High Churchman.  Liddon did not conceal his distress that such doctrine should have come out of the Pusey House.  But the manifesto was well timed; it enabled the younger men to go forward more freely, and sacrificed nothing that was in any way essential to the Anglo-Catholic position.  Since the appearance of ’Lux Mundi,’ the High Church clergy have been able without fear to avow their belief in the scientific theories associated with Darwin’s name, and their rejection of the rigid doctrine of verbal inspiration, while the Evangelicals, who have not been emancipated by their leaders, labour under the reproach of extreme obscurantism in their attitude towards Biblical studies.

As Canon of Westminster, and then as Bishop of Worcester, and of Birmingham, Dr. Gore has written and spoken much, and has defined his position more closely in relation to Anglo-Catholicism, to Church Reform, and to the social question.  It will be convenient to take these three heads separately.

This Bishop regards the excesses of the Ritualists as a deplorable but probably inevitable incident in a great movement.  He quotes Newman’s remonstrance against some hot-headed members of his adopted Church, who, ’having done their best to set the house on fire, leave to others the task of extinguishing the flames.’[26] But he reminds us that there has always been ‘intemperate zeal’ in the Church, from the time of St. Paul’s letters to the Church at Corinth to our own day.  ’It must needs be that offences come,’ wherever persons of limited wisdom are very much in earnest.  The remedy for extravagance is to give fair scope for the legitimate principle.  In the case of the so-called Ritualist movement, the inspiring principle or motive is easily found.  It is the idea of a visible Church, exercising lawful authority over its members.

This is the key to Bishop Gore’s whole position.  It rests on the conviction that Jesus Christ founded, and meant to found, a visible Church, an organised society.  It is reasonable, the Bishop says, to suppose that He did intend this, for it is only by becoming embodied in the convictions of a society, and informing its actions, that ideas have reality and power.  Christianity could never have lived if there had been no Christian Church.  And, from the first, Christians believed that this society, the Catholic Church, was not left to organise itself on any model which from time to time might seem to promise the best results, but was instituted from above, as a Divine ordinance, by the authority of Christ Himself.[27] The witness of the early Christian writers is unanimous that the conception of a visible Church was a prominent feature in the Christianity of the sub-apostolic age, and it is plain that the civil power suspected the Christians just because they were so well organised.  The Roman Empire was accustomed to tolerate superstitions, but it was part of her policy to repress collegia illicita.  The witness of the New Testament points in the same