IV
THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC

MACKAY was one of the most conspicuous figures in the post-war history of the Catholic revival in the Church of England. In order to appreciate his significance it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the significance of the revival and of the character of the men who have played the chief parts in its various stages.

The Catholic revival was a recovery, not a revolution. The Tractarian Fathers would have strongly repudiated any suggestion that they were saying something new. They claimed that they were saying something that was very old. They insisted that the Apostolic character of the English Church had never been lost. They would have admitted that, before the preaching by Keble of the Assize Sermon at Oxford in 1833, the great majority of the clergy and laity of the Church of England believed that they were Protestants in the full Geneva sense of the term. But they would have added that, whatever these misguided people believed, they were nothing of the sort.

The Tractarians were not consciously revolutionists, but history shows that the most effective revolutionists are the men who pull up the red flag against their better nature. They were entirely concerned with recovering that which had been lost; but recovery is often revolution.

The revolutionist, indeed, has often been far more intent on looking backward than on looking forward. Rousseau's doctrine of the rights of man meant a return to the simian life of the tree-tops. William Morris would have rebuilt New Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land according to the plans of a fourteenth-century architect. So would Gilbert Chesterton. The Protestant Reformers went back to the Bible, rejecting the Church's generally accepted interpretation of Holy Scripture and substituting arbitrary individual interpretations of their own. To-day the slogan of certain Protestant sects is "back to Luther"--Calvin is at the nadir of popularity--as if Christianity was invented in the sixteenth century. "Back to the primitive and undivided Church" was the cry of the Tractarians. This was coupled with the conviction that the Church of England was the heir in England of the primitive and undivided Church and that the character and divinely endowed power and authority of the early Church were the possessions of the Church of England, however little they were valued and understood.

Men dissatisfied with the present are almost always compelled to long for the past. This was true of the early Socialists. It took a man of genius like Karl Marx to envisage an unknown future.

Though they were united in a common aim, the Tractarians were men of vastly different temperaments and affinities. As I have suggested in my study of him, though he always regarded himself as the enemy of Liberalism, Newman was fundamentally himself a Liberal. He was in the very best sense of the word an apostle of Free Thought. He accepted everything on authority with a certain intellectual shudder and, when he had accepted, he was always extraordinarily uncomfortable. Pusey, on the other hand, was a fundamentalist. If he had ever gone to Rome he would have been as ultramontane as Manning. And the post-Tractarian history of the Catholic revival has run on two fundamentally different lines, the Newman line, of which Gore has been the most distinguished exponent, and the Pusey line, represented in the second generation by Liddon, who was horrified by the publication of Lux Mundi.

Mackay was not a theologian in the technical sense and he had extremely little sympathy with Gore's distinctive churchmanship, but he was a very definite Liberal. I remember that he once said to me that, while he held without qualification the doctrine of the Incarnation, he quite understood how the acceptance of that doctrine might be compatible with the rejection of the Virgin Birth. I do not think that he was, as a matter of fact, particularly interested in theology, and if in questions of dogma he was inclined to tolerance, he was rigid in every detail of Catholic practice. In this he went much farther than the Tractarians. He insisted, for example, that no child should make his First Communion before a First Confession, and, as Canon Ollard has pointed out to me, this was entirely opposed to the teaching of Bishop King.

The Tractarians were first and last theologians. Their concern was to preach Catholic doctrine--the real Presence, baptismal regeneration, sacramental confession, and absolution. They were not inany sense ritualists. Keble celebrated the Holy Communion at the north end of the altar. He and his associates cared nothing for mass vestments or incense, or elaborate services. Their appeal was to the learned, and it is one of the curiosities of religious history that they sowed without knowing in the least what the harvest would be.

Apart from its dogmatic emphasis, the Tractarian movement has had two vital developments, the one aesthetic, the other social. One of the first results of the quickening of religion in the Church of England was the building of new churches, which more or less successfully attempted a beauty in sharp contrast to the ugliness of the Waterloo churches and other monstrosities erected in the early years of last century. There was a new realization of the intimate relation between the teaching of Catholic doctrine and the solemn dignity of Catholic worship, which necessitated a setting as dignified and comely as was possible. The Puritans had realized the beauty of holiness: the Anglo-Catholics began to insist on the holiness of beauty. This recovery of a great and saving truth has had the most profound effect on the practice of religion, both within and without the Church of England. With his highly developed aesthetic intelligence, Mackay played no small part in accentuating the supreme value of this fact, realized to the full in the Middle Ages and recovered to some extent when the era of Victorian drabness was coming to an end. All Saints', Margaret Street, is not a beautiful church--it is indeed, almost as ugly as it is uncomfortable--but during Mackay's incumbency its services became the model of liturgical beauty. Mackay was not himself an expert liturgiologist, nor was he a musician. His personal interference in the arrangement of the services was of the smallest, but he loved beauty as he loved comeliness and order and, being a wise man, he gave the expert his head, so long as the result was aesthetically satisfying.

His individual position was difficult to understand. Canon Ollard, who, not without reason, regards himself as the last of the Tractarians, and who is convinced that nothing has happened of much value since Pusey died, thinks of Mackay as an ecclesiastical Bolshevist. As a matter of fact he was nothing of the sort. He was essentially as Church of England as Canon Ollard himself. In common with the Tractarians he was neither anti-Roman nor pro-Roman. I should think it was extremely unlikely that at any time in his life it had occurred to him that he might pursue the primrose path from Canterbury to the Vatican. Above all things he was acutely modern. Unlike the Tractarians, who lived in the past, he lived in the present and, as I have already pointed out, it was his mission to bring the past into the present, without shock and always with good manners. He could always wait and see. An example of this is the fact that until the War the Blessed Sacrament was reserved in the Sisters' Chapel in Margaret Street and was only brought into church to meet the needs of the times. It would be unfair to say that Mackay was an opportunist, but he was certainly a realist.

In the second stage of its history the Catholic revival moved from the schools to the parishes and at the beginning it flourished most conspicuously in the poor parishes. In 1859 St. George's in the East was the scene of persistent sacrilegious riots, nominally aggravated by the ritualistic practices of the Church but "largely stimulated by the sweaters whose proceedings the curates, Messrs. Mackonochie and Lowder, had the unheard-of temerity to denounce and interfere with". It is good to be reminded that, when the revival was less than twenty-five years old, it had already become actively associated with the preaching of the social Gospel.

Mackonochie went from St. George's in the East to become the first incumbent of St. Alban's, Holborn. His intention was to build a church in a poor district for the benefit of the poor. On the actual site of St. Alban's was a thieves' kitchen, and the whole neighbourhood of Baldwin Gardens was sordid, criminal and depraved. In 1866, in a letter to The Times, a writer said:

"St. Alban's is pre-eminently a church for the poor. The number drawn into the fold by baptism from the very lowest and most wretched class is truly astounding. The clergy are indefatigable in their labour of love among the poor and there is a goodly muster of this class in the congregation every Sunday."

St. Alban's, Holborn, was not the only Anglo-Catholic lighthouse set up in the dark places. The social gospel was preached by Dolling in Portsmouth, by Lowder, and by a score of men in provincial slums, and perhaps the first proof of the vitality of Tractarianism was that, planted in the schools, it first flourished in the mean streets. The move to well-to-do parishes was a later development. All Saints', Margaret Street, was built some years after St. Alban's, Holborn. It was built with the conviction that the rich have souls to be saved as well as the poor. As Gilbert wrote:

Hearts just as pure and fair

May beat in Belgrave Square

As in the rarer air

Of Seven Dials.

There is--I often wish from one point of view there was not--an instinctive jollity in mean streets. The poor laugh more heartily and more frequently than the well-to-do. Gray's Inn Road half a century ago was sordid enough, but it was more or less jolly. Margaret Street was never a jolly neighbourhood, and All Saints' has never been a jolly church, but it has its prim, respectable place in the story of the Catholic revival, equally important and equally symbolic as the place of St. Alban's, Holborn, or St. Peter's, London Docks, or St. George's in the East.

The clergy of St. Alban's preached to the simple. The clergy of All Saints', Margaret Street, and particularly Mackay, preached to the subtle, or if not to the really subtle, to people who would be vastly annoyed if they were regarded as simple. And this contrast between the two churches suggests an interesting comparison between Father Stanton, the most famous of the St. Alban's priests, and Canon Mackay, who will always be remembered as "Mackay of All Saints' ".

Father Stanton was pre-eminently a missionary to the poor. He had a genius for friendship. He could never patronize. Wherever he was, he lived among his equals. Stanton caught the admiration and affection of the populace in a way that no other English priest has succeeded in doing during the past century. Not perhaps since the Kentish fishermen waded out into the sea to welcome St. Thomas's homecoming for a triumphant death, or the poor crowded the Thames-side at Lambeth when Laud was taken to the Tower, has there been such a spontaneous outburst of sorrow as when Stanton died. Chancellor R. J. Campbell wrote:

"Shall one ever forget the sight as the procession moved down the crowded Holborn thoroughfare, men and women kneeling in the rainy streets as it passed, and even passengers on the tops of omnibuses standing with bared heads and joining in the strains of Rock of Ages?"

Stanton was a revivalist. His mission was the preaching of repentance. He was, that is to say, a pioneer and for the greater part of his life, so far as Anglo-Catholicism was concerned, he lived in a pioneering area. Mackay was largely, though of bourse not entirely, concerned with confirming in the faith. His congregation was a congregation of the converted, whom he guided, instructed and encouraged. Stanton and his contemporaries were first-class fighting men. To Mackay Catholicism was established as firmly as the Church of England itself. Its respectability had made it possible and indeed had made it imperative for a man with Mackay's peculiar gifts and characteristic detachment to elaborate and to embellish, to suggest the graces of the Catholic life and the relations of the faith to the problems and the developments of the modern world. Each man performed the task for which he was peculiarly fitted, but while the pioneer and the fighter naturally attracted popular affection, the man, called to the less picturesque task of strengthening and building up, could never have the same sort of glamour. It was perfectly natural for Stanton, like Wain-wright who outlived him, to have worn a shabby cassock: it would have been affectation for Mackay to have done anything of the sort.

The less showy role was much more difficult to play. Middle-class Ghurchpeople, self-conscious and the heirs of the Puritan tradition, as the poor certainly are not, are suspicious of Catholic doctrine and some of them seem still troubled with fear of the re-lighting of the Smithfield fires. The congregation at All Saints' is for the most part neither rich nor distinguished, but the majority have a considerable culture and a tendency to criticize which that limited culture hardly justifies. On the whole they are not easy people to hold and to influence. Mackay held them week after week and was the predominant influence in the lives of hundreds of men and women.

In the second period of Anglo-Catholicism, the characteristics of its strength and the cause of its progress were an intense sympathy and an intense individualism. The instinctive dislike of submission to authority, which is essentially English, if it is not exaggerated, is far more of an asset than a liability. The Englishman is law-abiding, but he detests lawyers and has no great affection for policemen. The priests who disobeyed authority were not disobedient for fun. It must be remembered that the men, who took the Catholic religion into the slums, did so with the open hostility of Bishops. Davidson drummed Dolling out of Portsmouth. Mackonochie was literally martyred. Tait clapped several clergymen into gaol, being vastly embarrassed when one of them refused to come out. Conscious of the mission entrusted to them, these men were compelled to realize that ecclesiastical authority was doing its utmost to prevent the fulfilment of the mission. They were forced into a rebellion clearly inconsistent with Catholic principles and yet entirely justifiable--one of those queer things that can only happen in England.

The opposition to authority was not factious. Priests disobeyed a lower authority as they be-ieved in obedience to a higher authority. Dolling was persecuted by Davidson for little more than every High Church vicar nowadays does every Sunday. The offenders were not, and certainly did not think that they were, Romanists in any sense of the word. They believed that they were carrying out their obligation as priests of the Church of England. But the era of legitimate disregard of partisan Episcopal instruction came to an end when the Episcopate ceased to be partisan and when Bishops generally had accepted the fact that Anglo-Catholics had their rightful place in the Church.

The time of active persecution had come to an end before Mackay went to All Saints', and the sympathy and understanding of the Bishop of London made general disregard of Episcopal direction at once ill-advised and ill-mannered. Mackay himself was essentially a man of order. I do not think that I have ever met a man in my whole life less inclined to lead a revolt and while, if he had been placed in the same difficult position as Mackonochie, he might have rivalled Macko-nochie's courageous resistance, he must have often rejoiced that he was never called to such resistance. It was the greater sympathy and the greater understanding at Fulham that made the work of consolidation in Margaret Street possible.

Mackay was not among those who regarded the flouting of Bishops as a primarily Catholic duty. He was much more inclined to obey than to disobey. He never lost his sense of proportion. He could always put first things first. When therefore the Bishop of London, who, by the way, never failed to turn to him for advice in any case of trouble with his Anglo-Catholic clergy, forbade extra-liturgical services, that were even a modified imitation of the Roman service of Benediction, Mackay promptly, if regretfully, obeyed. This was an important lead in reasonable, rightful obedience. Mackay was a consolidator, and the era of consolidation demanded the acceptance of rulings that might appear unnecessary but which were not opposed to fundamental Catholic truths. The patience of a Mackay was as valuable as the impatience of a Dolling.

The progress of Anglo-Catholicism into the slums has had an enduring consequence in its concern with what has come to be called the social Gospel. As time has gone on, clergy and laity have become more and more convinced that there is something blasphemous in promising a Heaven above unless something has been done to create a Heaven below. Basil Jellicoe's destruction of the slums in Somers Town is the achievement of the past ten years of which Anglo-Catholics have most reason to be proud, and this is only one manifestation of the conviction, expressed two years ago at a great meeting in the Albert Hall at which Archbishop Temple presided, when seven thousand men and women declared that bad housing, malnutrition and enforced idleness were affronts to Almighty God. Anglo-Catholicism has become not only Liberal Catholicism but Social Catholicism, the Catholicism for which Manning stood and which since his death has almost entirely been lost by the Roman Church in England. Mackay was always outside this most vital development. He was not untouched by the woes of the harassed and the unfortunate, but he knew very little about them and I do not think that he wanted very much to know about them.

I do not suppose that he ever went into a slum. Geoffrey Heald says that he hardly ever went into an omnibus. He would have been shocked by the slum if he had been into a slum and, unlike St. Francis, he would have hated to have been shocked. This side of a man of many parts is not to be ignored and I think it largely accounts for his failure to play a larger part in the life of his time. I have said this before in this short sketch and I repeat it designedly, because it seems to me to summarize the man. He never left Oxford and he never went to Hoxton.

During the past thirteen years the Catholic revival has been dominated by the Anglo-Catholic Congress movement with which the great name of Bishop Frank Weston will always be associated and which, among other things, has led to the amalgamation of the Congress and the old English Church Union, for a generation the righting Catholic Society. The first Anglo-Catholic Congress was an appeal for support of foreign missions. The week concluded with Weston's never-to-be-forgotten speech in which he asserted that it is useless to worship Christ in the tabernacle if you do not pity him in the slum.

Mackay made many noble speeches at the various Anglo-Catholic Congresses and, trusted and respected as he was by his brethren, his public utterances always had their profound effect. In another chapter I discuss why he declined the leadership that might have been his after Bishop Weston's death. Here it is sufficient to say that his influence was steadily used to curb the eccentricities into which the Congress movement has tended and to deprecate the stunts for which some of its leaders have a very human, if none the less regrettable, affection.

Mackay was essentially Church of England. He never regretted the comprehensiveness of the Church. He frequently invited Evangelical priests to preach at All Saints'. There was nothing indefinite in his own position, but he could understand and appreciate other men's approach to the problems of life and death. All Saints' under Mackay was the home of sane English Catholicism.

How has Mackay affected the character of to-morrow? It is unhappily not to be denied that the poor who thronged Anglo-Catholic churches in East London and South London in the later decades of last century are no longer held. It may XJ be because, for the time at least, the gift of forcibly preaching the word has largely been lost. On the other hand the middle-class congregations are being held to a considerable extent, and I think largely because of the inheritance by other men of what may be called the Mackay spirit, which cherishes austerity in expression and in devotion, simplicity of ritual and submission to constitutional rules and regulations.

It was once said to me by my friend, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, a humorously truculent unbeliever, that Bishop Gore must have been dishonest because he was far too clever a man really to believe in Christianity, and it is always a little annoying to the modern ladies and gentlemen, persuaded that no person can sincerely accept the Christian doctrines who is not either an elderly spinster or a callow curate, to find men of culture and intellect who are professing Christians. The sceptic is ready in these days with admiration for St. Francis. Francis was a good man, rather a pleasant person indeed, and therefore he can be forgiven for holding strange beliefs. The Christian who is more obviously intelligent than good is a dreadful problem, and a priest therefore like Mackay, who was pre-eminently a rationalist, is an outstanding asset to the Church, since he is a standing contradiction of the assumption that the truth is only revealed to babes. In the finest sense of the word there is something babyish in a man like Stanton, because that kind of man never really grows up. Mackay's was a grown-up man's religion. For all his intense admiration of St. Francis, he would have felt much more at home with St. Thomas Aquinas. No man has preached more eloquently of St. John the Divine, but I think Mackay would have been happier with St. Paul, though he might not have found it comfortable to have shared the vicissitudes of the Apostle's travels.

Mackay, indeed, was the epitome of Catholicism and common sense.

In the years before us something more is wanted than taste and restraint and intelligence, something more even than faith. The old order is hurrying into chaotic change. All things are becoming new. What part is the Church to play in this era of revolution? To a considerable extent Mackay realized the inevitable course of world events. But I do not think that he ever seriously considered how the Church might influence and affect that course. He had nothing like a political mind. He never preached a political sermon. He was concerned with the adventures of the soul, with the development of individual relations with the Eternal, with the refining of character. And he had no obvious conception of how unequal social conditions affect character, how they vulgarize the well-to-do and demoralize the very poor. He was not unworldly. He loved literature, music and painting, and particularly he loved the theatre. The happiest week of his year was Festival Week at Stratford-on-Avon. But he was otherworldly. His spirit lived apart. His was not a voice crying in the wilderness. His was a voice speaking in pleasant cadence and with persuasive skill, as it were in the quiet cloisters far away from the hurly-burly.

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