275 - William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657-1737

William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657-1737
By Norman Sykes
Vol. 1: 366 pp. Vol. II: 289 pp. London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1957. $15.00.

If the stereotype of the history of the Church of England in the eighteenth century as an arid desert, in Which only the cacti of heresy bloomed amid the sands of a desiccated morality, has been shattered, it is to Professor Norman Sykes in chief to whom we owe the newly-emerging portrait. His Edmund Gibson (1926) and his Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (1934) emphasized that Anglicanism had bishops in eighteenth century England who were not mere time-servers, but who were often conscientious in their discharge of the duties of a diocesan, as well as being men of spiritual insight with a proper concern to safeguard their charges from heterodoxy and antinomianism. Furthermore, he showed that, in practical Christianity, the leaders of the Church of England supported the charity movements of the day and concerned themselves with the spread of the Gospel among Englishmen abroad. Theirs was not a dereliction of duty so much as a very sober and limited conception of duty in which decorum played a large part. They steered a middle course between Deism and Enthusiasm in an age in which the heart of the religious man suffered from low blood-pressure.

His present book, the fruit of many years of intense application to the thirty-one volumes of Archbishop Wake's correspondence, the vast majority of which was written in Latin, the language of ecclesiastical diplomacy, and to the events of his times, gives us an even deeper admiration for the difficulties and achievements of an eighteenth century archbishop, as well as of a twentieth century ecclesiastical historian. this work is undoubtedly a magnum opus, in its range, organization of material, and critical acumen, as well as in the thoroughness of its scholarship.

Perhaps the greatest surprise for the reader who is unacquainted with Professor Sykes' Old Priest and New Presbyter (1956) or with his ad-

276 - William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657-1737

mirable contribution to A History of the Ecumenical Movement (edited Rouse and Neill, 1954) will be to note the unusual and far-reaching ecumenical concerns of Archbishop Wake. On the one hand, he was involved for a long period in discussing the possibility of the mutual recognition of a Gallican Church in France, which seemed likely to shake off the shackles of the Papacy, and the Church of England. On the other hand, he stretched out arms of welcome to encourage a potential union of German Lutherans and Calvinists which, at one stage in the negotiations, was considering adopting a translation of the Book of Common Prayer and episcopacy. To some this might seem like running with the hounds and the hare, and Wake acknowledged the delicacy of his correspondence. At the same time Wake felt himself to be impregnable because the Church he represented was incontestably Protestant in doctrine, and ineluctably Catholic in polity and liturgy. Hooker might speak of the Anglican via media defensively in the precarious days of Elizabeth; Wake, however, was arguing from strength as the head of the most important Protestant State in the eighteenth century, yet the only one to have maintained so much of the traditions of the primitive Church.

To be sure, Wake had other things on his mind, but unity was the chief and overriding concern of his archiepiscopate, and Dr. Sykes devotes 150 pages to this theme. Second in Wake's time, though not in his interest, was concerning himself with matters of state, and particularly with the Whig ministers of state, with whom he had an uneasy alliance at first, and later, because he had not proved as subservient as might be desired, he experienced the ignominy of seeing the politicians turn to Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, as their adviser in "the things that are Caesar's." Chapter VII of the second volume is an extremely judicious and revealing account of the political disenchantment of the archbishop, his ingenuousness, and his academic distate for any type of compromise, as well as his rather petulant tendency to assume that any diocesan who disagreed with him politically was disloyal to him.

Wake's chief interests were historical and pastoral. He was no theologian, certainly not a speculative type of theologian. Rather his interest was in tracing the history of the Church of England and its canons and councils. He was also an indefatigable administrator, both as Bishop of Lincoln, that unwieldy diocese, and as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was served well his archdeacons and they gloried in serving him. His visitation charges were prepared with the utmost care and he wearied himself in the Lincoln visitations, in particular, that he might systematically confirm hundreds in a single day in the outlying districts. He was most careful in examining candidates for the priesthood and the diaco-

277 - William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657-1737

nate. He was, as befitted the guardian of the truth committed to the Church, careful to guard his flock against heresy and schism. Yet, at the same time, he was tender to those who had fallen into Arianism provided they did not assert their views arrogantly, and this tenderness extended even to the writers of these heretical works.

He had his weaknesses, of course. One was that he was interest and declining health unfitted for the hurly-burly of politics and his influence as Primate diminished because he would not be more accommodating with the Whigs who stood for the Protestant succession. It was noticeable that while he was friendly to the Calvinists abroad, he was cool to the orthodox Dissenters at home. This was the ground of the objection of some of the Whigs to him, particularly as he had seemed to be sympathetic to the legal amelioration hoped for the Nonconformists in his younger days. Furthermore, in an age when natural theology claimed to be superior to revelation, it would have befitted his office and bettered his influence to have concerned himself more with theological apologetics rather than with historical. Finally, though he was no means the chief of offenders, he encouraged pluralism (however he set himself against it officially) placing his proteges, chaplains, and kinsmen, in pluralities. He was not a dazzling prelate, but in his scholarship, his conscientiousness as a father-in-God, his ecumenical concern abroad, and his loyalty to the Church of England, and to a wider vision of the Church, he was a good and an irenic man, even a courageously irenic man.

Hitherto there has been no biography of Archbishop Wake; it is unlikely that any other will be required for half a century. That is the measure of the achievement of the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge. Two muted notes of criticism find a reluctant place in what is a paean of a review. In the first place, while Dr. Sykes may stigmatize Gibson as an insular bishop, yet he had the wit to know that "charity begins at home." Wake was an ecumenist abroad; to the Nonconformists he could only be viewed as a bigot, and this Dr. Sykes does not allow for. Secondly, delighted as I have been the quips of Dr. Sykes in most of his other writings, I cannot decide whether it is the humorless character of his subject, or the gravity of living so long in the confidence of a decorous eighteenth century Primate, or his own impending translation to the episcopate-but whatever the reason, the sparkle of the preface reappears only very rarely in the rest of this splendid work, and a single beaded bubble per chapter finds it hard to wink!

Horton Davies
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey