Religion: Cosmo Cantuar Steps Down

The 94th successor to St. Augustine will retire March 31.

This is no mean event—for the Most Reverend and Right Honorable Cosmo Gordon Lang, P.C., G.C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L., LL.D., D.Litt., Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, is the senior prelate of the Anglican Church, which with its worldwide affiliates (including the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.) has 40,000,000 members. Spiritually, only the Pope has more followers. Temporally, Canterbury ranks among Britons next to the royal family, takes precedence over the Prime Minister. Even a King cannot safely defy him, for his opposition, making use of the Anglican stand against divorce, was a major factor in forcing Edward VIII to abdicate.

Only thrice before in the 1,345 years since Augustine landed in Kent has an Archbishop of Canterbury left office before death relieved him. But 77-year-old Cosmo Cantuar, as the Archbishop signs him self (Cantuar: abbreviation for Cantuarium, Latin for Canterbury), felt he had good cause.

“In Ordinary times I might have been able to continue my work for a few more years,” he explained. “But the times are not ordinary. . . . When this war is over great tasks of reconstruction must await the Church as well as the State. Preparation for these tasks must begin now.” In emphasizing the need for post-war reconstruction, Dr. Lang clearly implied that his personal choice as a successor is the man who is probably the world’s leading exponent of Christian social reconstruction: portly, brilliant, 60-year-old William Temple, Archbishop of York and second-ranking Anglican prelate.

When Lang was promoted from York to Canterbury in 1928, Temple succeeded him at York. Temple may well succeed him again. Outstanding as a church administrator and theologian as well as a reformer, Dr. Temple a year ago called the famed Malvern Conference to seize for the Church leadership in “ordering the new society.” In December he led an official interdenominational commission (TIME, Jan. 5) in a far-to-the-left program for Social Justice & Economic Reconstruction which he called “a conscious and deliberate attempt to cancel the divorce between theology and economics.” But York may decline the Primacy—on the grounds that it would bog him down with State duties—in order to leave himself freer for postwar planning.

Like many another thing British, the unwritten system of appointing bishops and archbishops in England is antiquated, illogical, even blasphemous—but in practice quite effective. The King, who is the official head of the Church of England, supposedly picks the prelates. Actually the Prime Minister does (even when he is a Unitarian like Neville Chamberlain). The appointee’s name is then forwarded to the cathedral chapter of the vacant diocese. The chapter assembles, prays for God’s guidance, opens the sealed envelope, elects the man whose name it finds inside. The system has produced at least as good a batch of bishops as other systems.

Whoever his successor is, Dr. Lang will almost certainly be the last archbishop of his kind (just as he is the first unmarried Primate since the Reformation). The 20th Century does not breed his type of courtier-bishop. Since he first caught Queen Victoria’s eye in 1896 with his tactful eloquence and for being “so human,” he has been the friend and confidant of the royal family—except for Edward VIII, who called him a “sanctimonious humbug.” He also is strong-willed and not afraid to speak his mind, even went to the unpopular extreme of defending his friend Kaiser Wilhelm during World War I.

When George V was Prince of Wales, Dr. Lang rebuked him for having attended a Roman Catholic service, pointed out that there was no precedent for such an act since James II. “A very good precedent too,” snapped the Prince. “No doubt your Royal Highness is familiar with your history,” retorted Dr. Lang, “and remembers that the consequences to the King and his family were not so good.” (James was driven from his throne after three years, and his luckless heirs, the old Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie, lived out their lives in exile.)

Dr. Lang even stood up to Queen Victoria. While he was vicar of Portsea, the largest parish in England, with twelve curates under him, she told him a good wife would be more help than any six curates. “If I have a curate I do not like,” he replied, “I can sack him. But I couldn’t sack a wife.” Forty years later his views on sacking a husband cost Victoria’s great grandson the throne.

A seventh son of a seventh son, Cosmo Lang was born a Presbyterian. In fact, his father was Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland—as his brother became in 1935. After winning his M.A. from Glasgow University at 18, he had a brilliant career at Oxford, topped in 1886 with a first class in Modern History and the presidency of the famed Oxford Union (which York held in due course, too). In tending a political career, he studied law in London for the next three years, did not decide to enter the church until just before he was to be called to the bar.

As a curate in grimy industrial Leeds, young Cosmo Lang slept in a condemned tenement on a board bed only two feet wide, ministered to people even poorer than himself. But promotion came to the shrewd young man: as an Oxford don, vicar of Portsea and, in 1901, Bishop of London’s East End diocese of Stepney. In 1908 the Archbishop of York died, and at 44 Lang was appointed Europe’s youngest archbishop.

As Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang got £15,000 (peacetime equivalent of $75,000) a year, most of which went in income taxes and upkeep of the vast medieval pile of Lambeth Palace which the Nazis blitzed last year. In his resignation speech the Archbishop referred to his “sudden withdrawal to some obscure place … to face … the restraints and inconveniences of very slender means.” Leftist papers tartly said they thought his £1,500 pension was more than that.