For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation—­a miracle which, he has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for the change which takes place in digestion.  If they were rid of his restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and honourable Oxford Movement.

If any man think that I bear too hardly on these very positive protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters in A Spiritual AEneid.  Father Knox was once a member of this party and something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his “mediaeval” theology.

A member of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised, or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual influence which might at this time have been well-nigh supreme if the main body of the nation had not unfortunately lost its interest for the man in its contempt for, or rather its indifference to, the party to which he consents to belong.

But for the singular beauty of his spiritual life, one would be tempted to set him up as an example of Coleridge’s grave warning, “He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”

I find him in these late days no nearer to Rome, not an inch nearer, than in the days of his early manhood, but absolutely convinced that Christ founded a Church and instituted the two chief sacraments.  He will sacrifice nothing in this respect.  His whole mind, which is a very different thing from his whole spirit, leans towards authority, order, and coherence.  He must have an organised society of believers, believers in the creeds, and he must have an absolute obedience to authority among these believers.

But he is a little shaken and very much alarmed by the march of modernism.  “When people run up to you in the street,” he said recently, and the phrase suggests panic, “and say, ‘Oh! what are we to do?’ I have got no short or easy answer at all.”  A large, important, and learned body of men in the Church, he says, hold views which are “directly subversive of the foundations of the creeds.”  He calls this state of things evidence of “an extraordinary collapse of discipline.”  But that is not all.  He is alarmed; he is not content to trust the future of the Church to authority alone.  “What are we to do?” He replies: