Elegy in A Country Churchyard

Extract

It is a misfortune for those writers who base their character sketches on historic fact that they are tempted so often on to ground where it is necessary for the success of their artistic effort that they should form some conception of the reactions and background of the Catholic mind. In the recent past no difficulty was experienced in England in this matter. That reasoned and subdued religious temper which was the legacy of the matured Anglican tradition provided a secure fortress for the spirit from which the ecclesiastical archaeologist could sally forth on those delectable voyages of Victorian discovery. It was a time, too, in which historical episode had to bend itself to the slow movement of the lych gate and attune itself to the dust-laden sunshine of a rector’s study, to the ink wells and the long quill pens, to the Bible and the calf-bound books of sermons, and sometimes to those early, temerarious volumes of an Anglo-Catholic theology, before it could hope to reach the light of print. The broad lines of political history might be seized by some Whig historian, fashionable and remote, but how completely and with what slow content did this clerical atmosphere pervade the Tory camp. But it was never a purpose of the influential Whigs to concern themselves with monks and the old Church life and the Elizabethan priesthood, and it was in the vicarage gardens of the English country that such trees of knowledge grew.