stately. He is in a genial mood, with his back to the bright fire in the ample hall of the old vicarage house. He is laughing heartily as my father tells him of the theology of the leading parishioner, who found great comfort in the doctrine of eternal damnation. That incident is also sixty years since. The Archbishop and the leading parishioner must be added to the group of those who make up the stuff of English History.
That Archbishop remains in my memory as one of the few great men whom I have met. I mean men with outstanding governing force conjoined with capacious intellect. I do not think that he was subtle; but there was no doubt about him. Archbishop Tait ought to have been a prime minister. Fate made him Archbishop of Canterbury. I have always been grateful for my glimpse of him during half-a-dozen years, and for the family tradition of him during a longer period. To have seen Tait was worth shelves of volumes of medieval history. He magnificently closed the line of great ecclesiastics who organized the intimate cultural life of England, round monasteries, village churches, dioceses, cathedrals, parishes — in New England called “townships” — parish meetings, schools, colleges, universities. The line stretches from Augustine of Canterbury, through Theodore of Tarsus, Lanfranc, Anselm, Becket, Warham, Cranmer, Parker, Laud, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tait. The national activities that cluster round the archbishops as representative leaders are as much worth dwelling on as those that centre round kings and parliaments.
Tait really closed the line in the sense in which I am thinking. All these men from Augustine to Tait energetically acted on the policy that the Church was the national organ to foster the intimate, ultimate values which enter into human life. For the earlier men, the Church was more than that; but at least it was that. They refused to conceive the Church as merely one patty within the nation, or merely as one factor within civilization. For them the Church was the nation rising to the height of its civilization. They were men with vision — wide, subtle, magnificent. They failed. Tait was the last Archbishop who effectively sustained the policy. Since his time, English ecclesiastical policy has been directed to organizing the Anglican Church as a special group within the nation.
But the failure of the earlier set of men was a magnificent one. Their policy prevailed for twelve hundred years. It civilized Europe. Country after country has discarded it as an archaic obstruction. Even to-day, Spain and Mexico ate engaged in casting it away. The interest of men like Warham, Parker, Tillotson, Tait, is that they rescued the final stage of the mediæval vision of civilization from the reproach of decrepit reaction. Its end in Spain at the present moment is that of a backward-looking system, divorced from modern realities. Its supporters in Spain are mediæval, blind and deaf to the modern world. But Tait, Tillotson, and Warham, each in his day, were forward-looking men. They took the inherited notion of cultural organization, and tried to give it a new life in terms of the modern world.
