Peculiar Revolutionist

(See Cover) The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him.

The timing was dramatic. Last week, for the Christian world, was Holy Week --the seven most holy of Lent's 40 days in which are solemnized Christ's temptation in the wilderness, His agony before and during the Crucifixion, culminating in the promise of the Resurrection. Last week the agony of Holy Week was shared by the human race. There was scarcely a man, woman or child anywhere who, in the degree to which the war directly touched him, or the degree to which he was capable of compassion, did not suffer a personal Golgotha, did not share the hope, paradoxical by all rational processes, that out of the war's crucifying evil some great good must be resurrected.

Passion and Resurrection. When, under cover of wartime secrecy, the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York, Primate of England and Metropolitan, slipped across the Atlantic Ocean into the U.S. (it was his first visit), there was no Protestant churchman who could have impressed Americans more. For the Archbishop was a symbol of one great Protestant church which, under the impact of war, had suffered a passion and predicated a resurrection.

The Archbishop arrived in response to a year-and-a-half-old invitation of the Federal Council of Churches, and an invitation by the Protestant Episcopal Church. He had come on a flurry of ecclesiastical errands, to:

P: Foster the practice of international visits between dignitaries of U.S. churches and the Church of England.

P: Assist in the laying on of hands when Boston's Very Rev. Angus Dun is consecrated Bishop of Washington at the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul (April 19).

P: Discuss closer cooperation between the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, especially in missionary work (the Archbishop is a vice chairman of the International Missionary Council) and plans for the postwar world.

P: Meet with clergy of all denominations at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.

P: Visit the Most Rev. Derwyn T. Owen, Primate of the Church of England in Canada, at Toronto, where the Archbishop will discuss with Canadian church leaders postwar missionary and rehabilitation problems.

War's Desperate Surgery. These program notes might be important to churchmen. But most laymen did not know who the Archbishop was. They might remember vaguely that Dr. Garbett was jointly responsible (with the Archbishop of Canterbury) for proclaiming the necessity of a New World Order embodied in the revolutionary Malvern Resolutions (TIME, Jan. 20, 1941). They might also remember that last September Dr. Garbett had taken a long trip in the opposite direction--to Moscow, to give the hand of traditional ecumenical brotherhood to Russia's newly reinstated Patriarch. (Last week Patriarch Sergei gave the back of his hand to Pius XII, declared, in the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, that the Pope is not Christ's Vicar on earth.)

As against Europe's dark backward and abysm of wars and revolutions, America was still a New World with its own democratic New Order still evolving. In an historic sense nothing very profound had as yet happened to America as a result of the war. But something had happened to Britain--something which jolted England's No. 2 churchman (with his colleague and superior, Dr. Temple) into viewing the war as not merely a struggle for survival between two political power groups, United Nations and Axis, but also as a symptom of a social disease so virulent, long-standing and neglected that only war's desperate surgery could begin to treat it. The Archbishop's three weeks' in the U.S. would give secular eyes a chance to observe at close range the No. 2 representative of England's ecclesiastical change of heart.

When the distinguished visitor gave his first press conference last week in Manhattan, Americans saw an extraordinarily mild-eyed, 69-year-old prelate whose six-foot height was dissembled in an habitual stoop of age. His was not the constrained mildness of a prince of the church whose natural fierceness of temper has been beaten and battered into benignity. It was a natural gentleness refined by devotion, austerity and great human sympathy. And there was a sense of easy power about him, fitting as comfortably as his open prelatical coat and apron, his greavelike buttoned black gaiters. The Archbishop of York has presence.

Says one character to another in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon: "Such peculiar birds as you are found only in the trees of revolution." The Archbishop of York is possibly the most peculiar social revolutionist the world has ever known. It is doubtful whether he thinks of himself as a social revolutionist at all (though, like Cardinal Manning, he might have called himself a "Mosaic Radical").

Meoe, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Men find it hard to read the true meaning of most things, but the hardest of all to read is the handwriting on the wall--which becomes legible to everybody only when the walls begin to totter and collapse. In mid-January, 1941, under the impact of Nazi bombs, the walls were falling on all sides of the 221 Anglican prelates, priests and laymen who under the sponsorship of Dr. Temple, then Archbishop of York, huddled in greatcoats in the unheated rooms of Malvern College. It was not only British walls that were crashing. Under the onset of the Nazi conquests the walls of the whole known world were tottering. They had been thick with scribbled warnings. The Nazis were the terrible evidence that though men cannot live by bread alone, permanent hunger (for bread, for work, for hope) starves the human spirit into permanent inhumanity.

Able to read Mene, Mene at last, the Malvern delegates unanimously voted a program for "ordering the new society" which they saw "quite evidently emerging" from the war. Its most sensational planks were:

Union Then. "After the war our aim must be the unification of Europe as a cooperative commonwealth"--a project which seemed more feasible when there was no possible way to do it than it does now. (In the U.S. the idea of a Federated Europe was just beginning to dawn.)

Commerce and Conservation. "In international trade a genuine interchange of materially needed commodities must take the place of a struggle for so-called favorable balance. . . . We must recover reverence for the earth and its resources, treating it no longer as a reservoir of potential wealth to be exploited, but as a storehouse of divine bounty on which we utterly depend."

Labor. "The true status of man independent of economic profits must find expression in the managerial framework of industry; the rights of labor must be recognized as in principle equal to those of capital in the control of industry.. . ."

Church's Function. "The Church has the duty and the right to speak, not only to its members but to the world, concerning the true principles of human life. . . . The Church, as we know it, does not. . .."

Church Finances. "Christians, clergy and laity alike, cannot take part in this work unless they are prepared to advocate complete reorganization of the internal financial life of the Church."

Form of Worship. "This must be so directed and conducted that its relevance to life and to men's actual needs is evident. . . ."

Christian Service. "The whole congregation, habitually worshiping together, should regularly meet to plan and carry out some common enterprise for the general good; if there are social evils in a locality, such as bad housing or malnutrition, let them consider how evil can be remedied. . . ."

To the conferees at Malvern, and more & more to the world, it seemed as if, when the walls fell, the stone rolled away from the sepulchre and the Body which was missing had been found again.

The Man. Dr. Garbett did not take part in the Malvern Conference. But through his sponsorship of its program and his close participation with Dr. Temple in a series of endorsements, Dr. Garbett became almost as completely identified with Malvern as was Dr. Temple. Besides, his whole ecclesiastical life had been the practice of what Malvern preached. When Dr. Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury, England's No. 1 primate, Dr. Garbett undertook the heavy burden of the Archbishopric of York, chiefly to assist Dr. Temple in carrying out the Malvern program.

Cyril Forster Garbett (rhymes with carpet) was born (1875) in the little Hampshire parish of Tongham, which served the military camp Queen Victoria had recently established at Aldershot. Garbett's father was vicar. Tongham lies near the chalk downs of Salisbury Plain and the heather-and-fir country of the New Forest. Here, until he was 23, Cyril Garbett lived with his three brothers and one sister (all raised on his father's midget salary). Later Cyril Garbett decided to follow his father, grandfather, and two uncles into the Church of England.

As an assistant curate (at -L-20 a year), Cyril Garbett went to the combined vicarage of Portsmouth and Southsea, which, under the name of Portsea, was the biggest vicarage in England. The shy, reserved youth had exchanged the quiet of the cloud-shadowed chalk downs for some of the toughest waterfront slums in Britain. As quietly and systematically as he had dug in the vicarage garden, young Cyril Garbett dug into the causes of slums and poverty, turned up the disturbing idea that no matter how much help the churches' spiritual program and social services may give, the roots of most social evils are economic. By 1909 Cyril Garbett had become Vicar of Portsea.

But the vicarage of Portsea was only his basic training in social problems. Soon Vicar Garbett was graduated to be Bishop of Southwark (pronounced Sutherk), the South London section which includes Lambeth, Bermondsey, Battersea, Tooting and Greenwich. Portsea was a British Hell's Kitchen. Southwark was the noxious central inferno. In this massive slum, hundreds of thousands of people lived in "the greatest area of unbroken poverty in Europe."

Expert In Rackets. Again Bishop Garbett resolutely dug in. A bachelor, he struggled with the malnutritive budgets of swarming slum families. He became an expert in the manipulations of loan sharks, mastered the ins & outs of rent piracy. Today the benign Archbishop of York probably knows more at first hand about rackets, gambling and liquor than any other man in England. He studied the problem of permanent unemployment as voluminously as and at much closer quarters than prolix Beatrice & Sidney Webb (Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain). Through the Church he encouraged interdenominational efforts to spread social service, free medical services, homes and nurseries for poor children, recreational clubs. Through the Church and the Government, he fought for slum clearance, boosted low-price housing projects, and the establishment of more parks, playgrounds and country camps for children. The influence of the quiet garden at Tongham lingered, in the resentful realism with which he described (In the Heart of South London) the stench, vermin, disease, crime, immorality in which his parishioners and their neighbors lived.

By 1932 Bishop Garbett had earned the right to drink a dish of tea without a ring of Southwark's grime within the cup. He was translated to the country Diocese of Winchester. In influence the Bishop of Winchester is second in the province of Canterbury. He becomes, automatically, Prelate of the Order of the Garter. In his diocese is the big port of Southampton, whose waterside slums, though less imperial than Portsea's, were still imposing.

"Hiking Bishop." And Winchester was a rest after Southwark. Sometimes the Bishop would take off a whole afternoon to discuss the problems of visiting vicars or to take tea with a County family. He might even snatch several days to dash off a treatise on What Is Man? At Winchester Bishop Garbett began his hikes about the rural parishes, for which he has become famous. Hiking, for an Anglican bishop, is still something of an episcopal innovation, and has given Dr. Garbett the nickname of "The Hiking Bishop."

Clad in a purple cassock, with his square, flat, soft purple cap pulled well down on his balding head and his oaken pastoral crook in hand. Bishop Garbett would stride through the Hampshire countryside, to chat with field workers, pub keepers, cricketers, country doctors and school children. At each village, the forewarned vicar or curate would greet his Bishop, and together they would conduct an informal service on the green or at the war memorial. Sometimes his chaplain would accompany him. In more spacious Yorkshire, a chaplain always goes along.

Translation to York. Dr. Garbett was Bishop of Winchester at the time of the Malvern Conference. He was busy, happy, and nearing 70. But Dr. William Temple is an insistent man. Dr. Temple knew that Dr. Garbett is a first-rate administrator and that Portsea and Southwark had made him surprisingly wise in the ways of the world. He had long experience as a parish priest, which Dr. Temple lacks almost entirely. Though Dr. Garbett is progressive, he is cautious, farsighted and more of an old-fashioned "man of God"--a fact which new-fashioned Dr. Temple probably realized would be reassuring to those who consider the Archbishop of Canterbury a Karl Marx in a cassock.

So one day in June 1942, the expert on slum rents and rackets went to live in 13th-Century Bishopthorpe, the episcopal palace hidden three miles from York in vast grounds shaded with towering pines and surrounded by avenues of ancient limes and thickets of holly, carpeted in spring with daffodils, primroses, bluebells in a profusion unknown to the vicarage at Tongham.

-L-9,000 and Eleven Hens. Bishopthorpe is now managed by the Ecclesiastical Commission of the Church of England, which uses about half the Archbishop's annual allotment of -L-9,000 (about $36,000) to run the palace and keep up the grounds, gives the balance to Dr. Garbett for personal living and traveling expenses, staff salaries, taxes.

In this sumptuous archiepiscopal palace Dr. Garbett lives with his quiet, shy sister Elsie (who looks after the Archbishop, his eleven hens and two hives of bees), his staff and three London refugee families. After the war, most of Bishopthorpe will probably become a training college for clergy. Until that time, the Archbishop will be perfectly at home amid its temporal magnificence.

The paradox of Dr. Garbett's conservatism is that it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual radicalism. To U.S. observers, this fact made their archiepiscopal visitor a more dependable guide to England's present and future than some of his more strenuously progressive colleagues. For the Archbishop of York, even more than the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the key to the real meaning of Malvern.

Malvern was revolutionary only in the sense that it recognized the existence of a social revolution. The problem was as plain as hunger. The world over, the masses must be provided with food, clothing, work. To provide these necessities was a duty no Christian might shirk. Not to provide them was an incitement to civil war. For, unlike Bolshevism or Fascism, Malvern's revolution did not glorify the impersonal power politics of the war of classes or the iron economic laws against whose predestined operation there can be only abject, unconditional surrender. Its proper subject was not Political Man or Economic Man, but man's relation to man as a consequence of man's relation to God. Malvern's New Order was as revolutionary as the New Testament. "The great function of the Church," says York's Archbishop, "is to be the conscience of the State."

If, in the troubled days of peace to come, the Church fails to be this conscience, there will be at first only deepening doldrums in what Lytton Strachey once called "the vast calm waters of Christian thought."

If it succeeds, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, will pay it the reverence of contumely and hate.

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