Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 11

He was a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days.

There was a true ring of the "Grand Seigneur" about him which always impressed me.

Yours sincerely, REAY.

_July_ 1_st_, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I thank you very much for your kindness in writing to me.

You may, indeed, presume that it is with painful interest and deep regret that I hear of the death of your father, and that I value the terms in which you speak of his feelings towards myself.

Though he died at such an advanced age, it is, I think, remarkable that his friends spoke of him to the last as if he were still in the full intercourse of daily life, without the disqualification or forgetfulness that old age sometimes brings with it.

For my part I can never forget my a.s.sociation with him in the House of Commons and elsewhere, nor the uniform kindness which he always showed me.

Believe me, most truly yours, ARTHUR W. PEEL.

_June_ 29_th_, 1894.

My DEAR RUSSELL,

I have seen, with the eyes of others, in newspapers of this afternoon the account of the death--shall I say?--or of the ingathering of your father. And of what he was to you as a father I can reasonably, if remotely, conceive from knowing what he was in the outer circle, as a firm, true, loyal friend.

He has done, and will do, no dishonour to the name of Russell. It is a higher matter to know, at a supreme moment like this, that he had placed his treasure where moth and dust do not corrupt, and his dependence where dependence never fails. May he enjoy the rest, light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him.

With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.

On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time to return southward, and resume, if it please G.o.d, the great gift of working vision.

Always and sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE.

III

RELIGION AND THE CHURCH

I

_A STRANGE EPIPHANY_

Whenever the State meddles with the Church's business, it contrives to make a muddle. This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected with the War. The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its special function, and its peculiar lesson. The function is to commemorate the revelation of Christianity to the Gentile world; and the lesson is the fulfilment of all that the better part of Heathendom had believed in and sought after, in the religion which emanates from Bethlehem. To confuse the traditional observance of this day with the horrors and agonies of war, its mixed motives and its dubious issues, was indeed a triumph of inept.i.tude.

[Footnote *: January 6th, 1918.]

Tennyson wrote of

"this northern island, Sundered once from all the human race";

and when Christians first began to observe the Epiphany, or Theophany (as the feast was indifferently called), our own forefathers were among the heathen on whom the light of the Holy Manger was before long to shine. It has shone on us now for a good many centuries; England has ranked as one of the chiefest of Christian nations, and has always professed, and often felt, a charitable concern for the races which are still lying in darkness. Epiphany is very specially the feast of a missionary Church, and the strongest appeal which it could address to Heathendom would be to cry, "See what Christianity has done for the world! Christendom possesses the one religion. Come in and share its blessings."

There have been times and places at which that appeal could be successfully made. Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due. But for Europe at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India or China would be to invite a deadly repartee. In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world "rose out of chaos," you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which "tare each other in the slime." Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares. You still make your sons to pa.s.s through the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical science are those which make possible the destruction of human life on the largest scale. Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany and what it stands for.

Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "The present is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power and facility of the means of destruction. Science is hard at work (science, the great--nay, to some the only--G.o.d of these days) to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to annihilate the human race." We see the results of that work in German methods of warfare.

Germany has for four centuries a.s.serted for herself a conspicuous place in European religion. She has been a bully there as in other fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological pretensions. Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has renounced the religion of sacrifice for the l.u.s.t of conquest, and has subst.i.tuted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ. A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists.

If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking. The Infallibility which did not save the largest section of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these latter days. No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute; but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies of s.e.xual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.

Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile Germany and in neutral Rome? I must confess that I cannot answer.

We were always told that the force which welded together in one the different races and tongues of the Russian Empire was a spiritual force; that the Russian held his faith dearer than his life; and that even his devotion to the Czar had its origin in religion.

At this moment of perplexity and peril, will the Holy Orthodox Church manifest her power and instil into her children the primary conceptions of Christian citizenship?

And if we look nearer home, we must acknowledge that the condition of England has not always been such as to inspire Heathendom with a lively desire to be like us. A century and a half ago Charles Wesley complained that his fellow-citizens, who professed Christianity, "the sinners unbaptized out-sin." And everyone who remembers the social and moral state of England during the ten years immediately preceding the present War will be inclined to think that the twentieth century had not markedly improved on the eighteenth. Betting and gambling, and the crimes to which they lead, had increased frightfully, and were doing as much harm as drunkenness used to do. There was an open and insolent disregard of religious observance, especially with respect to the use of Sunday, the weekly Day of Rest being perverted into a day of extra amus.e.m.e.nt and resulting labour. There was a general relaxation of moral tone in those cla.s.ses of society which are supposed to set a good example. There was an ever-increasing invasion of the laws which guard s.e.xual morality, ill.u.s.trated in the agitation to make divorce even easier than it is now. Other and darker touches might be added; but I have said enough to make my meaning clear. Some say that the war is teaching us to repent of and to forsake those national offences. If so, but not otherwise, we can reasonably connect it with the lessons of Epiphany.

II

_THE ROMANCE OF RENUNCIATION_

"What is Romance? The world well lost for an ides." I know no better definition; and Romance in this sense is perpetually ill.u.s.trated in the history of the Church. The highest instance-save One--is, of course, the instance of the Martyrs. When in human history has Romance been more splendidly displayed than when the young men and maidens of Pagan Rome suffered themselves to be flung to the wild beasts of the arena sooner than abjure the religion of the Cross? And close on the steps of the Martyrs follow the Confessors, the "Martyrs-Elect," as Tertullian calls them, who, equally willing to lay down their lives, yet denied that highest privilege, carried with them into exile and imprisonment the horrible mutilations inflicted by Severus and Licinius. In days nearer our own time, "many a tender maid, at the threshold of her young life, has gladly met her doom, when the words that accepted Islam would have made her in a moment a free and honoured member of a dominant community."

Then there is the Romance of the Hermitage and the Romance of the Cloister, ill.u.s.trated by Antony in the Egyptian desert, and Benedict in his cave among the Latin hills, and Francis tending the leper by the wayside of a.s.sisi. In each of these cases, as in thousands more, the world was well lost for an idea.

The world is well lost--and supremely well lost--by the Missionary, whatever be his time or country or creed. Francis Xavier lost it well when he made his response to the insistent question: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Henry Martyn lost it well when, with perverse foolishness as men accounted it, he sacrificed the most brilliant prospects which a University offers to preach and fail among the heathen, and to die at thirty, forsaken and alone. John Coleridge Patterson lost it well when, putting behind him all the treasures of Eton and Oxford, and powerful connexions and an opulent home, he went out to spread the light of the Gospel amid the isles of the Pacific, and to meet his death at the hands of the heathen whom he loved and served.

These, indeed, are the supreme Romances of Renunciation, but others there are, which, though less "high and heroical," are not less Teal and not less instructive. The world was well lost (though for a cause which is not mine) by the two thousand ministers who on "Black Bartholomew," in the year 1662, renounced their benefices in the Established Church sooner than accept a form of worship which their conscience disallowed. And yet again the world was gloriously lost by the four hundred ministers and licentiates of the Church of Scotland who, in the great year of the Disruption, sacrificed home and sanctuary land subsistence rather than compromise the "Headship of Christ over His own house."

One more instance I must give of these heroic losses, and in giving it I recall a name, famous and revered in my young days, but now, I suppose, entirely forgotten--the name of the Honble. and Revd.

Baptist Noel (1798-1873). "His more than three-score years and ten were dedicated, by the day and by the hour, to a ministry not of mind but of spirit; his refined yet vigorous eloquence none who listened to it but for once could forget; and, having in earliest youth counted birth and fortune, and fashion but loss 'for Christ,'

in later age, at the bidding of the same conscience, he relinquished even the church which was his living and the pulpit which was his throne, because he saw danger to Evangelical truth in State alliance, and would go forth at the call of duty, he knew not and he cared not whither."

After these high examples of the Romance of Renunciation, it may seem rather bathetic to cite the instance which has given rise to this chapter. Yet I cannot help feeling that Mr. William Temple, by resigning the Rectory of St. James's, Piccadilly, in order to devote himself to the movement for "Life and Liberty," has established a strong claim on the respect of those who differ from him. I state on p. 198 my reason for dissenting from Mr. Temple's scheme. To my thinking, it is just one more attempt to stave off Disestablishment.

The subjection of the Church to the State is felt by many to be an intolerable burden. Mr. Temple and his friends imagine that, while retaining the secular advantages of Establishment and endowment, they can obtain from Parliament the self-governing powers of a spiritual society. I doubt it, and I do not desire it. My own ideal is Cavour's--the Free Church in the Free State; and all such schemes as Mr. Temple's seem to me desperate attempts to make the best of two incompatible worlds. By judicious manipulation our fetters might be made to gall less painfully, but they would be more securely riveted than ever. So in this new controversy Mr. Temple stands on one side and I on the other; but this does not impair my respect for a man who is ready to "lose the world for an idea"--even though that idea be erroneous and Impracticable.

To "lose the world" may seem too strong a phrase for the occasion, but it is not in substance inappropriate. Mr. Temple has all the qualifications which in our Established Church lead on to fortune.

He has inherited the penetrating intelligence and the moral fervour which in all vicissitudes of office and opinion made his father one of the conspicuous figures of English life. Among dons he was esteemed a philosopher, but his philosophy did not prevent him from being an eminently practical Head Master. He is a vigorous worker, a powerful preacher, and the diligent rector of an important parish. Of such stuff are Bishops made. There is no shame in the wish to be a Bishop, or even an Archbishop, as we may see by the biographies of such prelates as Wilberforce and Tait and Magee, and in the actual history of some good men now sitting on Episcopal thrones. But Mr. Temple has proved himself a man capable of ideals, and has given that irrefragable proof of sincerity which is afforded by the voluntary surrender of an exceptionally favoured position.

That the attempt to which he is now devoting himself may come to naught is my earnest desire; and then, when the Church, at length recognizing the futility of compromise, acquires her complete, severance from the secular power, she may turn to him for guidance in the use of her new-born freedom.