Friends of Lambeth Library - 19/07/07

A portrait of Tait broods over the main office at the Old Deanery of St Paul’s, where he would be surprised to find his successor living. The date is 1868. After more than a decade of exhausting work in London, he is leaning on a red cushion, toying with his academic square and wearing an expression which suggests that “all is vanity”.

Who could fail to sympathise with his personal tragedy, the loss of five daughters from scarlet fever when he was Dean of Carlisle and later, when Archbishop of Canterbury, the death of his only son, Craufurd, only shortly after his institution at St John’s Notting Hill.

The story of the Taits’ domestic affliction is well known. But this afternoon we turn to another side of Tait’s character, less familiar and one which prompted Disraeli to detect in him a strange streak of enthusiasm – enthusiasm which he reminded Queen Victoria was undesirable both in an Archbishop of Canterbury and in a Prime Minister. Tait himself rejected this assessment. Dean Lake remembers him saying laughingly that he respected an enthusiast “all the more because I could never possibly be one myself”. His special hero in the English Church was Archbishop Tillotson who was wont to say that stirring up men’s passions was like the muddying of the waters – you see nothing clearly afterwards. But we shall see what evidence Disraeli had for his contention as we contemplate Tait the missionary.

Tait’s Diary, Wednesday, September 17th 1856

“I have this morning received a letter from Lord Palmerston saying that he has the Queen’s command to offer me the See of London. I am now [11 am] about to take an hour of prayer….That I may not act rashly seeing that I have no doubt of accepting the offer.”

He was consecrated in the Chapel Royal in November. The Chapel Royal is modest in size and Tait was consecrated with the Bishop elect of Grahamstown so few were present to hear the preacher laud the comprehensiveness of the Church of England and describe the challenge posed by the growing “secularism” of the great towns. The word “secularism” was just coming into vogue and the preacher used it with an apology.

Both these themes resonated with Tait. He was in many ways a layman’s bishop and was sometimes accused in his London days of neglecting administration for the evangelistic task which was reckoned to be more the province of the inferior clergy.

He inherited a church building strategy from his predecessor Charles James Blomfield who worked on the understandable assumption that the burgeoning population of London should be matched by new churches. Churches should be multiplied, said Blomfield so as “to bring home to the very doors and hearths of the most ignorant and neglected of the population the ordinances, the solemnities, the decencies and the charities of our Apostolical Church”. It was a paternal version of a socially inclusive policy.

But for Blomfield the encouragement of anything like mission preaching, outdoor services or other “irregular” efforts smacked of Methodism and were anathema. Save for one occasion he never preached an unwritten sermon and certainly in his earlier days disapproved of weekday addresses. Tait followed a dramatically different strategy in the very first full year of his episcopate, 1857.

Never was Britain a more overtly religious country than at this time. Contemporaries might soon be agonising about the receding tide on Dover beach. We marvel at the flood of energy and the building spate which created a symbolic landscape in London in which the Christian faith in its many varieties was unignorable. Even railway termini were built in tune with the premier ecclesiastical styles of the times.

Probably too many churches were built. Blomfield himself consecrated 198. This aspect of his ministry, I know very well since one of the challenges of being any bishop and perhaps especially the Bishop of London is that you not only have to fulfil your own diary but much of your predecessors as well. Every year there is a fresh crop of anniversaries which cause me to contemplate the astonishing activity of Bishop Blomfield. Now in celebrating 150th anniversaries, I have reached Tait’s era and I know that although he thought that church extension as an exclusive strategy was deficient, nevertheless he was still at work opening new ones.

By contrast of course in our own time the Christian reference is being brushed out and the new buildings which dominate the symbolic landscape celebrate the triumph of priapic capitalism. Stories of giant mosques affright the Anglican faithful who are too timid to robe their own faith and love in stone. Is Christianity to be the only love that dare not tell its name? I am thinking of one church in my Diocese built in the last few years to blend in with a row of shops so successfully that even when you know its whereabouts in theory, you still miss the entrance which is as obscure as a secret doorway in Harry Potter. What are we going to do about the new village and communications hub at Kings Cross - St Pancras? It will be a new terrestrial Heathrow. Watch this very large space.

Despite the evidence of extraordinary and confessedly competitive Christian exertions, Tait and some of his contemporaries were seized with the urgency of developing a “go to them” strategy to complement the invitation to “come to us” in the freshly sown acres of pitch pine pews.

The Victorian fervour for statistics both fuelled the anxiety and informed the response. In 1851 a religious census was undertaken separately from the decennial census. Attendances were counted on Sunday March 30th. When the Report finally appeared over two years later in 1854, it was best seller. 21,000 copies were sold and it has created great confusion ever since. For one thing “attendances” were not clearly distinguished from individual persons.

But some things were obvious. Large numbers of people stayed at home and of those who attended a place of Christian worship that Sunday, less than half went to Church of England services. England was third in the churchgoing league with Wales first and Scotland second.

There was shock in the Established Church and this has sometimes blinded subsequent generations to the fact that about 25% of the entire population of England did attend a Church of England service on that Sunday in 1851. Comparison with other times and places make this a remarkable result. The Church of England had become a voluntary organisation and not a quasi comprehensive national one but still it was widely distributed and had four times as many attendances than the next largest group - the Wesleyans.

Up to 1840 the growth of Dissent outstripped the growth of population. In the period which interests us this afternoon the growth of Dissent balanced the increase in population. Then the growth fell behind, although the peak years in terms of absolute numbers were still in the future in Edwardian England.

Dissenters were however notably fissiparous and as Sir Thomas Brown remarked, “they are complexionally propense to schism and by degrees will mince themselves into atoms”. Even though it was very small and only founded in 1838, one dissenting group with a presence in the Diocese, “The Peculiar People of Kent and Essex”, was racked with ferocious debates about the interpretation of James V: 14 and its implications for the proper Christian attitude to orthodox medicine. These debates generated yet further splits.

The Church of England against this background experienced a remarkable period of recovery and not least in the Diocese of London. Increasing suburbanisation created a demand for the establishment mix of social cachet, dignified worship and theological variety.

Tait’s focus however was not so much on the new prosperous areas as on the “labouring poor”. Souls were to be saved not only from Satan but more immediately from violent revolution. In the spring and summer of 1857 he began preaching in the streets. The diary reveals him leaving the House of Lords to preach to a ship’s company of emigrants in the Docks. He goes from Convocation to speak to the Ragged School children in Golden Lane and then he preached to costers in Covent Garden; to railway porters from the footplate of a locomotive; to a colony of gypsies in their camp on Shepherds Bush Common.

This scandalised those who distrusted “enthusiasm” and one critic inveighed against “the Bishop’s undignified and almost Methodist proceedings”.

The 1850’s were a time of pan denominational evangelical solidarity. Tait was a supporter of forging closer alliances between Protestants across denominational boundaries although enthusiasm for this early bout of ecumenism waned after the triumphalistic way in which the Dissenters celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Great Ejectment in 1862. The next significant anniversary of this event, the 350th, falls of course in 2012 but it may be overshadowed by other preoccupations.

All was still well in 1857, however, when in alliance with Lord Shaftesbury, Tait supported a new campaign to hold Sunday evening evangelistic services in the Exeter Hall, a great Victorian Conference venue on the north side of the Strand, notable for its religious gatherings and described by Punch, tongue in cheek, as “an amulet around the neck of wicked London”. They were a great success but provoked the ire of those who pined for the days before the opening up of free trade in religion. The local incumbent attempted - unsuccessfully and despite the Bishop’s support for the venture - to veto the whole exercise.

Nothing daunted, the Bishop next set about opening up Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral to evening services. Dean Trench of Westminster was sympathetic and the first evening service was held in the presence of an overflowing congregation in January 1858.

Dean Milman was harder to convince. He complained about the expense of such a project and the absence of a fabric fund. The bishop himself raised the money for an experimental service. At last on Advent Sunday 1858, the space under the dome was opened and provided with 2,500 chairs. The bishop was the preacher and every seat was taken an hour before the service was due to begin. Ludgate Hill was blocked and newspapers variously estimated the numbers that had to be turned away from 10 – 100 thousand. The services continued throughout the winter but the Dean and Chapter declined to prolong them into the spring and the experiment was not repeated for many years.
This disappointment lay in the future when on November 17th 1858, two years after his consecration, Tait delivered his primary charge under the Dome of St Paul’s to the Church throughout London. The charge runs to more than 120 pages in the printed version and took nearly five hours to deliver. Davidson and Benham in their great “Life of Archbishop Tait” record that “Eyewitnesses have often described how the short November Day sank into twilight, then into darkness and still in clear quiet earnest tones he went on, the only object visible in the great building [for the dome was then unlighted], turning his pages by the light of two small lamps upon the temporary desk from which he spoke.”

Soon afterwards the bishop was carried off to the seaside for convalescence.

Some of the themes of the Primary Charge are only too familiar to any modern bishop. There is concern about the inadequacy of clergy remuneration and “the nature and the amount of funds by which our places of worship are maintained in due repair”. As Chairman of the Church Buildings Division I am still wrestling with this major problem greatly exacerbated by the exuberance with which the Victorians built churches which are now rather past their “sell-by” date.

As to clergy remuneration, matters had deteriorated in London because of the reduction in burial fees consequent on the closure of church yards. St Giles in the Fields was especially hard hit.

There were even more serious spiritual challenges and in particular, “the subtle progress of an intellectual infidelity”. Barely a year was to pass after this remark before the publication of Darwin’s seminal book. There were also the seductions of Rome which Tait described as “the subtle adversary”. His ecumenical enthusiasm did not extend to Rome and within the Church of England in the Diocese he was alarmed by the disruptive effects of what he termed “excessive ritualism”. He also testified to his aversion from any systematic invitation to auricular confession. This anxiety was reinforced by the escalating crisis at St George in the East where rioting broke out the following year as an unsavoury crew sought to disrupt ritualistic services. The front door of the recently restored Hawksmoor Vicarage reinforced with an iron plate is a reminder of those violent days when mobs could be ignited by the slightest liturgical innovation.

The population of the Diocese in 1858 was 2,422,300, [about a million less than now although its extent was vastly greater] and there were 885 licensed pastors. Clearly more clergy were needed and better trained.

Tait was not disposed however to lower the academic standards, – “it is a favourite theory with some in the present day that we need a lower order of clergymen of a more homely type with less of Latin and Greek. For my own part I totally disbelieve in this theory: learning and refinement will never stand in a pastor’s way if he adds higher qualities.”

His mission strategy was clear. “Overgrown parishes” should be reduced to “manageable dimensions” and “every five or six thousand persons in the metropolis have a church of their own as the centre of their religious activity, and a pastor of their own, with his legitimate endowment and means to support his curates.”

One topic to which contemporaries gave perhaps excessive attention was that of pew rents. They constituted a very significant part of the income of many incumbents and led to pews being regarded as a species of private property and thus not available, even when unoccupied, to accommodate poorer neighbours.

But Tait recognised that even if the pew problem were solved - “you may invite your people-you may have clergy for them-but what if they will not come?”

He described what had already been achieved by the Diocesan Home Mission. This enterprise had been founded as a result of a meeting early in 1857 of the incumbents of the most populous areas “for adding somewhat of a missionary machinery to our ordinary parochial work.”

When I became Bishop of London, I did of course know about Tait’s personal story and something about the difficulties he faced during his tenure at Lambeth but nothing abut his forward mission strategy for London.

In the nineteen nineties it was obvious that the Church of England was becoming more and more disconnected from the people of England. I had daily experience visiting the parishes which Blomfield and Tait had established of how wide the gap had become. In Islington entering a church in my purple cassock and silver topped shepherd’s crook inherited from Bishop Winnington Ingram, I encountered a young lad with a fresh expression of a non ecclesiastical kind. “Who are you?” he said. I know enough abut modern teaching to know that you never answer questions – you lead the student to the discovery of fuller knowledge by posing a counter question. I pointed to my shepherd’s crook with its great silver hook and said, “If you can think what this is, you will probably work out, for whom I work.” He looked baffled and then brightened up and said triumphantly, “I know who you are – you’re the Grim Reaper”.

Meanwhile we were fidgeting abut in-house matters like liturgy and structures of governance and there was an elaboration of defensive bureaucracy. There was supposed to be a decade of evangelism but with notable exceptions there was an air of introspection and denial.

We have a skilled and dedicated administration at national and diocesan level, we have many well run parishes but it is clear that we need to complement the administration and our established parochial communities with a campaigning mentality and “machinery” to use one of Tait’s favourite words.

Financially however we are organised to maintain what exists rather than to take advantage of new opportunities.

In the 19th century the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were an agent of reform diverting resources to enable the Church to make additional provision for “the cure of souls in parishes in most need of assistance in such manner as shall be deemed most conducive to the efficiency of the Established Church”. The report of the task group which this year reviewed the spending plans of the Church Commissioners suggested that “this reforming position has not been given enough weight in comparison with what has been done to maintain provision where it already exists”.

At this point I want to spell out the essential message of this talk. Fascinating as it may be, it is not entirely my intention to retail gossip from the muniment room. The study of church history does not of course yield any simplistic lessons that can be directly applied in very different circumstances, but it is still immensely suggestive. The study of church history often exposes the poverty of our analyses of the challenges and opportunities we face. It encourages us to enlarge the range of the questions we put to the evidence. It dispels any notion of inevitabilities; that things are as they are and cannot be different. The study of Church History liberates us from mind cramping contemporary orthodoxies and both indicates the scope for choice and the need to make choices and not simply to drift, lacking urgency and unaware that things could be different. Knowledge of our story also makes for deeper humility and rescues us from the endemic short-termism of the present day. As Acting Chairman of the Commissioners for example I have it found it very instructive to study the story in a way that has shone light on some of the decisions we have made and reveals them to have been made only semi consciously.

For Tait the primary challenge was the care of “the labouring poor” who take their views of life from “newspapers of the most doubtful class and the conversation of their fellows in the alehouse”. He admitted that they could hardly be induced to enter into “the lengthened and highly spiritual services of our usual worship”.

He concluded that “The parochial system standing quite alone is unable to meet many other wants of our complicated and highly artificial state of society.” “Mission Shaped Church”, the report on “fresh expressions of church” has been very liberating in our own day. I believe that the debate would be even richer if we clearly recognised the extent to which the mid- Victorian Church was on the same tack certainly in the Diocese of London.

Far from being too proud to learn from the Methodists, Tait recalls in his Charge the memory of the excitement raised “in a quiet and dull place by the gathering of the Methodists in a fine summer’s day on the common under the shadow of the old trees”. That was a reminiscence of his curacy in Marsh Baldon in Oxfordshire which students from Cuddesdon in my day also used to visit.

He reported that the time was past when the Church of England could be said to be dying of its dignity. The Diocesan Home Mission in the previous year had both financed and organised services for the labouring poor while the first “missionary curate” had been appointed for Whitechapel and Spitalfields. He was to be the first of many missionary curates, some of whom I suppose we would call “sector ministers” like the chaplain appointed to look after the 80,000 strong community of Hansom Cab drivers and their families.

To achieve these large aims Tait called for “a combination of the whole Diocese”. It is still a challenge. Theologically speaking the “local church” both in patristic times and in the Anglican tradition is located in the Diocese but in popular sentiment the truth is frequently otherwise and this enfeebles the Church’s ability to engage with constituencies, structures and communities which transcend parochial boundaries. Blomfield and Tait were in the forefront of what Arthur Burns has called the “Diocesan Revival” but we still have a way to travel.

The resemblances between the challenges confronting the church in London in 1857 and now are uncanny. One of the first things I had to deal with on entering office was a plan to reduce the expense and increase the missionary effectiveness of the City Churches. Tait also had plans for the City Churches before him which had been prepared for Bishop Blomfield. These plans he suggested were – “perhaps somewhat too sanguine in their expectations and rather rashly devised.” Any way the City Churches are still with us and experiencing thanks to modern communications, a renaissance.

Constrained by a financial structure which gave little scope for new work, I decided that we should establish a “Bishop of London’s Mission Fund” and it was at this point that I discovered for the first time how closely I had been following in Tait’s footsteps. Unknown to me he had established a fund with precisely the same name as a result of an appeal in 1863.

A meeting of leading laymen in May 1863 decided on an appeal to produce £100,000 per annum and so £1 million in ten years. It was to be expended on the clear basis of certain “standards” There was to be one clergyman for every 2,000 parishioners and church room for one in four of the population.

The response was generous and it is instructive to compare what Tait was able to do with our own performance as fund raisers. The Marquis of Westminster gave a princely £10,000. Truman Hanbury the brewers gave £1,000 and William Gibbs £1,000. It is pleasant to record that descendants of these three donors are still active in support of the Diocese and troubling to reflect on our relative lack of success in gaining the support of new wealth. There were also a myriad of more modest donations down to Lady Caroline Charteris who subscribed a guinea a year.

Fund raising is a salutary discipline. It poses in a sharp way the question of whether we are offering what our contemporaries require of us. There is in the Tait papers in the library an 1864 letter from a London Clergyman who sensibly points out that there had to be a pruning of the ecclesiastical tree and that the laity would not be convinced unless the church exhibits “a more quick and living aspect than would seem at present to be its character.”

The Church of England survived the 19th century greatly strengthened and it has survived into our own day as the most disestablished, established church in Europe.

The Church lost its role as schoolmaster to the nation but it flourished in the busy free market in religion that was established. These conditions led to the co-existence of a large variety of Christian traditions. Puritans, pietists, prelatists and papists had all at one or another time hankered after a religious monopoly. All failed and the way was opened to a state of religious pluralism in which it was not necessary as it was in the countries where one church or another had secured dominance to embrace atheism as a integral part of opposing the economic and social status quo. The phenomenon of large left wing, specifically anti clerical and even atheist political parties so much a part of the recent political history of Continental Europe has not been a part of the British experience. At no point in its history for example has the British Communist Party ever equalled the membership of the Lord’s Day Observance Society.

It was as part of a free market that there was an astonishing recovery both in confidence and effectiveness in the Church of England in the years leading up to the First World War. The activities of Bishop Tait and the London Diocesan Home Mission from its offices in 79 Pall Mall played a substantial role in this recovery.

Time does not permit me to discuss all his initiatives although I should have liked to have given more attention to the revival of the sisterhoods and Tait’s dealings with Elizabeth Ferard. Tait knew Germany from first hand experience and he it was who advised Elizabeth Ferard to visit the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth which was to be an important influence on the beginnings of ordained women’s ministry in the Church of England. Elizabeth Ferard’s diary tells the story, with an illuminating introduction by Helen Blackmore in a volume recently published by the Church of England Record Society.

Contemplating the records in this library however one cannot fail to feel close to Tait in the press of daily correspondence. How his heart must have sunk on receiving missives like the complaint from the Marquis of Westminster. The letter is dates 11-viii-1865 and is couched in terms of the iciest politesse. [Tait papers 133; 352-3] The Marquis was dissatisfied with what he considered to be the excessive salary level of the secretary of the Diocesan Mission to which you will remember the noble Marquis had been a large contributor.

Mr Bardsley “may be the ablest divine and most distinguished clergyman in the Diocese – but it appears to me that a gentleman of inferior abilities and smaller pretensions would be better suited to this post, leaving Mr Bardsley to exercise his abilities with greater advantage to the church in another sphere”

My own subscription “never reaches the object for which it was intended, intercepted in its course in order to supply a fifth part of the salary paid to the Secretary”.
He appealed to Tait as President of the Mission Fund “but as you cannot have time to look into the lesser details of arrangements such as these, I shall feel it necessary to call attention elsewhere to the subject, without troubling your Lordship further for a reply.”

We live at a time when we are just re-discovering that questions about God are un-ignorable and that the world cannot be understood without reference to its religious traditions. We are moving out of the time which I remember from the beginning of my episcopate when in the guide to the City of London, the Churches were relegated to the Leisure Section. Now is a time when we need to refresh our understanding of the way we have travelled as a church or we shall lurch between unreasonable optimism and unwarranted despair. Some of the strategies being proposed for the Church and indeed the communion are somewhat deficient in the practical wisdom which comes from an historical perspective. It is no doubt desirable that every matter should be “under girded with theology” an ugly phrase which we hear frequently in the House of Bishops but it is no less desirable that we should reflect candidly on recent church history as an aid to a more critical evaluation of the claims for novelty and effectiveness of some of the “new ways of being church”.

With the assistance of Arthur Burns of Kings and John Wolfe of the Open University, the Diocese has applied to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a grant to support a “Knowledge Transfer Project” which I hope will lead to clergy and others growing in their awareness of the development of the church in a way that builds confidence and practical wisdom and enlarges the terms of the debate on how we should move forward together in obedience to the mission of God.

This is a time of great opportunity. I was visited recently by someone responsible on behalf of one of the three main parties for overseeing the evidence from the focus groups and individual interviews during the last General Election Campaign. He said that the testimony was remarkably uniform and focussed on questions which legislators were unable to do much about. There was a concern about the erosion of moral values and the phrase most often used in this connection was “respect for others”. There was also confusion about moral true north and what was being communicated to the next generation. Then there was no confusion about who was to blame and the result was disappointingly simplistic. In the dock were the politicians themselves and the media; the judges and the police; the teachers and the schools. The most startling finding in some ways was that no one blamed the church, even though the agenda was one which might be thought to involve churches of all kinds. Indeed nobody mentioned the church so far have we disengaged from the imagination of the people of England. Nevertheless there is a great opportunity in this situation.

As we respond to this new century, I believe that we shall be assisted to make a deep response if we were to have a clearer grasp on church history. It interests and encourages me that a distinguished group of younger theologians involved in the “Deep Church” movement in the Diocese of London have recently published a book with the significant title – “Remembering our Future” – testifying to their sense that trapped in the present moment it is impossible to do justice to the New Testament moment without the company of those who have been inspired by the Scriptures to follow the Christian way in other times and cultures.

You will understand from what I have said how greatly I value this library as a place where there can be deep and creative remembering. I salute the work of those who are presiding over its current growth. I should like to pay tribute to the staff who, under the leadership of Richard Palmer, have treated me ad a host of other readers with unfailing courtesy even under extreme provocation.

I have known the library for many years and I am convinced that its greatest days are to come. But I remember with gratitude and affection the days of Geoffrey Bill who was librarian while I was living in the Footman’s Tower. He was a great friend, to whom with Melanie Barber, I should also like to pay tribute. Mind you he did have his blind spots. He once told me that God had kept one last plague up his sleeve if Pharaoh had finally proved obdurate – a plague of genealogists.