CHAPTER XIV

ST. WILFRED AND ST. CHAD

MARK's way of dealing with a lewd busybody did his church some disservice by attracting a good deal of public attention to it after he had been summoned and fined for assault. Mark's victim, Frederick Swatton by name, hired a room within the confines of the parish and attempted to interfere with the procession of the Host through the open streets on the feast of Corpus Christi. He was dealt with less forcibly on this occasion, whereupon he applied to the magistrate for a warrant for a breach of the King's peace against the whole body of clergy attached to St. Chad's. On this being refused he raked together a number of putative malcontents, who were indeed parishioners but had no claims to be called worshippers at St. Chad's, and presented a petition to the Bishop against Roman abuses. The chief supporters of Mr. Swatton were a chemist close to Victoria station, who sold more of ergot and pennyroyal than any other drugs, and the keeper of a brothel, against whom Hett had stirred up the police to take action.

The Bishop felt bound to observe that any celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in the Church of England was unwarranted, and as for celebrating it by carrying the Host under a red umbrella round the streets of Pimlico, that seemed to him quite inexcusable and likely to be the cause of most painful scenes of irreverence. No, he was not paying the least attention to the petition addressed to him by discontented parishioners. The chief organizers of that petition might be everything of which Mr. Whitmore accused them, but that had nothing to do with the case. He must extort from Mr. Whitmore a most solemn promise never to permit such a procession to take place again. He had done all that he could to be

sympathetic with Mr. Whitmore's methods. He had, against his own better judgment, allowed him to reserve the Blessed Sacrament exclusively for the use of the sick; but the notion of carrying it round in procession was repugnant to him; yes, It was indeed most painfully repugnant, and while sincerely anxious to do everything he possibly could to help Mr. Whitmore in his work, he felt inexpressibly shocked by what had occurred.

No sooner had the fuss over the Corpus Christi procession subsided than Hett, strongly supported by Cumberbatch, persuaded Whitmore to hold the Quarant'ore.

"I've looked up ve Instructio Clementina," Cumberbatch announced with gusto. "And I fink we can do it splendidly. I'll make all ve necessary arrangements for ve relays of watchers. No women are allowed inside ve church all night, and at least twenty candles must be kept burning all ve time."

The Exposition took place with Mass of Exposition at the beginning and Mass of Deposition at the close, and in the middle a votive Mass of the Most Holy Sacrament. Nothing was wanting of outward correctness, and yet there was nobody who did not feel that it had not possessed the spiritual appeal that it ought to have possessed. Something had been wrong.

It was the first time that Mark had experienced this particular malaise of mind in regard to any service at the altar. When he first came to London he had chosen as his director the Vicar of All Souls', Haymarket, who besides being a man of the saintliest life and the profoundest scholarship, was generally recognized as the leader of the Catholic party among the clerics of the Church of England; in whose doctrine and belief not the most advanced member of that party could find a flaw; and yet who, by his prudence, gravity, and common sense had been able to influence the episcopate as no Catholic priest had been able to influence it during the last twenty years to sympathize with the aspirations of the individual priest toward the perfection of sacramental teaching and practice. To him soon after the Quarant'ore Mark went to confession, in the course of which he accused himself of a lack of faith in regard to the Exposition. On being

questioned more closely by Canon Warrilow he was inclined to substitute a lack of hope for a lack of faith.

"I had one of those attacks of despair," he said. "An almost unbearable sense of the futility of it all."

Canon Warrilow suggested that he might have been overworking himself lately, and before Mark could deny this said quickly that though personally he should derive from an Exposition nothing but the greatest spiritual help, he did feel that the way such devotions had to be carried on in the present condition of the English Church militated very greatly against the intention of those who introduced them.

"I should be the last," he said, "to undervalue in any way the work of pioneers, but I cannot help feeling that the consciousness of doing something rather daring, something that is almost flouting and defiant, must detract from the spirit of pure devotion which could be the only justification for such a service. You used to be worried by Mr. Moxon-Hughes's mediæval effects, because they savoured of play-acting. Did not-mind you, I make this suggestion with the utmost diffidence-did not your Forty Hours' Exposition at St. Chad's possibly affect you slightly, very slightly in the same way?"

"But Benediction doesn't," Mark said. "And Benediction is regarded as an unwarrantable innovation by the whole of the Anglican episcopate. Yet I am profoundly convinced of its incalculable benefit, especially in a church where the congregation chiefly consists of poor people."

"I am entirely at one with you about that benefit. But wouldn't you feel happier in giving Benediction if you had episcopal sanction? You must remember that among the Romans the episcopal licence is necessary to use a monstrance. I don't feel that it's really possible to argue that one is entitled to defy one's bishop over Benediction."

"Yes, I should feel happier if it were sanctioned," Mark admitted. "But I can't agree with you that the episcopal licence required by Roman parish churches is comparable. I presume that such a licence is necessary to guard against any possible competition with Mass.

But you cannot pretend that any Anglican bishop would object to Benediction on those grounds."

"Well, I don't think it's advisable to argue that point at the present moment. I cannot help feeling that you want a rest. You have been working very hard. Wouldn't it be possible for you to have a kind of rest by taking up some work for a few months in the country? Why not go home for a while and help Mr. Ogilvie?"

His director was only giving expression to an idea that had been in Mark's own head for several weeks now; but he had a dread of giving way even temporarily to what seemed a weakness of the spirit, and he insisted that his depression was due to nothing more than the hot weather.

The strife between St. Chad's and the Bishop began again, and presently Benediction was laid under an episcopal interdict. Whitmore called a meeting of his clergy and churchwardens to decide upon their attitude. Was it to be defiance? Would the Bishop venture to proceed against such a powerful centre of Catholic work as St. Chad's? Letters were written to various dear brothers all over England. Intrigues were set on foot to get round the Bishop. Drogo Mortemer of St. Cyprian's rushed from clergy-house to clergy-house in a taxi. Canon Warrilow journeyed up to Oxford to consult with the most influential priest at Keble House. Father Waterlow, S.S.J. E., journeyed down from Oxford to go carefully into the whole question from the point of view of liturgical authority. Seventeen unbeneficed clergy representing Anglo-Catholic opinion all over the United Kingdom presented a grand remonstrance to the Church Times. Lord Hull was in perpetual consultation. Five prominent members of the C.B.S. demanded that the Confraternity should issue an official pronouncement whether the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament did or did not affirm the doctrinal utility of Benediction. Moxon-Hughes brought out a pamphlet asserting that liturgical services had practically vanished, and that the old seasons of the Christian year so deeply beloved in England before the Reformation were gradually losing their importance. Lent was turned into the month of

Joseph; Christmas was dislocated by the Immaculate Conception; Easter was upset by the Month of Mary; and Whitsuntide had been swallowed up in the Sacred Heart. At this rate the Holy Mass would soon be displaced by Benediction. Several High Church divines wrote and proclaimed their firm conviction that they were second to none in true Catholicity, but was Benediction apostolic? Was there any authority for it in St. Paul's epistles, or even in St. Irenæus? And several Broad Church divines took the opportunity to ask why, when it was becoming every day more difficult for the educated modern man to believe in either the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of the Body, or even in view of the grave difficulty about the Fourth Gospel for him to feel quite sure from his study of the synoptic gospels that Jesus Christ ever believed himself to be God, the educated modern man should be affronted by a return to the degraded materialism of scholastic superstition. Whereupon several Low Church divines wrote to say that, while repudiating the abominable suggestion that Jesus Christ was not Very God, they repudiated with equal vigour the insult offered to His Godhead by the so-called "Anglo-Catholics" in trying to undo the work of the Reformation. The lay press could not understand what all the fuss was about. It seemed to them extraordinary that clergymen could possibly attach so much importance to forms and ceremonies. The only hope for Christianity was for all Christians to give up quarrelling and reunite, and meanwhile could anything be more dastardly than the conduct of the present Government or more ruffianly than the manoeuvres of the Opposition or more atrocious than the behaviour of the Labour party, according to the politics of the paper that was lecturing what it called "The Churches."

And then upon all this clatter and chatter of contentious opinion the oblivion of August scattered her poppies.

"Well, it's to be hoped we shall be allowed to keep ve Assumption in peace and quiet," said Cumberbatch. "Faver Whitmore tells me vat nuffing need be decided one way or ve uvver till ve middle of September."

"And I'm going off for my holiday on the sixteenth," Mark announced.