The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward
page 77 of 585 (13%)
page 77 of 585 (13%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
Thus gradually, through ways direct and indirect, the intellectual story of the man revealed itself to the pure and sensitive mind of the girl. She divined his home and upbringing--his father an Evangelical soldier of the old school, a home imbued with the Puritan and Biblical ideas. She understood something of the struggle provoked--after his ordination, in a somewhat late maturity--by the uprising of the typical modern problems, historical, critical, scientific. She pieced together much that only came out incidentally as to the counsellors within the Church to whom he had gone in his first urgent distress--the Bishop whom he reverenced--his old teachers at Oxford--the new lights at Cambridge. And the card houses, the frail resting-places, thus built, it seemed, along the route, had lasted long; till at last a couple of small French books by a French priest and the sudden uprush of new life in the Roman Church had brought to the remote English clergyman at once the crystallization of doubt and the passion of a freed faith. "Modernism"--the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to refashion Christianity, not outside, but _inside_, the warm limits of the ancient churches--was born; and Richard Meynell became one of the first converts in England. "Ah, if your father had but lived!" he said at last, turning upon her with emotion. "He died his noble death twenty years ago--think of the difference between then and now! Then the Broad Church movement was at an end. All that seemed so hopeful, so full of new life in the seventies, had apparently died down. Stanley, John Richard Green, Hugh Pearson were dead, Jowett was an old man of seventy; Liberalism within the Church hardly seemed to breathe; the judgment in the Voysey case--as much a defiance of modern knowledge as any Papal encyclical--though |
|