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Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890
by R.W. Church
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I think it fair to set down these which were, in truth, formed opinions, and not random sayings; but it would be most unfair if one concluded from them, written and spoken in the freedom of friendly intercourse, that there was anything sour in his spirit, or harsh and narrow in his practice; when you discussed any of these things with him, the discussion was pretty sure to end, not indeed with any insincere concession of what he thought right and true, but in consideration for individuals and depreciation of himself.

And the same thing comes out in the interesting letter in which the Solicitor-General describes his last recollections of Keble:—

There was, I am sure, no trace of failing then to be discerned in his apprehension, or judgment, or discourse. He was an old man who had been very ill, who was still physically weak, and who needed care; but he was the same Mr. Keble I had always known, and whom, for aught that appeared, I might hope still to know for many years to come. Little bits of his tenderness, flashes of his fun, glimpses of his austerer side, I seem to recall, but I cannot put them upon paper.... Once I remember walking with him just the same short walk, from his house to Sir William's, and our conversation fell upon Charles I., with regard to whose truth and honour I had used some expressions in a review, which had, as I heard, displeased him. I referred to this, and he said it was true. I replied that I was very sorry to displease him by anything I said or thought; but that if the Naseby letters were genuine, I could not think that what I said was at all too strong, and that a man could but do his best to form an honest opinion upon historical evidence, and, if he had to speak, to express that opinion. On this he said, with a tenderness and humility not only most touching, but to me most embarrassing, that "It might be so; what was he to judge of other men; he was old, and things were now looked at very differently; that he knew he had many things to unlearn and learn afresh; and that I must not mind what he had said, for that in truth belief in the heroes of his youth had become part of him." I am afraid these are my words, and not his; and I cannot give his way of speaking, which to any one with a heart, I think, would have been as overcoming as it was to me.

This same carelessness about appearances seems to us to be shown in Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him, in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw about what the world thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren; which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is too much given to "hunting-up" passages for catenas of precedents and authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of the nation.

It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master, though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his most perfect work, the Life of Dr. Arnold—the method of singling out points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side, with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, The Christian Year, and the treatise On Eucharistical Adoration; to compare even in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and modesty, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's Remains, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments, Essays and Reviews prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter, or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people of his time, took up his system, and really, considering that the ideal which he honestly and earnestly aimed at was the complete system of the Catholic Church, it is an abuse of words to call it, whatever else it may be called, a narrow system. There may be a wider system still, in the future; but it is at least premature to say that a man is narrow because he accepts in good faith the great traditional ideas and doctrines of the Christian Church; for of everything that can yet be called a religious system, in the sense commonly understood, as an embodiment of definite historical revelation, it is not easy to conceive a less narrow one. And, accepting it as the truth, it was dearer to him than life. That he was sensitively alive to whatever threatened or opposed it, and was ready to start up like a soldier, ready to do battle against any odds and to risk any unpopularity or misconstruction, was only the sure and natural result of that deep love and loyalty and thorough soundness of heart with which he loved his friends, but what he believed to be truth and God's will better than his friends. But it is idle and shallow to confuse the real narrowness which springs from a harsh temper or a cramped and self-sufficient intellect, and which is quite compatible with the widest theoretical latitude, and the inevitable appearance of narrowness and severity which must always be one side which a man of strong convictions and earnest purpose turns to those whose strong convictions and earnest purpose are opposite to his.

Mr. Keble, saintly as was his character, if ever there was such a character, belonged, as we all do, to his day and generation. The aspect of things and the thoughts of men change; enlarging, we are always apt to think, but perhaps really also contracting in some directions where they once were larger. In Mr. Keble, the service which he rendered to his time consisted, not merely, as it is sometimes thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil—of hollowness, impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation—was greater than was always his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest which his life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all parties, and not least the Liberal party—the danger of shallowness and superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity, of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great exception of Arnold—Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards parted from him—the religious Liberals of our time have little reason to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as some of them were, who represented their cause then. They owe to Keble, as much as do those who are more identified with his theology, the inestimable service of having interpreted religion by a genuine life, corresponding in its thoroughness and unsparing, unpretending devotedness, as well as in its subtle vividness of feeling, to the great object which religion professes to contemplate.



XVIII

MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS[21]

[21] Theological Essays. By F.D. Maurice. Guardian, 7th September 1853.

The purpose of this volume of essays is to consider the views entertained by Unitarians of what are looked upon by Christians generally as fundamental truths; to examine what force there is in Unitarian objections, and what mistakes are involved in the popular notions and representations of those fundamental truths; and so, without entering into controversy, for which Mr. Maurice declares himself entirely indisposed, and in the utility of which he entirely disbelieves, to open the way for a deeper and truer, and more serious review, by all parties, of either the differences or the misunderstandings which keep them asunder. It is a work, the writer considers, as important as any which he has undertaken: "No labour I have been engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply;" and with his estimate of his subject we are not disposed to disagree.

We always rise from the perusal of one of Mr. Maurice's books with the feeling that he has shown us one great excellence, and taught us one great lesson. He has shown us an example of serious love of truth, and an earnest sense of its importance, and of his own responsibility in speaking of it. Most readers, whatever else they may think, must have their feeling of the wide and living interest of a theological or moral subject quickened by Mr. Maurice's thoughts on it. This is the excellence. The lesson is this—to look into the meaning of our familiar words, and to try to use them with a real meaning. Not that Mr. Maurice always shows us how; but it is difficult for conscience to escape being continually reminded of the duty. And it is in these two things that the value of Mr. Maurice's writings mainly consists. The enforcing of them has been, to our mind, his chief "mission," and his most valuable contribution to the needs of his generation.

In this volume they are exhibited, as in his former ones; and in this he shows also, as he has shown before, his earnest desire to find a way whereby, without compromising truth or surrendering sacred convictions of the heart, serious men of very different sides might be glad to find themselves in some points mistaken, in order that they might find themselves at one. This philosophy, not of comprehension but of conciliation, the craving after which has awakened in the Church, whenever mental energy has been quickened, the philosophy in which Clement of Alexandria and Origin, and, we may add, St. Augustine, made many earnest essays, is certainly no unworthy aim for the theologian of our days. He would, indeed, deserve largely of the Church who should show us a solid and safe way to it.

But while we are far from denouncing or suspecting the wish or the design, we are bound to watch jealously and criticise narrowly the execution. For we all know what such plans have come to before now. And it is for the interest of all serious and earnest people on all sides, that there should be no needless and additional confusion introduced into theology—such confusion as is but too likely to follow, when a design of conciliation, with the aim of which so many, for good reasons or bad ones, are sure to sympathise, is carried out by hands that are not equal to it. With the fullest sense of the serious truthfulness of those who differ from us, of the real force of many of their objections and criticisms on our proceedings, our friends, and our ideas, it is far better to hold our peace, than from impatience at what we feel to be the vulnerable point of our own side, to rush into explanations before we are sure of our power adequately to explain.

And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open. There is sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth. "If I could persuade all Dissenters," he says, "to become members of my Church to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it. I believe the chances are they might leave it the next day. I do not wish to make them think as I think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point." He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing" of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say that we have done no good.

And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and homage of both, we seem—not to grasp a shadow—Mr. Maurice is too earnest and real a believer for that—but to be very much where we were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:—

"My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the word 'miraculous,' which we ordinarily connect with it, suggests an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists; and because that language taken in connection with the rest of their story, offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken in the idea of an Incarnation, as the only natural and rational account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have taken human flesh."

Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or different from, our ordinary meaning of miraculous, as applied to this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account? We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject. But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "untrue meaning" of the word miraculous, as applied to what he believes. And the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.

We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this. Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so. In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most important truth—that that same Great Person by whose "holy inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is a generic difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other, or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link—a great one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after—in God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"—"forms of speech which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them; and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us, instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth." Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to say on the subject—if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he throws hard words about,—when at the close of this essay he paints to himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and found that he had blessed them these three times,"—he ought to consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the claims of opposite sides.

Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then, a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this belief in a "final judgment, unlike any other that has ever been in the world," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of Bible and Creed—a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what we rightly call 'God's judgments' as essentially resembling it in kind and principle." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the world, has obliged us first to practise the most violent outrages upon the language of Scripture, insisting that words cannot really mean what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean." It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than reason, that Christ is every moment judging us—that His tribunal is one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now—and that the time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is always with us—always seeing us—always judging us. Doubtless "everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now inconceivable to man, must understand "the substitution of a mere external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"—a resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of sight—how, or in what manner they know not—therefore they must suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever else may be committed to Him."

Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar, confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology. It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim, which holds in writing as well as in art—"Know what you want to do, then do it."



XIX

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]

[22] Saturday Review, 6th April 1872.

This Easter week we have lost a man about whom opinions and feelings were much divided, who was by many of the best and most thoughtful among us looked on as the noblest and greatest of recent English teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of inspiring enthusiasm and trust among honest and powerful minds in search of guidance, which belongs to none but to men of a very high order. Professor Maurice has ended a life of the severest and most unceasing toil, still working to the utmost that failing bodily strength allowed—still to the last in harness. The general public, though his name is familiar to them, probably little measure the deep and passionate affection with which he was regarded by the circle of his friends and by those whose thoughts and purposes he had moulded; or the feeling which his loss causes in them of a blank, great and not to be filled up, not only personally for themselves, but in the agencies which are working most hopefully in English society. But even those who knew him least, and only from the outside, and whose points of view least coincided with his, must feel that there has been, now that we look back on his course, something singularly touching and even pathetic in the combination shown in all that he did, of high courage and spirit, and of unwearied faith and vigour, with the deepest humility and with the sincerest disinterestedness and abnegation, which never allowed him to seek anything great for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured as he was, never found it. For the sake of his generation we may regret that he did not receive the public recognition and honour which were assuredly his due; but in truth his was one of those careers which, for their own completeness and consistency, gain rather than lose by escaping the distractions and false lights of what is called preferment.

The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr. Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set, exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of duties. There is no want of earnest and fervent religion among us, intelligent, well-informed, deliberate, as well as of religion, to which these terms can hardly be applied. And there is also no want of the boldest and most daring freedom of investigation and judgment. But what Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he endeavoured to impress on others, was that religion and liberty are no natural enemies, but that the deepest and most absorbing forms of historical and traditional religion draw strength and seriousness of meaning, and binding obligation, from an alliance, frank and unconditional, with what seem to many the risks, the perilous risks and chances, of freedom.

It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the two—the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and possibilities of modern thought. That he always satisfactorily explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of the day. The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the influence which he had with such minds. He had no system to formulate or to teach. He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them. He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind which is to be made wiser and better by them. And his aim was to reach up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to reach to it in life as much as in thought. And so to the end he was ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the traditional form. In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice's manner of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on. This governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them, explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him, of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction, equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and influencing practice. This habit of distinguishing sharply and peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, Subscription no Bondage, explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.

The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist's aim was high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their own account and by their own title the deference of all who read them; and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted to see—the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is, no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men's experience and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to see with another's eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice's desire to give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.

But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness, and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the modern English Church may well be proud.



XX

SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]

[23] Guardian, 26th March 1873.

General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly, the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his name was much in men's mouths. He was prominent in a band of distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion, and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of revolutions—the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless tyranny of the Turks.

He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting from it—changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations, and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy, his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks, not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose characteristic faults they were impatient.

His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity, activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean. He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania, from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare, half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed. His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy in 1814 and 1815.

At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and threats of assassination; he was known to be no sanguinary and merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which, as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after it—his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them, the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared, for good and for evil, their fortunes.

For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his opponents—enemies he could scarcely be said to have—as to the straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that might be risked in his presence.

The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return. His blameless unselfishness, his noble elevation of character, were a warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit, public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and that noble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and, some of them, to love it.



XXI

DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]

[24] Guardian, 23rd July 1873.

The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity, the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our generation had passed away from the scene in which his part was so large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind. It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.

A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us, probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us. Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of it—it may be stops of great immediate interest—our sense of its connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand, falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many admirers—many who deeply loved and trusted him—many who, in the face of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them, and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be both in the Church and the country.

For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals, though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect, but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society, to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges, disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness—or what was often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.

But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging energy in action. He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its benefits would satisfy—this was the aim from which, however perplexed or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.

When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a Bishop's duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon. The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about him at one time; turning them to account, assigning them tasks, pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.

What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from local points which brought him into closer communication with his flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions, social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force, of far-seeing judgment, of noble boldness and earnestness, of power over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr. Monsell[25] in our columns shows.

He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.

[25] ... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself, had been, during the past week, closely associated with him in anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present surrounded.

He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church's interests; and in his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.

... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day—questions which require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction, so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct responsibility between God and the soul, which are some of the most distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.

From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen's to hear him there vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the assaults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please. Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.

To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please—was "the last effort of his toilsome day."



XXII

RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]

[26] Guardian, 4th November 1874.

Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during which he has presided over his college has been one of the most eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes; and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh, though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford, its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.

He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold, Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done, and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the Apologia, has told us, in touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an obvious truth which had escaped other people—his work on Unauthoritative Tradition. His logical acuteness, his habits of disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble, his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of intellectual power—all this would have made him eminent, whatever the times in which he lived.

But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary—the Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish; and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.

One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination, the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford, have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by younger champions.

It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent tasks, we do not inquire.

Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and noble qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their precipitate and untested assumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the passing fashions of the hour.

This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the account which he was one day to give at his Lord's judgment-seat. We trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less conscientious man would have claimed long ago.



XXIII

MARK PATTISON[27]

[27] Guardian, 6th August 1884.

The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be biassed by prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements—great as they undoubtedly were,—the use that he made of them, and the place which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes; that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once recognised with all his soul the nobler side. And on the other hand, the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself, naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame. To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as their determined and implacable antagonist—to be able to point to him in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a passionate nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust of reserve and sarcasm—this was a triumph of no common order; and it might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and remarkable ones.

Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to despond was increased by circumstances. There was something in the quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the class list, in the higher competition for Fellowships, he was not successful. There are those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellowship, and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges; but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of 1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church. Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality, and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This, however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friendships, where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects, which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything was real—character, purpose, cause—and at any rate it was sure of his respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind; and these doubts grew with his years.

People have often not given Pattison credit for the love that was in him for what was good and true; it is not to be wondered at, but the observation has to be made. On the other hand, a panegyrie, like that which we reprint from the Times, sets too high an estimate on his intellectual qualities, and on the position which they gave him. He was full of the passion for knowledge; he was very learned, very acute in his judgment on what his learning brought before him, very versatile, very shrewd, very subtle; too full of the truth of his subject to care about seeming to be original; but, especially in his poetical criticisms, often full of that best kind of originality which consists in seeing and pointing out novelty in what is most familiar and trite. But, not merely as a practical but as a speculative writer, he was apt to be too much under the empire and pressure of the one idea which at the moment occupied and interested his mind. He could not resist it; it came to him with exclusive and overmastering force; he did not care to attend to what limited it or conflicted with it. And thus, with all the force and sagacity of his University theories, they were not always self-consistent, and they were often one-sided and exaggerated. He was not a leader whom men could follow, however much they might rejoice at the blows which he might happen to deal, sometimes unexpectedly, at things which they disliked. And this holds of more serious things than even University reform and reconstruction.

And next, though every competent reader must do justice to Pattison's distinction as a man of letters, as a writer of English prose, and as a critic of what is noble and excellent and what is base and poor in literature, there is a curious want of completeness, a frequent crudity and hardness, a want, which is sometimes a surprising want, of good sense and good taste, which form unwelcome blemishes in his work, and just put it down below the line of first-rate excellence which it ought to occupy. Morally, in that love of reality, and of all that is high and noble in character, which certainly marked him, he was much better than many suppose, who know only the strength of his animosities and the bitterness of his sarcasm. Intellectually, in reach, and fulness, and solidity of mental power, it may be doubted whether he was so great as it has recently been the fashion to rate him.



XXIV

PATTISON'S ESSAYS[28]

[28] Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln College. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, M.A., Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. Guardian, 1st May 1889.

This is a very interesting but a very melancholy collection of papers. They are the remains of the work of a man of first-rate intellect, whose powers, naturally of a high order, had been diligently and wisely cultivated, whose mind was furnished in a very rare degree with all that reading, wide and critical, could give, and which embraced in the circle of its interest all that is important to human life and society. Mr. Pattison had no vulgar standard of what knowledge is, and what goodness is. He was high, sincere, exacting, even austere, in his estimates of either; and when he was satisfied he paid honour with sometimes unexpected frankness and warmth. But from some unfortunate element in his temperament, or from the effect upon it of untoward and unkindly circumstances at those critical epochs of mental life, when character is taking its bent for good and all, he was a man in whose judgment severity—and severity expressing itself in angry scorn—was very apt to outrun justice. Longing for sympathy and not ill-fitted for it, capable of rare exertions in helping those whom he could help, he passed through life with a reputation for cynicism which, while he certainly exhibited it, he no less certainly would, if he had known how, have escaped from. People could easily tell what would incur his dislike and opposition, what would provoke his slow, bitter, merciless sarcasm; it was never easy to tell what would satisfy him, what would attract his approval, when he could be tempted to see the good side of a thing. It must not be forgotten that he had gone through a trial to which few men are equal. He had passed from the extreme ranks and the strong convictions of the Oxford movement—convictions of which the translation of Aquinas's Catena Aurea, still printed in the list of his works, is a memorial—to the frankest form of Liberal thought. As he himself writes, we cannot give up early beliefs, much less the deep and deliberate convictions of manhood, without some shock to the character. In his case the change certainly worked. It made him hate what he had left, and all that was like it, with the bitterness of one who has been imposed upon, and has been led to commit himself to what he now feels to be absurd and contemptible, and the bitterness of this disappointment gave an edge to all his work. There seems through all his criticism, powerful as it is, a tone of harshness, a readiness to take the worst construction, a sad consciousness of distrust and suspicion of all things round him, which greatly weakens the effect of his judgment. If a man will only look for the worst side, he will only find the worst side; but we feel that we act reasonably by not accepting such a teacher as our guide, however ably he may state his case. There is a want of equitableness and fairness in his stern and sometimes cruel condemnations; and yet not religion only, but the wisest wisdom of the world tells of the indispensable value of this equitableness, this old Greek virtue of [Greek: epieikeia], in our views of men and things. It is not religion only, but common sense which says that "sweetness and light," kindliness, indulgence, sympathy, are necessary for moral and spiritual health. Scorn, indignation, keenly stinging sarcasm, doubtless have their place in a world in which untruth and baseness abound and flourish; but to live on these is poison, at least to oneself.

These fierce antipathies warped his judgment in strange and unexpected ways. Among these papers is a striking one on Calvin. If any character in history might be expected to have little attraction for him it is Calvin. Dogmatist, persecutor, tyrant, the proud and relentless fanatic, who more than any one consecrated harsh narrowness in religion by cruel theories about God, what was there to recommend him to a lover of liberty who had no patience for ecclesiastical pretensions of any kind, and who tells us that Calvin's "sins against human liberty are of the deepest dye"? For if Laud chastised his adversaries with whips, Calvin chastised his with scorpions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to be suprised, yet we are taken by surprise, when we find a thinker like Mr. Pattison drawn by strong sympathy to Calvin and setting him up among the heroes and liberators of humanity. Mr. Pattison is usually fair in details, that is, he does not suppress bad deeds or qualities in those whom he approves, or good deeds or qualities in those whom he hates: it is in his general judgments that his failing comes out. He makes no attempt to excuse the notorious features of Calvin's rule at Geneva; but Mr. Pattison reads into his character a purpose and a grandeur which place him far above any other man of his day. To recommend him to our very different ways of thinking, Mr. Pattison has the courage to allege that his interest in dogmatic theology was a subordinate matter, and that the "renovation of character," the "moral purification of humanity," was the great guiding idea of him who taught that out of the mass of human kind only a predestined remnant could possibly be saved. It is a singular interpretation of the mind of the author of the Institutes:—

The distinction of Calvin as a Reformer is not to be sought in the doctrine which now bears his name, or in any doctrinal peculiarity. His great merit lies in his comparative neglect of dogma. He seized the idea of reformation as a real renovation of human character. The moral purification of humanity as the original idea of Christianity is the guiding idea of his system.... He swept away at once the sacramental machinery of material media of salvation which the middle-age Church had provided in such abundance, and which Luther frowned upon, but did not reject. He was not satisfied to go back only to the historical origin of Christianity, but would found human virtue on the eternal antemundane will of God.

Again:—

Calvin thought neither of fame or fortune. The narrowness of his views and the disinterestedness of his soul alike precluded him from regarding Geneva as a stage for the gratification of personal ambition. This abegnation of self was one great part of his success.

And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was "moral depravity," he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of discipline, based on dogmatic grounds—meddlesome, inquisitorial, petty, cruel—over the interior of every household in Geneva. What is there fascinating, or even imposing, in such a character? It is the common case of political and religious bigots, whether Jacobin, or Puritan, or Jesuit, poor in thought and sympathy and strong in will, fixing their yoke on a society, till the plague becomes unbearable. He seeks nothing for himself and, forsooth, he makes sacrifices. But he gets what he wants, his idea carried out; and self-sacrifice is of what we care for, and not of what we do not care for. And to keep up this supposed character of high moral purpose, we are told of Calvin's "comparative neglect of dogma," of his seizing the idea of a "real reformation of human character," a "moral purification of humanity," as the guiding idea of his system. Can anything be more unhistorical than to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology "neglected dogma," and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not even true that he "swept away at once the sacramental machinery" of mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is yet induced to credit him with such great qualities? The reason is to be found in the intense antipathy with which Mr. Pattison regarded what he calls "the Catholic reaction" over Europe, and in the fact that undoubtedly Calvin's system and influence was the great force which resisted both what was bad and false in it, and also what was good, true, generous, humane. Calvinism opposed the "Catholic reaction" point-blank, and that was enough to win sympathy for it, even from Mr. Pattison.

The truth is that what Popery is to the average Protestant, and what Protestant heresy is to the average Roman Catholic, the "Catholic reaction," the "Catholic revival" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in our own, is to Mr. Pattison's final judgment. It was not only a conspiracy against human liberty, but it brought with it the degradation and ruin of genuine learning. It is the all-sufficing cause and explanation of the mischief and evil doings which he has to set before us. Yet after the violence, the ignorance, the injustice, the inconsistencies of that great ecclesiastical revolution which we call by the vague name of Reformation, a "Catholic reaction" was inevitable. It was not conceivable that common sense and certain knowledge would submit for ever to be overcrowed by the dogmas and assertions of the new teachers. Like other powerful and wide and strongly marked movements, like the Reformation which it combated, it was a very mixed thing. It produced some great evils and led to some great crimes. It started that fatal religious militia, the Jesuit order, which, notwithstanding much heroic self-sacrifice, has formed a permanent bar to all possible reunion of Christendom, has fastened its yoke on the Papacy itself, and has taught the Church, as a systematic doctrine, to put its trust in the worst expedients of human policy. The religious wars in France and Germany, the relentless massacres of the Low Countries and the St. Bartholomew, the consecration of treason and conspiracy, were, without doubt, closely connected with the "Catholic reaction." But if this great awakening and stimulating influence raised new temptations to human passion and wickedness, it was not only in the service of evil that this new zeal was displayed. The Council of Trent, whatever its faults, and it had many, was itself a real reformation. The "Catholic revival" meant the rekindling of earnest religion and care for a good life in thousands of souls. If it produced the Jesuits, it as truly produced Port Royal and the Benedictines. Europe would be indeed greatly the poorer if it wanted some of the most conspicuous products of the Catholic revival.

It is Mr. Pattison's great misfortune that through obvious faults of temper he has missed the success which naturally might have seemed assured to him, of dealing with these subjects in a large and dispassionate way. Scholar, thinker, student as he is, conversant with all literature, familiar with books and names which many well-read persons have never heard of, he has his bitter prejudices, like the rest of us, Protestants or Catholics; and what he hates is continually forcing itself into his mind. He tells, with great and pathetic force, the terrible story of the judicial murder of Calas at Toulouse, and of Voltaire's noble and successful efforts to bring the truth to light, and to repair, as far as could be repaired, its infamous injustice. It is a story which shows to what frightful lengths fanaticism may go in leading astray even the tribunals of justice. But unhappily the story can be paralleled in all times of the world's history; and though the Toulouse mob and Judges were Catholics, their wickedness is no more a proof against the Catholic revival than Titus Oates and the George Gordon riots are against Protestantism, or the Jacobin tribunals against Republican justice. But Mr. Pattison cannot conclude his account without an application. Here you have an example of what the Catholic revival does. It first breaks Calas on the wheel; and then, because Voltaire took up his cause, it makes modern Frenchmen, if they are Catholics, believe that Calas deserved it:—

It is part of that general Catholic revival which has been working for some years, and which like a fog is spreading over the face of opinion.... The memory of Calas had been vindicated by Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. That was quite enough for the Catholics.... It is the characteristic of Catholicism that it supersedes reason, and prejudges all matters by the application of fixed principles.

It is no use that M. Coquerel flatters himself that he has set the matter at rest. He flatters himself in vain; he ought to know his Catholic countrymen better:—

We have little doubt that as long as the Catholic religion shall last their little manuals of falsified history will continue to repeat that Jean Calas murdered his son because he had become a convert to the Catholic faith.

Are little manuals of falsified history confined only to one set of people? Is not John Foxe still proof against the assaults of Dr. Maitland? The habit of a priori judgments as to historical facts is, as Mr. Pattison truly says, "fatal to truth and integrity." It is most mischievous when it assumes a philosophic gravity and warps the criticism of a distinguished scholar.

This fixed habit of mind is the more provoking because, putting aside the obtrusive and impertinent injustice to which it leads, Mr. Pattison's critical work is of so high a character. His extensive and accurate reading, the sound common sense with which he uses his reading, and the modesty and absence of affectation and display which seem to be a law of his writing, place him very high. Perhaps he believes too much in books and learning, in the power which they exert, and what they can do to enable men to reach the higher conquests of moral and religious truth—perhaps he forgets, in the amplitude of his literary resources, that behind the records of thought and feeling there are the living mind and thought themselves, still clothed with their own proper force and energy, and working in defiance of our attempts to classify, to judge, or to explain: that there are the real needs, the real destinies of mankind, and the questions on which they depend—of which books are a measure indeed, but an imperfect one. As an instance, we might cite his "Essay on the Theology of Germany"—elaborate, learned, extravagant in its praise and in its scorn, full of the satisfaction of a man in possession of a startling and little known subject, but with the contradictions of a man who in spite of his theories believes more than his theories. But, as a student who deals with books and what books can teach, it is a pleasure to follow him; his work is never slovenly or superficial; the reader feels that he is in the hands of a man who thoroughly knows what he is talking about, and both from conscience and from disposition is anxious above all to be accurate and discriminative. If he fails, as he often seems to us to do, in the justice and balance of his appreciation of the phenomena before him, if his statements and generalisations are crude and extravagant, it is that passion and deep aversions have overpowered the natural accuracy of his faculty of judgment.

The feature which is characteristic in all his work is his profound value for learning, the learning of books, of documents, of all literature. He is a thinker, a clear and powerful one; he is a philosopher, who has explored the problems of abstract science with intelligence and interest, and fully recognises their importance; he has taken the measure of the political and social questions which the progress of civilisation has done so little to solve; he is at home with the whole range of literature, keen and true in observation and criticism; he has strongly marked views about education, and he took a leading part in the great changes which have revolutionised Oxford. He is all this; but beyond and more than all this he is a devotee of learning, as other men are of science or politics, deeply penetrated with its importance, keenly alive to the neglect of it, full of faith in the services which it can render to mankind, fiercely indignant at what degrades, or supplants, or enfeebles it. Learning, with the severe and bracing discipline without which it is impossible, learning embracing all efforts of human intellect—those which are warning beacons as well those which have elevated and enlightened the human mind—is the thing which attracts and satisfies him as nothing else does; not mere soulless erudition, but a great supply and command of varied facts, marshalled and turned to account by an intelligence which knows their use. The absence of learning, or the danger to learning, is the keynote of a powerful but acrid survey of the history and prospects of the Anglican Church, for which, in spite of its one-sidedness and unfairness, Churchmen may find not a little which it will be useful to lay to heart. Dissatisfaction with the University system, in its provision for the encouragement of learning and for strengthening and protecting its higher interests, is the stimulus to his essay on Oxford studies, which is animated with the idea of the University as a true home of real learning, and is full of the hopes, the animosities, and, it may be added, the disappointments of a revolutionary time. He exults over the destruction of the old order; but his ideal is too high, he is too shrewd an observer, too thorough and well-trained a judge of what learning really means, to be quite satisfied with the new.

The same devotion to learning shows itself in a feature of his literary work, which is almost characteristic—the delight which he takes in telling the detailed story of the life of some of the famous working scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These men, whose names are known to the modern world chiefly in notes to classical authors, or occasionally in some impertinent sneer, he likes to contemplate as if they were alive. To him they are men with individual differences, each with a character and fortunes of his own, sharers to the full in the struggles and vicissitudes of life. He can appreciate their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light—perhaps of genius—a man, too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of romance. There is something touching in Mr. Pattison's affection for those old scholars, to whom the world has done scant justice. His own chief literary venture was the life of one of the greatest of them, Isaac Casaubon. We have in these volumes sketches, not so elaborate, of several others, the younger Scaliger, Muretus, Huet, and the great French printers, the Stephenses; and in these sketches we are also introduced to a number of their contemporaries, with characteristic observations on them, implying an extensive and first-hand knowledge of what they were, and an acquaintance with what was going on in the scholar world of the day. The most important of these sketches is the account of Justus Scaliger. There is first a review article, very vigorous and animated. But Mr. Pattison had intended a companion volume to his Casaubon; and of this, which was never completed, we have some fragments, not equal in force and compactness to the original sketch. But sketch and fragments together present a very vivid picture of this remarkable person, whose temper and extravagant vanity his biographer admits, but who was undoubtedly a marvel both of knowledge and of the power to use it, and to whom we owe the beginning of order and system in chronology. Scaliger was to Mr. Pattison the type of the real greatness of the scholar, a greatness not the less real that the world could hardly understand it. He certainly leaves Scaliger before us, with his strange ways of working, his hold of the ancient languages as if they were mother tongues, his pride and slashing sarcasm, and his absurd claim of princely descent, with lineaments not soon forgotten; but it is amusing to meet once more, in all seriousness, Mr. Pattison's bete noire of the Catholic reaction, in the quarrels between Scaliger and some shallow but clever and scurrilous Jesuits, whom he had provoked by exposing the False Decretals and the False Dionysius, and who revenged themselves by wounding him in his most sensitive part, his claim to descent from the Princes of Verona. Doubtless the religious difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days.

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