For a year he was Vicar of Radley, and then came to London as a Canon of Westminster, immediately attracting enormous congregations to hear him preach, his sermons being distinguished by a most singular simplicity, a profound piety, and above all by a deep honesty of conviction which few who heard him could withstand.  Weller, the Dean’s verger at the Abbey, has many stories to tell of the long queues at Westminster which in those days were one of the sights of London.  The Abbey has never since recovered its place as a centre of Christian teaching.

Up to this time Dr. Gore’s sympathy for the Oxford Movement was merely the background of a life devoted to the mystical element and the moral implications of the Christian religion.  He was known as a High Churchman; he was felt to be a saint; his modernism was almost forgotten.

It was not long before his tentative movement towards modernism ended in a profession of Catholic principles which allied him with forces definitely and sometimes angrily ranged against the Higher Criticism.  He became a Bishop.  Almost at once the caressing fingers of the saint became the heavy hand of the dogmatist.  He who had frightened Liddon by his tremulous adventure towards the mere fringe of modernism became the declared enemy, the implacable foe, of the least of his clergy who questioned even the most questionable clauses of the creeds.  He demanded of them all a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true.  Every word of the creeds had to be uttered ex animo.  “It is very hard to be a good Christian.”  Yes; but did Dr. Gore make it harder than it need be?  There was something not very unlike a heresy hunt in the diocese over which the editor of Lux Mundi ruled with a rod of iron.

I remember once speaking to Dr. Winnington Ingram, Bishop of London, about the Virgin Birth.  He told me that he had consulted Charles Gore on this matter, and that he agreed with Charles Gore’s ruling that if belief in that miracle were abandoned Christianity would perish.  Such is the fate of those who put their faith in dogmas, and plant their feet on the sands of tradition.

Dr. Gore’s life as a Bishop, first of Worcester, then of Birmingham, and finally of Oxford, was disappointing to many of his admirers, and perhaps to himself.  He did well to retire.  But unfortunately this retirement was not consecrated to those exercises which made him so impressive and so powerful an influence in the early years of his ministry.  He set himself to be, not an exponent of the Faith, but the defender of a particular aspect of that Faith.

Here, I think, is to be found the answer to our question concerning the loss of Dr. Gore’s influence in the national life.  From the day of the great sermons in Westminster Abbey that wonderful influence has diminished, and he is now in the unhappy position of a party leader whose followers begin to question his wisdom.  Organisation has destroyed him.