the scottish episcopal church

A New History, by gavin white

Preface

1
Tullochgorum

2
Eighteenth Century

3
Seabury

4
Worship

5
Edinburgh

6
Oxford Movement

7
Glasgow

8
Publications

9
Church or Province

10
'English Episcopal'

11
Schools

12
Social Service

13
Synods and Councils

14
Clergy Training

15
A Small Dog Barking

16
As Others See Us

17
Women

18
Society

19
Second World War and After

Selected bibliography

Links

In the minds of Episcopalians in the first half of this century there was a working class, which was a threat, and there were the poor, who were not. The working class sought to supplant the natural leaders of society, including the clergy, but the poor depended on those leaders for assistance. And it was their dependence which made them acceptable. This is seen in the weekly journals which stress social class. And in which the English are seen more as a class than as a people. There was very little racism; even Jews were presented as class upstarts, at least from 1900 onwards, rather than as aliens. Americans were seen as friendly but boorish, needing cultured guidance from Britain, and there was a vague belief of American Episcopalians being the agency for this guidance, much as Scottish Episcopalians sought to provide leadership to a nation without its own upper class. But these assumptions were threatened by the fear, which was to prove well-grounded, that the church was not really part of the ruling group, but increasingly a social dead-end. This does not mean that men were ordained solely or mainly for social status, but in seeking to serve they expected to do so through the only social system they could imagine.

E.R.Norman has charted the way in which the Oxford and Cambridge elite championed the inevitability of market forces while most of their inferiors still believed in benevolent paternalism. And then, when the population as a whole had caught up and believed in market forces, the elite moved on, or back, to benevolent paternalism, frequently with a medieval tinge, verging on forms of socialism. In the Scottish Episcopal Church this process was complicated by the fear of displacement on the part of the ordinary clergy. Most of these were only marginally a part of the ruling classes, men with third-class degrees or none at all, as were the lesser professionals who were leaders in the congregations, while the imported bishops and provosts were real members of the English elite and could expect their pre-eminence to last their day. (1)

We see this in the Episcopal weeklies. In 1895 an editorial dismissed demands for improvement in working-men's pay with the comment, "For my part, it seems to me that the question of shorter hours and more pay is one with which we have nothing to do either as citizens or Christians. It must be settled by considerations which belong to political economy." By this was meant the pure gospel of Adam Smith, and religious influences "cannot effect the current price of labour any more than they effect the heat of the sun or the duration of the frost." But after 1900 the ideas of Adam Smith went into cold storage, and the leaders opted for Christian socialism, Bishop Deane being most outspoken on this as well as everything else, while the lesser clergy re-acted strongly against socialism and working class claims. On this they generally assumed that they were well-informed. In 1917 a Mr. Bradbury lectured at St. Margaret's, Newlands, Glasgow, on "Socialism and the Church", whereupon the incumbent, Rev. E.J.Petrie, "gave a masterly summing up, and neatly exposed a fallacy upon which one of the chief arguments of the lecturer rested." Which settled that. (2)

But most reaction was less intellectual than that of Petrie. It was just grumble. In 1921 there was an outcry over clergy being poor, and receiving less than artisans; in fact there was widespread hardship amongst clergy but artisans were scarcely living in luxury. There was concern about Socialist Sunday Schools, though a paranoid retired admiral failed to turn this into anything more serious, and the Socialist Sunday Schools bored children stiff with economics and "flower drill". In 1922 there was an outburst against limiting the hours of shopworkers, which would lead to people for whom work "is simply a disagreeable duty." "The men who rise to the top in any profession or business are not the clock watchers, they are those who care nothing for the hours...", though in general Episcopalians did not want people rising from the bottom to the top. In 1923 there was a lament for the British worker, "His hands are becoming soft, his body limp, his mind dazed, his heart broken, and his soul - well, we had better not speak about his soul; it has ceased to interest him since he discovered that it rhymed with dole." In 1926, the year of the General Strike, it was argued that strikes were caused by a lack of Christian love and charity. Later that year there were veiled attacks on trade unions, and evidence that workers were overpaid, a constant theme, since they had money to put into savings banks. But in the same year workers were attacked for not saving, "Where does the money come from that fills the picture houses, crowds the football matches, and invigorates the gambling mania (to say nothing of the drink traffic) which runs its course in this once-thrifty country ?" But when William Temple and other English bishops were condemned for supporting the strikers, unlike the Roman Catholics who were thought to have given a better witness against them, one letter did support Temple. Usually there was no response to this nagging. Editorials or letters on the Athanasian Creed or the Episcopalianism of Sir Walter Scott sparked off voluminous correspondence, but until the 1930s the social bias of the magazines did not. References to the middle classes and their "unmerited impoverishment under preposterous taxation" and the "shrewdly calculated decrease in ex-service pensions" were contrasted with the over-payment of the working-class, who could afford to take holidays while clergy could not. (3)

And there was the usual assumption of moral degradation. "Five children, all under seven years of age, have wrecked the interior of a London church !" Even Bishop Deane grew heated about "a very disgraceful and disagreeable fact", which turned out to be nothing more horrendous than a fading taste for herring, which was hurting the fisheries. In 1944 it was flatly stated that, "Most of the beggars are imposters...", while a note of the following year, to the effect that parents of 150 Edinburgh evacuee children could not be traced, could have been compassionate but managed, in that context, to imply that working-class parents were feckless. (4)

If this was the main thrust of the journals, there were also appeals for the poor, and even for that supposedly different section of society, the workers. These included a certain number of Episcopalians, though it must have been assumed that they could not read the attacks upon them in the Scottish Guardian. Of course some of them would be working-class Tory, and would have agreed that most of their work-mates were feckless and selfish, and some of these may have gravitated to the Episcopal Church for that reason, but others must have winced at what they read. Yet some clergy were working in poor areas; what we know of them suggests that, whatever their social origins, they believed the evidence of their eyes. They knew that the workers were hard-pressed, and were horrified by the poverty they saw each day. But a great many clergy and others seem to have lived and ministered in comfortable surroundings, to have accepted the social views of their parishioners, and to have discounted what they were told of the slums. At least they were told. Canon Aitchison has been quoted with regard to St.Peter's in Glasgow, and Canon Laurie of Old St. Paul's in Edinburgh constantly argued that the poor suffered unfairly in any financial retrenchment by government, and he also lamented the "Absence of Beauty" in the slums. Yet Dean Farquhar, annually visiting many hundreds of homes in Perth, of which many must have been working-class, and being himself the kindliest of men, could write in 1919 that the miners were "richly-paid", and in the next year that the workers seemed "to fling their huge incomes recklessly about." But throughout the 1930s there was more understanding than there had been in the 1920s, which were a decade of middle-class resentment not only in the Episcopal Church but nationally. And when Bishop Reid of Edinburgh stated in 1933, "The majority of the unemployed do not wish to stand all the day idle...", he was likely to find more support than he would have ten years earlier. When the Social Service Board made its report in the following year they affirmed that "the widespread opinion that slum-dwellers, if placed in new houses, will speedily turn them into slums, was quite erroneous." It was a marked change from 1923 when Canon Frederick Barrett-Ayres, a former catholic-minded Congregationalist from the City Temple in London, had exploded against a comment that "all Scotland was not peopled by disloyal Glasgow Irish or even alien anarchists." To this Barrett-Ayres asked his fellow clergy if they had ever gone into the market-place "and tried to devise some real form of propaganda", instead of trying to bring down the law on Socialist Sunday Schools. He then supported a working-man's letter about being unwelcome in Episcopal churches, "he had seen that sort of thing himself". The Rev. W.Collins, another fire-brand, asserted that there was no Episcopal church where the poor were not welcomed, though he said nothing about pew-rents used to keep them out of sight. Barrett-Ayres then retreated to the assertion that, "There are churches where working men are not wanted as office-bearers." But he was right when he stated, "We are fiddling while Rome burns." More common was the view, especially referring to Glasgow, that "unless the power of the Spirit of God is brought to bear directly on the daily lives of those people, the outlook must in a few years be even darker and more forbidding than it is." The poor were a threat to society as a whole, but religion was the answer, and by inference better housing and social improvements were not. (5)

F.Ll.Deane was a special case. Both in Glasgow and Aberdeen he worked for better social conditions, and as bishop he condemned mine-owners (there were none in his diocese) whom he compared to German war-lords. He was not happy with strikes, but he tried to damp down "indignation". Russian Bolshevism he blamed on the failures of the Russian ruling class, as if the ideal was a good ruling class. But he also blamed social strife on Evangelicals; Deane shared the belief that Protestantism led to Capitalism and Catholicism kept everyone brotherly, as it was said to have done in medieval times. After his first visit to South Africa he came back burbling about British fair play in giving the best land to the natives, but after his second he came back trumpeting the virtual slavery of Africans to such effect that he was personally rebuked by General Smuts. Deane had his shortcomings, but he was a better prophet than most. (6)

Public education was a special grievance of Episcopalians, whether because they thought it would have no effect, or whether because it would have an effect and middle-class parents would have to pay to educate working-class boys to compete with their own sons. Through the 1920s there were grumbles about "our modern Prussianized system of education", "The teachers are at it again ! Money, more money, yet more money !", "I challenge the whole system...", and, "The public are already grudging the extraordinary expense of education...". In 1937 there was an attack on admission to secondary school by examination, thereby excluding the fee-paying middle classes. Learning on the job was recommended instead; in 1919 it was argued that, "Actual practical experience in any trade or business, given average natural ability, will do more to make a man complete master of it than all the University training in the world...". This admission of working-class boys into higher education was related to "the process of middle-class extermination which is now going on", which would ruin the country, since they "shoulder burdens which the worker cynically shirks." (7)

Of course this was related to anglicisation, and it must be emphasised that this was not just an aim, but a fact, and one welcomed, to some degree, by most Scots. And in the last century it was assumed that it would become complete. A comment on imported English clergy in 1879 remarked that "it will be, at least, two or three generations before the Anglicising process, which is undoubtedly taking place among us, is much felt in country districts." What was more doubtful was the 1924 remark, from a Scot, "that the Scottish people are gradually losing their old national characteristics." But that same observer rejoiced that "they are learning to be glad", probably referring to the decline of supposed Calvinism. And there was general rejoicing at anglicisation, "Since Scotland has undertaken to play a great and influential part in the industry, commerce, and the government of the Empire, it must for general purposes employ the language which is most widely understood", though an English accent was as incomprehensible as a Scottish in most parts of the empire, and Scottish education, banking, and medicine were more to be found abroad than English. But education was the key issue. The whole claim of Episcopal clergy to be the real thing, and Presbyterians not to be, depended on being educated at Oxford or Cambridge, or at Coates Hall by tutors who had been there. "It is the cheapest in the world", a critic wrote of Scottish education in 1932, "and our poverty compels us to put up with it. But the fact remains that an increasing number of parents are sending their sons and daughters to boarding schools in England...". This criticism then extended to universities, and later in the year the matter arose again, "It will not be disputed that these universities send out those who become good teachers, skilful doctors, learned lawyers..... in a word, specialists, imbued with the desire of 'getting-on'..... But that ideal is not a high one, is thoroughly selfish and self-seeking, and is hardly tinged with Christianity." But other assaults on Scottish universities led to letters in their defence. (8)

If the Presbyterians indulged in a brief orgy of anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishism in the 1920s, Scottish Episcopalians scarcely thought of the Irish and blamed their problems on the Jews. This may have been because they thought in terms of class and not of race, and their anti-Semitism was neither religious nor racial but class-based. It was as a social class that they were encroaching and dangerous, though they had been seen as a race in 1898 when an editorial approved the Russian pogroms. "Now, in many countries of Europe - especially the eastern - the Jews multiply so fast and remain so distinct, that they seriously threaten to eat out and finally supersede the nationality of the native and Christian inhabitants." Moreover, "they secure for themselves an extraordinary proportion of all posts of influence and advantage." "A nation has an inherent right to exist, and to secure from alien admixture its own type of national life and character." But as early as 1919 the Christian failure to condemn pogroms was being regretted. From that date it was a matter of class, with the economy being run for the benefit of Jewish financiers, a repeated theme. If there was trouble in Ireland this could be laid at the door of a Jewish statesman, while agitation in India was largely because, when General Dyer ordered the 1919 massacre at Amritsar and 380 were killed and 1200 wounded, "we had then a Jewish Secretary of State possessed with a greater affection for Hindus than for Christians, who succeeded, with the concurrence of a time-serving government, in getting Dyer condemned" which led to "an enormous loss of British prestige." But not only were contemporary Jewish statesmen reviled; Disraeli was dragged out of history to be described as a "Jewish adventurer". Then came Hitler and anti-Semitism was no longer fashionable. In 1933 there was an article on Jews as "exponents of materialism", with "a hatred of Christianity", but this hatred was due to persecution. Nazi persecution of the Jews was repeatedly condemned, and the irrepressible Stephen P. Ross managed to argue that Britain had no need to re-arm because, "The nations who have befriended the Jews have always prospered...". Of course the tone of the Scottish Guardian changed when Malcolm MacColl became editor from 1934 until 1940, but what could be observed in the Episcopal Church could be observed in Britain as a whole. (9)

As for Britain, "There is no nation under heaven in a better position to give the world..." whatever was needed, it was observed in 1925. In 1936 Bishop Deane pronounced that, "In His strange providence, God has made this island the centre of an influence which had spread little by little over the whole world. He had also entrusted to us the ideals of brotherhood and righteousness." But others did not support Britain as they should; the colonies battened on Britain. (10)

There were other complaints. The war was thrust on Britain in 1914 through troubles in Ireland. The American naval build-up was the latest threat to Britain. But America was not as it had been; those of British descent had been cut down in the Civil War, and Central Europeans had taken over. And there was a surprising amount on South Africa, not all of it from Bishop Deane. But when the The Rev. D.D.A.Lockhart of Old St. Paul's criticised colour prejudice in the Diocese of St. John's, in moderate terms and on the basis of experience, Bishop Hannay of Argyll was unsympathetic, "You cannot isolate the question of colour prejudice from human sin... You have gradually to build up public opinion." And Mr. Spens agreed, " - - I suggest that we not go further except that we should commend the subject to our prayers." (11)

The issue of contraception worried Canon Laurie who, as already noted, believed that "the whole fabric of Christian morals is endangered". Others assumed that contraception would mean decrease in numbers except for Roman Catholics, who otherwise did not much figure in the Episcopalian imagination. But there was no attempt to relate this to illegitimacy, which was twice in high in Scotland as in England, one fifth of children being conceived out of wedlock, and highest in the rural south-west. This was part of a social system largely unknown to most Episcopalians. (12)

Finally, three things need to be said about all this. First, the Episcopal Church may seem pretty horrific if judged by its views of the world, but it probably worked as well at the local level as could have been expected and the views of its members had little impact. That their views had little impact may have made Episcopalians all the more bitter in expressing those views. Second, the real leaders of the church, the bishops and well-to-do committee men, cannot have shared in most of these phobias, but there is no evidence that they did much to damp them down. Third, was this extreme class prejudice derived from the backgrounds of clergy and laity, or did it have deeper roots ? It is possible to suppose that a Jacobite theory of monarchy, with things being established by God, and a Hutchinsonian theory of science, with God being directly at the helm, would lead to belief in direct succession to particular states of life, without Whiggish contract law or awards for merit entering into the matter. But perhaps that is being too charitable.