the hopelessly corrupt and fatal times of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, which led to the break-up
of the sixteenth. Thus to the great question,
What is the Church? he gave without hesitation, and
gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans gave
and are giving still. But he added two points
which were then very new to the ears of English Churchmen:
(1) that there were great and to most people unsuspected
faults and shortcomings in the English Church, for
some of which the Reformation was gravely responsible;
(2) that the Roman Church was more right than we had
been taught to think in many parts both of principle
and practice, and that our quarrel with it on these
points arose from our own ignorance and prejudices.
To people who had taken for granted all their lives
that the Church was thoroughly “Protestant”
and thoroughly right in its Protestantism, and that
Rome was Antichrist, these confident statements came
with a shock. He did not enter much into dogmatic
questions. As far as can be judged from his Remains,
the one point of doctrine on which he laid stress,
as being inadequately recognised and taught in the
then condition of the English Church, was the primitive
doctrine of the Eucharist. His other criticisms
pointed to practical and moral matters; the spirit
of Erastianism, the low standard of life and purpose
and self-discipline in the clergy, the low tone of
the current religious teaching. The Evangelical
teaching seemed to him a system of unreal words.
The opposite school was too self-complacent, too comfortable,
too secure in its social and political alliances;
and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions.
“We will have a vocabularium apostolicum,
and I will start it with four words: ‘pampered
aristocrats,’ ’resident gentlemen,’
‘smug parsons,’ and ’pauperes
Christi’. I shall use the first on
all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing.”
“I think of putting the view forward (about
new monasteries), under the title of a ‘Project
for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.’ Certainly
colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course,
retire to a living, when they could and liked) would
be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively
for the spiritual wants of a large population.”
And his great quarrel with the existing state of things
was that the spiritual objects of the Church were
overlaid and lost sight of in the anxiety not to lose
its political position. In this direction he was,
as he proclaims himself, an out-and-out Radical, and
he was prepared at once to go very far. “If
a national Church means a Church without discipline,
my argument for discipline is an argument against a
national Church; and the best thing we can do is to
unnationalise ours as soon as possible”; “let
us tell the truth and shame the devil; let us give
up a national Church and have a real
one.” His criticism did not diminish in
severity, or his proposals become less daring, as he