born for the universe, narrow'd his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
For, unhappily, this party in the Church to which, as Dean Inge well puts it, Dr.Gore "consents to belong," and for which he has made such manifold sacrifices, and by which he is not always so loyally followed as he deserves to be, is of all parties in the Church that which least harmonises with English temperament, and is least likely to endure the intellectual onslaughts of the immediate future.
It is the Catholic Party, the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians, which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, a marked ability in superstitious ceremonial, a not very modest assertion of the claims of sacerdotalism, a mocking contempt for preaching, and a devotion to the duties of the parish priest which has never been excelled in the history of the English Church.
Bishop Gore, very obviously, is a better man than his party.

He is a gentleman in every fibre of his being, and to a gentleman all extravagance is distasteful, all disloyalty is impossible.

He is, indeed, a survival from the great and orderly Oxford Movement trying to keep his feet in the swaying midst of a revolutionary mob, a Kerensky attempting to withstand the forces of Bolshevism.
There is little question, I think, that when his influence is removed, an influence which becomes with every year something of a superstition, something of an irritation, to the younger generation of Anglo-Catholics--not many of whom are scholars and few gentlemen--the party which he has served so loyally, and with so much distinction, so much temperance, albeit so disastrously for his own influence in the world, will perish on the far boundaries of an extremism altogether foreign to our English nativity.
For to many of those who profess to follow him he is already a hesitating and too cautious leader, and they fret under his coldness towards the millinery of the altar, and writhe under his refusal to accept the strange miracle of Transubstantiation--a miracle which, he has explained, I understand, demands a reversal of itself to account for the change which takes place in digestion.

If they were rid of his restraining hand, if they felt they could trust themselves without his intellectual championship, these Boishevists of sacerdotalism, these enthusiasts for the tyranny of an absolute Authority, these episcopalian asserters of the Apostolical Succession who delight in flouting and defying and insulting their bishops, would soon lose in the follies of excess the last vestiges of English respect for the once glorious and honourable Oxford Movement.
If any man think that I bear too hardly on these very positive protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters in _A Spiritual AEneid_.

Father Knox was once a member of this party and something of a disciple of Dr.Gore, who, however, always regretted his "mediaeval" theology.
A member of this party, marching indeed at its head and its one voice in these degenerate days to which men of intelligence pay the smallest attention, Bishop Gore has lost the great influence he once exercised, or began to exercise, on the national life, a moral and spiritual influence which might at this time have been well-nigh supreme if the main body of the nation had not unfortunately lost its interest for the man in its contempt for, or rather its indifference to, the party to which he consents to belong.
But for the singular beauty of his spiritual life, one would be tempted to set him up as an example of Coleridge's grave warning, "He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all." I find him in these late days no nearer to Rome, not an inch nearer, than in the days of his early manhood, but absolutely convinced that Christ founded a Church and instituted the two chief sacraments.