Archbishop Whately

“ His cherished scheme of unsectarian religious instruction for Protestants and Catholics alike was carried out for a number of years with a measure of success, but in 1852 the scheme broke down owing to the opposition of the new Catholic archbishop of Dublin, and Whately felt himself constrained to withdraw from the Education Board. From the beginning Whately was a keen-sighted observer of the condition of Ireland question, and gave much offence by openly supporting the state endowment of the Catholic clergy as a measure of justice. ”

“ Of that, Archbishop Whately's must be held to be the correct account. ”

“ When, however, Dr Whately was made an archbishop, and Dr Hampden some years afterwards regius professor, many wise divines saw that a change was taking place in men's minds, and that more liberal ideas would henceforward be suitable to the priests as well as to the laity. ”

“ With not a few, the bishop is chief hero, next to Jean Valjean. He is redemptive, like the purchase money of a slave. He is quixotic; he is not balanced always, nor always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity and tenderness and goodness and love—a good way to fall, if one is to fall at all. We love the bishop, and can not help it. He was good to the poor, tender to the unerring, illuminative to those who were in the moral dark, and came over people like a sunrise; crept into their hearts for good, as a child creeps up into its father's arms, and nestles there like a bird. ”

“ One day he realized that indeed the whole flood and tumult of the war would be going on almost exactly as it was going on now if there had been neither cathedral nor bishop in Princhester. It came to him that if archbishops were rolled into patriarchs and patriarchs into archbishops, it would matter scarcely more in the world process that was afoot than if two men shook hands while their house was afire. At times all of us have inappropriate thoughts. ”

“ In every gathering of the Church and of the people, in every synod, in every gemót, the Archbishop of Canterbury held a place which had no equal or second, a place which was shared by no other bishop or earl or ætheling. If we reckon the King as the head of the assembly, the Archbishop is its first member. If we reckon the King as a power outside the assembly, the Archbishop is himself its head. His leadership of the nation. He is the personal counsellor of the King, the personal leader of the nation, in a way in which no other man in the realm could be said to be. ”

“ He is bound to appoint a man who not only has hitherto played no pranks, but of whom he may feel sure that he will play none in future. In our Church, as it exists at present, we have ample latitude joined to much bigotry, and it is almost as impossible to control the one as the other. Such control is, in fact, on either side absolutely impossible; and, therefore, archbishops are wanted who shall make no attempts at controlling. And yet an archbishop must seem to control,—or, else, why is he there? An Archbishop of Canterbury must be a visible head of bishops, and yet exercise no headship. ”

“ One result of an hereditary Episcopate is that the bishop is often absurdly young in years. The present holder of the Patriarchate is of the mature age of twenty-three, and{268} is in the ninth year of his consecration! That a lad of that age (though admittedly maturity comes quickly in the East) should take himself very seriously as an Archbishop, is too much to be expected. Still he does take himself very seriously as the responsible Head of his nation; as the one to whom all have the right to turn in their need, and who is bound to help them to the limits of his power. ”

“ Why,” he continued, “think what a helpless creature a priest is in everything but his priesthood—more helpless than a woman, even. The only thing he could do would be to leave the church, and how could he do that? He’s in the world, but he isn’t of it, and I don’t see what he could do with it, or it with him. If an Italian priest were to leave the church, even the liberals, who distrust him now, would despise him still more. Do you know that they have a pleasant fashion of calling the Protestant converts apostates? The first thing for such a priest would be exile. ”

“ This grievous error, which has the necessary effect of repelling and ultimately offending and alienating the whole body of the inferior clergy, a body who constitute the active strength of the Establishment, we must hope to see henceforth totally changed. In the higher view of the case, an Archbishop of Canterbury possesses every advantage for giving an honourable and meritorious popularity to the Church. ”

“ To assume everybody to be good, as some philanthropists do, is folly, being so transparently false. The good bishop—bless him for his goodness!—who prays God daily not to lead him into temptation, why does he lead this sullen criminal into temptation? Reformatory methods should be sane. The bishop's methods were not sane. He meant well, but did not quite do well. Jean Valjean, sleeping in a bed of comfort, grows restless, wakens, rises, steals what is accessible, flees, is arrested, brought back, is exonerated by the bishop's tenderness, goes out free ”

“ The archbishops, as the heads of the endowed clergymen of the Church of England, are possessed of freeholds, and that freehold cannot be touched. It is theirs for life; and so great is the practical latitude of our Church, that it may be doubted whether anything short of a professed obedience to the Pope could deprive an archbishop of his stipend. ”

“ It followeth not a mere Bishop may have a multitude of Churches, because an Archbishop may, who hath many Bishops under him.
What then does Baxter quarrel about? That our Bishops take a humbler title than they have a right to claim;—that being in fact Archbishops, they are for the most part content to be styled as one of the brethren! ”

“ It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn in two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop's was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the historic character of Church government. ”

“ But, on whatever principle chosen, the bishop, once duly consecrated and enthroned, was a formidable person, and surrounded by a dignity scarcely less than royal. "Nobody likes our bishop," says Parson Lingon in Felix Holt. "He's all Greek and greediness, and too proud to dine with his own father." People still living can remember the days when the Archbishop of Canterbury was preceded by servants bearing flambeaux when he walked across from Lambeth Chapel to what were called "Mrs. Howley's Lodgings." ”

“ The archbishops in England have from time to time exercised a visitatorial power over their suffragans, in use till the time of Archbishop Laud. The archbishops of Ireland have immemorially visited their suffragans triennially: the Episcopal Visitation being there annual. (See Stephens’ Edition of the Book of Common Prayer, with notes, vol. i. pp. 26–30.)
Some learned men are of opinion, that an archbishop is a dignity as ancient as the apostles’ time, for there were primi episcopi then, though the name of archbishop was not known until some ages afterwards ”

“ The Archbishop, “who was present at all the sermons, and who for the first time since the violences of which he had been the victim after the Revolution of July, found himself in the presence of the crowd, was transported by a success which avenged him so nobly by associating him with the popularity of this new-born glory. One day, rising from his archiepiscopal throne before that immense audience, he bestowed on his young disciple the title of the new prophet.” ”

“ The clergyman, as soon as he is appointed, comes into possession of it in his own right; and he is not appointed by the people, but by some nobleman or high officer of state, who has inherited the right to appoint the clergyman of that particular parish. There are bishops, also, who have very large revenues, likewise independent; and over these bishops is one great dignitary, who presides in lofty state over the whole system. This officer is called the Archbishop of Canterbury. There is one other archbishop, called the Archbishop of York; but his realm is much more limited and less important. ”

“ The monks now raised again their lamentable cry. The king, several of the bishops, and various monasteries and chapters petitioned the pope to restore the abbey to its ancient independence; and we are glad to have a letter from Dean Alexander and the canons of Wells, of whom Jocelin the future bishop was one, assuring the pope that Bishop Savary's scheme, however well-intentioned on the part of those who had carried it through, had proved a disastrous failure. ”

“ That the bishop should treat the whole teaching of the church and the church itself as wrong, was an idea so new that it fell upon him now like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky. But here, clear in his mind now, was a feeling, amounting to conviction, that it was the purpose and gesture of the true God that he should come right out of the church and all his professions.
And in the first glow of his vision he felt this gesture imperative. He must step right out.... Whither? how? And when?
To begin with it seemed to him that an immediate renunciation was demanded. ”

“ The main body of the clergy are good, holy men. The Archbishop is a man who would be an honor to any church in any country. He is a man of eminent learning and great sanctity. He is one of the kindest and most charitable men I ever met. ”

“ The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man; but nearly all the fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and glancing down a row of these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the constant recurrence of the line of beauty in their well-rounded persons. ”

“ The high station occupied by the bishop in the social hierarchy is proved by the amount of his wergyld and of the fines assigned to offences against his honour, his person, and his property. Although the bishop and the presbyter are in fact but of one order in the church, yet the state found it convenient to place the former on much the higher scale. In the “North-people’s law” an archbishop is reckoned upon the same footing as an æðeling or prince of the blood, at fifteen thousand thrymsas, and a bishop upon the same footing as an ealdorman at eight thousand. ”

“ For a bishop, as saith Augustine, is a name of labour, and not of honour: because he will have that man understand himself to be no bishop, which will seek to have pre-eminence, and not to profit others. And that neither the Pope, nor any other worldly creature can no more be head of the whole Church, or a bishop over all, than he can be the bridegroom, the light, the salvation, and life of the Church. ”

“ He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain. He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men, in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.
Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people. ”

“ The churches do not serve God. They stand between man and God. They are like great barricades on the way to God.”
The bishop's hand brushed over Archbishop Pontifex, who was just coming down to breakfast in his palace. This pompous old man was dressed in a purple garment that set off his tall figure very finely, and he was holding out his episcopal ring for his guests to kiss, that being the customary morning greeting of Archbishop Pontifex. ”

“ The archbishop, by his archdeacon Philip le Brand, held a visitation at Athenry, at which the friars were, in the usual course, summoned to appear. The friars, it seems, claimed exemption from the visitatorial powers of the archbishop; only three of them attended the the chapter, and thy delivered a protest so loudly and violently, and abused the archdeacon so grossly, that he excommunicated them. Immediately after the archbishop issued a proclamation forbidding the people to give them food of alms, or sell them anything, or enter the church. ”

“ Yet the Archbishop, as if aware that his candour might, by a very natural process, excite suspicion of his Orthodoxy, raises himself above imputation by adding, “In a word, they are the strongest managers of a weak cause, and which is ill-founded at the bottom, that perhaps ever yet meddled with controversy ”

“ It is an emotion, a mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody—even for an Archbishop—especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. ”

“ The Archbishop says, these "foolish men" (the Freethinkers) are "striving to replunge the world into the depths of Barbarism and Paganism," etc., etc. To those who know that the present attitude of all the great scientists and eminent savans towards the dogmas of the Christian Church, is one of undoubted unbelief and hostility; and who are conversant with the history of the Archbishop's own church in particular, during the past fifteen centuries,—to them the Archbishop's vituperation is as foolish as it is ridiculous. ”