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 UNIVCRSITY OF 
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 1 SAN DIEGO \
 
 LEADERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 1800 1900 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL
 
 UNIFORU WITH THIS VOLUME. 
 3\6 net. 
 
 DEAN CHURCH. 
 
 By D. C, Lathbury. 
 
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 ajo-yzj
 
 LEADERS OF THE CHURCH 
 
 18001900 
 
 EDITED BY GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL 
 
 DR. LIDDON 
 
 BY 
 
 G. W. E. RUSSELL 
 
 A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LIMITED 
 
 LONDON : 34, Great Castle Street, Oxford Circus, W 
 
 OXFORD : 106, S. Aldate's Street 
 
 1905
 
 TO MY FRIEND 
 
 LOUIS KERCHEVAL HILTON, 
 
 RECTOR OF SEMLEY, 
 
 IN REMEMBRANCE OF 
 
 HAPPY DAYS AT OXFORD.
 
 GENERAL PREFACE. 
 
 TT seems expedient that the origin and scope 
 of this new Series of Biographies should 
 be briefly explained. 
 
 Messrs. A. R. Mowbray and Co. had formed 
 the opinion that Ecclesiastical Biography is apt 
 to lose in attractiveness and interest, by reason 
 of the technical and professional spirit in which 
 it is generally handled. Acting on this opinion, 
 they resolved to publish some short Lives of 
 "Leaders of the Modern Church," written 
 exclusively by laymen. They conceived that 
 a certain freshness might thus be imparted 
 to subjects already more or less familiar, and 
 that a class of readers, who are repelled by 
 the details of ecclesiasticism, might be attracted 
 by a more human, and in some sense a more 
 secular, treatment of religious lives. 
 
 This conception of Ecclesiastical Biography 
 agreed entirely with my own prepossessions ; 
 and I gladly acceded to the publishers' request 
 that I would undertake the general superin- 
 tendence of the series. I am not without 
 the hope that these handy and readable books 
 may be of some service to the English clergy. 
 They set forth the impressions produced on 
 
 vi
 
 Vlll 
 
 the minds of devout and interested lay-people 
 by the characters and careers of some great 
 ecclesiastics. It seems possible that a know- 
 ledge of those impressions may stimulate 
 and encourage that "interest in public affairs, 
 in the politics and welfare of the country," 
 and in "the civil life of the people," which 
 Cardinal Manning noted as the peculiar virtue 
 of the English Priesthood ; and the lack of 
 which he deplored as one of the chief defects 
 of the Priesthood over which he himself 
 presided. 1 
 
 G. W. E. RUSSELL. 
 
 S, Mary Magdalene 't Day, 
 1905. 
 
 1 See "Hindrances to the Spread of the Catholic 
 Church in England," at the end of Purcell's Life of 
 Cardinal {Manning.
 
 NOTE. 
 
 TT will be seen at a glance that this book 
 does not attempt to compete with the Life 
 ana Letters of Henry Parry Liddon^ D.D., com- 
 piled by the Rev. J. O. Johnston, Principal 
 of Cuddesdon. It is intended merely to 
 supplement the larger book in some small 
 matters of detail ; and I desire to testify my 
 deep obligations to the accuracy and thorough- 
 ness of Mr. Johnston's work. 
 
 In describing Dr. Liddon's opinions, I 
 have of course made free use of his pub- 
 lished writings. In attempting to estimate his 
 character and gifts, I have relied mainly on 
 the friendship with which he honoured me : it 
 began in my first term at Oxford, and 
 lasted till his death. I am greatly indebted 
 to members of his family for their encourage- 
 ment and help ; and to several of his friends, 
 outside the domestic circle, who have given 
 me similar assistance. 
 
 G.W. E. R. 
 
 Ml Sauli 
 1905
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. BEGINNINGS ORDINATION CUDDBSDON - i 
 
 II. S. EDMUND HALL SERMONS BAMPTON 
 
 LECTURES - - - - - -13 
 
 III. THE IRISH CHURCH THE LENT LECTURES - 28 
 
 IV. S. PAUL'S THE ATHANASIAN CREED - - 42 
 
 V. THE P. W. R. ACT THE EASTERN QUESTION 
 
 CHANGES AT OXFORD - - - 55 
 
 VI. WORK IN LONDON BISHOPRICS THE EAST - 71 
 
 VII. MR. BELL Cox "JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC" 
 
 S. PAUL'S REREDOS LINCOLN TRIAL - 89 
 
 VIII. Lux MUNDI - - - - -101 
 
 IX. THE LAST CHARGE THE END - -' - 122 
 
 X. THEOLOGY RITUAL ESTABLISHMENT- - 139 
 
 XI. POLITICS - - - - - - 161 
 
 XII. CHARACTERISTICS SUMMARY - - - 172
 
 Leaders of the Church 
 
 18001900 
 
 DR. LIDDON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 BEGINNINGS ORDINATION CUDDESDON. 
 
 " LIDDON is half a Frenchman." Vary the 
 phrase by occasionally substituting "an Italian" 
 for " a Frenchman," and you have the short 
 and easy formula in which, in 1870, the world 
 summarized its impressions of a new and 
 astonishing force in the religious life of 
 London. 1 Some show of plausibility was 
 lent to the statement by the great preacher's 
 olive skin, jet-black hair, and piercing eyes ; 
 some by the vehemence of his rhetorical 
 manner ; some by the structure and method 
 of the arresting orations in which he had 
 sought to deliver his hearers from "per- 
 plexities which beset an age of feverish 
 scepticism." But it was all delusion. In 
 spite of his complexion and his rhetoric, 
 1 See page 33. 
 
 B
 
 2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Liddon was as thoroughbred an Englishman 
 as could be found between the Solent and the 
 Bristol Channel. His ancestors had long been 
 settled in the south-western part of England. 
 His father, Matthew Liddon, was an officer in 
 the Royal Navy, and had served with distinc- 
 tion under Captain, afterwards Sir Edward, 
 Parry in the attempt to discover the North- 
 West Passage. 1 On his retirement from active 
 service, Captain Liddon married Ann Bilke, 
 and established himself at North Stoneham, near 
 Basingstoke. Here their eldest son, HENRY 
 PARRY LIDDON, was born on August 2oth, 1829, 
 and was baptized on the 26th of September. 
 Captain Parry was one of the Godfathers, 
 and bestowed his name upon the child. 
 
 It is worthy of note, and should be stated 
 at the very outset, that the religious influences 
 which governed Henry Liddon's infancy and 
 youth were profoundly Evangelical. At his 
 mother's knee he learned the vital lesson that 
 " other foundation can no man lay than that 
 is laid, which is JESUS CHRIST ; " and on that 
 impregnable rock the whole superstructure of 
 his lire and work was built. 
 
 In 1832 the Liddons moved to Colyton, 
 and in 1839 Henry Liddon was sent to a 
 boarding-school at Lyme Regis. His tastes 
 and habits at school were remarkably unlike 
 those of the normal schoolboy. He played 
 
 x A bay in the west of Melville Island was named by 
 Parry " Liddon Gulf."
 
 Dr. Liddon 3 
 
 no games, and eschewed all athletic exercises 
 except swimming. He collected coins, read 
 military history, wrote dramas and acted 
 them, wrote sermons and sent them to his 
 maiden aunt. The tone of his theology was 
 still strictly Evangelical, and markedly Anti- 
 Roman. In 1 844 he went to London, to enter 
 King's College School, and boarded with one of 
 the Assistant Masters. What was he like in those 
 early days ? Let his school-fellow, Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison, reply : " He was much my senior, 
 and very old of his years, so there was no 
 kind of school-intimacy between us. He 
 always seemed to me an elder brother, who 
 wished the young ones were more serious. 
 But, different though our interests and habits 
 were, I always found him friendly, gentle, and 
 considerate. So far as I can remember, he was 
 at seventeen just what he was at twenty-seven, 
 or thirty-seven, or forty-seven sweet, grave, 
 thoughtful, complete. Others perhaps may 
 recall growth, change, completeness, gradually 
 coming on him in look, form, mind, and 
 character. I cannot. To me, when I heard 
 him preaching in S. Paul's, or heard him speak 
 at Oxford of more recent years, he was just 
 the same earnest, zealous, affectionate, and 
 entirely other-worldly nature that I remember 
 at seventeen. The lines in his face may have 
 deepened : the look may have become more 
 anxious of late years. But, as a schoolboy, 
 I always thought he looked just what he did
 
 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 as a Priest. There was the same expression 
 of sweet, somewhat fatherly, somewhat melan- 
 choly interest. He would reprove, exhort, 
 advise boys just as a young Priest does in 
 his own congregation. We expected it of 
 him : and it never seemed to us to be in 
 any way stepping out of his own business 
 when he gave one of us a lecture or a sharp 
 rebuke. We seemed to feel that this was 
 what he was there for. He was entirely a 
 Priest amongst boys." This testimony is the 
 more remarkable, because in after years Liddon, 
 though he was wont to speak gratefully of the 
 intellectual training which he received at King's 
 College School, used to deplore the stiffness 
 and dryness of the religious teaching. Preach- 
 ing in the Chapel of King's College in 1873, 
 he said : " If, after leaving King's College 
 School, I had not come into contact with other 
 influences, I might have shrunk to the end of 
 my life from the religious truths which now 
 have a first place in my heart. And why was 
 this ? . . . There were school-prayers ; there 
 were religious lessons ; there were examinations 
 in religion, as in other things. But there was 
 nothing to touch a boy's soul ; there was nothing 
 to reflect GOD ; nothing to make the Christian 
 life in its lofty and pure ideal a popular power 
 among 500 boys." 
 
 But the " other influences " were now near 
 at hand. Henry Liddon left school at Mid- 
 summer, 1846, having been confirmed on the
 
 Dr. Liddon 5 
 
 29th of the previous May. He had already 
 realized his vocation to Holy Orders, and had 
 set his heart on Oxford. Captain Liddon had 
 shown some of the youthful Henry's manuscript 
 sermons to Dr. Barnes, who was both Vicar of 
 Colyton and Canon of Christ Church, and the 
 Doctor was so much impressed by them that he 
 offered their author a Studentship at Christ 
 Church. Liddon went into residence in 
 October, 1846; in the following December he 
 was admitted to his Studentship ; and he was a 
 Student of Christ Church when he died. In 
 1879 he wrote of himself as "having belonged 
 to the list of Students of the Old Foundation 
 for thirty-three years this Christmas, and loving 
 every stone of a place with which I associate the 
 happiest moments and memories of my life." 
 Just after his death, a fellow-Student wrote : 
 "He had come to Christ Church when he 
 was only seventeen years of age ; in con- 
 nexion with Christ Church, in many instances 
 within its walls, he had formed his most 
 enduring friendships ; almost without any 
 break from the date of his matriculation he 
 had continued to hold his rooms ; and all 
 through his life it had been his habit to spend 
 a considerable portion of each year in residence 
 with us. Christ Church was emphatically his 
 home, and he lavished on it all the wealth of 
 affection of which so deep and genuine a nature 
 was capable." But, above all, Christ Church 
 was the scene, and in some sense the instru-
 
 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 ment, of the momentous change which now 
 overtook his religious beliefs. He fell at once 
 under Dr. Pusey's influence, and his eyes were 
 opened to see the treasures of Sacramental truth 
 and corporate Churchmanship. 
 
 The life which Liddon led at Oxford was 
 as remote from the ordinary life of Under- 
 graduates, as his life at school had been from 
 that of ordinary schoolboys. He took no 
 part in athletic exercises. He read and 
 walked and bathed with like-minded friends, 1 
 and cultivated music, and went to church, and 
 frequented Dr. Pusey's society, and wrote 
 elaborate sermons, and practised, in an unob- 
 trusive way, some little "ritual frivolities." 
 In the Long Vacation of 1849 ne went with a 
 " Reading Party " to Wales, under the guidance 
 of William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford ; 
 H. N. Oxenham being of the party. In later 
 life he was wont to narrate with pardonable 
 pride the fact that during this tour he had 
 rescued the historian from a watery grave. It 
 was his one athletic triumph. 
 
 1 Among his friends were Lord Carnarvon, Lord Robert 
 Cecil (afterwards Lord Salisbury), Frederick Lygon (after- 
 wards Lord Beauchamp), G. W. Kitchin (afterwards Dean 
 of Durham), and R. M. Benson, founder and first Superior 
 of the Society of S. John the Evangelist, Cowley. Another 
 was F. T. Buckland, "the accomplished and kindly naturalist, 
 whose observations have opened out to this generation un- 
 suspected fields of knowledge, and who, in his most intimate 
 study of nature, never failed to recognize nature's GOD." 
 Church Troubles, p. 53.
 
 Dr. Liddon 7 
 
 As regards the prescribed work of the 
 University, Liddon was at a double disad- 
 vantage. His absorbing interest in theological 
 study had to some extent distracted his thoughts 
 from scholarship and philosophy ; and he was 
 at least a year younger than most of his com- 
 petitors, two years younger than some. In 
 spite of these disqualifications, and of a delicacy 
 of health which led his tutor to caution him 
 against over-work, he secured a Second Class 
 in the Final Classical School in the summer of 
 1850, being not quite twenty-one years old. 
 More than two years had to elapse before he 
 could be ordained. He occupied the interval 
 by reading for the Johnson Theological Scholar- 
 ship (which he won in 1851) ; by mastering 
 the history of the Church of England ; and by 
 making journeys in Scotland and on the Con- 
 tinent, sometimes in company with a private 
 pupil. In September, 1852, he paid his first 
 visit to Rome. Vehement attempts were made 
 to convert him, and he was honoured by a 
 polemical conversation with Pius IX. He 
 was attracted by much that he saw at Rome, 
 but neither his intellect nor his conscience 
 was convinced. 1 Unseduced and unterrified, he 
 returned to England, and on December I9th, 
 1852, he was ordained Deacon in " the Cathe- 
 dral Church of CHRIST in Oxford," by the 
 
 1 In 1864 he wrote "I never pass the Festival of the 
 Assumption without being thankful that I am not a Roman 
 Catholic."
 
 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 hands of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The first 
 of that ever-memorable succession of sermons 
 by which, during a ministry of nearly forty years, 
 he so gloriously served the cause of GOD in 
 England, was preached in S. Thomas's Church, 
 Oxford, on S. Thomas's Day, 1852. In 
 January, 1853, he settled at Wantage, as Curate 
 to the Rev. W. J. Butler, afterwards Dean of 
 Lincoln. Here he instantly made his mark 
 as a preacher of very long, very eloquent, 
 and very impassioned sermons. By Dr. Pusey's 
 wise advice he abandoned his manuscripts, 
 and began to cultivate his splendid gift of 
 extemporaneous oratory. His Vicar wrote in 
 after years : " Nothing could exceed the beauty 
 of his language, or the majesty of his thought. 
 Strange, however, to say, his preaching was 
 not popular among the Wantage folks. He 
 had formed his style at that time much 
 on the French or foreign model, and 
 he used action and manner which our old- 
 fashioned Berkshire parishioners could not 
 appreciate." But, in spite of their truly 
 English tendency to mistrust outlandish ways, 
 the poor people loved Liddon as they knew 
 him in the fields, in their cottages, and at 
 their sick-beds. He acted as Chaplain to 
 the Workhouse, where he tried to introduce 
 some congregational singing in the Sunday 
 Services, and even ventured to decorate the 
 white-washed walls with some sacred prints, 
 which the Guardians abruptly returned. This
 
 *Dr. Liddon 9 
 
 incident was never forgotten. " I remember," 
 writes Dr. Holland, " how he flamed up at the 
 mention of the Poor Law ; and this fiery 
 indignation grew out of some event in his 
 old curacy at Wantage, where he had given 
 some pictures to relieve the hideous Work- 
 house walls, only to find them removed by 
 unbending Guardians." l 
 
 However, Liddon's career as a curate was 
 not destined to be of long duration. His health 
 was not robust ; Wantage is bleak ; Butler's 
 rule was strenuous ; and it soon became ap- 
 parent that Liddon was, in the phrase of his 
 friend Richard Benson, "not up to Wantage 
 requirements." He resigned the curacy, and, 
 after a short interval of rest, was ordained 
 Priest by the Bishop of Oxford on December 
 1 8th, 1853 "My GOD, strengthen me for 
 that to which Thou hast called me." 
 
 The remarkable prelate 2 whose privilege it 
 was to admit Liddon to the Diaconate and the 
 Priesthood was now in the eighth year of his 
 Episcopate. He had not been a Bishop three 
 months when he noted in his private list 
 of "Agenda" for his diocese "A Diocesan 
 Training-College for Clergy to be established 
 at Cuddesdon." Eight years elapsed before 
 the design was actually realized ; but by the end 
 of 1853 the building was nearly complete, and 
 
 1 The CofftmonvffaM, January, 1905. 
 * Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) Bishop of Oxford, 
 1845 ; of Winchester, 1869. 
 
 C
 
 I o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 the Rev. Alfred Pott, afterwards Archdeacon of 
 Berkshire, had undertaken to be Principal of 
 the College when it should be opened in the 
 following summer. Liddon was now free 
 from pastoral duties ; he had his station and 
 income as Student of Christ Church ; he was 
 a thoroughly well-instructed theologian, and 
 his fervent piety was a living epistle known 
 and read of all men. He was an ideal officer 
 for a Theological College, and, just before the 
 Ordination at Christmas, 1853, the Bishop asked 
 him to become Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon. 
 After some mutual explanations of views and 
 intentions, he accepted the post. The College 
 was formally opened on June I3th, 1854, and 
 the new Vice-Principal entered on his new 
 duties in the following October. 
 
 He entered on them not without misgiving. 
 He foresaw difficulties only too likely to arise 
 from the Bishop's ingrained Protestantism, just 
 veneered with a layer of Moderate High 
 Churchism. His own theological teaching was 
 definite, unmistakable, insistent. The Bishop's 
 might, without uncharity, be described as nebu- 
 lous and uncertain. The difference between the 
 two theologies soon made itself felt in practice. 
 The Bishop, submitting to the representations 
 of Episcopal brethren, thought it necessary to 
 curb some elementary ritualism in the College 
 Chapel. He required the abandonment of the 
 Eastward Position at the Altar. "This 
 change," wrote Liddon, " I feel to be the
 
 Dr. Liddon 1 1 
 
 most important ; it is doctrinal." The 
 Bishop, on his part, wrote : " Our (that is, 
 Liddon's and mine,) theological standing- 
 point is not identical. On the great doctrine 
 of the Eucharist we should use somewhat 
 different language, and our ritualistic ten- 
 dencies would be all coloured by this. On 
 Confession, and its expedient limits, we should 
 also, I think, differ." 
 
 At the beginning of 1858, a sudden storm 
 burst over Cuddesdon College. It began with 
 an article in the Quarterly Review, commenting 
 severely on the theological tone of the College, 
 and it was industriously fomented by a " gossip- 
 ing friend " of the Bishop's, whose name need 
 not now be recalled. Protestant feeling, both in 
 the diocese and beyond it, was violently aroused, 
 and the usefulness, perhaps even the existence, 
 of the College was imperilled. At first the 
 Bishop wrote that the Vice-Principal was 
 " eminently endued with the power of leading 
 men to earnest devoted piety," and that with 
 such a man he ought not to interfere except 
 as to " anything substantially important." But 
 gradually his attitude changed. He found 
 that there was in Liddon "a strength of will 
 an ardour a restlessness a dominant 
 imagination which makes him unable to 
 give to the young men any tone save exactly 
 his own tone." That tone was not the 
 Bishop's, nor was it acceptable either to the 
 old-fashioned High Churchmen who, in their
 
 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 staid way, wished the College well ; or to 
 the Protestant fanatics who were howling 
 for its destruction. Difficulties from within, 
 as well as from without, increased term by 
 term, and eventually the Bishop resolved to 
 lighten the ship by throwing his lieutenant 
 overboard. He "came with a torn heart to 
 the conclusion " that Liddon must go. 
 
 Of this conclusion Liddon said twenty 
 years later, " It was the only great dis- 
 appointment of my life." He was a Priest 
 to the innermost fibre. He was obviously 
 unfitted, both mentally and physically, for 
 the ordinary duties of a parish, but his 
 ardour for the Priesthood was intense, and 
 he was supremely happy in a sphere of work 
 where he could train men for the priestly 
 life, stamping on young consciences and 
 wills his own high ideal of the Sacerdotal 
 Vocation. His work at Cuddesdon had been, 
 in spite of Puritan calumnies and Episcopal 
 qualms, eminently successful. Then, as always, 
 he powerfully attracted the love and loyalty of 
 young men. Principal Johnston generously 
 says, that " to the present day the special 
 features of Cuddesdon College are due, under 
 GOD, to the work of its first Vice-Principal." 
 That work was closed by the combined action 
 of friends and foes ; and at Easter, 1859, the 
 most brilliant ecclesiastic in the Church of 
 England found himself without office, employ- 
 ment, or responsibility.
 
 Dr. Liddon 13 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 S. EDMUND HALL SERMONS BAMPTON 
 LECTURES. 
 
 WE have seen that Liddon had a precocious 
 talent for composing sermons, and he had 
 improved it with sedulous care. For the 
 villagers of Cuddesdon and Wantage he 
 probably had (as was said of Edward Irving 
 at Kirkcaldy) "ower muckle gran'ner," and 
 in the chapel of a Theological College he 
 may have been, if not " ower grand," 
 yet over -long and over -rhetorical. His 
 return to Oxford, in the summer of 1859, 
 suddenly supplied him with a larger and a 
 fitter audience. He was made Vice-Principal 
 of S. Edmund Hall, 1 but his activities extended 
 far beyond the walls of that secluded quad- 
 rangle. His Theological Lectures on Sunday 
 evenings, delivered in the Hall of Queen's 
 College and open to all Undergraduates, 
 made a deep impression ; and his skill and 
 
 1 A pair of candlesticks in the Chapel of the Hall 
 bear this inscription : 4* " Deo et Sacello Aulae S. 
 Edmundi Cantuar : d.d. H. P. Liddon : A.M. : aed. 
 Christi Aluran : ejusdem aulae vice-principalis in fest : 
 Pasch.: 1861."
 
 1 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 judgment in guiding individual souls served 
 to drive home the lessons more publicly 
 delivered. One who was then an Under- 
 graduate of Christ Church writes : " I used 
 to go for walks with him to Headington 
 Hill and Marston. Almost at once I began to 
 attend his Sunday evening lectures. At the 
 end of one of my walks with him, I asked 
 him if he would receive my Confession. He 
 said, * I hope, dear friend, that you do not 
 wish to go to Confession because it is the 
 High Church thing.' I said, { Certainly not, 
 but I feel that it is a necessity,' or words to 
 that effect. It was near the turning from the 
 High to S. Edmund Hall that this matter 
 was arranged, and the thing was done in S. 
 Edmund Hall." 
 
 But, apart from all this academical or semi- 
 academical work, Liddon was beginning to 
 realize the true scope of his genius. He was 
 a born preacher, and internal and external 
 testimony combined to convince him of the 
 fact. In Oxford he had no rival. The first 
 sermon which he ever printed had been 
 preached in S. Giles's Church, Oxford, in 
 Lent, 1858, and was published by the 
 Bishop's request. On Good Friday, 1859, 
 just before the beginning of the Campaign of 
 Solferino, he preached in Christ Church that 
 magnificent sermon on "The Divine Victim," 
 which now stands as No. IX. in the First 
 Series of his University Sermons. Very soon
 
 Dr. Liddon 15 
 
 his fame went abroad, and he was invited to 
 preach all over England. In the year 1860 
 he preached at forty-two different places ; and 
 so acceptable were his sermons to great con- 
 gregations in London and elsewhere that, 
 before 1866, twelve of them had been pub- 
 lished separately. The style and manner of 
 his preaching will be noted later on ; at 
 present I am merely cataloguing events. 
 
 In 1859 and 1861 he delivered, before the 
 Oxford " Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity," 
 to which he had belonged from undergraduate 
 days, and of which he was now Master, two 
 striking addresses the one on the Christian 
 obligation of study, the other on the needs 
 and prospects of the Brotherhood. In the 
 second of these addresses he drew a vivid 
 contrast between Oxford as it then was, and 
 Oxford as it had been in the great days of 
 the Movement, and the passage is so charac- 
 teristic of his habitual thought and style that 
 some part of it must be reproduced : 
 
 " We read of rivers whose waters at the 
 mouth bear towards the distant ocean the 
 products of those widely different climates 
 and latitudes in which they take their rise : 
 and it is not, I think, too much to say that 
 the Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity never 
 would or could have taken shape and form 
 in the Oxford of 1861. It was thrown off 
 from the Movement in its days of fresh and 
 warm creative vigour : and it embodied con-
 
 1 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 victions which were then shared by numbers 
 outside it who did not even know of the 
 existence of a Society which expressed them. 
 It has lived through internal convulsion and 
 external isolation and neglect : it flows down 
 to us laden with the associations, and breathing 
 the spirit, of a period which is already historical. 
 It brings to us the impress of minds which 
 have long been lost to it, and the strength 
 of prayers which ascend for it, as we trust, 
 beyond the Veil. It is already, after its far-off 
 measure, a little image of the Church, travers- 
 ing as she does in her Divine and Majestic 
 strength remote and recent ages, and divergent 
 civilizations ; and interpenetrating societies 
 which have scarcely any one other point of 
 resemblance and union, save in that com- 
 mon impress of moral and social grace and 
 beauty which they owe to her beneficent 
 presence." 
 
 In the summer of 1862 Liddon, who had 
 never been strong, had a sharp attack of illness. 
 This, combined with some other considerations, 
 determined him to leave S. Edmund Hall. 
 He had already declined to be the first 
 Incumbent of S. Alban's, Holborn ; he now 
 refused the Wardenship of Radley. Those 
 were the days when the sciolism of Essays 
 and Reviews, and Bishop Colenso's aberrations, 
 had overthrown the faith of some ; and, acting 
 on Dr. Pusey's advice, Liddon decided to
 
 Dr. Liddon 17 
 
 remain in Oxford, devoting all his powers 
 to the intellectual defence of the Christian 
 Creed against the assaults of Unbelief and Mis- 
 belief. By the end of 1862 he had established 
 himself at Christ Church, in those rooms in 
 " Tom Quad " which he retained till his 
 death. In 1863 he was appointed Examining 
 Chaplain to his friend Dr. Hamilton, Bishop 
 of Salisbury, whose entire confidence he 
 enjoyed, whose theological opinions he shared, 
 and to whom he always referred as " his 
 revered Master." This appointment made 
 heavy demands on his time, already pretty 
 well occupied with preaching in all directions, 
 with the preparatory study which this involved, 
 and with the guidance of souls both orally 
 and by correspondence. Dr. Pusey disliked 
 all this varied activity, because it interfered 
 with systematic authorship. " You preach 
 sermons an hour long at S. Paul's, 1 and 
 nobody hears you, and you are knocked up 
 for a fortnight afterwards. You have done 
 nothing." 
 
 In 1864 Liddon was appointed by Bishop 
 Hamilton to a Prebendal stall at Salisbury : 
 and in the following year he published his 
 first volume of sermons. It was rather 
 awkwardly named Some Words for Qod ; but 
 this tide was subsequently dropped, and it 
 is now the First Series of University Sermons. 
 Several of the sermons which it contains had 
 1 On the invitation of Dean Milman. 
 
 D
 
 1 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 already been published in separate form, but 
 the volume is united by a certain " apologetic 
 character " which belongs to it as a whole. It 
 is worth noting that " The Law of Progress " 
 and "The Freedom of the Spirit," both 
 preached in 1864, were intended by their author 
 as attempts to " trace to a Christian source 
 some prominent ideas, which, in their appli- 
 cation to secular and material interests, form 
 the strength and staple of the system of 
 thought vaguely described as * Liberalism."' 
 Perhaps the finest sermon in the book is " The 
 Conflict of Faith with Undue Exaltation of 
 Intellect." It was preached at S. Mary's on 
 Friday evening, March 17, 1865 not strictly 
 " before the University," but to a congrega- 
 tion of Undergraduates for whose special 
 benefit Bishop Wilberforce used to organize 
 courses of Lenten Sermons. Of those ser- 
 mons Dr. Holland gives an inimitable descrip- 
 tion : " Can we ever forget them ? Could we 
 tear the memory out of our hearts ? Can 
 Liddon's life be written, without a picture of 
 that moving sight ? The swarms of Under- 
 graduates, herded in galleries, in deep rows, or 
 crowded into every nook and corner of the 
 floor ; the lights ; the unwonted fact that we 
 were all there in church ; the odd weird length 
 of Burgon 1 giving out the hymn in a shrill, 
 piping tone ; the young voices released, in 
 
 1 J. W. Burgon, (1813-1888) Vicar of S. Mary's, and 
 afterwards Dean of Chichester.
 
 . Liddon 19 
 
 their joy, to sing some old friend like c Saviour, 
 when in dust to Thee,' the mighty hush of 
 expectation ; and then the thrill of that vibrant 
 voice, alive with all the passion of the hour, 
 vehement, searching, appealing, pleading, ringing 
 ever higher as the great argument lifted him ; 
 the swift turns of the beautiful face, as he flung 
 out over us some burning ironic phrase or 
 quivering challenge ; the beads on the brow 
 that told of the force expended ; the grace, the 
 movement, the fire, the sincerity of it all. It 
 was wonderful to us. We lived on the 
 memory of it till next Lent came round, and 
 then there we all were again : the same scene 
 enacted itself, the same voice pleaded with 
 us for our souls. So, from year to year, in 
 our weak, boyish hearts the flickering flame of 
 faith was saved from perishing under the gusty 
 tumult of the perilous times." 
 
 But now a greater effort was at hand. Act- 
 ing on the advice of friends, Liddon had offered 
 himself as a candidate for the office of Bamp- 
 ton Lecturer for 1866, and had been defeated 
 by the casting vote of the Vice-Chancellor ; but 
 in November, 1865, the selected candidate fell 
 ill and resigned the lectureship, and the Heads 
 of Houses unanimously appointed Liddon to 
 take his place. 
 
 The first Lecture had to be delivered on the 
 4th of March, 1866, and Liddon had chosen as 
 his subject the most profound and far-reaching 
 mystery of the Christian Faith " the Divinity
 
 2 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo 
 
 of our LORD and Saviour JESUS CHRIST." The 
 intervening four months were a season of 
 intense study, incessant labour, and painful 
 misgiving ; but the result was a transcendent 
 triumph. The Lectures, now in their four- 
 teenth edition, 1 and twentieth " impression," 
 remain among the masterpieces of English 
 theology ; while the consuming earnestness 
 and rhetorical fire with which they were 
 delivered attracted unprecedented congrega- 
 tions, and determined the spiritual future 
 of many an Undergraduate who heard them. 
 Let the peroration of the last Lecture be 
 recalled : 
 
 " But here we must close this attempt to 
 reassert, against some misapprehensions of 
 modern thought, the great truth! which guards 
 the honour of CHRIST, and which is the most 
 precious feature in the intellectual heritage of 
 Christians. And for you, dear brethren, who 
 by your generous interest or by your warm 
 sympathies have so accompanied and sustained 
 him, what can the preacher more fittingly or 
 more sincerely desire, than that any clearer 
 sight of the Divine Person of our glorious and 
 living LORD which may have been granted you, 
 may be, by Him, blessed to your present sanc- 
 tification and to your endless peace ? If you 
 are intellectually persuaded that in confessing 
 the true Godhead of JESUS you have not fol- 
 
 1 The preface to the fourteenth edition was written 
 within three months of Liddon's death.
 
 *Dr. Liddon 11 
 
 lowed a cunningly-devised fable, or the crude 
 imagination of a semi-barbarous and distant 
 age, then do not allow yourselves to rest con- 
 tent with this intellectual persuasion. A truth 
 so sublime, so imperious, has other work to do 
 in you besides shaping into theoretic compact- 
 ness a certain district of your thought about the 
 goodness of GOD and the wants of man. The 
 Divine CHRIST of the Gospel and the Church is 
 no mere actor, though He were the greatest, in 
 the great tragedy of human history ; He 
 belongs not exclusively or especially to the 
 past ; He is f the Same yesterday, to-day, and 
 for ever.' He is at this moment all that He 
 was eighteen centuries ago, all that He has 
 been to our fathers, all that He will be to our 
 children. He is the Divine and Infallible 
 Teacher, the Healer and Pardoner of sin, the 
 Source of all graces, the Conqueror of Satan 
 and of death now, as of old, and as in the years 
 to come. Now as heretofore, He is 'able to save 
 unto the uttermost them that come unto GOD 
 by Him ; ' now, as on the day of His triumph 
 over death, * He opens the Kingdom of Heaven 
 to all believers ' ; now, as in the first age of the 
 Church, He it is * that hath the key of David, 
 that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and 
 shutteth, and no man openeth.' He is ever 
 the Same ; but, as the children of time, 
 whether for good or evil, we move onwards in 
 perpetual change. The hours of life pass, they 
 do not return ; they pass, yet they are not
 
 2 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 forgotten ; pereunt et imputantur. But the 
 present is our own ; we may resolve, if we will, 
 to live as men who live for the glory of an 
 Incarnate GOD. Brethren, you shall not repent 
 it, if when life's burdens press heavily, and 
 especially at that solemn hour when human 
 help must fail, you are able to lean with strong 
 confidence on the arm of an Almighty Saviour. 
 May He in deed and truth be with you, alike 
 in your pilgrimage through this world, and 
 when that brief journey is drawing to its close ! 
 May you, sustained by His Presence and aid, 
 so pass through the valley of the shadow of 
 death as to fear no evil, and to find, at the gate 
 of the eternal world, that all the yearnings of 
 faith and hope are to be more than satisfied 
 by the vision of the Divine * King in His 
 Beauty 1 ' " 
 
 A great part of the year 1866, and some 
 months of 1867, were spent by Liddon in 
 revising his Bamptons for the press. At the 
 same time he 'was rendering constant aid to 
 Bishop Hamilton in the preparation of his famous 
 Charge of 1867 ; J and he was in close consulta- 
 tion with Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison 
 about the Declaration on Eucharistic Doctrine 
 to be submitted to the Upper House of Con- 
 vocation. 2 Amid these varied labours he 
 refreshed himself by a two months' tour in 
 
 1 Reasserting the doctrines of the Real Presence, the 
 Eucharistic Sacrifice, and the Power of the Keys. 
 See Appendix A.
 
 'Dr. Liddon 23 
 
 Russia, where the spiritual atmosphere de- 
 vout, orthodox, and conservative, yet eminently 
 anti-papal was exactly congenial to his own 
 temper. On his return to England he was 
 forced to consider the question of accepting 
 the Headship of Keble College, which was 
 to be opened in two years' time. The sug- 
 gestion was pressed by many friends, who 
 did not accept his refusal without a struggle. 
 In the autumn of this year, on the invita- 
 tion of Dr. Butler, afterwards Master of 
 Trinity and then Head Master of Harrow, 
 Liddon preached to the boys of Harrow 
 School. It was then that I first saw and 
 heard him, and I am one of those who will 
 always regard him as incomparably the 
 greatest preacher they ever heard, and will 
 estimate all other preaching by comparison 
 with his masterpieces. Perhaps the im- 
 pression created by more than twenty years' 
 close study of his methods may here be 
 not out of place. 
 
 October 10, 1868, is Founder's Day at 
 Harrow. It has been announced that Mr. 
 Liddon the "great Oxford swell," as the 
 better-instructed boys called him, the author 
 of the most eloquent Bampton Lectures which 
 have ever been delivered is coming to preach 
 in the School Chapel at the Commemoration 
 Service. Prayers and hymns and thanks- 
 givings for Founder and Benefactors are duly 
 performed, and the preacher enters the pulpit.
 
 24 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 His appearance instantly attracts attention. 
 " He looks like a monk," one boy whispers 
 to his neighbour ; and, indeed, it is a better 
 description than the speaker knows. The 
 Oxford M.A. gown, worn over a cassock, is 
 the Benedictine habit modified by time and 
 place ; the spare, trim figure suggests asceti- 
 cism : the beautifully chiselled, sharply-pointed, 
 features, the close-shaved face, the tawny 
 skin, the jet-black hair, remind us vaguely 
 of something by Velasquez or Murillo, or of 
 Ary Scheffer's picture of S. Augustine. And 
 the interest awoke by sight is intensified by 
 sound. The preacher recites the prefatory 
 collect. The vibrant voice strikes like an 
 electric shock. The exquisite, almost over- 
 refined, articulation seems the very note of 
 culture. The restrained passion, which thrills 
 through the disciplined utterance, warns even 
 the most heedless that something quite unlike 
 the ordinary stuff of school-sermons is coming. 
 The text is announced " Remember now thy 
 Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil 
 days come not, nor the years draw nigh when 
 thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." 
 Thirty-seven years have sped their course, and 
 the echoes of that sermon still quiver in the ear 
 of memory. It speaks of the blessedness and 
 glory of boyhood ; the splendid inheritance of 
 a Public School built on Christian lines ; the 
 unequalled opportunities of learning while the 
 faculties are still fresh and the mind is still
 
 Dr. Liddon 25 
 
 receptive ; the worthlessness of all merely 
 secular attainment, however desirable, how- 
 ever necessary, when weighed in the balance 
 against the "one thing needful." The con- 
 gregation still are boys, but soon they will be 
 men. Dark days will come, as Ecclesiastes 
 warned dark in various ways and senses, 
 darkest when, at the Universities or else- 
 where, we first are bidden to cast faith 
 aside and to believe nothing but what is 
 demonstrable by "an appeal, in the last 
 resort, to the organs of sense." Now is the 
 time, and this is the place, so to " remember 
 our Creator " that, come what may, we shall 
 never be able to forget Him, or doubt His 
 love, or question His revelation. 
 
 We are listening, for the first time in our 
 lives, to a man inspired. The scene has 
 transported the preacher. The sea of up- 
 turned faces, the graceful architecture, the 
 memorial windows flashing like jewels in the 
 autumn sunshine, the handwriting of the 
 names of saints and heroes speaking from 
 every wall and pillar all combine to show 
 him, as in a trance, the splendid destiny of 
 a Christian School. His eyes glow and flash, 
 every line of his face quivers with emotion, 
 his gestures are so free, so expressive, so 
 illustrative, 
 
 " that you might almost say his body thought." 
 He leans far out from the pulpit, spreading 
 
 E
 
 2 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 himself, as it were, over the congregation, in 
 an act of benediction. " From this place may 
 CHRIST ever be preached in the fulness of His 
 creative, redemptive, and sacramental work. 
 Here may you learn to remember Him in the 
 days of your youth ; and in the last and most 
 awful day of all may He remember you.'* 
 
 Five minutes afterwards we are in the open 
 air. Boys stare and gasp ; masters hurry past, 
 excited and loquacious. Notes are compared, 
 and watches consulted. Liddon has preached 
 for an hour. 
 
 That sermon at Harrow in 1868 may be 
 taken as a turning-point in Liddon's rhetorical 
 method. His peculiar gifts and graces were 
 fully developed ; his supremacy among Eng- 
 lish preachers was assured. But from this 
 time on he began to subject his genius to a 
 more rigorous discipline. The exuberance of 
 early manhood was laid aside ; he no longer 
 indulged his natural tendency to extempo- 
 raneous declamation. After he became Canon 
 of S. Paul's he very seldom preached except 
 in that Cathedral or at Oxford, and in both 
 places he made it an absolute rule to preach 
 written sermons. In some respects the change 
 was an improvement. A comparison of his 
 First Series of University Sermons, and even 
 his great Bamptons, with the Second Series 
 of University Sermons and his Christmas and 
 Easter Sermons at S. Paul's will show the
 
 Dr. Liddon 27 
 
 nature of the change. His arrangement, 
 always clear, became more absolutely lucid ; his 
 train of reasoning still closer and more cogent. 
 His rhetoric, which had been undeniably 
 florid, became a very pure and lofty style of 
 eloquence ; and the vivid flashes of sarcasm 
 against unbeliefs and misbeliefs, which had 
 so often gratified his Undergraduate hearers, 
 no longer illumined his solemn passion. If 
 preaching be a distinct art from public 
 speaking if it implies the effective reading 
 of a carefully-written manuscript then Lid- 
 don's last days were his best days as a 
 preacher, for no one ever managed a manu- 
 script so well. 1 But Memory has her own 
 delights, not always amenable to canons of 
 taste or principles of art ; and among those 
 delights are the echo and the vision of 
 Liddon's early oratory. 
 
 1 His manuscripts were small sheets of notepaper, strung 
 together at the top corner.
 
 2 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE IRISH CHURCH THE LENT LECTURES. 
 
 IN November, 1868, the Parliament which 
 had been elected in 1865 was dissolved, and 
 the first General Election under Household 
 Suffrage -took place. The issue, raised by 
 Mr. Gladstone in the previous summer, and 
 now submitted to the electors, was whether 
 the Irish Church should or should not be 
 disestablished. The result was a majority of 
 a hundred pledged to Gladstone and Dises- 
 tablishment, and Mr. Disraeli resigned without 
 meeting the new Parliament. Among his 
 last acts as Prime Minister were the appoint- 
 ments of Dr. Tait, Bishop of London, to the 
 Primacy, and of Dr. Jackson, Bishop of 
 Lincoln, to the See of London. On the i8th 
 of November, 1868, Liddon wrote to a 
 friend 
 
 " The recent appointments are very miserable 
 work. I try to shut my eyes to what they 
 mean, but without much success. The new 
 Primate will, I fear, set Colenso on his legs 
 again, by saying that he is in communion with 
 him, and that will be a much more compromis-
 
 Dr. Uddon 29 
 
 ing thing for the Church of England than a 
 like statement from a Bishop of London. The 
 whole thing shows how little Dizzy was to be 
 relied on in these matters how perfectly 
 subordinate the Church's most vital interests 
 are, with him, to the exigencies of -political 
 party." 
 
 In December, 1868, the Judicial Committee 
 of the Privy Council pronounced judgment in 
 the suit of Martin >. Mackonochie, condemn- 
 ing Mr. Mackonochie for certain practices, 
 esteemed " ritualistic," in the celebration of the 
 Holy Communion at S. Alban's, Holborn. 
 On the 28th December, Liddon wrote : 
 
 " My own inclination is for resistance, if 
 there is a chance of resistance with such 
 unanimity and success as to make the Judg- 
 ment a dead letter. For it seems to me that 
 a much more serious thing than any particular 
 judgment which may emanate from that Court 
 is the fact that such a Court should give judg- 
 ment in such matters at all, and that the Church 
 of CHRIST, by tacit or practical consent, should 
 acknowledge its jurisdiction. The Court is at 
 once a standing defiance of our LORD'S arrange- 
 ments for the government of His Church, and 
 a very dishonourable violation, on the part of 
 the State, of the Reformation Settlement (cf. 
 24 Henry VIII. preamble). As a natural 
 consequence, the instinct of the Court is, under 
 the pretence of administering law, to support
 
 3 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 infidelity and to insult Church-truth on every 
 possible opportunity. ... I wish for the 
 sake of the poor Church of England that that 
 miserable Court could be abolished. Mr. Keble 
 said more than ohce to me that c No one who 
 cared for our Saviour's honour and the future 
 of our Church should rest while it remained as 
 it is.' " 
 
 Mr. Gladstone was now for the first time 
 Prime Minister, and it was obvious that the 
 first work of the new Parliament must be 
 Irish Disestablishment. This was a topic 
 which sharply divided even High Churchmen, 
 the older-fashioned sort clinging desperately to 
 a discredited Establishment : the younger and 
 more adventurous spirits sympathizing with the 
 cause of Justice and Freedom. Liddon wrote 
 to Lord Carnarvon : r " My own line would be 
 to accept Disestablishment for Ireland, and to 
 endeavour by doing so to secure two advantages, 
 or so much of them as possible." These two 
 advantages were the preservation of endow- 
 ments, "or as much of them as could be 
 saved ; " and the attainment of spiritual free- 
 dom, " in particular, freedom from the 
 doctrinal jurisdiction of the Judicial Com- 
 mittee of the Privy Council." In England, 
 he added, what we have most to dread is, 
 not Disestablishment, but " a careful protection 
 both of our social position and of our property, 
 1 Henry, fourth Earl of Carnarvon (1831-1890).
 
 'Dr. Liddon 31 
 
 combined with a systematic endeavour to destroy 
 all firm hold upon doctrine, under the plea of 
 making the Church national. . . . The fate 
 of the Irish Church, disestablished and im- 
 poverished, would be a very welcome alternative 
 to this destiny, which, if some active minds 
 among us could have their way, is in store 
 for ourselves." 
 
 This is exactly the view of Disestablish- 
 ment and Disendowment which he enunciated, 
 in a more picturesque form, as late as 1881 : 
 " Few, if any, Churchmen desire to see the 
 Church of England disestablished and disen- 
 dowed ; but, if it be a question whether it is 
 better to be turned out of house and home, 
 without any clothes, and even on a winter's 
 night, or to be strangled by a silken cord in a 
 richly-furnished drawing-room, what man, or 
 Church, will have any difficulty in arriving at a 
 decision ? " * 
 
 A great part of the year 1869 was spent by 
 Liddon in close attendance on the last illness of 
 his " revered Master," and " dearest Father in 
 CHRIST," Bishop Hamilton. Early in the year, 
 the Bishop, already fatally ill, suggested that 
 Liddon should preach the sermon on " CHRIST 
 and Human Law," which stands as No. XVI. 
 in the Second Series of University Sermons. 
 "The opinions which are embodied in this 
 sermon are substantially those of this revered 
 and lamented prelate," and the sermon is 
 
 1 Preface to Thought! on Present fyurcb Troubles, 1881.
 
 32 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 noteworthy as combining an emphatic protest 
 against the State's law of Divorce and Re- 
 marriage with an equally emphatic repudiation 
 of the authority of the Judicial Committee in 
 ecclesiastical disputes. It was preached before 
 the Judges of Assize at Oxford on the 28th of 
 February, 1869. On the i6th of March Liddon 
 wrote, " The cold has been very great during 
 the last two or three days, and the green 
 things which have begun to grow look terribly 
 pinched like Christians after a "judgment" 
 of the Privy Council. By-the-by I have got 
 into a certain sort of hot water for a sermon 
 about the P.C. at Oxford the other day, which 
 accordingly I must publish." 
 
 The Bill for the Disestablishment of the 
 Irish Church had been introduced on the 
 ist of March ; and it ran a very easy course 
 through the House of Commons. In the 
 House of Lords, however, it was seriously 
 imperilled ; and the following account of the 
 division on the Second Reading, given by an 
 eye-witness, was well worth preserving. On 
 the 2 6th of June, Liddon wrote 
 
 " Mrs. Gladstone's account of the division in 
 the House of Lords was very amusing. She 
 sat there for 1 1 hours : came home to Carlton 
 House Terrace at 3.30 : rushed up-stairs, 
 woke her maid (who probably cared nothing 
 about the Irish Church), woke Agnes and 
 Helen Gladstone ; then * went in to William.'
 
 Dr. Liddon 33 
 
 He had gone to bed early, and was sound 
 asleep : he had been unwell in the early part 
 of the week. * Could not help it : gave 
 William a discreet poke.' ' A majority of 
 33, my dear.' * Thank you, my dear,' he 
 said, and turned round, and went to sleep 
 on the other side." The Bill became law on 
 the 26th of July, 1869. 
 
 The Church of S. James, Piccadilly, has 
 long been famed for its courses of Lent Lectures 
 on Sunday afternoons. In 1869, Dr. Jackson, 
 Bishop of London, requested Liddon to lecture 
 during Lent, 1870. It was an epoch-making 
 point in the lecturer's career. He had often 
 preached in London, at S. Paul's Cathedral, 
 at All Saints', Margaret Street, and elsewhere ; 
 but now for the first time the denizens of the 
 West End, Ministers of State, members of the 
 Houses of Parliament, great squires, leading 
 lawyers, and all their contingents of wives 
 and daughters, heard the greatest of English 
 preachers, and heard him in the fulness of 
 his physical and mental vigour. Dr. Holland 
 writes about the impression created by these 
 lectures with his usual vivid accuracy : " Was 
 anything ever seen like the sensation which 
 they produced ? Those smart crowds packed 
 tight, Sunday after Sunday, to listen for an 
 hour and forty minutes to a sermon that 
 spoke straight home to their elemental souls. 
 It was amazing ! London never again shook 
 
 F
 
 34 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 with so vehement an emotion. * Society,' in its 
 vague, aggravating ignorance, believed itself 
 to have discovered Liddon. How indignant 
 we used to get with the rapturous Duchesses 
 who asked whether we had ever heard of this 
 wonderful new preacher ! Why, for years before 
 we had stood ranked thick on each others' toes 
 in huddled S. Mary's, to catch every word of 
 the ringing voice. Those belated Duchesses, 
 indeed ! Yet it was something that, however 
 late in the day, they should all feel it necessary 
 for their reputations to be there at S. James's." 
 
 To Dr. Holland's reminiscences I must 
 add a contemporary account of these famous 
 Lectures, which I have treasured all these 
 five-and-thirty years. It was extracted from 
 a daily paper, and a certain resonance in the 
 style seems to recall what Matthew Arnold 
 called " the magnificent roaring of the young 
 lions of the Daily Telegraph" 
 
 " * As dull as a sermon :' no proverb is more 
 trite. * The age of the pulpit has gone by : ' 
 no idea is more readily taken for granted by 
 cultivated men. On these commonplaces of 
 society, however, a strange commentary has 
 been furnished by the afternoon Lenten Ser- 
 vices at S. James's, Piccadilly. For several 
 Sundays the space in front of the church has, 
 more than half-an-hour before the beginning of 
 the service, been thronged by a fashionable 
 concourse, which has eagerly watched for the 
 opening of the door, and has pushed into the
 
 Dr. Liddon 35 
 
 lobby with the unceremonious vigour of a 
 plebeian mob at the pit-entrance of a theatre 
 on " a first night." Elegantly-dressed ladies 
 have endangered shawls, bonnets, and tempers 
 in the crush ; fashionably-dressed men have 
 not scrupled to use their physical strength to 
 get a good place ; and, five minutes after the 
 opening of the doors, every free seat has been 
 filled. By three o'clock not a single seat has 
 been unoccupied, and throughout the service 
 the passages have been crammed. 
 
 " Cabinet Ministers, ex-Ministers, members 
 of the nobility, a throng of fashionable women, 
 and a crowd of men who seem to have strayed 
 out of their element in going to afternoon 
 prayers, have filled the church to overflowing. 
 Still more striking has been the sight during 
 the sermon. Sometimes for an hour and forty 
 minutes, and never for less than an hour and 
 a quarter, has the preacher drawn out the 
 thread of his discourse. The sermons have 
 dealt with the profoundest questions that can 
 engage the human mind. In what form the 
 religious instinct has revealed itself in succes- 
 sive ages, and among different peoples ; what 
 has been done to satisfy that instinct by Pan- 
 theism on the one hand, or by Positivism on 
 the other ; what lines of connexion exist 
 between the speculation of modern Germany 
 and that of ancient Greece ; how evil has 
 intertwined itself with the works of a sinless 
 Creator ; and with what hope of answer the
 
 3 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 prayers of a finite being can be addressed to 
 an infinite Creator : such are the subjects on 
 which Mr. Liddon has been discoursing to the 
 great West-end crowd. And, if the themes 
 have seemed unlikely to be popular, still less 
 popular might appear the method of treatment. 
 No appeals have been made to excited feelings, 
 and the vigorous flow of rhetoric has been 
 disturbed by no bursts of vague eloquence. 
 Every sermon has manifestly been written 
 with elaborate care, and the successive links 
 of the reasoning have been so closely knit 
 that to keep them all in view has needed the 
 closest attention even of trained minds. No 
 insult is offered to the intellect of the audience 
 by the doubt whether many of the hearers 
 fully comprehend the Theistic argument which 
 Mr. Liddon drew from the reasoning of Kant 
 with respect to the supremacy of the moral 
 law. Nor is the metaphysical learning of the 
 West-end ladies disparaged by the suspicion, 
 that few possessed such knowledge as he took 
 for granted when he reviewed the efforts of 
 Hume and Mill to resolve cause and effect 
 into a mere antecedent and consequent, bound 
 together by no tie of force, but merely by the 
 link of position in time or space. Yet, while 
 the preacher was minutely detailing and elabor- 
 ately criticising the arguments of Fuerbach or 
 Comte, the large audience has preserved such 
 silence, and displayed such fixity of attention, 
 as to recall the triumphs of the opera rather
 
 Dr. Liddon 37 
 
 than of the pulpit. Whereas an ordinary 
 preacher finds it difficult to gain a hearing 
 even for a quarter of an hour, Mr. Liddon 
 has riveted the attention of his audience for 
 more than an hour and a half. That the eager- 
 ness to hear great preaching is still a passion, 
 and that the pulpit might still be a great power, 
 are facts amply attested by the series of Lenten 
 Sermons which are to be finished next Sunday. 
 "And what is the secret of the preacher's 
 success ? In the first place, he has something 
 to say. Instead of clap-trap sentiment, or 
 vague declamation, he gives the results of 
 long study and careful thought. Even when 
 most widely disagreeing with Mr. Liddon's 
 conclusions, the student of philosophy, theo- 
 logy, or Church history sees that each sermon 
 sums up the reading and the thought of years. 
 Such general erudition could be matched by 
 that of few divines in a Church which, even 
 in the era of Georgian mediocrity, never lost 
 the reputation for learning achieved by the 
 Cudworths and the Hookers. So wide and 
 so accurate an acquaintance with the specula- 
 tion of Germany and France could be out- 
 matched only by the few English divines, who, 
 like Dean Mansel, have made ontology and 
 psychology their special province. Just as 
 Mr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures on 'The 
 Divinity of our LORD ' were at least as 
 remarkable for their display of minute famili- 
 arity with the destructive criticism of Strauss
 
 38 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 and Baur as for the acuteness of the reasoning 
 or the force of the rhetoric, so the Lenten 
 Sermons are not least distinguished by a wide 
 and varied erudition. But erudition, when it 
 stands alone, is a poor endowment for a 
 preacher, and Mr. Liddon is a reasoner as 
 well as a scholar. In these days of loosely- 
 reasoned discourses, when preachers do not 
 even dream that a defiance of accurate think- 
 ing is a great sin, it is a positive wonder to 
 see Mr. Liddon's attempt to link the deliver- 
 ances of dogmatic theology with the primary 
 instincts of our nature by a hard chain of 
 logical inference. We do not say that the 
 cogency of the argument would win a tribute 
 of admiration from his philosophical opponents. 
 His attempt to overthrow the Pyrrhonism of 
 Hume will not, we fear, strike terror into the 
 small but enthusiastic band of Comtists ; his 
 assault on the Utilitarian theory of ethics will 
 not give Mr. Mill reason for a change of 
 front ; nor, we suspect, will his treatment of 
 that mystery of mysteries, the origin of evil, 
 give more universal satisfaction than the 
 vehement rhetoric which rang through the 
 tents of the Arabs untold centuries ago. But 
 if the accuracy of Mr. Liddon's reasoning be 
 impugned, he will find himself in good 
 company. If Dean Mansel is strong in 
 anything, it is in accuracy of logic ; and yet, 
 by a hundred able critics, his Bampton Lectures 
 on * The Limits of Religious Thought ' were
 
 Dr. Liddon 39 
 
 assailed on the very ground that the air of 
 superficial exactness which distinguished the 
 expanse of inference concealed a mass of as- 
 sumptions. Besides having something to say, 
 Mr. Liddon knows how to say it. ... In the 
 power of clear, vivid and strong statement, he 
 has no rival among English preachers. And 
 the sermon of yesterday afternoon, 1 on the 
 efficacy of such prayer as a finite being might 
 address to an Infinite Being, displayed a fervour 
 of rhetoric which could scarcely be reined in 
 even by the curb of a fastidious culture, or stayed 
 by the load of learning and thought. As for 
 an hour and forty minutes Mr. Liddon dis- 
 cussed the question whether the idea that 
 prayer could be heard was compatible with 
 the doctrine that the world is governed in 
 accordance with inflexible laws, he set forth 
 the result of such reading and thought as 
 would equip an ordinary preacher for a year 
 of pulpit eloquence. Indeed, the defect of 
 the sermons is that they are better fitted for 
 the eye than the ear. Only when they are 
 published in a collected form, and read as 
 a review of the relations borne by the current 
 forms of philosophical thought to religious 
 faith, will their real weight and power be 
 fully seen. 
 
 " And what is the moral of the brilliant 
 success which is attending these remarkable 
 lectures ? It is a moral which, as old as 
 1 April 3, 1870.
 
 40 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 human thought itself, has been denied by 
 age after age only to be re-asserted with 
 renewed vehemence and vigour. It is the 
 moral that, of all subjects, those which con- 
 cern the everlasting destinies of man excite 
 the profoundest interest, and that when dis- 
 cussed with earnestness and sterling intellectual 
 power such themes exercise a resistless fascin- 
 ation. Again and again does scepticism seem 
 the omnipotent creed, and the very idea of 
 religious belief to have vanished from educated 
 society ; but the chill of unbelief passes away, 
 and the fever of faith comes back again. 
 Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists fancied that 
 from the belief of cultivated Europe they had 
 at last banished every tenet except naked 
 Deism, and had reduced Christianity to a 
 bugbear of the Priests. Hume imagined that 
 he had finally demonstrated the futility of 
 reasoning with respect to the invisible world. 
 And, stealing weapons from the armoury of 
 the great Scottish sceptic, Comte waged war 
 against all forms of the supernatural, on the 
 ground that we can reason accurately only 
 from the data furnished by sense, and that, 
 when we cannot reason correctly, it is a breach 
 of morality to reason at all. Voltaire, Hume, 
 and Comte have taught that it is a culpable 
 waste of time to perplex ourselves with such 
 insoluble questions as whether we can deter- 
 mine our own fate in the infinite hereafter, 
 and whether the Omnipotent Ruler of the
 
 Dr. Llddon 41 
 
 universe listens to the prayers of His creatures. 
 And yet these questions are as eagerly discussed 
 now as they were five thousand years ago. To 
 any fresh or earnest word on those most solemn 
 and mysterious of themes, men listen with some 
 measure of the eagerness which a fond imagin- 
 ation ascribes to the ages of faith. Generation 
 after generation feels those questions start up 
 with the greenness of a recurring spring. 
 Dynasties come and go, Empires rise and fall, 
 literatures vanish from the memory of man, 
 forms of polity wax old and perish, and the 
 ancient homes of great peoples survive as the 
 sepulchres of the dead ; but the breedings of 
 the soul on the dim hereafter never fade or 
 die. With immortal vigour they renew them- 
 selves in each generation, and baffle the efforts 
 of logic or sarcasm to numb them into death. 
 It is these undying problems that Mr. Liddon 
 has been passing under review, with the help 
 of a rare erudition and a vigorous dialectic ; it 
 is these yearnings of the soul that have found 
 expression in the solemn passion of his rhetoric ; 
 and hence, despite his constant recourse to the 
 profundity of German analysis, a brilliant and 
 overflowing audience has flocked to hear his 
 lofty discourse." 1 
 
 1 The Lent Lectures were published in 1872, under the 
 title, Some Elements ofRe/igion.
 
 42 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 S. PAUL'S THE ATHANASIAN CREED. 
 
 1870 was a marked year in Liddon's life. 
 Before the famous Lent Lectures were delivered, 
 he had received from Mr. Gladstone the offer 
 of a Canonry at S. Paul's, and the appointment 
 was announced on February i6th. He was 
 installed on April 27th, and preached for the 
 first time as Canon on May ist. : On June 
 1 1 th he was elected to the Ireland Professor- 
 ship of Exegesis at Oxford, though he had 
 steadily refused to put himself forward for the 
 office. At the Encaenia on June 22nd, the first 
 over which the new Chancellor, Lord Salisbury, 
 presided, he received the honorary degree of 
 D.C.L. 2 An American visitor to Oxford, 
 describing the proceedings of the day, wrote 
 as follows : "The men who received the 
 warmest applause were Liddon, the famous 
 preacher, and Arnold, the poet. ... Mr. 
 
 1 Liddon never gave way to the new-fangled fashion of 
 using " Canon " as a title. To a friend who addressed him 
 as " Canon Liddon," he would say, " Please do not 
 Canonize me." 
 
 2 He was made D.D. in the following November.
 
 'Dr. Liddon 43 
 
 Arnold's recent attacks 1 upon the Dissenters 
 had endeared him to the clergymen's sons in 
 the galleries." 
 
 Liddon spent his summer holiday on the 
 Continent, travelling from Luxembourg to 
 Metz just as the Franco-German War broke 
 out, and went on to Ober Ammergau and to 
 Munich. By September he was back in Lon- 
 don, and on the 1 1 th he preached, as Canon 
 in Residence, under the Dome, thereby estab- 
 lishing the precedent which has been followed 
 ever since. On December 1 6th he took posses- 
 sion of his official house, No. 3, Amen Court. 
 For twenty years that house was to his friends, 
 old and young, and to his spiritual children a 
 shrine, a sanctuary, and a home. 
 
 When Liddon became Canon of S. Paul's, 
 the condition of the Cathedral was not very 
 markedly different from what it had been 
 twenty years before, when Charles Kingsley 
 described it : " The afternoon service was pro- 
 ceeding. The organ droned sadly in its iron 
 cage to a few musical amateurs. Some nursery- 
 maids and foreign sailors stared about within 
 the spiked felons'-dock which shut off the body 
 of the Cathedral, and tried in vain to hear what 
 was going on inside the choir. The scanty 
 Service rattled in the vast building, like a dried 
 kernel too small for its shell. The place 
 breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy 
 1 In S. Paul and Protestantism.
 
 44 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 life-in-death, while the whole nineteenth cen- 
 tury went roaring on its way outside. And as 
 Lancelot thought of old S. Paul's, the morning 
 star and focal beacon of England through 
 centuries and dynasties, from Augustine and 
 Mellitus, up to those Paul's Cross sermons 
 whose thunders shook thrones, and to Wren's 
 noble masterpiece of art, he asked, * Whither 
 all this ? ' Coleridge's dictum, that a cathedral 
 is a petrified religion, may be taken in more 
 meanings than one. When will life return to 
 this Cathedral system ? " 
 
 Some attempt to give a practical answer to that 
 wistful question had been made by Dean Mansel 
 and Canon Gregory before Liddon joined the 
 Chapter, and his appointment gave fresh impetus 
 and strength to the reforming party. In the 
 following year Dean Mansel died, and was suc- 
 ceeded by Dean Church, who threw all the 
 splendid resources of his character, intellect, and 
 knowledge into the work of making S. Paul's the 
 great centre and exemplar of Divine Worship 
 and spiritual activity for the whole Diocese of 
 London. Of that work a detailed account has 
 been given in another volume of this series. 1 
 Here it is enough to say that the restoration of 
 the Holy Eucharist to its rightful position in 
 the devotional life of the Church was the guid- 
 ing principle of this new reformation. Hence- 
 forward, the " Daily Sacrifice of Sacramental 
 Thanksgiving " 2 was to be offered ; the Bread 
 1 T>ean Church by D. C. Lathbury. 2 Jeremy Taylor.
 
 Dr. Liddon 45 
 
 of Life was to be broken daily, and the Breaking 
 was to be the central act of Sunday's worship, 
 gathering round it the best that the Cathedral 
 had to give in the way of music and architec- 
 ture and ordered rite. Every change from the 
 dismal disorder of the past, whether in the way 
 of structure, or ceremony, or organization, was 
 directed to the more conspicuous honour of 
 " the LORD'S Service on the LORD'S Day." 
 
 One detail in the improved order or Divine 
 Worship was the Eastward Position at the 
 Altar, which Liddon and Gregory always 
 assumed. It chanced that by a decision of the 
 Judicial Committee in the " Purchas Case " of 
 1871, this position was pronounced illegal. 
 The Bishop of London l sought to enforce this 
 decision in his Cathedral Church, and the 
 " Two Senior Canons," Gregory and Liddon, 
 announced in a published letter to the Bishop 
 that they could not recognize the spiritual 
 authority of the Judicial Committee, and were 
 not prepared to alter their liturgical practice in 
 obedience to its decrees. They invited prosecu- 
 tion, but eventually the Bishop acquiesced in 
 what he could not prevent ; and the incident is 
 only mentioned here because it illustrates that 
 intensity of conviction which made Liddon fight 
 even desperately for what the Man in the Street 
 would call a trifle, when he believed that it 
 embodied or expressed a principle. To a 
 Parish Priest whose Bishop was harrying him 
 1 Dr. Jackson.
 
 46 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 about Ritual, and had ordered the Episcopal 
 rebuke to be recorded in the Archives of the 
 Diocese, Liddon wrote in 1872, "The * Arch- 
 ives of the Diocese ' do not matter much : 
 they contain a great many odd things, you may 
 be sure. 'The Lamb's Book of Life,' if 
 through His Infinite Mercy our names can 
 only be found there at the last, is the only 
 'archive ' worth fidgeting about." 
 
 It was this intensity of conviction about the 
 spiritual forces underlying external forms that 
 made Liddon's preaching at S. Paul's so incal- 
 culably effective. " No one could suppose that 
 the changes in the Services and Ritual at St. 
 Paul's were superficial, or formal, or of small 
 account, so long as that voice rang on, like 
 a trumpet, telling of righteousness and tem- 
 perance and judgment, preaching ever and 
 always, with personal passion of belief, JESUS 
 CHRIST and Him crucified." l 
 
 It was Liddon's special strength that, in an 
 age which deifies Nebulosity and mistakes vague- 
 ness for depth, he based all that he taught and all 
 that he practised on the dogmatic foundation of 
 the Atoning Sacrifice, offered once for all by 
 Incarnate GOD. 
 
 And now we approach one of those great 
 
 controversies which so profoundly stirred 
 
 Liddon's heart and conscience, and in which 
 
 he was appointed to play so heroic a part. 
 
 1 Dr. Holland.
 
 Dr. Liddon 47 
 
 About this time the forces of unbelief began 
 one of those periodic attacks on the Athanasian 
 Creed, by which, in each succeeding generation, 
 they endeavour to remove the Landmarks of the 
 Faith. The attack was sedulously fomented by 
 Archbishop Tait. The Bishops, as usual, were 
 frightened by the outcry ; l and even Bishop 
 Wilberforce was in favour of compromises 
 and arrangements. Liddon told him plainly 
 that under existing circumstances the Bishops 
 could not advise the omission of the Creed 
 from Morning Prayer "without being guilty of 
 an act of conspicuous unfaithfulness to Ityealed 
 Truth." 2 For his own part his mind was soon 
 made up, and his course was clear. On the 
 23rd December, 1871, he wrote to Archbishop 
 Tait, " If this most precious Creed is either 
 mutilated by the excision of the (so-termed) 
 Damnatory Clauses, or degraded, by an altera- 
 tion of the rubric which precedes it, from its 
 present position in the Book of Common Prayer, 
 I shall feel bound in conscience to resign my 
 preferments, and to retire from the ministry of 
 the Church of England." 3 
 
 1 In 1872 Liddon wrote "It is painful and odd that 
 we should associate Bishops so generally with qualities 
 which the ideal of their office does not make room for. 
 Dr. Newman tells us that most of them were much the 
 same in the Arian times. No doubt they were, if, as I 
 suppose, something in the position makes its holders timid 
 and imperious at once, quite oddly." 
 
 * The italics are Liddon's. 
 
 3 Dr. Pusey announced the same decision.
 
 48 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Archbishop Tait was always intolerant of 
 opposition, and he continued his Anti- 
 Athanasian labours with unabated zeal, being 
 powerfully reinforced by Dr. Thomson, 
 Archbishop of York, and Dr. Stanley, Dean 
 of Westminster. On the 5th of March, 1872, 
 Liddon wrote to a friend " Men who would 
 be frantic with indignation if the Establishment 
 or its endowments were threatened, look on 
 with tranquil equanimity while the Church is 
 menaced with the loss of her truest treasures. 
 I confess I care little about S. Paul's. 1 . . . 
 What is the good of decorating a temple to 
 the honour of a GOD Who may, or may not, 
 in the judgment of so many of His ministers, 
 be the Holy Trinity or anything else you 
 like?" On the loth of August he wrote 
 again "The Archbishops seem bent upon 
 consummating the dTroo-Toerta, in one way or the 
 other. The only thing that can possibly 
 prevent them will be alarm about the Estab- 
 lishment, and I don't know whether we can 
 inspire them with that. They think, no doubt, 
 that, if they muffle or mutilate the Creed, they 
 will gain more support at one end than they 
 will lose at the other. A formidable lay 
 demonstration or remonstrance is the only 
 thing that they will mind." 
 
 Two days later he wrote " There is a fatal 
 
 1 The great scheme for decorating S. Paul's had just 
 been set on foot, as a Memorial of the Prince of Wales' 
 recovery from his serious illness of 1871.
 
 Dr. Liddon 49 
 
 something about the existing positions of our 
 Bishops, which utterly demoralizes them, as 
 defenders of the Faith. They make a certain 
 
 figure if, like the s and the s, 
 
 they are avowedly on the unbelieving side. 
 But they don't dare to go against the tide. 
 Now and then you have a Bishop Hamilton, 
 and I do not forget the noble Bishop of 
 Lincoln J in the present controversy. Of the 
 rest, the less said the better : specially of the 
 two Primates, who are really always thinking of 
 the Establishment and their seats in the House 
 of Lords." 
 
 Two months later it fell to Liddon's turn, as 
 Select Preacher at Oxford, to occupy the pulpit 
 at S. Mary's. The impressions of the scene 
 have not yet faded from the minds of some 
 who witnessed it. It is the 2Oth of October, 
 1872 a bright autumn morning, the yellow 
 sunlight streaming in upon the densely-crowded 
 church, the long array of scarlet-robed Doctors, 
 the beautiful face looking down from the high 
 pulpit, with its anxious brow and wistful gaze. 
 And then the rolling Latin hymn, and then the 
 Bidding Prayer, and then the pregnant text He 
 that belie^peth on the Son bath everlasting life ; and 
 he that believetb not the Son shall not see life ; but 
 the 'wrath of Qod abideth on him. 
 
 "Are we listening to S. John the Baptist, 
 or S. John the Evangelist ? " The preacher 
 holds that we are listening to the Evangelist, 
 1 Dr. Wordsworth. 
 
 H
 
 50 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 and says that the purpose of S. John's Gospel 
 is condensed into this sentence. " But why 
 should not the text have stopped at the first 
 clause ? Why is it not enough to proclaim 
 the blessedness of those who possess life in 
 possessing CHRIST ? Why should anything be 
 added as to the loss of those who do not possess 
 Him ? " The answer is that, if CHRIST be 
 indeed the SON of GOD, through and in Whom 
 the Perfect Moral Being has spoken to His 
 creatures, to reject Him is to reject GOD. " If 
 to believe Him is life, to have known and yet 
 to reject Him is death. There is no middle 
 term or state between the two. . . . The 
 absolute religion can claim no less than this : it 
 cannot dare to represent its acceptance as other 
 than a strict moral necessity for those to whom 
 it is offered. In fact, this stern, yet truthful 
 and merciful, claim makes all the difference 
 between a Faith and a theory." And now 
 there is a moment's pause. Preacher and 
 hearers alike take breath. Some instinct assures 
 us that we are just coming to the point which 
 is really at issue in the great controversy of the 
 hour. The preacher resumes "A statement 
 of this truth in other terms is at present 
 occasioning a painful controversy, which it 
 would be better in this place to pass over in 
 silence, if too much was not at stake to warrant 
 a course from which I shall only depart with 
 sincere reluctance. Need I say that I allude to 
 the vexed question of the Athanasian Creed ? "
 
 Dr. Liddon 51 
 
 It is proposed in some quarters to excise 
 large portions of that Creed, in others to 
 banish it altogether from the service of the 
 Church. The former of the two alternatives 
 is dismissed with suitable contempt. 1 "The 
 good taste of scholars, and a fitting sense 
 of the immodesty and grotesqueness of any 
 pretension on the part of a merely National 
 Church to alter the terms of a document 
 of world-wide authority, will probably save 
 the Athanasian Creed from the various cur- 
 rent schemes for mutilating it." But the 
 expulsion of the Creed from public worship 
 is a more probable event, and the argu- 
 ments against such expulsion must be stated 
 with clearness and emphasis. " The broad com- 
 mon-sense of the people would argue that the 
 Creed was discarded because it was imagined to 
 be wholly or partly untrue ; untrue enough, it 
 would be observed, to be discredited as a 
 formulary for general use, although not 
 sufficiently untrue to be unfitted for solemn 
 Clerical Subscription. The fact would remain 
 patent to all men that, after using the Creed for 
 the last three centuries on all the greatest 
 festivals of the Christian year, the English 
 Church had deliberately abandoned it, and the 
 friends and foes of faith would alike draw their 
 own conclusions as to the meaning of such a 
 step. It would be inferred that the Church of 
 
 1 It has, in these latter days, been carried into effect at 
 Westminster Abbey.
 
 52 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 England no longer held belief in the doctrine of 
 the Holy Trinity and of our LORD'S Incarnation, 
 as taught by the Church Universal, to be neces- 
 sary to salvation ; and that she admitted herself 
 to have erred in affirming this necessity since 
 the Reformation, not less than before it. But 
 the Creed would be really rejected because it is 
 too faithful an echo of that Gospel which men 
 do not venture openly to reject." 
 
 The conclusion of the great discourse is now 
 drawing nigh, and the preacher gathers up all 
 his energies for the last word of personal 
 application. 
 
 "The controversies of our day may do us 
 lasting harm, if they lead us to adhere to 
 our own opinions only because they are 
 our own ; if they send us fuming with our 
 earthly passions into the very sanctuary ; if 
 they estrange from each other hearts which 
 should, in the holiest of causes, be one, and 
 weaken by dividing moral forces which, when 
 united, are none too strong to cope successfully 
 with the energies of evil around us. But, if we 
 should have received in any degree the high and 
 rare grace of an intrepid loyalty to known truth 
 allied to a really unselfish spirit, we too may 
 * take up serpents, and if we drink any deadly 
 thing it shall not hurt ' us. Nay, more to be 
 forced back upon the central realities of the faith 
 which we profess ; to learn to know and feel, 
 better than ever before, what are the convic- 
 tions which we dare not surrender at any cost ;
 
 Dr. Liddon 53 
 
 to renew the freshness of an early faith, which 
 affirms within us, clearly and irresistibly, that 
 the one thing worth thinking of, worth living 
 for, if need were, worth dying for, is the 
 unmutilated faith of JESUS CHRIST our LORD ; 
 these may be the results of inevitable differ- 
 ences, and, if they are, they are blessings 
 indeed." 
 
 To at least one Undergraduate who heard 
 that saying, it became the motto and watch- 
 word of a lifetime. On the afternoon of the 
 same day Liddon wrote " I have just delivered 
 myself in S. Mary's on the subject of the 
 Athanasian Creed. The Liberals were there 
 in great force ; and I could feel that I shocked 
 them, though I phrased my positions as warily 
 and as tenderly as I could. However, I feel 
 relieved at having spoken out." 
 
 On the 3ist of January, 1873, a great 
 meeting in defence of the Creed was held 
 in S. James' Hall. Liddon consented to 
 speak, but very reluctantly, as he felt the 
 difficulty of handling sacred themes on a 
 public platform. When he rose to speak, he 
 was greeted by thunders of applause from a 
 densely-packed audience of loyal and grateful 
 churchmen. It must suffice to give the per- 
 oration of his speech. " I believe that we have 
 before us, amid all our anxieties, a great future 
 for the Church of England. The hearts of 
 young clergymen, and of young laymen, are 
 being stirred by the HOLY SPIRIT of GOD
 
 54 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 as they have not been stirred for many a 
 generation. The great Middle Classes of our 
 towns, too long alienated from our Church, not 
 through their fault but through ours, are being 
 again drawn within the embrace of their true 
 mother. And I cannot believe that He Who 
 has done and is doing of His mercy so much 
 for us will leave us now. I cannot doubt that 
 He will lead us, through the dark valley of 
 controversy and struggle, into a bright future 
 of confirmed faith and unimpaired chanty 
 beyond it." 
 
 The controversy dragged its slow length 
 along for another six months, but the heart 
 was knocked out of the attack. The Arch- 
 bishop was beaten and the Creed was saved. 
 The shar; which must be claimed for Liddon 
 in this victory for the Faith was ruefully 
 admitted by the Archbishop in his Primary 
 Charge.
 
 Dr. Liddon 55 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE P. W. R. ACT THE EASTERN QUESTION 
 CHANGES AT OXFORD. 
 
 THE smoke and din of the Athanasian battle 
 had scarcely cleared away when Liddon found 
 himself summoned to another campaign. Arch- 
 bishop Tait had shown, from the days when 
 he was one of the " Four Tutors " at Oxford 
 who protested against Tract XC., a natural 
 love of persecuting Tractarians, Puseyites, and 
 Ritualists. Just now he was smarting from 
 defeat, and he was not unwilling to take re- 
 prisals on those who had successfully resisted 
 his highhanded policy. Bishop Wilberforce, 
 himself no ritualist but the ritualists' best 
 friend on the Episcopal Bench, was killed by 
 a fall from his horse on the I9th of July, 
 1873. On the 24th of July, Liddon wrote 
 to his sister " How wonderful are the ways 
 of GOD ! He takes from us the sanctity 
 and the genius, the Hamiltons and the 
 Wilberforces ; and He leaves us the prosaic 
 and commonplace selfishness which has got 
 
 on in the world, the s and the s." 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, notoriously not unfriendly to
 
 56 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Ritualism and a sworn foe of religious tyranny, 
 was dethroned by the General Election of 
 February, 1874, and was succeeded by Mr. 
 Disraeli. Archbishop Tait saw his opportunity, 
 and jumped at it. He introduced a Public 
 Worship Regulation Bill, which, considerably 
 altered at the instance of Lord Shaftesbury and 
 Lord Cairns, passed the House of Lords and 
 went down to the House of Commons. There 
 Disraeli, who believed that Ritualism was 
 unpopular, welcomed it with effusion ; and 
 blurted out the brutal truth which prelatical 
 wiliness had attempted to conceal. " This," he 
 said, " is a Bill to put down Ritualism " and 
 so it was, at least in the pious intention of its 
 authors. 
 
 Of course, Liddon regarded with anxiety 
 the prospect of legislation against the 
 Ritualists. Such a Bill, endorsed by the 
 concurrence of the Episcopate, " would of 
 itself be a scandal to our Church of the 
 gravest kind." He dreaded " the cruelty of 
 the Bishops, or at least some of them." 
 He felt what the Church had lost by Mr. 
 Gladstone's retirement. " The Archbishop 
 would not have ventured on such an enter- 
 prise during the late Government's time." 
 When the Bill was passing through Parliament, 
 he preached against it 'at S. Paul's, denouncing 
 the " unreasoning panic " which dictated it, and 
 the " disregard of the historical structure and 
 spiritual independence of the Church " which
 
 Dr. Liddon 57 
 
 it involved. On the 28th of June he wrote to 
 a friend : " The Archbishop's Bill has engaged 
 the attention of the country to the exclusion of 
 any other subject. It left the House of Lords 
 on Thursday night. Lord Salisbury gave it a 
 parting kick, and the Archbishop a parting 
 benediction ; while other persons assumed the 
 various postures which the occasion appeared 
 to them to require. Of all the disappointments 
 which the matter has caused, the greatest is 
 Lord Selborne. ... I was unprepared for the 
 placid sophisms of his published letters, and 
 for the violence (it was considerably greater 
 than as reported) of his last speech in the 
 House of Lords. If so good a man can fall 
 so low, what must we not, all of us, fear ? 
 As for the Episcopal Bench, they have been 
 throwing themselves, with ultramontane de- 
 votion, at the feet of the two Primates with 
 the noble exception of the Bishop of Lincoln. 
 . . . The (guardian has behaved badly, as it 
 always does on these great occasions." 
 
 On the 1 6th of June, Liddon addressed a great 
 meeting in S. James' Hall, called to protest 
 against the Bill. In his speech, which was en- 
 thusiastically received, he affirmed with all 
 possible emphasis, the binding character of the 
 Ornaments Rubric, and repudiated the spiritual 
 authority of the Judicial Committee. He 
 poked bitter fun at " the Giant Intolerance," 
 who seemed to have taken up his abode near 
 Lollard's Tower ; and he declared his unabated
 
 5 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 confidence in the success of his cause. "After 
 all," he said in conclusion, " Church Principles 
 are true : they are the substance of the Gospel 
 translated into an energetic and tangible form. 
 They are true, and therefore they are indestruc- 
 tible." So when, in spite of Mr. Gladstone's 
 single-handed opposition, the Bill had become 
 law, Liddon took an unexpectedly cheerful 
 view. " Of course," he said, " there is no 
 reason for despondency. We shall live to see 
 the drowned Egyptians on the sea-shore even 
 yet." But, at the same time, having regard 
 to the Archbishop's unmistakable designs, he 
 held it was necessary " to reiterate from time 
 to time our thorough dislike of the Bill, and 
 our distrust of the animus which will preside 
 at its enforcement ; hinting, too, as pru- 
 dence may suggest, that there are such things 
 as withdrawal of subscriptions from Church 
 objects, and Disestablishment." That animus 
 soon became only too conspicuously apparent. 
 Priest after Priest was thrown into prison, for 
 no more heinous fault than conscientious in- 
 ability to recognize the spiritual jurisdiction of 
 the new Court established by the Public 
 Worship Regulation Act, and presided over 
 by the Ex-Divorce Judge. Liddon's sym- 
 pathies were keenly with the sufferers. 1 In 
 
 1 A writer who knew him well, reviewing Principal John- 
 ston's book, said " When fourteen long years had been 
 allowed to elapse there was ground for expectation that 
 nothing of interest would be suppressed, but that Dr.
 
 Dr. Llddon 59 
 
 1877, he wrote "Mr. Tooth's sick face in 
 that cage in the court of the gaol quite 
 haunts me." * And, on a later occasion, " I 
 feel half-ashamed of myself for going off for 
 a time while Mr. Green is shut up in 
 Lancaster Gaol." 2 It was with reference to 
 this outbreak of persecution that he wrote to 
 a younger friend on the eve of his ordination 
 in 1877 "The days are troublous for taking 
 Orders : but f No Cross, no Crown.' They 
 are far better than the old days of sluggish- 
 ness and death : and, if they bring many 
 anxieties, they are not without some very 
 bright hopes indeed." 
 
 Liddon's share in all the great struggles of the Church 
 would be told at length. The imprisonment of the clergy 
 prosecuted under the Public Worship Regulation Act filled 
 his heart and mind to a far greater extent than this volume 
 shews. He grieved for their distress ; he grieved yet more 
 that no personal challenge availed to bring him into the 
 same predicament ; he admired, almost to envy, those who 
 were suffering for conscience sake. Immediately upon the 
 imprisonment of the Rev. A. Tooth, Liddon went to visit 
 him in Holloway Gaol. During the long imprisonment 
 of the Rev. S. F. Green, when persons to whom the 
 spectacle of such an unflinching loyalty to principle was 
 disagreeable, began to say ' the door was locked on the 
 inside,' Dr. Liddon's characteristic comment was : * They 
 would have said, had they lived soon enough, to the 
 Apostle Paul, If you would only give up your foolish 
 superstition, you might come out and go all about Rome, 
 and do great service to the gutter-children.' " Church 
 Quarterly Review, July, 1905. 
 
 1 The Rev. A. Tooth, Vicar of S. James', Hatcham. 
 
 8 The Rev. S. F. Green, Vicar of Miles Platting.
 
 60 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 In the meantime Liddon had turned for a 
 season from the work of war to that of peace. 
 In September, 1874, he went to Bonn, on the 
 invitation of Dr. Bellinger, to take part in the 
 first of two well-meant but infructuous Con- 
 ferences on Reunion. 1 "What the Conference 
 had at heart was to deny that the Pope is 
 endowed with an infallibility enabling him to 
 make substantial additions to the received Faith 
 of the Church. . . . For the rest, peace- 
 making is proverbially thankless work, and 
 those who have a hand in it know, or ought to 
 know, their inevitable portion. But, whatever 
 the probabilities of immediate failure, they 
 work for a distant future, and they remember 
 humbly but thankfully Who has promised 
 a blessing on the peace-makers." 
 
 In March, 1875, tne Archbishops and 
 Bishops, issued a Pastoral Letter deprecating 
 Ritualistic excesses. While regretting that 
 certain of the better-instructed Bishops should 
 have signed the Pastoral, Liddon wrote : 
 "Probably there is a difficulty about holding 
 aloof on these occasions, which persons who 
 are not Bishops cannot enter into ; but the 
 fetal incapacity of seeing that, if fault is to be 
 found at all, it must be in all directions, and 
 not in the one which chances to be unpopular, 
 takes the moral force out of all these compo- 
 sitions which come nowadays from Lambeth. 
 
 " I hope, with you, that things are looking 
 1 He attended the second in 1875.
 
 Dr. Liddon 61 
 
 better than they did some while ago. If we 
 can only have the grace to hold on inflexibly to 
 the whole body of Revealed Sacramental Truth, 
 and yet to avoid exaggerations which are in 
 conflict with our formularies, and which only 
 do the work of Puritanism and Scepticism, we 
 must, Dei Gratid, win our way. The Sacra- 
 mental principle, considered as a religious force, 
 is much stronger than anything opposed to it ; 
 and there is no sort of reason why it should 
 not make way with the English people in its 
 English shape, instead of being associated with 
 the repellent and unhistorical theories of Rome." 
 
 We turn now to a very different field of 
 controversy. In the autumn of 1875, an 
 insurrection against Turkish misrule broke 
 out in Bulgaria, and the Turkish Govern- 
 ment despatched a large force to repress it. 
 This was done, and repression was followed 
 by a hideous orgy of massacre and outrage. 
 A rumour of these horrors reached England, 
 and public indignation spontaneously awoke. 
 Disraeli, with a strange frankness of cynical 
 brutality, sneered at the rumour as " coffee- 
 house babble," and made odious jokes about 
 the oriental way of executing malefactors. But 
 Christian England was not to be pacified by 
 these Asiatic pleasantries, and in the autumn of 
 1876 the country rose in passionate indignation 
 against what were known as " the Bulgarian 
 Atrocities." On the ijth of August, Liddon
 
 62 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 made his first contribution to the great 
 controversy in a sermon at S. Paul's. 
 
 " Day by day we English are learning that 
 this year of grace 1876 has been signalized by a 
 public tragedy which, I firmly believe, is 
 without a parallel in modern times. . . . 
 Not merely armed men, but young women and 
 girls and babes, counted by hundreds, counted 
 by thousands, subjected to the most refined 
 cruelties, subjected to the last indignities, have 
 been the victims of the Turk." And then 
 comes a fine burst of patriotic indignation : 
 " That which makes the voice falter as we say 
 it is that, through whatever misunderstanding, 
 the Government which is immediately respon- 
 sible for acts like these has turned for sympathy, 
 for encouragement, not to any of the historical 
 homes of despotism or oppression, not to any 
 other European Power, but alas ! to England 
 to free, humane, Christian England. The 
 Turk has, not altogether without reason, 
 believed himself, amid these scenes of cruelty, 
 to be leaning on our country's arm, to be sure 
 of her smile, or, at least, her acquiescence ! " 
 
 It was not in Liddon's nature to sympathize 
 merely by word of mouth with an oppressed 
 and righteous cause ; so, as soon as his term of 
 residence at S. Paul's was over, he started for 
 Eastern Europe, combining a mission of friend- 
 ship and succour to our persecuted fellow- 
 Christians with some negotiations tending 
 towards reunion with the Eastern Churches.
 
 Dr. Liddon 63 
 
 On September i8th he wrote in his diary: 
 " We passed two chief scenes of the insurrec- 
 tion, and by the bank were a series of Turkish 
 military stations. In front of each of them sat 
 a group of Turks, grave and imperturbable : 
 and close to each [qu. one ?] of those stations, 
 surrounded by a palisade, was an impaled man, 
 and other poles on which insurgents had been 
 impaled. Mr. Odzic said that some of them 
 lived for four days, some only for twelve hours. 
 
 * And the men who do these things,' he said, 
 
 * are our neighbours England wills it.' " The 
 publication of this grisly fact drew down on 
 Liddon's head a vehement storm of incredulous 
 abuse ; but all the thunders of the pro-Turkish 
 press were utterly powerless to shake his 
 testimony. "That was a moment never to 
 be forgotten, when Liddon challenged the 
 united hostility of England's Officialdom. 
 And how vivid was his insistence in after 
 years, in making you look through the 
 splendid glasses which had shown him the 
 gruesome sight close at hand : and, then, in 
 contrasting their immediate evidence with that 
 of the British Consul, who, at a distance of 
 eight hundred miles, off and on, from the spot, 
 suggested that it might, possibly, have been 
 a bag of beans on a post, and has got himself 
 believed by all intelligent Englishmen ! " l 
 
 Early in October Liddon was back again in 
 England, " even more of an Anti-Turk than he 
 1 Dr. Holland.
 
 64 Leaders of the Church 180x3-1900 
 
 went out." On December 8th he spoke at a 
 great Conference in S. James's Hall, convoked 
 to consider the state of affairs in Eastern Europe. 
 He declined to treat the issue before the country 
 as a question between Christianity and Mahom- 
 medanism, between Truth and Error. He 
 regarded it simply as a question of right or 
 wrong -justice or injustice. 
 
 " I do not ask for a law which shall secure 
 exceptional privileges to the Christians. I only 
 ask for a law which shall be just a law which 
 shall secure to every subject, Mussulman and 
 Christian, equal rights secure to the Turks the 
 right to live in peace, the right to enjoy their 
 property, secure to them even their harems, so 
 long as their consciences are not sufficiently 
 instructed to wish for something better but to 
 take from them that which damages them even 
 more than it harms the Christian the right 
 to injure the latter by continual persecution." 
 And, later, he renewed his protest in the pulpit 
 of S. Paul's, when, as he said in after years, " it 
 seemed possible that this country might be 
 committed to a war in defence of the Mahom- 
 medan Power, which for centuries has been 
 the persecutor of the worshippers of CHRIST." l 
 In January, 1877, he wrote to a friend: "If 
 we were a Christian people, we should join 
 Russia at once in any measures which may 
 be necessary to force Turkey to do justice to 
 her Christian subjects. But, as it is, we shall, 
 1 See Preface to (Church Troubles.
 
 Dr. Liddon 65 
 
 I presume, acquiesce in the deeds of lust and 
 vengeance by which the Turk will now pro- 
 ceed to signalize his victory over the half- 
 hearted friends of his victims." In May, 
 1877, he wrote: "How really magnificent is 
 the moral position of Mr. Gladstone ! He has 
 shown within the last week what I have always 
 believed about him that he is thoroughly 
 superior to the petty ties of party which form 
 the moral horizon of ordinary men. Never at 
 any time have I felt so much respect for him as 
 now, when he faces every sort of unpopularity 
 from a simple sense of duty." 1 In 1878 he 
 made a noteworthy confession : " Really the 
 Dissenters have put us to shame in this matter. 
 They were much more likely to have embar- 
 rassed a plain moral issue with the utter non- 
 sense which the Roc^ and the Puritanical party 
 generally talks about the superstitions of the 
 Greek Church. To their honour, they have 
 brushed all this away, and gone to the heart 
 of the matter ; I must say I have felt drawn to 
 them not theologically but morally as never 
 before ; ' as the School-authors say, they 
 deserve grace of congruity' for their recent 
 proceedings." 2 
 
 At one time it was a journalistic fashion to 
 describe Liddon as a Liberal. I propose, later 
 
 1 Mr. Gladstone was then heading the opposition to 
 Turkey, and some of his party declined to follow him. 
 * See also p. 165. 
 
 K
 
 6 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo 
 
 on, to enquire whether, and in what sense, this 
 term could ever have been properly applied to 
 him : but there was at least one important 
 department of public affairs in which he was 
 the most consistent and tenacious of Conser- 
 vatives : this was the Reform of the University 
 of Oxford. The moderate changes which were 
 effected by the Act of 1856 were, in the eyes 
 of most people, beneficial ; but Liddon had 
 nothing but blame for " the baneful action of 
 that Secularist tendency which was introduced 
 and disseminated by the University Commis- 
 sion." He disapproved so strongly of the 
 abolition of Tests that he felt in advance that 
 " one will be able to do better work for GOD 
 somewhere else than in a place which will have 
 done its best to get rid of Him." But, when 
 in 1877 a Conservative Government passed 
 another Act, and issued another Commission 
 to enquire into the condition of the Universities ; 
 and when that Commission recommended 
 changes tantamount to an official seculariza- 
 tion of the University and the Colleges, his 
 cup of bitterness overflowed. The first Com- 
 mission had done a great deal of harm, but 
 the second Commission, engineered by Lord 
 Selborne, had utterly surpassed it. " Alas ! 
 dear friend," he said, "what the locust had 
 left, the Talnier-worm * hath eaten." " Of all 
 her ancient inheritance in Oxford, the Church 
 
 1 Lord Selborne had been better known in Oxford as 
 Roundell Palmer.
 
 Dr. Liddon 67 
 
 now retains the use of the College Chapels 
 and the Faculty of Divinity ; and what is 
 called * the logic of justice,' with its bold and 
 fallacious assumptions, renders her hold of these 
 remaining fragments most precarious." 
 
 Liddon's own plan for dealing with these 
 new and perilous conditions was characteristi- 
 cally thorough. The ancient connexion between 
 Christ Church and the See of Oxford should 
 be dissolved. Christ Church should hence- 
 forward be merely one of the ordinary Colleges, 
 and the Bishop's throne and capitular estab- 
 lishment should be removed to S. Mary's 
 Church. The spiritual needs of the Under- 
 graduates should be served by a College of 
 Priests, living in community, in a house having 
 no connexion with the University. He had 
 already frustrated a design to have the Chapel 
 of Keble College consecrated, inasmuch as, if 
 it were consecrated, it must follow the legal 
 fortunes of the Church in Oxford. His own 
 personal ties with the University were growing 
 weaker. He had lost in 1873 his seat on 
 the Hebdomadal Council. In 1882, on Dr. 
 Pusey's death, he determined that it was his 
 duty to write "the Doctor's" Life, and, in 
 order to secure the necessary leisure, he re- 
 signed the Professorship of Exegesis, 1 and 
 
 1 One who used to attend his professorial lectures " in a 
 shabby little room in the Clarendon Building " reports that, 
 towards the end of his professorship, Liddon said, "I used 
 to get sixty men, and now I get six."
 
 6 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo 
 
 ceased to preach before the University. His 
 only official connexion with Oxford was his 
 Studentship at Christ Church, and Christ 
 Church he henceforth used chiefly as a place of 
 quiet study, where he could work at Dr. Pusey's 
 Life more uninterruptedly than at Amen Court. 
 
 It was, perhaps, with the view of marking 
 a change in his relations with the Univer- 
 sity that, in 1879, he published his second 
 and last Series of University Sermons. They 
 range from 1869 to 1878 ; and the latest in 
 date might, if comparisons in such matters were 
 possible, be considered the greatest sermon that 
 he ever delivered. It is called "Worth of 
 Faith in a Life to Come." It was preached on 
 November loth, 1878: it dealt with the majestic 
 theme of life continuous through and after death; 
 and it had special reference to the recent de- 
 parture of a peculiarly bright and saintly spirit. 1 
 
 The sermon ended thus : " Suffer me to add 
 in conclusion a few words which may be remem- 
 bered in years to come. The expectation of a 
 life after death enables us to see things in their 
 true proportions. The future life furnishes us 
 with a point of view from which to survey the 
 questions, the occupations, the events of this. 
 Until we keep it well before us, we are like 
 those persons who have never travelled, and 
 have no standard by which to estimate what 
 they see at home. Next to positive error, a 
 
 1 Sarah Acland (1815-1878) wife of Sir Henry Acland, 
 M.D., Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford.
 
 Dr. Liddon 69 
 
 mistake as to the relative proportions of truths 
 is the greatest misfortune. But who does not 
 feel, every day of his existence, how easily this 
 mistake is made ? Some occurrence which 
 touches us personally appears to be of world- 
 wide importance. Some book which we have 
 fallen in with, and have read with sympathy, 
 or perhaps have helped to write, seems to mark 
 an epoch in literature or in speculation. Some 
 controversy, with its petty but absorbing 
 ferocities, . . . appears, through its present 
 relation to ourselves, to touch all interests in 
 earth and heaven. Self magnifies and dis- 
 torts everything ; the true corrective is to be 
 found in the magnificent and tranquillizing 
 thought of another life. As men draw near 
 to the threshold of Eternity, they see things 
 more nearly as they are; they catch perspec- 
 tives which are not perceived in the days of 
 business and of health. When Bossuet lay 
 a-dying, in great suffering and exhaustion, one 
 who was present thanked him for all his kind- 
 ness, and, using the courtly language of the 
 day, begged him when in another world to 
 think of the friends whom he was leaving, and 
 who were so devoted to his person and his 
 reputation. At this last word, Bossuet, who 
 had almost lost the power of speech, raised 
 himself from the bed, and gathered strength to 
 say, not without an accent of indignation, 
 * Don't talk like that. Ask GOD to forgive 
 a sinner his sins.'
 
 yo Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 " And surely those occupations should claim 
 our first attention, which prepare us for that 
 which, after all, is the really important stage of 
 our existence. All kinds of earthly duty may, 
 indeed, be consecrated to this work by a worthy 
 motive ; but direct preparation for the future 
 is made in worship. In the most solemn 
 moments which we can spend on earth, we 
 hear the words, "The Body of our LORD 
 JESUS CHRIST, Which was given for thee, 
 preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting 
 life.' Nay, all Christian worship is, in pro- 
 portion to its sincerity, an anticipation of the 
 Life of the World to come. Worship is the 
 earthly act by which we most distinctly recog- 
 nize our personal immortality ; men who think 
 that they will be extinct a few years hence do 
 not pray. In worship we spread out our insig- 
 nificant life, which yet is the work of the 
 Creator's hands, and the purchase of the 
 Redeemer's Blood, before the Eternal and 
 All-merciful, that we may learn the manners 
 of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for com- 
 panionship with saints and angels, and for the 
 everlasting sight of the Face of GOD. Wor- 
 ship is the common-sense of faith in a life to 
 come ; and the hours we devote to it will 
 assuredly be among those upon which we shall 
 reflect with most thankful joy, when all things 
 here shall have fallen into a very distant back- 
 ground, and when, through the Atoning Mercy, 
 our true home has been reached at last."
 
 Dr. Liddon ?i 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 WORK. IN LONDON BISHOPRICS THE EAST. 
 
 DR. HOLLAND says in his delightful book of 
 'Personal Studies ; : "I was Proctor when Liddon 
 preached the sermon which bade all Churchmen 
 wipe the dust off their feet, and abandon Oxford 
 for Zanzibar, where they might give themselves 
 to the service of the Catholic Creed." Happily 
 for the cause of the Catholic Creed in this 
 country, Liddon bethought himself in time 
 that the inhabitants of London, as well as 
 those of Zanzibar, have souls to be saved ; 
 and, when the official ties which had bound him 
 to Oxford were severed, S. Paul's became the 
 centre of his life and ministry ; as it was already, 
 in Bishop Lightfoot's striking phrase, " the 
 centre of the world's concourse." His home 
 was gladdened by the companionship of his 
 younger sister, Mrs. Ambrose, and he spent a 
 good deal of his leisure with another sister, 
 Mrs. Poole King. He loved travelling, both 
 in England and abroad ; liking to find himself 
 "out of the way of gossip and the English 
 language," but liking also, in its turn, the easy 
 
 1 Personal Studies, by Henry Scott Holland. (Wells 
 Gardner & Co.)
 
 72 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 and joyous life of English country houses. At 
 Hatfield he was an annual visitor, and he 
 was warmly attached to both Lord and Lady 
 Salisbury. Lord Beauchamp and Sir Robert 
 Phillimore were friends whom he highly 
 valued, and his letters are full of happy 
 allusions to Madresfield and "The Coppice." 
 Perhaps his most intimate friends, in the 
 generation immediately below his own, were 
 Lord and Lady Halifax, and his visits to them 
 at Hickleton or Powderham were always 
 seasons of peculiar pleasure. For Lord 
 Halifax's sister, Mrs. Meynell-Ingram, he 
 felt a respect and an admiration which all the 
 world must have shared if only it had enjoyed 
 the opportunity : and his words about the 
 Church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross, 
 which she built, are so characteristic as to 
 deserve reproduction : " It must be a matter 
 for great thankfulness to GOD that you have 
 been enabled to offer Him so beautiful a gift, 
 which will be a mute prophet of faith and 
 reverence long after we have passed away." 
 But all these enjoyments belonged only to his 
 brief and rare intervals of holiday-making : 
 his daily life was spent in strenuous and even 
 exhausting labour. There was the mental 
 effort of preparing, and the physical effort of 
 delivering, his great sermons at S. Paul's ; 
 there was the unseen but incessant business 
 which devolved on him as a member of the 
 Chapter ; there was a correspondence which
 
 Dr. Liddon 73 
 
 ranged over the whole world, and touched 
 every topic in theology and morals ; there was 
 the ministry to individual souls in Sacramental 
 Confession ; and, superadded to all these 
 labours, the stupendous toil of writing Dr. 
 Pusey's "Life." Into this self-imposed task 
 he threw himself with a too-conscientious 
 diligence. The physical and mental task of 
 coping with the huge mass of undigested 
 material which Pusey had left behind him 
 overtaxed his strength, and this was only 
 subsidiary to the constructive effort which was 
 required in order to present the Doctor's 
 personality and teaching in a vivid light to a 
 generation which had ^already begun to forget 
 him. The assumption of this gigantic labour 
 was Liddon's great mistake, and, in the judg- 
 ment of Principal Johnston, who had the best 
 means of knowing, " beyond any other one 
 cause, it led to his early death." But, if the 
 energy bestowed on Dr. Pusey's " Life " was to 
 some extent Love's Labour Lost, the energy 
 bestowed on the sermons at S. Paul's was most 
 gloriously and fruitfully expended. Liddon 
 was, as Lord Acton said, " assuredly the 
 greatest power in the conflict with sin, and in 
 turning the soulsof men to GOD," that England 
 then possessed, or had possessed for genera- 
 tions. When he spoke to the people of 
 London under the dome of S. Paul's, he 
 seemed to speak in the spirit and power of 
 S. Paul himself.
 
 74 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 " He was one of those few, those very few, 
 from whose lips we could bear to hear without 
 an apology such strong and awful words as 
 these which came from the innermost soul of 
 the great Apostle. So few of us have the right 
 to use this great language. From so few can it 
 come without a sense of unfitness, of disqualifi- 
 cation, of presumption. We are so blinded by 
 this world's dust and turmoil ; we are so 
 clouded by compromise and hesitation ; we are 
 so insincere, so unconverted, so earthly ; we 
 are so far, far, from these high visions and 
 piercing calls. The burning flames that leap 
 through the speech of S. Paul are not for us to 
 touch without offence, without peril. 
 
 " But he ! he was different ; to him they 
 seemed akin : he understood ; he had the 
 right to take them on his tongue. We asked 
 for no apology from him ; we murmured 
 under no questioning qualification. As they 
 rang out from his lips (and whoever could 
 make Scripture ring as he did ?) their original 
 force seemed to reach and touch us across all 
 the dividing years. No insincerity withheld it. 
 No half-hearted allegiance made them falter in 
 their coming. * The world,' with its worries, 
 its disputes, its vanities, its beguilements, its 
 pettiness, its greeds the world threw no 
 veiling mist between us and those Divine 
 appeals. He who spoke to us had got past all 
 that. He had pushed his way up through all 
 the tangle. He was not afraid of what was
 
 Dr. Liddon 75 
 
 involved in facing the truth. He at least was 
 ready for the sacrifice. He had counted the 
 cost. And so, by virtue of that sincerity, of 
 that purged eye, he, we felt, saw something of 
 that vision which the Apostle opens to us. 
 That inner world was real and substantial to 
 him. That fiery zeal had its echo in him. 
 That ever-climbing life of grace upon grace had 
 come within his ken. His life was a cleansed 
 channel down which the news of it might pass 
 to us." i 
 
 The period which we are now considering 
 covers, roughly, the last ten years of Liddon's 
 life. The first great event of that decade 
 was the dethronement of Lord Beaconsfield 
 by the General Election of 1880. How- 
 ever little of a Liberal Liddon was in 
 reference to several matters of public contro- 
 versy, he was able to rejoice whole-heartedly in 
 Mr. Gladstone's victory over the Turk, the 
 Tory and the Times. When the question of a 
 successor to Lord Beaconsfield became acute, 
 and there were ominous rumours that the 
 Liberal Prime Minister was to be Lord 
 Granville or Lord Hartington, Liddon declared 
 himself against either selection with equal 
 emphasis. " They did not say a word for 
 the Christian Cause in 1876, and they would 
 rob the Liberal triumph of all moral interest 
 whatever. . . . The anguish of the Pall Mall 
 is most edifying, and is a measure of the wound 
 1 Dr. Holland.
 
 76 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 which cultivated ungodliness feels that it has 
 received." 
 
 Meanwhile, events of grave importance 
 were occurring or impending in the Church. 
 The Public Worship Regulation Act had come 
 into operation in 1875. The Puritan party, 
 sanguine that their opportunity had arrived, 
 went gaily to work, spying and reporting and 
 delating and prosecuting, with curious results. 
 They did not indeed destroy Ritual, and they 
 fomented " Ritualism ; " but, as we have already 
 seen, they succeeded in putting some excellent 
 clergymen into prison, and keeping them there 
 for considerable periods. " The imprisoned 
 clergy would not recognize the authority of 
 Lord Penzance as an ecclesiastical judge, and 
 they went to prison rather than commit them- 
 selves to any action which would imply such 
 recognition." 
 
 The spectacle of these imprisonments for 
 conscience' sake did not favourably impress 
 the English people ; and it weighed heavily 
 on the hearts of all who, like Liddon, believed 
 that the clergy were right and the Courts 
 wrong. " What a hideously unchristian thing 
 Puritanism is ! " he wrote to an intimate 
 friend; and just at the same time he was 
 uttering his thoughts on the topic of Persecu- 
 tion, in a more restrained but a more public 
 form. On the Sunday afternoons in December 
 1880, he preached at S. Paul's the four 
 sermons which he published under the title of
 
 Dr. Liddon 77 
 
 Thoughts on Present Church Troubles. A rumour 
 had got abroad that the sermons would deal 
 with the ecclesiastical prosecutions, and it was 
 remarked at the time that the preacher had 
 never before addressed such vast and such 
 distinguished congregations. As a matter 
 of fact, the allusions to current events were 
 studiously guarded ; but they were unmis- 
 takable. The idleness of trying to repress 
 conviction by force ; the attractive power of 
 suffering for conscience* sake ; the folly of 
 trying to cramp by minute regulation the free 
 life of a growing Church these were allusions 
 which no one could fail to apprehend. In 
 publishing the sermons, Liddon admitted that 
 the title might seem to promise something 
 more distinctly polemical than what it actually 
 introduced. But, he said, the sermons con- 
 tained " two or three explicit statements of 
 opinion which had attracted a certain amount 
 of public notice ; and moreover, when treat- 
 ing of topics immediately suggested by the 
 Church Services of the day, their language was 
 at times shaped or coloured by occurrences and 
 reflections which no man, to whom the 
 interests of CHRIST'S Kingdom in this country 
 are dear, could, at least in his more serious 
 moments, hope just now to forget. . . . 
 When challenged to do so, a clergyman is 
 especially bound to accept the full responsibility 
 which may attach to his public utterances ; and 
 this reason may sufficiently count alike for the
 
 7 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 publication and for the title of the present 
 work." 
 
 But the rancour of the " Church Association " 
 was proof even against Liddon's eloquence and 
 wisdom ; against the spectacle, again renewed, 
 of an imprisoned Priest ; against the tem- 
 porizing language of prelates who began to 
 feel frightened at the results of their handi- 
 work. The Association had other weapons 
 besides imprisonment in their armoury. The 
 long series of prosecutions by which S. Alban's, 
 Holborn, had been harrassed, reached in 1882 
 a point at which it seemed certain that the 
 devoted Mr. Mackonochie would be deprived 
 of his benefice. Some ingenious friends of the 
 persecuted priest suggested a way of escape 
 by means of exchange. Mackonochie should 
 resign S. Alban's ; the Rev. R. A. J. Suckling 
 should resign S. Peter's, London Docks ; the 
 patrons of S. Alban's should appoint Mr. 
 Suckling, and the patrons of S. Peter's should 
 appoint Mr. Mackonochie. It might well have 
 been that the Bishop of London would refuse 
 his consent to this curious arrangement ; 
 and, on the other hand, it was by no means 
 certain that Mackonochie would acquiesce in it. 
 But, at the critical juncture, Archbishop Tait, 
 who was already on his death-bed, intervened. 
 He wrote to the Bishop, and to Mackonochie, 
 strongly urging compliance with the suggested 
 course. His counsel prevailed, and the exchange 
 was effected.
 
 Dr. Liddon 79 
 
 This intervention was Archbishop Tait's last 
 official act. He died on Advent Sunday, 1882. 
 Beyond question, he was what Mr. Gladstone 
 once called him " A considerable person," and 
 I am not disposed in this place to pronounce 
 judgment on his character and administration. 
 On December 4th, 1882, Liddon wrote : " All 
 that can be said is that the late Archbishop 
 had a conscientious desire to do something 
 on a scale worthy of his great position 
 only, unfortunately, his unhappy education 
 was fatal to any true sense of what to do." 
 At the beginning of 1883 a movement was 
 started to raise a " National Memorial " to the 
 Archbishop ; and to a friend who thought of 
 subscribing Liddon wrote as follows : " We, 
 High Churchmen, must feel grateful to him 
 for what he did on his death-bed to promote 
 the peace of the Church, in the matter of 
 Mackonochie and Suckling. But is this a 
 reason for a 'Memorial?' Was not the 
 act on his death-bed an attempt to undo one 
 part of the wrong which he had done to the 
 Church I do not say intentionally in his 
 life ? Can we rightly forget the history of the 
 Poole l persecution, of the Gssays and Reviews, 
 of the Colenso case, of the Divorce Bill, of the 
 attack on the Creed of S. Athanasius, of the 
 Public Worship Regulation Bill ? Was not 
 the whole drift and purpose of the late Arch- 
 
 1 A curate whom Tait, when Bishop of London, per- 
 secuted for hearing Confessions.
 
 8o Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 bishop's life hostile to principles which we hold 
 dear ? And, if so, what is the moral value of 
 our share in a memorial to him ? . . . and will 
 not a memorial of this sort destroy the moral 
 value of other memorials, which are intended 
 to express deep and heartfelt gratitude to GOD 
 for the works and example of the saintly dead ? " 
 Again "A memorial is a tribute to services 
 rendered to the Church. What has he done 
 except in the way of undoing his own mis- 
 takes that really deserves it ? Alas ! he 
 certainly has helped the Church of England 
 on the downward road that leads to repudiation 
 of all faith and principle whatever, more effec- 
 tually than any one who has been in high places 
 in our day. It is one thing to draw a veil over 
 the mistakes of those who have gone before 
 the Eternal Judge. It is another to rank them 
 with the courageous and the self-denying ser- 
 vants of CHRIST." 
 
 The death of Archbishop Tait and the eleva- 
 tion of Bishop Benson to Canterbury made a 
 vacancy on the Episcopal Bench, and set 
 people speculating on names and qualifications. 
 The late Lord Salisbury, whose experience of 
 ecclesiastical patronage was unequalled, used to 
 say that the English clergy could be exhaus- 
 tively divided into two classes those who 
 wished to be Bishops and were unfit ; and 
 those who were fit but unwilling. All through 
 1883 and 1884, Liddon's admirers were, quite 
 unknown to himself, pressing him on Mr.
 
 Dr. Liddon 8 1 
 
 Gladstone as a man who, alike on personal 
 and on public grounds, ought to be made a 
 Bishop. By the end of 1884 there were 
 several vacancies actual or imminent. Dr. 
 Moberly, Bishop of Salisbury, was old and 
 infirm ; Dr. Wordsworth had announced his 
 intention of resigning Lincoln. On January 
 6th, 1885, Dr. Jackson, Bishop of London, 
 died suddenly. If his successor were brought 
 from some other diocese, there would be yet 
 another See to fill. 
 
 At this juncture, Mr. Gladstone was most 
 strongly urged to appoint Liddon to London ; 
 but he took another and a much less satisfactory 
 course. He sent a message to Liddon, through 
 Dean Church, enquiring whether he would "take 
 a Bishopric," but making no specific proposal. 
 To put the question in this form to a man of 
 Liddon's principles and temperament was to 
 ensure refusal. It seems, on the whole, likely 
 that if the See of London had been definitely 
 offered, Liddon would have felt it impossible 
 to decline. The opportunity which it afforded 
 of witnessing for truth in one of the most 
 conspicuous places in the Church was too 
 great to have been declined ; and the charge 
 of London, vast as it is, would not have been 
 fatally incompatible with his state of health and 
 habits of life. But in the Diocese of Exeter 
 or Lincoln he would have felt himself wholly 
 out of place ; and to say " Yes " to Mr. 
 Gladstone's question would have implied a 
 
 M
 
 8 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 readiness to accept any See which might be 
 offered. This seemed to Liddon impossible. 
 It would have been " false to the whole Tract- 
 arian (i.e., the Patristic and Catholic) tradition 
 on the subject. What would S. Ambrose have 
 said to a willingness to accept a Bishopric in 
 the abstract ? What would Dr. Pusey or Mr. 
 Keble have said ? My reply was that I 
 earnestly hoped to be spared the great anxiety 
 of answering such a question. This put an 
 end to the matter for good and all." Thus, 
 not for the first or last time, Mr. Gladstone 
 failed to perceive true greatness of character 
 and intellect, and exalted mediocrity to the 
 highest place. 1 
 
 In the summer of this year 1885 Liddon's 
 health, never very robust, began to give way. 
 He suffered greatly from rheumatism and 
 allied affections, among them a disabling 
 pain in the head. On the I5th of June he 
 wrote : " Sir H. Acland said that I ought to 
 go off at once ; and Dr. Gray, that, if I tried 
 to preach, he would not answer for the con- 
 sequences. And even now I have difficulty in 
 writing this such is the state of my head." 
 
 June 1 8. " I am laid up to-day with a pain 
 in the head which makes me almost quite deaf, 
 and unable to say much more." 
 
 1 It is only fair to add that in The Impregnable Roc{ of 
 Holy Scripture Mr. Gladstone spoke of Liddon's death as 
 having " extinguished a light of the English Church, 
 singularly bright and pure."
 
 Dr. Liddon 83 
 
 June 28. "My head is still very trouble- 
 some." 
 
 August 1 1 . " My illness has reduced my 
 correspondence to about three or four letters a 
 day ! " 
 
 Acting on the advice of his life-long friend, 
 Dr. Ogle, 1 he determined to spend the winter 
 and spring in Egypt and the Holy Land. A 
 history of the journey has been published by 
 his sister, Mrs. King, who, with one of her 
 daughters, accompanied him. 2 Just before he 
 sailed he wrote to Lady Halifax a letter to 
 which a pathetic interest attaches. Six years 
 before he had become Godfather to her 
 youngest son. The child was christened 
 Henry Paul, in honour of his Godfather and 
 of the Apostle on whose feast he was born. 
 " It would," wrote Liddon, " be impossible to 
 improve upon the names, considering all the 
 circumstances. I am so glad that he was born 
 on S. Paul's Day, and may thus, in an especial 
 way, claim the great Apostle as his own, all 
 through his life, and after it." Now, on the 
 
 1 The Lent Lectures of 1870 are dedicated 
 
 To 
 JOHN WILLIAM OGLE, ESQ., M.D., 
 
 OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, 
 WHOSE WORK AND CHARACTER SUGGEST 
 
 MANY PRECIOUS LESSONS 
 WHICH HE NEVER THINKS OF 
 
 TEACHING. 
 
 3 2)r. Ltidotfs Tour in Sgyft and Tales tine In 1886, 
 (Longmans.)
 
 8 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 eve of his departure for the East, he wrote 
 thus to the boy's mother : 
 
 " Before leaving England on a health-voyage 
 to the East, I am anxious to send my godson 
 a Prayer Book, and am making bold to ask 
 you to keep it for him until his next birth- 
 day. Will you give it to him on that day, 
 and tell him that I pray that he may one day 
 be a very good and useful man ? " Before 
 the godfather returned to England, the godson 
 was dead, and Liddon wrote to the sorrowing 
 mother with characteristic insight and tender- 
 ness. " I had indeed built much on the possible 
 future in this world of my dear godson ; but 
 his future is now, in the best sense, secure. 
 . . . Certain it is that, fifty years hence, 
 when we are all together in another world, 
 he will express his delight at not having lived 
 long enough to offend our LORD by committing 
 deadly sin ; and the Divine Love and Wisdom 
 which took him away will be fully revealed to 
 us." And again " Not a day passes, but 
 does not suggest how happy are they whom 
 GOD takes to Himself before they have 
 seriously offended Him." And, at the follow- 
 ing Easter, Liddon wrote to Lord Halifax 
 " Dear Henry Paul has been much in my 
 mind, especially at my Easter Celebration. 1 
 am sure that he is spending an even happier 
 Easter this year than he did last. How 
 much to be envied are those who are taken 
 young ! "
 
 Dr. Liddon 85 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's second Administration came 
 to an end in June, 1885. He was succeeded 
 by Lord Salisbury, who, for whatever reason, 
 did not appoint Liddon to the See of Salisbury, 
 which became vacant in July, 1885. He did, 
 however, offer him the Deanery of Worcester. 
 This was declined on the following grounds : 
 " I do not think that an offer of mere 
 preferment to higher dignity and larger income 
 constitutes any claim upon the conscience ; and 
 on this point, as on so many others, the old 
 Tractarian feeling ... is profoundly opposed 
 to that commercial view of the higher offices in 
 the Church which was very sincerely held by 
 the old Latitudinarians. In the army, it is 
 natural enough that a Captain should be uneasy 
 until he is a Major, and a Major until he is 
 a Colonel, and a Colonel until he is a General. 
 ' But ye shall not be so,' is surely our Master's 
 rule, and the craving for preferment, which 
 prevails so largely among the English clergy, 
 is one of the secrets of our moral weakness as 
 an Order." The offer of the Deanery reached 
 Liddon at Cairo. Six months later, at Con- 
 stantinople, he heard that he had been elected 
 Bishop of Edinburgh. This offer he also 
 declined, partly on the ground that the Bishops 
 of the Church of Scotland should be Scotchmen. 
 " So long as they are Englishmen, that Church 
 will always wear the appearance of an English 
 importation in the eyes of the Presbyterian 
 majority, whose conversion will thus be
 
 8 6 Leaders of the Chut ch 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 rendered more difficult by a sense of slighted 
 national feeling. ... I should not forgive 
 myself if I were in my own person to aid an 
 evil tradition of seeking Bishops for Scotland 
 south of the Tweed, which I have deplored 
 ever since I have been able to think about 
 these things seriously at all." 
 
 Liddon's journey in the East was an 
 immense and unqualified success. He enjoyed 
 the riding, though quite unused to it ; he 
 enjoyed the warmth and brightness, he enjoyed 
 the ever-changing variety of scene, he enjoyed 
 the opportunity of seeing the religion of the 
 Holy Orthodox Churches at close quarters, 
 observing their daily life and work, and discuss- 
 ing the problems which divide Christendom 
 with the occupants of the Patriarchal Thrones. 
 Above all he revelled, with all the rapt 
 devotion which was his innermost nature, in 
 the sacred associations of the places which he 
 visited. 
 
 "The Patriarch of Jerusalem allowed me to 
 celebrate in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 
 in the Chapel of Abraham, which is on the Hill 
 of Calvary, and parted only by a thin screen 
 from the Chapels of Calvary, Greek and Latin." 
 " One of the greatest pleasures of being in the 
 East is the extraordinary relish, if I may use 
 the word, which all that one does and hears 
 gives to the Old Testament. The habits of 
 the people, their whole bearing and aspect, 
 suggest the Bible." When living in a tent on
 
 Dr. Liddon 87 
 
 the Mount of Olives, he wrote that, though the 
 distance from Jerusalem was a drawback, " the 
 associations of the Sacred Hill and the constant 
 view of the Holy City counterbalance all else. 
 Only one feels that breakfast and dinner are 
 a sort of desecration : it is ;like eating in the 
 Choir of a Church." Again " Our LORD 
 seems to have sanctioned the aesthetic principle 
 by deigning to choose so beautiful a neighbour- 
 hood for some of the great scenes of His life 
 on earth. The pleasure of witnessing the real 
 framework of His Earthly Sojourn which one 
 had hitherto only imagined is indescribable. 
 I wonder how I can have let so many years 
 pass by without making a great effort to see 
 spots, compared with which the interest of all 
 else on earth is tame indeed." 
 
 But even among scenes so august, and 
 memories so moving, Liddon's sense of 
 humour (of which more will be said later on) 
 could not lie dormant. At Jerusalem, during 
 Divine Service on Easter Eve, " I fear I had 
 my pocket picked on the stairs of Mount 
 Calvary." At Cairo, " a camel suddenly 
 gobbled and spat at me a curious variation 
 of the look of tranquil disdain with which these 
 beasts generally regard everything, as if they 
 were Heads of Houses of the old type." As 
 to the disputed site of Calvary, he wrote 
 " General Gordon seems to have taken up the 
 1 new site ' with great fervour, and this settles 
 the question with all those many persons who
 
 88 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 think that a good man, a good engineer, and a 
 brave soldier must necessarily be an antiquarian 
 and a Biblical scholar to boot." As Dr. 
 Holland says, Liddon never firmly denied the 
 famous story of his backsheesh, which was so 
 large that it enabled his dragoman to add 
 a new wife to his establishment. He entered 
 into the domestic perplexities of the captain of 
 his dahabeah, whose wife at Assouan com- 
 plained bitterly that the other wife at Cairo had 
 all the fun, and pleaded that each should have 
 a spell of the gay city, turn and turn about. 
 " Liddon entirely sympathized with this claim 
 for equal justice, and gave his judgment in 
 favour of the lady at Assouan."
 
 Dr. Liddon 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MR. BELL Cox "JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC" 
 S. PAUL'S REREDOS LINCOLN TRIAL. 
 
 LIDDON returned from his Eastern pilgrimage 
 in greatly improved health and spirits ; but 
 unluckily found himself almost immediately 
 involved in a series of controversies which told 
 heavily on his mental and physical strength. 
 The first of these concerned the Rev. J. Bell Cox, 
 Vicar of S. Margaret's, Liverpool, who, having 
 been prosecuted for alleged excesses in ritual 
 and having declined to defend himself before 
 Lord Penzance's Court, was imprisoned for 
 Contempt. This case was more scandalous than 
 any which had gone before ; for, as Dean 
 Church remarked, " they were in the thick 
 of battle, and in hot blood. This comes after 
 all has cooled down." The gross unfairness, 
 as between one section of Churchmen and 
 another, which was exhibited by all this one- 
 sided discipline, disgusted everyone in whom 
 the sense of justice was not dead. Dignitaries 
 were allowed to " make open questions of the 
 Personality of GOD, and the fact of the 
 Resurrection, and the promise of immortality," 
 while Mr. Cox was sent to prison " for having 
 
 N
 
 90 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 lighted candles and mixing water with the 
 wine." l It happened that, just at the time when 
 this case was attracting attention, Mr. Balfour, 
 the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was congenially 
 occupied in imprisoning Irish Nationalists. 
 This coincidence seems to have powerfully 
 impressed the mind of a certain dignitary for 
 whom Liddon felt a very imperfect sympathy. 
 "I agree," he wrote to a friend, "in your 
 
 distrust of the Dean of , He has two 
 
 faces to the two worlds in which he moves, or 
 would wish to move." And again, " The Dean 
 
 of has been staying in Oxford. Gore 
 
 preached the Gospel to him, but without 
 effecting any marked results. This Dean has 
 all the airs of a Nuncio only not from the See 
 of Peter." 
 
 It would seem that " this Dean " drew an 
 ingenious parallel between the imprisonment 
 of Mr. Cox and the imprisonment of the Irish 
 Nationalists. Both were legal, and therefore 
 both must be right. On this contention 
 Liddon, writing on the I9th of March, 1887, 
 commented as follows : " I return you the 
 
 Dean of 's grotesque letter grotesque, 
 
 because he writes as if he were quite cer- 
 tainly talking straight out of the Oracle. . . . 
 If the letter has any argument in it, it assumes 
 as a major premiss that no human law is, in 
 any circumstances, to be resisted an assump- 
 tion which would make short work with the 
 1 See 'Dean Church, p. 151.
 
 Dr. Liddon 91 
 
 Apostles and Martyrs. If this assumption is 
 not made, then the case of the Irish, and the 
 case of Mr. Cox, must each be argued on its 
 own merits ; and it is at least conceivable that, in 
 resisting the law, the Irish may be wrong, 
 and Mr. Cox may be right. And, if this 
 should be so, a further question would arise, 
 viz., whether those whose consciences oblige 
 them, much against their will, to resist what is 
 wrongly called " law," ought to disobey their 
 consciences, lest they should encourage other 
 persons, who disobey unquestioned law, from 
 motives into which conscience does not enter 
 at least prominently ? If this is so, then the 
 Apostles ought not to have disobeyed the 
 Sanhedrim in Jerusalem, lest they should give 
 encouragement to the Sicarii who are 
 denounced by Horace and Cicero. Ought not 
 more attention to be given to logic, before 
 people are made Deans ? " 
 
 The next controversy concerned the restora- 
 tion of the English Bishopric in Jerusalem, 
 to which Archbishop Benson had in a moment 
 of aberration committed himself. The estab- 
 lishment of that bishopric in 1841 was one of 
 the events which " broke " Newman, and 
 helped to drive him out of the Church of 
 England : its other results were inconsiderable. 
 The plan was that the Queen of England and 
 the King of Prussia were each in turn to nomi- 
 nate a Bishop, who should be consecrated by
 
 92 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 English prelates, and should exercise ecclesias- 
 tical jurisdiction over Anglican clergy and 
 Lutheran ministers in Syria. This arrange- 
 ment seemed to ignore the fundamental 
 difference between an Apostolic priesthood 
 and a man-made ministry ; the intrusion of 
 a nondescript Bishop into the Patriarchate of 
 Jerusalem was an outrage on all historical 
 conceptions of the Church ; and, as a matter 
 of fact, the energies of the anomalous Mission 
 were often directed to the end of weaning 
 Oriental Christians from their spiritual 
 allegiance, and turning them from Orthodox 
 to Protestant. 
 
 In 1 88 1 the third of these Anglican Bishops 
 in Jerusalem died, and this time the appoint- 
 ment lay with the German Emperor, as King 
 of Prussia. However, he did not move in the 
 matter, and it looked as if the ill-omened enter- 
 prise had died of natural causes. But towards 
 the end of 1886 a rumour went abroad that the 
 Bishopric was likely to be restored. Liddon, 
 fresh from intercourse with the Eastern 
 Patriarchs, who had said, with perfect justice, 
 that the Anglican professions of good-will 
 towards the Orthodox Church did not closely 
 accord with a good deal of Anglican practice 
 in the East, was horrified by a proposal so 
 reactionary. He wrote an intensely anxious 
 letter to the Archbishop, praying that he 
 might be authorized to contradict the rumour. 
 The Archbishop replied that the Foreign
 
 Dr. Liddon 93 
 
 Office did not yet know whether Prussia 
 would be ready to renounce her share in 
 the arrangement of 1841, and pointed out 
 some difficulties with regard to the endow- 
 ments of the Bishopric. 1 By the Archbishop's 
 wish, the state of the case was made public in 
 the Quardian.- A violent storm of controversy 
 arose, Protestants clamouring for the restoration 
 of the Bishopric, and Catholics protesting. In 
 February, 1887, the Archbishop wrote to 
 Liddon that Prussia had finally withdrawn, 
 and that he was going to consecrate an English 
 Bishop who should be " Bishop of the Church 
 of England in Jerusalem and in the East," and 
 who should discountenance all proselytiza- 
 tion among the Eastern Christians. So far, 
 the plan was obviously a great improvement 
 on that of 1841 ; but Liddon was profoundly 
 dissatisfied. The new Bishop was to draw his 
 
 1 On this point Liddon wrote to the Archbishop " If 
 hereafter it should be discovered that any funds now 
 devoted to the maintenance of a Bishop at Jerusalem are 
 placed at your Grace's disposal, that they may be devoted 
 in some other way to the furtherance of Christianity in 
 Palestine, might I suggest that they might furnish an 
 annual grant to the Patriarch, with the object of enabling 
 him to print LXX. Copies of the Old Testament, the New 
 Testament in Greek and Arabic, and, perhaps, some of the 
 Early Fathers, at the Press of the Holy Sepulchre ? " The 
 Archbishop notes the suggestion in his diary, and quaintly 
 adds, " Is such a man serious, or does he think I am ? " 
 
 2 Archbishop Benson's comment, Life, Vol. II., p. 165, is 
 scarcely reconcilable with the case thus stated by Principal 
 Johnston.
 
 94 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 income from irresponsible Societies, one, at any 
 rate, of which had been deeply implicated in 
 the proselytizing policy of former years. On 
 May 4th, 1887, he wrote: "Yesterday the 
 S.P.C.K. voted 300 to the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury for Bishop Blyth to spend on 
 schools which are not engaged in promoting 
 schism. This is meant as a set-off against 
 the patronage which he will be obliged to 
 extend to those that are. Was there ever 
 anything so humiliating as the whole of this 
 fiasco ? And the odd thing is that all the 
 time the Archbishop supposes himself to be 
 acting as a High Churchman should." 
 
 The next controversy arose over the new 
 Reredos erected by the Dean and Chapter in 
 S. Paul's Cathedral. Of this Reredos the 
 central feature was a representation of our 
 LORD on the Cross, and it was crowned by 
 the figure of our Lady carrying the Divine 
 Child. Some Puritan malcontents instituted 
 a suit under the Public Worship Regulation 
 Act against the Dean and Chapter, and the 
 suit was vetoed by the Bishop of London. 1 
 The promoters of the suit applied to the 
 Court of Queen's Bench, where Lord Chief 
 Justice Coleridge and Mr. Justice Manisty 
 (Mr. Baron Pollock dissenting) decided against 
 the Dean and Chapter. Lord Coleridge's 
 Judgment, vulnerable indeed in point of law, 
 1 Dr. Temple.
 
 Dr. Liddon 95 
 
 was delightful for humour and sarcasm. On 
 June 4th, 1889, Liddon wrote to a friend: 
 " The Judgment on our Reredos will be 
 given this morning. But as, I apprehend, there 
 will be an Appeal in any case, the interest is 
 limited to the effect which this move will 
 have upon the future chances of the game." 
 
 After the delivery of the Judgment, he 
 wrote : " Of course, Lord C. only retains the 
 shell of his old principles : but, as you read his 
 judgment, you see that he knows, and has 
 once felt, a great deal which is an unknown 
 world to a mere ordinary lawyer like Mr. 
 Justice Manisty. ... I hear that Lord 
 Grimthorpe says that Lord C.'s Judgment 
 will not stand. Lord G. no doubt thinks 
 that Lord C. has missed a great opportunity. 
 Had Lord G. presided in the Queen's Bench 
 the blander features of Lord C.'s oratory 
 would have been eliminated, and the Dean 
 and Chapter would have been told the plain 
 truth about their misdoings in that vigorous 
 English to which we are all accustomed. 
 But that, after doing his best, Lord C. should 
 be thrown overboard by Lord G., is too hard." 
 
 The Judgment of the Queen's Bench was duly 
 carried to the Court of Appeal, and was there 
 upset ; the Bishop's veto was sustained, and 
 the Reredos was saved. Thus the Dean and 
 Chapter were finally upheld in a work which 
 cost them an infinity of thought, care, and 
 expense ; but the worry entailed by the suit
 
 96 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 was just one more burden on Liddon's already 
 over-burdened back. 
 
 The next controversy was, to adopt Liddon's 
 phrase, a far more serious "move in the game." 
 The Church Association, tired of its infruc- 
 tuous victories over Ritualistic Priests, valiantly 
 resolved to prosecute a Bishop. The prelate 
 selected as the subject of the experiment was 
 Liddon's life-long friend, Edward King, Bishop 
 of Lincoln. The Association raised a special 
 subscription, and "went to work in a most 
 business-like way, sending delegates to attend 
 services at which the Bishop officiated, as 
 ordinary worshippers ; and, however incon- 
 sistent it may appear, to attend (not, how- 
 ever, as communicants) at the Celebration of 
 the Sacrament of Christian Unity." 1 
 
 The points on which the Bishop was 
 attacked were the Eastward Position at the 
 Altar, lighted candles on it, the mixture of 
 water with the wine in the Chalice, the 
 cAgnus Dei after the Consecration, the Sign 
 of the Cross at the Absolution and the Bless- 
 ing, and the ablution of the sacred vessels. 
 The Bishop's offences were committed in 
 Lincoln Minster on December 4th, and in the 
 Parish Church of S. Peter-le-Gowts, Lincoln, 
 on December i8th, 1887. In June, 1888, the 
 Church Association addressed the Archbishop, 
 stating that the Bishop had been guilty of 
 1 Life of Archbishop Benson, Vol. II., p. 320.
 
 Dr. Liddon 97 
 
 illegal acts, and begging him, in virtue of his 
 office, to cite and try his Suffragan. A vast 
 commotion immediately arose. Some great 
 authorities doubted whether the Archbishop 
 possessed the requisite jurisdiction ; some 
 thought that he would be unwise to exercise 
 it ; some held that he possessed it and should 
 exercise it by dismissing the suit ; some said 
 that, if he attempted to try the Bishop, he 
 would be condemned by the Secular Courts ; 
 others that, if he declined to try him, the 
 Secular Courts would compel him to do so. 
 Beset by these many and conflicting difficul- 
 ties, the Archbishop conferred freely with legal 
 flesh and blood. " Dean Davidson l was in 
 this matter, as in so many, his intimate friend 
 and counsellor." Dean Church called the 
 authority of the Archbishop's Court " alto- 
 gether nebulous." Liddon wrote to his friend 
 and former colleague, Bishop Lightfoot : "The 
 Archbishop is presumably approached, qua" 
 Archbishop, and presumably as having a large 
 discretionary jurisdiction, not necessarily con- 
 trolled by recent legal decisions. It is most 
 earnestly to be hoped that he may exercise 
 this by dismissing the charges as * frivolous.' 
 That such a person as the Bishop of Lincoln 
 should be exposed to the vexation of legal 
 proceedings is a serious misfortune to the 
 Church much more serious than to the 
 Bishop himself, who would probably regard 
 1 Afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 o
 
 9 8 Leaaers of the Church 1 800 - 1 900 
 
 it simply as an opportunity for growth in 
 Christian graces. But, as a consequence of 
 his rare and rich gift of spiritual sympathy, 
 the number of people in all classes of society 
 who look up to him with a strong personal 
 respect and affection is probably quite un- 
 rivalled in the case of any other prominent 
 Churchman of the same type, and the mere 
 apprehension of his being attacked is already 
 creating widespread disquietude. Anything like 
 a condemnation would be followed by conse- 
 quences which I do not venture to anticipate." 
 
 It is obvious that the Archbishop longed 
 to assert and exercise his jurisdiction, and 
 to sit in judgment on the successor of S. 
 Hugh ; but he was not quite sure whether 
 he could. Reference was therefore made, on 
 his suggestion, to the Judicial Committee of 
 the Privy Council, who were of opinion 
 that he had jurisdiction, and accordingly 
 " humbly advised Her Majesty to remit the 
 case to the Archbishop to be dealt with ac- 
 cording to law." Thus encouraged, the Arch- 
 bishop went forward, and cited the Bishop to 
 appear before him at Lambeth on February 
 1 2th, 1889. Liddon recommended that the 
 Bishop should demur to the single-handed 
 jurisdiction of the Archbishop, and should 
 demand a hearing before the Bishops of the 
 Province. " The more I think of it," he 
 wrote on February 6th, "the clearer it is to 
 me that, as a broad question of principle, and
 
 Dr. Llddon 99 
 
 in view of his example upon the future of the 
 Church, the Bishop is right in making this 
 appeal to the Comprovincial Bishops, with the 
 Primate." On the I2th the trial began : 
 the Archbishop having appointed five Epis- 
 copal Assessors to comfort and abet him, 
 but to have no share in the Judgment. 
 The Bishop duly made his protest, which the 
 Archbishop allowed to be argued at a later 
 date. On February I4th Liddon wrote : 
 " The Archbishop somehow seems to bury 
 great issues out of the sight, at any rate, of 
 his own mind, beneath a mass of drapery and 
 phrases ; and the great ecclesiastical ladies 
 who flit about in the surrounding atmosphere 
 add an element of grotesqueness to the whole 
 thing which makes it difficult to keep its great 
 seriousness steadily in view. 1 . . . One thing 
 is certain that Church principles could not 
 possibly have had a morally-worthier repre- 
 sentative and this is a blessing the full value 
 of which it is difficult to take in all at once." 
 
 Eventually the Archbishop decided to dis- 
 regard his Comprovincials, and to try the case 
 on his own responsibility. The trial, therefore, 
 went forward, and ended on February 23rd. 
 Judgment was delivered on November list, 
 and the Bishop was justified on every point 
 except the Sign of the Cross at the Absolution 
 
 1 This phenomenon was curiously reproduced at the 
 hearing of the case for Lights and Incense at Lambeth, May, 
 1899.
 
 ioo Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 and Blessing. This result was an immense 
 relief to Liddon, both as vindicating a decent 
 ceremonial on grounds of historical continuity, 
 and also as delivering a loved and honoured 
 friend from undeserved distress. But, before 
 the Judgment was given, the clouds were dark- 
 ening for a more perilous storm.
 
 Dr. Liddon 101 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Lux MUNDI. 
 
 FROM first to last Liddon's opinions concerning 
 the structure and interpretation of the Bible were 
 sensitively and pugnaciously conservative ; and 
 it is not unreasonable to surmise that they had 
 been permanently affected by his Evangelical 
 up-bringing. 
 
 In March, 1860, he pounced upon the newly- 
 published Sssays and JKevif&s, and pronounced 
 that " between Jowett's and Wilson's essays, the 
 Gospel history simply evaporates as Jowett 
 considers the three first Gospels to be merely 
 three forms of one tradition, not c three 
 independent witnesses' to our LORD'S sayings 
 and acts ; and Wilson sees in S. John an 
 element of legendary and ideal embellishment, 
 which contrasts disadvantageously with the 
 predominant moral element of the * Synoptic 
 Gospels.' ' Two years later, the offender was 
 Bishop Colenso, whose childish quibbles about 
 the Ark and the Flood had " the direct result 
 of promoting thorough-going disbelief of the 
 truth and contents of Scripture." In 1868 
 Liddon wrote to a perplexed friend : " Your
 
 IO2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 difficulty appears to me to assume that a 
 limitation of knowledge and a liability to 
 error necessarily go together that, because 
 our LORD admits His 'ignorance' of the Day 
 of Judgment, He is ignorant also of the 
 authorship and claims of the Pentateuch, about 
 which He does not profess ignorance, but, on 
 the contrary, makes distinct assertions. Now, 
 I should have thought that the reverse was the 
 more natural inference. If a human teacher 
 tells me that he is ignorant of A., but goes on 
 confidently about B., I am led to trust his 
 profession of knowledge in the case of B. all 
 the more readily from his admission of ignor- 
 ance in the case of A. ... We have only one 
 distinctly recorded instance of limitation of our 
 LORD'S knowledge, and we have, as it seems to 
 me, absolutely no ground for inferring ignor- 
 ance in any other case, certainly not in cases 
 where He spoke as believing Himself to 
 know. . . . 
 
 " It seems important to observe that it is 
 not merely the * authorship ' of the Pentateuch 
 which our LORD'S quotations assume, and 
 which is disputed by modern Rationalism. It 
 is whether the Pentateuch contains legends 
 instead of history. Our LORD, for instance, 
 refers to the Noachian deluge, to Lot's wife, 
 and to take another case to Jonah's being 
 in the fish. It is admitted that He refers to 
 these things as literal matters of fact. Modern 
 Rationalism says that they are legends. If we
 
 Dr. Liddon 103 
 
 accept this conclusion, I do not see how we can 
 trust our LORD when He says that He will 
 come to judge the world. Why should He 
 not have been mistaken here, too ; first in 
 attributing to the prophecy of Daniel the force 
 of a description which was to be literally ful- 
 filled ; and, secondly, in claiming Himself to 
 fulfil it ? In short, I do not believe that it is 
 possible to draw a line between CHRIST'S 
 * doctrine concerning His FATHER and Him- 
 self,' and the other parts of His teaching. 
 To suppose that our LORD is really ignorant 
 of any one subject upon which He teaches 
 as One Who believes Himself to know, 
 appears to me to admit a solvent which must 
 speedily break up all belief in His authority 
 and teaching." 
 
 The last-quoted words anticipate, with almost 
 literal accuracy, a protest which Liddon uttered 
 twenty years later against hasty misbelief. 1 In 
 all the interspace, his mind on these grave 
 topics never varied. It would be easy, but is 
 unnecessary, to multiply quotations. I pro- 
 ceed to the circumstances which involved him 
 in the latest, perhaps the most important, and 
 certainly the most painful, controversy of his 
 life. 
 
 It will have been gathered from the fore- 
 going pages, that one of the master-passions of 
 Liddon's life was his devotion to Dr. Pusey. 
 They had lived in close and increasing intimacy 
 1 See Life and Letters, p. 361.
 
 IO4 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 from the time when Liddon became a member 
 of Christ Church. Pusey was Liddon's 
 spiritual director, and, to the end of his long 
 life, the elder was to the younger man " The 
 Doctor," " 6/Aeyas," " the most dear and revered 
 of friends, of whose friendship I have all along 
 been so utterly unworthy." To Liddon's 
 ardent nature, full of affection, loyalty, and 
 hero-worship, there was an irresistible attrac- 
 tion in Pusey's austere unworldliness, 
 indomitable courage, and persistent hopeful- 
 ness, even in the darkest hours of treachery 
 and persecution. As years went on, Pusey 
 became to Liddon, not merely a final authority 
 in all disputed points of criticism and 
 theology, but a kind of exterior conscience 
 in the practical problems of life and duty. 
 " The Doctor would not approve of it," was 
 on Liddon's lips a sentence of final condemna- 
 tion. In the smallest question of academical 
 polity, it was pain and grief to Liddon to find 
 himself differing by a hair's breadth from the 
 Doctor ; while in all the vital controversies 
 of a contentious time they were of one heart 
 and one mind. Whether it was entirely whole- 
 some for a man of Liddon's temperament to 
 be thus under the sway of a master who 
 taught us to regard bad butter as a means 
 of grace, and to remember, when we went 
 to bed, that we ought to be lying down in 
 Hell, this is not the occasion to enquire. It 
 is enough to record the fact that Pusey was
 
 Dr. Liddon 105 
 
 to Liddon, not only dilectissimus amicus, but a 
 Prophet and a King, from whose judgments in 
 the spiritual and moral domain there could be 
 no appeal. 
 
 Pusey died in 1882, and it was inevitable 
 that Liddon should be profoundly concerned 
 about the best method of perpetuating his 
 memory, and presenting his life and work to 
 the world. We have seen that he undertook, 
 to the great detriment of his own health and 
 efficiency, the burdensome task of writing 
 the Biography, and he was the leading 
 spirit in the movement for creating some 
 visible memorial of the part which Pusey had 
 played in the reconstruction of the Church of 
 England. 
 
 Liddon's first idea was that the memorial 
 should be a church, exceeding magnifical, in 
 some conspicuous part of London, where the 
 combined beauty of architecture, ornament 
 and ritual should teach through the eye that 
 great Theology of the Incarnation and the 
 Sacraments which the Tractarian leaders had 
 taught through the ear. "A church like 
 that," he said, "would have excited 
 enthusiasm." However, in this prosaic world 
 of ours, memorials depend on money, and rich 
 men are seldom idealists. It therefore came 
 to pass that Liddon's original scheme received 
 no support from those opulent Churchmen to 
 whose pockets he appealed. They, on their 
 part, suggested some very uninspiring projects,
 
 io6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 such as an enlargement of S. Stephen's House 
 for training Missionaries, and a "Theological 
 Appendix" to Keble College, where B.A.'s. 
 might be taught Theology. Failing the 
 Memorial Church, Liddon proposed a College 
 of Clergy in Oxford, which should be a centre 
 of religious faith, theological learning, and pas- 
 toral care for souls. This scheme, which would 
 in Liddon's view act as an opposing force to the 
 secular tendencies of the remodelled and 
 dechristianized University, was adopted at 
 a meeting held at Lord Salisbury's London 
 house on the i6th November, 1882. At the 
 same time it was resolved to purchase Dr. 
 Pusey's library and place it in a suitable house, 
 under the care of two or more clerical Librarians 
 who should combine educational with spiritual 
 work. The Pusey House was to be, in 
 Liddon's words, " a home of sacred learning, 
 and a rallying-point for Christian faith ... at 
 what, so far as we can judge, must always be 
 one of the chief centres of the mental life of 
 this country." It was to " exhibit, as the old 
 Colleges of Oxford were meant by their 
 Christian founders to exhibit, solid learning 
 allied to Christian faith and piety." 
 
 Here was indeed a Venture of Faith. It was 
 obvious that its success must depend in large 
 measure on the character of the man who was 
 placed in command of it. Liddon's choice fell 
 on the Rev. Charles Gore, Vice-Principal of 
 Cuddesdon Theological College ; and the
 
 Dr. Liddon 107 
 
 selection was generally approved. Pusey 
 House was opened by the Bishop of Oxford l 
 on the 9th of October, 1884, and immediately 
 entered on a course of vigorous and useful 
 work. Much of that vigour and that useful- 
 ness was due to the first Head, afterwards 
 Bishop of Birmingham. 
 
 Charles Gore was born in 1853, and 
 educated at Harrow and Balliol. At Harrow 
 he was marked by an 'early and consistent 
 piety, and by a habit of close study, pursued 
 outside, though never at the expense of, his 
 regular work. When other clever boys were 
 content to talk about books, he read them ; but 
 he was no mere student. In many ways he 
 was a born teacher. It came naturally to him 
 to think, to theorize, and to expound. He had 
 views on most subjects, and was not shy about 
 enunciating them. His thinking processes were 
 in great measure shaped by Dr. Westcott, 
 then an Assistant-Master at Harrow, who 
 pleaded for the revival of Religious Com- 
 munities in England, and at the same time 
 sought to implant in his pupils "a firm faith 
 in Criticism." Some traces of Westcott's 
 influence were visible in Gore when he first 
 went up to Balliol as a Scholar in 1871, and 
 they were reinforced by the intellectual in- 
 fluences of the time and place. After taking 
 his degree in the First Class of the Final 
 Classical School, he fulfilled a long-cherished 
 1 Dr. Mackarness.
 
 io8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 purpose by seeking Holy Orders. He was 
 elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College, 
 and soon began to make a distinct mark on 
 the life of the University. He had social 
 advantages which differentiated him in some 
 ways from other Dons. His Balliol Scholarship 
 and First Class sufficiently attested his mental 
 competence ; and no one who knew him could 
 doubt that spiritual and moral interests held 
 the first place in his heart. In 1878 he wrote 
 a paper on the Nature of Faith and the con- 
 ditions of its exercise, which was privately 
 printed, and revealed him at once as a clear, 
 bold, and yet cautious thinker. Being appointed 
 Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon, he developed a 
 power of attracting and interesting young men ; 
 and the same power made both his public in- 
 structions and his private ministrations at the 
 Pusey House acceptable to a wide circle of 
 Undergraduates. 
 
 In boyish days, Gore had passed through 
 a ritualistic phase ; but residence at Oxford 
 had conformed his religion to a more academic 
 type ; and it was common knowledge to his 
 friends and pupils that he inclined towards 
 some extremely modern methods of criticizing 
 the Old Testament. But, curiously enough, no 
 suspicion of this unconcealed fact seems ever to 
 have crossed the mind of the man who put him 
 at the Pusey House. Liddon " knew and 
 loved his general character ; knew that he was 
 sound about the Incarnation and the Sacra-
 
 Dr. Liddon 109 
 
 ments ; and did not suspect that he had 
 constructed a private kennel for liberalizing 
 ideas in Theology within the precincts of the 
 Old Testament, and so much of the New 
 Testament as bears upon it." 
 
 Now it happened that this was a subject on 
 which Liddon's own convictions were fixed 
 and immoveable. He held them even pas- 
 sionately, and the lapse of years brought no 
 change in the manner of stating them. In 
 1 86 1 he wrote "The religious admiration of 
 our day is very generally given to systems 
 which still bid us study Scripture, while they 
 evacuate its almost every claim to reverence ; 
 and to men whom we are thankful to hear 
 describing the dress of a patriarch or the 
 historic parallels of a crisis, lest they should 
 be insisting upon all the objections which can 
 be urged against some primal Christian 
 doctrine, or suggesting indirectly all the 
 criticisms which tell against the genuineness 
 and authenticity of some Canonical Book." 
 
 To a mind thus possessed, the arbitrary 
 assumptions and bland self-confidence of the 
 criticism quaintly called " Higher," were 
 necessarily repulsive. Its prevalence in 
 Oxford was a permanent distress to Liddon, 
 but he took comfort in the thought that the 
 Pusey House, which he had done so much to 
 establish, and the Librarians whom he had 
 placed there, were sedulously confirming 
 Undergraduates in the Faith, and were battling,
 
 no Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 with all their might, against the forces of the 
 New Scepticism. To some extent this was 
 true. Pusey House did good work in the 
 regions of devotion, conscience, and morals ; 
 and crude theories about the text and inter- 
 pretation of the Old Testament ran off the 
 robust common-sense of sincerely Christian 
 Undergraduates, like water off the back of the 
 proverbial duck. But all at once the skies 
 darkened for a drenching storm ; and that 
 storm, when it burst, destroyed for ever the 
 peace and brightness of the devoted and 
 beautiful life which this book attempts to 
 pourtray. 
 
 On the 6th of July, 1889, Liddon wrote to a 
 friend " I should be happier about the future 
 of good principles among us, if some of our 
 friends did not coquette with rationalism, as 
 put out by the destructive school of Professors 
 Driver and Cheyne ; and others, with such 
 forms of worldliness as theatre-going which, 
 in a Priest, is surely unintelligible. Each of 
 these symptoms characterized a large section of 
 the French clergy in the generation which 
 preceded the Revolution of 1789. Each is due 
 partly, I suppose, to a mistaken notion that we 
 can conquer worldly morals, or forms of 
 thought that are unbelieving at bottom, by 
 discreetly * playing pretty ' to them. I daresay 
 I have made my full share of mistakes in this 
 way, if I only knew : perhaps one sees the 
 outline of the battlefield more clearly when one
 
 T>r. Liddon 1 1 1 
 
 is leaving it, though without having con- 
 tributed to the success of the day." 
 
 In September of this year Liddon spent 
 some time at Brighton, where it was the 
 privilege of the present writer to be daily in 
 his company. From Brighton he went to stay 
 with Mrs. Meynell-Ingram at Hoar Cross, and 
 there, in reply to a question of his hostess, he 
 so strongly urged the merits of the Pusey 
 House and its Head, that she subscribed 500 
 to its funds. At the beginning of the October 
 Term he returned to Oxford, and soon learned, 
 to his unspeakable dismay, that a book which 
 was just coming out under the editorship of 
 the Principal of the Pusey House contained 
 an essay by the editor which would " make 
 great concessions to the Germans." This book 
 was of course the well-meant but ill-starred 
 volume entitled Lux Mundi. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, in his famous Lectures on 
 translating Homer, said that Mr. Ichabod 
 Wright's translation had no proper reason for 
 existing. If I could venture so far without 
 appearing to verge on blasphemy, I should say 
 the same of Lux Mundi. The contributors 
 were men of high character and great attain- 
 ments, among whom I count some loved 
 and honoured friends ; but why they published 
 Lux IMundi is a question to which in sixteen 
 years there has been no intelligible answer. 
 The preface states that the volume was
 
 1 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 primarily due to a set of circumstances which 
 at the time of publication existed no longer. 
 The writers had been Tutors at Oxford between 
 1875 anc ^ 1885, and had then been compelled 
 to "attempt to put the Catholic Faith into 
 its right relation to modern intellectual and 
 moral problems." It might perhaps be sug- 
 gested that to put intellectual and moral 
 problems into their right relation to the 
 Catholic Faith would be a more promising 
 and a more dutiful attempt for a company of 
 clergymen. The phrase was indeed explained 
 away in the preface to the Tenth Edition ; 
 but it still stands in the forefront of the 
 book, a monument of infelicitous expression. 
 Whatever necessities were laid upon these 
 Tutors at Oxford between 1875 an< ^ J ^^5> one 
 would have thought that they had been re- 
 moved by lapse of time and change of duties. 
 By Michaelmas, 1889, the men, "who once 
 enjoyed this happy companionship, were for the 
 most part separated." And yet they felt bound 
 to gather up the residuum of their old teaching, 
 which had filtered harmlessly enough through 
 several generations of Undergraduates, and to 
 precipitate it on the Church at large. The 
 Undergraduates of 1875-1885 may have 
 required instruction about Faith and Pain and 
 Inspiration and Ethics and other venerable 
 themes ; but the Church, which had free access 
 to the works of Pascal and Butler and Paley 
 and Newman and Pusey and Church and
 
 Dr. Liddon 113 
 
 Liddon, was not conscious of any aching void 
 which Lux Mundi could fill. I have lived most 
 of my life in circles where religious enquiry 
 and discussion abounded ; but I have never 
 yet encountered a human being whose doubts 
 had been removed by Lux Mundi ; and the 
 fact that it ran through eleven editions in 
 twelve months is, I imagine, due to the fact 
 that, as Liddon said, "the world at large 
 thinks it piquant that such a book should have 
 issued from the Pusey House." 
 
 Myself an unworthy son of Oxford, I know 
 the repulsiveness of the suggestion that we at 
 Oxford have ever learnt anything from Cam- 
 bridge, or that Cambridge has preceded us in 
 any line of fruitful thought or action. Yet, 
 when I read Lux Mundi> I cannot perceive that, 
 with all its exuberance of rhetoric and verbiage 
 and illustrative allusion, it carries us much 
 further than the position taken by that least 
 exciting of teachers, Dr. Vaughan, 1 as far back 
 as 1862. Preaching in that year before the 
 University of Cambridge, Vaughan admitted 
 that "the Bible itself is the battle-ground of 
 our generation." He warned his hearers not 
 to ignore difficulties, but still to keep their 
 heads amid the rattling storm of Criticism. 
 He laid it down that it was no part of 
 GOD'S purpose in Revelation to anticipate the 
 discoveries of science, to teach history in ad- 
 
 1 C. J. Vaughan (1816-1897), Master of the Temple, 
 and Dean of Llandaff.
 
 114 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 vance, or to disclose truths which lay within 
 the competence of man's intellect to discover 
 for himself. Above all and here he was on 
 exactly the same ground as the more reverent 
 writers in Lux Mundi he taught that for the 
 man who owned the true and proper Deity 
 of the LORD JESUS CHRIST, and placed him- 
 self as a learner at the Divine Feet, the 
 problems of criticism and speculation had 
 neither fears nor perils. 1 
 
 However, for weal or woe, Lux Mundi was 
 compiled, and rumour in Oxford was busy with 
 its supposed contents. The Editor, hearing 
 that Liddon was terribly perturbed, sent him 
 the unpublished sheets. On October 2oth, 
 1889, Liddon replied, "I have read through 
 your Essay, but nothing else in the volume. 
 It is needless to say that with the drift of the 
 earlier part of the Essay I am in hearty agree- 
 ment. There are passages which command 
 my warmest admiration. You will, in your 
 kindness, forgive me if I add how much I wish 
 that pages 345-362, or large passages in them, 
 could have been modified or abandoned." 
 
 Whoever cares to peruse the pages to which 
 Liddon here refers must look at the first 
 edition of Lux Mundi. In later editions, " two 
 of the more painful passages that bore on the 
 Person of our Divine LORD " were, as Liddon 
 said, "altered for the better." But the 
 Essay as it stood, and stands, says, with an 
 1 See Appendix B.
 
 Dr. Ltddon 1 1 5 
 
 air of superior information, that our LORD 
 "argues with the Pharisees on the assump- 
 tion of the Davidic authorship of Psalm 
 ex.;" and in a footnote we read, "He never 
 exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in 
 the realm of natural knowledge ; such as would 
 be required to anticipate the results of modern 
 science or criticism." Surely to introduce the 
 tremendous and far-reaching doctrine of the 
 " Self-emptying of GOD " in a casual footnote 
 to a book of miscellaneous Essays suggests a 
 levity which might well appal a mind so 
 reverent and so scrupulous as Liddon's. 
 
 A long correspondence followed, and re- 
 vealed an almost equal amount of misery in 
 Liddon and his younger friend. To both, the 
 divergence which was now <made clear was a 
 source of the deepest pain, and unluckily the 
 Editor of Lux Mundi saw at the moment no 
 practicable way of amending or suppressing his 
 Essay. Liddon's judgment on some parts of 
 the book was comparatively favourable. " Some 
 of the Essays," he said, " or, at any rate, one of 
 them F. Paget's is a real contribution to 
 Christian theology." But, "the whole volume, 
 as I read it, has a naturalistic and Pelagianizing 
 tone ; the writers seem to think it a gain when 
 they can prune away or economize the Super- 
 natural, and the great and awful doctrines of 
 grace, which are the very heart of Christianity." 
 Such was his general criticism ; but his special 
 dismay was evoked by the Essay on Inspiration,
 
 1 1 6 Leaaers of the Church 1 800 - 1 900 
 
 * 
 
 and this dismay was deepened by a multitude of 
 concurrent circumstances. On November i yth, 
 
 1889, he wrote to a friend : " Dr. 's death 
 
 has saddened me, because, having had from 
 Almighty GOD an unusually fine intellect, he 
 has not made a use of it which can give him 
 much satisfaction wow. He has, in fact, helped 
 to pull down Belief in Oxford, and his influence 
 was steadily on the negative side of theology. 
 This, of course, makes him an object of admir- 
 ation to the whole of the Latitudinarian and 
 non-believing world here, and at his funeral on 
 Friday, I am told there was a regular " mena- 
 gerie," including the Principal and Professors 
 of the new Socinian College, as well as I am 
 sorry to say Gore and Paget, and everything 
 between. I should be glad to do anything I 
 
 could for 's widow and children, but I have 
 
 no mind for insincere homage paid to intellectual 
 ability minus faith. Nothing, in fact, depresses 
 me so much as the fear that our own friends 
 here are unconsciously adopting Broad Church 
 principles. There are more symptoms of this 
 than I like to think of." 
 
 So the sad weeks went by the saddest, pro- 
 bably, of Liddon's life and at the end of 
 November Lux Mundi was published. On 
 the 24th Liddon wrote thus to Mrs. Meynell- 
 Ingram : 
 
 " When I was spending those delightful 
 weeks with you in September, you asked me 
 more than once whether I had entire con-
 
 Dr. Llddon 1 1 7 
 
 fidence in all the teaching of my dear friend 
 Mr. Gore of the Pusey House. I told you, 
 and with entire good faith at the time, that I 
 had ; but he appeared to me to have kept clear 
 of the forms of thought and opinion which 
 characterized others whom I named. And, on 
 the strength of what I said, you made your 
 most generous gift to the Pusey House of 
 500. Since then, to my great sorrow, I have 
 found that I spoke too confidently. A book is 
 on the point of coming out, called Lux tMundi^ 
 at pp. 351-362 of which is a passage that 
 appears to me to be inconsistent with serious 
 belief in the trustworthiness of Holy Scripture, 
 for various reasons on which I must not now 
 dwell. But it has been a greater matter of 
 regret to me than I can well put into words, 
 that so excellent and able a man as Mr. Gore is 
 should have written it ; and I feel that I owe 
 you a reparation so far as a reparation is 
 possible by saying at once that, had I thought 
 it were remotely probable that anything of the 
 kind would have proceeded from such a quarter, 
 I could not have spoken to you as confidently 
 as I did. I have, of course, told Mr. Gore 
 frankly what I think about it he was so good as 
 to let me see the sheets. But I could not expect 
 that this would influence him practically ; and, 
 indeed, the book was too near publication, and 
 the matter it contained too notorious in various 
 quarters within the University, to admit of 
 modification or suppression. I hope that, if
 
 1 1 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 attention should be drawn to it, Mr. Gore will 
 write something that will tend to reassure 
 people, by modifying more or less considerably 
 some of the statements and opinions expressed 
 in the Essay. But some of the harm can 
 never be undone. If our spoken words 'last 
 for ever' in their effects, how much more is 
 this true of our printed words ! I cannot but 
 feel that, considering the assurances on the 
 strength of which you made your generous 
 present, the Pusey House has now no right 
 to it, or at best a very imperfect one. And, 
 as through my want of knowledge and insight 
 into what was going on, I was the person who 
 misled you, it would be a relief and satisfac- 
 tion to me to be allowed to replace the money 
 in your hands." 
 
 This characteristically generous offer was as 
 generously declined ; and on November 3Oth, 
 Liddon wrote again to Mrs. Meynell-Ingram : 
 
 " I must lose no time in thanking you for 
 your very kind letter, and for your generosity 
 in treating what I felt to be a moral obligation 
 as you do. Mr. Gore is so able and so lovable 
 a man that any deflection on his part from the 
 lines of Revealed and Catholic Teaching is 
 nothing short of a personal calamity. I hope 
 that he will see his way to making some public 
 explanation of his language, which will reassure 
 his friends ; though, as I read his Essay, I fear 
 he will find it difficult to do this without re- 
 tracting if he can retract some paragraphs.
 
 Dr. Liddon 1 1 9 
 
 That the Pusey House will, in any case, 
 continue to have GOD'S blessing upon it, I hope 
 and believe, if it is not saying too much. One 
 may almost apply to it that Apostolic saying, 
 * The gifts and calling of GOD are without 
 repentance.' " 
 
 As the winter advanced, this painful con- 
 troversy took stronger hold of Liddon's soul. 
 On December 6th he wrote : 
 
 " We must all wish to make the best, and 
 not the worst, of a misfortune. I do think it 
 a serious misfortune, in itself, and for the sake 
 of the Pusey House. Theology is not a matter 
 of characters holy or attractive, or the reverse. 
 It is a matter of propositions which are either 
 true or false. And I cannot harmonize Gore's 
 theory of our LORD'S ad hominem arguments 
 with any such belief in the perfection of His 
 Human Soul as Catholic theology prescribes." 
 
 On December 8th, he uttered his inmost 
 thoughts in a splendid sermon at S. Paul's, 
 which he published under the title of "The 
 Worth of the Old Testament." With regard 
 to that sermon Mr. Gladstone wrote that the 
 passage describing the unique position of the 
 Bible " rises to the very highest level of British 
 eloquence, and exhausts all the resources of our 
 language. It is too long to quote, too special 
 to appropriate ; and to make extracts would 
 only mangle it." 
 
 On Christmas Eve, 1889, Liddon wrote to 
 Archdeacon Denison " I have tried to tell
 
 I2O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Gore as explicitly as I can how wrong I think 
 his language, and how gravely the assumed 
 ignorance of our Blessed LORD'S Human Soul 
 on the subject of the Old Testament bears on 
 the true doctrine of His Person. As in the 
 case of Theodore of Mopsuestia, it is the high- 
 road to Nestorianism." l 
 
 Liddon's last year on earth dawned in utter 
 sadness. " I find myself," he wrote, " more 
 isolated in Oxford than ever before in the whole 
 course of my life." On the I9th of February, 
 1890, he wrote : "Dear Gore is deeply com- 
 mitted to a large number of young men who 
 regard him as the clever inventor of a working 
 compromise between Catholic truth and negative 
 criticism, and who would be much grieved at his 
 relapse into consistent orthodoxy." The more 
 deeply he looked into the matters at issue, the 
 more strongly he was convinced that there 
 was "nothing short of absolute contradiction 
 between Gore and Pusey." He urged that 
 " those who hold our LORD to be in error 
 when He teaches us what to think about the 
 Old Testament ought to furnish a criterion of 
 His infallibility, if they believe Him to be ever 
 infallible. On what religious subjects is He 
 infallible, if not on all ? When did He begin 
 to be, if He was not always, infallible ? " He 
 sorrowfully admitted that "both friends and 
 foes have a right to say that I ought to have 
 known better than I did what I was about when 
 1 See Appendix C.
 
 Dr. Liddon ill 
 
 I recommended Gore for the first post in the 
 Pusey Library." And again, a little later, he 
 wrote : " Lux ^Mundi is a proclamation of 
 revolt against the spirit and principles of Dr. 
 Pusey and Mr. Keble." 
 
 The sad controversy was soon transferred 
 from private correspondence to the columns of 
 the religious press, and the debates of Eccles- 
 iastical Societies and Congresses. Eventually, 
 it ebbed away, as such controversies generally 
 ebb, in a more or less unsatisfactory series of 
 replies and rejoinders, dissertations and ex- 
 planations. But, as far as Liddon himself was 
 concerned, the mischief was already done. He 
 had been wounded in a vital place, and 
 wounded in the house of his friends.
 
 122 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE LAST CHARGE THE END. 
 
 ONE, and only one, ray of cheerfulness 
 emerges from the gloom of this heart- 
 breaking time. In the spring of 1890 Mr. 
 Gladstone was staying in Oxford, and Liddon 
 writes "I had long conversations with him 
 about the Old Testament ; Dr. Dollinger ; 
 and the old Tractarians. Not a word about 
 Ireland. He dined with me in Hall ; delighted 
 the Common Room by his conversation ; and 
 then came up to my rooms for a long talk 
 afterwards. I am bound to add that he also 
 dined at * Mansfield : ' though I think he 
 would have made its enterprising Principal 
 understand that the basis of their sympathy 
 was political, and not theological. The world 
 at large, however, would not understand this." 
 
 This was only a transient gleam of the ironic 
 humour which in time past had cheered some 
 very dark hours. The months went by, and the 
 sorrow rather increased than diminished. In 
 the midst of it, Liddon received from Lord
 
 Dr. Liddon 123 
 
 Salisbury the offer, even vehemently urged, of 
 the See of S. Alban's. The offer was gravely 
 considered, but firmly declined : and, among 
 Liddon's reasons for declining it, as stated in 
 writing by himself, were his age, his uncer- 
 tain health, and the alienation of the younger 
 High Churchmen from him on account of 
 Lux Mundi. To an intimate friend he added 
 yet another that the incapacity to judge 
 of men which he had shown when he chose 
 Mr. Gore for the Headship of the Pusey 
 House proved that he was unfit for any office 
 involving the bestowal of appointments and 
 preferments. 
 
 And now, although none knew it, Liddon's 
 long day of warfare in the Church's cause was 
 drawing to a close ; but, before he laid down 
 the weapons which he had wielded so long 
 and so courageously, he was to strike yet one 
 more blow for the imperilled Faith. Earlier in 
 the year, in a letter to a friend who shared 
 his deepest confidence, he had said with regard 
 to the new theology of Oxford : " The best view 
 that we can take of it is that, like an eruptive 
 disease, it was latent in the system of the modern 
 Churchman, and is less dangerous now that it 
 has 'come out' and can be observed and dealt 
 with. May GOD give us grace to do this 
 wisely and unselfishly." The opportunity 
 came on Whitsunday, May 25th, 1890, when 
 he preached, by the Vice-Chancellor's ap- 
 pointment, before the University. S. Mary's
 
 124 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Church was full to overflowing, and an even 
 painfully intense interest possessed the great 
 congregation. Every one knew, by a kind of 
 instinct, that Oxford was now to hear from 
 the lips of her greatest preacher his final 
 testimony against the doctrine which, in his 
 belief, was undoing the best work of his 
 consecrated and laborious life. The text was 
 the fourteenth verse of S. John xvi. : " He 
 shall glorify Me : for He shall receive of Mine, 
 and shall show it unto you." The sermon (pub- 
 lished as 'The Inspiration of Selection} expounded 
 the work of GOD the HOLY GHOST in the com- 
 pilation of the Bible, and the testimony borne 
 by Him in the New Testament to the truth 
 and authority of the Old. "In some passages," 
 says Liddon's biographer, " the sermon directly 
 traversed statements in Lux Mundi, though the 
 book itself was never mentioned." These were 
 the closing paragraphs. 
 
 " Our LORD'S words furnish us with a 
 decisive criterion of the exact worth of domi- 
 nant influences around us, of currents of 
 thought which, now and again, would sweep 
 us imperiously along with them ; of the 
 temper of our own time ; of the Zeitgeist. 
 It is natural to us to think that the days in 
 which we live are wiser and better than any 
 before, and that in throwing our thoughts 
 without restraint into the main currents of the 
 hour we are doing the best we can with our 
 short span of life. And yet we might observe
 
 Dr. Liddon 125 
 
 that many a past generation has cherished this 
 notion of an absolute value attaching to the 
 thought and temper of its day, while we, as 
 we look back on it, with the aid of a larger 
 experience, can see that it was the victim of an 
 illusory enthusiasm. When we analyse the 
 ingredients that go to make up the spirit of 
 the time, of any one phase of time ; and when 
 we observe that, notwithstanding its stout 
 assertions of a right to rule, it melts away 
 before our very eyes like the fashions of a 
 lady's dress, into shapes and moods which 
 contradict, with equal self-confidence, its former 
 self, we may hesitate before we listen to it as 
 if it were a prophet, or make a fetish of it, as 
 though it had within it some concealed divinity. 
 The spirit of any generation may have, nay it 
 must have in it some elements to recommend 
 it. But assuredly it also has other and very 
 different elements ; and the question is whence 
 do they come, and whither are they drifting ? 
 All that is moving, interesting, exciting in the 
 world of ideas, in the successive conceptions of 
 the meaning and purpose of life that flit across 
 the mental sky, is not necessarily from, nor 
 does it necessarily tend towards, the Source of 
 good. The mere movement of the ages does 
 not in itself imply a progress from lower to 
 higher truth, from darkness to light ; move- 
 ment is possible in more directions than one. 
 * Brethren,' exclaims an Apostle to some of his 
 flock, to whom every claimant for speculative
 
 126 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 sympathy seems to have been welcome, 
 ' brethren, believe not every spirit ; but try 
 the spirits whether they are of GOD. . . . 
 Every spirit that confesseth that JESUS CHRIST 
 is come in the flesh is of GOD ; and every 
 spirit that confesseth not that JESUS CHRIST 
 is come in the flesh is not of GOD.' 
 
 " The test of the true worth of the spirit 
 of our day of the spirit which rules our own 
 thoughts and lives is the saying, * He shall 
 glorify Me.' All that wins for the Divine 
 Redeemer more room in the thoughts and 
 hearts of men ; all that secures for Him the 
 homage of obedient and disciplined wills ; all 
 that draws from the teachings of the past and 
 the examples of the present new motives for 
 doing Him the honour which is His eternal 
 due, may be safely presumed to come from 
 a Source higher than any in this passing world, 
 and to have in it the promise of lasting happi- 
 ness and peace. And, for the rest 
 
 ' Sunt multa fascis illita 
 Quae luce purgentur Tu2, 
 Tu vera Lux coelestium 
 Vultu sereno illumina.' " 
 
 The University of Cambridge, impressed 
 perhaps by the sermon l on " Devotion to 
 
 1 After preaching that sermon, Liddon wrote on the 28th 
 of October, 1888 : "Cambridge strikes me as being more 
 conservative as to religious matters than Oxford. The young 
 men still wear their academical dress, and they are more 
 reverent in chapel. I felt sure to-day that a great deal might 
 be done with them."
 
 Dr. Liddon 127 
 
 the Church of CHRIST" which Liddon had 
 preached there two years before, now con- 
 ferred on him the Honorary Degree of 
 LL.D., which he publicly received on June 
 loth. From Cambridge he returned to his 
 rooms in Christ Church, and there addressed 
 himself to his last piece of theological work. 
 In the previous April he had written to a 
 friend with reference to Dr. Martineau's recent 
 book, The Seat of Authority in Religion : " I 
 have been reading more of Dr. Martineau. 
 It is the most powerful attack on Christianity 
 that I have come across for many years. Its 
 significance is that it is merely the extension 
 of methods which get rid of unwelcome 
 features in the Christian Faith, without de- 
 stroying, or professing to destroy, what is 
 essential.' ' 
 
 It is not difficult to conjecture what was at 
 the bottom of Liddon's mind when he wrote 
 those words. All his life long he had devoted 
 his best powers of heart and brain to the task 
 of defending the true and proper Deity of the 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST, and he looked with the 
 most profound abhorrence on all theories 
 which suggested that it was possible for the 
 LORD to err. He wrote a short criticism of 
 Dr. Martineau's book, and published it as 
 the preface to the Fourteenth Edition of his 
 Bampton Lectures. It ends with these words : 
 " The sincere and able writer before us unin- 
 tentionally illustrates the real connexion
 
 128 Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 between the New Testament and the doctrine 
 of our LORD'S Divinity, when, in order to get 
 rid of the approaches to, as well as the 
 statements of, that doctrine, he finds himself 
 obliged to tear the writings of the Evangelist to 
 shreds. He then teaches us that, if we would 
 read the Gospels as they stand and with our 
 eyes open, we cannot but read in their pages 
 the truth which was reasserted for all time 
 by the Catholic Church at Nicaea, because 
 it was inextricably bound up with the first 
 and only trustworthy record of Him Who 
 is the Object as well as the Author of our 
 Faith." 
 
 This preface is dated "Christ Church, S. 
 Peter's Day, 1890." It was Liddon's last con- 
 tribution to the service of the cause which 
 had absorbed his life. And now, like an earlier 
 apostle of the unchanging Faith, he was ready 
 to be offered, and the time of his departure was 
 at hand. He had never been a very strong 
 man. His nervous system was highly strung, 
 and he felt pain, as he felt pleasure, with 
 peculiar keenness. He used to say, " I am 
 a living barometer," and during the last 
 five years some rheumatic and neuralgic 
 troubles, which had long beset him, in- 
 creased in frequency and force. On the ist 
 of March, 1890, he wrote to a friend "I 
 have not been well, and have fallen into the 
 hands of Dr. Ogle, to whom I am now in 
 subjection."
 
 Dr. Liddon 129 
 
 His look of pain and illness attracted general 
 notice when he was receiving his LL.D. at 
 Cambridge ; and he suffered acutely after he 
 got back to Oxford. On the 3rd of July he 
 attended the funeral of his staunch friend Lord 
 Carnarvon, at Highclere, near Newbury, but 
 only made the journey with the utmost difficulty. 
 He returned to Christ Church after the funeral, 
 and that evening spent some time in the 
 rooms of his friend, the Rev. E. F. Sampson, 
 where he met Dr. Bright and Scott Holland. 
 " He was very tired and unwell, but most 
 delightful and most brilliant." 
 
 He now took to his bed, suffering torture 
 from what appeared to be neuralgia at the base 
 of the skull and in the neck. He was attended 
 with the most tender care by Sir Henry Acland, 
 and his younger sister, Mrs. Ambrose, came 
 to nurse him. For a fortnight he suffered 
 " agony," and " unspeakable distress." He 
 "went through the fire." He had "never 
 known before what pain might be." He " felt 
 that the pain might crush life out of him by 
 sheer violence." As the urgency of the 
 symptoms abated, it was judged expedient to 
 remove him from his rooms in Christ Church, 
 which were gloomy and inconvenient, to the 
 house of his elder sister, Mrs. Poole King, 
 at Stonehouse, Gloucestershire. The move 
 was made on the I9th of July, 1890, Mrs. 
 Ambrose, Sir Henry Acland, a nurse, and a 
 man-servant accompanying him. Of the sequel 
 
 s
 
 130 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 I am allowed to give the following account, 
 abridged from a longer narrative by one of 
 his kinsfolk : / 
 
 When he arrived at the station, his face 
 was of a ghastly colour, and he was carried, 
 apparently unconscious of his surroundings, 
 from the invalid carriage to his sister's 
 brougham. What made him doubly difficult 
 to move was that he had also a severe attack 
 of gout in his foot ; but of this he never 
 complained. He once said that it was " of no 
 more importance than a burning out-house 
 when the citadel was in flames." He revived a 
 good deal after his arrival, and seemed to enjoy 
 his new surroundings, and the fine view over 
 the Severn Valley and the Forest of Dean. 
 For the first week he seemed to improve ; his 
 complexion grew brighter, and he could relish 
 his food. He was carried daily from his 
 bedroom to a sitting-room next door ; and on 
 the 29th of July, by the direction of his brother 
 Dr. Edward Liddon, T he was taken into the 
 garden in a chair. Unluckily, the movement 
 brought on great pain, and the experiment had 
 soon to be discontinued. On the 3ist he was 
 suddenly seized by an attack of agony so 
 overmastering that he could not, for several 
 hours, be moved out of the chair into which he 
 had sunk. It was noticed, however, that the 
 pain made very little difference to the pulse or 
 temperature. On the 3rd of August he was 
 1 M.D. ; of Tafcnton.
 
 Dr. Liddon 131 
 
 again carried into the garden, and during a 
 week of very fine weather was able to spend a 
 good many hours there. At this time, he 
 complained little of pain, and was able to 
 read a good deal. He wrote his diary with 
 his accustomed care, noting his symptoms 
 from day to day ; and insisted, in defiance of 
 doctors, on superintending his correspondence. 
 One of his dearest friends was Lord Halifax, 
 whose domestic joys and sorrows were as real 
 to him as his own. Lord Halifax's eldest son, 1 
 an Undergraduate at Christ Church, was 
 seriously out of health ; and it was now 
 suggested that, as soon as the two patients 
 were fit to travel, they should accompany Lord 
 and Lady Halifax on a journey to Egypt. 
 Liddon's reply to this suggestion is the last of 
 his letters which has come into the present 
 writer's hands. The handwriting shows painful 
 signs of weakness. 
 
 . 6. (Trans. D.^J.C.) 1890. 
 " MY DEAREST FRIEND, 
 
 " I can only write a line (in defiance of the 
 doctor) to thank you for your most delightful 
 letter. But I must do that. Last week I had 
 a relapse ; but am again, by GOD'S mercy, 
 improving. The plan at which you hint would 
 be delightful. I dare not, however, as matters 
 stand, make any plans. ' One step enough for 
 
 1 Charles Reginald Lindley Wood (1870-1890).
 
 132 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 me.' At best, my recovery must be a very 
 slow matter so it seems. 
 
 " I have read Mr. Lilly's Right and Wrong. 
 It is a well-written re-statement of old Intui- 
 tional Morality, which they used to teach at 
 Oxford before the rise of J. S. Mill. His 
 quotation from Coleridge I recollect learning 
 by heart before I went into the Schools. 
 Certainly it is a book calculated in these days 
 to do a great deal of good. I can write no 
 more. How heartily I agree with you about 
 dear Lord B. 1 He is the truest of friends. 
 May GOD of his mercy enable Charlie to regain 
 strength 1 
 
 " Yours most affectionately, 
 
 " H. P. LIDDON." 
 
 The week during which the letter was 
 written was the brightest period of the illness ; 
 but changes were at hand. By the loth of 
 August, the gout in his foot had so far abated 
 as to allow of his walking in the garden, but, 
 though in this and in other ways he seemed 
 to be improving, he became increasingly 
 depressed, and seemed to lose all heart and 
 hope. " From the time that the gout left 
 his feet, and he was able to move about, his 
 depression became much greater, and he felt 
 <iller' in himself." On the I2th of August 
 he was almost unnaturally affected by the 
 death of Cardinal Newman, and "found it 
 1 Frederick, Earl Beauchamp (1830-1891).
 
 Dr. Liddon 133 
 
 impossible to think of anything else through- 
 out the day." In his weakened state, every 
 blow fell with tenfold weight. He was 
 " better by all the rules by which doctors and 
 nurses measure improvement," but one to 
 whom he always gave his confidence knows 
 where the deepest mischief lay. " He had lost 
 all heart about the Church, and he was so 
 miserable at the assaults on the Faith that 
 he no longer cared to live." Against moral 
 despair of that type no medical service can 
 avail. 
 
 Throughout the illness, Liddon showed a 
 strong and strange reluctance to see old friends. 
 " He did not feel sure of his self-control, and, 
 the fonder he was of them, the greater the 
 effort appeared to be." To this rule, how- 
 ever, an exception occurred in the case of 
 the Rev. Albert Barff, 1 who came, by in- 
 vitation, to Standish House on the ist of 
 September. Down to this time, Liddon, 
 though scrupulously exact about his prayers 
 and Daily Offices, had not felt sure enough 
 of himself to make arrangements for a Cele- 
 bration. " He always feared that he might not 
 be able to control his thoughts, if suddenly 
 attacked by the pain." But, with his friend 
 staying in the house, he seemed to gain 
 greater confidence ; and, at his request, Mr. 
 Barff gave him the Holy Communion in the 
 early morning of the 3rd of September, his 
 1 Vicar of S. Giles', Cripplegate.
 
 134 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 own servant being present, and the rest of the 
 household still asleep. 
 
 Mr. Barff writes " I was alone with him for 
 some time during the latter part of the day. He 
 talked freely and brightly of old times, and of 
 
 y o j * 
 
 plans for the immediate future. He seemed to 
 be so well that I said, * You are much better 
 this evening/ * Yes,' he said, c I have often 
 noticed that the Blessed Sacrament helps the 
 body as well as the soul.' This was his last 
 Communion." 
 
 By this time, the doctors began to advise 
 that the patient should be removed from 
 Gloucestershire to the more bracing air of 
 Weston-Super-Mare. Before Liddon left his 
 sister's house, he insisted on saying good-bye 
 to each of the servants. To one he said that 
 he should never see her again, and to some 
 hopeful words of hers he replied, " I am quite 
 happy. I could not be in better hands, and all 
 is being done for the best." His courtesy to 
 servants, and gratitude for their good offices, 
 were strongly-marked features of his character ; 
 and it is only just to master and man to insert 
 these words from one of the family : " He was 
 quite devoted to Frank Mawler, and liked him 
 to do everything for him. Frank was the best 
 of nurses, and the most unselfish and devoted 
 servant." 
 
 The move was safely made on the 5th of 
 September ; though the drive from the station 
 at Weston to Claremont Crescent caused acute
 
 Dr. Liddon 135 
 
 pain. Liddon had always revelled in "the great 
 and wide sea," and seemed to enjoy the view 
 across the bay. Next day, a new doctor 
 overhauled him thoroughly, and, like all who 
 had done the same, could find nothing wrong 
 in his vital organs ; but the doctor was 
 mystified, and was very strongly impressed 
 by a degree of illness for which he could not 
 account. That day Liddon went out in a bath- 
 chair, took a turn with his servant, and in the 
 evening walked up to his nieces' sitting-room, 
 and talked quite cheerfully about books and 
 coins (a favourite hobby). Next day, Sunday, 
 7th, was very hot, and though he was able 
 to get out in his chair, he seemed unusually 
 weak. 
 
 On Monday morning the fatal blow fell. 
 The first post brought a letter from Lord 
 Halifax saying that his son, for whose benefit 
 the journey to Egypt had been projected, had 
 died suddenly. Liddon was overwhelmed. 
 He dictated a letter of passionate sympathy, 
 but was so weak that he could hardly sign his 
 name. Throughout the day he kept about as 
 usual ; but in the evening, after sitting in the 
 garden, he had an alarming fit of nervous 
 exhaustion. "Without losing consciousness, 
 he seemed to lose all muscular power," and so 
 remained for about half an hour, when the 
 power to move himself suddenly returned. 
 That evening he spoke plainly of impending 
 death, but the doctor still reported a stronger
 
 136 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 and steadier pulse. He went to bed soon after 
 II, and had a quiet night but not much sleep. 
 Next morning, Tuesday, September 9, his 
 servant got him out of bed about 9 o'clock ; 
 when an attack similar to that of the previous 
 evening came on, and he suddenly became 
 helpless. The writer of the narrative from 
 which I have been quoting thus describes the 
 rest " I went in, and found him sitting up, 
 not faint or unconscious, but apparently unable 
 to move. I begged him to let us help him 
 back into bed, but he shook his head and 
 seemed unable to speak. I called my sister to 
 stay with him, and ran off for the doctor, who 
 only lived about five minutes off. Somehow, 
 I was not frightened, for I had often seen 
 him very like this, and he had generally come 
 round suddenly. I noticed though, this time, 
 that his eyes were unusually large and bright 
 and expressive : they had struck me so too on 
 Monday. I found the doctor in, and he came at 
 once. We reached Claremont Crescent together. 
 He went straight into my uncle's room, and, as 
 he went in, my sister came out. I asked her 
 how Uncle Harry was. She said that he had 
 gradually become easier, and she had sent the 
 servant away ; and that he soon fell asleep. At 
 first, his breathing had been very laboured, but 
 now he was sleeping so quietly that she could 
 hardly hear him. She went on to say that his 
 sleep was like death, but she remembered to 
 have seen him look like it in the night, and
 
 Dr. Liddon 137 
 
 was not really alarmed. In a few minutes the 
 doctor came to us, and told us that it was all 
 over before he arrived. The face had not a 
 trace of suffering on it. I never saw anything 
 more beautiful than his expression a certain 
 sweet but rather severe look which he had 
 sometimes, reminding me somewhat of what 
 he had been as a young man." 
 
 And so the life-long conflict ended in the 
 Eternal Peace. Euge, serve bone etfidelis : infra 
 in gaudium Domini tui. 
 
 Liddon had made his will in 1885, before 
 starting on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 
 " First, I commit my soul into the hands of 
 Almighty GOD, trusting to obtain His mercy 
 only through the merits of JESUS CHRIST, and 
 firmly believing the Christian Faith as held by 
 the whole Catholic Church before the Division 
 of East and West, and by the Church of 
 England. Next, I desire, in case I should die 
 in England, to be buried in the crypt of S. 
 Paul's Cathedral, if it may conveniently be 
 arranged." 
 
 On the Thursday after his death, his body 
 was brought to London, and laid in his study 
 at 3, Amen Court. On the following Monday 
 it was carried by night to the north-west chapel 
 of S. Paul's Cathedral. There on Tuesday 
 morning, the i6th of September, the Holy 
 Communion was celebrated twice ; at seven by 
 Mr. Gregory, and at eight by Mr. Scott
 
 138 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Holland. At twelve the Burial Service began, 
 in the midst of a vast and deeply-moved con- 
 course of friends and followers. Ten Bishops 
 were present, but the Archbishop of the Province 
 and the Bishop of the Diocese were not among 
 the number. The sentence of committal was 
 read by Dean Church, who never again officiated, 
 and died in the following December. The 
 service closed with Liddon's favourite hymn, 
 " When morning gilds the skies."
 
 Dr. Liddon 139 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THEOLOGY RITUAL ESTABLISHMENT. 
 
 Now that the historical part of my task is 
 finished, I must attempt some estimate of 
 the Man whose career I have endeavoured to 
 narrate of his character, attributes, opinions, 
 and accomplishments. From this part of my 
 task I shrink with a humbling sense of my 
 complete unworthiness to discuss a Genius and 
 a Saint, who was the master of all my religious 
 thinking during the most impressible period of 
 human life. But the attempt must be made, 
 and the disciple may auspicate it with a prayer 
 which was often on the master's lips Deus in 
 adjutorium. 
 
 And first of Liddon as Theologian. Here 
 it is to be borne in mind that, unlike Keble 
 and Pusey and- Moberly, Liddon was not born 
 into the Anglican tradition. Like his own 
 master, Bishop Hamilton, he was born and 
 bred an Evangelical. There is no foundation 
 on which the superstructure of Catholic faith 
 can be more securely built than on the Evange- 
 lical confession of man's utter sinfulness and of 
 the free pardon purchased by the Blood of 
 CHRIST. A man trained in that confession
 
 1 40 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo 
 
 may, without sacrificing a jot of his earlier 
 creed, learn to accept all that the Catholic Church 
 teaches about Orders and Sacraments ; but to 
 the end he retains some characteristic marks of 
 his spiritual beginnings. Among these are com- 
 monly found an awful sense of the sinfulness 
 of sin and the reality of hell ; an ever-present 
 anxiety that no human being and no created 
 thing shall interpose itself between the soul and 
 the Creator ; and a personal devotion to the 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST which embraces (if the 
 phrase may be reverently written) with equal 
 love and loyalty the Divine and Human 
 Natures in the one Adorable Person. These 
 marks of his Evangelical upbringing stamped 
 Liddon's theology from the beginning to the 
 end. It may be profitable to trace some of 
 the many forms and connexions in which they 
 manifested themselves. 
 
 i. To resort to Liddon in Sacramental Con- 
 fession was to realize, perhaps more vividly 
 than the penitent had ever realized it before, 
 what Sin means to a saint, and, therefore in 
 some faint and broken way, what it means to 
 the All-holy GOD. As the tale of wrong-doing 
 was unfolded, Liddon seemed to shrink, as 
 from the sight of the Evil One who had been 
 at work. He seemed to perceive not merely 
 the power, but the very presence, of Satan. 
 On his lips the Word of Absolution sounded 
 like an exorcism. But, with all this horror of 
 the sin, there was conjoined the tenderest kind-
 
 Dr. Liddon 141 
 
 ness to the sinner ; the most loving sympathy 
 with human frailty ; and the most inspiriting 
 confidence in the Blood-bought Pardon. So, 
 too, every sermon which he ever preached is, in 
 its central spirit, a warning to flee from the 
 Wrath to come ; and the awfulness of that 
 Wrath is driven home to the shrinking con- 
 science by the reiterated assurance that the 
 punishment of the Impenitent lasts for ever. 
 
 ii. No one was more urgent than Liddon on 
 the absolute necessity of personal relations 
 between the soul and GOD. Even in dealing 
 with the Sacraments and the Creeds, he taught 
 us to seek for the Living LORD " beneath the 
 forms and the words which shroud Him while 
 they speak of Him." In the fundamental 
 part of religion, the man must be solus cum Solo. 
 The LORD alone could wash away sin ; the 
 LORD alone could impart the New Life ; the 
 LORD alone could fortify against temptation 
 and conquer death. And so again with regard 
 to the forms of worship ; " it is of the last im- 
 portance that we should recognize the danger 
 of substituting a devotion to the externals of 
 religion for a supreme anxiety about the state 
 and prospects of the soul its freedom from 
 the empire of sin, its actual reconciliation to 
 GOD, its supernatural life, its cheerfulness and 
 peace, its readiness for death." 
 
 iii. Liddon's whole life was a systematic 
 and continuous devotion, loyal, loving, and 
 enthusiastic, to the Adorable Person of the
 
 142 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 LORD That bought him. For him all thought, 
 as well as all life, was " the worship of a living, 
 ever-present, and immaculate Redeemer." 1 
 This is a fact on which, with his correspondence 
 and his books before us, it is needless to insist. 
 Not to realize it would simply mean that one 
 had never realized Liddon. Even the Bishop 
 of Oxford, 2 who so strangely misconceives 
 some parts of his friend's beautiful character, 
 is clear on this. " He seemed as one who 
 was often thinking of the Gaze of CHRIST 
 lighting on him, the Hand of CHRIST pointing 
 to some act of service, the Voice of CHRIST 
 prompting some witness to the Faith. There 
 was a memorable tone that came into his words 
 when, in preaching or in argument or in con- 
 versation, he spoke of that which he condemned 
 as slighting or disloyal to CHRIST. It was, 
 quite simply, like the way in which a man fires 
 up when anyone has, even unawares, spoken 
 rudely or contemptuously of his friend ; and 
 there are parts of his writings in which, for 
 those at least who knew him, that same tone 
 still sounds. It was but one sign of a real 
 habit of thinking constantly of his Master ; of 
 a very attentive listening for His command ; of 
 an earnest, anxious desire to go straight forward 
 in His cause, to live and die as His." 
 
 On the Evangelical foundation (of which 
 the three just enumerated were conspicuous 
 
 1 In this connexion, see Note G in the Bampton Lectures. 
 3 Dr. Paget.
 
 Dr. Liddon 143 
 
 marks) Liddon builds the great superstructure 
 of Catholic faith, practice, and worship. Very 
 early in life he was led to perceive the magni- 
 ficent ideal of a " Holy Church Universal," 
 world-wide in extension and visibly united, and 
 he never could bring himself to understand 
 how Christians who seriously believed that our 
 LORD uttered the words recorded in S. John 
 xvii., could acquiesce without a sigh or a 
 struggle in the present dislocation of Christen- 
 dom. The Unity of the Church was a consum- 
 mation for which Christians should hope and 
 pray and labour ; but the idea gave, in Liddon's 
 mind, no countenance to the Papal claim. He 
 disbelieved in the Infallibility ; he rejected the 
 Supremacy. He saw in the Holy Orthodox 
 Churches of the East an age-long contradic- 
 tion of the Roman theory ; and he believed that 
 the Church of England, possessing Apostolic 
 Orders, holding Catholic Creeds, and administer- 
 ing valid Sacraments, offered all that was neces- 
 sary for the edification and salvation of her 
 children. Even in the darkest hours of storm 
 and stress, when it seemed as if the Church of 
 England might repudiate one of the Creeds of 
 Christendom, it was not to Rome that Liddon 
 looked for a refuge. " I cannot," he wrote in 
 1872, "become a Roman, because I entirely 
 disbelieve the Pope's Infallibility, and other 
 things too. 1 And, like you, I have seriously 
 
 1 Lord Acton wrote of him in 1884 : "He has tried 
 and has rejected the Cause of Rome."
 
 144 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 thought of the Old Catholic Movement. If I 
 am stranded ... I shall go to Munich, I 
 think, and do any work for Dollinger that 
 I can, and get such knowledge as may be 
 useful for us hereafter in England." 
 
 The dreaded possibility was graciously 
 averted, and Liddon lived his life of devout 
 activity within the precincts of the Church 
 of England ; leaning, of course, towards the 
 higher forms of the Anglican tradition. He 
 duly revered the unique blessedness and Per- 
 petual Virginity of Mary, Mother of GOD. He 
 boldly claimed and diligently used the Power 
 of the Keys in Absolution. He prayed for the 
 Faithful Departed that they might "rest in 
 peace and light, beneath the Throne of our 
 gracious LORD." As to the Holy Eucharist, he 
 felt that " we have nothing to gain by exchang- 
 ing our simple faith in the Real Presence for 
 a philosophical speculation about it that is 
 weighted with the difficulties of centuries." 
 He taught that " no Liturgy in the world, 
 at this hour, embodies the Sacramental prin- 
 ciple, as stated by the great Augustine, more 
 fully than does the Communion Service of the 
 Church of England." He insisted that "the 
 Body and Blood of the LORD lie before the 
 Priest on the altar," and that "the Presence 
 itself, inseparable from the duly-consecrated 
 Sacrament, is to be carefully distinguished 
 from the spiritual benefit which it conveys 
 to the soul of a faithful recipient." As
 
 Dr. Liddon 145 
 
 regards the Eucharistic Sacrifice, he taught 
 that " the Eucharist is a presentation of the 
 ever-living and present CHRIST, once for all 
 Sacrificed, to the Eternal FATHER, as being 
 the all-prevailing Mediator, through union 
 with Whom alone we can hope for mercy 
 and acceptance." 1 
 
 As regards the externals of religion, Liddon 
 loved a beautiful and dignified ceremonial, and 
 more especially he loved it when it was so 
 ordered as to direct devout attention to the 
 supreme Mystery which is transacted at the 
 altar. He revelled in the riches and 
 splendours of Divine worship, as he saw them 
 either on the continent of Europe or in the 
 Sacred East. As early as 1 8 6 1 he deplored the 
 loss of those "accessories, which lend such 
 majesty and attractiveness to the worship of 
 some other branches of the Church." Ten 
 years later he bore an eager and a loving part 
 in the restoration of Eucharistic Worship at S. 
 Paul's, and (unlike Dean Church, who had 
 never seen a vestment except Bishop Jackson's 
 subfusc cope 2 ) he was constantly a worshipper, 
 and often the Celebrant, at altars where the full 
 Eucharistic Vesture was a matter of course. 
 
 In all departments of faith and practice, 
 Liddon, like other people, had his own predilec- 
 tions ; but he brought everything to the test of 
 
 1 For a fuller statement of Eucharistic doctrine as held 
 by Liddon, see Appendix A. 
 
 3 See Dean Church in this series, p. 1 04. 
 
 U
 
 146 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 the Church of England ; what she taught, 
 he believed ; what she prescribed, he practised ; 
 what she forbade, he eschewed. He mistrusted 
 all such vague phrases as " the whole spirit of 
 our liturgy " and " the living voice of the 
 Church." He made his constant appeal to 
 the written word of the Prayer Book as the 
 authoritative guide of English Church-people, 
 both in faith and worship. When a Roman 
 controversialist 1 accused the Catholic party in 
 general and Liddon among them of dissemi- 
 nating Roman doctrines, Liddon promptly 
 repudiated the "little collection of inexact or 
 exaggerated phrases" which his opponent had 
 compiled from ritualistic manuals of devotion. 2 
 He was full of charity for those whose eyes were 
 so holden by inveterate prejudice that they 
 failed to see the plain meaning of Anglican 
 formularies ; but he made no terms with the 
 modern delusion that to affirm and to deny the 
 same proposition is only to look at truth from 
 both sides. In 1883 he wrote "In their 
 anxiety to be paradoxically sympathetic, our 
 friends forget what is due to the sacred claims 
 of Revealed Truth." In 1885 he wrote 
 " The doctrine of the " Three Schools " in the 
 Church of England, all interesting and 
 admirable, is hard to reconcile with the nature 
 and obligations of a Revelation from GOD. It 
 
 T. J. Capel. 
 
 * For this controversy, see the Times for December, 1874, 
 and January, 1875, passim.
 
 Dr. Liddon 147 
 
 cannot be equally agreeable to Him to say that 
 Baptismal Regeneration, for instance, is a truth 
 which He has revealed, and that it is a 
 falsehood which obscures the true sense of 
 His Revelation. The attempts to combine 
 contradictories as "two sides of truth," only 
 result in injuring the sense of truth in those 
 who make them." 
 
 The Bishop of Oxford, who excels in the 
 part of Candid Friend, says that Liddon, though 
 generous and warm-hearted, was " not wholly 
 just to those from whom he differed." 1 It is 
 pleasant to set against this sentence the 
 repeated instances in which, as Principal 
 Johnston's book makes manifest, he 
 "differed" profoundly from his contempo- 
 raries, and yet was not only "just" to them, 
 but generously and affectionately kind. He 
 " differed " from Bishop Wilberforce about the 
 mode of the Eucharistic Presence and 
 suffered for the difference but, when the 
 Bishop died, he wrote : " Since my father's 
 death, I have had no such personal sorrow." 
 He " differed " from Dean Stanley on almost 
 every point in controverted theology, but 
 strained charity almost to bursting-point in 
 belauding his attractiveness, unselfishness, and 
 sincerity. He "differed" from the present 
 Bishop of Birmingham about the inspiration of 
 the Old Testament and the limitations of our 
 LORD'S Human Knowledge ; but even in the act 
 1 Life and Letters, chapter xiv.
 
 1 4 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 of criticizing him he said, "It is most unwelcome 
 to me to write thus, for I love Gore dearly." 
 He " differed " from Cardinal Newman and 
 Mr. Redington l on the Papal Supremacy, but 
 revered and loved the one, and numbered the 
 other among his closest friends. He 
 " differed " from Dr. R. W. Dale about the 
 structure of the Christian Church, but was 
 touchingly grateful for his " kindness," and 
 humbly asked his prayers. He " differed " 
 from Professor Max Milller about the Origin 
 of Religion, but wrote to him in terms of an 
 almost reverent admiration. He " differed " 
 from Darwin on the nature and obligation of 
 Revealed Religion, but felt that " we owe 
 him much for his courageous adherence to 
 Theistic truth." He "differed" from George 
 Eliot about as widely as one human being 
 can differ from another ; yet this was his 
 comment on her Life : " It is very heartrending 
 reading. Such an abuse of so much genius ! 
 The easy way in which she throws off her 
 Christianity, as if it were an old bonnet with- 
 out any trace of moral or intellectual anguish 
 is terrible. . . . And yet there is something 
 which makes one read the book with a pity 
 that outweighs all other feelings whatever. 
 Beneath all that is most revolting I seem to 
 hear an undertone of deep sorrow, which 
 neither her unbelief, nor her relation to Mr. 
 
 1 The Right Hon. C. T. Redington, (1847-1899), Irish 
 land-owner and Educationist.
 
 Dr. Liddon 149 
 
 Lewes, could silence, and which makes one 
 think what she might have been, had she not 
 been what she was." 
 
 One who knew Liddon before the Bishop of 
 Oxford was born writes as follows " His deep 
 interest in all forms of religion led him to 
 friendships with men of varied creeds Jewish 
 Rabbis, English Dissenters, Roman and Greek 
 Churchmen. The study of the old religions, 
 as leading up to Christianity, interested him 
 intensely ; as did the Intellectual Unbeliever 
 in fact every mental condition bearing upon the 
 spiritual life of man had a fascination for him, 
 and, though his own convictions were hard 
 and fast, he had great sympathy with and 
 comprehension of other forms of spiritual 
 life. He was at once the severest task- 
 master to himself, and the most liberal judge 
 of others." 
 
 In brief it may be said that Liddon's severity 
 was reserved not for error, but for treachery 
 not for a failure to recognize Divine Truth, but 
 for the pitiful stratagem of retaining office and 
 emolument in a Church whose expressed faith 
 one denies or belittles. " It seems to me," he 
 wrote in 1885, "that to say that the Prayer 
 Book or Ordinal proceeds on a mistaken view 
 of the Will of our LORD, must be less ungrate- 
 ful to Him than to employ its solemn language 
 in an utterly unreal way. ... I can understand 
 only too well how easily people are alienated 
 from the Church of England by those of us
 
 1 50 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900 
 
 who accept her Formularies and Organization 
 for no other reason than that they are 
 recognized by the State, and in combination 
 with religious theories which make them 
 unintelligible or erroneous." 
 
 With reference to a sermon preached by 
 a Broad Church Bishop on Queen Victoria's 
 first Jubilee, he wrote as follows : 
 
 " I confess I was shocked by the Bishop of 
 
 's sermon, as reported in the Times. 
 
 Laudatory allusions to people like Huxley, 
 without one word of regret that they deny the 
 first of all truths, and that, if they are right, 
 the preacher himself is a very gross and 
 overpaid impostor. And nothing about the 
 Church of which he himself is a Chief Pastor, 
 the world and that which belongs to it having 
 apparently taken the place of the Kingdom of 
 GOD in minds of this kind." 
 
 It is impossible to discuss Liddon as 
 Theologian without saying a word about his 
 relation to Criticism. It is, of course, sadly 
 true that Criticism, in some clumsy and 
 unguarded forms, did much to embitter his last 
 days. But, in spite of all aberrations, there is 
 such a thing as devout and well-considered 
 Criticism ; and Liddon was much too good 
 a scholar had far to keen a sense of the 
 evidential value of language to ignore or 
 rebuke it. " Criticism," he wrote in 1889, " is 
 an equivocal term, and is applied to many
 
 Dr. Liddon 151 
 
 different kinds of Textual or Exegetical work. 
 Dr. Pusey, in one sense, was a great critic." 
 Everyone who admits that the text of the 
 Heavenly Recorders is an interpolation, or 
 reads the Adorable Name for " Joshua " in 
 Hebrews iv. 8, or omits the bewildering 
 negative in the First Lesson for Christmas 
 Morning, has conceded something to Criticism. 
 But Liddon knew full well that Criticism is an 
 ever-shifting process ; that its results are often 
 ephemeral ; that theories which to-day it treats 
 as axioms to-morrow it repudiates as delusions ; 
 that it habitually substitutes probability for 
 demonstration, and gaily assumes where it 
 cannot prove. When Criticism announces some 
 new and strange discovery, the part of wisdom 
 is not to fall down in ecstatic admiration : but 
 to wait and see what is said next year. In 
 1887 Liddon wrote : 
 
 " When I saw Dr. Dollinger a year ago we 
 were talking about Wellhausen's Prolegomena. 
 I forget how many ' assumptions ' he told me 
 he had counted, when at last he could stand 
 it no longer, and put the book down." As 
 a literary exercise, Criticism is no doubt full 
 of interest and charm : but it is proverbially 
 unsafe to build one's house on a quicksand. 
 
 Liddon was, of course, wholly uncommitted 
 to any theory of Verbal Inspiration, whether 
 in the writers or in the copyists of the Sacred 
 Books. "No authoritative definition of the 
 Inspiration of Scripture of what it does and
 
 152 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 does not permit or imply has been pro- 
 pounded by the Church of CHRIST." But still 
 " GOD the HOLY GHOST speaks to the heart 
 and conscience through the Bible, as He 
 speaks through no other existing book." The 
 Church, in giving us the Bible, gave it as a 
 whole, and gave it as inspired. " The Church 
 is indeed historically older than the New Testa- 
 ment ; but the New Testament is the supreme 
 work of the HOLY SPIRIT when glorifying 
 CHRIST in the Church." Divine authority is 
 not restricted to the New Testament. " For 
 Christians it will be enough to know that our 
 LORD JESUS CHRIST set the seal of His infallible 
 sanction on the whole of the Old Testament." 
 " Profoundly interesting as must be the least 
 important enquiry that concerns GOD'S earlier 
 Revelation of Himself, there is a question 
 compared with which the most important that 
 can concern it sinks at once into utter insig- 
 nificance. That question is whether He, with 
 Whom, in life and in death, we Christians have 
 to do, is a fallible or The Infallible CHRIST." 
 
 From the consideration of Liddon as 
 Theologian, one passes by a natural transition 
 to Liddon as Priest. And here it may be 
 briefly said that, as he taught, so he practised. 
 His Essay on " The Priest in his Inner Life," 
 prefixed to the Sermons on Clerical Life and 
 Workj shows that as early as 1856 he had 
 formed, not merely in outline but in detail,
 
 Dr. Liddon 153 
 
 that high ideal of priestly duty to which his 
 practice so faithfully conformed. He held that 
 the Celebration of the Holy Eucharist is " the 
 highest service which a creature can render to 
 the Supreme Being." By this "central and 
 supreme act," the Christian Ministry " is 
 directly associated in the mediatorial work of 
 JESUS CHRIST." This being so, he naturally 
 embraced every opportunity of celebrating, 
 whether in S. Paul's Cathedral or in a Sisters' 
 Chapel, or in a Parish Church. For the 
 discharge of this high function he prepared 
 himself with anxious care. As long ago as the 
 days when he was Prebendary of Salisbury, 
 he had deplored the want of musical education, 
 which made it impossible for the Canons 
 Residentiary to take their part at the altar 
 " without the most inharmonious result," and 
 he carefully trained his own voice 1 for the 
 Choral Eucharist at S. Paul's. He had helped 
 to compile that well-known guide for celebrants, 
 The Priest to the c/f/tar, and he was scrupulous 
 about every posture and gesture which 
 might mark the reverence due to the Holy 
 Things. 
 
 He was rigorous in the recitation of the 
 Daily Offices, not intermitting it even in the 
 last stages of his last illness, and supplementing 
 
 1 Sir George Martin says "As to his singing voice, the 
 compass was undoubtedly that of a high tenor. The quality, 
 like that of his speaking voice, was of great purity, and the 
 tone excellent."
 
 154 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 the offices with the " Lesser Hours." He was 
 a man of profound and persevering prayer. He 
 abounded in intercession. He was a proficient 
 in the divine art of Systematic Meditation. 
 What he was in the Ministry of Penance has 
 already been described. What he was in the 
 pulpit can never be forgotten by his hearers, 
 and can be, to some extent, realized by those 
 who study his sermons. The most casual 
 observer was forced to note that such preach- 
 ing as his must be the product not only of 
 intense emotion but also of close study and 
 penetrating thought. His correspondence 
 covered the whole range of spiritual and 
 theological interests. In brief it may be said 
 that, from his rising at a very early hour to his 
 late lying-down for rest, his whole day was 
 consecrated to the work, either direct or indirect, 
 of the Christian Priesthood. One can scarcely 
 doubt that he was describing his own practice, 
 when he thus described the close of the Priest's 
 working day : " He will say Compline with 
 his servants, and will spend a quarter of an 
 hour in general and particular self-examination ; 
 for he will learn others best in the abyss of his 
 own heart. He will offer the day to GOD, and 
 pray for mercy on his many falls, and for more 
 perfect devotion to the cause of JESUS CHRIST. 
 He will lay him down in peace, anxious yet 
 light-hearted, commending his spirit into his 
 FATHER'S Hands, and resigning himself to the 
 Will and protection of his gracious Saviour."
 
 Dr. Lidaon 155 
 
 To the ideal of the Priestly Life set forth in 
 the Essay from which these words are quoted, 
 it should be added that Liddon set a high value 
 on Clerical Celibacy. On this subject he held 
 no " rigorist " or exaggerated doctrine. With 
 the examples of his heroes, Keble and Pusey, 
 before his eyes, he could not denounce 
 marriage after Ordination as inconsistent with 
 priestly obligations. In sketching the early 
 life of Bishop Hamilton, he was careful to note 
 that marriage "certainly did not involve any 
 lowering of the religious standard." But, for 
 all that, he was gratified when his friends in 
 Holy Orders chose to fashion their lives after 
 S. Paul's rather than S. Peter's example. 
 When they changed their estate, he was 
 distressed ; and, if they happened to be already 
 Bishops, the case was worse. Thus, at different 
 dates (which it is expedient to suppress), he 
 wrote as follows : " You will have heard of 
 
 's projected wedding. The Bishop so 
 
 approves of it, that he wishes rooms to be 
 added to the College for a married Principal. 
 It almost seems as though a temper of high 
 purpose in such matters could not be main- 
 tained in the Church of England." Again, " It 
 
 is a mistake to regard Bishop as a High 
 
 Churchman. He is going to be married again 
 in spite of ist Tim. III. 2." Again, "I am very 
 
 much distressed at hearing that Bishop is 
 
 going to be married. He is one of the few in 
 whom we had invested a large stock of hope
 
 156 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 and enthusiasm ; and this fiasco seems to show 
 that no one can be trusted. Here are A, B, 
 and C, all sound Churchmen all consecrated 
 Bishops while yet young men and all these 
 marrying after their consecration I " And yet 
 once again, with reference to two other 
 
 offenders : " The Bishops of and 
 
 have, each of them, two wives, although in 
 different worlds. . . . How it exposes the 
 poor Church to the taunts of her opponents ! " 
 
 When we have considered Liddon as 
 Theologian and as Priest, it is natural to 
 approach " the mixed sphere of religion and the 
 Saeculum" l and to glance at his views on the 
 relation between Church and State. Of course 
 he was profoundly Anti-Erastian. He believed 
 that the Church of England, as part of the 
 Holy Catholic Church, is a Spiritual Society, 
 with a Goo-given life, and that she has rights, 
 duties, and laws of her own which the State can 
 neither create nor destroy. As regards the 
 hostility of the State to the independence of the 
 Church, he thought that we had not suffered 
 more heavily than other parts of Christendom. 
 In 1876 he wrote "We cannot, if we would, 
 get rid of Justinian or of Charlemagne ; and 
 they interfered, in spiritual questions, almost as 
 energetically, if not quite, as did Elizabeth . . . 
 I do not think that these districts of history are 
 much studied by writers of the 'Presbyter 
 1 Mr. Gladstone.
 
 Dr. Liddon 157 
 
 Anglicanus' 1 type." And again, in 1887 
 "A study of the reigns of the Emperor 
 Justinian or of Louis XIV., but particularly 
 the former, shows that Erastianism is not of 
 one age or country." 
 
 He repudiated what he called " crude 
 theories to the effect that any union or under- 
 standing between the Church of GOD and the 
 Civil Power involves a species of spiritual 
 adultery." He held that such a doctrine was 
 contradicted by the instinct and practice of the 
 Universal Church. " When the State has 
 shed Christian blood, the Christian Church 
 has, as in the first three centuries of her 
 existence, bowed her neck to the executioner 
 as to the Will of GOD ; when the State has 
 permitted it, the Church has lost no time 
 to use ancient language in placing the cross 
 on the diadem of the Caesar. It was clearly 
 better for humanity that the two powers, 
 the Civil and the Ecclesiastical, each of them 
 Divine in its origin, should, when possible, 
 work harmoniously ; and this harmony has 
 been effected, not by any formal compact or 
 treaty, but by the silent action of those higher 
 instincts of charity and order which are deep 
 and permanent in the heart of the Church." 
 
 At the same time he frankly admitted that 
 the idea of a union between Church and State 
 had been profoundly modified by the actual 
 
 1 " Presbyter Anglicanus " was a Romanizing clergyman 
 who soon afterwards seceded.
 
 158 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 conditions of modern England, where "the 
 Parliament, which still claims to control the 
 Faith and Worship of the Christian Society, is 
 itself largely composed of unbelievers." "If," 
 he said, " the union of Church and State is to 
 continue, it can only be when these changed 
 circumstances are practically recognized, the 
 Church asking for less in the way of support 
 and privilege than heretofore, and the State 
 foregoing the claim to interfere with the 
 Church's spiritual functions. Should Parlia- 
 ment, in the years which are before us, show an 
 increasing disposition to treat the Church of 
 CHRIST in this country as if she were merely *a 
 department of the Civil Service,' the consciences 
 of faithful Churchmen will, however reluctantly, 
 be driven to urge the separation of Church and 
 State. The Public Worship Regulation Act 
 was an experiment, which cannot be repeated 
 without entailing serious consequences." 
 
 In 1885 he wrote "Our real danger lies in 
 the direction of attempts to save the Church 
 from Disestablishment and Disendowment by 
 c Liberalizing ' i.e., destroying what it has 
 of fixed doctrine and discipline. Fremantle l is 
 the most mischievous of the advocates of this 
 policy ; but Dr. Ince, 2 our Regius Professor, 
 has just proclaimed to the world, in a University 
 Sermon, that he is willing to give up the Creed 
 
 1 The Hon. and Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle, Dean of 
 Ripon. 
 
 a The Rev. W. Ince, Regius Professor of Divinity.
 
 Dr. Liddon 159 
 
 of S. Athanasius, and to 'reform' the Service 
 for the Visitation of the Sick and the Ordinal. 
 The first concession is to please the Broad ; 
 the two last, the Puritan party. I pray that he 
 may be made * like unto a wheel.' ' 
 
 With regard to the property of the Church, 
 Liddon by no means admitted that " the endow- 
 ments of a Church necessarily corrupt it ; " but 
 he realized full well that worldly wealth 
 sometimes reconciles endowed Churches to the 
 surrender of spiritual rights. In 1869 he 
 wrote " We have sold our spiritual liberty for 
 a mess of pottage ; a large and nutritious mess, 
 no doubt, but scarcely worth what was given 
 for it." In the crucial case of the Irish Church, 
 he stood aloof from the violent contentions 
 for and against Disestablishment. His attitude 
 was that which he had learnt from Keble and 
 the Lyra vfpostolica : 
 
 " The Church shone brightly in her youthful days 
 
 Ere the world on her smiled ; 
 So now, an outcast, she would pour her rays, 
 
 Keen, free, and undefiled : 
 Yet would I not that arm of force were mine 
 Which thrusts her from her ancient, awful shrine." 
 
 Disestablishment of course removed the Irish 
 Archbishops and Bishops from the House of 
 Lords ; and Liddon would not have been 
 much perturbed if their English brethren had 
 followed them. When the Law of Burial was 
 under discussion in 1876, he wrote "As
 
 160 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 for the two Archbishops, I cannot help 
 thinking that the line they take must make a 
 good many people, who do not generally agree 
 with us, ask themselves the question whether 
 anything is now gained by those seats in the 
 House of Lords. Practically, they enable the 
 State to despoil and demoralize the Church in a 
 dignified sort of way." 
 
 In this connexion I may quote a pleasing 
 story, communicated to me by the kindness of 
 the present Head of the Pusey House. Liddon 
 had been dining at Merton, during the 
 Wardenship of the late Mr. G. C. Brodrick, 
 and thus reported his post-prandial conversa- 
 tion with that characteristic specimen of the 
 Academic Liberal "We disagreed on many 
 points, and at last I said, * I think perhaps there is 
 one point on which we shall be agreed : I am most 
 anxious to see the Bishops out of the House of 
 Lords.' ' I fear,' said the Warden, * that we 
 shall not agree even there : I think it is a good 
 thing to keep the Bishops under the healthy 
 influence of lay opinion.' '
 
 Dr. Liddon 161 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 POLITICS. 
 
 WHEN Liddon died, his brother wrote in 
 the Guardian " With regard to his politics, 
 he is claimed as a Liberal. He certainly 
 was no Party politician ; he subordinated his 
 politics to his religious convictions." This 
 sentence exactly accords with my own recollec- 
 tions. Liddon once said to me " The real 
 interest of politics is to watch the course of 
 events, and, when the time for voting comes, to 
 vote for the Party which is supporting what 
 one believes to be the cause of Righteousness 
 in the prominent question of the moment." 
 
 In May, 1878, at the very crisis of the 
 Eastern Question, a vacancy in the repre- 
 sentation of the University of Oxford was 
 created by the elevation of Mr. Gathorne 
 Hardy to the Peerage. The Conservative 
 candidate was Mr. J. G. Talbot, a devoted 
 adherent of Lord Beaconsfield ; the Liberal was 
 Professor H. J. S. Smith, of whom Freeman 
 remarked that he was admirably qualified to 
 represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia 
 Minor. Liddon declined to vote. " To vote
 
 1 62 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 for Talbot was to vote for Lord Beaconsfield 
 and his Eastern policy. To vote for Smith 
 was to vote for that variety of Liberalism which 
 ... is too academical to care about questions 
 of right and wrong." At the General Election 
 of 1880 he voted enthusiastically for the 
 Liberals, who were then upholding the cause 
 of Righteousness in Foreign Affairs. At the 
 Election of 1885 he voted against the Liberals, 
 who were menacing the Church. In 1887 l 
 he wrote, " As to Home Rule, I have what the 
 Liberals call * an open mind,' although I find it 
 difficult to see how, if granted, it will not 
 create more troubles than it relieves." He 
 placed his political conscience in no man's 
 keeping. Even with regard to the few politi- 
 cians whom he genuinely admired, he reserved 
 his right of private judgment on their policies 
 and acts. When Mr. Gladstone lost his seat 
 for the University of Oxford, he wrote to the 
 Bishop of Salisbury "The pathos of the 
 speech at Manchester 2 makes one love and 
 respect Mr. Gladstone more than ever ; and, if 
 I were to trust my feelings, I could go in for a 
 very advanced Liberalism in political matters. 
 That the Carlton Club and the Record 
 newspaper chose to oppose Gladstone was 
 natural and right ; they acted after their kind. 
 That our friends should have enabled them to 
 
 1 Wrongly printed 1885 in the Life and Letters. 
 
 2 In this speech Mr. Gladstone declared his devotion to 
 the University which had just dismissed him.
 
 Dr. Liddon 163 
 
 carry out their wishes is one of the saddest 
 episodes in the history of the Church Move- 
 ment." In later years, he said, " When 
 Gladstone is gone, then we shall feel that we 
 have had a prophet among us." But in 1882 
 he wrote to Freeman, "Is not 'the People's 
 William ' remiss in the matter of the Turk ? 
 Once or twice of late, he has fondled the Turk 
 more or less unbecomingly." In February, 
 1885, when the crimes and follies of our 
 Egyptian policy were coming home to roost, 
 he wrote, " No doubt it is difficult to defend 
 the hesitations of the Government ; but people 
 are very wise after the event, and they 
 make little or no allowances for those elements 
 in a situation which are beyond all human 
 control. Mr. Gladstone's real misfortune is 
 to have had a menagerie instead of a Cabinet 
 herein resembling the assortment of Chap- 
 lains at Lambeth. 1 No good ever comes in 
 the moral world of these unseemly mixtures. 
 Above all I regret his having a colleague in 
 Mr. Chamberlain." And again, with regard to 
 the Church he wrote in the same year " Mr. 
 Gladstone is a statesman, under the strongest 
 temptations to make Church interests give way 
 to the exigencies of politics, and with a fatal 
 power of inventing theories on the spur of 
 the moment, in order to justify these sur- 
 renders. I believe that, if cross-questioned, 
 
 1 W. Cadman, B. F. Smith, E. S. Talbot, H. Wacc, 
 S. R. Hole, B. F. Westcott.
 
 164 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 he would say . . . that he has, under great 
 difficulties, done his best for what he believes to 
 be true. I agree with you that that best is 
 little. 1 . . . His greatest opportunity was 
 Lambeth ; and bow sadly it was missed ! " 
 
 For Lord Salisbury he had the most sincere 
 respect ; but he wrote of him in 1875 : "The 
 fact is that to be in office, or near it, makes it 
 very difficult for men to look at a question of 
 religious truth entirely on its merits," and four 
 years later he wrote : " Lord Salisbury is quite 
 incapable of knowingly saying what is untrue 
 or doing what is dishonourable. . . . This is 
 quite compatible with his making great mis- 
 takes, and on subjects of the greatest impor- 
 tance." In 1879 ne wrote: "Lord Granville 
 is not much in my way, though he can be 
 brilliant and amusing. The only Liberal 
 whom I really trust is Mr. Gladstone, and 
 he is often like Lord Salisbury, damaged more 
 or less seriously by his political associates." 
 " Liberalism itself is, on all matters con- 
 nected with Church and Education, only a 
 kind of corporate and * respectable ' ungodli- 
 ness ; and I cannot forget or forgive its 
 misdeeds in this way (because it has largely, 
 though not by any means entirely, gone 
 right about the Eastern Question) so easily 
 as MacColl 2 does." 
 
 1 This was written before Dr. King was made Bishop of 
 Lincoln. 
 
 2 Rev. Malcolm MacColl, Canon of Ripon.
 
 Dr. Llddon 165 
 
 " As to Liberalism, I admire its Foreign 
 Policy, but cannot endure it in the sphere of 
 Education. It is by instinct heathenish in that 
 matter." 
 
 Enough has been already cited to shew that 
 to Liddon the Eastern Question was pre- 
 eminently one of those political issues in which 
 the real question is between Right and Wrong, 
 Light and Darkness, CHRIST and Belial. In 
 1878 he enunciated a principle which, in these 
 days of Anglo-Japanese Alliances, may be 
 profitably laid to heart : " Between Russia or 
 England, taken at their worst, and Turkey, the 
 difference is enormous. It is the difference 
 which Christianity alone can make. Chris- 
 tianity always carries with it the germs of 
 progressive improvement ; whereas Mahome- 
 danism condemns the races which it curses to 
 stagnate in evil. . . . Russia contains the true 
 secret of improvement, and her advance in 
 Central Asia has been as great a blessing to 
 humanity as our own in India. Each has 
 limited the area of triumphant brutality." 
 
 In the following year he wrote to Dr. Dale, 
 " I have often and often wished that we, as a 
 body, could have been as true to what was 
 morally as well as theologically the Cause of 
 CHRIST in Eastern Europe as were the English 
 Nonconformists." 
 
 After the bitter passage quoted above about 
 the " Ungodliness " of Liberalism, it is an
 
 1 66 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 agreeable surprise to read Liddon's plea for 
 the admission of the late Mr. Bradlaugh to 
 the House of Commons in 1880. It takes 
 very much the same line as was taken by 
 Mr. Gladstone in his famous speech on the 
 Affirmation Bill. 1 "It seems to me, as an 
 outsider, that the Oath notoriously breaks 
 down if considered as a protection of the 
 Theistic belief of the House : and this quite 
 independently of Mr. Bradlaugh. We both 
 know, or have known, Members of the 
 House who are not Theists, but who have 
 no scruple about taking the oath. I see 
 nothing to differentiate e.g., the late Mr. 
 J. S. Mill's doctrine of the Categories in his 
 c Logic ' from Mr. Bradlaugh's performances 
 in the Rational 'Peformer^ except that the 
 latter is coarse and repulsive, while the 
 former is interesting to every educated man. 
 Our modern society tolerates any amount 
 of blasphemy against the Being and At- 
 tributes of GOD still more against His 
 Revelation of Himself in and through CHRIST 
 our LORD if only the blasphemy be thrown 
 into good literary form. Mr. Bradlaugh's 
 real offence is not his Atheism, but the 
 coarseness which accompanies it ; and yet 
 this coarseness is surely a service which he 
 unintentionally renders to religion. When 
 I say that the religious character of the 
 House of Commons is a * fiction,' I do not 
 1 April z6th, 1883.
 
 Dr. Liddon 167 
 
 forget that it contains a great many excellent 
 Christians. But it also contains misbelievers 
 and unbelievers in large numbers ; and, alas ! 
 as matters stand, these latter interest them- 
 selves quite as actively as do the Christians in 
 the sacred interests of the Church of CHRIST. 
 Mr. Bradlaugh's presence in the House will 
 not really add much to the Anti-Christian and 
 Anti-Theistic elements of it ; but it will bring 
 vividly before the mind of the people of this 
 country the unfitness of a legislative body to 
 which he belongs to handle the truths of 
 Divine Revelation and the concerns of the 
 Christian Church. He reduces to a positive 
 absurdity a state of things which for sincere 
 Christians has long been well-nigh intolerable. 
 You will say, perhaps, that this is a narrow 
 issue on which to decide a great question. But 
 there is another point, which I own has great 
 weight with me as a clergyman. If Mr. 
 Bradlaugh had been admitted to the House 
 of Commons without any delay, he would 
 have found his level, and in all probability 
 his baneful influence with the people would 
 have been materially lessened, as Mill's cer- 
 tainly was. But, as matters stand now, he 
 has made himself a name and a power beyond 
 his wildest expectations. He has, as somebody 
 said, become part of the history of England ; 
 and he will pose as a Confessor all through this 
 autumn. His wretched books have now an 
 enormous circulation ; I have had a great
 
 1 6 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 many letters from people who have taken to 
 reading him solely in consequence of the vast 
 advertisement which he has secured for himself 
 and for his productions. The longer this 
 resistance to his entrance to the House goes 
 on, the keener and wider will be the infidel 
 propaganda a propaganda which is not less 
 serious from a social point of view than from 
 a theological and religious one." 
 
 On the economic side of politics Liddon's 
 leanings were perceptibly, though perhaps not 
 avowedly, towards what is vaguely called 
 " Christian Socialism." As we have already 
 seen, he detested the harshness and hardness 
 of the Poor Law as commonly administered. 
 He had imbibed something of Dr. Pusey's 
 fear that "in the great Day many even kindly 
 people will find that reliance on the Poor Law 
 has steeled their heart against CHRIST." l I 
 well remember his painful interest in the great 
 strike at the London Docks in 1889, and the 
 alacrity with which he subscribed to the fund 
 for maintaining the strikers' wives and children. 
 "There, at any rate, one cannot be doing 
 wrong." 2 He had scant respect for the stiff 
 dogmatism of Political Economy. A beggar 
 on the roadside was a brother in CHRIST, with 
 a definite claim on his sympathy and help. Dr. 
 
 x Christianity without the Cross a Corruption of the Gospel of 
 Christ. A Sermon by E. B. Pusey, D.D., 1875. 
 * See also "Self-Denial" in Sermons on some words ofQknst.
 
 Dr. Liddon 169 
 
 Holland says that he was " the terror and the 
 plague of the Charity Organization Society. 
 Several old men who sold pencils in the streets 
 were popularly believed to be sustained in 
 existence by his constant purchases ; " and little 
 boys on the Thames Embankment who made 
 " wheels " for his amusement might rely con- 
 fidently on adequate rewards. One who knew 
 him well says, " He gave presents or tips in a 
 way that made the recipients feel that they were 
 conferring a favour in accepting the gift." 
 
 The question of Women's Rights and 
 Women's Duties has become so closely inter- 
 woven with politics, that Liddon's view 
 concerning it may be suitably introduced in 
 connexion with his political opinions. For 
 womanhood he had the most chivalrous 
 respect ; to women his manner, always 
 beautifully courteous, became even rever- 
 ential. But anything that brought women 
 into the rough-and-tumble of public life, 
 forced them on to platforms, or in any way 
 blurred the vital distinction between woman- 
 hood and manhood, he hated with a cordial 
 hatred. When a friend asks him if he is 
 going to the Church Congress, he replies : 
 " No ; I remarked in the papers that a flock 
 of Publicly-talking Women had settled on the 
 Congress. This alone would be a reason for 
 not going there." When women took the 
 platform on behalf even of very sacred causes 
 
 z
 
 1 70 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900 
 
 his condemnation was equally unsparing. " I 
 have been corresponding with Miss X. about 
 the Publicly-talking Women. The last letter 
 will, I fear, have wounded her ; but it can 
 hardly be helped. -We seem to live in a time 
 when everything that is opposed to the tra- 
 ditional sense of Christendom flaunts itself as 
 never before. Miss X. takes refuge in the 
 Bishop of Y., who, it seems, has commissioned 
 her to talk to young men about morality in 
 public meetings." 
 
 This view of the sacredness of womanhood 
 affected his view of women's education. He 
 rejoiced that women should acquire every form 
 or culture and accomplishment, but he insisted 
 that they must pursue their studies in private. 
 In 1879 he wrote from Oxford: "Talbot, 1 
 and even dear King, 2 have gone in for it, and 
 are engaged in establishing a Hall for these 
 young persons here in Oxford. Think of 
 sending A. and B. to places like Oxford or 
 Cambridge, where there are two thousand 
 young men, to be met out for walks, in 
 Lectures, at Church ; to be discussed and 
 amused, or anything else ! It seems madness 
 to Christian common-sense . . . There are 
 mixed Committees of both sexes, mixed Councils 
 for these new Halls." 
 
 Nine years later, it chanced that he was the 
 guest at Cambridge of a lady who .had just 
 
 1 Afterwards Bishop of Southwark. 
 a Afterwards Bishop of Lincoln.
 
 Dr. Liddon 171 
 
 attained the first place in the Classical Tripos, 
 and he thus described his hostess : " Mrs. Z. 
 is really a delightful person, very simple and 
 unassuming, and never dropping a hint that 
 she is at all accomplished." That same after- 
 noon he drank tea at Newnham Hall, and it is 
 possible to detect just a touch of his ingrained 
 suspicion, qualifying his appreciation of the 
 lady-students. " I am bound to say that those 
 whom I saw were very lady-like and un-be-isb ; 
 they may, or may not, have been average 
 specimens."
 
 1 7 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS SUMMARY. 
 
 I TURN now from "views" and opinions to 
 personal characteristics. What was Liddon 
 like ? It has been already implied, and may 
 here be stated, that his facial beauty was 
 almost faultless. The nose was very nearly 
 straight and sharply chiselled, the nostrils curl- 
 ing upwards with a critical and rather fastidious 
 curve. The chin was prominent and strongly- 
 moulded, the mouth wide but firmly set, and 
 connected by a deep groove or furrow with the 
 corners of the nostrils. His forehead was 
 broad, and crowned by a mass of straight hair, 
 which once was black but latterly nearly white, 
 though the definitely-marked eyebrows retained 
 their blackness to the end. 
 
 Liddon's physical beauty began and ended 
 with his face. He had neither figure nor 
 carriage. He had been spare in early life, but 
 latterly became more portly, and his height was 
 not proportioned to his width. His bearing, 
 except in the pulpit, was not impressive ; and 
 Lord Acton's phrase, " the deferential sac- 
 ristan," hit a certain aspect of his appearance.
 
 Dr. Liddon 173 
 
 When we turn from physical to mental 
 traits, the impression which dominates all others 
 in my remembrance of Liddon is that of his 
 vitality. He was alive all through vivid, 
 vivacious, sensitive, alert. He seemed sur- 
 charged with moral electricity, which tingled 
 and flashed and sometimes scorched. One 
 form of his vitality was his effervescing humour, 
 not always very sedulously restrained. His 
 sense of the ludicrous knew no bounds except 
 those prescribed by reverence and charity. 
 This was a painful stumbling-block in the way 
 of serious people dons, pedagogues, digni- 
 taries, whether secular or ecclesiastical. To 
 "jock wi' deeficulty " is the hard lot of some 
 very excellent people, and there is a still 
 larger class which finds it difficult to enjoy or 
 even tolerate the jokes of other people. To 
 such as these, it must be confessed, Liddon's 
 humour was often a sore trial. The Bishop of 
 Oxford strangely says that Liddon "seldom 
 talked of people." One who knew Liddon 
 much more intimately notes the statement, and 
 asks in natural astonishment : " Were Liddon's 
 stories really ever anything else than personal ? 
 It was the personal, dramatic effectiveness that 
 gave him this power, and made old Gaisford l 
 and Harry of Exeter 2 such living personalities 
 for us." This exactly accords with my own 
 impression. He was personal, when he de- 
 
 1 Thomas Gaisford (1779-1855), Dean of Christ Church. 
 a Henry Phillpotts (1778-1869), Bishop of Exeter.
 
 1 74 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 scribed how Archbishop Tait had heckled 
 him when he was a witness before a Royal 
 Commission : "Yes, dear friend, he doth 
 ravish the poor when he getteth him into his 
 net." He was personal when he wrote that 
 London was just then buried under a dense 
 fog, " which is commonly attributed to Dr. 
 Westcott having opened his study-window at 
 Westminster." He was personal when he said 
 of a smooth book of vague divinity : " Yes, 
 it is the sort of book which a Little Fog 
 writes, and dedicates to the Great Fog." He 
 was even more personal than usual when he 
 wrote with regard to an ecclesiastical appoint- 
 ment in which Mr. Gladstone had greatly 
 disappointed him : "The Prime Minister has 
 given us, instead of an alabaster box of oint- 
 ment very precious, an ornamental jar of 
 scented pomatum." 
 
 Certainly he was personal in two famous 
 speeches, felicitously reported by Dr. Holland : 
 " Very rarely, indeed, could he be induced to 
 make a speech. He hardly ever would go 
 on a platform. He avoided all conceivable 
 oratorical opportunities. But, when he did 
 speak, you felt that he was as excellently 
 gifted for it as for preaching. He had the un- 
 English power of becoming more terse and 
 epigrammatic the more he was moved. Two 
 or three delicious occasions I well remember. 
 Once at the Cuddesdon Festival, when King 
 had just been appointed Professor, and W. E.
 
 Dr. Liddon 175 
 
 Jelf had written a pamphlet, charging Bright 
 and King with patronizing all the Ritual ex- 
 cesses of S. Barnabas', and enquiring how far 
 they meant to go, with the title Quousque tan- 
 dem ? Liddon at the luncheon, pictured King 
 riding into Oxford on his cob to take up his 
 duties, and rinding himself stopped by an old 
 gentleman with not much to do, on Magdalen 
 Bridge, who is saying : ' Quousque tandem y Mr. 
 Professor of Pastoral Theology ? ' Then he 
 gave King's imagined answer in a series of 
 retorts which flew like pistol-shots round the 
 tent, each beginning * I am not going to stop, 
 until . . .' I only recall one now : * I am not 
 going to stop until I have convinced the young 
 men of Oxford that the Church of England is 
 something more than the shell of an establish- 
 ment ! ' The effect of the stinging epigrams, 
 as they followed on each other's heels, delivered 
 with flashing eye and the terse utterance of 
 passionate conviction, was absolutely electrical. 
 " Then there was the famous speech at the 
 Union Jubilee Dinner in the Corn Market, 
 Oxford, which had the disastrous effect of 
 reducing Matthew Arnold to speechlessness. 
 We had toiled on through an enormous array 
 of speeches : Lord Salisbury, Lord Selborne, 
 Lord Coleridge, and more : Archbishop Man- 
 ning had given us a mournful funeral oration on 
 the dead : we had got wearied and despairing : 
 it was drawing on to midnight : every speaker 
 apologized for its being so late, and then
 
 1 7 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 rambled on through the long speech that he 
 could not bring himself to shorten. Yet, still 
 we hung on in hope, to hear Liddon propose 
 Literature, coupled with the name of Matthew 
 Arnold. He would be worth dying in our 
 chairs to hear. * Tom ' l was getting himself 
 together for his midnight effort, before it was 
 reached. Liddon rose. In a moment we had 
 risen out of a corpse-like listlessness into acute 
 attention. He shot out each perfect sentence : 
 he delicately chaffed : he stole to the very edge 
 of dangerous ground, and then, as we trembled 
 lest he should go too far, he sheered off through 
 some felicitous phrase : he praised, yet retained 
 sincerity : he let us feel the gulf that yawned 
 between him and his subject, yet never forced 
 the matter. It was exquisite in banter, real in 
 emotion, flawless in expression. When he sat 
 down, we found ourselves shouting in an 
 enthusiasm of which we had thought ourselves 
 incapable at that exhausted hour. And Matt ? 
 Well, he took the measure of the situation. It 
 was obviously impossible at that late hour to 
 produce an effect that could stand against 
 Liddon's. He gave it up. * Everybody else 
 who has spoken has said it was time to go to 
 bed ; and I am one who believes it.' So he 
 rose, said, and sat down, leaving his speech 
 where it was in his pocket : and out we 
 streamed into the street." 
 
 But, though his fun was often personal, it 
 1 The great bell of Christ Church.
 
 Dr. Liddon 177 
 
 was by no means limited to personalities. It 
 broke out sometimes in his sermons, where 
 personalities could scarcely be indulged. He 
 is preaching on the first Sunday in August, 
 and warning his hearers against the perils of 
 the Public House on the public holiday. " If 
 S. Paul could rise from his grave, and traverse 
 the streets of London in the afternoon of a wet 
 Bank-holiday, he would, I think, be disposed 
 to modify his statement that they that be 
 drunken are drunken in the night." The 
 unfitness of the Judicial Committee to decide 
 questions of Christian doctrine and worship 
 was illustrated by a happy comparison : " It 
 would be no disparagement to the merits of a 
 besom to say that it was not a suitable imple- 
 ment with which to clean the Turners and the 
 Claudes in the National Gallery." Phrases of 
 this type, if ever they crept into his sermons, 
 were erased before the sermon was printed : 
 but echoes of them lingered in the ear. l 
 A sarcastic reference to rationalizing theories 
 of the Fall of Jericho was considerably toned 
 down before the Second Series of University 
 Sermons was published, though it may still be 
 detected ; and the reader may search in vain 
 for an allusion to those teachers whose motto 
 would seem to be, " I live, yet henceforth not 
 I, but Plato liveth in me." 
 
 There were certain types of ecclesiastical life 
 
 1 A friend writes : " He put in bits and hits that are 
 not in print." 
 
 2 A
 
 1 7 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 and thought which never failed to elicit Liddon's 
 shafts. " How singular 1 " he said to me, as we 
 stood before the portrait of Bishop William 
 Jackson r " how singular to reflect that that 
 person was chosen in the Providential order to 
 connect Mr. Keble with the Apostles ! " 
 Everyone who knows S. Paul's must know 
 the monument to T. F. Middleton, Bishop of 
 Calcutta, in the South Aisle. The Bishop, who 
 seems several sizes larger than life and wears 
 marble sleeves of corresponding dimensions, is 
 invoking a blessing on an Indian boy and girl, 
 who kneel, nude and minute, at his feet. Liddon 
 delighted in recounting the explanation of this 
 work of art which he heard a workman impart 
 to his friend : " Why, don't you see ? It's 
 the Almighty creating Adam and Eve." He 
 
 o / o 
 
 made fun of an Evangelical clergyman whose 
 favourite topic in preaching was " the danger 
 of thinking to be saved by works," whereas the 
 " works to which a large proportion of his 
 parishioners were somewhat conspicuously 
 addicted were not of a character to suggest 
 the question of being saved at all." When 
 there was a rumour that the Prussian Pro- 
 testants were going to send a " Bishop " to 
 Jerusalem, he wrote : "As they are presby- 
 terians, it is much as if a hen-owl were to 
 undertake to lay an eagle's egg. But in an 
 age of Protestant gush, which covers the void 
 of profound indifference to principles, one thing 
 1 (1751-1815), Bhhop of Oxford.
 
 Dr. Liddon 179 
 
 will do, I suppose, as well as another. Mean- 
 while, Bishops are becoming very cheap more 
 so than could be wished by those who would 
 maintain the ancient respect for the Order." 
 When his friends embarked on foolish courses 
 he would gently warn them, that " if you begin 
 to slide down an inclined plane, you cannot stop 
 in the middle merely by wishing earnestly to 
 do so." He excused himself for spending 
 several hours of a precious Sunday in writing 
 a letter of advice to a friend who had got into 
 a foolish scrape, on the ground that the act was 
 analogous to that of pulling an ass out of a pit 
 on the Sabbath Day. 
 
 He excelled in vigorous phrase-making. 
 "The Palmer- Worm" has been noticed already. 
 Our poor attempts to keep religion alive in the 
 Secularized University he likened to "combing 
 the hair of a corpse." Of one who pro- 
 mised stout resistance to a wrong policy and 
 then surrendered, he said : " Yes ; the good 
 man set his face against it but not like a 
 flint like a pudding." Time out of mind, 
 it has been conceded that even the patience 
 of philosophy is exhausted by toothache ; but 
 in Liddon's case humour taught philosophy a 
 lesson. " I have been quite laid up by trouble 
 with my few remaining teeth, of which I had 
 five taken out the day before yesterday. As 
 only four remain, this particular experience 
 cannot be repeated in this present life." 
 
 I am well aware that the aspect of Liddon's
 
 i8o Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 character which I am now considering may 
 appear unnatural and out of keeping to those 
 who know him only through his published 
 letters. It would almost seem as if he used 
 his pen as the safety-valve of his more anxious 
 thoughts, reserving his fun and light-heartedness 
 for social intercourse with his friends. He was 
 never better than at a small dinner-party of people 
 whom he knew thoroughly well, and with 
 whom he could trust himself. Having worked 
 hard all day, and from a very early hour, he 
 had an excellent appetite, ate heartily, and 
 enjoyed a glass of wine. But his fun was 
 not in the least dependent on these provoca- 
 tives, but, as Dr. Holland says, " it used 
 positively to disgrace the mild austerities of a 
 fish-tea on Fridays, at which he used to 
 delight in joining us." On all social occasions, 
 if Liddon was in good trim and felt at 
 home with his company, the result was sure 
 to be "a babel of happy and uproarious 
 laughter." 
 
 But it must always be borne in mind that 
 Liddon's cheerfulness was part of his religion. 
 No human being ever had a deeper or more 
 abiding sense of direct responsibility to GOD. 
 "A Christian," he said, "knows that he passes 
 his earthly life between two momentous facts. 
 Behind him is the Incarnation. Before him is 
 the Judgment." In reply to a criticism of his 
 preaching at S. Paul's, he wrote " Alas ! at 
 the Day of Judgment, no one else can answer
 
 Dr. Liddon 181 
 
 for what I say or have left unsaid ; and, 
 meanwhile, I try to think of that Day, and 
 pray GOD for grace to enable me to help the 
 greatest number, as best I may." A man 
 who wrote thus was not likely to forget the 
 awful solemnity of life and death ; but, if 
 Liddon believed in the Day of Judgment, 
 he believed not less intensely in the For- 
 giveness of Sins, and the restoration of the 
 penitent Soul to peace and safety. He held, 
 with his master Bishop Hamilton, that "light- 
 heartedness is at once the right and the duty 
 of a Christian whose conscience is in fairly 
 good order." 
 
 His natural gaiety, unrestrained by any 
 depressing imaginations, overflowed in his 
 dealings with children and young people. He 
 arranged holidays and amusements. He 
 bought beautiful presents. He took part in 
 obstreperous romps ; though, as childhood ad- 
 vanced into young ladyhood, he would have 
 been dreadfully pained by rough ways or 
 hoydenish merriment. His own manner was 
 perfect, and in others he admired an even 
 ceremonious bearing. This high value for 
 courtesy was allied with, or perhaps part of, 
 his deep sense of reverence, which was not 
 reserved for Holy Things or Holy Places, but 
 was bestowed on all that was beautiful in 
 nature, and on all that had cost human skill 
 and labour. " He could not endure to see a 
 book roughly used."
 
 1 8 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 His fondness for children was related to his 
 love of animals. Children and animals alike 
 were made by GOD, and were pretty, interest- 
 ing, defenceless, and innocent. With horses he 
 was not on familiar terms. In a sermon on 
 Bishop Wilberforce, he describes him as having 
 met his fatal accident when " cantering at a quiet 
 trot." 1 Dogs are inadmissible in College Rooms, 
 and would have been out of place in Amen 
 Court. So Liddon's domestic affections were 
 concentrated on cats, which he cherished with an 
 eager but discriminating devotion. His niece 
 writes "As soon as he arrived on a visit to us, 
 he sent for the parrot to sit in his room while 
 he worked, and tried to bribe the dog of the 
 house to do the same." I well remember his 
 grave and tender expostulations with a child of 
 five, who was trying some rather rudimentary 
 experiments on a crab, and was with difficulty 
 induced to remit the subject to its native deep. 
 Feeling thus strongly about the animals, it was 
 inevitable that Liddon should feel a horror of 
 the calculated barbarity which is wrought in 
 the scene of Vivisection. His speech in Con- 
 vocation at Oxford in the debate about es- 
 tablising a "Physiological Laboratory" in the 
 University aptly illustrated his love of animals 
 generally, and his ignorance of horses in 
 particular. With regard to some concession 
 made by the advocates of Torture, he said, 
 " It is proverbially ungracious to look a 
 1 Sermons on Some Words of Christ, p. 188,
 
 Dr. Liddon 183 
 
 gift-horse in the face." And though the 
 Undergraduates in the gallery roared, " Mouth, 
 sir, mouth," he went unheeding on his 
 rhetorical way. 
 
 One of those who knew Liddon best has 
 said that his two main enjoyments in life were 
 Conversation and Landscape. Himself the 
 best of talkers, he delighted in hearing other 
 people talk well ; and he was perhaps the most 
 appreciative recipient of a good story whom I 
 have ever known. As regards Landscape, he 
 would undertake any amount of exertion in 
 order to see a fine view ; and his love of it was 
 a strongly-marked feature of his aesthetic 
 composition. The eye meant more to him 
 than the ear. In a formal enumeration, he 
 placed Poetry as " the first and highest of the 
 arts " ; but a survey of his writings does not 
 suggest the thought that he lived habitually in 
 communion with the poets (except those who 
 constructed the Lyra cApostolica). He poked 
 fun at the people for whom music was only 
 "a scientific form of noise." He enjoyed good 
 music when it came his way (unless the com- 
 poser was Wagner, for whom he had acquired 
 from Bellinger a moral distaste). Sir George 
 Martin says, " Dr. Liddon was distinctly 
 musical, and was much affected, and I think 
 helped, by certain compositions for the Church. 
 One especially, * In Thee, O LORD ' (Weldon) 
 he was very fond of, and it was always intro- 
 duced, when possible, during his month of
 
 1 8 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 residence. The music of Spohr's * Last Judg- 
 ment' also appealed to him strongly; yet he 
 was devoted to the severity of the Gregorian 
 mode." 
 
 His feeling towards painting was more 
 enthusiastic. The early Italian School of 
 sacred art was w hat he chiefly loved ; and he 
 would travel all across Europe to see some 
 fine specimen which might have suddenly come 
 to light in some obscure Refectory or Chapel. 
 But it always seemed to me that Architecture 
 was the sphere in which he was really most 
 at home, combining scientific and historical 
 knowledge of the art, with a keen discernment 
 of its spiritual significance. 
 
 So entirely did Liddon live and move in the 
 atmosphere of the Bible, that his feeling about 
 different professions was to a great extent 
 regulated by their Scriptural associations. S. 
 Luke was a " beloved physician," and Liddon 
 loved doctors and had a keen sense of the 
 dignity and sacredness of their calling. Corne- 
 lius was a " devout Centurion," and Liddon 
 rejoiced in every opportunity of showing his 
 respect for the profession of the soldier. 1 The 
 
 1 With reference to his Sermon on " Religion and 
 Arms " (No. XVI. in " Sermons preached on Special 
 Occasions ") he wrote in 1889 " I am rather glad of the 
 opportunity of setting such as myself right with the Army, 
 who probably mistook our love of the persecuted Eastern 
 Christians as hostility for their profession. Far from it, as 
 you know."
 
 Dr. Liddon 185 
 
 Apostles were fishermen, and Liddon loved a 
 chat with the blue-shirted mariners of the 
 Brighton Beach. On the other hand, Pilate 
 and Herod and Gallic were, in their various 
 ways, politicians, and Liddon looked askance at 
 the political character. S. Luke tells us of a 
 Lawyer who tempted CHRIST, and S. Paul had 
 some experience of a Judge who smote contrary 
 to the law ; Liddon realized uneasily that 
 neither Judge nor Lawyer was unrepresented in 
 modern England. With regard to the The- 
 atrical profession, he was ready to admit that 
 " there are actors and actresses who lead even 
 saintly lives saintly because victorious over 
 temptation and certainly higher than that, 
 e.g., of a clergyman who is never tried as they 
 have been " ; nor could the New Testament be 
 quoted against the dramatic art. But " the 
 Church had never had much doubt about the 
 matter." She had " kept clear of spectacula" 
 There was no form of entertainment which he 
 so thoroughly enjoyed as good acting ; but he 
 saw it only in the nouses of his friends, and he 
 had never entered a theatre since his Ordination. 
 It was his deliberate judgment that " the in- 
 fluence of the theatre, in the case of average 
 human nature and character, lies in the 
 direction of sin." 
 
 In this connexion it may not be out of place 
 to indicate another point on which Liddon's 
 Evangelical upbringing affected his judgment to 
 the last. In 1879 he wrote, with reference to 
 
 2 B
 
 1 8 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 a " Sunday Band," promoted by an enter- 
 prising clergyman " The Puritan Sunday, 
 certainly, has not a leg to stand on in the 
 New Testament, or in the tradition of the 
 Church of the first sixteen centuries. But my 
 fear is lest we break it down, and are unable 
 to put anything in its place. To give up 
 something for GOD even upon the strength 
 of the misunderstanding of His Revealed Will 
 is better than to give up nothing. And 
 this is very much the case (is it not ?) with 
 * Sabbath observance,' so termed in modern 
 England." 
 
 Mr. Arthur Benson, in his Life of his father, 
 has a very curious passage about the Arch- 
 bishop's relations with Liddon. It is curious, 
 partly because it so profoundly misconceives 
 Liddon's views of the Archbishop's churchman- 
 ship ; and partly because of the terms in which 
 it describes Liddon's mental constitution. "To 
 the eager practical temperament of the Arch- 
 bishop, the subtle metaphysical element in 
 Canon Liddon's mind was wholly antagonistic." 
 
 Mr. Benson is so accomplished a critic that 
 one hesitates to dissent from his deliberate 
 judgment ; and yet it must in candour be said 
 that " a subtle metaphysical element " is about 
 the last quality which I should have suspected 
 of lurking in Liddon's mind. He belonged 
 essentially to the Oxford of Aristotle and 
 Butler, ere yet it had been sophisticated
 
 Dr. Liddon 187 
 
 by Kant and Hegel and T. H. Green. He 
 seemed less at home when he was speculating 
 on the abstract ideas of GOD and the Soul, the 
 origin of Evil, and the possibility of Prayer, 
 than when he was deducing lessons of faith 
 and life from the Gospels and the Epistles. 
 He was, indeed, a most vigorous thinker, but 
 he did all his thinking in the terms of time and 
 space. He did not shrink from applying 
 temporal standards of measurement to the life 
 of eternity. To him the things of sense were 
 not adumbrations from intangible existences 
 elsewhere, but realities as real, in their own 
 place and order, as the unseen Realities of 
 the Supernatural Kingdom. He admitted the 
 difficulties of religious belief; but then he 
 " knew no part of truth, however axiomatic 
 (except pure mathematics), to which some objec- 
 tions may not be raised." He thought that 
 the difficulty of believing in a Moral Governor 
 of the universe was "on the whole greater 
 than any that can be urged in detail against 
 any part of the Christian Creed." He ad- 
 mitted that the evidence for Christianity is 
 " moral, not mathematical ; but moral evidence 
 is sufficient, and if faith is, as the New Testa- 
 ment represents it, a criterion of man's moral 
 state, mathematical evidence which should compel 
 rational assent would be out of place." He 
 said to his friend, Mr. Oswald Simon, " GOD 
 might, had He willed, have demonstrated His 
 presence to us in the nature of a mathematical
 
 1 8 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 proposition, and then everyone would have 
 believed Him without any exercise of faith ; but 
 it was His special purpose that He should be 
 revealed through the affections and by the 
 exercise of a faith which depended on love." 
 
 Liddon, by the exercise of such a faith, 
 convinced himself of certain facts, objective, 
 concrete, historical ; and by those facts all 
 his thinking was dominated. He believed 
 that GOD has revealed Himself to man in the 
 Person of the Incarnate SON, Who died, and 
 was buried, and rose again ; and that the 
 Christian Society is the permanent witness to 
 those events, and the Bible the authorized 
 record of them. 
 
 These were the postulates of Liddon's 
 thinking ; and, these once granted, he argued 
 from them with irresistible cogency. It has 
 been truly said that his mind was Latin, or as 
 some say French, in structure. He disliked 
 and despised what Matthew Arnold called the 
 " splay-footedness " of German thought. He 
 loved system and method, syllogism and 
 deduction. He would have heartily endorsed 
 the dogma of that vigorous dialectician, Arch- 
 bishop Magee, who said that " logic is as real 
 a fact as steam " ; but he would, I think, have 
 shrunk from the distinction which Magee drew 
 when, speaking of one of his early friends, he 
 said, " He taught me how to think ; before I 
 met him I only knew how to argue." Liddon 
 would have vehemently resented Jowett's as-
 
 Dr. Liddon 189 
 
 persion on logic " It is sometimes spoken of 
 as an art, and sometimes as a science. It 
 would be more properly described as a dodge" ; 
 and, though S. Ambrose laid it down that 
 we are not saved by logic, 1 I think Liddon 
 would have urged that logic may play a useful 
 part in the process. 
 
 If it be true that the aim of Logic is to 
 ascertain truth, and the aim of Rhetoric to 
 persuade men, Liddon was at least as great a 
 Rhetorician as he was a Logician. He had 
 in a singular degree the power of leading a 
 sympathetic hearer to the conclusion at which 
 he wished him to arrive. In the skilful com- 
 bination of fact, inference, illustration, and 
 appeal, he had no rival. Regarded as a 
 practical effort for a definite end, his rhetoric 
 was perfect ; but, when we come to regard it 
 as a literary performance, we must walk more 
 warily. Henry Nettleship, 2 when he was an 
 Assistant Master at Harrow, often tried to 
 make his pupils share his devotion to New- 
 man's sermons ; some of us, in those callow 
 days, felt them a little cold and thin. We 
 preferred Liddon's fervent declamation ; and 
 were a good deal put out when Nettleship said, 
 " But Liddon's style is vulgar." 
 
 1 Non in dialectic;! complacuit Deo salvum facere 
 populum Suum. S. Ambrose, De Fide, I, 42. 
 
 2 Henry Nettleship (1839-1893) Corpus Professor of 
 Latin at Oxford.
 
 190 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 The lapse of years has enabled me to 
 understand what my gentle teacher meant. It 
 comes, I think, to this that Liddon's hand was 
 subdued to what it worked in, and that his 
 lifelong devotion to newspapers left an indelible 
 mark on his literary style. The Times represented 
 every cause which he most cordially detested : 
 it was, as he said, " embarrassed by no fixed 
 principles " ; and yet the perusal of it was a 
 duty no more to be intermitted than the Daily 
 Offices, and it was read to him every day in his 
 last illness. It would have been well if he had 
 confined himself to the 'Times ; but he read om- 
 nivorously. Nothing in the way of journalism 
 came amiss to him, and the curious point is that 
 he disliked what he read, but went on reading 
 it. He found the Spectator " flagrantly dis- 
 loyal to Christian truth." He enjoyed "the 
 wrath of the Tall Mall" when the Jingoes 
 were worsted. He scoffed when the Standard 
 " shrieked," and the Daily Telegraph " tried 
 thoughtful remonstrance." He equally dis- 
 liked all the " unlovely family " of the Month, 
 the Record, and the 1{oc%. He incessantly 
 condemned the treachery of the Quardian> 
 and the truculence of the Church Times. He 
 groaned over "an execrable article in Fraser:" 1 
 and yet he went on reading all this stuff with 
 scrupulous diligence. No man on earth could 
 
 1 It should be borne in mind that, at the dates to which 
 these quotations relate, all these papers were under editor- 
 ship which have long since ceased.
 
 Dr. Liddon 191 
 
 come unscathed through such a process ; and 
 Liddon's style always showed (though less 
 conspicuously as years went on) the traces of 
 the school in which it had been formed. One 
 of those traces was that most ingrained of all 
 journalistic habits the unwillingness to call 
 anyone or anything by a plain name when a 
 periphrasis is available. Liddon called the Bible 
 " the Sacred Volume," the Times " the Lead- 
 ing Journal," Mr. Keble "the Author of The 
 Christian Tear" and Dr. Pusey "the Regius 
 Professor of Hebrew." When he wrote thus, 
 every journalist must have recognized him as 
 a man and a brother. The style of modern 
 journalism has been so profoundly affected by 
 Macaulay, that whoso writes journalese writes 
 also Macaulayese : and Macaulay's influence on 
 Liddon's style made itself felt in the short sen- 
 tences, the rolling paragraphs, and the sonorous 
 eloquence of the descriptive passages. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the 
 chapter which the present Bishop of Oxford con- 
 tributed to Principal Johnston's Life and Letters 
 of Henry Tarry Liddon. The chapter is written 
 with much unction and urbanity, but it is 
 pervaded throughout by an apologetic tone 
 which is curiously out of place. We cannot 
 doubt that the apology is offered in perfectly 
 good faith. Indeed, to think otherwise would 
 be to charge the Bishop with insensibility to 
 a high privilege ; for Liddon, though nine-
 
 192 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 teen years his senior, honoured him with a 
 close and almost brotherly kindness, and never 
 lost an opportunity of praising him. " F. 
 Paget is a self-forgetting person." " F. Paget 
 left Oxford to-day. What a blessing he has 
 been to me during the last four years." Even 
 in Lux Mundij " F. Paget's " Essay was marked 
 out from the rest by Liddon's commendation 
 " a real contribution to Christian Theology." 
 Now that this gracious friend and master has 
 been for fifteen years in his honoured grave, 
 the Bishop of Oxford reviews his career, and 
 finds two great defects in it. Divested of 
 verbiage, those defects are found to be (i) that 
 Liddon was too fond of controversy, and (2) 
 that he would have been a greater man if he 
 had been a Bishop. 
 
 When I first read the former of these implied 
 censures, there came back upon my memory 
 some words from the Sermon on " The Curse 
 on Meroz." l To play the part of Meroz was 
 not congenial to Liddon's temperament. When 
 a sacred cause was imperilled, he flung himself 
 into the thick of the fighting with absolute and 
 calculated self-surrender. He did not stand 
 aloof to see which side was going to win. To 
 
 1 " To refuse aid to the Sacred Cause until it was certain 
 of success, was, in a man or a community belonging to the 
 Covenanted Nation, an act of virtual apostasy ; and 
 Meroz was not merely politically disfranchised : it was 
 religiously excommunicated." University Sermons, Second 
 Series.
 
 Dr. Liddon 193 
 
 imagine 'that he loved controversy is ridicu- 
 lously to misconceive the man. He simply 
 regarded it as a duty which could not be shunned 
 without unfaithfulness, when the Honour and 
 Truth of GOD were at stake. Thus he wrote 
 from Oxford in 1868: "I often envy the 
 scouts I and their boys, who know nothing of the 
 Church troubles of our time, and who, if they 
 like, can do their duty and go to Heaven 
 without a previous hand-to-hand fight with 
 Romans and unbelievers. However, this no 
 doubt is wrong : we are best where and as 
 GOD has placed us." It was Liddon's high 
 though arduous fortune to fight and win some 
 great battles for Truth and Righteousness : 
 and the Bishop of Oxford may rest assured 
 that no apology is needed for such a career. 
 
 The Bishop, who seems to be exceptionally 
 impressed by the responsibilities of his office, 
 writes solemnly about " great burdens of ad- 
 ministration and government," and " lonely 
 tasks of decision," which he has been called to 
 bear : and says that it would have been better 
 if Liddon had been obliged to share them. 
 That Liddon would have been a chief glory of 
 the English indeed of the Universal Episco- 
 pate is certain enough ; but the effect of 
 Episcopal office on the character of even good 
 men has not always been such as to make one 
 wish to see the experiment tried in the case of 
 those whom we love and honour. Of a certain 
 1 College Servants. 
 
 2 C
 
 194 Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 Bishop who once " did run well," but, after his 
 elevation, took to persecuting Ritualists, Liddon 
 wrote : " Popularity is his God, and all his 
 higher chances in the way of character have 
 been sacrificed at its shrine." As regards my 
 loved and honoured master, I feel assured that 
 his spiritual temper would have been proof 
 against all such base temptations ; but still I am 
 thankful that he was permitted to live and die 
 in a position where he could testify for Truth 
 without pausing to consider the susceptibilities 
 of worldliness and time-serving and misbelief, 
 whether displayed at courts, or in newspapers, 
 or on episcopal thrones. It is true that Faith- 
 ful was burned to ashes, and that Christian was 
 all but drowned in crossing the river ; but, 
 after all, they are more attractive characters 
 than Mr. Facing-both-ways and Mr. Worldly- 
 Wiseman. It would be well for the Church of 
 England at this moment if a few more of her 
 servants were inspired by Liddon's spirit, and 
 were as ready as he to rebuke spiritual wicked- 
 ness in high places, at whatever sacrifice of 
 worldly ease and professional advancement.
 
 Dr. Liddon 195 
 
 In the life and character of Henry Parry 
 Liddon the modern Church saw reproduced 
 the attributes which marked the Saints or 
 Apostolic and Sub-Apostolic times. He shared 
 their personal devotion to our Adorable Re- 
 deemer ; their unconquerable valour in the 
 defence of truth ; their capacity for Confessor- 
 ship ; their readiness for Martyrdom : and his 
 words concerning those who had gone before 
 him with the Sign of Faith may serve as the 
 summary of his own life in time and in 
 eternity 
 
 "Things would not have been better than 
 they are for Martyrs and Confessors, if, in 
 their day, the sea had been calm and the waves 
 unruffled. For them, long since, the winds 
 and waves of life have been stilled, and CHRIST 
 has brought them to the haven where they 
 would be. Sit anima nostra cum Sanctis 
 with them, if He wills, in the fellowship of 
 their sorrows ; with them, through His mercy, 
 as sharers of their everlasting rest ! " l 
 
 1 " CHRIST in the Storm," in University Sermons, Second 
 Series.
 
 Dr. Liddon 197 
 
 APPENDIX A. 
 
 "Whereas, at this present time, imputations of disloyalty 
 to the Church of England are current, to the discredit of 
 those who have been, some of them for many years, incul- 
 cating and defending the Doctrines of the Real Objective 
 Presence, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and of the adoration 
 of CHRIST in the Blessed Sacrament ; and whereas, by reason 
 of these imputations, the minds of many are troubled : 
 We therefore, the undersigned, exercising the office 
 of the Priesthood within the Church of England, beg 
 respectfully to state to your Grace, and through your Grace 
 to our Right Reverend Fathers in GOD the Bishops of your 
 Province, and to the Church at large, what we believe to 
 be the mind of our LORD, touching the said Doctrines, as 
 expressed in Holy Scripture, and as received by the Church 
 of England in conformity with the teaching of the Catholic 
 Church in those ages to which the Church of England 
 directs us as ' most pure and uncorrupt,' and of ' the old 
 godly doctors,' to whom she has in many ways referred us, 
 declaring hereby both what we repudiate, and what we 
 believe, touching the said Doctrines. 
 
 "(i) We repudiate the opinion of a 'Corporal Presence 
 of CHRIST'S natural Flesh and Blood ' ; that is to say, of 
 the Presence of His Body and Blood as They 'are in 
 Heaven ' ; and the conception of the mode of His Presence, 
 which implies the physical change of the natural substances 
 of the bread and wine, commonly called ' Transubstantia- 
 tion.' 
 
 " We believe that, in the Holy Eucharist, by virtue of the 
 Consecration, through the Power of the HOLY GHOST, The 
 Body and Blood of our Saviour CHRIST, ' the inward part,
 
 198 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 or Thing signified,' are Present, really and truly, but 
 Spiritually and ineffably, under ' the outward visible part 
 or sign,' or ' form of Bread and Wine.' " 
 
 " (2) We repudiate the notion of any fresh Sacrifice, or 
 any view of the Eucharistic Sacrificial offering as of some- 
 thing apart from the One All-sufficient Sacrifice and 
 Oblation on the Cross, Which alone 'is that perfect 
 Redemption, Propitiation, and Satisfaction for all the Sins 
 of the whole world, both original and actual,' and Which 
 alone is * meritorious.' 
 
 "We believe that, as in Heaven, CHRIST, our Great High 
 Priest, ever offers Himself before the Eternal FATHER, 
 pleading by His Presence His Sacrifice of Himself once 
 offered on the Cross ; so on Earth, in the Holy Eucharist, 
 that same Body, once for all sacrificed for us, and that same 
 Blood, once for all shed for us, Sacramentally Present, are 
 offered and pleaded before the FATHER by the Priest, as our 
 LORD ordained to be done in Remembrance of Himself, 
 when He instituted the Blessed Sacrament of His Body and 
 Blood. 
 
 "(3) We repudiate all 'adoration' of 'the Sacramental 
 Bread and Wine,' which would be ' idolatry ; ' regarding 
 them with the reverence due to them because of their 
 Sacramental relation to the Body and Blood of our LORD : 
 we repudiate also all adoration of 'a Corporal Presence 
 of CHRIST'S Natural Flesh and Blood,' that is to say, of 
 the Presence of His Body and Blood as they 'are in 
 Heaven.' 
 
 "We believe that CHRIST Himself, really and truly, but 
 Spiritually and ineffably, Present in the Sacrament, is 
 therein to be adored." 
 
 From a declaration signed by Liddon, Pusey, Mack- 
 onochie, and eighteen other leading Churchmen, and pub- 
 lished as Appendix F. in the First Report of the Royal 
 Commission on Ritual, 1867.
 
 Dr. Liddon 199 
 
 APPENDIX B. 
 
 " What think ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He ? Till that 
 question is answered in each one of us, there is no rest and 
 no strength for any man. If we set out in the race of life 
 without answering it, we are the sport of every passing 
 wind, in the deepest interests and the highest destinies of 
 our being. Every word breathed against the authority of 
 a divine revelation or the reality of a divine inspiration is 
 enough to topple down the whole fabric of a traditional 
 faith, and to destroy the sand-built habitation of a con- 
 ventional hope. Happy is the man who has so assured 
 himself, by GOD'S grace, of the mission, the truth, and the 
 Divinity of his Saviour, that he can consider every other 
 question, whether of opinion or practice, under His 
 guidance, in His presence. Then, if he has anything to 
 modify, by later experience or deeper reflection, in his first 
 ideas of theology, whether in regard to the relation of 
 Scripture to science, or of the human to the divine element 
 in inspiration, he does so under CHRIST'S direction, and is 
 a believer and a Christian still. Perhaps, if he looks more 
 closely into the matter, he will find that what is supposed 
 adverse to the Bible is in reality in perfect harmony with 
 it, and will eventually turn to it for a testimony. He will 
 not be forward to surrender without reason, but neither 
 will he be perverse in retaining against reason, any supposed 
 outwork of the truth he loves. His faith in CHRIST Himself, 
 the result first of enquiry, and then secondly of intercourse 
 of carefully noting the evidences of the Gospel, and then 
 of daily communing with the Saviour Whom the Gospel 
 reveals is built upon a ' rock that is ' indeed ' higher than 
 he,' at whose feet the storms of controversy may spend 
 themselves, but upon whose head, through all time, the 
 ' Eternal Sunshine settles.' " 
 
 ' Univtrsity Sermons, New and Old, by C. J. Vaughmn, D. D. , 
 pp. 59, 60.
 
 2 oo Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 
 
 APPENDIX C. 
 
 " On this serious subject, there is often a singular con- 
 fusion between limitation of knowledge and the utterance 
 through ignorance of that which is in fact untrue. If our 
 LORD as <Man did not know the day and hour of the 
 judgment (5. ^Mar^ xiii. 32), He did not as Man claim to 
 know it. Had He told us that the real value of the books 
 of the Old Testament was hidden from Him, or had He 
 never referred to them, there would have been no conflict 
 between modern so-called * critical ' speculations and His 
 Divine authority. But if the Apostles "beheld His glory," 
 'full,' not only 'of grace,' but 'of truth' (5. John i. 
 14) ; if, on the one hand, He knew what was in man 
 (5. John ii. 25), and, on the other, as the Only Begotten 
 SON which is in the bosom of the FATHER, 'declared' Him 
 Whom no man hath seen at any time (S. John i. 1 8), is it 
 conceivable that He could say, ' Moses wrote of Me ' 
 (S. John v. 46), in utter ignorance of the (presumed) fact 
 that the book to which He was principally alluding (Deut. 
 xviii. 13, 14 ; but cf. also Qen. iii. 15 ; xii. 3 ; xviii. 1 8 ; 
 xxii. 18 ; xlix. lo) was really compiled by a "dramatizing" 
 Jew in the reign of Josiah ; or that He could have referred 
 to Ps. ex., as He is reported in Sf. ZMarfc xii. 36 ; S. Luke 
 xx. 42 (in S. {Matthew he is reported as less directly assert- 
 ing the Davidic authorship, xxii. 42-46), if that psalm 
 never really existed before the date of Simon Maccabaeus ? 
 
 "The hypothesis that, in consequence of imperfect in- 
 formation, our LORD taught erroneously on the subject of 
 the historical worth of the Old Testament history, appears 
 to be inconsistent with the Catholic doctrine of the In- 
 carnation as asserted by the Church against Nestorius. 
 According to that doctrine, all the acts and words of the 
 One CHRIST are the acts and words of GOD the SON, 
 although performed and uttered through the Human 
 Nature which He assumed (cf. Labbe and Cossart, Cone. 
 III. 408, anath. 4). Erroneous teaching is as little com- 
 patible with the Union of His two Natures in a single, and
 
 Dr. Liaaon 201 
 
 that a Divine, Person, as is sinful action (S. Thomas, Stttntrt., 
 pt. iii. quasst. xv. a. 3). Language is sometimes used which 
 appears to imply that, unless our LORD'S Human Intellect 
 was not only limited in knowledge but also liable to error, 
 He did not assume ' a true human nature.' But this is 
 to forget the very purpose with which He condescended to 
 become Man. As Hooker observes, " the very cause of 
 His taking upon Him our nature was to better the quality 
 and to advance the condition thereof, although in no sort 
 to abolish the substance which He took, nor to infuse into 
 it the natural forces and properties of His Deity " (Bed. 
 Pol., V. liv. 5). And thus 'to be the Way, the Truth, 
 and the Life ' ; to be the Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctifica- 
 tion, Resurrection ; to be the Peace of the whole world, 
 the Hope of the righteous, the Heir of all things ; to be 
 that Supreme Head whereunto all power in heaven and 
 earth is given, these are not honours common unto 
 CHRIST with other men ; they are titles above the dignity 
 and worth of any which were but a mere man, yet true of 
 Christ even in that He is Man, but Man with Whom Deity 
 is personally joined and unto Whom it hath added these 
 excellences which make Him more than worthy thereof " 
 (/.). It is in accordance with this principle that the 
 Church has hitherto believed Him to be an infallible 
 Teacher, and especially when He is touching on matters 
 which, like the Old Testament Scriptures, directly concern 
 GOD'S revelation of Himself to man. To say that He 
 shows no signs of transcending the historical knowledge ot 
 His age is to imply that He shared with the rabbis around 
 Him grave errors respecting the real worth of the Old 
 Testament literature, and that He was in this respect in- 
 ferior to modern scholars who take the negative side in 
 questions of Old Testament criticism. To assert that, 
 while thus imperfectly informed, He used and sanctioned 
 the Old Testament as He did, is to go further : it is to 
 imply that, as a Teacher of Religion, He was a Teacher of 
 error. 
 
 " Those persons who unhappily have persuaded themselves 
 
 2 D
 
 2O2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 
 
 that this is the case, and yet happily shrink from rejecting 
 His authority altogether, sometimes attempt to save them- 
 selves by projecting a distinction between critical or 
 historical and spiritual truth. If He was in error respect- 
 ing the historical value of the Pentateuch or Daniel, He 
 could not, they think, err in what He tells us as to the 
 Nature of GOD or the duty of man. But such persons 
 must know that at this hour His authority in these spiritual 
 matters is as fiercely challenged as in those questions which 
 they somewhat arbitrarily describe as ' critical.' And He 
 Himself has taught us that we must receive His teaching as 
 a whole, if we are to receive it at all. ' If I have told you 
 earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I 
 tell you of heavenly things ? ' " (5. John iii. 12). x 
 
 1 From Footnote to Sermon on " The Worth of the Old Testament."
 
 INDEX TO NAMES OF PERSONS 
 MENTIONED IN THE TEXT. 
 
 Acland, Sir Henry, 82, 129. 
 Acland, Mrs., 68. 
 Acton, Lord, 73, 143, 172. 
 Ambrose, Mrs. (Sister), 71, 
 
 129. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 34, 42, 
 
 in, 175, 176, 188. 
 
 Balfour, A. J., 90. 
 Barff, Rev. A., 133, 134. 
 Beauchamp, Lord, 6, 72,132. 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, 28, 29, 
 
 56, 61, 75, 161, 162. 
 Benson, Archbishop, 80, 91- 
 
 94,96-99, 1 86. 
 Benson, A. C., 186. 
 Benson, Rev. R. M., 6, 9. 
 Bilke, Ann (Mother), 2. 
 Blyth, Bishop, 94. 
 Bradlaugh, C., 166, 167. 
 Bright, Dr., 129, 175. 
 Brodrick, Hon. G. C. 
 
 (Warden of Merton), 
 
 1 60. 
 
 Buckland, F. T., 6. 
 Burgon, Dean, 18. 
 
 Butler, Dr. (Head Master 
 
 of Harrow), 23. 
 Butler, Dean, 8, 9. 
 
 Cadman, Rev. W., 163. 
 Cairns, Lord, 56. 
 Capel, Monsignor, 146. 
 Carnarvon, Lord, 6, 30, 1 29. 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 163. 
 Cheyne, Dr., 1 10. 
 Church, Dean, 44, 81, 89, 
 
 97, 138, 145. 
 Colenso, Bishop, 1 6, 28, 
 
 79, 101. 
 
 Coleridge, Lord, 94,95,175. 
 Cox, Rev. J. Bell, 89-91. 
 
 Dale, Dr. R. W., 148, 165. 
 Davidson, R. T. (Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury), 
 
 97- 
 Denison, Archdeacon, 22, 
 
 119. 
 Ddllinger, Dr., 60, 122, 
 
 144, 151, 183. 
 Driver, Dr., no. 
 
 303
 
 2O4 
 
 Index 
 
 Freeman, Professor, 161,163. 
 Fremantle, Dean, 158. 
 
 Gaisford, Dean, 173. 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 28, 30, 
 4 2 55, 5" 58, 65, 75, 
 79,81,82,85, 119, 122, 
 156, 162, 163, 164, 166, 
 174. 
 
 Gladstone, Mrs., 32. 
 
 Gordon, General, 87. 
 
 Gore, Bishop, 90, 106-108, 
 1 16-121, 123, 148. 
 
 Granville, Lord, 75, 164. 
 
 Green, Rev. S. F., 59. 
 
 Gregory, Dean, 44, 45, 
 
 137- 
 Grimthorpe, Lord, 95. 
 
 Halifax, Lord, 72, (Letters 
 
 to) 84, 131, 135. 
 Halifax, Lady, 72, 83, 131. 
 Hamilton, Bishop, 17, 22, 
 
 3 ! 49, *39 155, l8l 
 Hardy, Rt. Hon. Gathorne, 
 
 161. 
 
 Harrison, Frederic, 3. 
 Hartington, Lord, 75. 
 Hole, Dean, 163. 
 Holland, Dr., 9, 18, 33, 34, 
 
 46, 63, 71, 75, 88, 129, 
 
 138, 168, 174, 180. 
 Huxley, T. H., 150. 
 
 Ince, Dr., 158. 
 
 Jackson, Bishop (of London), 
 *8, 33, 45, 81, 145. 
 
 Jelf, W. E., 174. 
 Johnston, Rev J. O., 12, 58, 
 
 73,93, 147,191- 
 Jowett, Rev. B., 101, 188. 
 
 Keble, Rev. John, 30, 82, 
 121, 139, 155, 159, 191. 
 
 King, Mrs. Poole (Sister), 
 71,83, 129. 
 
 King, Bishop, 96-99, 1 70, 
 
 . 17 5.' 
 Kitchin, Dean, 6. 
 
 Liddon, Capt. Matthew 
 
 (Father), 2, 5. 
 Liddon, Dr. Edward 
 
 (Brother), 130, 161. 
 Lightfoot, Bishop, 71, 97. 
 
 Mackarness, Bishop, 107. 
 Mackonochie, Rev. A. H., 
 
 *9 78, 79 
 
 Magee, Archbishop, 188. 
 Mansel, Dean, 37, 38, 
 
 44. 
 Martin, Sir George, 153, 
 
 183. 
 
 Martineau, Dr., 127. 
 Max Miiller, Professor, 148. 
 Meynell-Ingram, Hon. Mrs., 
 
 72, 1 1 1, (Letters to) 1 16- 
 
 118. 
 
 Milman, Dean, 17. 
 Moberly, Bishop, 81, 139. 
 
 Nettleship, Professor, 189. 
 Newman, Cardinal, 47, 91, 
 132, 148, 189.
 
 Index 
 
 205 
 
 Ogle, Dr., 83, 128. 
 Oxenham, H. N., 6. 
 
 Paget, Francis (Bishop of 
 Oxford), 115, 1 1 6, 142, 
 
 147, 149,173* I9 X J 9 2 - 
 
 Parry, Sir Edward (God- 
 father), 2. 
 
 Penzance, Lord, 76, 89. 
 
 Phillimore, Sir Robert, 72. 
 
 Phillpotts, Bishop, 173. 
 
 Pius IX., 7. 
 
 Pott, Archdeacon, 10. 
 
 Pusey, Dr., 6, 8, 16, 17, 
 22, 47, 67, 68, 73, 82, 
 
 103-106, 120, 121, 139, 
 
 151, 155, 168, 191. 
 
 Redington, C. T., 148. 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 6, 42, 57,72, 
 
 80, 85, 123, 164, 175. 
 Salisbury, Lady, 72, 80. 
 Sampson, Rev. E. F., 129. 
 Selborne, Lord, 57, 66, 
 
 175- 
 
 Shaftesbury, Lord, 56. 
 Simon, Oswald, 187. 
 Smith, Rev. B. F., 163. 
 
 Smith, Professor H. J. S., 
 
 161, 162. 
 
 Stanley, Dean, 48, 147. 
 Stubbs, Bishop, 6. 
 Suckling, Rev. R. A. J., 78, 
 
 79- 
 
 Tait, Archbishop, 28, 47, 
 48, 56, 78, 79, 80, 174. 
 
 Talbot, Bishop., 163, 170. 
 Right Hon. J. G. 
 161, 162. 
 
 Temple, Archbishop, 94. 
 
 Thomson, Archbishop, 48. 
 
 Tooth, Rev. Arthur, 59. 
 
 Vaughan, Dean, 113. 
 
 Wace, Dean, 163. 
 Westcott, Bishop, 107, 163, 
 
 174. 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 8, 9, 
 
 18,47, 55 *47, 182. 
 Wood, Hon. C. R. L., 131, 
 
 135- 
 
 Wood, Hon. H. P. L. (God- 
 son), 83, 84. 
 
 Wordsworth, Bishop, 49, 
 81.
 
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