[In the following excerpt, Stewart examines Ward's theological novels.]

There are few of [Mrs Ward's] books from which the religious interest is wholly absent, and there are at least five in which it may be said to predominate. Robert Elsmere is the best known, but in any such general survey we must not omit The History of David Grieve, Helbeck of Bannisdale, Eleanor, and The Case of Richard Meynell. The first point which calls for notice is one that all of these novels exhibit alike, and that constitutes a notable merit in the authoress when compared with many others who have imported speculations about faith into a work of fiction. We all know with tolerable exactness what Mrs Ward herself believed, or at least some things that she emphatically disbelieved. But her first concern was neither to proclaim what she thought true nor to repudiate what she thought false. The Evangelical school, the Broad school, the Romanising school—all pass before us in order, and if the writer's sole or even her chief object had been to take sides among them she would have deserved all the artistic censure that some quarterlies have bestowed upon her work. Her first desire was to enter with what St Paul called "charity" into the attitude of all candid souls who have set out, in however blundering a fashion, upon the great quest, to give all the credit that seemed to be their due, and to wean the angry disputants of each school not from the zeal that springs from conviction but from the bitterness that has its roots in misunderstanding. It would be too much to expect of anyone that this purpose should be achieved with perfect impartiality, and one can recall places where far less than equal justice has been done. For instance, George Eliot was at least as remote intellectually from Methodism as Mrs Ward can be, but the fervid Wesleyan must feel that sympathy is further from her perfect work in the hand which drew Mrs Fleming in Robert Elsmere, or the smithy prayer-meeting in David Grieve, than in the hand which gave us Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. The prejudices of temperament are hard to overcome, but we should be thankful to those who manage to overcome them as consistently as Mrs Ward has done, and thus set a pattern to that great number who do not even attempt to overcome them at all. On the whole she deserves the high eulogium passed upon her own Henry Grey, for she was sympathetic to "every genuine utterance of the spiritual life of man."

Again, while many others have introduced religious and anti-religious debate into a novel, she is one of a very few who have given us studies of cultured unbelief as it exists at the present time. We know how Dickens and Thackeray, for example, used to poke fun at the narrow evangelicals. Sam Weller in Pickwick, making his unseemly jests about Regeneration; Miss Murdstone in David Copperfield, rolling her dark eyes with delight over the congregation around her as often as the prayer-book mentioned "miserable sinners"; Miss Miggs in Barnaby Rudge, who hoped that she knew her own unworthiness and hated and despised herself as every good Christian should; Lady Emily in Vanity Fair, tying up her parcels of tracts, with mild exhortation for real ladies and warmer stuff about "The Frying Pan and the Fire" for the servants' hall such matter as this has become quite familiar, and can be produced, now that the pattern has been set, in almost any quantity by very indifferent artists. It is often very successful wit, but its fault lies in the absence of humour, that lack of a background in charity which our own sobered age increasingly demands, Charlotte Bronte used to keep up the fun at the expense of the High Church. Mr Wells never lets us rest from laughing at the formulae of "vindictive theologians." And Mr Winston Churchill—the American of that name—provides us in such books as The Inside of the Cup with most effective satire upon those who are zealots for dogma, but not zealots for the housing of the poor or the living wage. Mrs Ward's interest in religion was different. She was concerned with the state of mind of persons of culture, and although "culture" is an object of scorn just now to those who think it just the English word for Kultur, and keep themselves in readiness to explode the moment it is named, yet this is a misunderstanding which must soon pass away.

Mrs Ward spent her life in the atmosphere of the intellectuals; the university was her spiritual home; it is of the leaders of thought that she loved to write. She had the great advantage of personal acquaintance with literary and scientific men of wide celebrity, and it is their varying moods and attitudes towards religion which she has drawn with the most unerring hand. Taine, Edmond Scherer, Mark Pattison, Jowett, Walter Pater, and many others are made to pass before us in A Writer's Recollections by a critic who knew them well, and she has made us very much her debtors by helping us to know them too. Everyone must have been struck by her frequent allusions to two men, Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. The brilliant gifts of the former were enough to impress any keen receptive mind during the seventies, and we may well pardon the partiality of an admiring niece if Arnold's bons mots are treated by her as if they now formed part of the linguistic inheritance for all educated Englishmen. One may, perhaps, object that such phrases as "Barbarians, Philistines, Populace," "Hellenist and Hebraist," "Stream of tendency not ourselves that makes for righteousness" are not quite such universal counters of human thought as Mrs Ward seemed to assume, and not a few may be puzzled to find them used as if they came from Hamlet or Faust. So too we may smile at a writer who is still harking back for illustration to something that was done or said or felt by Renan, for the men of our own time have had many other teachers, and recognise many other landmarks as at least equally significant with the Vie de Jésus. But very few of those who grumble so were under the immediate influence of these magicians. Arnold and Renan were perhaps the two most original minds with which Mrs Ward in her youth was brought into close contact, and it is to her credit that she so appreciated each of them as to be unable afterwards to escape from the power of his personality.

The historic impulse which produced the first, and still the most famous, of her theological novels is quite apparent. In the five years from 1869 to 1873 Matthew Arnold made his well-known contribution to the great debate. The four books, Culture and Anarchy, St Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, form together a manifesto of humanitarian Christianity. No one who reads Robert Elsmere can mistake the source from which some of its most arresting features were drawn. The strange re-interpreting of St Paul on the Resurrection, the spiritualising of the words "risen with Christ," the breaking away from the "envelope of miracle," the dissolving of supernatural occurrences into mere clothing for moral ideas—for all these, if a chief inspiration was found in the Lay Sermons of Thomas Hill Green, it is no less the thought and often the very words of Arnold which persistently recur.

But at this stage Mrs Ward was also in somewhat sharp revolt against some of her distinguished uncle's positions. The hero of her book could find no satisfaction in the Broad Church. She quotes Renan's judgment that if the prophecies of Daniel have to be placed by criticism in the period of the Maccabees, there is no option for critics but a resolute schism. And she adds, curiously enough, that the Protestant "is in truth more bound to the book of Daniel than M. Renan." In those days Mrs Ward could see no place for religious compromise, depicted Elsmere as confronted with a situation which left no room for choice to an honest man, set before us in the proposals of the cynical squire on the one hand and the idealistic Oxford tutor on the other the great contrast between temporising disguise and resolute veracity. "It can't be said," declares Henry Grey, "that the Broad Church movement has helped us much. How greatly it promised! How little it has performed!"

In the sequel to Robert Elsmere, published more than twenty years afterwards under the name The Case of Richard Meynell, this attitude of bold secession is very suggestively modified. Meynell is a Modernist, but by no means willing to be in consequence a schismatic. He believes that the time is ripe for a new Reformation, and, though he thinks that this should be a Reformation from within, he is determined that it shall adopt no half-measures of timidity or concealment. Like Erasmus, he would move slowly, but he would not be so slow as to make no perceptible movement at all. If his movement fails he is prepared to be its victim, taking no refuge in the comfortable thought that Providence has bestowed upon him "no gift for martyrdom." But he is determined that, so far as lies in the power of himself and his friends, it is the orthodox resistance that shall be made to fail, and that the old historic Church of England, once more reformed, shall rise as she did three centuries ago to meet the new dawn.

Thus Meynell's case is that the so-called "orthodox" have no more right to expel Modernists than Modernists to expel the orthodox. If we defend the retention of the Roman cathedrals, though the English people had cast off Roman supremacy, why cannot we assert a similar ownership in the same fabrics if the supremacy of the Thirty-nine Articles has now to be repudiated. In the end this must no doubt be a trial of strength between parties, and the voice of the nation as a whole must decide. Hence arises Meynell's curious emphasising of the significant increase in the number of Modernists as compared with the days of Elsmere. Speaking to the daughter of that vigorous secessionist, he says: "All within the gates seemed lost. Your father went out into the wilderness, and there, amid everything that was poor and mean and new, he laid down his life. But we!—we are no longer alone, or helpless. The tide has come up to the stranded ship—the launching of it depends now only on the faithfulness of those within it."

Almost exactly equidistant in time of composition between Robert Elsmere and Richard Meynell came that fascinating pair of romances in which Mrs Ward gave us her study of the Church of Rome. Helbeck ofBannisdale appeared in 1898, Eleanor in 1900. If we trace our authoress's interest in the broader Anglieans to the stimulus imparted by her uncle, it may equally well have been filial piety which made her touch so delicate when she drew those in willing and glad subjection under the Roman obedience. Charles Hargrove, whose frequent changes of creed the editor of this Journal has lately been setting before us, is among the very few parallels one may quote to the chameleon-like religious career of the younger Thomas Arnold. That a son of the famous headmaster of Rugby should have begun as a disciple of his father, seceded in early manhood to the Church of Rome, swung over after a few years to Rationalism, and having remained there for a period should have made a fresh submission—not again to be recanted—to the Holy See, was by itself a sufficiently curious phenomenon to set any thoughtful mind upon the task of its unravelling.

In Helbeck ofBannisdale Mrs Ward has given us a psychological picture of an old Catholic household, whose representative is a man of the finest feeling, torn between the promptings of human nature and what he takes to be the inexorable obligations of his religion, preserving in a hostile neighbourhood the loyalty of his mistaken creed, and struggling in vain to reconcile his duties towards the true faith with an attachment he has formed, in spite of himself, to a girl who is, alas! among the "sinners of the Gentiles." Eleanor has its scene laid in Italy, the Italy that had just passed through the period of hot contention between the papal power and the national movement, and makes us realise with great vividness the two sides—the party of Pius IX. and the party of Victor Emmanuel; but to many of us the most important interest of the book centres round the case of Father Benecke, who has published a book about the Church and her history which is condemned by Propaganda. Shall he recant and escape deprivation? Or stand firm, and be a martyr? Father Benecke's dilemma, like that of Elsmere and Helbeck, brings home to us the everlasting issue between the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future.

Mr. G. W. E. Russell declared that, so far as he knew, the Rev. Robert Elsmere was the only human being whose religious faith had been shattered by the discovery that "miracles do not happen." "That long-legged weakling," wrote Mr Russell, "with his auburn hair and 'boyish innocence of mood' and sweet ignorance of the wicked world went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany."

Probably this is, on the whole, the most inept comment that was made by any critic upon the hero of Mrs Ward's great novel. Whether religious faith is, or is not, bound up with acceptance of the miraculous, is a matter upon which there is fair ground for difference of opinion, and the present writer at least is in thorough agreement with what he takes to be Mr Russell's view upon it. It may be conceded, too, that Elsmere after his ordination was curiously unacquainted, for a man of his training and powers, with the trend of modern unbelief. But it is absurd to suggest that he is an unintelligible or even a very unusual type, and that he is not—as the dramatic critics say—"psychologically convincing." He presents no greater problem than, for example, the Rev. James Anthony Froude at the time when he wrote The Nemesis of Faith. There is not the least doubt that many men, brought up to Holy Orders in the Oxford of forty years ago, were similarly immune from the infection of the Zeitgeist. No one who is in the least familiar with the moods of the theological student of our own time has the least difficulty in recognising Elsmere's distress, and most of us could quote parallels from men whom we have personally known.

The reason is obvious. To many—perhaps to the greater number of Christians—the whole fabric of faith stands as a solid system of which no part can be invalidated without invalidating the rest. That which, so far as Mr Russell was aware, had never occurred in the experience of any human being except "a character in a popular work of fiction" has, as others are well aware, occurred historically again and again, when religious faith has been shattered by discoveries about the antiquity of the earth, the dimensions of stellar space, the evolution of species, and the higher criticism of scripture. In all these cases the rule falsus in unofalsus in omnibus was applied, to the immense dislocation of fixed beliefs, and it was the principle of a supernatural—or a miraculous—revelation which was on each occasion held to have been overthrown. The inference may have been exaggerated, or it may have been wholly wrong; but there is no doubt of its occurrence as a fact of religious psychology. It is no failure of insight into the moods of the human mind which we can justly charge against Mrs Ward, for the verisimilitude of her characters—Roman, High Anglican, Broad Anglican, and Agnostic—is well-nigh perfect.

It may be argued with far greater force against her, as Gladstone and many others argued, that the prestige of learning and intellect are by no means so exclusively on the side of her own school as she has tried to suggest. And it may be maintained that she has undertaken far more than she can effect in trying to find the essence of Christianity in Thomas Hill Green. But these discussions would carry us much too far. What I wish to consider is her proposed practical solution of the issue about Modernism as she has set it forth in The Case of Richard Meynell. Here she touched the newest and most urgent problem of our own time, and revealed, I think, the most vulnerable side in her whole programme for the future of the Church.

Some historian will yet be much interested in that singular alliance between Freethought and Erastianism of which Mrs Ward in her latest phase was so striking a representative. It is significant that in matters of Church Reform she again and again appealed to "England" as the ultimate authority, and one cannot help feeling that she had often in mind Reformers not so much like John Knox as like Henry VIII. The national Church, she kept reminding us, is a national possession, with its cathedrals, its ecclesiastical fabrics of every kind, its endowments—its "plant," as she occasionally, breaking into the vernacular of commerce, rather startles us by summing the matter up. Her idea seemed to be that just as state machinery, provided from the public purse, must not be monopolised by the interests of a single class, so the spiritual organisation is in essence a public affair, and must be wide enough to allow a home to men of every Christian faith. Why it should thus be limited to those whose attitude is Christian, or whether she would set any limits at all, Mrs Ward did not make quite clear. She did not meet such embarrassing proposals as that of Mr Ronald Knox in Reunion All Round, or such dilemmas as are set in A Spiritual 4.neid. "For the life of me," says Mr Knox, "I could never see why we had to regret being out of communion with a good man like Dr Horton, more than being out of communion with a good man like Professor Gilbert Murray, who repudiates Theism."

Perhaps the most extraordinary position taken up by Richard Meynell is that the High Churchman ought to be as willing to tolerate the Broad as the Broad is to tolerate the High. For what this really means is that, while the Broad keeps his own view, the High ought either to become Broad or at least to act as if he had become so. The demand for tolerance is by no means identical as applied to each of these two parties. Rather, one is forced to say, must the orthodox be driven to exclusiveness by the very same logic which drives the liberal to charity. Those to whom dogma is comparatively indifferent may, and indeed must, adopt a generous attitude towards those whose honest beliefs they cannot themselves share. But men to whom dogma is essential cannot without absurdity be other than unbending towards men who preach that creeds are a matter of ceaseless change. The Modernist can remain in the Church undisturbed by the fact that his brother in the next parish imposes penances, pronounces absolution, and reserves the sacrament; for, although he does not himself approve such doings, he does not think of them as endangering souls in another world, or of the communion of saints as fundamentally vitiated by these divergences of practice. But the sacerdotalist cannot in the same way look on without fierce protest while his neighbour in Holy Orders is teaching that belief in the miraculous is superstition, that there was no Virgin Birth, and that the Tomb at Jerusalem did not on the third day yield up the body of the Lord; for he does not simply dissent from all this as a lamentable error of judgment: he regards it as a blasphemy, and a mood of complaisant indulgence for peace's sake towards those who commit it is, for him, denying his Lord before men.

I speak of this with all the more vigour because I do not share in any degree most of the objections which the orthodox level against Modernism. Perhaps, however, I understand them all the better just because of some very real objections with which I wholly sympathise against the presence of certain so-called Modernists, and because the principle involved appears to be the same. From time to time we have to hear or read sermons in which, for example, the notion of "subjective immortality" is insinuated, elegant Emersonian scorn is poured upon those—generally psychic researchers—who dare to take the survival of man as a genuine and perhaps even a verifiable fact, and the idea of evil as a mere negation of good or a necessary form of finitude is played with under some such nonsensical phrase as "supra-moral sphere." Are we to pretend that the Christian Church should make room for incoherences like these? And, if not, is our revolt different in kind from that which inspires the Anglo-Catholic to cut himself loose from association with Modernists in general! Are not the yearly secessions to Rome, however deeply we may deplore the fact that men feel driven to make them, thus the tokens of both clear-sighted and resolute candour? Aptly indeed from his own point of view may the High Churchman find a parallel to this theological issue in that old affiliation case tried before Solomon, and see men like Meynell typified by the latitudinarian mother who cried out, "Let it be neither mine nor thine, but let us divide it." And, though we may think that his point of view is wrong, we cannot fairly reproach him for acting upon the situation as he sees it, or set him in discreditable contrast with those who act differently because they see differently. The present writer, Modernist as he is in his own sympathies to an extent by which many evangelicals would be appalled, cannot acquiesce in this programme of easy-going complaisance for those to whom it would mean a denial of truth. Not thus shall the new Reformation be achieved. The coming change must involve no disguises, for the thing at stake is too momentous. Perhaps the Church should be divided in two, but where the differences are radical the division must be radical. Those within her pale who believe, however erroneously, that saving truth lies in rigid dogma, should not be browbeaten in the name of toleration into taking liberties with that which—as they hold—is not theirs to compromise. The stigma of narrowness is not to be expunged by the mop of prevarication.

One might point out, as further illustrating this tendency in Mrs Ward, how the spirit of revolt which has been so conspicuous in her theological novels is moderated into an enthusiasm for what Lord Eldon called the "wisdom of our ancestors" when she deals with problems of government. No one will be surprised, or at any loss to guess the reason, when he finds in A Writer's Recollections such grateful adoration of Mr Kipling and such nasty resentment towards Mr Wells. Some of us feel that old church tradition deserves at least as respectful a treatment as old political usages, that ecclesiastical authority is not more open to reproach than the prestige of an hereditary ruling class, and that there are dogmas about imperialism not less obsolete in the living thought of our new world than any dogmas of old theology. But Mrs Ward's mind was curiously blended—half conservative and half liberal,—and to those who, like England herself, "love not coalitions," this sort of compromise is far from satisfactory. It is not, indeed, uncommon in cultivated circles. Like many others, this novelist was a very orthodox aristocrat, though a quite unorthodox theologian. Robust rationalism in dealing with religious tenets can easily make its peace with a tenacious traditionalism in one's theory of the State, so that the abuse of radical politicians in Marcella and of the suffragettes in Delia Blanchflower gives willing place to a quite different tone when the radicals are causing upheaval of the Church in Richard Meynell or an Italian countess is plunging into political discussion against Pio Nono in Eleanor. The Germans, as Dr Sarolea has aptly remarked, used to combine great freedom of thought about the divinity of Christ with a docile subservience to the divine right of their Kaiser. Imperialistic politics almost everywhere can be cherished by some side by side with the most vigorous spirit of theological anarchy. And although I mean nothing so offensive or so absurd as a likening of Mrs Ward to German exponents both of religious agnosticism and of earthly Realpolitik, I cannot refrain from noticing that the liberal trend of her thought was restrained by some astonishing limits. Inconsistency, however, is a poor charge in these days when our world has been shaken to its base, and we have much ground for thankfulness to this writer of fiction for at least some healthy ethical conventionalism. As we think, for instance, of the abyss of immoral nonsense into which the sex novel so often degenerates, even those pious folk who have been most shocked by Robert Elsmere must not forget what they owe to the authoress of Daphne and The Marriage of William Ashe.

There are many others too who in these times of religious disturbance are "wandering between two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born." Few have been able to present this state of mind with even a tithe of the vividness and strength with which this novelist has set it before us.…

[Mrs Ward] was in error, I think, in supposing that the path of progress now lies in any other direction than that in which it has always lain, that fundamental discords can with advantage be superficially disguised, or that truth will be furthered by minimising rather than by intensifying the "clash of Yes and No."

Herbert L. Stewart, "Mrs. Humphry Ward and the Theological Novel, "in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, July, 1920, pp. 675-86.