page_title: Cosmo Gordon Lang
section_title: In office
hierarchical_section_title: Cosmo Gordon Lang / Archbishop of Canterbury / In office
caption_attribution_description: Lambeth palace great hall and Cardinal Pole's fig tree
context_page_description: William Cosmo Gordon Lang, 1st Baron Lang of Lambeth, GCVO, PC was a Scottish Anglican prelate who served as Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury. His rapid elevation to Archbishop of York, within 18 years of his ordination, is unprecedented in modern Church of England history. As Archbishop of Canterbury during the abdication crisis of 1936, he took a strong moral stance, his comments in a subsequent broadcast being widely condemned as uncharitable towards the departed king.
  The son of a Scots Presbyterian minister, Lang abandoned the prospect of a legal and political career to train for the Anglican priesthood. Beginning in 1890, his early ministry was served in slum parishes in Leeds and Portsmouth, except for brief service as Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. In 1901 he was appointed suffragan Bishop of Stepney in London, where he continued his work among the poor. He also served as a canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London.
  In 1908 Lang was nominated as Archbishop of York, despite his relatively junior status as a suffragan rather than a diocesan bishop.
context_section_description: Archbishop Davidson resigned in July 1928 (he is believed to have been the first Archbishop of Canterbury ever to retire voluntarily). On 26 July Lang was notified by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, that he would be the successor; William Temple would succeed Lang at York.  Lang was enthroned as the new Archbishop of Canterbury on 4 December 1928, the first bachelor to hold the appointment in 150 years. A contemporary Time magazine article described Lang as "forthright and voluble" and as looking "like George Washington". Lang's first three years at Canterbury were marked by intermittent illnesses, which required periods of convalescence away from his duties. After 1932, he enjoyed good health for the rest of his life.
  Lang avoided continuation of the Prayer Book controversy of 1928 by allowing the parliamentary process to lapse. He then authorised a statement permitting use of the rejected Book locally if the parochial church council gave approval. The issue remained dormant for the rest of Lang's tenure at Canterbury. He led the 1930 Lambeth Conference, where further progress was made in improving relations with the Orthodox Churches and the Old Catholics, although again no agreement could be reached with the non-episcopal Free Churches.  On an issue of greater concern to ordinary people, the Conference gave limited approval, for the first time, to the use of contraceptive devices, an issue in which Lang had no interest. Through the 1930s Lang continued to work for Church unity. In 1933 the Church of England assembly formed a Council on Foreign Relations and, in the following years, numerous exchange visits with Orthodox delegations took place, a process only halted by the outbreak of war. Lang's 1939 visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is regarded as the high point of his ecumenical record. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, maintained that no one in the Anglican Communion did more than Lang to promote the unity movement.
  In 1937 the Oxford Conference on Church and Society, which later gave birth to the World Council of Churches, produced what was according to the church historian Adrian Hastings "the most serious approach to the problems of society that the Church had yet managed", but without Lang's close involvement. By this time Lang's identification with the poor had largely vanished, as had his interest in social reform. In the Church Assembly his closest ally was the aristocratic Lord Hugh Cecil; Hastings maintains that the Church of England in the 1930s was controlled "less by Lang and Temple in tandem than by Lang and Hugh Cecil".  Lang got on well with Hewlett Johnson, the pro-communist priest who was appointed Dean of Canterbury in 1931.
caption: Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury in London
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