. This is because the thinner-spreading process is by far the easier course to pursue. It lies directly before him if he desire to undertake it, whereas, if he retrench mentally and spiritually, it means that he must seriously incommode himself, and perhaps others involved with him. For example, it might mean in some cases resignation of a cure, with all the risk involved in securing an- other, under present conditions in the Church. It might mean cutting down on various activi- ties to which, by habituation, he had become greatly attached. It might spell serious finan- cial embarrassment, especially if he were equipped with a family of his own. He may be too old to study. But the remedy for all this lies, chiefly, in realizing the underlying facts while the per- son preparing for the sacred ministry is still in the course of his preparation in the sem- inary. To a certain extent the "tone" of any seminary is in the control of the student body. If the man who aspires to be a priest does not wash to come to a point in his ministry'' at which he is to realize how under-equipped he is to 154 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD deal with certain serious problems which should be (and sometimes force themselves to be) cen- tral in his work for God among hmnan souls, he must look ahead and look within, and look about him at what he works upon. Seminary- students are, taken as a whole, an intensely attractive group of young men. Their vision is likely to be clear, their faculties at the keenest and most critical stage of formative develop- ment, their ideals relatively undimmed, and they are, corporately, beset with a high desire to go to work for God in His garden. Such men are open-minded on the whole, and it should not be difficult to convince them that they are clearly entitled to a training in the details and practices of the religion they are to teach, and in time corporately to regulate, after they have obtained Holy Orders. Their future task, speaking strategically, is to reor- ganize Anglicanism, and they must realize that this tremendous task cannot well be accom- plished if their equipment is to consist too largely of a smattering of Hebrew, a thorough- going knowledge of economics, a great deal of Church-School pedagogy, an obsession in favour of eschatology, or even a hard-earned academic skill in the rudiments of Social Service, supplemented by occasional visits to the nearby factories and state institutions. It cannot so be done, and as soon as the semin- arians realize that it must be done, it is the writer's belief that the Church will get action — quick, effective, and compelling. The Church seminary student is committed to a system which, for better or worse, hap- A TASK FOR SEMINAEIANS 155 pens to be a sacramental system, with a not- to-be-ignored mystical aspect. The life of the ideal cleric must be both a reservoir and a fountain of spirituality. Every priest, ideally, must drink often, long, and refreshingly at the ever-flowing spring of Christ's life. Christ Himself is not so much the Giver of life in the religion named after Him ; He is that life. To that life every student of Christ 's is entitled to access. If in his seminary he is denied free access to that life, if his days are too much taken up with things academic or details in petto, he should, if necessary, go the length of demanding that access. He must have sacra- mental life provided for him. If, for example, the reverend faculty is collectively too lazy to take turns at celebrating so that the students may have the advantage of a daily Eucharist, the students must see to it that they have such provision made for them; through the legiti- mate channels, of course — this is no Soviet counsel ! Students in seminaries must get into the way of leading Christ 's life, other^\ise they will never be able to induce others to lead it; and, if they fail to get others to lead it, their ministry will have been a failure from any legitimate standpoint. No one can give to others what he does not himself possess. Starved souls cannot be fed, even by Rural methods or by scientific economics, even though in one's ministry starved bodies may, from time to time, be fed through Social Service. But if one base his ministry upon centralizing Social Service, that ministry mil, in the nature of things, even though a success on its own 156 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD plane, be a very slight thing when compared with the great and worthy body of secular benevolence which makes the name American to be blessed by the oppressed of the world. The great difficulty with Social Service (ex- cept it be carried on on a world scale as Mr. Herbert Hoover was able to do in his magnifi- cent work during and after the Great War) is that in any community as more and more peo- ple join the ranks of the workers in it, less and less people remain to be the objective of the service, and so the very success of this move- ment tends to destroy it as a religious expres- sion. An ideal of Fellowship which would, in its nature, include all the details of the small- scale Social Service as practiced by ''Modern Churchmen" would be a far higher and more worthy ideal, even though it need not, neces- sarily, be even Christian. Very splendid or- ganized Fellowship including all the Social Service details is practiced by organized Juda- ism, in the name and in the spirit of our com- mon humanity. The cure of souls involves chiefly, so far as preparation capable of reception in a seminary is concerned, great knowledge and skill in the Moral Theology. To this more or less exact science, an entire ministry in all its details might well be subordinated (witness Fr. Stan- ton's) and, by sticking to that rule, be made into an enormous and conspicuous success. But if anyone who is familiar with the management of the average seminary will stop for a mo- ment to compare the amount of time and effort put in upon Moral Theology with what is used A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 157 up over, say, Hebrew, and then ask himself how much of anyone's ministry, under the most favorable conditions, could possibly be based upon a knowledge of Hebrew, the point which it is attempted to make will not be long in emerging. It is, of course, possible to get one 's bishop under certain circumstances to dispense from the Study of Hebrew, but it is unneces- sary to get dispensed from the study of Moral Theology, even though a student should be ob- tuse enough to think M. T. unnecessary because the amount of time spent upon it on the aver- age is practically negligible in a three years' course. There are several of the Church's seminaries in which there is no attempt what- ever to teach this vitally important and central subject. An elderly clergyman once told the writer of his experience in a parish wherein he had been pastor for many years. It was an agricultural community, and in the course of the preceding twenty-five years the original inhabitants had nearly all sold their land to Bohemian farmers, and the parish run down in numbers until there was only a pitiful handful of elderly people left to come to Church. ' ' Don 't the Bohemians have children for the Sunday-school, and isn't there any way to get the Bohemians to Church? Don't they understand English, or what is it?" was asked. "There are three or four times as many children in my village," said the elderly X)riest, ' ' as there were in the old days, for these Bohemians have large families. They all speak English, more or less, and they learn rapidly. When a new family comes, they usually attend 158 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD Churcli and bring the children, but they always come to me to make their confessions, and of course I can't hear their confessions, so they slop coming." Another central matter, is to know how to conduct the various services of the Church. This would appear to be so obvious as not to require discussion, but, in the average semin- ary, the whole subject is commonly ignored ex- cept in the one technical matter of the use of the voice. But there is infinitely more to the conduct of the services than the use of the voice. It is as though a man were in training to be head of a musical conservatory where part of his duty was to be able to lead the conservatory orchestra at stated and frequent intervals. If his training for this conspicuous duty were limited to a more or less exact drill in the manual calisthenic of baton swinging, the ab- surdity of the training would need no demon- stration from any critic. That is submitted as a fair comparison with the training received in the seminaries with respect to the conduct of religious services. Well may the mdely-depre- cated Dr. Dearmer point out to the Anglican world that the Art of Public Worship is with us one of the lost arts. The Church is full of priests wiio could not — literally could not — go into some other parish Church (in their own city, it may be) and con- duct the services there. It is full of men who do not know how to put on Eucharistic vest- ments ; how to sing any of the parts at a Choral Eucharist with deacon and subdeacon; who could not, for the life of them, conduct a choral A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 159 evensong; wlio do not know what to do with their hands even at an ordinary Low Celebra- tion; who are incapable of walking in a simple and dignified manner in a religions procession ; who habitually destroy the inherent solemnity and reverence of any service — except, perhaps, Social Service! One would think that the seminary is the place where one who is to be charged with tlie conduct of necessarily litur- gical acts should learn these simple and funda- mental things. There is too much preoccupa- tion in the seminaries to-day with such mat- ters as the two dead languages, technical Sun- day-school methods, social reform, Boy-Scout- ing, and the findings of Vice Commissions — it w^ould appear — to leave time for such matters as how to take care of souls and how to con- duct public worship according to the standards which 2,000 years of liturgical development and common sense have managed to formulate. To a very large and important extent, the future of the Church is in the hands of the seminary students, for better, for worse. Most of us are pretty well wearied with *' states- manship," and fogeyism, and over-emphasis on side issues. Are the seminary students go- ing to do anything about it at the fountain- head, and so get the Church — ^which they will be called upon in time to share in guiding along the years — somewhat nearer Christ's ideals in their generation, or are they going to be con- tent with wasted time and effort about non- essentials and a gradually-grooving, old-crusted Anglican dufferism? XIII Sample Christians The writer is acquainted with a brother clergyman who, in some mysterious manner, manages to appear always three days away from having been shaved, and whose hair ap- pears always to be three weeks away from hav- ing been cut. In lighter moments the solution of his method has sometimes afforded food for conjecture, and the only possible explanation appears to be that he tells the barber to trim the ends, and "shaves" himself with the kind of clippers barbers use on the lower part of one 's neck ! Practically everybody who knows this priest loves him because of his sweet simplicity and kindliness, but he embarrasses some of his ac- quaintances because he almost invariably hugs them, pats them on the back, and utters cer- tain vociferations indicative of joy when he meets them, thus causing strangers to turn their heads and grin. These doings are what people call his ^ ' way, ' ' and it is a bad way. A comparison between the character and the **way" of this good priest is something like what Dr. Johnson said about Goldsmith — poor honest Noll, who wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll! This man is a true servant of God, his devotion to God and to his people are 160 SAMPLE CHEISTIANS 161 things beautiful to see, but he might greatly facilitate his pastoral work and increase its effectiveness if he could be persuaded to sub- stitute the ordinary manners and appearance of gentlefolk for the devastating details of his *Svay." This priest has the traditions and the education of a gentleman, and along with these an ample income, and yet he is the kind of man who wears a collar several times, who per- forms his ablutions sketchily, and Avho leaps out of bed ten minutes before the hour set for his first service and huddles on his clothes, which have hung over a chair-back during the night. There is another priest in mind who is very neat, spick and span. He radiates cleanliness. He is always up on time, and shaved, brushed, and pressed to a nicety. His household falls just short of being painfully neat and orderly. There is a place for everything, and adequate equipment and system throughout. The parish church over which this sartorial paragon pre- sides reflects his spirit. It is a model of cor- rectitude and should be a joy to eveiy wor- shiper. This priest, too, is a godly and pious man who loves God and serves his people well, feeling keenly his pastoral responsibility and making the acquisition of skill in his proper work a matter of constant study and watchful- ness. He wastes, however, one fears, a goodly portion of his pastoral influence because, to put it in an old-fashioned phrase, he always has a chip on his shoulder. He is perfectly fearless, entirely unhampered by the corporate timidity which blasts Anglican 162 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD growth so disastrous!}^, and always ready for an argument. He fairly bristles at times. He has a formula for everything and into his mould everything must fit exactly or someone risk a belaboring. He vigorously resents it if even a kindly old lady of the Methodist persuasion, who means to be courteous and even motherly, addresses him otherwise than as ''Father." He appears incapable of referring to the Euchar- istic Sacrifice by any other term than * ' Mass. ' ' He is what Mrs. Mandell Creighton described as a Katholic! Churchmanship is constantly on his mind. He is constantly bracing up his catholicity and that of the Church by flying buttresses of diction, and so defeating his own purpose by thus suggesting that it is rather frail and crumbly. There is a suggestion of pertness about this really worthy priest and gentleman quite out of relation to such matters as incense and meditation and the cool grandeur of noble gothic fabrics. Then there is the writer's old friend, the great rector, who has accomplished many won- derful works and brought many souls to know and love their Lord. The great rector is a driving mass of energetic force, always battling and striving against the powers of evil and making a noble and a winning fight of it. In his community he is a power, in the pulpit he is mighty, in pastoral visitation indefatigable — ^but, he' is a great trial to his organist because he changes his mind and the hymns at the last instant. His curates are kept jumping about from place to place and from task to task mth- out any regard, it would seem, to the fact that SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 163 tliey are human beings. He gives them con- flicting and contradictory commands, forgetting when he tells Brown to drop what he is doing and rush to get something else done, that Rob- inson did it a week ago. It is a puzzle to the great rector's friends how his magnificent wife manages to stand up under the vast load she is obliged to carry. It would be a greater puzzle if they realized how heavily the great rector leans upon his wife, and how she sacrifices her own convenience and comfort for him. It never seems to occur to the great rector how extremely selfish he can be, and how, in getting done his share of the Lord 's gardening, he gets in the way of all who are associated with him in kindred tasks. All these subordinates refrain from complaint, that is, 'all but the sexton, who differs from the rest in that he does not pray for strength to endure, because he is a person of adamantine taciturn- ity, even in his relations with God. Clergy like these, other kinds, and ''church workers" in general, are all sample Christians. It is chiefly by contact with them that the peo- ple of any community test the quality of the religion which has jiroduced the outward and visible sample. To the people the. clergy and church workers are the living, examinable product of tlie gospel they represent and by which they live; and the people's attitude to that religion is apt to be governed accordingly. This principle can be illustrated in many ways. For example, if a music teacher cannot perform acceptably upon the instrument she teaches few people will care to employ her to teach their 164 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD cliildren to play that instrnment. If a tailor wears ugly, ill-fitting clothes, it requires a kind of rare, my sticaF faith on the part of the cus- tomer to entrust him with the making of clothes. So it is in the case of a prominent Christian — a sample Christian. People may love the unshaven, slack-dressed priest, but he cannot impress them as a very wholesome prod- uct of his own system. They may admire the priest with the chip on his well-brushed shoul- der, but they can hardly avoid drawing the con- clusion from contact with him that his religion must be an over-rigid system. Many may revere the great rector and even look up to him as pagans to their demigods; yet when they notice that they are hugging themselves in a spasm of self-congratulation because they do not have to work for him, or be his wife, they may possibly go a step farther in analysis and begin to deprecate the Christianity which can produce such a demeanor in so very prominent a professor of it. There is this much good in what has been called ' ' The New Morality, ' ' that it defines as sinful that which works harm to one's fellow man. The only objection to this system is that it stops short of defining as sin that which hurts God. Perhaps to the New Moralist God is too transcendent to be hurt. But dirtiness, and truculence, and tyrannous behaviour not only hurt those who have succumbed to these evils, and do not only distress those surround- ing such persons — they also, surely, hurt God; because, man being in God's image, they mis- represent Him whenever they appear in con- SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 165 nection with those who represent God to their fellow men. If snch persons are not, as it were, samples of God Himself, they are at least samples of what God can produce in persons and lives; and any who, like Christ Himself, would attempt to represent God to man, must be at his best and as much like God as possible, clean and unselfish, gentle and kindly. These rough categories do not, of course, exhaust the list of blemishes which all who try to interpret God would do well to avoid. Per- haps the most prominent of the many others which might be listed as weeds in God's gar- den are the devastating vices of timidity and ignorance. These misrepresent God very dread- fully. For God is not only omniscient; God is also so divinely brave that He dared to make men and endows them with free will. And by the terms timidity and ignorance it should be carefully observed that humility and mere lack of education are not intended. There is room for a certain confusion here. Many a person who is simply timid thinks he is endowed with a blessed humility. Many a one is learned and even scholarly, and at the same time wofully ignorant of what is going on in the garden of the Lord. Many of us will question the quality of a piece of cloth while swallowing untested the statement that God did command the in- vaders of Canaan to put to the sword all liv- ing creatures in Jericho, and find no trace of difficulty in the matter, even though within ten minutes they may hear it said that God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son. This is ignorance ; the kind which crumbles be- 166 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD fore the crudest of criticism and takes refuge in the formula that with God all things are possible ! This kind of ignoramus may have at his fing- er's ends an encyclopaedic knowledge of Greek prepositions, and the characteristics of all the early heresies, yet remain unaware that liis own son has abandoned his belief in God ! There are not a few accredited leaders who (like the people in Tudor Jenks' fable, ''The Statue") are so taken up with admiration of the statue which stands in the great square of their city that they would fail to recognize the subject of the statue if he should walk among them in the flesh. There are prominent churchmen who do not realize that the Church of God must move forward all along the battle-line, acquire new glories and beauties and revive old ones! Such are satisfied, in one field of endeavor, to give old clothes to a man out of work ; while in another they are apt to believe that churchty ceremonial attains its consummation of excel- lence in the parade of the vestry with the alms during sung mattins on a Sunday morning. They are delighted with their accomplishment when the pupils of the Church School have learned to enumerate the list of the kings of Israel and the places visited by St. Paul on his second missionary journey, as though these matters were the gist of the Christian Religion. They would be glad, of course, to "minister to the Italians," but there are so many things in the way! The present congregation probably Avouldn't like to have the church invaded; and then — the germs ! The children couldn 't be ex- SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 167 pected to come to the Clmrcli School if there were Italians there, naturally. ''Altar lights? Candles? Yes, oh, yes, entirely fitting and very dignified ; but then there is Miss W. — her uncle, — a very saintly character — was a vestrjTQan here for forty-three years, and it is quite cer- tain that she wouldn't like it; she would un- doubtedly be offended I — well, disturbed, then, and that would never do!" , Of course, the minds of these timid folk are simply closed to the needs of the ninety-and- nine just persons who are alive in their com- munity, but who have not been attraced by the Church as they might be if the Church, as locally represented, did not continue to hold in solution, and hence latent, a great part of what the Church should be teaching and doing. Ig- norance and timidity do not make any great appeal to people who are alive. One can be "other-worldly" and yet take an intelligent interest in aerial freight transportation. One inay be self-immolating to the last degree, yet ^insist upon truthfulness and reverence and order. Even in a petrified community there is no singular merit in being conservative for the sake of being conservative. It is the man, and especially the pastor, the spiritual leader and guide, who respects his responsibilities and his community enough to turn the community in- side out if necessary, who is truly worthy the regard of the community, and who wins that regard because he earns it. One whose lot may be cast and whose life must be led as leader and guide among the backward and the timid and the ignorant must, more than any other, 168 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD demonstrate wliat Christianity has done for him to make him courageous and wise and clean and gentle and strong and unselfish. His Gos- pel must stand out like a tower placed on a hill. It is, especially in the ministerial priesthood, leadership that God's people are hungering for — not mere acquiescence in the foibles of the spiritually narrow-minded. It is not the gard- ener who saunters about, nodding to the pop- pies as they swing in the breeze, who makes his garden groAv. If the priest rise to the opportunity which God has given him, the garden which is liis in trust to cultivate must blossom and bear fruit. He must implant in the soil of the heart among his people the seed of a glorious vision to which they will be moved to reach up, even though it transcends their comprehension when it bursts into bloom; but at the very least they will learn to look up and not be afraid. Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 1 1012 01208 3368 Date Due WR?. 'I"y 9 < m /,.•';' f ;'M 'i'.'r.tK