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A LIST OF BOOKS
ON THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL

LETTERS AND CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN
HENRY NEWMAN DURING HIS LIFE IN THE
ENGLISH CHURCH. With a brief Autobiography. Edited,
at Cardinal Newman's request, by Anne Mozley. 2 vols.
Crown 8vo, 7s.
THE STORY OF DR. PUSEY'S LIFE. By the Author
of " Charles Lowder." With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo, y. 6d. net.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS THELLUSSON
CARTER, Warden of the House of Mercy, Clewer, and Hon.
Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. Edited by the Ven. W. H.
Hutchings, M.A., Archdeacon of Cleveland. With Portrait and
8 other Illustrations. 8vo, 10s. 6d. net.
LIFE. AND LETTERS OF HENRY PARRY LIDDON,
D.D., Canon of St. Paul's, and sometime Ireland Professor of
Exegesis in the University of Oxford. By John Octavius
Johnston, M.A., Principal of Cuddesdon Theological College ;
with a Concluding Chapter by the Lord Bishop of Oxford.
With 5 Illustrations (4 Portraits). 8vo, 1 5.?. net.
THE LIFE OF GEORGE RUNDLE PRYNNE, M.A.:
a Chapter in the Early History of the Catholic Revival. By A.
Clifton Kelway. With Photogravure Portrait and 4 other
Illustrations. 8vo, 6s. 6d. net.
CUDDESDON COLLEGE, 1854-1904 : a Record and
Memorial. With 3 Portraits and 3 other Illustrations. 8vo, stiff
paper covers, 2s. 6d. net ; cloth boards, 3.1. net.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.
By Sir Samuel Hall, M.A., K.C., formerly Vice-Chancellor of
the County Palatine of Lancaster. Crown 8vo, 45-. (sd. net.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

JOHN MASON NEALE, D.D.

JOHN MASON NEALE
D.D.
A MEMOIR

BY

ELEANOR A. TOWLE
AUTHOR OF
1 ALEXANDER HERIOT MACKONOCMIE : A MEMOIR '

WITH PORTRAIT
AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1907
All rights reserved

First Printed  November igob
Second Impression. . . ¦ April 1907

PREFACE
The following memoir of Dr. Neale cannot claim to be a
comprehensive record of his life ; but it is a memorial of
an unconventional and striking personality which left its
mark upon a prosaic period ; whilst it is also a chronicle
of spiritual and practical undertakings that, within the
limits of the English Church, might well be regarded as
original in conception and tentative in character.
Pioneer work of any kind was especially congenial to
one who united the impulse of the discoverer to an
indefatigable spirit of mental activity. A less sympathetic
insight into the deeds and minds of other men might
have resulted in a more creative exercise of unusual in
tellectual powers. His inclination was to adapt and
interpret. Readers of Pater will remember that Sebastian van
Storck's dissatisfaction with the Catholic Religion arose
from his perception of " its unfailing drift towards the
concrete — the positive imageries of a faith, so richly beset
with persons, things, historical incidents." To Neale this
was one of its chief attractions. These were the things
about which his imagination hovered, illuminating forgotten
pages of history, giving life to an effigy, setting an aureole
about a Saint, transforming a defaced inscription, restoring
the glow and colour of painted glass and gilded missals.
His mind was a reliquary where stones of little value lay
mingled with pearls of great price. They had been gathered

Vl PREFACE
rather than selected. The dusty sunbeams dancing about
old folios dazzled his eyes, the waves of fancy washed the
dull pebble till it sparkled like a gem, and spiritual experi
ences confounded the dispassionate judgments of ordinary
persons. These might have been presumed to be the charac
teristics of a student and a visionary, but Dr. Neale's
comparatively short life was not destined to be spent in a
scholarly seclusion where thoughts of the past might main
tain an unbroken ascendency, or dreams of the future usurp
the sphere of action. The very existence of the Church
upon earth presupposed difficulty and strife, and it was
not unwillingly that he found himself involved in her
conflicts. Moreover, it was also his happier lot beside still
waters and green pastures to nourish the innocence of
childhood and minister to the infirmities of age and the
sorrows of the poor with a direct and affectionate simplicity
that insensibly drew rustic untaught minds within the
circle of his constraining influence.
It is a difficult, if not an impossible task in drawing
a portrait, which might be regarded from such very dif
ferent points of view, to preserve its true proportions. The
intention and aim of the book is to form a conception
of Dr. Neale's character as manifested in his active life,
his relationships with those committed to his care, as
also in his intellectual pursuits and literary accomplish
ments. He can neither be measured with the dispassionate
judgment of posterity nor with the certainty of contem
poraneous knowledge. Some memories are naturally dim,
old friends have passed away, the mass of Tractarian
literature hardly touches the Cambridge side of the
movement, but a large correspondence, and journals
regularly kept, have done much to fill in details and
corroborate the testimony of living witnesses.
The author's thanks are in the first place due to those

PREFACE Vil
members of Dr. Neale's family who have spent much time
and infinite trouble in collecting material and selecting
letters. Amongst old friends still living who have kindly
supplied reminiscences, the Very Rev. R. W. Randall,
formerly Dean of Chichester, and the Rev. J. G. Young,
Vicar of Hursley, should be especially mentioned. Dr.
Neale's daughter, the present Mother Superior of S. Mar
garet's Sisterhood, has bestowed invaluable information
no other source could have supplied, as to the organiza
tion and spirit of the Order. A privately printed memoir,
compiled by one of the Sisters, has been largely drawn
upon for facts and extracts ; and a book, entitled
" Memories of a Sister," by the present Mother Superior
of S. Saviour's Priory, Haggerston, has furnished graphic
pictures of the initial difficulties of the Sisters' practical
work. It only remains to hope that the present biography,
though necessarily curtailed and imperfectly executed,
may yet give a true presentment of a life of disinterested
service, which, surmounting many disappointments and
disillusions, was spent in patient research, in the vindi
cation of Catholic beliefs, and in the humblest offices
of the Christian ministry.
ELEANOR A. TOWLE.
October, 1906.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
D. , , PAGE
birth and parentage— The Evangelical movement and its in
fluence—Character and career of Cornelius Neale — His
death — John Mason Neale's boyish letters — School life . . i
CHAPTER II
School days — Sherborne— Early attempts in verse — Farnham —
Influence of the Tractarian Movement— Trinity College,
Cambridge — Death of Charles Simeon— Change in Neale's
religious opinions  14
CHAPTER III
Undergraduate days— Friendship with Benjamin Webb— Early
interest in mediaeval literature — Archaeological studies —
Neale's theological standpoint — Undergraduate friendships
— Benjamin Webb — Church tours  27
CHAPTER IV
The Cambridge Camden Society — College friends and asso
ciates — Architectural studies — Restoration of S. Sepulchre's
Church — Neale's appointment to the chaplaincy and tutor
ship of Downing — Publication of the Ecclesiologist
— Neale's exposition of its aims — Descriptive powers
exemplified  40
CHAPTER V
Ordained deacon — Begins clerical work at S. Nicholas, Guild
ford — Visit to Wells — His licence refused by the Bishop of
Winchester — " Herbert Tresham," his first story for children
— Ordained priest — Theological views  53

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI FACE
Crawley — Breakdown in health — " Hierologus " — " Symbolism of
Churches : translated from Durandus " — Visit to Aitkin . . 63

CHAPTER VII
Delicacy of health — Winter in Madeira — Intercourse with
Montalembert — Attitude with regard to modern contro
versies — Literary work — History of the Holy Eastern
Church projected — Adventure in Spain— Return to England 75
CHAPTER VIII
The state of religious parties — Letters on the Oxford Movement
— Newman's threatened secession — Neale's religious opinions
—"The Ideal Church "—" Catena Symbolica "—Personal
characteristics  87
CHAPTER IX
Neale's interest in the Eastern Church — Prepares to write its
history — Studies in the Funchal Library — Authorities cited
— Cyril Lucar, Patriarch — Description of the Council of
Nicsea  98
CHAPTER X
The "History of Alexandria" continued and epitomized— Plan
of the introduction — Neale's attitude with regard to the
supernatural — Excursions and last days in Madeira — Dis
solution of the Cambridge Camden Society  109
CHAPTER XI
Final return to England in 1845 — Newman's influence— Spirit of
the times— Neale's position with regard to religious parties
— Correspondence with Webb— Republication of Spelman's
" History of Sacrilege" — Seatonian Prize — Early poems . . 121
CHAPTER XII
Residence at Reigate — Dr. Pusey's letter on Newman's secession
— Neale's visit to Oxford — Dislike of compromise — Warden-
ship of SackviOe College offered to Neale, and accepted —
Absence of worldly ambition — Description of Sackville
College  132

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIII

Sackville College— Its position and statutes— First months in the
College— Address to the pensioners— Christmas in the
College — Sermons in the Chapel  143

CHAPTER XIV
The first year at Sackville College— The beginning of trouble—
The Bishop of Chichester's inhibition— The judgment of
the Court of Arches — Petitions from pensioners — Neale's
conduct under persecution ...  154

CHAPTER XV
Panegyric on the Eastern Church— William Palmer's visit to
Russia — Desire for reunion — Introduction to the "History of
the Eastern Church " concluded — Friendship with the Rev.
Eugene Popoff— Letters from Mouravieff— Acknowledgment
of Neale's work from the Czar  165

CHAPTER XVI
The Gorham judgment — Its effect — Neale's letter and pamphlet
on the subject — Offer of the Deanery of Perth — The Scotch
Office — Reason for refusing the Deanery — The English
Church Union — Letters from Archdeacon Denison and the
Bishop of Exeter  177

CHAPTER XVII
Work in connection with the Morning Chronicle — Petition to
the Eastern Church — Troubles at Sackville College — Letters
respecting them — Mediaeval preachers  191

CHAPTER XVIII
Hymnology in the past — Webb's disapproval of hymns in the
vernacular — Neale's taste in poetry — Southey's letter to
Cornelius Neale — Neale's translations from the Latin and
Greek — Examples of his original hymns  205

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIX
PAGE
Travels in Holland and Denmark — Visit to the Bollandists —
Tours in Spain and Portugal — Political views — Memorial
with regard to Bishop Gobat's action in Palestine — Doctrine
of the Real Presence — First idea of the formation of S.
Margaret's Sisterhood  218

CHAPTER XX
Conditions of rural life — Neale's idea of a nursing Sisterhood —
Advice from various quarters — Training and reception of
Sisters — Their work amongst the poor — Beginning of com
munity life at East Grinstead  231

CHAPTER XXI
S. Katharine's Orphanage — Dealings with children — Catechetical
Instructions — "Duchenier" and children's books — Scenes
drawn from nature — " Child's History of England " — The
" Pilgrim's Progress "  243

CHAPTER XXII
" Essaysxm Liturgiology and Church History" — The Bollandists —
The Greek liturgies — Reminiscences from Sackville College
— Renewed opposition — The Lewes riots — Bishop Wilber-
force's action  257
CHAPTER XXIII
Tours in the South of France and Dalmatia — Interview with
Michael, Prince of Montenegro — Neale's social qualifications
— Lecture on Sisterhoods — Degree of D.D. conferred by
Hartford University— Autograph letter respecting it . . . 271

CHAPTER XXIV
Neale's correspondents — Letters from Gladstone and Dean
Stanley— Visit and letters from Ambrose de Lisle — Pro
posed " History of the Church "—The " Commentary on the
Psalms" — Mystical interpretations of Holy Scripture — Dr.
Littledale finishes the " Commentary "  282

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXV

Development of the Sisterhood — The Spirit of the Founder —
Inner life — Spiritual dealings and letters — Attention to
details — The Sisters' work in Soho — Penitentiary work . . 299

CHAPTER XXVI
Spiritual work — Retreat at Clewer — Neale's appreciation of others
— The foundation-stone laid of S. Margaret's Convent —
Preaching engagements — Last illness — Letter from Keble —
Death on August 6, 1866 — Funeral  308

APPENDIX I
Genealogy  321
APPENDIX II
Chronological List of the Works of the late Rev. J. M. Neale,
from the Catalogue in the British Museum  322
APPENDIX III
Archaeological Studies  328
APPENDIX IV
A Letter from Dr. Neale, dated February 1, 1855, with reference
to the Formation of St. Margaret's Sisterhood  334
Index  337

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Portrait of John Mason Neale  Frontispiece
The Grandmother and Father of Dr. Neale .... 4
Sackville College: The Quadrangle  141
Sackville College: The South Entry  141
Sackville College Chapel  154
Facsimile of Autograph Letter  281
S. Margaret's Convent, East Grinstead  311

JOHN MASON NEALE, D.D.
A MEMOIR
CHAPTER I
Birth and parentage — The Evangelical movement and its influence —
Character and career of Cornelius Neale — His death — John Mason
Neale's boyish letters — School life.
John Mason Neale, whose life after the age of five years
was to be almost wholly spent amongst green fields and
country lanes, was by birth a citizen of London, being
born in Lamb's Conduit Street, on the 24th of January,
1818. Like so many of the leaders of religious thought in the
first decades of the last century, he was the descendant of
a family whose strong religious convictions, formulated in
the strictest phraseology of Calvinistic belief, had yet been
vivified and enlightened by the purer, gentler spirit of the
Evangelical revival. Sin was no longer merely an adverse
force to be overcome, it was individualized ; and sinners
were sought out and cherished with an inextinguishable,
pitiful hopefulness, as souls to be saved. Up and down
the land, preachers with no credentials from constituted
authorities, but fervent in faith, rich in self-sacrificing
charity, had gathered the scattered peasantry in remote
villages and upon lonely hillsides to listen to their
message — a message truly of wrath to come, but also of
everpresent and illimitable mercy. Wesley and Whitfield
had drawn their thousands — an innumerable company of
every sort and degree ; rough farm lads had foresworn
their vices, and vain young girls their pleasures, at their
1 B

Yy

2 JOHN MASON NEALE
bidding. A missionary zeal had been awakened, and it
spread in the most unexpected quarters. Hannah More
and her sister had civilized the wildest and most neglected
districts in the Mendips with an enthusiasm which braved
at once all personal risks and the graver discouragement
of adverse critics. At court there was a desire to evangelize
the long-despised masses. Religion was in danger of be
coming the fashion. The Duke of Gloucester, brother of
George IIL, contributed with Wilberforce and others to
the expenses of the publication of the " Cheap Repository
Tracts;" and Horace Walpole, when a temporary illness
interrupted his letters, and shut out visitors and ordinary
distractions, was heard to exclaim, " I am sorry I scolded
poor Hannah More for being so religious. I hope she will
forgive me." Two millions of the tracts were sold within
the year, and it was not alone in country parishes, said to
be dark as Africa, that in this and other ways the work was
carried on. The respectable, ordered ranks of the middle
classes were broken by the onslaughts of spiritual incen
diaries, and the fire once kindled caught at everything that
opposed its progress. Deep, but very varied, religious con
victions and experiences threatened the disruption of united
families ; and serious-minded persons, hitherto content with
the accustomed fulfilment of religious obligations, found
themselves moved and disquieted, impelled to search,
not only into the established foundations of belief, but
for the more intangible and illusive assurance of personal
salvation. At the close of the eighteenth century this encroaching
wave of religious feeling, blown by strong gusts of mis
sionary zeal across the land, had swept into the sheltered
precincts of S. Paul's Churchyard, and, under the shadow
of the great Cathedral, had stirred the consciences and
sensibly affected the lives of Mr. James Neale and
Elizabeth Simpson his wife, who had their home there.
They carried on a very prosperous china manufactory for
some time in connection with the firm of Wedgwood,
and success in temporal matters and easy circumstances
left them ample time to spend on private devotion

PARENTAGE 3
and upon the furtherance of the religious objects they
had so much at heart. John Newton was an intimate
friend and constant visitor. During the period of the
French Revolution they established prayer-meetings in
their house, and Mr. Neale became one of the earliest
and most active supporters of the London Missionary
Society. The place of their abode, one may imagine, must have
had an effect upon their children, and especially upon
the receptive mind of their youngest son, Cornelius, whose
childhood and character bear, in some respects, a curious
resemblance to those of his only son, John Mason Neale.
In this central spot of the City there was much to
appeal to a child's imagination. The ceaseless traffic and
strange street cries ; the solemn booming of the deep-toned
bells ; the long flights of stone steps leading to the wide
doors of the church, like the stairs in ancient pictures by
which saints and angels mount to the gates of heaven ; the
great dome, vast, mysterious, dim even in the sunshine
against the clouded blue of London skies, — all these
gave food for fancy, whilst the restless tide of human
activities, surging around the impregnable stronghold of
faith, had a spiritual significance that must have uncon
sciously impressed itself upon a sensitive mind. The boy
had a fertile imagination and versatile gifts, and was keenly
alive to the absorbing interests of the world upon which he
was entering. Though brought up in the strictest round
of what his mother termed "new covenanted duties and
privileges," he soon developed tastes and leanings con
sidered to be tokens of an unregenerate nature.
Always devoted to books, he was an apt scholar, and
made such good use of his opportunities that he left
Cambridge, in 18 12, as Senior Wrangler, Chancellor's
medalist, and the winner of Dr. Smith's first mathematical
prize. He had won his honours with ease, and his early
training inspired a wish that all men might see the vanity
of these distinctions ; yet to a close observer, there must
have been indications of dangerous inclinations and dis
positions, for one of his anxious friends, in speaking of

4 JOHN MASON NEALE
him, fears " lest Satan should throw a fiery dart into the
gunpowder." The dart was thrown, but not, we may hope, by Satan.
He became an inordinate reader of fiction, a constant
frequenter of London theatres, and, leading in other
respects a blameless life, he gradually broke through the
severe ordinances and prohibitions which had governed
his childhood. To some it might seem that his fear lest
" the enchanting poetry of Jeremy Taylor's prose should
take the place of substantial spiritual nutriment" still
savours of scrupulosity ; but to his enlightened friends his
spiritual state was unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, there was
no open breach, and Susannah, the eldest daughter of Dr.
John Mason Good, to whom he made an offer of marriage,
had no difficulty in accepting it, though at the time, or
soon after, she appears to have entertained disquieting
doubts as to his position.
Dr. Good was not only a distinguished physician, but
a thoughtful and accomplished writer and an excellent
linguist, whose scholarly translations and original verses
had won recognition in literary circles. It is not un
interesting to note that his grandson's exceptional gifts
were, in some respects, of the same order.
Cornelius had been early disposed by parental in
fluence and his own inclinations to receive Holy Orders ;
but during his first years of married life he took pupils,
and of set purpose his ordination was delayed until
1822. By that time his health had declined. Agonizing
thoughts of grace, and election, and final perseverance
were pressed upon him with irresistible force, and what
was technically termed " conversion " took place. Abso
lutely and convincingly sincere, though, like his illness, of
a somewhat hectic character, it brought enduring peace to
his soul, and afforded immense consolation to his wife,
who, to her inexpressible joy, found he had violently
thrown the Waverley novel he had been reading, to the
other end of the room, in a vehement recoil from any
thing which might interpose an earthly interest between
him and matters of more serious moment.

THE GRANDMOTHER AND FATHER OF DR. NEALE.

STATE OF RELIGION 5
Ordination followed, he was admitted to the priesthood
in 1822, and, after one short year of pastoral work, his
ministry on earth was over. Always constitutionally
delicate, a life of comparative ease and comfort had not
inured him to the ordinary physical trials of the earnest-
minded curate. He was a constant and eloquent preacher,
fond of children, and unusually fitted to instruct their
minds and engage their attention ; and an anxious attend
ance upon the sick and poor, with arduous devotion to the
duties of his office, accelerated the development of con
sumptive tendencies.
In spite of his youth, he had had varied experiences.
His boyhood, in the very centre of the great emporium of
the mercantile world, his brilliant university career, and
subsequent clerical labours in an obscure country parish,
had, as it were, divided his life into three distinct portions.
For a while indomitable energies had conquered physical
weakness, and he had successfully competed with stronger
men, but now, though the intellectual strain might be
relaxed, he had felt the pressure of increased moral
responsibilities, and the fear of leaving his young wife and
four little children to battle unprotected with the world
must have necessarily weighed upon his mind. He
preached his last sermon, upon the text, " To me to live is
Christ, and to die is gain," in 1823, only one year after his
ordination ; and a few days later the truth he proclaimed to
others had become to him a matter of personal experience.
In those days, unhappily, even the more zealous
amongst the clergy rarely found such a consummation
desirable. We may well use the words of a modern
theologian to describe the condition of the Church in
which " the existence of a cycle of supernatural virtues, all
founded upon faith and constituting the Christian life, still
maintained a traditional place, yet little belief was reposed
in that heroic sanctity which is the practical embodiment
of all those virtues."
The most ephemeral literature, and chance passages in
works of fiction, throw curious side-lights upon clerical
habits and standpoints, and bear not unfair witness to

6 JOHN MASON NEALE
practices and manners of life little in harmony with
the high obligations of the Christian ministry. There
were, of course, many great and notable exceptions.
Men with minds powerfully affected by religious
fanaticism, of whom Grimshaw, Rector of Haworth,
the contemporary of Wesley and Whitfield, whose life
was written by Newton, was a type. In that wild
moorland parish, afterwards the home of the Brontes,
he preached thirty or forty times a week; he would
leave his reading-desk during the singing of a psalm to
flog his parishioners from the public-houses into church,
and yet, after these exceptional exertions, he would cry
in despair from the pulpit that " the greater part of them
were going to hell with their eyes open." Many there
were, fortunately, of other but yet heroic mould — Henry
Martyn, Heber, Simeon, Bishop Wilson of Calcutta, and
many less well known gentle and cultivated divines, who
maintained Church order and preached sacramental
doctrines, whose lives afforded a practical commentary
upon the doctrines which they preached ; the friends
of the friendless, the advocates of the poor, true pastors
of the flock committed to their charge. But what
wonder if the rank and file of the army should indulge
in laxity and idleness when those in high command
set so incredibly evil an example of the most irre
verent disregard of episcopal obligations : when Bishop
Pelham (i 807-1 827) examined a candidate for Holy
Orders by sending him a message by his butler to write
an essay ; and a Chaplain performed the same duty in a
cricket-tent during an interval in the match in which he
was playing ; when a contemporary of the same bishop,
Bishop Porteus of London, never endowed or built a
single church, and, in reply to a request for a charity
sermon, could assert, "I only give one a year, and the
next is promised ! " No wonder that, in such an atmo
sphere, aspiration should fold its wings, and faith itself
grow cold. Nor were morality and manners upon a
much higher level. It may be remembered that Henry
Tilney, the most upright and amiable of Miss Austen's

CORNELIUS NEALE 7
clerical heroes, found a very slight and perfunctory
attention to his parochial duties a most inconvenient and
wearisome interruption to the more important and con
genial task of lovemaking ; and that when a new living
was in question it was of the greatest moment that it
should be in a good hunting neighbourhood. Miss
Bronte had every opportunity for observing the ways and
characteristics of country curates, and though in St. John
she draws, probably from life, the highest type of austere
purity and sacerdotal devotion, the figures who cross her
stage — also, in all probability, portraits — have, for the most
part, little either in their words or actions to remind secular
people of higher principles or spiritual aims. Nor were
their sermons calculated to inspire a more religious tone
than their lives. Crabbe, who wrote from the point of view
of the pulpit, had upon this subject no illusions : —
" Hark to the churchman j day by day he cries,
' Children of men, be virtuous and wise ;
Seek patience, justice, meekness, temperance, truth ;
In age be courteous, be sedate in youth.' . . .
So they advise, and when such things be read,
How can we wonder that their flocks are dead ? "
In fact, when Cornelius Neale, in 1823, brought his
short pastorate to a close, his single-minded, self-sacri
ficing service of love must have been the result of strong
personal convictions rather than of prevalent ecclesiastical
ideals. The ordinary members of the clergy had, indeed,
hardly reached the standard of Trollope's cathedral dig
nitaries — men of irreproachable integrity and gentlemanly
manners, giving sufficiently edifying examples of ordinary
virtues in their homes and parishes, with consciences
undisturbed by any sense of neglected higher duties. One
bishop congratulates himself with simple sincerity upon
twenty years of episcopal life innocently spent in West
morland, at a safe distance from the trials and duties
which a residence in his own diocese might have forced
upon his notice.1
1 See Essay in the Quarterly Review. Bishop Wilberforce.

8 JOHN MASON NEALE
" My time has not been spent," he writes, with a touch
of modest pride which cannot be suppressed, "in idle
visitings, in country bickerings, in indolence or intemper
ance. No ! it has been spent partly in supporting the
religion and constitution of the country by seasonable
publications, and principally in building farm-houses,
blasting rocks, . . . planting larches, and implanting in the
hearts of my children principles of piety and self-govern
ment." Nor does it seem for a moment to occur to him
that these labours, however praiseworthy, could hardly be
regarded as apostolic.
Cornelius Neale's conceptions were of a different
order. He took the highest view of his responsibilities,
and he ungrudgingly dedicated his gifts and powers to the
succour of the poor and sorrowful, in whom he most surely
recognized the presence of his Lord.
His little son was only five years old at the time of his
father's death, but a child's admiring love had taken such
deep and ineradicable root in his mind that, to the end of
his life, in spite of long intervening tracts of happiness, and
many losses and poignant griefs, he still remembered his
silent misery when, lying awake in his little bed (perhaps
forgotten in the first awestricken confusion of the bereaved
household), he had wondered how it would be possible to
go on living in the empty world from which his hero had
departed. His father's tender affection may have made the more
impression in that his mother's character was cast in a
harder and narrower mould. Full of deep solicitude and
anxious desire for her children's moral and spiritual welfare,
she may have been somewhat lacking in the excusable
and engaging weaknesses of maternity, and possibly
oblivious of the danger of laying down unalterable rules
and carrying out preconceived theories for the guidance
and development of the little souls and bodies of her
children. Her religious views were strongly tinged with
Calvinism, with no shrinking, as far as we can learn,
from its grim logical conclusions. But the boy's instincts
had been awakened in a wider, freer atmosphere. The

EARLY CHILDHOOD 9
Bible stories heard at his father's knees were entrancingly
real. Already, in imagination, he had fought the lion
and the bear alone in the field with David the shep
herd-boy, he had been with Moses in cloud and flame
upon the sacred mount, he had wandered with the spies
into the promised land, the land — oh, strange figure of
unimagined joys ! — flowing with milk and honey ; and his
childish feet, both in fancy and in reality, had touched the
waters of Jordan, the river of death. The Gospel story,
with its parables from nature, and miracles of love, had
been unfolded in all its fulness, and the mystical inter
pretation of Scripture which was to take such a strong
hold upon his mind as to permeate all his future writings,
had formed a part of his father's teaching.
Soon after her husband's death, Mrs. Neale left Chiswick,
where he had died, and took up her abode at Shepperton.
The old-world river-side town of Chiswick, as it was at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, had many natural
features which could hardly have failed to have impressed
themselves upon the child's ready perceptions and pre
cocious understanding : the wide flowing river, with the dark
barges gliding past noiselessly, mysteriously, upon its still
surface ; the clink of the chains and the regular tramp of
patient horses along the wide towing-paths ; the low, brown
wharf running down to the water ; the faint grey-green of
the osiers, and the pollarded elms before the gates of old,
substantial, many-windowed houses ; and above the level
landscape, through fog and smoke, the glory and the
glow of Turner's sunsets ; — all these things were spread
like an open book before the boy's eyes, at an age when
impressions are most vivid and enduring, and we can
imagine that it was not without regret that Battersea-
and Chiswick, the first homes of his recollection, were left
behind. At Shepperton he was still amongst tranquil scenery —
wide village greens with their ponds and willows, butter-
cupped meadows and orderly rows of tall sentinel poplars,
bordering lanes so happily remote from the centres of popu
lation that in their hedgerows, twined with honeysuckle

io JOHN MASON NEALE
and bright with red campion, the treasures of childhood,
the nest of the thrush or chaffinch might yet remain the
happy secret of the fortunate discoverer.
It was an age when careful parents were, perhaps, over
anxious to awaken the early intelligence of their children,
and to direct it more especially to the understanding of
natural physical science. Mrs. Marcet's boys, though
clad in nankeen trousers and frilled collars, were allowed
to build the Alps with stone and earth in the kitchen
garden, and to dabble with wet clay and watering-pots,
in order that they might comprehend the course of rivers
and the nature of springs. Miss Edgeworth's Harry and
Lucy could not eat their bread-and-milk without learning
some useful lesson, and the joy of strawberry-gathering
must have been, we imagine, somewhat dashed by the
compulsory acquisition of the first rules of arithmetic,
since the subtraction of strawberries by the method
most approved by the gatherer formed no part of the
working of the sum.
Mrs. Neale, it seems clear, fostered in like manner the
early acquisition of general knowledge, whilst inculcating
principles destined to guide and govern the minds of her
children in later years. But her health was not strong,
and when the little Mason, as he was called, was six years
old, she felt the need of a man's assistance, and addressed
the following letter to the Rev. W. Russell, Rector of
Shepperton : —
"My dear Sir,
"I hope by this time you have been able to
determine whether your inclination and engagements will
allow of you taking my dear boy under your daily care
and general superintendence, especially in those things
which a woman is incompetent to teach. You are now
acquainted with what were his father's views and what are
mine for him — to bring him up in such a manner as shall
be most for the glory of God, and which is but the same
thing for the child's present and future happiness.
" I greatly fear everything like a modern education for
a boy — as totally subversive of that 'fear of the Lord

MATERNAL TRAINING n
which is the beginning of wisdom,' and of that ' holiness
without which no man shall see the Lord.' "
It would be interesting to learn what were in Mrs. Neale's
mind the dangerous elements of a modern education.
We can hardly be wrong in conjecturing that her nursery
laws were of a strict and uncompromising character,
counsels of perfection, hardly to be put in practice by
the small subjects of that well-governed kingdom. It is
a relief to learn that Mason was sometimes found
in the position of a rebel against lawful authority, and,
upon one occasion at least, was said by his old nurse
to be "the dearest, dirtiest, lyingest boy she had ever
known." Mr. Russell's rule was a beneficent one, and he soon
appears to have gained an influence based as much upon
affection as authority. Though the Neales left Shep
perton in 1829, his pupil ever held him in affectionate
remembrance; they kept up a constant correspondence
and arranged to meet each year, if possible, on the tutor's
birthday. His instructions, in the mean time, had borne abundant
fruit. The boy, with his keen intelligence and ques
tioning mind, was eager to learn, and his rapid progress
is sufficiently well exemplified in the childish letters, of
copper-plate propriety, specimens of the early Victorian
epistolary style and phraseology, which nevertheless give
some indications of individual character. Laboured, stilted,
and treasured, they carry us back to the days when letter-
writing was a fine art, to which an apprenticeship was
served in the schoolroom. "April, 1825. "MX. 8.
"My dear Mr. Russell,
" Mamma has been to see the Diorama. . . . The
text last Sunday was taken from Is. 51-15- Ist head, the
broken-hearted under a sense of sin ; 2nd, the broken
hearted under a sense of affliction. ... I have been to see
a printing press. ... I had my name printed 'Utinam
quod videram te.' . . . We have learnt 132 words in French.

12 JOHN MASON NEALE
... I have learnt 1 1 conjugations in French. . . . Grand
papa means to get an empty thermometer and fill it, that I
may see how 'tis done.
" Your affectionate boy,
"John Mason Neale."
One cannot help being sorry that he had already had
his attention directed to the experiences of the broken
hearted, and may well be pleased that the printing press
and the empty thermometer should have come to divert
his mind. One would have been still more glad to hear
of less instructive toys.
Fortunately, though an only boy, he was not an only
child, and he had his little sisters as fellow scholars and
playmates in his lighter moments, for the bond uniting
the fatherless children seems to have been not merely
that of a tender family affection, but of like interests
and congenial tastes. Before he was ten he had started a
family magazine, to which the less scholarly feminine pens
were allowed to contribute, though a tragedy, written about
the same time, was the sole work of his own classical
muse, a serious composition for which he had prepared
himself by reading all the tragedies of Seneca.
From the school at Blackheath, to which he was removed
in 1829 at the age of eleven, he writes again to his "very
dear Mr. Russell," to thank him for " the very pretty Greek
Testament and the letters, and the prayers you were so
kind as to give me. We have learnt a verse out of the
Greek Testament every day, out of Philippians." He has
also found time to admire the beautiful country ; but the
Sunday exercises would surely now appear to the most
puritanic mind expressly designed to alienate a boy of his
age from a creed so exacting with respect to religious
observances. Twice in the day he is taken to hear a
sermon at the long morning and evening services at
Dartmouth Chapel, carefully noting the texts; and lest
there should be any respite from serious thoughts and
enforced quiescence, Mrs. Neale gathered her flock about
her, and read one of Dr. Doddridge's sermons to them
in the afternoon ! She must, one would imagine, have

BOYISH LETTERS 13
been singularly lacking in a sympathetic understanding
of the natural instincts and capacities of young children,
if she had no fear of causing permanent injury by the
surfeit of spiritual nourishment. After recounting with
praiseworthy exactitude the regulated duties of his Sunday,
the real little Mason breaks out at the end of the letter,
beneath the cloak of Sabbatarianism.
" About a mile and a half from here is a great cavern,"
he writes, "which you pay sixpence a-piece for seeing,
where Jack Cade, who lived in the reign of Henry the VI.,
and a great many robbers have kept their spoils " — here
we have at once the future historian and romanticist.
" And we have a field at the back of the house with about
a dozen tiny trees stuck into some tiny beds, and a great
adder haunting the bottom."
It is possible that the "great adder's" very problematical
existence had been used by some bigger boy to strike
wholesome terror into his junior's innocent and credulous
mind, but at any rate he had the satisfaction of being
able to thrill his absent master with the thought of the
dangerous reptile.
We much fear that the realm of fairyland whence Hans
Andersen, and Grimm, and many others have brought
back such marvellous tales, was to him an undiscovered
country, but in his spare moments he took his pleasure
in " a world of moonshine." The creations of his own
brain were as real and almost as attractive as the mer
maids and goose-girls, the giants and princesses of known
fame and well-authenticated reputation, and the live adder
at the bottom of the garden an object of pleasurable
though trembling awe.
So his early school life went on ; diligent, inquiring, full
of varied interests, most of them centring upon the know
ledge found between the pages of lesson-books. A born
student, it is clear that he would never, even at ten years
old, have asked with Stevenson, in passionate wonder,
"Why cannot we all be happy, and devote ourselves to
play?"

CHAPTER II
School days — Sherborne — Early attempts in verse — Farnham — Influ
ence of the Tractarian movement — Trinity College, Cambridge —
Death of Charles Simeon — Change in Neale's religious opinions.
His thirteenth birthday found Neale still at Blackheath,
and it would appear that the same processes as those
of earlier years were applied to the furtherance of his
intellectual and spiritual advancement. Here is the un-
childlike list of his ponderous birthday presents : Leigh-
ton's "Holy Life," Wilson's "Evidences of Christianity,"
" Jewish Records," Walker's " Christian ; " and Samuel,
apparently a schoolfellow of the Sandford and Merton
type, presents him with "Watts on the Improvement of
the Mind."
Can it be matter of surprise that his letters reflect his
training, and that the record of his boyhood is painfully
exempt from the natural foibles of youth, and the de
structive but wholesome ebullitions of animal spirits ! Yet
doubtless those "apprehensions were being quickened
which are the material of future thought, and, to a great
extent, the rule of future conduct;" and, moreover, his
literary instincts were being exercised and formulated.
The school had started a " Musae Proprietariensis," in
which all the pupils' best performances were to be written
out, and some of his earliest efforts found a place
there. In 1832 he encloses in a letter a piece of Sedulius ;
" Omnipotens aeterne Deus spes unica mundi," etc., and
his subjoined translation of more than seventy lines : —
" Eternal God, the only hope of Adam's ruined race,
Who rear'st the heaven's huge pillars up, reveal to us Thy grace.
14

SCHOOL DAYS 15
Thou that restrain'st the roaring sea by bands of feeble sand,
Who measurest out the night and day with Thy Almighty Hand :
'Tis Thou that numb'rest all the stars, 'tis by Thy Power they shine,
And every shining lamp appears a proof of skill Divine "—
showing evident signs of care, and elementary ideas of
versification ; curiously foreshadowing the diligence of the
future gifted translator of mediaeval hymns. He was
beginning to take pleasure, not only in Latin verse and
poetical exercises, but in the study of poetry. He read
Warton's " History of English Poetry," and found it very
interesting. Here are his comments.
"Warton begins from the last period of the English
language, which he divides into three portions, the Gothic,
the Norman, and the Saxon. Of the first he says there
is no fragment remaining except a few sentences from
Caedmon. The second he takes no notice of. The third
he begins with. The first part is rather dull, as it contains
only an account of the Saints' lives in metre, which are very
long and tedious. Then follows Chaucer and Lydgate,
and after that the most interesting part, containing Wyatt,
Surrey, Heywood, Sackville, Hall. Here he leaves off, for
he grew tired of the work."
This last fact no doubt aroused displeased astonish
ment in the young student, whose unwearied mind was
ever seeking fresh fields and pastures new of light and
knowledge, but it would seem clear that the critic and
commentator, though he might not be in all respects a
safe or sympathetic guide, had at least introduced him
to hitherto unknown poets, and to what he justly terms
the most interesting period of English poetry. The
Elizabethan period, with its "pastoral fancies and Italian
conceits," would not, except in the case of the dramatists,
have been specially attractive to the ordinary schoolboy.
Many children, without any real appreciation of poetry,
are captivated by the rhythm and the sound — the march
ing measures of a war song, the minstrel music of Scott's
flowing verse, the rugged tragedy of an old ballad, and
even the music of a love lyric ; but it is for the same reason
that, without any ear for music, they delight to blow a

16 JOHN MASON NEALE
trumpet or beat a drum. Neale was not so much a listener
as a student. A musical-box would have given him little
pleasure unless he had been allowed to pull it to pieces,
not for mischief, but in order to understand its construction.
Quaint fancies, archaic verse, the perfection of expression,
and simplicity of thought with elaboration of style, — some
of these things at least he discovered in the rich mine of
Elizabethan literature; and undoubtedly his taste was
being formed and his faculties strengthened by his limited
chances of advancement in this particular study. He
began to write blank verse, naturally of no great merit,
but careful and imitative. Here are some lines from a
poem upon winter, enclosed in a letter to his mother : —
" The pale moon disappears,
Then comes the morning, lurid, hoary, wan,
And overwhelmed with vapours and with cloud.
The dewdrops are congealed upon the trees ;
The hailstones, deadly cold, drop on the thatch."
If she likes these, he cheerfully promises to send her some
longer ones on summer. Versification is an easy art, and
he is quite prepared to practise it if desired.
So far his education from all accounts was more or
less desultory, with spare time in which to gratify his
inclinations with respect to reading and authorship ; but
in 1833, at the age of fifteen, he went to Sherborne, and
the busy routine of public-school life must have broken in,
not altogether agreeably, upon some congenial pursuits ;
though more opportunities were afforded for improvement
in scholarship. It would not, however, appear as if the
school itself had left any decided impress upon his cha
racter. He had no popular qualifications, and probably
found few companions who preferred with him the library
to the playing-fields. Though always an indefatigable
walker, he had no aptitude for athletics. A tall, shy,
sallow-faced boy, with thick dusky hair tumbled above
a broad forehead, and dark-blue short-sighted eyes, he
moved a solitary figure among the young, happy herd, and
found ordinary schoolboy distractions and talk unwelcome

SHERBORNE 17
interruptions to more serious preoccupations and self-
communings. In his first letter from Sherborne, he characteristically
notes what he evidently considers its two most important
features : the Great Tom of Sherborne, a magnificent bell,
and its inscription, " Sancta Maria, ora pro mihi, miserimo
peccatori, A.D. MCCCXXXXXI;" and, in the neigh
bourhood, Auburn, the scene of Goldsmith's "Deserted
Village." There were other outward circumstances well fitted to
make impressions that have not been recorded. The
change from ordered suburban scenery to the deep, winding
lanes and green valleys of Dorsetshire ; the soft sweep of
rounded hills against unclouded skies ; the wide, untrodden
pastures and low-lying woods, — all these must have had an
unconscious influence ; and then, set in their midst, there
rose the old town with its historical associations reaching
back to the days of S. Ealdhelm, when Newer Wessex —
the lands of Dorset and Somerset, with that part of Wilts
which may be called the land of Malmesbury — became the
diocese of the Bishop of Sherborne (705). So strong was
its natural position that it was the only corner of the
country where Englishmen successfully resisted the on
slaughts of the pirate Northmen, and this not without
the powerful assistance of the militant Church, for between
the years 868 and 933, no less than three bishops of
Sherborne were slain in battle. Nor did the town lose its
ecclesiastical character when, in 1075, the see was removed
from Sherborne to Old Sarum. The abbey remained, and,
under King Ethelred, the rule of S. Benedict had been
already introduced into the monastery.
We can have little doubt that an intelligent boy
would have been eager to make himself acquainted
with the history of the town, but we may be yet more
certain that his attention would have been irresistibly
attracted by its architectural wonders. The old castle
on rising ground, with two streams flowing beneath it
through fertile water meadows, had suffered a memorable
siege under Fairfax. Upon its surrender it was reduced
c

1 8 JOHN MASON NEALE
by gunpowder to untenable ruins, some of these forming
part of the present building : the Chapel of " Alhalowes "
and the great Abbey Church. Round these fierce
quarrels between the monks and the townspeople centred,
culminating in the great fight and fire of 1436, that inter
rupted the restoration of the fifteenth century. It is a
Norman Church transformed into a Perpendicular build
ing, though its tower and transepts retain Norman cha
racteristics. The great vault of the nave with its transverse
arches, their bosses of foliage and flowers in infinite variety ;
the harmonious design of the choir with the shafts rising
straight from the floor to the intricate panellings of the
roof; — all these may well have served as steps in the
study of ecclesiology, and to this he was to devote a large
portion of his future time. But though ghosts of the past
might haunt the ancient enclosure, they had no message
for him. The great church was not as yet to him the sign
and witness of a spiritual reality. Chancel and nave, porch
and altar, were symbols of a faith to which he was more or
less a stranger. The Christian instruction he had received
made little account of Christian art. Architecture might
place within his hands the lamp of power and beauty, but
hardly that of truth and sacrifice. He had been taught to
look for the outward signs of inward piety in personal acts
and words, rather than in the consecrated types of sacra
mental grace.
Such was, as far as we can learn, the condition of his
mind, when, in 1835, at the age of seventeen, he quitted
Sherborne. There is no record of any school distinctions
gained, though in many respects he must have been in
advance of lads of his age. He had an insatiable appetite
for books, extraordinary mental powers, and an ex
ceptionally retentive memory. Yet it may well have been
that he had tried too many devious paths to advance upon
the beaten track, and in a crowd his shyness naturally
kept him in the background. Mrs. Neale was not, as
we have seen, actuated by worldly ambition, the prizes of
life were of small importance in her eyes, and the boy
shared her indifference. He left Sherborne without in

ATTEMPTS IN VERSE 19
any way making his mark there, and went for a short time
subsequently to school at Farnham.
Here, with perhaps more spare time at his disposal, he
again employed himself in versification, and some lines
have been preserved showing signs of quickened poetic
fancy, as well as of a more practical understanding of the
art. The poem is to be entitled the "Contest of the
Months," and he copies out a dialogue between the fairies
Oberon and Titania (one may hope he has been reading
the "Midsummer Night's Dream"), in a letter to his
sister.

" Oberon. How calm how rev'rend rise these forest stems,
Whose dark red twilight scarce admits a ray,
Save, where on some green blade or mossy stump,
An eye of gold is strewn. . . .
These solid walls of green, as they run down
By rocks and caverns to the green vale's jaws,
Are fitted for our court."
And in more graceful numbers the fairy queen replies—
" 'Tis pleasant now,
When hoary winter throws one arm, bespangled
With gems of frost, around young Spring, who half
Shrinks from his touch, and half with pleasure viewing
His form, now milder from her flowery store,
Hangs her pale snowdrop on his icy neck."
Besides his ordinary studies and verse-making he had
other pursuits, and for the first time we hear of him in
connection with parochial work ; on Sundays taking the
class of ' James,' the bishop's butler, in the Sunday school.
One of his longest letters home relates his difficulties and
experiences. It is remarkable as foreshadowing the infinite
pains he was ever ready to bestow upon the teaching of
the poor and ignorant. He discusses the best way of
applying catechetical methods, and finds it hard to ask
questions neither beyond his scholars' comprehension nor
else too leading.
He evidently liked the work of a teacher, and took an

20 JOHN MASON NEALE
individual interest in his pupils ; -.but, next to versification,
letter-writing was of all occupations, so he averred, the
most delightful ; thereby unconsciously betraying a funda
mental want of resemblance to the modern schoolboy. In
his case words flowed freely, and he probably found it
easier to express himself upon paper than in ordinary
conversation. It was whilst he was at Farnham that he first received,
either from books or living teachers, some dawning
notions of a visible Church as the authorized and divinely
appointed vehicle and interpreter of the gospel truths
that were to him already the very foundation-stones of
faith. In order to understand what otherwise appears a some
what sudden and inexplicable change in his mind with
regard to theological questions, it will be necessary to
take a short survey of the state of the religious parties
in England who at this time in various and sometimes
divided camps were contending for the faith, and yet with
a loyal enthusiasm had ranged themselves beneath one
standard — the standard of the Cross.
The Oxford movement was not merely affecting members
of the University, but was exercising a far wider influence
than could have been anticipated by its most ardent
adherents. The days were over when the discussion or
exposition of theological propositions was relegated to the
pulpit ; and the minds of men were filled and stirred, not
so much by questions of conscience, as by articles of belief.
To many it appeared to be a time of dangerous specula
tion and unrest, whilst to others it was the God-sent
troubling of stagnant waters. What may be termed the
old Oriel School, 1826-38, was still a great power when
Neale was preparing to go up to Cambridge. It was
a united party relying upon the justice of the cause,
with no unhesitating voice proclaiming old truths and
obligations as taught by the Catholic Church from the
beginning, and consequently to be accepted and practised
by all her faithful members. As Newman writes of the
spring of 1839 —

THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT 21
" My position in the Amglican Church was at its height.
I had supreme confidence in my controversial status, and
I had a great and still growing success in recommending it
to others."

And in his article on " The State of Religious Parties,"
published two years before Tract 90, he notes with pleasure
the testimony of opponents as to the rapid spread of the
doctrines he taught. The movement, it was asserted, had
"manifested itself with the most rapid growth of the
hotbed of these evil days . . . The Via Media is crowded
with young enthusiasts, who never presume to argue except
against the propriety of arguing at all  These doctrines
have made fearful progress. There are few towns of note to
which they have not extended. They are preached in small
towns in Scotland. . . . They are advocated in the news
papers and periodical press. They have even insinuated
themselves into the House of Commons."
This disastrous climax might well fill the minds of
cautious opponents with dismay, lest the secular arm should
be in vain invoked to suppress ecclesiastical lawlessness.
Moreover it was easy to charge the adherents of these
opinions with folly and conceit, with ignorant obstinacy
and wild indiscretions, but it was not possible to deny
that their leaders were men of acknowledged ability, of
high moral character and of rare intellectual gifts. Dean
Church, in reviewing the course of the movement, declared
that " Keble had given the inspiration, H. Froude had given
the impetus, and then Newman took up the work," and
that work had assumed proportions to fill the onlookers
either with surprised delight or with unbounded dissatis
faction. The Tracts were coming out, each like a bomb
shell thrown into the opposite camp; and the alarming
rapidity of the attack hardly left time for effectual
retaliation, or organized defence.
It was one of the most remarkable notes of the
Catholic Revival, that it united men of the most opposite
characters, not simply in the work itself, but also in the
tenderest bonds of personal affection. The mystic, the

22 JOHN MASON NEALE
logician, the poet, and the student were, in very diverse
manners, all seeking the same end — the restoration of
Catholic doctrinal teaching and Catholic practice in the
worship of the Anglican Church. In 1833 Keble's Assize
sermon on "National Apostasy," whilst it awakened a
storm of opposition, had undoubtedly confirmed weak
disciples and gained fresh followers ; some serious theo
logians, and some as daring revolutionists as Hurrell
Froude, who, with youthful audacity, railed at the Re
formers and described the Reformation as " the bad setting
of a broken limb." There were, in fact, representatives
of every type of character : Newman, Keble, Pusey,
Rose, Church, William Palmer, Ward, Isaac Wilberforce,
and many others, who, by their teachings and writings,
and yet more by the power of an intangible personal
influence, had, like the apostles of old, filled the city with
their doctrine.
At Cambridge there was a different atmosphere, and
its inhabitants breathed a lighter air. But we must not
forget that, before he went up to Cambridge in 1836, it
was the spirit of the Oxford Tractarians that, like a
breeze from an unknown quarter, brought a reanimating
sense of space and life to the more or less narrow limits of
Neale's doctrinal knowledge and spiritual conceptions.
In the beginning of that year he studied under Dr.
Challis, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, then Rector
of Papworth St. Everard, a village near Cambridge. Here
Harvey Goodwin, afterward Dean of Ely and Bishop of
Carlisle, was his fellow pupil. Soon after, Dr. Challis
moved to the Observatory at Cambridge, and Neale
remained one of his household, under other tuition, until
he matriculated at Trinity. His time at Papworth, how
ever short, was in one respect memorable, for whilst there
he had, at eighteen, fallen in love ; not an unusual experi
ence at that age, and one to be repeated a few years later
in a second attachment. This last was not a mere passing
fancy, but held within it serious elements of stability and
truth. The boy-and-girl romance, however, and the formal
character of the first courtship, throw a curious light upon

COURTSHIP 23
the habits of mind and customs of the day. " Love in par
ticular," we are assured, "will not endure any historical
scrutiny," but it is undoubtedly true that in its expression
it has much to do with times and seasons and public
opinion. Mason Neale's proposal was made in what he
considered the most correct form, and in the manner best
fitted to secure a favourable reply, namely, in a copy of
verses. His love was likened to a moss rose, and he prays
that in the garden where she blooms he may be permitted
to plant a forget-me-not.
This somewhat ambiguous wooing met with the desired
response, and we find him at once writing to acquaint his
old tutor, Mr. Russell, with his happiness. To a young man
just entering upon college life it might prove the surest
safeguard ; and to Mr. Russell's fear that it may make him
idle, Neale can confidently reply that there is not the
least danger, since the young lady had no desire to furnish
any distractions from important duties, and quotes a
sentence from one of her letters in proof of his assertion : —
" Once again, before I close this letter, may I add that,
if ever you have wished for my regard, you will show it
by your unwearied industry and perseverance, now, and
when at College."
These cautions might have come more appropriately
from his old master, and we are not surprised to learn
that, though the engagement received unqualified approval
and parental sanction, it was not destined to survive the
disenchanting influences of absence ; and, unalleviated by
risks or difficulties, it was irrevocably sunk in smooth
waters. It had one enduring result, that from this time, in spite
of the pressure of other work, he kept a copious diary.
It is of too intimate a nature to be quoted, and contains
little of general interest, but now and again it furnishes
indications of character, when a boy's enthusiasm or a
boy's conceit breaks out through the bare record of
events. For example, he proposes to gaze into futurity,
and mournfully imagines his funeral tablet erected in

24 JOHN MASON NEALE
some quiet village church, " To the memory of the Rev.
J. M. Neale " — he has already determined to take Holy
Orders, — and he longs " that he may have done something
to exempt that tablet from being carelessly passed by."
He "pants after immortality," with a youthful disregard
of the necessarily obliterating action of time upon earthly
fame and honour. He is intent upon the workings
of his mind, and more wholesomely occupied in reading
for matriculation. Mr. Shilleto, his tutor, was fitted for
his post. Neale felt he could sit with him from morning
to night. He, in his turn, was delighted with his pupil
and especially commended his Greek verse.
In the midst of much heterogeneous matter there are
three entries in the journal of this year very appositely
illustrating three phases of his mind : the strong substratum
of evangelical fervour ; the growing sense of the unity of
the Church, and of the sacramental system as the necessary
outcome of her teaching ; and, thirdly, an increasing interest
in architecture as the authentic exponent of historical facts
and eternal verities.
As one instance of the sympathetic hold he still re
tained upon the principles in which he had been educated,
his detailed narrative of Charles Simeon's death, as he
heard it related to a gathering of young men by his devoted
friend and follower Mr. Carus, may be quoted : —
" I went to him after chapel this morning, and he was
then lying with his eyes closed. I thought he was asleep,
but after standing there a little while he put out his hand
to me. I said, 'The peace of God which passeth all
understanding shall keep your heart and mind.' He said
nothing. I said again : ' They washed their robes, dear
sir, and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb ;
therefore they are before the throne of God.' • I have, I
have,' he said. ' I have washed my robes in the Blood of
the Lamb ; they are clean, quite clean, I know it.' He
shut his eyes for a few minutes, and, when he opened them
again, I said : ' Well, dear sir, you will soon be able to
comprehend with all Saints what is the breadth and length
and depth and height, and know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge, that ye may  ' He tried to raise

DEATH OF CHARLES SIMEON 25
himself after his quick manner. 'Stop, stop, you don't
understand a bit about that text ; don't go on with it— I
won't hear it. I shall understand it soon.' And after a
while he whispered, ' I think, death — silence.' "
How clearly one sees the scene ! the revival of energy
in the dying teacher lest the text should receive a wrong
interpretation ; the well-meant efforts of his over-anxious
friend, who remembered, somewhat too late, that Simeon
had always expressed a wish to be alone when dying, not
praying but meditating, and not even interrupted with texts
from the Bible. A last recorded utterance, "Lord, now
lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to
Thy word;" and then the solitude and silence he had
desired as the Shadow of Death fell upon the room ;
and not upon that room only, for many houses were in
mourning, and there was much sorrow, as Neale writes,
in Cambridge that night. He rejoices in the thought of
what the meeting must have been between Simeon and
Henry Martyn, and is impressed by the vast mourning
crowds at the funeral and the funeral oration.
A little later we find quite another note sounded in
some verses on the death of an uncle, who had apparently
been buried with the unseemly ostentation of the ordinary
conventional burials of those days : —
" Oh give me back the days of old ! Oh give me back one hour !
To make us feel the Holy Church o'er death hath might and power.
Take hence the heathen trappings, take hence the Pagan show,
The mimicry, the heartlessness, the unbelief of woe.
And let us know to what we go and wherefore we must weep,
As o'er the Christian's hopeful rest, or everlasting sleep.
Lay in the dead man's hand the Cross, the Cross upon his breast,
Because beneath the shadow of the Cross he went to rest.
And let the Cross go on before — the Crucified was first
To go before the people and their chains of death to burst :
And be the De Profundis said for one of Christ's own fold,
And — for a prisoner is set free — the bells be rung, not tolled.
Deck the High Altar for the Mass ! let tapers guard the hearse
For Christ, the Light that lighteneth all, to blessing turns our curse."

26 JOHN MASON NEALE
Here we have a description of a Christian's funeral, clearly
indicating an appreciation and understanding of Catholic
rites one might have hardly expected to discover; dis
tinctly marking a stage in his advance towards the
principles to which his after-life was so sure and true a
witness. The third indication of a new temper of mind and
attention to what was destined to become an absorbing
study is given in the last entry to be quoted from his
journal before he went into residence at Trinity.
" It has struck me that in the different styles of archi
tecture we may perhaps find an analogy with the different
stages of popular feeling in England. The Norman, heavy,
dark, and gloomy, corresponds well enough to the absence
of liberty which characterizes the reigns of our kings till
John. Then the Early English has certainly a resemblance
to the far more cheerful and free views introduced by Magna
Charta. Still, though there is great beauty in the parts,
there is a want of amalgamation and unity in the whole,
which, however, we find in the Decorated, the most perfect
style, which answers to what was perhaps the happiest age
of England, Edward the Third's. Gradually the Commons
asserted their own rights, and broke through the symmetry
of the Government, and, behold ! at the same time, the
Perpendicular mullions cut the beautiful tracery, before
unbroken, to pieces. I am disposed to think there is more
than fancy in that."
However this may be, here we have a glimpse into the
workings of his mind, and a notion is afforded of some
of his individual tastes and preoccupations when, at the
age of eighteen, in October, 1836, he obtained a scholarship
and went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge

CHAPTER III
Undergraduate days— Friendship with Benjamin Webb — Early inte
rest in mediaeval literature — Archaeological studies — Neale's
theological standpoint — Undergraduate friendships — Church
tours.
UPON looking back to the Cambridge of the years imme
diately preceding Neale's matriculation, Lord Houghton —
himself a Trinity College man — said, when speaking at
the opening of the New Cambridge Union : " I am
inclined to believe that the members of that generation
were, for the wealth of their promise, a rare body of men,
such as the University has seldom produced ; " and he
might have added that in most cases that promise had
been abundantly fulfilled. Trinity had just cause to be
proud of the long list of distinguished literary men who
had not long since quitted her precincts — the Tennysons,
Thackeray, Edward Fitzgerald, Trench (afterwards Arch
bishop of Dublin), James Spedding, Alford, Arthur Hallam,
and many others. And Neale notes that, in a letter from
B. Jowett, he had heard that " four very clever men were
going up at the same time as himself." One cannot but
be curious to know how far the acquaintance between the
future Master of Balliol and Neale, the founder of East
Grinstead and the mediaeval historian and ecclesiologist,
had gone (they had been fellow pupils under Mr. Russell) ;
but probably their future lives were as separate as their
very dissimilar lines of thought.
Though Neale's proclivities were emphatically those of
a student, he was not at first thrown into an exclusive set of
reading or literary men. He was still somewhat of a solitary,
with a natural incapacity for undergraduate amusements.
27

28 JOHN MASON NEALE
Boating, cricket, riding, all outdoor games gave him less
pleasure than books. He read at all times, in season
and out of season, early and late, walking and at meals.
And his taste was not unduly fastidious. In reading he
was content to traverse wide tracts of history and to make
himself acquainted with uncongenial sciences. Grammars,
dictionaries, obsolete treatises, dusty folios; all in their
different degrees had an attraction for his inquiring spirit.
In the fresh, self-confidence of youth he was ever with an
eager hopefulness seeking something new. Conscious of
his latent powers, he was not over-anxious for results;
in fact his failings were those of a clever boy, whose
superior gifts have more or less shut him off from a close
and salutary contact with the undiscerning public opinion
of his fellows. He had never conformed to school-boy
codes and prejudices ; he remained indifferent to college
customs and traditions.
It is fortunate that at this period fresh and engrossing
problems were crowding upon his mind and clamouring for
attention, or he might well have been inclined to too
exact, if not morbid, introspection. In forming any judg
ment of his immature character, it is very necessary to
recall the advantages and counterbalancing drawbacks
of his early training. Under a strict, though beneficent,
maternal rule, treated with a too conscientious regard to
future prospects and spiritual advancement, he had missed
the natural outlets afforded by boyish levity and boyish
games. There was no irrational forcing of growth and
experiences ; he was not brought up in the stimulating
atmosphere of a hot-house, but in the sheltered decorum
of the parlour, which had manifestly unfitted him for a
rude contact with the outside world. He had a high,
but not unjust, opinion of his own talents, and shrank
from the society of those to whom his aims were in
comprehensible and his tastes insipid ; as a consequence,
his friendships were few, and founded rather upon mutual
predilections and habits than upon the irresistible if im
permanent ground of a magnetic and irresponsible personal
attraction.

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT 29
Recalling the fact that in later years he was regarded
in many quarters as an ecclesiastical rebel, it is certainly
curious to note that, though he was gradually emerging into
a stronger and clearer light with regard to moral and
religious questions, he had, in his youthful spring of con
fidence, no desire to shake off old persuasions and free
himself from old associations, that might have been re
garded by men of his age as cramping or ignoble.
He had been born in what has been called the " after
glow of the Great Revolution." Social portents were in the
air, and sober-minded men felt the ground giving way
beneath their feet. To some, as to Newman, " the vital
question was how to keep the Church from being liberal
ized." To others there had come another ideal — a Church
which "for her tenderness and loving-kindness will most
effectually retain the affections of the poor, while her plain
protests against evil will affront and irritate the powerful,
... a religion of visible self-denial and holiness, that will
ingly took on itself the sorrows which to the multitude are
inevitable, and lightened their sufferings by its own pain
and privation " 1 — regarding the poor as bearing " a quasi-
sacramental character."
The revolutionary spirit was abroad. In Italy the eyes of
young patriots were dazzled by a vision of a united country,
and Christ's Vicar himself was soon to be acclaimed as
their leader. In England Carlyle's violent denunciations,
full of fire and fury, whilst they shocked refined suscepti
bilities, had undoubtedly awakened disquieting suspicions
as to the insecure and possibly illegal tenure of vested
interests and established rights. In 1829 the old poet
Wordsworth, on reading Gladstone's " Church and State,"
was inclined to believe that it claimed too much for
the authority of the Church. Since then higher claims
had been put forward, and found a ready recognition
amongst the advance guard of the Anglo- Catholic party.
It would not have been strange if the force of the current
had swept young Neale, with his religious impulses and
somewhat incoherent creed, completely off his feet. But
1 British Critic, No. Ivi., p. 370.

30 JOHN MASON NEALE
such was not the case. He retained with faithful tenacity
his hold upon evangelical truth, whilst slowly and surely
gaining clearer views of the doctrines of the Catholic
Church as taught in her creeds and formularies. And he
fought his battle single-handed. He was not one of a
party, fired by one enthusiasm, inspirited by numbers. All
the prejudices of his family were ranged on the opposite
side. He was forced in some sort to disown the influence
of the tenderest family ties, and to take his stand upon the
broad principles of right and wrong, and of truth and error.
The history of the progress of his mind bears some resem
blance to the progress of the Tractarian party itself, which
from "beginnings so small, from elements of thought so
fortuitous, had suddenly become a power in the National
Church."1 It was at first a growth rather than a
revolution, and it is clear that in his college days,
amongst all the excitements of a more or less public
life and novel surroundings, Neale's preoccupations and
opinions were changing their character.
His recreation consisted in long walks along the straight
roads and over the level country about Cambridge, and with
a congenial companion his reserve would be broken down.
Once the stream of words was set loose, it knew no bounds.
With extraordinary keenness and apprehension of the most
abstruse subjects, with contagious enthusiasm about classical
and historical or antiquarian questions, he would pour forth
a flood of information ; and though his conclusions might
be hasty and unconvincing, his premises were rarely at
fault. One subject alone was uncongenial, and to this he
obstinately refused to apply himself.
" He was soon marked out as the cleverest man of his
year," to quote the words of a friend and contemporary ;
" but neither his father's powers, nor his teacher's instruc
tions ever influenced him so as to give him the slightest
taste for mathematics. He had through life a rooted dislike
to that study, and he was wont to say that the most dismal
mode of existence conceivable to him was that of a
mathematical coach at Cambridge. This dislike proved
1 Newman's "Apologia."

PATRISTIC STUDIES 31
disastrous to his hope of graduating with distinction, for the
iron rule (since obsolete) which compelled all candidates
for the Classical Tripos to take mathematical honours
first, resulted in his being unable to secure the prize, which
was universally adjudged to him by those who knew his
powers." His mind was working in another direction. He was
exploring the libraries and treasure-houses of the Early
Church, patiently investigating the rich mine of mediaeval
records and patristic literature, becoming gradually more
and more absorbed in the laborious and fascinating study.
Undeterred by the magnitude of the work, he had resolved
to write an account of the Latin poets of the Middle Ages,
and, as a preliminary step, he searched Trinity College
library for every volume of the kind to be found there, his
note-books bearing witness to the immense labour the task
involved. With the exception of a translation from Sedulius,
and some slight attempts in verse in 1833 and 1834, his
first production was" a translation from S. Bernard on
Psalm xci., published in the " Voice of the Church " about
1839-40. This was followed by his earliest versions of
hymns from the Roman and Parisian breviaries, afterwards
revised and reprinted.
In these early years at Cambridge he read much
modern English literature and most of the earlier English
dramatists. Unlike his father, the artificial adjuncts of
the theatre would have rather repelled than attracted
him, as tending to destroy his own imaginative concep
tions ; but the dramatic instinct was strong, though
upon his stage the players represented the ideals and
customs of other generations. He was not a poet by
nature, for poetry with him was rather an art than an
inspiration. The spirit of poetry was said to have de
scended upon Shelley from the air, and that of Words
worth to have sprung from the ground ; with Neale it was
one evoked from the past, revealing itself in a fanciful but
cultured reproduction of the subtle beauty, both of imagi
nation and form, which permeated the minds of monastic
saints, and found its expression in the chants and hymns of

32 JOHN MASON NEALE
mediaeval Christianity. And it must be remembered that
in exploring these records he was impelled more by the
animating pleasure of the quest than by a distinctive search
for truth. To many at this time it was of supreme im
portance to affix the seal of antiquity to the doctrines
which ill-instructed opponents were stigmatizing as " new."
They might have been for a time lost sight of, hidden away,
or forgotten even by some accredited teachers, but the whole
Faith once delivered to the saints was the inalienable
inheritance of the Anglican Communion as one branch of
the Catholic Church. She had but to display her title-
deeds to silence one argument at least of those who were
as yet strangers to her true teaching and practice. Neale's
position with regard to these matters was in many respects
peculiar. He was not a controversialist, nor a logician.
He was sanguine and credulous. Fascinated by the history
of the Early Church, with its long rolls of saints and
martyrs, some of them obscure and forgotten, and many
whom he afterwards commemorated in his "Annals and
Legends," they had become to him dear and familiar
companions, who in intimate converse disclosed their
thoughts and related the story of their lives and of their
times with but a chance passing reference to disputed
matters of dogma. He had a child's unquestioning love
of the marvellous, united to the indomitable untiring zeal
of the discoverer. He unearthed the jewel not so much to
appraise its value as to rejoice in the amazing brilliance of
its beauty. He had gone back to the perennial source and
fountain-head of faith, and was not at this time greatly con
cerned about the various streams in which it had flowed
forth to water and fertilize the earth. The language of the
Saints was familiar to him, by reason of the love he had
to them. He had studied the Scriptures with S. Jerome
and the Psalms with S. Bernard. He had attended the
great Council of Constantinople with S. Gregory of
Nazianzus and S. Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, and rejoiced
when they confounded the Pagan philosopher; he had
hidden himself in the cell of the holy hermit Meinrad, in
the solemn green depths of the Harz Forest ; he had gone

CAMBRIDGE

33

forth along the Appian Way with S. Peter, and witnessed
his meeting with his Lord. These were not simply stories
to kindle the imagination, still less mere historical facts
lending their aid to refute heresies and confound un
believers : they were to him the unfolding of the pedigree
of the great family of which he was a member; in
whose triumphs and losses, in whose joys and sorrows he
was most intimately concerned. This explains what might
otherwise have been a source of perplexity, the curious
fact that, whilst fully conscious of original powers, so many
of his first literary attempts should have been adaptations
or translations of the works of others. He undoubtedly
had much self-confidence, but more than most men he had
a spirit of admiration for heroic sanctity, and a reverence
for divine truth which, in company with its exponents
and confessors, made him well content to take the place of
a humble and faithful interpreter.
In spite of the pursuit of knowledge outside the usual
University course, he did not fail to attain some distinction.
He won the Members' Prize in 1838, and, soon after taking
his degree, was appointed assistant tutor of Downing.
Though, as we have said, slow in making friends, and
without those special qualities which ensure popularity, in
these years there were laid the foundations of some friend
ships destined to stand him in good stead. Amongst
these, one was especially distinguished ; common interests,
congenial tastes, and sincerity of purpose uniting in the
most affectionate and closest intercourse two men of very
opposite character.
Benjamin Webb was a freshman at Trinity when Neale
was in his third year : a man of great critical ability, an
iron will, and, together with a comprehensive grasp of great
subjects, surprising patience in working out details. In
many ways the friends were fitted to supplement each
other. Neale's impetuosity was restrained by Webb's
calmer judgment, and his rash conclusions corrected by
the relentless force of logic. There was, even in this time
of their youth, a foreshadowing of their careers. Neale,
the mediaeval historian, the disciple of mystics, the patristic
D

34 JOHN MASON NEALE
scholar, to whom echoes of the past were blown by airs
from the very gate of heaven ; Webb, with his clear per
ceptions of the sharp lines dividing truth from error, and
imaginative beauty from the disenchanting realities of life,
were each, no doubt, in some measure shaping their future
destinies: Neale's work, as the Warden of Sackville
College, was to lie for the most part within the walls of his
chapel or his study, remote from the strife of controversy
and the stress and strain of public and parochial life;
Webb, as the vicar of an important London parish, was
to bring his varied gifts and qualifications to bear, not only
upon those to whom he ministered in spiritual things, but
upon the great political, social, and religious problems
forcibly presented to the practical consideration of a priest
labouring in one of the great centres of population.
We can scarcely understand Neale's tastes and dis
positions at this time without a careful characterization of
the man whom he chose for his constant companion, and
who became, before long, his chief, though not his only,
intimate friend. At the commencement of their intimacy
Neale took the lead. He was never suited to be the head
of a party, his fancy was too redundant and his ideas too
diffuse to be presented in a concrete shape to the ready
understanding of a multitude ; yet his enthusiasm was
infectious, and upon special individuals the quality of his
personal influence, sympathetic, kindling, inspiriting, and
disinterested, was such as to ensure a certain reciprocity
of conviction. To Webb, three years his junior, Neale's
schemes occasionally took the form of castles in the air, and
his conclusions appeared rashly improbable, but he shared
to the full his student love for ancient manuscripts and
hymnology, for architectural symbols and early Christian
art. Thoughtful and prudent, his powerful intellect and
brilliant gifts were controlled by an unusual sense of pro
portion and a wise deliberate judgment rarely exercised at
the outset of life ; he acted, even then, under the sobering
sense of its tremendous issues and grave responsibilities.
As a writer in the Church Quarterly remarked, " The early
maturity and completeness with which Mr. Webb's views

BENJAMIN WEBB 35
were reached by the process of clear logic, and systematically
ranged in their relations to each other, was a conspicuous
element in his moral and intellectual career." *
Brought up in S. Paul's School, he had early learnt to
play his part in the world, and was already qualifying him
self to deal with other men. He had highly cultivated
powers of observation and acute insight into motives and
character, and in 1838-39, when he went up to Trinity,
there were clear indications of future distinction. Just and
statesmanlike, equable and unbiassed, he was absolutely
free from the frailties of the revolutionist or the dema
gogue ; and, to use adjectives which might at first sight
seem to have no connection with their subject, he had
already in him the seeds of what he was to become — the
kindest of autocrats and the most tender-hearted of
inquisitors. The Tractarian movement had been to Neale somewhat
in the nature of an inspired revelation. Faith took to
herself forms and symbols ; Truth was newly arrayed
in rich and appropriate garments ; and his imagination
wandered unfettered in the realms of transcendental thought.
Webb was more concerned with practical conclusions.
Neale's inclination was to distil and expand, Webb's to
condense and eliminate. Nevertheless, they were united
in a common interest, engaged in a common search, and
together were perfecting one very important branch of
knowledge ; which was to spring, not only from ancient
learning and traditions, but from a personal acquaintance
with the evidences in architecture of the faith and worship
of our forefathers.
In 1837-38 Neale had spent two long vacations
in archaeological studies. From S. Leonards he had
visited all the old churches in the neighbourhood, in
company with a friend, the Rev. E. J. Boyce, afterwards
Rector of Houghton. Neale registered and tabulated
results, whilst Boyce made drawings and took copies of
brasses. In the same way they went through Lincolnshire,
Yorkshire, Durham, on to Newcastle, Carlisle, and Glasgow,
1 Church Quarterly Review, Jan., 1886.

36 JOHN MASON NEALE
taking notes of cathedrals and visiting hundreds of churches,
both in these neighbourhoods and also, during shorter
holiday tours in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Sussex, etc.
The most unimportant buildings and the most trivial
details were submitted to an exact scrutiny, bearing
witness to Neale's growing and absorbing love for ecclesi-
ology. The endless technical lists are uninteresting or
unintelligible to any but an expert ; but beneath the form
and structure he found the lesson and the spirit — " sermons
in stones," less easily forgotten than those of living preachers.
In the " Stones of Venice " Ruskin instructs us —
"that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of
its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots
of grass beside it, of its delicacy, though it is a thousand
fold less delicate, of its admirableness, though a thousand
times less admirable, results from our consciousness of its
being the work of poor clumsy toilsome man. Its true
delightfulness depends on our discovering in it the record
of thoughts and intents, and trials and heart-breakings —
of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success ; all this can be
traced by a practised eye."
And for Neale also, though his insight might not be so
capable of expression, the history of past ages of faith and
endeavour and aspiration was legibly written in corbel and
pediment, facade and tracery, pillar and chancel. They were
all instinct with the life of bygone generations. The great
cathedrals, amidst their green and sheltered precincts ; the
small village churches, placed, as country churches so often
are, at a distance from the hamlet to which they belong ;
the flagged footpath with its overshadowing yew trees,
leading to the low porch ; the curious epitaphs on the old
head-stones, bright with moss and lichen, and half hidden
in tall flowering grasses; the font of simple antiquity; some
remnant of old glass in a chancel window ; the grace of an
arch or pinnacle, — sent his thoughts back at once to the
date of their conception, and from the outward sign
to the spiritual grace, from type to antitype.
In monumental brasses he was particularly learned.
Sometimes he speaks in his letters of late visits to these

MONUMENTAL BRASSES 37
solitary churches, when, accompanied by the sexton bring
ing the church keys and a lantern, they would examine and
take rubbings of some brass amongst the worn stones
of nave or chancel ; and describes the " flashing and
quivering of the light on pier, arch, and roof, the misty
exhalation which floats about, the dull cold fixed gaze of
the effigy, the shifting of light and shade, and melancholy
howling of the wind round the casements." One of his
many descriptions, sometimes afterwards employed in
lectures or articles, may be given as a sample of the pains
taking care exercised in gathering information ; it refers to
the Church at Hatley Cockayne.
"You enter by folding doors adorned with the most
exquisite carving ; they came from some Dutch church,
all the additions were procured at or near Antwerp. . . .
The pulpit is a most elaborate piece of carving of the date
of 1559, it has the four Evangelists exquisitely sculptured
with their symbols. . . . The east window of the north
aisle has nine Saxon saints, the lowest are S. Edward the
Confessor, S. Sebert, and S. Oswald. All this glass is
ancient. The font was a plain octagon ; it is now panelled
into most beautiful Perpendicular. The font is an ancient
piece of china, containing the history of Joseph and his
brethren, though this is incorrect. In the nave are three
sets of brasses containing two, three, and two figures re
spectively. These all commemorate the Cockaynes, but
being, unfortunately, enamelled, I could not take them. In
the south aisle is a monument to Sir Patrick Hume."
Neale wrote an introduction to the volume upon " Monu
mental Brasses," published by the Cambridge Camden
Society, as being upon a subject which he had made
peculiarly his own ; and also a Latin epilogue of eleven
stanzas ; four lines in; mediaeval verse, every line of the
quatrian ending with one and the same double rhyme, from
which we extract a few verses.
" Sit labori terminus ! Facientes Dei
Jussa et Ecclesiae, quod debemus Ei,
Tumulum monstravimus esse domum spei,
Verum ccemeterium, portam requiei.

38 JOHN MASON NEALE
" Longe late Angliamnovimus Sanctorum,
Multa templa visimus, opera majorum
Ubi dulce dormiunt animae justorum ;
Et hunc librum pretium tulimus laborum.
" Mortis habitaculo adstet Vitae Lignum,
Illud sit solatium flentibus benignum,
Nihil est Catholico monumentum dignum,
Nisi sit Ecclesiae Triumphantis signum."

We may believe that he no longer looked for his
memorial tablet upon the walls: boyish self-absorption
had given place to the humility of the student. More
over, he was being brought into closer relations with
intellectual and scholarly men. Devoid of personal vanity,
his conceit with respect to opinions and judgments was
yielding to a wider knowledge, and an admiring acquaint
ance with superior minds. He might think highly of his
own abilities, but gave to others unstinted praise and the
readiest recognition. When, in the next chapter, we
enter upon the history of the Cambridge Camden Society,
we shall see that, engaged in an important work,
undertaken for the common good, though he undoubtedly
took the initiative, he was yet always ready to consult
and co-operate. His mind flew with the directness
of an arrow to its goal. The great truths which were
being carefully elaborated, the arguments so slowly
weighed, the problems so painfully wrought out by the
overburdened anxious minds of the great Oxford leaders,
were to him matters of easy acceptance and trium
phant certitude. He had a curious, inveterate distaste for
laboured controversy. At a time when theological topics
could hardly be introduced amongst friends without
arousing personal bitterness and party feeling, his buoyant
spirit rose above the troubled waves of religious strife to
find a refuge in the higher regions of fundamental belief
and spiritual perception. "The religious revival had
stirred Cambridge, but it touched different points from
Oxford, and worked in a different way. . . . The questions

CONTROVERSY 39
which sent Oxford men to Rome, certainly did not disturb
University life at Cambridge." x
This assertion may require some qualification, but
there was certainly less feverish activity, fewer melan
choly forebodings and morbid searchings of conscience,
together with a less bitter sense of alienation from old
convictions, and a less painful severing of old ties, than
was taking place during these years at Oxford. To
his surrounding atmosphere Neale may have owed the
lighter touch and the more disengaged spirit with which
at this period he entered upon the vindication and defence
of Catholic faith and practice.
1 The Guardian, Oct., 1897.

CHAPTER IV
The Cambridge Camden Society— College friends and associates —
Architectural studies — Restoration of S. Sepulchre's Church —
Neale's appointment to the chaplaincy and tutorship of Downing
— Publication of the Ecclesiologist — Neale's exposition of its
aims — Descriptive powers exemplified.
One day, in the course of Dr. Neale's last illness, in re
calling former times, he observed that it had been an
audacious proceeding for a few young men at Cambridge
to undertake the reform of Church architecture, and to
assume for their motto, " Donee templa refeceris ; " but, after
a pause, he added, " The temples had been rebuilt."
Neale and Webb were in the front rank of those " who
discovered that they had a mission to help the Church
revival on the side where Oxford left it weakest, that of
religious art, notably architecture, and of worship treated
in reciprocal dependence." *
It is a noticeable and significant fact that the early
Tractarians were more concerned about doctrine than
about modes of expression, more intent upon formulating
ecclesiastical systems than upon regulating worship ; fear
less and uncompromising in principle, cautious and re
strained in act. Neale, though less deeply versed in
theological learning, and rash and unskilled in controversy
upon the burning questions of the day, was possessed by
a desire to bring home to the Church at large, by type and
allegory and illustration, the same truths impressed by
historical research and serious investigations of her records,
in creed, and formulary, and definition, upon the under
standing of the wise and scholarly.
1 The Guardian, 1885.
40

HURRELL FROUDE 41
Hurrell Froude, withl his impetuous haste to arrive at
concrete results, was an associate of the Oxford group of
contemporaries who took the same view of architecture, as
one of the necessary and legitimate evidences to be brought
forward to defend and corroborate the teaching of his
party. Indeed Froude, brilliant, aggressive, and buoyant,
" radiantly sure of his position," x the " wing and talon " to
his friends, bears in some respects a resemblance to Neale.
" Froude," writes his biographer, " applied his thoughts to
architecture with a power and originality which at the
time were not common." Neale's taste was guided and
informed by more laborious study and greater technical
knowledge, but with him also it was united to joyful
revelling in all beauty of design, and form, and colour.
Soon after his matriculation he had had some half-
formed intention of gathering together a like-minded band
of students to make theoretical and practical acquaintance
with an art too long forgotten or obscured by ill-instructed
teachers ; but the project only took a definite shape in
1839, when its two chief promoters, Webb and Neale, with
some few other young men, joined themselves together,
under the somewhat "haphazard title" of the "Cambridge
Camden Society."
"We have no hesitation in saying that to this organi
zation is primarily due that thorough revolution in the
fabrics and worship of our churches which is a marvel of
the last half-century, and which has so profoundly affected
the habits and the phraseology, not merely of the more
devout, but of general society." 2
This may be too comprehensive a claim, at the same
time there is no doubt that the society soon became a
noteworthy element in Cambridge life. Its history during
the years with which we are now concerned is one of some
reverses, but of much unprecedented success. The aim
of its members was to restore and reconstruct the outward
signs and symbols of the Church ; to manifest her unity
and strength, her grace and purity in an art entirely
1 Canon Scott Holland. 2 The Guardian, 1885.

42 JOHN MASON NEALE
consecrated to her service ; once more to discover the
angel in the stone, and so to fashion the tabernacle of
God upon earth as to present a true, though faint and
imperfect image of the temple of God in a city that
lieth foursquare, of which the Lamb Himself is the
Light. Each member of the society was bound to further
its purposes by visiting churches and making what they
termed "schemes" of their construction and salient archi
tectural points. Neale was confident and ardent, with a
boyish impetuosity disarming criticism, and a hopeful
spirit making light of opposition. He found under
graduates and others who gladly followed in his wake.
Young, afterwards Vicar of Hursley, Edward Boyce,
Edmund Venables of Pembroke, Griffin of S. John's, Harvey
Goodwin, and F. A. Paley were early members of the small
company. But no doubt the attitude of some, at least, of
the band was not so much defensive as aggressive. They
made little account of constituted authorities and academic
order. No revolution could be carried on without some
destructive elements, nor brought to a successful issue
without an appointed recognized leader ; and at first their
designs had no coherence, and the difficulties of co-opera
tion were increased by the remarkable popularity of the
project which attracted nominal and unsuitable adherents.
"It was under the excitement caused by the opposition
of some who, because they could not rule, wished to destroy
the little coterie of lovers of Church architecture," writes
Edward Boyce, " that we determined to try and secure a
head and an influential leader to the movement on behalf
of founding a society which should embrace the same
objects as the smaller one, but open its arms wider and
extend its operations beyond the narrow sphere to which
the smaller society had limited itself."
Archdeacon Thorp, their college tutor, was on the most
friendly terms with his pupils. Surprised, amused, and
tolerant, he was taken by storm : at ten o'clock one night
an embassy was sent to his rooms, and did not quit
them until the representative of law and authority had been
induced to sanction their cause. A public meeting was

CAMBRIDGE CAMDEN SOCIETY 43
held under his auspices in the lecture-room of Trinity
College, and beyond all expectation largely attended, not
only by undergraduates and members of Trinity, but
by graduates and tutors from other colleges. At this
meeting, in May, 1839, the Cambridge Camden Society
was formally instituted, and the Ven. Archdeacon Thorp,
Fellow and tutor of Trinity College, Archdeacon and
Chancellor of Bristol, became its president. So rapid and
widespread was its influence, that by the fourth year of
its existence (1843) it had secured, as patrons or members,
two archbishops, sixteen bishops, thirty-one peers and
members of parliament, twenty-one archdeacons and rural
deans, sixteen architects, and no less than seven hundred
ordinary members.
We may reasonably suppose that, in spite of his failure
in his degree (which seems to have been a greater dis
appointment to his friends than to himself), Neale was at
this time full of sanguine happiness. " I made quite sure,"
writes Webb, in January, 1840, " that you would be senr.
opt. . . . One cheering thing is that it will not, as far as I
can see, affect your Fellowship." And that once gained,
he hopes he " will show these thick-headed mathematicians
what the chairman of CCS. is made of."
This arrogant tone, not unnatural perhaps in the first
rush of friendly indignant disappointment, is not recipro
cated by his correspondent, who may have learned some
salutary lessons from his failure ; and yet he is evidently
not unduly depressed, but full of new hopes and pro
jects. In his next two letters (happily dated January
nth and January 21st, not, as sometimes happens, the
Eve of S. Hilary or Martyrdom of S. Charles, or the
octave of some obscure Saint for whose feast we have to
search the calendar), he is proposing more literary work
for the society: "The Ecclesiastical Brasses of England,
selected and edited by the C.C.S., to appear in parts," and
what he calls the " accompanying list of revolutions ; " " for
it is evident that if we want to keep up our character we
must do something."
What was attempted and accomplished must be

44 JOHN MASON NEALE
mentioned in order ; but, before entering upon the record
of external work, it is well to glance once more at his own
motives and aims. They are casually exemplified in
a few sentences in a letter of this year. He wishes his
schemes to be " carried into operation to preoccupy ground
from the Oxford-Gothic." Another reason (an esoteric one,
mind) " is that who knows what impulse we may give
to the re-introduction of the Catholic vestments into the
Anglican Church ! When persons come to see the reformed
Bishops, Heaton and Persglove and Archbishop Harsnett
vested in copes, etc., they will think there must be some
thing more than talk in this. Depend upon it, one example
is worth twenty precepts." And again : " I am sure, in spite
of the becalvinization of England, there is yet a chord in
most people's hearts which vibrates to Catholic truth."
During this year (1840) he was continually gathering
material for papers and lectures on archaeology ; and his
letters, from which space only allows of extracts, all bear
upon the same subject.
"Do you remember in Stedman an account of a house
in Worcestershire, Mire-hall, with the date in Arabic
numerals 1337? I have lately been introduced to the
possessors, good antiquaries, first-rate heralds and high
Tories (alas for Catholicity !). They spent yesterday
evening here, and went through all my brasses, making
such remarks on each as showed them to be well versed
in the subject. . . . Thorp is much debating whether to
allow the proposed rood screen to be erected in S. Mary
Redcliffe, instead of the present barbarous thing. So far
as I hear I hope he will. ... I have seen so much since I
left you, or, to quote Ecclesiasticus, ' And behold when I
travelled, I saw many things, and beheld more than I can
understand,' that is perfectly bewildering, that I quite
long to see you that I may hear your opinion on many of
the Worcestershire churches." And then, a little later,
after giving architectural details, " What a dull catalogue
this would be to any one but a thorough Camdenian ! "
This preliminary work]was, however, not only of interest
to those engaged in it, but fruitful in results far exceeding

ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES 45
their expectations ; and more knowledge, as was natural,
softened asperities and sobered youthful ambitions. " We
must indeed," writes Neale in a letter to Webb — " we must
indeed, as you observe, learn humility."
Doubtless the life he was leading at this time very
sensibly nourished this and other graces: His visit to
each church was a pilgrimage ; however neglected and
despoiled, it was a sacred place, where he learned many
lessons upon his knees.
" But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ? " — so
Charles Lamb writes — "go alone on some weekday,
borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the
cool aisles of some country church : think of the piety
that has kneeled there — the congregations old and young
that have found consolation there — the meek pastor, the
docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the
place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as
the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee."
And Neale's imagination went still further back to the
long roll of the aureoled Saints who, once despised and
travel-worn, had wandered upon earth and toiled and
suffered, until the very marks of humiliation and pain had
become emblems of sanctity and pledges of glory, and
now, arrayed in rich garments of purple and crimson, looked
calmly down from painted windows ; back to the days of
the squires, barons, and crusaders, whose effigies, mutilated
and worn, were the only memorials of long-forgotten lives.
There are some — and Neale was emphatically one amongst
them — who, "when they pursue truth, desire as much as
possible of what we may call human scenery along the
road they follow." 1 To him, more than to most men,
history was not so much a record of facts as a series of
biographies. These pictured saints were not detached
figures, and the solitary crusader stretched upon his tomb
was the representative of a religious enthusiasm awaking
an echo in his own heart.
It is difficult on looking back from the vantage ground
1 R. L. Stevenson.

46 JOHN MASON NEALE
of 1906 to form a just conception of all that was accom
plished in the forty or fifty years subsequent to 1839, the
year when the Camden Society was formed and the new
spirit conspicuously manifested, almost simultaneously,
in the erection of the chapel at Littlemore, and the building
of Leeds parish church, as a most striking embodiment of
the continuity of Catholic worship.
"The CCS.," writes Mr. Beresford Hope, "with an
energy which sometimes showed more determination than
tact, but which was always impelled by a convinced will,
devoted «^ itself to the cultivation of church architecture in
connection with worship, and of worship in reference to
Ithat architecture under the name of Ecclesiology. The
spirit of church restoration and church building leapt
from county to county, and from parish to parish ; . . . one
cathedral after another has shaken off sleep, and has
arrayed itself in the glorious apparel of the king's daughter,
and the spiritual works of a Church in vigorous life have
followed the outward adorning of the sanctuary." *
In merely practical matters an amazing amount was
accomplished in these years 1 839-1 845. To give an idea
of the number of churches improved or restored, we are
told, would " be almost as difficult as to count the stars on
a frosty night." In 1843 alone no less than ninety-eight
applications were made to the committee for designs or
advice. " Not only from every part of the British Isles,
but from every colony of the British Empire," there came
applications for advice or plans.
Much opposition had to be encountered, and a certain
amount of ridicule evoked, yet more repugnant to youthful
optimism, and even Neale must have had his bad moments.
" One thing I see plainly, that we are making out for
ourselves lives of anything but happiness in the ordinary
sense of the word," so he writes. "I do not say this
despairingly : so be it, if we can only gain our ends." And
he is cheered by Dr. Hook's saying, in respect to the pro
pagation of the truth, that " the great law annexed to it is
that the preachers suffer and the cause prevails."
1 Beresford Hope, " Worship of the Church of England."

IDEAS AND PROJECTS 47
After all, he was only twenty-two. Naturally many
of his crude ideas could not be carried into effect, and
hastily conceived plans proved abortive. Here is a wild,
impossible scheme, set forth in a letter of September,
1841 :—
" It is proposed to erect in Cambridge a large Cross
Church called S. Alban the Protomartyr. The style to be
Decorated, with lofty cathedral spire. The arrangement
to be perfect — open and magnificent wood seats, exquisite
font with splendid canopy, painted tiles, magnificent Altar
raised on nine steps ; in short, in everything except size, to
rival Lincoln. The collection to be a national one. For
this purpose the plan is now lying before the Archbishop
of Canterbury, who, I believe, is not opposed to it. . . .
We reckon not to build with less than £1 50,000, or some
trifle like that"
It is evident that he is impelled to laugh in his sleeve at
his own exuberant fancies ; and this plan, we may be sure,
was never executed : but nevertheless a church upon paper
had its charms. He had another idea of carrying
the war into the enemy's country by writing short para
graphs in condemnation of what he termed "barbarized
churches " in the Times — where, again, we may be certain
they never found a place. And, in curious contrast to these
fantastic projects, we have the prosaic titles of his first
publications in connection with the society : " A Tract
upon Pues," and " A Few Words to Churchwardens."
In 1 841 a rare opportunity was afforded to the mem
bers of the Camden Society of showing " how the outward
aspects of English public worship might be made more
reasonably and intelligently to correspond with the ideals
and best traditions of the historic Church."1 The old
Norman Church of S. Sepulchre had partly fallen down,
and the restoration was given into their hands. The work
was far beyond what they had before undertaken, both
in magnitude and importance, but it was satisfactorily
accomplished ; a good deal of attention was drawn to it by
the lawsuit concerning the stone altar which supervened,
1 The Guardian, 1887.

48 JOHN MASON NEALE
and it very sensibly helped to spread an intelligent
understanding of their aims and powers.
It is no exaggeration to assert that at this time Neale's
whole mind was fixed upon these and kindred subjects.
Academic interests were thrust into the background.
Already, in 1840, he wrote, on his appointment to Downing
 « 1 have been offered the assistant-tutorship and chap
laincy of Downing (which, of course, gives a little), the
former immediately, the latter as soon as I can take it. I
shall be very glad of this, as far as it enables me to be with
you all at Cambridge, and to continue with the CCS. For
the thing itself I don't much care; the Protestant and
Reformed foundation of Downing will never usurp a large
share of my affection from my old college."
All through the letters of these years, not always
directly concerned with the subject, we find constant refer
ences to books and facts bearing upon the symbolic
teaching of buildings and brasses, of early English chapels
and Norman arches. The idea so pervades his mind as to
exclude for the time other questions. He delights in the
society of like-minded persons. In one of the 1841 letters,
he writes that he has been so fortunate as to fall in love with
a lady, " who is an enthusiastic ecclesiologist and a symbo
list to the last degree. She has, I believe, hit on the true
reason why gurgoyles are so frequently fashioned like
demons. She thinks that they are intended to represent
the evil spirits rushing away from the church, just as
Freeman's idea about the roof-angels represents good
spirits as anxious to inquire into its mysteries." This
idea is certainly corroborated by the fact that to the
mediaeval mind evil was always grotesque or repulsive.
Lucifer, in art at least, had no resemblance to an angel of
light. Again, he speaks of long evenings at country
parsonages, where he is asked to expound his views, and
many schemes are propounded ; when his hosts, like the
ecclesiological lady, are not permitted to talk of anything
else. Indeed, we may believe they were not inclined to
change the conversation, as with unrelenting fervour he
pressed home his points, and enlarged upon the theme

ECCLESIOLOGY 49
so dear to his heart. And up to the end of 1841, the
members of the CCS. had no means of spreading infor
mation except by lectures and communications amongst
themselves. Those who had left the University were out
of touch with its proceedings, and it became necessary to
start a periodical to retain interest and circulate informa
tion. The Ecclesiologist, a monthly publication, was first
issued in November, 1841, and had so large a sale that it
soon became, not merely a report of the doings of the
CCS., but a general organ of ecclesiology.
Webb and Neale were its chief contributors, sharing
between them the responsibility of editorship. The filling
up of " Church schemes," as they were called, or forms for
the classified description of churches, had already defined
knowledge and ensured accuracy of expression. They
had now an opportunity to unfold the allegory, and press
home the lessons of the symbol. "A Few Words to
Church Builders," " Illustrations of Monumental Brasses,"
" Hints on the Practical Study of Ecclesiastical Antiquities,"
— such were some of the earliest publications of the society.
The aim of the promoters of this literary organ of the
CCS. may be best expressed in Neale's own words, ex
tracted from one of his earliest books, " Hierologus," cast
in the form of a conversation, in which he expounds and
defends the vocation of the true ecclesiologist ; who was
" not a mere student of Church architecture, but of all its
collateral branches of information as to Church history
and antiquities. . . . All that is beautiful in nature and
art, the past, the present, the future — all, to my mind, are
remembrances of the pursuit I love."
A building or monument, however striking, was never
to him a single detached impression — it had a history
and a background. Take but one paragraph from his
account of the Sussex village churches as an example
of the natural features of the pictures which come back
upon him "like lovely visions in the quiet night : " —
"Poynings, in its belt of trees, crouching down below
the soft yet vast range of the Dyke ; Clapham, hidden in
its wooded hills ; Bosham, conspicuous among the watery
E

50 JOHN MASON NEALE
environs of Chichester Harbour; Buxted, gleaming through
the gnarled oaks and chestnuts of its park ; Bramber, with
its thick, short tower, perched on the side of a shady hill,
under the solitary pile, the only remains of its castle;
Graffham, nestling in a crescent of wooded downs ; Haugh-
ton, on its bleak waste of barren hills ; Westmeston, seen
like a fairy church from Ditchelling Boss ; Sapton, with its
tower of shapeless massiness hidden in a glossy grove of
ivy; Horsted Keynes, Leighton's burying-place, with its
shapely spire pointing from its forest tract ; Ardingley, and
its wild scenery of ravines, redcrags, and quarries, where
birches hang down and underwood clothes the rocks;
Newhaven on its sea-beaten hill."
These form, as he writes, "a whole gallery of pictures."
Yet his sense of external beauty was hardly that of a poet,
still less that of the artist or landscape painter : it was the
unconscious delight of a child in sunlight and colour, in
fairy, cloud -built palaces and the magical transformations
of sunrise and sunset; and in the minute, though unscientific,
observation of natural phenomena. The world was to him
a garden of delight, in which he was well content to
wander; but he gathered neither flowers nor fruit with
the express purpose of putting them upon the market.
It is for this reason that his descriptions of scenery are
at once so simple and so lifelike. To take only one
example from many, here is a paragraph from a letter in
April, 1841.
" It was a fine sunset ; parallel with the horizon were
some long mare's-tails of a rich brown hue — these were
crossed by others of a redder brown, and to the north
were some stationary clouds of a tint between gold and
brown ochre. To my left, as I turned, was Cisbury ; to
my right a rising ground, but less bold in its outlines,
formed, as it were, the framework of the picture. Gradually
the clouds to the north assumed the look of dark foliage
blossoming in gold, the brightness of the sky contracted
into a smaller space by degrees, and then deadened into
plain night clouds. What sublime ideas did those same
shapeless night clouds suggest to me when I was some
seven years old, and how often did I stand at the window
of my room at Shepperton to watch them ! As I got on,

SYMBOLISM Si
distant peeps toward Cuckfield broke through the Downs
— in that grey mist to me so sublime and yet so beautiful,
so thoroughly like Handel ! What can give a better idea
of eternity than that particular shade ? To my right the
Downs were covered with hoary grass ; the valley to the
left, in which lay Bramber Castle, was filled with a river
of mist."
Here we have the symbolism of nature somewhat strained.
At the same time, how true and definite is the picture
painted in the colours a child might have handled ! — the
very same scene spread before his eyes, when he stood a
solitary little figure, looking forth from the nursery window
at Shepperton. But, however freely and happily his imagination might
play upon other subjects, his writings and most strenuous
endeavours were chiefly devoted to the vindication of
Catholic belief and the revival of art and ritual and archi
tecture as its expression. Indeed, it would not be unjust
to say that, though Oxford had for the most part provided
the letterpress of the movement, Cambridge was furnishing
the illustrations. Many experts and specialists were en
rolled as members of the Camden Society. William Scott,
Rickman, Pugin, were all invited to become honorary
members between the year 1839, when it was started, and
1846, when it changed its name to the wider one of the
Ecclesiological Society, and its headquarters were removed
to London ; whilst there were others who afterwards
became distinguished in different walks of life — Paley,
Salvin, Paget, — all alike awake to the importance of
making known their principles without reserve in decided
and corporate action. In fact, as Neale asserts, Oxford
men were amazed at their boldness.
In a later letter, dated Candlemas, 1844, Neale gives
his views upon this point very plainly : —
" It is clear to me that the Tract writers missed one
great principle, namely, the influence of aesthetics — and
it is unworthy of them to blind themselves to it  Pusey's
letter confounds two things. 'Have we,' he says, 'that
purity of heart and life which can fit us to be great church

52 JOHN MASON NEALE
builders in a Catholic sense ? Don't you see that you, or
I, or Paley, never set up to be able to be Catholic archi
tects ? Nay, rather, have not all our creative attempts —
S.Albans, the New Zealand Cathedral, etc., been failures?'
So far I agree with him. But that it does not often please
God to raise up as defenders of His Truth, men, even of
immoral lives, it is absurd to say — witness many of the
Popes. If of His Truth, why not of His Beauty ? Thus it
is necessary that a S. Athanasius or S. Cyril should be
men of eminent personal holiness : they were for the first
time developing truth. But it is not necessary that its mere
defenders should be so."
Nevertheless, at Cambridge, as at Oxford, the men
thus associated together for a common object were not only
of exceptional ability, but of high character and unusually
blameless lives. In spite of the pressure of work of various
kinds to be accomplished, and of absorbing if not con
flicting interests, Neale's residence at Cambridge was
marked by a manifest deepening of spiritual life, an in
creased desire for greater knowledge of Divine truth, and
an abiding, animating sense of sanctifying grace, enduing
the elect of God with supernatural powers, bringing order
out of confusion, and strength out of weakness, and, not
withstanding his many shortcomings and distractions,
most graciously preparing him to fulfil the vocation to
which he had been called.

CHAPTER V
Ordained deacon — Begins clerical work at S. Nicholas, Guildford —
Visit to Wells — His licence refused by the Bishop of Winchester—
" Herbert Tresham,"his first story for children — Ordained priest
— Theological views.
It has been well said that " high hopes in youth are the
stock-in-trade with which we are meant to open the
business of life," and with these Neale was amply pro
vided. But now there comes a pause, as it were, upon the
threshold of a new life. Exuberant fancies fade, ex
travagant schemes are laid aside, a graver tone pervades
the letters, and, in a soberer and clearer light, matters of
supreme moment assume their true proportions.
From boyhood he had been destined for the priest
hood, and he never appears to have had an idea of any
other possible profession. Not only the course of his
reading, but his whole habits of mind were in accordance
with the urgent solemnity of a call to which he could
not but be faithful. He seems to have had little guidance
in his theological studies except from his old tutor, Arch
deacon Thorp, but he was fitted to pass far more searching
tests than those to which Ordination candidates were
subjected, and there could be no doubt in the minds of the
examiners of his spiritual fitness.
He was ordained deacon at S. Margaret's, West
minster, by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, on
Trinity Sunday, June 6, 1841 ; and he preached his first
sermon, at Shepperton, in the following week.
The thread of life had never been twisted or broken,
and so, not unfittingly, he went back to the familiar place —
to the old church where, in spite of the restlessness natural
53

54 JOHN MASON NEALE
to his years, he had scrupulously striven to fix his wander
ing mind upon the discourse of other preachers ; and here,
for the first time, he exercises his new office, preaching to
many who must have known him as a boy, and possibly
to the joy and pride of his mother and sisters. Mrs. Neale
had however made her home in Brighton, and a little later
he was with her there, officiating in the church at Hove.
A three weeks' tour in France with Webb brought
increased architectural knowledge and a deeper appre
ciation of legendary and mediaeval art. During this and
other excursions he became acquainted, not only with the
French cathedrals, but with the other great churches of
vast and beautiful proportions which stand in the plains
of Normandy and Anjou, with small towns or villages
clustered about them, and he formed an intimate acquaint
ance with the general features of the country — the long
straight roads bordered with poplars ; the forests of low
trees and brushwood ; the sluggish streams, and small
roadside inns with trellised arbours. Of a similar famili
arity with the manners and customs of the peasantry,
we see evidences in his story of the days of the French
Revolution, entitled " Duchenier ; or, the Revolt of La
Vendue," and published in 1848.
His walking powers stood him in good stead, and he
could wander at his will, leaving the beaten track to seek
some sculptured figure or decorated work, some fragment
of old glass or iron-wrought gateway, that repaid his
trouble. For with him learning and pleasure were insepar
able companions.
After the Long Vacation he returned as Chaplain to
Downing. There were many ties binding him very
closely to Cambridge; much pleasant companionship
and work in which he delighted, further development of
schemes connected with the Camden Society, and access
to libraries impossible elsewhere ; but his position as
tutor and Chaplain of Downing was never congenial to
him, and he resigned it in the autumn of 1841. He was
anxious to enter upon parochial work, and " had made up
his mind," as he wrote, " to take the first suitable curacy

S. NICHOLAS, GUILDFORD 55
that offered, without exercising any choice in the matter."
There had been a considerable amount of opposition to
the changes he wished to introduce at Downing, and
he saw no good to be gained by the sacrifice of his own
inclinations towards another sphere of clerical work.
He went, therefore, to S. Nicholas, Guildford, and,
brought face to face with some of the snares and difficulties
of ministerial life, upon his first arrival, he wrote in a very
unusual and despondent strain to Webb — "Jan. 17, 1842.
" You are right in thinking that I feel this change. I
do, beyond all description. It is not, as I feared would be
the case, a feeling of loneliness — but a wonder how, in a
parish like this, Catholic principles are to prevail. Then,
again, the quantity of information I have to gain perfectly
amazes me. ... I fear for myself. I see the temptations
one will have to look at our views as a theory. I know
well that it is a want of faith, a want which, if it cannot be
overcome, must either make one utterly careless in the
whole subject or else active in a peculiar line. Pray for
me. ... I never felt so much distrust of myself yet."
Just before entering upon this curacy, during a short
tour to inspect churches, he had visited Wells, and been
hospitably received at the Palace. He slept in the oldest
part of the building, one of the angular turrets, called the
Virgin's Tower. " The room where Laud and Ken have
slept, how can one but feel inspired ! " He also discovered
that his bedroom window was a fine Perpendicular one,
which added immensely to his happiness, and the next
morning he went to Glastonbury, saw " S. Joseph's Well,
and the thorn in blossom."
The friendly welcome he had received at Wells hardly
prepared him for condemnation from another episcopal
quarter, coming in the shape of a letter from Bishop
Sumner, of Winchester, received very shortly after his
arrival at Guildford, refusing to license him.
The Camden Society had achieved enough notoriety
to render a Bishop of opposite views doubtful as to the
expediency of admitting one of its chief originators into

56 JOHN MASON NEALE
his diocese ; but to Neale, who had been already framing
multitudinous plans for the evangelization of the parish,
the refusal was a disheartening and unexpected blow.
Arrested on one path, he turned to another: im
mediately went back to Cambridge, and threw himself
into some of his old pursuits whilst waiting for another
curacy. Official duties were necessarily laid aside.
Domestic interests and lighter attractions might be
allowed free play.
He had for some time been engaged — so far as his own
wishes were concerned — to his future wife, Sarah Norman,
daughter of the Rev. Thomas Webster, Rector of S.
Botolph's, Cambridge, and Vicar of Oakington, whose
sister had recently married his friend, E. B. Boyce ; but her
family, possibly mindful of a former evanescent attach
ment, had insisted upon a period of probation. Now
formal consent was given, although the marriage did not
take place until July, 1842, he being then twenty-four and
his wife four years his senior. He must, therefore, have
had personal preoccupations of a very engrossing nature,
and yet he was never content to do one thing at a time.
To dam up the stream was to send the water abroad
in other channels.
When first ordained, with the work of the ministry
before him, extraneous pursuits had been, it is true, for
the time thrust into the background. Even the claims
of the Camden Society, his search for ancient brasses, his
Anglo-Saxon and liturgical studies, had been willingly
relinquished for parochial duties. His brain was teeming
with projects of social and ecclesiastical reform. Now his
designs were frustrated by the unforeseen action of the
Bishop of Winchester. Moreover, with the stigma of
rejection from one Bishop upon him, he found it difficult
to obtain another curacy. Yet he soon recovered hope,
and consoled himself with a confidence based upon
Calonne's saying to Marie Antoinette, to which throughout
his life he was wont to recur, " Si la chose est possible,
elle est faite; si elle est impossible, elle se fera." And
this time of suspense was by no means one of idleness. In

JUVENILE LITERATURE 57
this year he wrote " Herbert Tresham, a Story of the
Great Rebellion," the first of his delightful stories for
children. By these he is known to many to whom his
historical and liturgical works are sealed books.
During the first half of the nineteenth century many
eminent writers had attained to a curious celebrity
through their contributions to literature professedly
intended for children, but frequently more fitted for the
enlightenment of their parents and teachers. In "Sand
ford and Merton," Mr. Barlow's instructions to his pupils
are expressly designed to display approved methods of
imparting knowledge and inculcating moral principles.
Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton are merely living
illustrations of the working of the system. Miss Edge-
worth's tales are rightly collected in a volume under the
title of the " Parents' Assistant." They have many of the
merits and defects of an educational treatise, though in this
case the wholesome medicine is so well concealed beneath
the accidents of the stories that an unconscientious child
may find no great difficulty in skipping the moral. Nor
are children so impatient of a moral as their elders, pro
vided that it is promptly and practically exemplified in
severe retributive punishment bestowed on the offender.
Mrs. Crabtree's tawse in "Holiday House" gives zest
and flavour to Harry's misdeeds ; and these books, in
which good and naughty children present strong contrasts,
lead to no morbid self-introspection, and are popular
and wholesome reading. There was, however, a class of
evangelical publications issued at about the same time
eminently calculated to reverse the natural order of things,
and to awaken in the minds of childish readers an undue
sense of their importance, and a dangerous notion of their
responsibilities. In these tales the unregenerate parent
and the converted child play their several parts, and rever
ence for elders and humility in youth are evidently not
the graces that accompany conversion. Here, again, it
may be hoped the moral may be incomprehensible to
children brought up in other traditions, but these books,
both of English and American origin, attained a wide

58 JOHN MASON NEALE
circulation, none the less that their influence was, from a
domestic point of view, of a revolutionary character.
Besides the school of everyday and matter-of-fact
morality, and that of religious experiences and emotions,
there arose another, dealing with sacred truths in a wider
and freer spirit, — the school of allegory, in which Adams
and Monro and Bishop Wilberforce were masters. Spiritual
truths were there symbolized rather than defined, in a
region of beautiful images and mystical meanings wherein
a child might happily wander as in a dream without
seeking the interpretation thereof. Monro, indeed, often
leads us into a land of horror and gloom ; the lurid light
of his imagination plays upon the terrors of death and
judgment, and with him the Lord is in the whirlwind
and the fire rather than in the still small voice ; but these
books again achieved well-deserved fame and much
popularity in the schoolroom.
Now, Neale's notion of stories to be told to children
differed in many respects from those of any of these writers.
He had been an unduly sensitive child, and he had no desire
to stimulate, still less to terrorize, a child's emotions. His
method of inculcating truth was not by means of moral
precepts; nor did he set forth to weave a magic web of
mystical enchantment. His object was rather to tell a
direct and plain story of the past, in language that a
child could understand, and in such a manner as to bring
historical scenes before his eyes and make historical events
known to him as realities, whilst at the same time the
author drew clear and edifying lessons from the facts related
and the characters portrayed. In this line of literature
he secured unmistakable success. "Herbert Tresham, a
Story of the Great Rebellion," was the first of the series ;
and whilst it bears evident marks of a prentice hand, it
amply fulfils its intention. The story told by the partial
pen of a Royalist touches upon disputed points of doctrine,
which are hardly enough subordinated to the action of
the story. The Church and the Puritan party, set in
battle array, exchange fierce arguments, leaving us in
no doubt as to their polemical aims ; in fact, the last

HERBERT TRESHAM 59
paragraph expressly declares the purpose of the book. The
author thus escapes any possible imputation of Jesuistry ;
at the same time, the method employed seems somewhat
clumsy, and Neale's later tales, though occasionally breath
ing the same spirit, are less markedly religious discussions.
But, in 1842, controversy upon Church questions was so
much a matter of course that each side sought eagerly for
historical facts and documentary evidence to strengthen
their position ; and fiction, like an agile free lance, was
quick to seize an advantage. Though Neale was a very
rapid writer, "Herbert Tresham," a slight volume, was
begun on March 5, 1842, and finished only on June 2nd,
but it had been no doubt put aside whilst he was pre
paring for the most momentous event of his life — his
ordination as priest on Trinity Sunday, May 22 nd, at
S. Margaret's, Westminster, by the Bishop of Gloucester
and Bristol. The very next day, he accepted the small
living of Crawley in Sussex.
Before entering upon the history of what was to be his
first and last parochial charge, it may be advisable to
review once more his position with regard to theological
controversies, and his religious views as noted in his
journal or revealed in correspondence with intimate
friends. Of his inner life we hear very little ; indeed,
for one brought up in an evangelical circle, he is singu
larly reticent. Old landmarks could hardly have been
swept away without some disquieting mental shocks,
nor old beliefs relinquished or remodelled without some
regret and strain ; but as to these changes and conflicts
he is silent. There were strange new lights, but they were
flashed upon truths as steadfast as the heavens themselves,
and he could walk secure in paths which Saints and Doctors
of the Church with whose lives and writings he was so well
acquainted had trodden before him, in the strength of the
faith of which he was an accredited teacher. Stimulated by
a happy certainty of conviction (somewhat surprising when
the distracted state of religious feeling is considered), he had
no illusions as to the difficulties to be encountered, and
few misgivings as to the possibility of overcoming them.

60 JOHN MASON NEALE
In writing to a friend, he presumes that he would not
have him " avoid the inseparable companion of every good
work — opposition. Opposition ! Why, our lives will be
one series of it ! " He had always a sort of unreasoning
courage which sent him to the front in any dangerous
emergency, and a happy incapacity for protracted de
pression. When at Guildford, he notes in his journal —
" Read some bitter attacks on the good cause, and
could not help thinking — with reference to them — as I
walked down the hill, the white tower of my church
glittering in the hazy sunshine, the bell ringing pleasantly
for Vespers, and the congregation going in by twos and
threes, how applicable, in spite of all they say of us, are
Abijah's words : ' But as for us, the Lord is our God, and
we have not forsaken Him ; and the priests, which minister
unto the Lord, are the sons of Aaron, and the Levites wait
upon their business : ... for we keep the charge of the Lord
our God ; but ye have forsaken Him. . . . O children of
Israel, fight not against the Lord God of your fathers ; for
ye shall not prosper.' "
At the same time, though strong in his beliefs, he
was (possibly because of secret leanings towards intoler
ance) anxious to preserve Christian charity in judgment
and word : —
" I would not speak of any one, even the most
abandoned Dissenters, as you do of Pugin," he writes. " I
could not call them apostates, and so on ; and, above all,
I could not impute motives to them, merely because I did
not happen to like them. All this I should consider in
myself a sad want of Christian charity : mind, I am not
saying what it is in others ; I am only telling you what I
should feel it myself. . . . No, as Bishop Montague said to
Archbishop Laud, ' We are all driving to the same end,
though not by the same means.' And it will be a most
grievous thing if, because we do not use the same means,
we are all to view each other with suspicion ; if N. is to
think me verging towards Romanism, and I am to look
upon him as little better than a Dissenter. At all events
though we may not be able to understand each other]

CHARITY 61
remember that ' charity hopeth all things.' Give me credit
for the best motives, and do not think that leaving Cam
bridge will make any difference in me — that I shall be a
whit more Protestant, nor show one whit more toleration
to the name than now."
Here precept and example seem to be somewhat at
variance; nevertheless, it is not untrue to say that he
was, as a rule, fair to his opponents and not harsh in his
judgments. In fact, he was too widely versed in old heresies
to exaggerate modern divisions, and was less fretted and
perturbed than most theological students of his day by the
spiritual upheavals taking place around him.
The Eastern Church, with its ancient rites and un
changeable laws and doctrines, whereof he was to be the
historian, was exercising a tranquillizing influence upon his
mind. At any crisis he instinctively turned to it as the
authority to be consulted or an important element in the
situation. When the question of the Anglican bishopric
at Jerusalem was a subject of embittered argument and
well-founded misgivings, his one desire was to know how
it was regarded by the Patriarch ; and, on March 5th,
1842, he writes of some letter of Pusey's —
" Pusey's letter, which I have to-day been reading, is
indeed admirable. I think that part where he speaks of
our not being yet anathematized by the Eastern Church,
one of the most touching passages I have ever read. I am
glad that it sells. It must do good."
It sometimes seems as if the Church of the century in
which he lived was to his mind but a link connecting the
Church of the past with that of the future. "We hear
much, whether rightly or wrongly, of the Church Militant,"
he writes, " but of the Church Triumphant, as a Church,
we talk, hear, and think little."
A sentence from one of his contributions to the
Ecclesiologist, though it belongs to a later date, so well
defines the objects of that periodical that it may properly
be read before entering upon the account of his pastorate
at Crawley : —

62 JOHN MASON NEALE
" We have always refused to enter into religious con
troversy. We set out with the principle of believing what
the Church believes, and that creed we are not called upon
to defend. But its symbolical an4 material expression is
our peculiar province, and we are always ready to explain
and maintain the position which we have taken with regard
to this subject."
This does not merely affect the subject of ecclesiology,
but it gives indications of his own temper of mind. In
modern theological discussions he might be worsted by
cautious disputants, and by more accurate and logical
arguments than any with which he was provided ; but he
was not easily to be surpassed in acquaintance with the
authorities of the early Christian centuries, and he was
richly furnished with illustrations from ancient liturgies
and symbolic art. Taking his stand upon the broad basis
of antiquity, he was comparatively little disturbed by the
controversies of the day.
At Crawley he was now for a short time to take refuge
from speculative theology, in assiduous attention to the
details of pastoral work.

CHAPTER VI
Crawley — Breakdown in health — "Hierologus" — "Symbolism of
Churches : translated from Durandus" — Visit to Aitken.
CRAWLEY, as Neale describes it, lies beneath the ridge of
a hill, from the top of which you look upon the South
Downs. Part of it is in the forest, and a wild and beautiful
ctountry it is. The soft sweep [of hills, above green woods
and fertile valleys, shelters the town, which in those days
was but a village, where old hereditary instincts and
traditions might easily be preserved.
No doubt, since 1842, education and progress have
altered the aspect of the country, and made destructive
inroads upon plainness of living and upon the simplicity
of rustic minds. But when Neale first took possession of
the vicarage, the arrival of a new parish priest was an epoch
in the lives of the villagers. They knew very little of the
world beyond the weekly news brought from the nearest
market town ; from larger centres of population it travelled
slowly. Respect for the squire and the parson largely
dominated the belief and customs of the peasantry. They
had an instinctive distrust of new creeds and new fashions.
The picturesque implements of labour, reaping-hooks and
scythes, had not yet been superseded by the ungainly
machinery now banishing the pleasant leisurely adjuncts
of seedtime and harvest; the little girls sewed their
seams without troubling their heads about latitudes and
longitudes, the date of the Norman Conquest or Magna
Charta ; the boys followed the plough in corduroys, and
learnt many things not to be found in school-books and
dictionaries. The sanitary reformer had not yet laid his
63

64 JOHN MASON NEALE
rude hand upon the village well and the small lattice-
windowed cottages; and rural conservatism was strong
enough to withstand the occasional shocks of new opinions
and strange tales brought by younger men who had left
the land for town employment or foreign service.
Now, instead of a sober-minded elderly rector with a
laudable desire to do his duty by his flock without affront
ing them by improved doctrines or startling them with
novel lights, there comes into this green seclusion and
into the very centre of tranquil village existence, a young
man fresh from the intellectual activities of a University,
uncompromising in his sacerdotalism, and anxious to carry
out high ideals. He is a liberal in politics, with no
respect for conventional habits and class distinctions, and,
in matters of religion, not much reverence for anything
of later date than the twelfth century. One can imagine
that curiosity was not unmixed with consternation and
disapproval in the unsophisticated minds of the Sussex
labourers when Neale first took up his abode among
them. During his short residence at Crawley his power of
adapting himself to new scenes and untried work was
strikingly^exemplified. The life of the student and the
antiquary was left behind ; he had no time to gratify his
taste for books and manuscripts, and rare chances of intel
lectual companionship : but to build up the spiritual fabric
of the Church in the eyes of his people, to dispense its
treasures and make known its power, was a work for
which everything else might be gladly and thankfully
relinquished. His letters from Crawley are diaries of personal service,
and of detailed experience of his parishioners. No doubt
they found his doctrines mysterious and his habits incom
prehensible. Neglect had engendered indifference. Sunday
observance they regarded as estimable though not binding,
but fasts and lesser festivals had fallen into abeyance.
There was not much outward reverence in the congregation,
and though the church was fairly filled, the communicants
and Communions made were lamentably few.

RUSTIC LIFE 65
Sanguine, persistent, energetic, Neale at once threw him
self into the work. No cottage door could be closed against
him : he was as ready to pray by the bedsides of the sick,
and to comfort the aged and sorrowful, as to start his daily
service and break down old bad customs of irreverence and
laxity. The revolutionary vigour of the young man's
onslaughts seem to have been forgiven for the sake of his
eager sincerity and genuine love for souls. His duties
were varied enough, for there were few to share what is
sometimes stigmatized as parochial drudgery. Lists and
parish accounts were carefully kept, lessons for school
revised, small improvements of different kinds carried out,
and irregular attendants at church sought out in their
own homes. He notes that he has met with " nothing but
civility," even from his " Baptist friend at Shelley," with
whom he exchanges tracts, each apparently hopeful of the
other's conversion. He lectures his churchwarden, and
evidently makes his way with his richer neighbours. " I
perceive, if we settle here," he writes with youthful
assurance, " that we shall be able to do anything with this
neighbourhood." He reconciles two sisters who had been
at enmity ; and preaches such sermons that, in spite of his
being a setter forth of new things, the church is thronged.
And finally, to the excited amazement of sober-minded
persons, armed with a hatchet and the churchwarden's
consent, he sets himself to hack down pews, as represent
ing worldly distinctions out of place in the house of God.
Then, in the midst of this cheerful round of missionary
labour, there fell a bolt from the blue. Some warnings had,
it is true, been given, but there was no time to gauge their
significance. Already, on his first Sunday, he is thankful
to get through the services with tolerable ease and comfort.
On S. John the Baptist's Day he is glad that he has felt
no inconvenience at all from reading, and has had no pain
in his chest. But night brought so much pain and fever
that he more than fears he must give up the living. Yet
on the very next day he is teaching in the school, and
preaching. Indeed, the letters which follow are full of
what he is attempting. Not content with necessary clerical
F

66 JOHN MASON NEALE
duties, he reorganizes classes in school, explores remote
hamlets, and is horrified at the condition of the cottages.
One consisted of a long room, with a mud floor.
"The boards are half or at most three-quarter inch —
huge cracks between ; the door will not shut, only fasten
to ; the thatch lets in the rain ; and, in that tremendous rain
last night, the wet poured in upon the bed, and the woman's
ingenuity was almost exhausted in keeping it off her
husband, who still slept on. How like a woman ! " And
we might well add : " How like a man ! "
Of course he could not inactively contemplate this
state of things. The landlord, himself a poor man, had
to be interviewed, and coaxed and threatened till he
promised to repair the damage. Two days after, Neale
was at work again ; he had a very pleasant day cutting
down three more pews. And all this time he had refused
any respite to the weakness of the flesh, in spite of the
admonitions of the London doctor whom he had consulted.
On June 27th he writes —
" I went with Webb to Dr. Blundell. I was determined
to hear the worst of the matter, so, after I had seen him, I
sent Webb up to receive his verdict. Well ! he says there
is no danger, but that it is necessary to take a good deal of
care, etc. He says that I ought not to be left alone — both
because this might become worse suddenly, and also on
other general accounts."
A week later he was obliged to revisit the doctor ; and
on the 6th of July there comes a melancholy little sentence
in the last of the letters from Crawley : " I do not think
that, if I really am to have rest, it will be well for me to
stay at Crawley, for the excitement of the parish is far
more than that of the church." Much as he loved his
church, cherishing visions of a restored chancel and a
sanctuary where the beauty of holiness should both be
preached and visibly manifested, greatly as he valued
public ministrations, and those highest mysteries of grace
of which he was the steward, — they were not the things
that fevered his imagination and disturbed his rest.

DISAPPOINTMENT 67
These included elements of peace, tranquillizing from
their very sanctity. But to work for the salvation and
sanctification of the individual soul was a responsibility
weighing even upon his confident spirit. One false step
might be so easily fatal in that venture ; moreover, he
could not but remember that he must tread with fear and
trembling upon consecrated ground ; and each soul, how
ever ruined or defaced, was a temple in which God dwelt.
So it came to pass that the needs of the ignorant and
sinful, with their especial claims upon his compassion, lay
heavy upon his heart ; though, when he went to Crawley,
he had written : " I think, the more I see of it, that we
may well say of it, ' The lines are fallen to us in pleasant
places.' "
Long afterwards he recurred to this time, when preach
ing on the text, " For the day of the Lord of hosts shall
be ... on all pleasant pictures," and he spoke of his dreams
when first ordained, of a " model parish where there were
to be such services, such frequent Communions, such village
schools, such cottage gardens, such joyous festivals and
holy Lents as nowhere else ! and how the day of the Lord
— His near and threatened approach by death — came upon
my poor picture, and it was utterly destroyed. . . . No
one excepting God Himself knows the bitter tears it cost
me to give up that picture, made all so ready to my hand
and looking so bright."
Now in retrospect, he could feel thankful that he had
been kept from realizing his wish.
Although this might be the result of maturer and more
chastened experience, even in the first shock of dis
appointment there was a remarkable absence of repining.
He could at least suffer in silence ; and he had the
immense alleviation of engrossing pursuits which could
have no detrimental effect upon his health. The purifying,
invigorating whirlwind of his presence had for a few weeks
only swept through the Sussex village ; yet we can well
believe that it was not without sincere regret that the vil
lagers, barely recovered from the amazement of his first
coming, witnessed his departure.

68 JOHN MASON NEALE
It seems strange that, in this precarious state of health,
and with his uncertain prospects, there should have been
no question of deferring his marriage. Miss Webster,
however, was not quite in her first youth ; Neale, four
years younger, had no disposition to be swayed by pru
dential considerations ; and their respective families being
apparently untroubled by misgivings, they were married
at Christ Church, Barnwell, less than a month after the
relinquishment of his living.
In enforced retirement from parochial work, literary
undertakings again filled his time, for as to leisure he
hardly knew the meaning of the word. He was making
incursions into various fields of literature. "Songs and
Ballads for the People ; " " Hymns for the Sick ; " "Agnes
de Tracy," a tale of the times of S. Thomas of Canterbury ;
"Ayton Priory, or the Restored Monastery;" "Hierologus;"
and " The Symbolism of Churches, translated from the first
book of Durandus," by J. M. Neale and B. Webb, were the
best known of his publications in 1843 > anc* some of these
had been written or projected in 1841 and 1842. The
preface to " Hierologus," an imaginary dialogue, fully
explains its object.
" The readers of the ' Compleat Angler ' (whence the
idea of these conversations was taken) will allow that the
least attractive part of that delightful book is the technical
description, wherein doubtless its author considered its
chief value to consist. We read it for its incidents, land
scapes, and reflections. And in like manner conversation,
however well adapted for discussion or description or
anecdote, seems out of place when made the vehicle of
didactic information. . . . The following work, therefore,
makes not the least pretension to be considered a treatise
on ecclesiology. Its aim is to set forth those collateral
sources whence so much beauty accrues to our ancient
churches ; such as situation, association, and legend, and
this more particularly with regard to English buildings.
At a time when a taste of syncretism or electicism prevails
among so many who ought to know better, next to Catho
licity of design it seems important to recommend nationality
of style. . . . And he trusts that these pages may in some

" HIEROLOGUS " 69
small degree, by aiding in the revival of a love for the out
ward beauties of a church, lead the mind to dwell on the
beauties of that spiritual Church which is builded as a city
that is at unity in itself."
In this curious little book many different matters are
discussed in a light and pleasant vein : the influence of
local scenery upon architecture ; the relics of curious cus
toms as exemplified in buildings ; legendary beliefs still
lingering in remote districts ; quaint epitaphs ; poetical
symbols in their relation to art, in such works as Quarles'
"Emblems" and Hey wood's "Hierarchie;" — these all
interspersed with fragments of original verse, cultured and
graceful, though of no great merit.
Frequently his fancy, like a wandering light, played
around whatever might be the ostensible subject of his
conversations or writings. He was impelled to regard it
from every possible point of view. This, of course, is no
uncommon characteristic, but it is not often combined with
the accurate information and the unwearied habits of re
search that led him to count no time wasted in verifying
a quotation or arriving at the correct interpretation of a
disputed passage. Webb, who was his constant and some
times almost daily correspondent, sharing with the intimacy
of true friendship and congenial tastes his interests and
successes, writes of "Hierologus," "The dialogue enter
tained me much. What learned fellows they are, and
how much they talk like a book ! " (an adverse criticism,
though he does not seem to be aware of it). " Paleologus
is, of course, Paley." * The intercourse with Paley at
this time seems to have been very constant, though
there were great and possibly increasing differences of
opinion. In the same letter, Webb hopes for another instal
ment of " Durandus " upon the translation of which they
were both engaged. Neale had thrown himself with more
than his accustomed vigour into the enterprise. He had
that surest incentive to perseverance, a clear and sometimes
1 This was a mistake.

70 JOHN MASON NEALE
an exaggerated sense of the importance of any work he
undertook. He was quite certain that "Durandus" would
meet with appreciative readers and secure a well-deserved
popularity. If a publisher could not be found, he was
determined to publish it himself. " Whatever we like to
say on the subject of symbolism," he writes, " we may say
without fear of contradiction." This is no doubt a satis
factory reflection for an author who writes upon an abstruse
subject, yet it may well fail in securing a large circle of
readers. To Neale it seemed incredible that matters of
such vital importance should be unattractive to differently
constituted minds. " The scheme," he writes again, " seems
very desirable. ... I hope you will join with me in so good
a work, . . . and I hope we shall strike one good blow
for symbolism." In this instance, his confidence was not
misplaced; the book attracted much attention, and was
republished as late as 1893.
Meanwhile his physical condition was still unsatis
factory. He very rarely touched upon the state of his
health ; it was in his own mind entirely subordinated
to other more engrossing subjects. Nevertheless, there
was clearly no possibility of taking up active work. After
his marriage he went for a short tour in the north, which
resolved itself into a pilgrimage to churches, to be numbered
amongst the thousands he visited in England or abroad.
Fresh " schemes " were taken, technical details noticed, and
much information collected for the Ecclesiologist.
Later he was again at Brighton, translating mediaeval
Latin poets, and making a kind of synopsis of Beaumont's
" Psyche;" and then reverting to his first series of "Hymns
for Children." Nothing came amiss to his fertile pen and
wandering fancy. And he had certainly realized one fact :
that it is far more difficult to instruct the ignorant than to
inform the educated — easier to write for the philosopher
than for the child. His collection of hymns for children,
" though small in size, has cost me a great deal of trouble,"
he writes, " and therein given me a great deal of pleasure."
It was true of this volume, one of his first attempts
at hymnology, also of those later labours in the same

BUILDING AND DECORATION 71
department which occupied so large a share of his time to
the very end of his life.
So painstaking was his love of detail and symbol that
without any great stretch of imagination one may fancy
that if his lot had been cast in mediaeval times he would
have been well content in some monastery library to pore
over ancient manuscripts, or spend days all too short in
illuminating the vellum with delicate brilliancy of fruit and
flower, or grotesque allegorical devices in rich and marvel
lous intricacy of design. His outlook was, nevertheless,
comprehensive, and broad principles governed and guided
both conduct and opinions.
Upon the subject of architecture he is in curious agree
ment with Ruskin.
"Very few faults of architecture are mistakes of honest
choice," so Ruskin tells us in the " Stones of Venice ; "
" they are almost always hypocrisies. So, then, the first
thing we have to ask of the decoration is that it should
indicate strong likings, and that honestly."
And Neale, writing upon the principles of building, in
other language brings out the same idea : —
" The first great principle to be remembered is reality
— taught and acted upon in church building. Let every
thing be real. Never attempt to make beech or deal, if
they are used, look like oak. To do so is either a silent
confession that such ought to be the materials of which a
church is built, or a piece of hypocrisy. . . . This false
ornament can arise from only one of two causes : either it
has its origin in our own ideas of luxury — ideas which
ought to be banished from a church — or from the idea of
making our offerings to God appear as great as possible,
while the cost to ourselves is as little as may be. This
principle of reality is the great lesson which must be learnt
by the church builder."
The principle was scrupulously carried out wherever
the wishes of the members of the Camden Society were
allowed to prevail. Neale never ceased to inveigh against
cheap churches; and when asked if it were not better

72 JOHN MASON NEALE
to build five for £4000 than one for £20,000, would answer,
" Why not five for £20,000 ? "
"England," he writes, "is now confessedly wealthy
beyond all comparison with former periods, and in the last
century we have built a certain number of meagre, tasteless
edifices for the worship of God. In a like period of a hun
dred years, when the country was impoverished by continual
war, ten times the number of churches were erected, many
of them of the most magnificent character, and among them
Bristol, Wells, and Salisbury Cathedrals, the choir of Ely,
and Beverley Minster; and of these many of the most
expensive decorations, such as stained glass, have perished.
How is this ? "
No doubt he pondered this and various other questions
which he would not ask aloud, in his solitary hours. At
times he took long walks, occasionally with a com
panion, more often alone, walking as much as twenty or
thirty miles a day, with the measure of his unwritten
hymns, scraps of " Durandus," or fragments of Latin verse
beating insistently upon his brain, whilst he took his way
towards some deserted shrine or forgotten ruin. But
though muscularly strong, his chest continued so delicate
that it was advisable in the autumn to seek a milder
climate. He and his wife reluctantly started for Penzance,
and spent the last months of this year in Cornwall.
Here, though separated from his old friends, he made
one interesting acquaintance, who attracted and amazed
him by his charming personality, and by what he had
been able to accomplish. Aitken, he discovers, in his
remote Cornish parish, near Marazion — "has the Holy
Eucharist every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday ; service
twice every day — three times Wednesday and Friday,
and has converted between thirty and forty Wesleyans in
a comparatively short time. . . . He is the most astonish
ing man I ever talked with — there is a sort of fascina
tion in him. He is a man of property (and at the time
I rode up was drawing out the plan of a chapel he is
going to build in the Isle of Man), but seems to give

VISIT TO AITKEN 73
away everything and , live poorly. His conversation
is surprising; he seems to talk as you may imagine S.
Gregory to have done." (It is like Neale not to be able
to compare him with a more modern conversationalist.)
" It struck me before I had spoken long to him that he
must be the author of ' The Church not a Place for the
Conversion of Sinners.' And he is. I had been writing
last night, and talking, on the necessity of re-establishing
monasticism. He was writing on the same subject.
When I told him of S. Michael's Mount being for sale, he
said he believed it would be bought in for the purpose — that
the bishop would make no objection ; that it was con
veniently situated as extra-parochial, and; that he knew a
man waiting to be at the head of the first."
These visionary projects naturally commended them
selves to Neale, and even Webb's less sanguine imagi
nation was fired. In his letter in answer, he demands to
hear more about Aitken. " I pine for further news." And,
in reply, Neale writes —
" Now about Aitken. I told you he had been a schis
matic. This is his history. He was a Manxman, and
after his Ordination settled at Liverpool. Being disgusted
with what he saw in the church, he left it, and set up a
schism place. Being full of energy, he built thirty in
different places, and at last settled in London and became
very popular. He read the Church prayers, and had very
high abstract ideas of the Church. One day a member of
his congregation of rank called, and said, ' Sir, I am sorry
to be forced to leave your communion, but I am sure, from
what you have taught me, that you are in schism.' Aitken
said frankly, ' To tell you the truth, I believe I am.' Next
Sunday he preached (and the sermon was published in
The Pulpit) on the subject, and said that he knew not if
there were any Church of Christ, or, if there were, where it
was ! Sixty of his congregation came afterwards and
asked him what they were to do. He said, ' Let us all go
into the chapel, and remain in silent prayer all night that
God would direct us.' They did, and three times a week
for three months they spent twelve successive hours thus.
The end was that all but one joined the Anglican Com
munion, and he turned Romanist. Aitken then called on

74 JOHN MASON NEALE
the Bishop of London, asking him to license his chapel
that it might be immediately filled up, and he, after a
three years' silence, licensed. The bishop hesitated, so A.,
that same day, takes his place in the Liverpool railway,
and goes down to the Bishop of Chester, who knew him.
' Sir,' says he, ' I always expected you would come back,
and, though I look on your peculiar views as the device of
Satan, I shall license you immediately.' Aitken then set
up daily services immediately, and has now turned all
his thirty chapels into Episcopal churches. Is not this
wonderful ? I had it from S. who had it from A., but I
mean to ask A. himself."
Evidently this modern apostle suddenly crossing his
path is a bewildering sight to Neale's mental vision. A
saint — but a saint who has been in schism by reason of
some of these nineteenth-century controversies which do not
appear to Neale to justify divisions. He could better have
understood the repentant apostates of early times, who
gladly submitted themselves to canonical penances as
the condition of their readmission to communion. With
a youthful enthusiasm he, however, recognizes the notes of
true sanctity, and the few months spent in Cornwall were
memorable, not merely for new impressions of scenery,
and fresh schemes projected, but for generous impulses
for good strengthened by intercourse with a man in whom
the love of God was the very source of life and the spring
of action.

CHAPTER VII
Delicacy of health — Winter in Madeira — Intercourse with Mon-
talembert — Attitude with regard to modern controversies —
Literary work — History of the Holy Eastern Church projected —
Adventure in Spain — Return to England.
The New Year, 1843, was hardly begun when it was
apparent that the mild airs of Penzance could not disperse
the threatening symptoms of delicacy of the lungs. The
doctors took so grave a view as to declare that in resi
dence abroad lay the best hope of preserving life. To
a young man of Neale's temperament it is likely that
sentence of death might have been almost more easily
accepted than condemnation to a protracted existence of
idle invalidism.
He was indifferent to comfort, impatient of control,
wearied and fretted by necessary considerations in respect
of either money or health. He wanted to be free to walk
and ride across the country regardless of time or weather.
He was still young, barely twenty-five. It was life and
fuller life that he wanted, not a gradual relinquishment
of his hold upon one thing after another. He had not
learnt how to conjugate the passive verbs. A sentence of
banishment from work and objects of interest and study,
from friends and libraries, might indeed to him have been
the death of hope. Yet his spirit rose up to meet this
supreme discouragement.
" As you may well imagine, to leave England is a great
trial, and especially to Sarah, but then we are not left
without comfort. Truly, as you say, it is a lesson to every
one to work while it is day." 75

76 JOHN MASON NEALE
His correspondent did not need to press home the
lesson. His years had been truly years of labour though
not of sorrow, and if he faltered upon the way it was not
that he might find excuse to rest. On the contrary, he
was busied in putting all in order.
" I have now nearly rid myself of the things I was most
anxious about, having sent off 'Agnes de Tracy' to
Stevenson, and nearly finished the other book. ' Durandus '
will, I hope, be fully arranged when Webb comes here.
All this is in case it is God's will that my work should
be done. Preparing for the dark does not exclude
hoping for the bright side — nor ought it." So he writes,
and adds that he will set about getting ready a new series
of hymns ; for he will " try at all events not to rust out,
and I may be good for something a good while yet. Who
can tell?"
The last days in England, though overshadowed by
the prospect of departure and all it involved, were full
of unwise exertions. On one day he mentions that he
rode twenty miles and walked two. He was making
architectural discoveries, afterwards embodied in writings
and letters. He was translating " much from S. Thomas
a Martyr's glorious epistle, ' ad Episcopos Anglicanos.' "
But on the ioth of January he writes —
" To please my wife I saw to-day Dr. Montgomery, the
first physican here, and his opinion is that, if I wish to
prolong my life, I must go to Madeira ; but that, going
there, I shall only prolong it."
And then he goes on to speak of the voyage, and of
" Agnes de Tracy." The doctor's sentence, which to most
men would have been of such vital importance, occupies
but a few lines of the letter. It is not stoicism or in
difference, but simply an inability to dwell upon physical
symptoms when there were other matters of greater
moment to be discussed.
They sailed on the 2nd of February, and he wrote in
his journal : " Si non Tu Ipse praecedas, non educas nos
de loco isto."

ARRIVAL AT MADEIRA 77
At this time he made great use of Bishop Andrewes'
"Devotions," and, after the same manner, wrote a long
Latin prayer for his own use in sickness.
Thus he set forth in hope and trust, yet as an exile
to a strange and undesired country, and, landing, found
himself in an enchanted isle. Madeira, with its mountains
swelling up into the clouds, and its two high snow-clad
peaks, lay before the travellers' eyes like a lovely vision,
bathed in the early morning sunshine, and its new-born
beauty solaced the lonely hearts of the wanderers. Here
was a place, one might have imagined, to seek repose.
Balmy airs and orange-groves were surely not the fitting
accompaniments of intellectual restlessness and bodily
energy. For the exercise of the last there was, indeed, at
first, little opportunity. The rainy season had set in, and
enforced some measure of inactivity. But as soon as
Neale arrived he was at work. He has been "pro
mised an introduction to the best parish priest on the
island, a most excellent man," and he is getting on with
Portuguese as fast as he can, for none can talk with ease
in Latin. Some of the canons of the cathedral are in
poverty, carrying on business as wine merchants. He
finds it quite impossible to make any progress with them
till he can get up some Portuguese. This, it would
seem, he readily accomplished, in the mean time medi
tating fresh literary labours, another story and a book
of ballads on some events in English history — " The Last
Hunt of William Rufus," " Martyrdom of S. Thomas of
Canterbury," "Lord Brook's Death," "Setting up the
Standard," etc.
His journal gives us a glimpse into the inner sanctuary
where, undisturbed by earthly aims and conflicts, his soul
might dwell secure —
" Gloria Tibi, Domine,
Qui me tam leniter corrigere dignatus es,
Alios amovens terrores,
Salutarem suspendens timorem ;
priusquam humiliarer ego deliqui ;
jam autem mandata Tua servem."

78 JOHN MASON NEALE
So he prays, and then in conclusion : —
" Unum petii a Domino, hoc requiram ;
ut, si longiorem vitam negas,
saltern in brevi spatio opus magnum
opereris,
cor contritum,
veram penitentiam,
veram fidem ;
tandemque, miserrimo peccatori
finem, si ita videtur, dones
saltern peccati expertem,
per J. C D. N. Amen."
The doctor at Madeira was hopeful. He did not believe
in any permanent injury to the lungs, and Neale found
that exile had alleviations. Long rides were taken,
sometimes of a dangerous character, in the beautiful
mountainous districts, Neale being throughout his life a
rash and impetuous rider.
"We have been to the Curral," he writes on the 28th
of March. " The ride there is sublime beyond description,
winding in and out among the mountains with a precipice
above and below, and in some places the road is far worse
than it would be to go downstairs, if not very steep. If
your horse made one false step, you would presently find
yourself some half mile below in the ravine. The height
we went is about 4000 feet."
"March "*,\st. To-day we got into our new house. It
stands on the side of a steep hill, some 300 feet above
the city, of which it commands a fine view, and has
two small gardens and a fine corridor. Count Monta
lembert called to-day: unfortunately we were at dinner.
He knows all about the CCS.'s election of him through a
mutual friend — as it would have been an awkward matter
to explain. So he evidently takes it well."
It would seem that, in their enthusiasm, the associates
of the Camden Society had elected Montalembert to be
an honorary member, and Neale is doubtful whether he
might regard it as an honour or an impertinence. Doubts
were laid aside when acquaintance ripened into inti
macy. Montalembert was friendly and cordial. Neale's

INTERCOURSE WITH MONTALEMBERT 79
admiration for monasticism, his historical and architectural
knowledge, furnished subjects of mutual interest ; whilst
Montalembert's liberalism, though of a finer and more
enlightened quality than his own, appealed to Neale's
instinct of revolt against any form of State tyranny. They
were mutually pleased with each other. Montalembert
invited Neale to visit him in Paris, and spoke of coming
to Cambridge for the purpose of seeing Ely. He supplied
information for the Ecclesiologist, and lent Neale a book
of his, "Vandalism and Catholicism," and a "history
with plates, of Cluny ; certainly the most wonderful church
in the world, with nine towers." In reference to this time
Montalembert writes, in the July of that same year —
" During last spring I was in frequent and interesting
communication with the Rev. Mason Neale, one of the
founders of the Camden Society at Cambridge. You see,
therefore, that, under your excellent guidance, I have been
making rather a deepened study of Puseyism, and I think
I may safely say I have never studied anything with more
interest and more conscientious attention. But although
I quite agree with you in the intense sympathy you feel
for this Anglican revival, although I do not hesitate to
look upon this crisis in the ecclesiastical affairs of England,
and its consequences, as the most important event of our
epoch, yet I cannot feel so sanguine as you do in your
hopes of the ultimate return of the Church of England to
the eternal truth through Puseyism. I do not really know
whether, on the contrary, Puseyism quant au tout ensemble
will not give the Anglican schism a new life and a new
energy." When we take into calm retrospective consideration
this period of fierce struggles, bitter renunciations, and
agonizing spiritual experiences, we may be sometimes
tempted to wonder whether the prize were worth the win
ning, or if, in the attainment of some contested point,
the greater issues were not apt to be, for the moment,
forgotten or obscured. Montalembert's view — the view
of an unprejudiced spectator — is specially noteworthy in
the light of the future. He is both an observer and

80 JOHN MASON NEALE
a prophet. More clear-sighted than some who were
quitting the storm-tossed vessel of the Anglican Com
munion as likely to make shipwreck of its faith, Monta
lembert foresees an awakening to new life and new
energy. Nor is he disposed to minimize the importance
of the crisis ; it is, he affirms, with somewhat surprising
dogmatism, " the most important event of our epoch."
During this winter at Madeira the questions upon
which they were happily in agreement appear to have
preserved the intercourse between Montalembert and
Neale from any disturbing incursions of prejudice or
party spirit. Montalembert was eagerly anxious to
encourage this young student of ecclesiastical history ;
and to extend the sympathy of a distinguished literary
man to one desiring to tread in his footsteps. But
in 1844, when they were again together in Madeira for
part of the winter season, complications arose. Neale
declined to recognize what Montalembert termed the
weakness of his position, having, upon that point, no fears
to be silenced, no doubts to be allayed. Montalem
bert ideclared, possibly with truth, that he was obstinate
and lacking in humility ; and when, in a letter of that
date, we find him in forcible language referring to Neale
and the Anglo-Catholics generally as men who " I am
convinced will always prove the worst enemies of the
Church, more so than infidels themselves," we can hardly
wonder if even a more longsuffering man than Neale
should have found his sentiments hardly in accord with
former professions of good will. Closer communication
accentuated points of difference. Nevertheless, being
very possibly the only two people in a small colony
with subjects in common, they continued to see each
other constantly.
"Montalembert," Neale writes, "has read 'Hierologus,'
and is delighted with it — and more particularly with the
parts relating to abbeys, which I take as a great compli
ment, seeing that he has studied the subject so deeply
and visited Cistercian houses from Sweden to the Tagus,
for his ' Life of S. Bernard.' "

"A VOICE FROM THE DEAD" 81
Again, on the 26th of February, he writes —
" I will send you a letter I received a few days ago
from Montalembert, written, you will see, in as kind a
spirit as possible, in which he frankly says that he looks
upon the English Church as one of the worst forms of
heresy. And he is very well acquainted with it, and does
not judge it from your tracts, etc. It is a curious thing,
that letter ; sixteen large quarto pages, closely written. It
is fair to say that he dislikes Gallicanism as much, and
will not hear of nationality in architecture, or in anything
else." It is an unconscious testimony to the strength of his
own convictions that he was undisturbed by so fierce an
onslaught, and could believe in the kind sincerity of his
assailant. Montalembert had no doubt taken much pains
in elaborating his argument. He sent a copy of the letter
to the Dublin Review for publication, and it was after
wards reprinted under the title of "A Voice from the
Dead." It drew forth an answer from Neale, which was
not, however, published. Attack is easier than defence,
and not having given equal attention to recent controversies
and disputed points, Neale may have found his simple
stone and sling hardly fitted to withstand his well-equipped
antagonist. His beliefs were not matters of controversy.
There was a childlike element in his faith preserving him
from the agitating spiritual difficulties that persistently
beset the minds of many other men, oppressing them with
doubt and obscuring the horizon of the future. He and
Montalembert had met some centuries too late to under
stand each other. Well versed in the ecclesiastical history
of early and mediaeval times, they would have found
themselves at one in the condemnation of ancient heresies,
but it is very possible that Neale's intimate knowledge
of the differences which in primitive ages had arisen
within the Church itself caused him to regard the
modern divisions of Christendom as to a certain extent
inevitable. They were to him matters of sorrowful regret,
rather than of perplexed disquietude. Moreover, he was
at a distance from all that was taking place in England. G

82 JOHN MASON NEALE
Webb, it is true, kept him in touch with the extension of
the Tractarian movement, and numbers of the British
Critic found their way to Madeira ; still he was not in the
heat of the battle. He heard enough to quicken interest,
but in a non-combatant passions were less easily roused.
He was more occupied with the differences between Nomi
nalists and Realists; with Origen's arguments against
Sabellianism, or S. Bernard's condemnation of Abelard,
than with the sentence on Dr. Pusey, or the last " Tract for
the Times." Moreover, his eyes were turned to the East ;
to the great Church which, in its immutable repose and
rigid orthodoxy, knew nothing of modern innovations.
The idea of his greatest book, the "History of the Holy
Eastern Church," was already in his mind, though he
had much other literary work on hand. "Hierologus"
and "Durandus" — or, to give the volume its full title,
"The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments, a
translation of the first book of the ' Rationale Divinorum
Officiorum,' written by William Durandus, sometime Bishop
of Mende ; with an introductory essay, notes, and illus
trations, by the Rev. John Mason Neale, B.A., and the Rev.
Benjamin Webb, B.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge" —
were published in the same year, 1843. Durandus was a
native of Provence, born about the year 1220. He became
a pupil of Henry de Luza, and taught Canon law at
Modena. He was subsequently chaplain to Pope Clement
IV., auditor of the Sacred Palace, legate to Pope Gregory
X. at the Council of Lyons, captain of the Papal forces,
and finally in 1286 Bishop of Mende.
His translators, in the preface, declare that they " have
endeavoured, too often unsuccessfully, to retain the
beautiful simplicity of the original, . . . and have felt
no small pleasure in thus enabling this excellent prelate,
though at so far distant a land from his own, and after a
silence of nearly six hundred years, being dead, yet to
speak ; and if the following pages are at all useful in
pointing out the sacramental character of Catholic art, we
shall be abundantly rewarded."
It is curious to note that this translation of a French

MADEIRA 83
bishop's Latin work was retranslated into the French
language. This, then, was one, but only one, of his many occupa
tions. Here are notes of some of his published works
during this year: "Ayton Priory," begun February 13,
1843; finished March 7th: 22 days. "Shepperton
Manor," begun March ioth ; finished May 4th : 56
days. " Hymns for the Sick," begun August 20th ;
finished September 25th. Translation of Bishop Andrewes
into Portuguese, begun October 24, 1843 > finished
December ioth : 47 days. And then he began the
" History of Alexandria, October 28, 1843 ; finished
September 21, 1844: 328 days.
He hardly lays down his pen before it is taken up
again. It was a life of retirement and regularity favourable
to industry. Upon the other hand, inclination to exertion
of any kind might have been easily foresworn in a delight
ful but enervating climate, by a man who was still more or
less of an invalid. The Neales had a small quinta, or
country house, five hundred feet above the sea. After an
early breakfast, he wrote all the morning until dinner
at 1.30. When the heat had subsided they rode, and after
tea he wrote again at one thing or another until night
prayers, followed by supper at nine and bed at eleven.
He had been fortunate in finding " an excellent library
at Funchal ; about two thousand volumes, very well chosen
by Bishop Costa Torreo. It will be of the greatest help,
and belongs to the Seminary in connection with the
Cathedral, the Rector of which, Padre Fa, is abundantly
civil to me."
Thus the three successive winters he spent in Madeira
were by no means wasted. At the conclusion of one of his
intimate letters to Webb, in 1843, he writes —
" I am reduced to talk about myself, and will begin by
telling you that I am much the same, stronger in some
points and not so strong in others ; but I hope that the
former preponderate. I am very well satisfied with what
I do till a letter of yours comes : measuring myself with
those around me, it is no vanity to say that I am doing

84 JOHN MASON NEALE
wonders in the way of work ; but to compare myself with
you at Cambridge makes me feel as if I were no good at
all. . . . But this I am certain of, if ever I am restored to
work with you all, I shall have authorities for almost
everything. You cannot think how well I am getting up
ecclesiastical history. Writing and reading little else
from morning till night The Greek history grows in
interest upon me. ... I am in hopes, in the section of
the introductory essay on the architectural differences
between the Eastern and Western Churches, to strike out
something new, and to prove to a dead certainty that our
views on the subject of the final development of architec
ture are most certainly true. . . . Montalembert is writing
the Life of S. Bernard. He must be thoroughly happy. . . .
I am rather startled by thinking that, in the Greek history,
I shall be the first Anglican of Catholic principles who
has touched the iconoclast controversy."
With extraordinary mental activity, he was not simply
concerned about the actual work in hand, but he was ever
looking on to heights yet to be scaled, and to more
arduous and responsible undertakings. It was not that
his eyes, like those of the visionary, rested upon the glow
and glory of the distance : to be transported to the summit
would not have brought him true satisfaction ; the joy was
in the perilous and difficult ascent.
When he returned to England it was to throw himself
once more into the affairs of the Camden Society, and the
predominant ideas and schemes of his former friends. On
the way he passed through Spain, "the land of romance."
His letters are, of course, full of descriptions of its cathe
drals and churches. Out of forty-seven churches of Seville,
he writes that he " has seen twenty — a fair number, as they
are far apart, and the middle of the day is lost time from
the intense heat."
In Seville he had an adventure, of which he gives the
following account in a letter to Webb : —
" I was walking by myself, about seven o'clock, in
Triana, the S. Sever of Seville. It was of course quite
light, and the street was full of people. As I was going on
I saw I was dogged by a Spaniard. After passing and

ADVENTURE IN SPAIN 85
repassing me, he came up and struck me on the arm with
a stick. As I had nothing in my hand, I contented myself
with stepping out of his way. He followed, and tried to
draw me into a side lane. I resisted . . . and in a
moment his Spanish knife was out. I jumped sideways
into a cottage door which was open — he after. I expected
to feel his knife in my back. Then I ran through a yard
into a wood-house, slammed the door in his face, and set
my foot against it. . . . By this time there was a hue and
cry. The man ran out of the house, seized a gun from
a horseman going by, and dared the passengers to seize
him." This determined person was eventually taken prisoner,
but not until the Alcalde del Manio came upon the scene
with a file of soldiers. Even then he fired at the Alcalde,
and, strangely enough, fifteen militia armed with guns
came to assist the soldiers before he could be secured.
His recklessly heroic defence seems to have awakened
no admiration on the part of the bystanders. An outlaw's
life was possibly of little account in his own eyes or theirs,
and he was bartering it cheaply for the sake of the gold
chain Neale wore, that had prompted his attack. Respect
for the law and a high moral sense must have been un
usually prevalent, since no one regarded the prospect of
his being shot or sent to the galleys with anything but
unmixed satisfaction.
This was the chief event upon the journey home, and
Falmouth was reached the day after the Feast of S.
Nicomede — June 1, 1843.
The solitary life in Madeira had not unnaturally
fostered anxieties about health. To fly is to induce fear.
In England he had been in a wholesome atmosphere ; en
joying the bracing companionship of other young men.
Ordered South, he was one of a band of invalids to
whom signs of disease gave unmistakable warning of the
enemy's advance. " Death comes to set thee free,
Then meet him cheerily,
As thy true friend."

86 JOHN MASON NEALE
But it is difficult to do this when all the paraphernalia
of sickness, physicians and nurses, potions and prescrip
tions, are set up in a defence, of which you instinctively
apprehend the inherent weakness. The journals at this
time reveal a nervous watch kept upon disquieting
symptoms, and, though residence in Madeira re-established
his health, there is no doubt that the summers in England
were as important for their salutary effect upon his spirits.
He does not, as he says, merely clear his head of Alex
andrine and Constantinopolitan Patriarchs by writing to
Webb, but he is drawn back into the healthy ebb and flow
of varied active personal undertakings, and has no time
to weigh the significance of physical weakness or dwell
upon vicissitudes of prolonged delicacy.

CHAPTER VIII
The state of religious parties — Letters on the Oxford movement —
Newman's threatened secession — Neale's religious opinions —
"The Ideal Church" — "Catena Symbolica" — Personal charac
teristics.
Neale returned to England at a turning-point of the
Tractarian movement. In 1843, Newman had given up
clerical duty, and withdrawn to Littlemore. One short
year had brought a manifest sense of discouragement.
Individual secessions and losses could not affect the
ultimate issues of the cause, yet they gave rise to
a feeling of insecurity, and alienated those who had
once fought side by side. Enemies from without were
renewing hostilities ; there was no thought of sounding a
retreat, for new adherents were gathered in and much
advance had been made, but the responsibilities pressed
heavily upon the leaders, anxious questions were being
asked, waverers needed to be strengthened and converts
instructed ; and when troubles from within and without
were crowding upon the party, the desertion of a single
member was an irreparable calamity.
Webb had been in constant correspondence with Neale
during his absence. He was so close a friend as to
share with him his half-formed perplexities and doubts.
Ecclesiastical symmetry and theological certainty had a
natural attraction for a mind constitutionally averse to
anything like disorder in thought or practice. He had
been more in contact with the disaffected, and took a
gloomier view of the prospects of success. For him it was
hard to believe that — 87

88 JOHN MASON NEALE
" If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now^the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main."
The retreating wave had drawn some from the shore, and
Webb, though he remained steadfast, was not without
doubts as to the right course to be pursued; His position
and Neale's are defined in letters of somewhat later date.
Webb writes to him, on the Feast of the Purification,
1844, from Trinity College, Cambridge —
"I do fear your Orientalizing. For my own part, I
cannot see any strong objections to what you call the
High Papal theory. . . . Let me earnestly warn you
against the Orientalism of books. I have lately heard
not a little of real Orientation, and, believe me, it is nearly
as bad as Anglicanism. ... I trust you will write the
Greek history on high Occidental developed ground. . . .
People now seem to think that we shall have to nonjure if
only some of the bishops will go with us. Everything,
however, is distracted. . . . Do not fear my secession ;
though I write strongly, many reasons keep me from it,
e.g. consciousness that I have not acted up to our privileges,
unwillingness to act on individual judgment and feeling,
and, above all, a clearer insight than ever into the miserable
state of the Anglo-Romanists. ... I saw a good deal of
Pugin. ... I have succeeded in making Dr. Pusey get
him to draw the cartoons for the Crucifixion window. I
had a daily correspondence with the Doctor for about a
fortnight. Then he came to us in town, and, after a long
talk, went up with me to Pugrn's. I was six hours with
him, and never enjoyed anything more. He had so holy
an air that by his side one felt wicked. He will surely be
canonized. I cannot conceive any one more meek and
lowly. ... I think I explained our position to him better
than he understood it before. . . . He gave me significantly
to understand that he would probably place relics in his
altar in Holy Cross."

THE OXFORD LEADERS 89
In the same letter there are references to Newman,
Oakeley, and Archdeacon Wilberforce, and evidently
Webb, with an inclination to hero-worship, is a student
and a worker ; one of a school with a loyal reverence for
his teachers. This discipline Neale had missed by reason
of his isolated circumstances during these critical years,
when, in contact with men of more intellectual power, he
might have depended less upon his judgment, and learned
by experience the difficulty of putting preconceived theories
into practice. In reply to this letter, he writes from
Madeira, February 26, 1844 —
" In the ' History of Alexandria ' you need not
be afraid of my anti-Romanism. That Church and
Rome have been as it were allies ; and with the
exception of the practices of the Jesuits in Ethiopia,
and of one schismatical proposition to the Jacobite
Patriarch in the sixteenth century, I am not aware that
one has occasion to mention Rome but with praise — or
merely historically."
He also urges the election of Rio as an honorary
member of the Camden Society.1 Montalembert wishes
him to be proposed, and certainly, in cordially falling
in with the suggestion, Neale shows no party animus
against the distinguished member of another Com
munion, almost as well known for his irreproachable
ultramontane spirit of loyalty, as for the brilliancy of
his genius. In the last sentences of the letter, Neale
adds —
" I am delighted to hear of your intimacy with Pusey,
and much like his idea of books of devotion of foreign
Catholics ; but why not, first of all, from S. Francis de
Sales and S. Thomas de Villanova ? "
Neale is clearly at a distance, not only from England
itself, but from sinking hearts and distracted minds ; and
from that widening circle of religious men who were
struggling against contrary waves and adverse currents.
Their faith was strengthened by the fierce opposition to be
1 A. F. Rio, author of" L'Art Chretien."

90 JOHN MASON NEALE
encountered, its flame burnt brightly in the wind. Neale,
who knew little of actual difficulties, looked on from his
retreat, and was interested and sympathetic, but felt him
self more at home in the discussion of ancient heresies
and the use of old liturgies, than in modern controversies
or Anglican books of devotion. When Webb discusses
some question of schism, he replies with a cheerful
confidence —
" You cannot doubt S. Cyprian would be on my side.
I cannot doubt S. Peter Damian would be on yours.
And whatever I have learnt to believe on this matter I
have learnt, not from Anglican writers, — you cannot abhor
them more than I do, but from such men as Quson, — and
Cardinal Bersenon, and Pereira, and, above all, from the
Fathers of Constance and Basle. With the single ex
ception of the denial of the Cup to the laity, I believe that
I could sign all the decrees of these Councils. But do not
do me the injustice to think that I do not hold the duty
of prayers for the dead, and the development of the
Communion of Saints as strongly as any one, though I
should always be careful at present of printing anything
on the latter subject, because I feel that the time may
come when I may more practically embrace it. ... I
hope and believe that Newman will not leave us ; but I
should not despair if he did. My sheet anchor of hope
for the English Church is, that you cannot point out a
single instance of an heretical or schismatical body which
after apparent death awoke to such life. The Donatists
might have done it, the Copts might have done it, the
Nestorians might have done it, but they have not. Why
should there be such a startling anomaly to all past
experience first of all exhibited in the nineteenth century ? "
Thus we see that it is not unfair to say that he was too
much engrossed in his own concerns and too remote from
the centres of life and thought to understand the temper
of the times. He was spared the overwhelming sense
of personal sorrow for a lost leader, the vain attempt to
minimize divisions in the strength of an unalterable affec
tion, the rending of the tenderest ties, and the sight of
vacant places.

DOUBTS AND FEARS 91
On Sunday, the ioth of November, 1844, Webb wrote
from Cambridge —
" I fancy the last week has been one of unparalleled
excitement and fear amongst us Anglo-Catholics here.
Rumours from many different quarters, and these most
authoritative quarters, had been about, to the effect that
Newman had at last determined to secede. . . . Yesterday
it was contradicted ; but I for one am persuaded, on the
best authority, that one need at no time be surprised at the
event. I know that we do not feel quite alike about this.
... It seems to me that one had need hope that there is
a purgatory, for our own sakes. You will see that I take a
very dismal view now ; indeed, there seems to be no rain
bow in the sky. Almost all I know seem to be equally
gloomy." And, in answer to this, Neale writes : " The report about
Newman had made us all very uneasy ; there was quite a
collection of us in Phelps's counting-house when the letters
were being opened ; " and he goes cheerfully on to rejoice
with his correspondent over the large bequest of £6000
to the Camden Society, from Maude of S. Catherine's,
to be spent in the restoration of churches.
A letter which follows refers to a paper of Oakeley's on
the notes of the Church : —
" I will tell you why I differ from it toto ccelo, and as
strongly as I can ; loving the manner and admiring his
spirit. 1. Because I know no schismatical sect in the
world that could not use the same argument. If you
overpower them with ecclesiastical proofs, they would say
in the same manner, ' We grant you have patristic authority,
but then we have sanctity ; ' if you reply that you don't
see it, their answer is easy, that ' by its peculiar nature it is
hidden from the view of mankind in general.' 2. Because,
according to Oakeley's views, those members of our Church
who are not able to point out this sanctity (which I
imagine nine-tenths are not), would be justified in leaving
it. 3. Because, and this is what strikes me as painfully
Protestant in Oakeley's letter, who gave him a right to
judge whether we have it or not ? " Then he instinctively,

92 JOHN MASON NEALE
after a few paragraphs, flies back to the great Schism
and S. Catharine of Siena's efforts^ on behalf of Pope
Urban, to show that the partisans of the true successor
of S. Peter dared not rest their cause upon the question
of sanctity, but appealed to ecclesiastical precedent ; an
appeal Oakeley rejects. These are facts, he writes
advisedly, " which we all know"
It is more and more evident that he fails to com
prehend the position of religious parties in England, the
fluctuating hopes, the painful bewilderment, the melan
choly forebodings, agitating the minds and spirits of
individual men. Webb, naturally calm and prudent,
tenacious of principles, is whirled into the vortex ; he
pours out his heart in vain. Neale, happily writing his
history of Alexandria among the orange trees of his
quinta, declines to be over-excited ; his friends at home
find themselves in a sea of tribulations, and he is touched
and compassionate, but he refuses to be miserable.
One reason for his comparative serenity has been
touched upon, his intimate knowledge of the great
divisions and differences within the Church from the
earliest times, which caused him to undervalue the danger
and significance of those affecting his generation. But
this was not the sole ground of confidence. He was
more undisturbed than others by ecclesiastical dissen
sions, since he had learnt sorrowfully to recognize the
fact that such existed to a greater or less extent in every
Communion. Montalembert, with whom he had had intimate rela
tions, was the distinguished exponent of religious ideas
and doctrines out of favour with many of the accredited
rulers of his Church. His furious denunciations of what he
stigmatizes as the " usurpations " of Anglicans wound and
shock his friend and co-religionist, Ambrose de Lisle, more
than Neale himself, whose letters from Madeira touch
with no unfriendly or captious spirit upon the religious
quarrels rife in the Portuguese community. " The Portu
guese Church," he writes, " has always been on its guard
against Rome." And during his residence in Madeira

PAPAL CLAIMS 93
there were internal difficulties, with which his mastery
of the language and acquaintances amongst the clergy
made him conversant. Nor is his view of the state of
the Church unjust, for upon this subject Montalembert
speaks still more strongly in a letter of the same year, in
which he refers to the —
" sad downfall of Catholic ideas and Catholic institutions
in Spain and Portugal, which I have recently visited on
my way from Madeira to France. In these unfortunate
countries, which were once the bulwarks of our holy Church,
the spirit of faith and legitimate resistance to oppression
has been completely broken down by three centuries of
political despotism and diplomatic subserviency on the
part of the Church."
Neale, who could not but perceive that the want of
unanimity and the Erastian spirit infecting the Anglican
Communion also permeated other branches of the Church
of Christ, was less troubled by its manifestations than
men whose outlook was more limited. He regarded it
rather as a symptom of the age, than as the note of a
decadent Christianity. His attitude with regard to Papal
claims was clear and defined, and certainly, at this period,
absolutely free from bitterness.
"Without becoming a shade more Anglican, I do see
more and more clearly that the High Papal theory is quite
untenable. ... I cannot make, as Montalembert does, or
as the R. C. sometimes seemed to wish to do, the desire
for visible union with the Chair of S. Peter, the Keystone
as it were of the Church — at least not in the sense in
which the Western Church has sometimes done. We
Orientals take a more general view. The Rock on which
the Church is built is S. Peter, but it is a triple Rock :
Antioch where he sat, Alexandria which he super
intended, Rome where he suffered. You would be
astonished at the weight of evidence in Doctors of the
Western Church."
There was no strong personal influence to draw him to
one side or another. His attitude was never that of a

94 JOHN MASON NEALE
partisan, nor was he inclined to painful self-question
ings. When the course Newman and others were taking
was to some the cause of incalculable suffering, and to
others an imperative call to follow in their footsteps;
whilst Newman could write of a constant " literal ache all
about his heart ; " and Pusey " looked like a Saint in
tribulation ; " Neale, partly from circumstances, and partly
by reason of more robust sensibilities, was spared many
of the trials which at this moment divided his party, and
in some respects his judgment was in consequence the
more reliable.
" I don't like Ward's book (except for beauty of
diction)," he says in reference to " The Ideal Church." " A
Saint like S. Bernard might indeed write so of the Church
in which he was ; in any one else I cannot but consider it
in the highest degree presumptuous. I could not stay in
it if I thought as he does. . . ."
Nevertheless he had no prejudice against the writer, as
a later letter states : " I think all the parts treating of the
present Roman system of devotion most edifying and
beautiful. But I cannot take in his theory ; at least not
at present." No single theory could have absorbed his mind. It
was not in any sense distracted, but filled to overflowing
with an endless procession of thoughts and projects —
aesthetics, theology, symbolism, architecture, and literary
work. He had been, for some time, collecting material
and acquiring knowledge of historical facts and of Oriental
languages, in preparation for his great task, the " History
of the Holy Eastern Church." The first portion was
written in October, 1843, and during that winter in Madeira
he was able to make good progress, impossible without
the help of the library at Funchal. It proved to be of
inestimable value. He frequented it almost daily, spending
the flying, happy hours amongst manuscripts and folios,
until the Rector of the Seminary, as a gentle hint — so
Neale suggests — that he did not require his presence so

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 95
often, proposed to send up any book he might require
to his quinta. His retentive memory made him so com
pletely master of the books once read, that he was able
to quote in after-years from volumes he had studied
there, with accuracy and readiness, as if from a work he
had just laid down. For instance, he never possessed
the works of S. Bernard, but he was so familiar with them
as to surprise good scholars by the variety and verbal
precision of his knowledge. At Funchal he set to work
also upon a " Catena Symbolica," and sent home much
curious information for the Ecclesiologist. His facility in
acquiring languages was of course of immense service, and
his trustworthy translations frequently threw a new light
upon some disputed point or obscure passage. Though
thoroughly well versed in a great number of languages,
and more or less conversant with no less than twenty,
he was not disposed to regard his talents as exceptional.
Self-confident to the verge of arrogance in opinion, he had
no temptation to over-rate his abilities. His aptitude
was in this respect misleading. He could hardly under
stand that others might not readily equal or surpass him.
In the same way he took his untiring diligence as a matter
of course. In the " delightful use " which he makes of the
library he is able to compose his " Catena Symbolica " from
mediaeval authors in addition to regular business, because
it may be useful for a second edition of "Durandus."
And here is his elaborate and definite scheme of the
work. The ideas are to be traced from "the year 200,
with one or two writers at least to each century. . . .
II. Chapter. The Analogy of Greek Symbolism. III.
An inquiry into the reason why the Greek Church never
had symbolical architecture. And here I hope to give
a list of such great Churches as were built in the four
Eastern Patriarchal cities before the Mahometan conquest.
IV. Further examples and deductions, principally from
French churches. . . . You see, in all this, very evident
proof of my access to a library."
On the 24th of January, 1844, his 26th birthday, he
notes —

96 JOHN MASON NEALE
" So ends a year of many mercies, and alas ! of
much abuse of them — a year the conclusion of which
I, at one time, never expected to see;" and he com
pletes the list of published works which we have
already given by recording as accomplished " some three
hundred pages of Greek History, besides many odds and
ends." Again, one must remember that his banishment to
Madeira favoured composition ; he had few interruptions
or demands upon his attention: at the same time, his
work suffered from want of contact with other minds whose
insight and powers might have corrected prepossessions
and broken down prejudices. But though intellectually
isolated, he was entirely free from any tendency to the
morbid self-consciousness of a recluse. His mind was
braced and invigorated rather than exhausted by effort,
and the very versatility of his resources preserved him
from the exaggerated concentration apt to destroy the
sense of proportion. The responsibilities of life had
been laid upon him early. Ordination, marriage, and
the birth of his first child, Agnes, which took place
at Brighton in the summer of 1844, had all combined
to mature character, yet it was not subject to any
sudden transitions. The vagabond light-heartedness of
youth had never been his, he had been too intent upon
the objects to be attained for any pleasant, aimless
dallying by the way. His spirit was rarely ready to
make holiday, and, in spite of his learning, he may at
times have lacked "the leisure to be wise." Abrupt in
his manners, and reserved with strangers, within his own
circle of intimate friends his conversation was free and
unrestrained. Until the summer of 1845, his health was not suffi
ciently re-established for him to undertake any clerical
charge ; but three winters in Madeira were then found
to have wrought a cure, and for many years he had no
other illness of a serious character.
His great work, the " History of the Eastern Church,"
was, for the most part, written at a period when his

PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES 97
mind was most disengaged. In England he would en
counter the ordinary difficulties of life, and be required
to deal with religious doubts and perplexities that, with
an especial force and in bewildering numbers, were besieg
ing the minds of most thoughtful persons.

H

CHAPTER IX
Neale's interest in the Eastern Church — Prepares to write its history
¦ — Studies in' the Funchal Library — Authorities cited — Cyril Lucar,
Patriarch — Description of the Council of Nicaea.
It is a curious indication of Neale's temper of mind that,
during these years — when what he calls " the High Papal
claims " were being advanced in England ; when the air
was full of agitating questions of Anglican rights and
Roman obedience ; when the Church of England, standing
upon her defence, was offering to her opponents a more
than passive resistance ; when, in a passionate loyalty, the
members of his own party, scholars and theologians, men
of unblemished lives and high spiritual attainments, were
absorbed in a struggle to vindicate her character and
defend her inheritance ; — his thoughts should have flown
from his native land, where the conflict was being waged,
to find a refuge in the East, to take sanctuary in the great
immovable fortress of faith against whose venerable
gilded gates the assaults of progressive thought and
modern sophistries might beat in vain.
In youth he had studied Byzantine art and Oriental
languages. Though swayed by the impulse of the Trac
tarian movement, he had never lost his ideal of a Church,
to which the Greek Church approached most nearly.
His patristic studies had quickened his keen desire for
fuller apprehension of her doctrines, and liturgical re
searches had shed fresh light upon her practice. Webb,
as he said, had well-founded fears that his friend might
" Orientalize." Early in 1843 Neale had written —
98

THE EASTERN CHURCH 99
" I think I might undertake a very favourite plan
of mine; a history of the Eastern Church to the
present time — perhaps only from the great schism of
East and West. Do you think Burns would like it?
A volume about the size of Palmer's 'History of the
Church.*" Though he is appalled by the magnitude of the work
and foresees difficulties, he flings himself into it with
headlong ardour. It was an undertaking involving learn
ing and industry, not merely a task to be accomplished,
but a preoccupation to which everything else was more
or less subservient. Many different threads of thought
and knowledge, obsolete liturgies, ecclesiastical details,
personal characteristics of actors in long-forgotten dramas,
made up the warp and woof of the work, all blended
together in one rich and harmonious whole. It was a
treasure-house for the student, a series of pictures of
doctors and patriarchs, of priests and neophytes, of
Origen and Ambrose, of S. Cyprian and S. Athanasius,
followed by a long catalogue of Saints and martyrs ;
for, in truth, he lived in the times he chronicled.
He spared no pains, grudged no amount of trouble to
glean the least shred of evidence, or ascertain a single
fact bearing upon his work ; whilst any one who
could give him the smallest assistance was pressed
into his service. Webb was at too great a distance to
help him very materially; but Neale highly valued his
co-operation. " I have been at our history tooth and nail," he writes
on the Feast of S. Austin, 1843, " principally working at
Constantinople ; but I have worked off this chapter, and I
wish to have your opinion of it. You must be merciful in
your judgment ; you only see the result, but don't know the
difficulties — Catholics contradicting Protestants, Jacobites
contradicting both ; Coptic names so altered that they
are hardly the same in two books. I was quite put out till
I discovered that David, of Geddes, and Onadingial, of
La Croze, were the same person. ... I never shall have
courage for this without your help. I don't care how much

ioo JOHN MASON NEALE
of it, so you take some. After all, it will be perfectly new
to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred."
From Madeira, in the same year, he writes —
" I find the Greek history pleasanter every day. But
it is not an easy thing, and the worry from the fear of
making a mistake used at first to be quite painful. It is,
however, a very good exercise. Especially I find the
having to define, in a few brief words, the early heresies,
very improving to one's divinity. If you wish to imagine me,
it must be thus : my reading desk " (he usually both wrote
and read standing at a high desk) " has notes, extracts, and
a volume of Fleury. On each side of me is a table, that
on my left has a desk with Le Quien." (This refers to the
treatise of the learned Dominican, Father Michael Le
Quien, to which he was indebted for so much informa
tion : " the patient industry, accuracy, fairness and modera
tion of the work being," as he writes, "above praise")
"A shelf on my left has S. John Damascene, King,
Mosheim, etc. The history after the Sixth GEcumenical
Council will contain little that is not to be found in Fleury,
though I think it will be a little more accurate and con
cise ; after that we launch out. I find twelve pages, such
as Newman's sermons, a good day's work ; then, except at
breakfast, etc., I never read anything unconnected with the
subject." Very possibly this excess of industry set limits to
imagination. There were no waste spaces where its
wild flowers might spring and blossom. Every inch of
ground was tilled and cultivated. He cannot even eat
his breakfast without a book at his side, though for that
short space of time he reluctantly foregoes the annals of
the Eastern Church. Unlike some other literary toilers,
his work was in itself an end. He was not, with the
indefatigable Southey, uncomplainingly accomplishing a
daily self-allotted task for the sake of his family, in a house
where poverty might at any moment walk in at the door,
though love would never fulfil the proverb by flying out
of the window ; nor could he be compared to Sir Walter
Scott, who in the intervals of business gave free rein to
fancy, — whose novels, as he expressed it, simmered in his

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED ioi
brain as he lay in bed or rode about the country. Neale,
on the contrary, wrote for the sake of the work, and he
composed with the pen in his fingers, for he had made
elaborate preparations, and now with documents at hand
and many investigations completed, he wrote on steadily
from day to day.
The spirit with which he set out is clearly explained in
the preface to the " History of Alexandria."
" I have reserved for my introduction to the study of
the history of the Oriental Church some remarks which it
seems right to make on the spirit in which such a book
should be written. The historian should write, not as a
member of the Roman, not as a member of the English
Church ; but, as far as may be, with Oriental views, feel
ings, and even, perhaps, prepossessions."
In this respect he found no difficulty in acting upon his
principles. The long list of his authorities : the Dominican
Le Quien ; Eusebe Renaudot, whose devotion to Eastern
literature and acquaintance with thirty languages gave
him immense advantages in compiling his history of the
Jacobite patriarchs ; Wansleb, a Dominican missionary in
Egypt, who first introduced their history to Europe ;
Sollerius the Jesuit, whose treatise suffers from his want of
access to manuscripts and ignorance of Eastern languages ;
Eutychius ; Elmacinus' Saracenic history ; the Mahometan
writer Makrizi ; Geddes, who wrote under the patronage of
Bishop Burnet, and whom Neale found totally untrust
worthy ; Stilting, the Bollandist, and Wilken's " Geschichte
der Kreuzziige," and other books and authors, all testify
to his desire to judge of disputed questions fairly, from
different points of view. In the sixth book, " On the Rise
and Decline of Roman Influence in Ethiopia," he cites, on
the Roman side, the " Perpetuite de la Foy," the " Creance
de l'Eglise Orientale" by Simon; Leo Allatius, etc.;
on the Oriental side, the Councils of Constantinople, Jassy,
and Bethlehem, "The History of the Russian Church"
by Mouravieff, "Present State of the Greek Church "by
Ricaut; and, on the Calvinistic side, Crusius' "Turco-

102 JOHN MASON NEALE
Graecia," Aymon's " Memoirs of the Greek Church," etc.
These are but selections from authorities mentioned,
yet they indicate the grounds for the judgments formed,
and show from what various directions he gathered
materials. His interest never waned ; indeed, as time went on, he
became more and more engrossed in his book, appropriately
dedicated — " To His Holiness Artemius
by Divine mercy
Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria
Libya, Pentapolis, and all the preaching of S. Mark
and Oecumenical Judge
This History of the Church of S. Athanasius
is, with all humility, inscribed."
In spite of the library at Funchal, with its particularly
valuable edition of the Fathers, he found great difficulties
in the way of obtaining all the intelligence he required.
On the nth of January he writes from Madeira: "My
chief difficulty at present has been to know what view
to take of the Second Nicene Council. You must re
member that neither in the East nor in the West had I
any one to whom I could look as a guide." At any rate,
he does his best, and boldly applies for assistance to every
possible quarter. The British Chaplain at Alexandria col
lected and transmitted information. Mr. Alfred Walne,
the Consul at Cairo, waited on the Patriarch, and received
answers to queries ; the Vicar of the Jacobite Patriarch at
Alexandria made important additions to his knowledge
of the state of that Communion ; at home, the learned
Eastern scholar, Dr. Mill, overlooked the sheets as they
passed through the press, supplied corrections, and gave
references to unexplored sources of illumination; and,
finally, his faithful friend Webb revised most of the
proofs. " I will not repeat to you," he writes to Webb, " the
success of my inquiries at Alexandria. If you return

CYRIL LUCAR 103
by Geneva, you may do me a great service. I am in
correspondence with G. Diodate, librarian of the Library
of the Republic, and he is to get for me copies of
the uncopied letters of poor Cyril Lucar which are
kept there. . . . This also, ask to see Cyril's confession
of Faith. I mean the original MS. If it is not forth
coming, hint that many believe it to have been a German
forgery, Romanists as well as Orientals, and see what he
says." With this desire to gain sidelights upon his subject, it is
no wonder that he adds, " I am overwhelmed with business."
He was (as George Williams expresses it) to devote the
best years of his laborious life to the accumulation of
materials for a work evidently designed to be the chief
monument of his industry, and his articles, hymns, and
stories might not now interfere with more serious studies.
The Greek history is ever the dominant note, and Cyril
Lucar much upon his mind. "You will not need re
minding to look out for Greek books at Venice. If you
fall in with any Greeks there, try to discover what is the
modern Oriental view of Cyril Lucar. The Russian view
we have from Mouravieff."
His story of the life and times of " poor Cyril Lucar,"
occupying the fourth and latest portion of the second
volume of his Alexandrian history, is a sample of the
manner in which individuals give life and reality to its
pages. It also so very curiously exemplifies his views
upon orthodoxy, heresy, and schism as to make it worth
while to give a short sketch of the method used in
dealing with the subject. Cyril was an important figure
in what Neale terms "the most interesting portion of
Alexandrian history — the rise, progress, and final rejection
of Calvinian tenets, which had, for a time, infested so large
a portion of Europe." His career was varied, and he was
a mover in those furious controversies and tempestuous
councils which, sharply defining the Faith, severed ecclesi
astical ties, embittered religious differences, and were
frequently inextricably intertwined with State intrigues
and political factions.

104 JOHN MASON NEALE
Crete, Cyril's birthplace, was at that date, 1572, at
peace under the Venetian Government, but the limited
area of the island brought religious parties into dangerous
proximity. The Eastern and Western Churches were
represented by prelates especially distinguished for learn
ing, having exceptional advantages from their easy access
to Italian universities, notably that of Padua, from whence
they brought back what Neale describes as "scholastic
novelties," to be introduced into the simpler Eastern
Creed. On the completion of his academical course, Cyril took
even a wider range, visiting Geneva and Holland, and
becoming more or less imbued with a reforming spirit
before returning to Alexandria, where his kinsman,
Meletius Piga, who at that time occupied the Chair of
S. Mark, admitted him to the priesthood. Evidently a
person of ability, he was sent on some business to
Constantinople, and subsequently on a delicate mission
to Poland, where great difficulties had arisen, King
Sigismund III. being a staunch upholder of the Papacy,
whilst the majority of his subjects adhered to the Oriental
faith. He returned to Alexandria with a considerable reputa
tion for diplomacy, and was soon after sent back to Crete.
On his travels he came across M. von Haga, a liberal-
minded Calvinist, who had some strange project for
bringing about a union between Constantinople and
Geneva. Cyril, with a taste for theological discussion,
and free from the rigid orthodoxy which befitted his
position, without committing himself to any change of
opinion, listened with compliant courtesy, and the seeds
of heresy, sown by a practised hand, though long in germi
nating, bore unexpected fruit
Cyril was raised to the Patriarchate, succeeding his
benefactor, Meletius, in 1602, and for ten years there are
scant records of his doings, but in 1612, on a visit to
Constantinople, he was again brought into close and
friendly relations with his old friend, von Haga, and, at
the same time, had his somewhat vacillating predisposition

ORTHODOXY IN DANGER 105
towards liberal ideas strengthened and confirmed by a
revolt against the tyrannical conduct of the Jesuits.
Constantinople was a city so distractedly disunited as
to present a striking illustration of the actual condition of
religious parties. The Jesuits had invaded it about ten
years earlier, bringing much learning and astuteness to the
propagation of their views. They were an influential body,
with both spiritual and carnal weapons at their command,
rich buildings, and a well-selected library, and they drew
many converts from the Greek Communion. This com
paratively peaceful work was however seriously interrupted
by sharp contentions with the Dominicans and Franciscans,
older established Orders, hitherto guiding and ruling the
counsels and consciences of the community. In Con
stantinople, Cyril hardly displayed his usual caution, for,
taking part unnecessarily in the quarrel, he brought
upon himself the undying animosity of the formidable
Society of Jesus. Moreover, he opened communications
with the Presbyterian minister at the Hague, though, in
a letter of immense length, curiously modern, written for
the most part in a strain of liberal Evangelicalism, he still
sets forth the true glory of the Eastern Church. "To
her, innovations are novel signs and prodigies to be
dreaded rather than followed. . . . She never takes away,
never adds, never changes. She always remains the same ;
. always keeps and preserves untainted orthodoxy." In
spite of this redeeming sentence, Neale regards the letter
as the first downward step towards ruin, especially since
Cyril addresses the Dutch Pastor as his " brother in Christ,"
and in " unbecoming language " contrasts his wide charity
with the intolerance of those who "would not hesitate,
if they thought him in error, to throw him into a seething
pot, stretch him over live coals, or terrify him with the
torturer's appearance." This surely very natural repugnance
to severe measures Neale terms " still more painful." In
fact, Cyril, in affronting the canons of orthodoxy, is in
danger of losing the sympathy of his biographer, and
presently he forfeits them altogether. A wordy theologian,
we find him writing long letters to the Archbishop of

106 JOHN MASON NEALE
Canterbury, commending to his care a young priest whom
he was sending to pursue academical studies in England.
The Archbishop replies in self-congratulatory strains as to
the state of his own Church, "salutes his Blessedness,"
and assures him that "the King (James I.) speaks of him
in the most flattering manner. Dealings with those outside
may have contributed to affect Cyril's faithful adherence
to the one Church which " never changes," and, notwith
standing his former protestations, it appears, from a hitherto
unpublished confession, that he decidedly, perhaps un
consciously, drifted into heresy. He again met with some
Dutchmen in Egypt, highly educated men of a nation
who were manifestly fatal to Cyril's orthodoxy, and, till the
plague banished them from Cairo in 1619, they exercised
much influence over his mind. On the occasion of this
visitation of sickness, calling for fortitude and devotion on
the part of a Christian prelate, we find him writing in
no very valorous strain : " I remained shut up, in great
danger, in my house, and let down from my windows the
answers I had to make to my Christians respecting the
dead ; and by the grace of God am safe up to this time."
This thanksgiving appears somewhat out of place, nor
would this conduct have been likely to commend itself
to his flock, yet, two years later, he was unanimously
elected to the GEcumenical Throne of Constantinople. A
series of internal troubles, and a period of civil war, ended
in the exile of one whom the Pope, Urban VIII., designated
as " a son of darkness and a champion of hell." After a
while, nevertheless, Cyril returned, his successor abdicated,
and he was once more recognized as the legitimate
Patriarch, and, resisting the renewed efforts of the Jesuits
to set up a rival, he maintained his position. It was a
strange anomaly — the rightful defender and ruler of the
Eastern Church in intimate correspondence with the
avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith and ecclesiastical
order ! No wonder that the most opposite forces were
arrayed against a man whose convictions, however sincere,
were entirely inconsistent with his high office. " Persecu
tion," he writes, "ceases not, but creeps like water under

CONSTANTINOPLE 107
straw." Once more sentence was given against him — but
on this occasion banishment could not content his enemies
Pasha and Jesuit united to compass his death. Enticed
into a boat, as soon as it was out of sight of land, a few
moments for prayer were all they accorded the Patriarch
before they murdered him.
Such then, shortly, is the story of " poor Cyril Lucar,"
as Neale relates it in many closely written pages of the
second volume of his " History of Alexandria." It is one
of many distinct biographies, illustrated by original letters,
and with the evidence on each side carefully selected and
weighed ; but it is typical, both of his style and of his
attitude of mind. Here we see very plainly the pre
possession with which he designedly set out — his Oriental
bias and his Eastern proclivities. Cyril, who should have
been the champion of primitive orthodoxy, is beguiled by
modern heresies, and, in justifiable opposition to Roman
usurpations, is tempted to make allies of new reforming
teachers. Rome, in her turn, does not scruple to use the
infidel arm to execute her behests. Neale, whilst he laments
the Patriarch's fall, and by no means disguises his weakness,
dwells with admiration upon his patience, gentleness, and
learning, those amiable qualities that, under serener skies
and in less troubled times, might have stood him in better
stead. The writer's position is always markedly that of
an advocate. The tyrannical and revengeful conduct of
the Jesuits, and even the laxity of the Church in England,
is more easily to be tolerated than the dishonour done to
the integrity of the Greek Communion by one of her
hierophants. In this he judges rather from within than
from without, and the summary vengeance wreaked upon
Cyril through the unholy alliance of Rome and the infidels
is less distressing to the author than his hero's apostasy.
The early portion of the history is more uninteresting to
the general reader, in consequence of what Neale himself
terms the necessarily brief accounts of early heresies, and
the long catalogue of persons of whom, from lack of
historical information, it is impossible to give more than
slight sketches. Nevertheless, these have life and reality

108 JOHN MASON NEALE
— facts in history, annals of persecution or martyrdom,
documentary evidence or contemporaneous witness, all
being employed to elucidate character. Every now and
again, the narrative flows with force and brilliancy, from
an inexhaustible sparkling spring of knowledge, as when,
in the chapter upon the Council of Nicaea, he describes the
assembling of the Fathers, —
" men who carried about with them the glorious marks
of confession in the Tenth Persecution, — men on whom
distant Churches had hung as columns of the One Faith, —
men in whom the apostolic gifts still dwelt in all their
pristine vigour, — men who had not only the power of
binding and loosing in Heaven, but of healing disease and
raising the dead on earth. They gathered from every
province of the known world, an exceeding great army of
prelates, an innumerable company of priests and deacons ;
they came to compare the Creeds taught in their Churches,
by the apostolic founders of each, and to bear witness to
the truth of the same Holy Ghost that spoke by all ;
they came to invest traditional faith with infallible words,
and to rear an everlasting bulwark between the Church
and heresy." Then follow the names emblazoned in a
roll of glory : " S. Macarius of Jerusalem, illustrious for
many miracles ; S. Eustachius of Antioch, who had raised
a dead man to life ; S. James of Nisibis, who by the
power of his intercession routed ^Sapor and all the flower
of the Persian host ; S. Leontius of Caesarea in Cappa-
docia, the ' equal of the angels ' and the spiritual father of
many martyrs ; . . . S. Nicasius of Die, the only delegate
from the ever orthodox Gaul ; Protogenes of Sardica, the
bulwark of the Dacian Church ; S. Meletius of Sebasto-
polis, who fought his good fight in Armenia ; . . . and
multitudes of other prelates, whose names, less famous in
the Church militant, were doubtless not the less surely
written in the Book of Life."
Still, in this volume as in other writings, questions of
style were subordinated to a simple desire to make the
narrative, without any special elegance of diction, or
felicities of expression, a true presentment of the personages
and facts recorded.

CHAPTER X
The " History of Alexandria " continued and epitomized — Plan of the
introduction — Neale's attitude with regard to the supernatural —
Excursions and last days in Madeira — Dissolution of the Cam
bridge Camden Society.
It was no wonder that the history of the Eastern Church
should have had a strong attraction for a student predis
posed to historical and ecclesiastical research ; and the
attraction without changing" its character, extended its
borders, as fresh light from various quarters was thrown
upon the subject.
In asking for Webb's co-operation he had expressed
" a great desire and expectation " that he should write two
of the Patriarchates, and he put it before him, not only as
a kindness to himself, but as a delightful occupation and
a good work to be accomplished. Webb, however, was
absorbed in the agitating topics of the day, and he had
much pressure of practical business with little leisure at
his disposal. He occasionally exercised the office of a
critic and a censor, but altogether declined joint authorship.
Neale's first conception of the work, in this and other
respects, therefore underwent several modifications. After
a good deal of hesitation, he had determined on writing
the Patriarchates separately, and meant the work to
be in four octavo volumes, each of 400 pages. He
began with Alexandria ; and its history in two volumes
was published in 1847 ; the Introduction, intended as a
preface, being kept back for valuable information he
hoped to receive from Constantinople and Damascus.
This Introduction eventually reached two volumes, and
it was not till Candlemas Day, 1850, that he could
109

no JOHN MASON NEALE
write : " Congratulate me, I have finished the Intro
duction at 4.30 this afternoon, and could almost have cried
when I laid down the pen. I began it in August, 1843."
The " History of Alexandria," as we have seen, was finished
in a year; but many other things intervened before the
Introduction (of which we shall hear more later) could be
completed ; and immediately after its publication he wrote :
" I am learning Armenian like a horse, for the ' History of
Antioch.' " This history was left unfinished at his death,
being completed by the Rev. George Williams, and not
published until 1878.
In reviewing the course of Alexandrian history, Neale
writes —
" By God's goodness we have finished the relation of
the ' Rise and Decline of the Church of Alexandria.' We
have traced it from the time when its apostolic founder
laid down his life for his Lord ; we have penetrated, so far
as we might, the obscure annals of its earlier patriarchs ;
we have seen it struggling with the persecutions of Valerian
and Diocletian, and, by the blood of its martyrs, spreading
the Faith into the wildest regions of Africa ; we have seen
it crushing the Sabellian heresy in the person of S.
Dionysius, standing alone against an Arian world in that
of S. Athanasius, overthrowing Nestorius and wielding an
CEcumenical Council in that of S. Cyril, . . . beset by a
long and fearful schism, from which neither the martyrdom
of S. Proterius, nor the alms of S. John, nor the learning
of S. Eulogius could deliver it ; and, finally, overwhelmed
by the victorious arms of the impostor of Mecca. . . . We
have seen the dismal gulf yawn between Eastern and
Western Christendom, and have noted the attempts made
by Rome and by Protestant Germany to pass it. We
have watched the progress of the Portuguese in Ethiopia,
from their first hope of success, through the absolute
victory, to the entire fall of Rome. . . . What remains but
that we long and pray for those happier times when
Alexandria and her sister Churches shall 'shake them
selves from the dust, shall loose the bands of their neck,
shall no more be forsaken and hated, shall become an
eternal excellency, a joy of many generations ; ' shall be
freed from the Ottoman yoke, purged from ignorance,
shall unite and be united with the Western Church ; shall

THE PORTUGUESE CHURCH in
become One Fold under One Shepherd, Jesus Christ our
Lord." It must be remembered that, whilst mentally engrossed
by the distinctive tenets and the theological standpoints
of the Eastern Church, he was continually in relations
with the Portuguese Church and its members. He
constantly attended their services, and was edified by
their devotion. He frequented the Seminary, and, as he
writes, " almost daily made some fresh acquaintance with
the priests, and met with no little worship." They were
genuinely amazed at his learning. His fluent Portuguese
brought him easily into relations with the most uneducated,
and upon their own subjects he possessed large stores of
information. Reverent and sympathetic, though he might
not see the Church under her best aspect, as an outsider
he scarcely perceived Montalembert's severe strictures
upon it to be deserved. The superstitions of the un
learned were no distress to him. He was pleased to
discover that a Portuguese, if stung by a bee, would not
kill it, because it made wax for Holy Church ! Here
Church principles and humanity went hand in hand, and
in any case an inadequate faith was worse than a mis
guided devotion. At the Christmas Midnight Mass, or
the "Cock-Mass," as they call it in Madeira, the con
course of worshippers carried him back to other times, and
he had "never before so fully understood the wonderful
skill with which the Church directs enthusiasm."
On Easter Eve, 1845, ne writes —
" Last night I went up to the Mount Church, to see the
' Descent from the Cross.' It is a thing, I think, fairly open
to criticism, as not being approved by the Church, but
simply allowed in some few places. You know the noble
situation of the church, 1760 feet above the sea, and the
feeling at that height and time was of an English evening
in May. The noble flight of steps up to the church was
alive with people, and, alas ! all kinds of buying and selling
were going on close to the door. . . . The vicar was preach
ing to a crowded congregation, and very well he did preach
too, though one could not but marvel at the contrast

112 JOHN MASON NEALE
between such a Passion sermon and one in England. The
people sobbed and cried, and the whole church was filled
with a sound it is impossible to describe. . . . ' Peter wept
bitterly,' said the preacher, ' and is there any one here that
weeps not ? If there be, out of the Church at once ; let
him not dare to look on this spectacle. They are bringing
the hammer, the nails, the crown of thorns. The Saviour
of the world is fastened to the cross. Behold the Man ! '
And amidst a perfect agony of weeping, the curtain drew
up. The taking down from the cross is then gone
through by persons dressed in character. . . . The bier
is then borne in torchlight procession among the wild
defiles of the Curral dos Romeiros — the Pilgrim's Fold, —
and the service concluded with another sermon. The
procession to the cathedral for the interment of our Lord
is the best I have yet seen — the soldiers with arms reversed,
the canons in the deepest mourning, their long trains
attended by an acolyte. The bishop has already done
much here. The seriousness and attention of the people
is greater, and more is done for them. Yesterday, e.g.,
there were eleven sermons, four at the cathedral, three
at N. S. de Monte, three at S. Antonio, and three at
S. Clara. I was not at the Alleluia this morning, that
the servants might go ; but it was very beautiful when the
wind brought up the first burst of bells that told of Lent's
being over."
From his circumstances he knew far more of Roman
Catholic worship than those at home, who, though painfully
considering the claims of that Communion, had less practical
experience of the working of her system. It was, therefore,
not so much inability to embrace special doctrines that kept
him in his own Communion, as an unalterable faith in the
unity and continuity of the Church of which, whether in the
English, Greek, or Roman Communions, he would have
equally felt himself to be a member.
It is easy to say that a closer contact with Eastern
Christianity might have modified his opinions and
destroyed his ideal. He had much Oriental corre
spondence, and was impressed by the courtesy, dignity,
and erudition of Patriarchs and Archimandrites ; but
personal intercourse was of a later date. His position seems

THE SUPERNATURAL 113
to have been a distrust of the doctrine of development,
and his affection for the Greek Church the result of her
claim to be, like her Lord Himself, " the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever."
In reference to this subject it is interesting to note
Dr. Liddon's observations, during his visit to Russia in
1867 :—
" To-day I feel that, for the first time in my life, I stand
face to face with the Eastern Church. ... To call her a
petrifaction here in Russia would be simple folly. . . . Right
or wrong, it is a vast, energetic and most powerful body,
with an evident hold upon the heart of the largest of
European empires, indeed a force within the limits of
Russia to which I believe there is no parallel in the
West. . . . The sense of God's Presence — of the super
natural — seems to me to penetrate Russian life more
completely than that of any of the Western nations which
I have seen, except perhaps the Tyrolese and Styrians."
This sense of the supernatural was very strong in Neale
himself. He could not be surprised at any manifestations
of God's grace and power. Miracles of unscriptural
authority presented no difficulties to his mind ; for this
reason, amongst others, his lives of the early Saints had
so vivid a reality. Their visions were no dreams of an
excited imagination, their miraculous powers no figments
of inventive followers, their superhuman sufferings and
conflicts with the visible powers of evil no more wonderful
than the inner trials to which the soul is subject. This
faculty of belief gives a special value to the chapters of
his history dealing with the persecutions. The courage of
the virgin saints, the fierce assaults of the devil and his
emissaries, the rigorous fasts of ascetics, the impenetrable
silence of anchorets, were all natural evidences of the
tremendous spiritual forces which, in an unceasing conflict,
rend and govern the Body of Christ's Church.
" Who can doubt," he says, when writing of the super
natural occurrences in the hermit life of S. Anthony, " who
can doubt that a life as completely contrary to every
natural desire of the heart as was that of the Egyptian I

114 JOHN MASON NEALE
hermits, such a total abnegation of every tie between the
individual and the world, such constant danger, want, and
suffering, days and nights so lonely, — and all this endured
without the hope of human applause, because beyond the
sphere of human knowledge, — that such a life we say,
which is believed by all to have been practised, is far more
wonderful, and far more contrary to antecedent experience,
than the marvellous tale of the conflicts of S. Anthony ? "
As early as 1842, when visiting Wells and Glastonbury,
his joy at seeing S. Joseph's Thorn in blossom had
surpassed even his rapt appreciation of the glories of the
cathedral ; and in the same year, when in Cornwall, he
writes in the following terms of his visit to a sacred well
near Madron : —
" It was never kept full, the water being turned on
when wanted. The three first days in May and Ascension
Day were the times. Children were chiefly cured ; after
being dipped, they were laid to sleep on the altar. The
miraculous efficacy seems to have ceased when the altar
was overthrown, for the woman [his guide] remembered
when it had not. It seemed quite strange to stand where
miracles — for the water is, I believe, not at all medicinal —
had so recently been worked."
In a like spirit he writes from Madeira : —
" I told you — did I not ? — of the Fixoes, the spectral
lights which are seen, on stormy nights, on the wildest
headlands of the coast, and which the fishermen believe
to be the spirits of tormented creatures. I have now
heard of a man who has seen one close to him ; from him
I must inquire more about it."
Again, in 1862, during a tour in the South of France,
he came across a servant-maid who had been an orphan in
the Providence at Ars, under the famous Cure.
" I asked her if she knew anything about the multiplica
tion of the meal. 'Mais, mon Dieu, j'y dtais moi-m£me;
favais les mains dans la pdte; c'est moi qu'on envoya
au Saint Curd pour lui demander ce que nous devions
faire. . . .' She said how they felt the dough grow and
grow under their hands as they kneaded it. I asked how

VISIT TO ARS 115
they felt. ' Tout le monde criait, " au miracle ! " mais nous,
nous nations pas etonn£es, pas le moins du monde ; nous
savions quel pouvoir le Saint Cur6 avait aupr£s du bon
Dieu ; et quand il m'avait dit, " Allez, allez, ma bonne
petite, travaillez la pate, il y en aura assez," nous n'en
doutions plus.' There, I think it was worth while to go a
hundred miles to hear that story from an eye-witness. I
confess I had not thoroughly believed it before."
More will be heard of his attitude towards this subject,
and his utterances and writings upon it ; for the present, it
is only necessary to emphasize the fact that he gave
ready credence to records of spiritual manifestations and
communications with the unseen world, and undoubtedly
he was, in this respect, as in many others, well fitted to be
the sympathetic historian of early Saints and martyrs.
Apart from his literary occupations, life in that
beautiful island had provided innumerable pleasures and
left indelible impressions upon his mind. If he could have
written his books walking or riding, he would have little
cared to have a roof above his head. He loved the open
air ; and asserted that there was a responsibility in living
amongst beautiful scenery, resembling that incurred by
dwellers at the doors of a great cathedral ; lest they
should miss or ignore its message and its meaning. As
health returned, he made long excursions into the
country. He was considered rash in his climbing ex
ploits, and his physical self-confidence caused him to run
unnecessary risks, not for the pleasurable excitement of
the danger incurred, but out of a careless determination
to gain his end. During the last part of his stay he made
himself well acquainted with all parts of the island. Of
one expedition he writes with especial pleasure. In
February, 1844, descending the Curral from the Serra
d'Agua, the party were on foot or on horseback fourteen
hours, his wife and her companions being, with one ex
ception, the first Englishwomen who had made the ascent,
though, to their descendants in this present athletic age,
it might not have appeared so much in the light of a
dangerous adventure.

116 JOHN MASON NEALE
" We performed the feat of coming out of it by moon
light. The pass, with its twenty-two zigzags cut in the
face of a sheer precipice, is a place of some difficulty by
day, and of no small danger in a dark night — the moon
not penetrating at that time down it ; but just as we
began to ascend, the Curral bell rang out Angelus, and
so with hats off we commenced the difficulty. The most
ghostly effect I ever saw was when we got into the
mountains. One of our party was mounted on a white
horse, and some distance before us. She reached the turn
of the ravine, everything else being in darkness, the moon
poured a flood of light on horse and rider with no other
background than the sky. It is a beautiful thing when
there comes any difficulty or pinch to hear the 'Vamos,
Vamos, sempre com Deos e Mossa Senhora,' of the sailors
or burroqueros, as the case may be ; and so it was that
night, to hear the hammock-bearers' ' Gracas e Deos,' when
they got into the moonlight.
" The other day I saw one of those very rare appear
ances, the Spectre of the Brocken. We were at the top of
the Pico dos Arnecros, one of our highest mountains, and
four of us had strolled down to a high wall of lava which •
separates the two abysses of the Curral and the Nubade.
The [illegible word] was filled with a boiling mass of cloud,
clear for about a quarter of a mile down from us. The
sun came out, and far below me I saw a gigantic figure of
myself with a halo or nimbus, just like the glory of a saint
round my head. We all saw the same thing at the same
moment, each of him or herself."
He constantly notes in his letters some new scene,
an effect of light or change of atmosphere, to which
his mind was as simply open as in his boyhood. He
sometimes longed to be in the middle of the confusion of
England, yet he adds —
" I am thankful to be able to live physically amongst
our glorious mountains, and morally with the men of the
ages of faith, as I do. I think there is nothing calculated
to give one more faith than scenery like this. There is
one view here that I can never see without being ready to
cry at its grandeur — between the Curral and the Serra
d'Agua. It is a great privilege to live among such scenery
and among such colouring."

SCENERY 117
These physical impressions were reflected in his writings,
and, as an example of his feeling for nature, the following
sonnet may be given, though from a literary and poetical
point of view it cannot be classed amongst his best : —
"SONNET WRITTEN AT UNSTEAD WOOD, NEAR
GODALMING, IN SURREY.
" 'Tis Nature's own cathedral ! Wood birds pour
Like vesper choristers rich melodies
From hawthorn bush and thicket ; shapely trees,
Its pillars, to their leafy vaulting soar,
Fretted and intricate, which Autumn's store
With gold and crimson tinges ; and the breeze
Maketh sweet music as it plays with these,
Like a deep organ, louder now, now lower.
The year's last flowers breathe incense all around ;
And scarlet leaves and sun-gleams here and there,
Like curious pavement, tessellate the ground.
Thus Nature culleth all things rich and rare,
When she a temple to her God would found ;
Shall man alone his choicest treasures spare ? "
But however indisposed to turn his mind from literary
work and the gracious influences of open-air life in that
beautiful region where he dwelt, there was one matter
that letters from England irresistibly pressed upon his
I attention. The affairs of the Cambridge Camden Society J
were involved in difficulty and the society upon its trial.
Its very success had necessarily raised complicated ques
tions as to organization and management. The large
number of its members in itself constituted a danger, lest
men of different views and varying degrees of knowledge
should fail to co-operate for a common cause. Prudent
dignitaries recruited by enthusiastic undergraduates, and
almost against their will sworn into the service, had had
time to reconsider their position. Suspicions had been
awakened. The restoration of churches by architectural
experts was a work wherein all might have easily com
bined, if art under a religious aspect had not been capable
of very diverse interpretations. Symbols were expounded
as illustrative of doctrines no intrinsic beauty could make

n8 JOHN MASON NEALE
acceptable to minds fearful of finding themselves called
upon to defend what they regarded as the rash actions
and utterances of the ultra members of the society, and
withdrawals took place, some amongst them being those
of old influential members. Disquieting reports reached
Neale in Madeira, and on the 12th of February, 1845, ne
wrote as follows : —
" I believe that the being at a distance from England
may sometimes give one a clearer view of right and wrong
than you have, in the midst of the burden and heat as you
all are at this time. To me there seems no doubt that,
while cor regis in manu Domini, it is a want of faith to
give up because the Privy Council seems so unlikely to do
us justice." (This, no doubt, refers to the appeal as to the
stone altar at S. Sepulchre's.) " We have been going on
too prosperously, and though you personally have had
struggles and vexations enough for any man, as a society
our course has been a continued success. So it was with
the Jesuits at first, and it was not till they met the terrible
storm excited against them after five or six years of
success, and overcame it, that S. Ignatius could really see
his work to be of God. The seal is a more difficult
question, I think, than the appeal. There is something
disheartening in writing advice when long ere the letter
can reach you the matter must have been settled. I have
that perfect confidence that you will do right, and so great
a belief, into the bargain, that you will have your own way
with the society, that I am not careful to answer you in
this matter. The belief in the truths symbolized is, indeed,
articulus stantis aut cadentis ; but whether the retention
of the type itself is of that vital importance that it is worth
while to risk everything for it, deserves thought. My own
idea is this ; I would retain the seal as long as the Arch
bishop stood by us ; if he left us on the ground of it, I
would then offer to withdraw it solely on the grounds of
not giving offence, making, at the same time, a solemn
protest that we believe all that we there express."
The seal of the society can have been hardly more than
a pretext for the animosity excited. It was designed by
Pugin, and was formed in the shape of the Vesica Piscis.
It contains figures of saints : S. George ; S. Etheldreda,

THE SEAL OF THE CAMDEN SOCIETY 119
patroness of the diocese of Ely ; S. John the Evangelist,
holding a chart of the New Jerusalem (for he has some
times been considered the patron of architecture) ; and S.
Luke, who holds a picture in his hand. An angel bears a
scroll Quam dilecta, and the legend is " Sigillum Societatis
Camdenicae Cantabrigiensis. A.S. MDCCCXXXIX."
The tempest once conjured up could not, however, be
easily allayed. The entire dissolution of the society was
proposed, but afterwards this was negatived, and, though
it became locally extinct, it was reformed, with its head
quarters in London, upon a wider basis, as " The Ecclesio-
logical (late Cambridge Camden) Society," and the seal
was abandoned. The intelligence found Neale still in
Madeira. His response is a letter discovering compensa
tions for the collapse of a project in which he had hopefully
taken the initiative.
" That I am satisfied with the reasons you give for the
dissolution of the CCS. I cannot say. But I have no
doubt that you have done right, and that, had I been on
the spot and capable of forming a more correct judgment,
I might have agreed with you. But the difficulties do seem
to me immense — not only as to what is to become of the
profits of the publications, but who is to bring out fresh
editions of them if needed, what authority may make
alterations in them, what security have we against their
being corrupted or protestantized? What is to take the
place of the society I cannot conceive. And yet I am
glad that, like a tropic sun, it should have set in its full
splendour, without an evening and without a twilight. I
think it is a worthy end of a society which, perhaps, aimed
higher than any body of men since the Reformation."
And upon this same perplexing and disquieting
subject, James Stewart Forbes wrote to him from
Cambridge : —
" What a state of things we have arrived at since you
left England! We ought to be preparing ourselves for
times of great sorrow and persecution. The latter has
already begun. Poor CCS. It was indeed a hard
necessity which induced the committee to seek for its

120 JOHN MASON NEALE
dissolution. It is very annoying that friends are unable
to sympathize with our reasons for wishing to dissolve.
None but those on the spot or intimately acquainted with
the interior working of the society can understand the
difficult part which the president and Webb have to act,
and the utter impossibility of the society being carried on
as a Catholic engine. I fancy you will be as opposed
as we can be to any, the slightest concession, and
it is only by sinking down to the level of the ignoble
Oxford Gothic that we should be able to go on. . . . We
look forward to the Ecclesiologist to support the cause of
Catholic art ; but you do not write for it enough.
" Your affect, friend,
"James Stewart Forbes."
There were many opinions as to the wisdom and
expediency of some measures taken by the majority of
the committee ; but, as Webb wrote, all agreed that the
Camden Society, as originally constituted, had done
wonders, and regretted the loss of so powerful an engine.
The question of the dissolution, of course, was eventually
decided apart from Neale, one of its first promoters ; and
he resigned himself unresentfully to the certainty that
the hopes once so firmly fixed upon its future were not
destined to be realized.
" If nothing else has been determined, I should like to
write in the July Christian Remembrancer, all well, a review
of the proceedings of the CCS., a sort of funeral ovation
over it. In many respects I should be the fittest man to
do it : sufficiently connected with the society to be able
to do it properly; sufficiently, during the last month,
disconnected to undertake it without any vanity."

CHAPTER XI
Final return to England in 1845 — Newman's influence — Spirit of the
times — Neale's position with regard to religious parties— Corre
spondence with Webb— Republication of Spelman's " History of
Sacrilege " — Seatonian Prize — Early poems.
SUCH, then, were Neale's distinctive ideas and preoccupa
tions, when, in June, 1845, he returned for the last time
from Madeira to take up his permanent abode in England.
The mere fact of his change of residence naturally
brought about an alteration, not only in his way of life,
but in his views of the state of the Church at large, and of
the difficulties affecting his own Communion. He was
unwillingly compelled to divert his attention from bygone
heresies, and the triumphant refutations of Saints and
Doctors, to the questions of conscience uppermost in the
minds of his Cambridge associates and contemporaries.
On the one side, the torrent of reform was beating
against its barriers, and assuming, in the eyes of many
sober persons, a devastating and revolutionary character,
and this with such dangerous rapidity that the restoration
of ancient bulwarks could hardly be effected in time to
resist its force. Upon the other hand, timid or half
hearted adherents were deserting a cause, possibly not
desperate, but increasingly unpopular.
Webb had warned him, in no measured terms, of the
state of unrest and bewilderment in which he and so many
others were involved ; of the uselessness of exhortations
to mutual forbearance in a contest between principles and
prejudices ; and had incidentally shown him that, with
regard to opinions and forebodings upon religious ques
tions, they were slowly, but surely, drifting apart. Neale
121

122 JOHN MASON NEALE
had steadily refused to entertain so unwelcome a con
viction. In Madeira it was comparatively easy to disguise
unacceptable contrasts and ignore unpalatable truths.
Before quitting it he had written —
" I will write no more to you about Rome, because I
shall run the risk of your misunderstanding me, and
creating a difference where there is none. It must always
be so in writing and at a distance. The comfort is that
such differences vanish when one comes to talk, like S.
Athanasius and the supporters of the One and of the
Three Hypostases."
He cannot, do what he will, get away from the stand
point of the fourth century, nor perceive that, though
history may repeat itself, the old actors cannot be resus
citated to play their parts. He had, of course, been more
or less forced to form an opinion upon the action taken
by some prominent persons, but he had been, as we said,
incapable of understanding the extent and power of New
man's influence upon other minds. He even ranked his
sermons (those sermons that made epochs in the lives of
men most distinguished for learning and piety) lower, as
regarded matter and style, than those of Jeremy Taylor,
S. Francis de Sales, or Bishop Andrewes ; he failed to
appreciate Ward's theory as set forth in the " Ideal
Church ; " he could not understand " what Oakeley was
driving at." " His distinction between teaching and hold
ing goes against me. I should hold, I dare say, as much
in most things (more in some things) as he holds ; but
then, directly or indirectly, I should feel bound to teach it."
He has been reading with far more interest a Portuguese
" Historia da Compantica de Jesus," and quotes the stress
the Jesuits laid upon preaching and upon necessary types
in churches as remarkable. "Are we to imagine men
of such astonishing holiness as the early Jesuits were
mistaken ? "
The dissolution of the Camden Society could not divert
his attention from the martyrdoms of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Portuguese India, which "are

THE YEAR 1845 123
something beyond conception, and the histories of such
men as Barreo, Arivedo, Vieyra, and a hundred others
most edifying."
Absorbed in such studies, it was natural he should
have undefined notions of the progress made, and of the
position of the several religious parties, when he returned
to England in 1845, that most critical of years for the future
of the Anglican Communion. It was a year rich in great
possibilities. "A spirit was abroad ready to make all things new,
justifying old institutions by invigorating them with the
enthusiasm of youth, reanimating the moral convictions
which had made founders and benefactors lavish their
wealth on the Church of Christ ; breathing into work as well
as into prayer, into literature as well as into philanthropy,
into art — whether music or architecture or poetry — as well
as into scientific theology, a reality and vigour that had
long been wanting."
So Dr. Liddon wrote in reference to this period, from
the unprejudiced judicial standpoint of the year 1881.
With this spirit Neale found himself to be instinctively
and joyfully in accord. He could trace, with an exacti
tude of knowledge some others might not claim, the course
of thought and practice to its source. The points of
doctrine and ritual for which the Tractarians had con
tended were no strange treasures brought from other lands,
but the lawful possessions of the English Church, once
neglected and laid aside, only needing to be reset to shine
forth in all their pristine beauty. Returning to England,
he at length perceived the immense weight of Newman's
example, and considered that Cambridge men had less
excuse for seceding than those who had personally ex
perienced its constraining power. Yet the history of the
Church in the past, as he avers, keeps him from wavering.
He had come to the conclusion that if the seceders were
right, those who remained were " in damnable heresy," and
nothing could shake his conviction that such was not the
case. Personal feelings could never have swayed him.

124 JOHN MASON NEALE
Webb, who apparently had more intimate and affectionate
relations with those who went than with those who stayed,
was distressed and distracted by desponding communi
cations from Paley, and the loss of S  , his friend from
boyhood, "a generous, noble soul, full of faults, but so
lovable," who had been one of the principal supporters of
the Ecclesiologist.
" I am not like you," he writes to Neale, "who can stand
alone and do firm things upon principle. I live upon
sympathy, and would scarcely be martyred but in company.
. . . These times, to me, seem worse than a pestilence ;
one loses friends and connections — perhaps more irrevocably
— without having had the joy of nursing them. When all
is over, we shall look round and count the never-to-be-filled
gaps." So far as the Ecclesiologist was concerned, Neale
soon assumed the editorship, and did his best to fill the
gaps ; but the state of public feeling ran high, and men's
minds were not sufficiently at leisure to investigate the
more remote questions of art and history of which it
treated, the urgent necessity being, as they conceived, laid
upon them, first to sharpen their weapons and prepare for
that most depressing and embittering of conflicts — a
religious civil war.
Dr. Pusey's view of Newman, "as being called to
another part of the Lord's Vineyard," seemed to many to
be dictated by charity rather than logic, whilst, as will be
remembered, his "Eirenicon," later on, failed to satisfy
Newman himself, who remarked that he discharged his
" olive branch as if from a catapult."
Olive branches, indeed, were not easily accepted,
since the vindication of principles involved a breach of,
at least, verbal charity. " It is hard to escape a kind of
fatalism," so Webb wrote, " in considering how two people
can view the same thing so differently according to their
character of mind." These and kindred questions hardly
affected Neale, who, when stating his belief in his own
Communion, declared that he could "hardly express"

NEWMAN ON DEVELOPMENT 125
the strength of his convictions. On November 28, 1845,
he writes to Webb : —
"I shall be most anxious to-morrow to hear what you
think of Newman's book.1 So far as I have read, it seems
to me perfectly worthy of him, but not the least calcu
lated to remove my difficulties. Did I hesitate about
joining Rome because of her corruptions the case might
be otherwise. But, granting what I now believe to be
corruptions to be developments, I should not be an inch
nearer to joining her. What disappoints me is the preface.
One might have expected a full and generous confession
of former error, and an expression of deep sorrow for having
misled so many; nothing like it. However, one cannot
pretend to judge of the book till after reading more. . . .
What I also object to is Newman's constant reference to
his own past works. He means, of course, to say, ' You, the
reader, believe now what I believed then ; develop as I
do, and you will in time think as I do now.' And doubtless,
so far as his extracts go, we do hold now what he did.
But there is another element in his then opinions, which we
never had — his exceeding hatred to Rome. And that may
almost unconsciously to himself have made him what he is,
on the principle of the reverse of wrong. So that I am
more than ever inclined to go with Hope's theory, and
believe that the first generation of reformers may perhaps
be absorbed by Rome, but that the second will remain in
our Church and renovate it. ... I am quite sure that if
we don't desert ourselves God will not desert us. If you
all go, I shall stay."
The tone and the words are both characteristic. The
salvation of his soul is not at stake. Painful self-com-
munings and the reconsideration of other men's doubts
would be of no avail. It is in no man's power to destroy
his peace. He is not much concerned to formulate theories
nor to bring forward arguments, but, if all others go, he
will stay. He evidently succeeds to some extent in dis
persing the gloom encircling Webb, who, in a letter
breathing a more cheerful spirit, relates, on good authority,
that the Pope, when he heard of Newman's conversion,
1 *' An Essay on Development of Christian Doctrine."

126 JOHN MASON NEALE
expressed great surprise "that such a notorious fool as
Father Dominic should have admitted him."
It is certainly noteworthy that at this time of con
troversy there should be so few controversial letters. The
fact was that Neale was to a certain degree unpractised, and
had no love of fencing for the sake of exercising himself in
the art. He could teach, he could talk, and, above all, he
could write, but the parry and thrust, the tournament of
words upon equal terms was not congenial to him.
In June, 1845, he returned to Cambridge, and took his
M.A. degree. He records upon this occasion, " A singular
mixture of feelings upon returning to Cambridge ; the pre
dominating ought to be thankfulness." His meetings with
old friends revealed some changes, but his strong inclina
tion was, (as far as it was feasible), to ignore differences,
and he was averse to the slightest estrangement from
friends and fellow-workers. It was not a season for internal
discords. " If we are to have a quarrel," he cries, " we will
choose a time of peace." So some separations from Beresford
Hope and others were averted, and he was free to give
his mind again to literary work. A most congenial
subject had occurred to him, and he only waited to get one
or two other matters out of hand before devoting his
attention to it.
In Madeira, he had been much occupied in the study
of Portuguese ; had translated Bishop Andrewes' " De
votions" into that language, revised the Portuguese
version of the Prayer-book, and written an article on the
Portuguese Church, the first of his contributions to
the Christian Remembrancer. The " Annals of Virgin
Saints," described as "a lovely but difficult subject," came
out in the autumn of 1845, and then he found himself at
liberty to embark upon a volume for which he had been
collecting material — a new edition of Spelman's " History
of Sacrilege." It appealed to him with especial force, for
it led of necessity to curious investigations, gained interest
from his inborn love of the supernatural, and evoked his
chivalrous defensive instincts on behalf of the spiritual
agencies of the Church. Lastly, it was a book eminently

HISTORY OF SACRILEGE 127
calculated to make present owners of Church lands and
property excessively uncomfortable. The families of
Somerset, Seymour of Sudley, Palmer, Lee, Wriothesley
of Southampton, Cromwell, Greville, Wentworth, Talbot,
Montague, and many others whom he enumerates, were
" beacons to warn us from this Charybdis ; " their ancient
lineage and immense wealth securing no immunity from
the inevitable decrees of fate ; the closed doors of their
great houses, still noiselessly opened by spectres of dis
possessed inhabitants ; halls and gardens tenanted by
undesired memories ; and their heirs and fortunes at the
mercy of ancestral evildoers.
Neale, by disposition a diligent student of historical
marvels, was eager to explore these haunted chambers of
the past. In this quest he selected Sir Henry Spelman,
(who in many ways was admirably fitted for this office), as
his guide. Spelman himself, in the beginning of the seven
teenth century, had become possessed of lands originally
belonging to Blackborough and Wrongley Abbeys in
Norfolk. Dogged by persistent misfortune until the sacred
property was taken from him by a decree of Chancery,
the result of his doubts concerning the lawfulness of his
tenure was embodied, as Neale tells us, in his work, " ' The
History and Fate of Sacrilege,' or, rather, in the series
of fragments which bear that name. Tracing the conse
quences of the crime from apostolic times to his own,
his object was to prove the following thesis : ' Property
consecrated to God in the service of the Church has, when
alienated to secular purposes, brought, as a general rule,
misfortune on its possessors ; whether by strange accidents,
by violent deaths, by loss of wealth, or (and that chiefly)
by failure of heirs male ; and such property hardly ever
remains long in one family.' On Sir Henry Spelman's
death the manuscript was left to the charge of Jeremy
Stephens, who, during the great Rebellion, employed him
self in making additions to it. At the Restoration it was
sent to press, but news of the volume had gone abroad
and excited great uneasiness in the many noble families
implicated in sacrilegious possession of Abbey lands. The

128 JOHN MASON NEALE
result was a private hint from Government to the printer
that no haste was to be used in putting the sheets through
the press. The whole of the sheets and, it was then thought,
the manuscript perished in the Fire of London. But a
transcript had been preserved ; and, when Dr. Gibson was
publishing Spelman's posthumous works, he had intended
to annex that in question to the rest. But foul play, it
seems likely, again prevented this. . . . Now the re-publi
cation of such a book, and a continuation to prove that at
the present time the curse is silently, and it may be slowly,
but most surely, hunting down its victims, cannot but be
useful." There might be different opinions as to the utility of
the contemplated publication, and a desire, such as had
before arisen on the part of many families, to retard its
appearance, but to Neale the needful investigations and
traffic with the supernatural were full of interest.
He works for four or five hours a day, collecting
additional facts from county histories ; he has planned an
introductory essay, giving an account of English writers
pro and con ; has completed a statistical statement upon
which he is able to found the assertion that the average
time each individual possesses Church lands is fifteen years,
each family about thirty-two. He proposes to divide the
work into different periods of sacrilege : " I. Huss and his
fellows in Bohemia. II. The German and Belgian Re
formation. III. The English. IV. The Great Rebellion.
V. The French Revolution. VI. The Spanish and Portu
guese Constitutions ; etc." Now that he has secured his
friend Haskoll's help, he "can go to work with double
spirit." He is captivated by the interest of the subject,
is gathering upon all sides curious facts from private
sources, and finds the perusal of old county histories very
amusing. At the same time, he is seriously persuaded
that "the Devil has a particular objection to this book;"
so that, in spite of his efforts, he makes but little way.
He is glad to get the assistance of a priest to carry it on
despite the evil one, for he is convinced that " he will stop
it if he can." These last sentences are important, as

S EATON I AN PRIZE POEMS 129
indicative of a mind steeped in mediaevalism. The
personality of the devil is as clear to him as it was to
S. Dunstan or S. Anthony. In things spiritual there
was no realm of confusion. The Angel of Light and the
Prince of Darkness stood out as distinct realities. The
outlines were sharply defined, and evil and good took
to themselves shapes and forms. Haskoll shared his
convictions, and felt it a privilege and a good work to
help him "in defeating the wicked one in one of his
greatest strongholds." He quite agreed that " the Devil
has used, and will use, all his strength to prevent the
republication of Spelman."
In this case his machinations were brought to nothing.
The book had been begun in July, 1845, and on Monday
in Holy Week, 1846, Neale wrote that it was absolutely
finished. It ran quickly through a first edition, and was
called for again. The second edition also passed out of
print, and a few years ago the book was reproduced
by the Rev. Dr. S. J. Eales. The whole undertaking
is illustrative of Neale's frame of mind. It was no
idle curiosity prompting a desire to get within the veil,
but a strong perception of the unseen, quickening his
thirst for fuller knowledge, and inspiring a practical
resolve to throw new light upon the records of the
past In this year, November, 1845, he wrote: "Behold! I
have the Seatonian ! This is a most unexpected success,
and I am most thankful for it. It enables me to give
at once ^20 towards Farncombe" — a district church of
Godalming, built by the exertions of his friend the Rev.
E. J. Boyce. The Seatonian prize was appointed by the
Rev. Thomas Seaton of Clare College, to be given yearly
to the Master of Arts who should write the best English
poem on a sacred subject ; and Neale won the prize
eleven years in succession. In 1858 he wrote two poems
— one in hexameters, and the Vice-Chancellor, W. Philpott,
expressed great satisfaction " in awarding two prizes to one
who has already gained so many, and who has earned so
much distinction in other branches of literature also." As
K

130 JOHN MASON NEALE
we have seen, he had early studied the art of versifi
cation; and in 1843 had written "Hymns for the Sick,"
and two series of " Hymns for Children." At first sight
it seems strange that so young a man (he was only twenty-
five when " Hymns for the Sick " were published) should
have especially addressed himself to solace and console
the suffering and dying. He had, however, experienced
sickness; and in Madeira no doubt had been constantly
brought into touch with invalids. Some sentences in his
preface betray a real understanding of their needs.
" It is not thoughtlessly that the present writer has
made choice (for the most part) of uncommon and difficult
metres. He knows both, from his own experience and from
the testimony of others, how often in illness, particularly
in fever, verses written in a very easy and natural metre
will run in the mind for hours together, and thus worry,
instead of soothing. It was to prevent this effect that he
has chosen measures not so likely to recur to, until they
worry, the mind."
The choice was sympathetic and considerate; and in
issuing a later edition, he was able to express his thank
fulness that instances had come to his knowledge of
those who to the last had found comfort in his hymns.
As an example of simplicity both of thought and diction,
his lines headed " In Fever " may be quoted.

" There is a stream, whose waters rise
Amidst the hills of Paradise,
Where foot of man hath never trod,
Proceeding from the Throne of God :
Oh ! give me sickness here or strife,
So I may reach that spring of life.
" There is a Rock that, nigh at hand,
Gives shadow in a weary land ;
Who in that stricken Rock hath rest,
Finds waters gushing from its breast :
Oh ! grant me, when this scene is o'er,
Their lot who thirst not any more.

HYMNS FOR THE SICK 131
" There is a people who have cast
The strife and toil away at last ;
On whom, so calm their rest and sweet,
The sun lights not, nor any heat :
Give me with them at length to be,
And send me here what pleaseth Thee."
All the poems are short, presenting thoughts a sick person
might like to dwell upon, or subjects for meditation and
refreshment — the ministration of angels, the blessed Sacra
ment, the Faithful departed, the Viaticum. They are not
so much poems as the prayerful musings of the sick
persons themselves; some, indeed, rising from the very
wells of suffering, such as the verses headed, " In Great
Bodily Pain." " Thou only Refuge from the heat,
Thou only Rock wherein to hide,
Thou only shade when tempests beat,
The Suffering, the Crucified :
Captain of our Salvation, That couldst be
Made perfect only through Thine Agony.
" My sin is great, my pain is sore,
My strength is gone, my spirit fails:
For me the Cross Thy great Love bore ;
For me the scourge, for me the nails ;
For me the Crown around Thy Temples set,
For me the Agony and Bloody Sweat.
" Oh ! while I tread these hard, rough ways —
Ways smooth to Thy way — lead mine eye
With holy, yet with steadfast gaze,
Into Thy Passion's Sanctuary.
Thy wounds my cure — my more than trust art Thou ;
Had'st Thou not borne them, where had I been now ? ''
These extracts may give an idea of the hymns, which
breathe throughout a spirit of deep, personal devotion to
our Lord. They were the first to be published in the
form of a volume — the first of those countless hymns and
translations, highly valued by qualified critics and appealing
to an immense body of readers.

CHAPTER XII
Residence at Reigate — Dr. Pusey's letter on Newman's secession—
Neale's visit to Oxford — Dislike of compromise — Wardenship of
Sackville College offered to Neale and accepted— Absence of
worldly ambition — Description of Sackville College.
In the autumn of 1845, Neale went to live at Reigate. He
had had a quasi offer of a living whilst in Madeira, but he
had not then felt at liberty to take up any definite work,
and he was content to wait ; not, indeed, in idleness, but
in the belief that he was best fulfilling his present duty by
holding himself in readiness to obey any distinct call sent
to him. In answer to some remonstrances upon his
delay which appear to have come from a parish priest, he
writes as follows : —
"It seems to me that you place us both in a false
position by your definition of a working priest. You mean
a working parish priest, and every one who is not that is,
according to you, a theoretical man. Now no one can
esteem more highly than I do the office of a parish priest.
At the same time, if our Church had nothing but parish
priests she would be pretty nearly as badly off as if she
had no parish priests at all. If you say that I am not as
truly, or rather might not be as truly, a working priest as
you are, then I think you mistake an accident of the
priesthood, namely parochialism, for its essence. ... I
think I might reasonably object to your thinking me less
practical than you. You have a narrower sphere, and know
it better. I have a wider one, and know it less perfectly.
Beyond your own parish all is as much theory to you as to
me. Mind, I should be the last to find fault with a parish
priest for rating parochial duty too highly. Only do not
let it make you unjust to others, and you may, with my
132

NEWMANS SECESSION 133
free leave, think it more important than the episcopate
itself. No man, of course, ever excelled in any pursuit
without over-rating its comparative importance."
Some of his friends failed to understand Neale's
position. His well-known energy seemed at variance with
his apparent unconcern about embarking upon active
work. It is true that he had been, as it were, temporarily
out of sight, nevertheless there was little doubt that, if he
had chosen, he might have easily obtained clerical duty.
It is evident from the correspondence that they feared
his reluctance proceeded from doubts as to the future
of the English Church, and an unwillingness to man a
sinking ship. This was very far from being the case. In
the first place, an unpopular cause would have rather
attracted than repelled him ; and in the second place,
though the Church might be passing through troubled
waters, he had no doubt of her ultimate victory.
Dr. Pusey, in terms of tender melancholy, had written
of Newman's secession —
" It looks as if some good purpose for our Church had
failed ; and that an instrument raised for her had not been
employed as God willed, and so is withdrawn. . . . Our
Church has not known how to employ him. And since
this was so, it seemed as if a sharp sword were lying in its
scabbard or hung up in the sanctuary because there was
no one to wield it. . . . He has gone as a simple act of
duty, with no view for himself, simply placing himself in
God's Hands."
Of this letter Neale writes —
" I cannot pretend to agree with it, because if the step
was not very right, it must have been very wrong ; but no
one can help admiring its spirit. ... I think that Dr.
Pusey's letter goes too much upon the hypothesis that
God cannot raise up some one of Newman's talents in our
Church, or do His Own work without them."
Neither impatient for results nor anxious for apparent
success, his trust in God's good purposes remains un
shaken.

134 JOHN MASON NEALE
" As He can endless glory weave
From what men reckon shame ;
In His Own world He is content
To play a losing game."
Neale confesses himself to be in an isolated position : on
the one hand, he is accused of seeing nothing but faults in
his own Church, whilst, upon the other side, the Tablet
declares him to be "the most impudent man living to
write so strongly in her praise."
The fact is that he believed the defects in the Church
of England to be in no wise inherent in her constitution.
They were obvious, distressing, and most certainly not
to be condoned. He spoke and wrote strongly in con
demnation ; but though the adverse forces were so great,
he perceived and dwelt with confidence upon the onward
movement in the right direction. " If I seemed to slight
it," he wrote, "it is simply because I am haunted day
and night with a beautiful theory, beneath which, oh
how far, is our present, and present Roman practice!
. . . Draw up any formula you will of confidence in our
Church, and expectation that the glory of the second
house will exceed the glory of the first, and I will sign it,
I have said it and written it a hundred times."
He went for the first time to Oxford this year for the
purpose of consulting a manuscript in the Bodleian ; and
found it " wonderfully superior to Cambridge in everything
but the coup deceit of the King's Parade ! " It is curious
to compare his opinions, in contrasting the two places, with
Newman's in a letter to his mother, on his first visit to
Cambridge. " Having come to this place with no anticipations, I am
quite taken up by surprise and overcome with delight. . . .
I do really think the place finer than Oxford, though I
suppose it isn't, for every one says so. I like the narrow
streets ; they have a character, and they make the University
buildings look larger by contrast. I cannot believe that
King's College is not far grander than anything with us ;
the stone, too, is richer, and the foliage more encompassing."

VISIT TO OXFORD 135
Possibly Neale's flying visit to Oxford may have set
him thinking of those with whom its halls and colleges
were so intimately associated. " Poor Isaac Williams," he
writes in January, 1846, "is sinking fast, in a most
heavenly frame of mind." Archdeacon Manning has been
at Margaret Chapel " exhibiting great devotion." Morris
(afterwards a Jesuit), "having preached before the
University three Sundays ago, is going to secede chiefly
from want of sympathy." He has had a long talk with
Anderdon about confession. The names occur in letters,
and the characters cross his line of vision and excite a
more personal interest than the Coptic poetry he is
studying, or the wilderness of Arabic authors by which he
is surrounded. Yet, in spite of Oxford influences, he is still
indifferent to the power and beauty of Newman's sermons,
and to him his " History of the Arians " or the " Essay on
Ecclesiastical Miracles " " is worth ten of them."
He was naturally more concerned than before with the
practical decision of ritual questions, though he hardly
apprehended the difficulties besetting less confident men,
when occasions arose of putting theories into practice.
Anything in the nature of a compromise was distasteful,
and when he assumed the editorship of the Ecclesiologist,
a breach with Beresford Hope became imminent.
" I cannot consent," he writes to Webb, " to have an
element of compromise introduced into the Ecclesiologist.
. . . You will say that I am setting up myself as freer from
the fear of man than you and Hope are. Simply, perhaps,
because I live so much out of society. You yourself were
freer from it when you did. And, after all, the thing is
more constitutional than moral."
There is no symptom of self-satisfaction, in the contrast
which he draws between himself and others. He could be
a rash assailant, but, it was, he said, a question of consti
tutional courage. He must needs defend things sometimes
regarded as unimportant adjuncts involving no principle ;
for outward signs and symbols were witnesses to a truth it
would be a treachery to surrender. Chancel and rood-screen

136 JOHN MASON NEALE
and lighted altars were the sign-manuals of the Church.
Eucharistic vestments were the legitimate expression of
Eucharistic doctrine ; and ecclesiastical order must guide
and regulate Christian worship.
Every detail of that worship possessed an interest for
him. " Why don't you," he asks Webb, " write a paper
for the Ecclesiologist on Organ Cases f " Here is a subject
that he feels might well inspire his pen! He has once
more thrown himself into architectural studies, and finds
that they have all their old charm.
The Ecclesiologist had many years before it of increas
ing success. Neale's own obituary notice, in 1866, found
a place there ; but his contributions, (chiefly on ritual or
liturgical subjects), had ceased, and he had long withdrawn
from any part in its management. At this period, which,
so far as regarded definite work, was in the nature of an
interval, he was full of schemes in connection with a publi
cation regarded by many as the authorized exponent of
the dangerous innovations contemplated and approved by
its promoters. One advantage of the dissolution of the
Cambridge Camden Society was the extension of its
influence when the headquarters were removed to London,
and Oxford men made common cause with its original
members. In June, 1846, Neale and Webb were invited,
as a special deputation, to the Architectural Society at
Oxford, and both received ad eundem degrees on the
occasion. To revert again to the personal characteristics that in
Neale's case were rather emphasized than modified as time
went on, it may be observed that the unusual lack of
personal ambition was one of the chief factors in deter
mining the part he was to fill in life. Eager, strenuous,
enthusiastic, with an intelligence always fully awake, and
a mind on the alert to catch at any hints or stray
allusions to strengthen convictions or to establish facts, —
with a southern temperament likely to run into extremes,
and a disposition to regard ideals as sacred stray visitants
to be entertained, and guarded from rude contact with
an unbelieving world, — it is obvious that he would be

ABSENCE OF AMBITION 137
tempted to withdraw into an intellectual solitude. From
this danger he was saved by the universality of his
interests. Architecture, and hymnology, liturgies, and
languages, all brought a refreshing, reanimating sense
of communion with minds of every race and quality.
Breezes from all quarters of the globe blew into his study
windows. Nevertheless, he was quite content that its
four walls should surround him. He was waiting for
a call, and if it were to be but a doorkeeper in the House
of the Lord, he would be satisfied ; indeed, happy in
fulfilling the humblest duty that might fall to his lot.
This disposition is not uncommon, but it may be
said to be generally accompanied by a diffidence in
judgment and a humility in conduct Neale could not
claim. He put no higher value upon other men's qualifi
cations and attainments than upon his own. Indifferent
to this world's unsatisfying prizes, though he had no
grudge against those who won them, he hardly felt their
rewards to be deserved. The fierce strife for power and
high office prevalent in the earliest ages of the Church
was the spirit with which he had the least sympathy.
There are men of true lowliness of heart, who work on
laboriously, regardless of results, careless of recognition ;
who, in renouncing distinctions and emoluments, make no
conscious effort at self-denial. Many such lives have been
passed within the narrow bounds of rural parishes, and
peacefully ended, after years of patient study and ministry
to the poor, within the walls of village parsonages. With
regard to this spirit, "Ours," — so Frederic Rogers, after
wards Lord Blachford, wrote in the British Critic — " ours
is the Church of Walton and Herbert ; not of Athanasius
and Ambrose." And still to some —
" each hamlet is skirted by a ' Golden Grove,' in which a
Taylor responds to S. Francis de Sales or echoes his
song ; for them the whole Anglican Church is scented by
the carnations and musk that grew in the garden of
Herbert."1 1 A. de Vere, " Religious Problems of the Nineteenth Century."

138 JOHN MASON NEALE
Now, in some degree, Neale's conceptions were akin to
these. Patient study, retirement from social snares, a
disregard of public opinion, were natural qualifications for
an existence of unenvied remoteness from the world.
At the same time he had enlisted in an army, where
there was much fighting to be done, and he had no desire
to withdraw from active service. He was, as will be seen,
by temperament a man of war, confident in the justice of
his cause, and quick to defend it with any weapon at
hand. Only it mattered little what post he had to fill, or
to what portion of the field he might be called.
Most certainly the appointment to the Wardenship of
Sackville College was unsought and unexpected.
At the close of the year 1845 he had formed no plans.
He was living with his wife at Reigate ; and his second
child, a son, Cornelius Vincent, was born in the spring
of the following year. On the 31st of December he notes
in his journal —
" And so we approach the end of another year — a year
of mercy — of how much more mercy than return according
to it ! + Et dixi ; Nunc ccepi ; o sit haec mutatio Dexterae
Excelsi ! Et quid nunc dicam ? aut in quo aperiam os
meum ? Quid respondebo, quia ipse feci ? Inexcusatus,
indefensus proprio judicio condemnatus sum. But I hope
I do not feel this the less because I do not write about it
more. And now, to close this year, let me record my hope
in Him + Qui nos liberavit a tanta morte et liberat: in
Quo speramus etiam quia adhuc liberabit"
A devotional sentence or a spiritual aspiration is rarely
recorded but in Latin. It is as if the foreign language
most appropriately clothed religious ideas when an in
stinctive reserve made it hard to give them expression.
As years went on the shyness wore off, but it is clear he
had all an Englishman's dislike to any display of feeling.
His evangelical training had furnished him with apt
ready-made phrases, but a dread of any kind of unreality
restrained his speech. And even his private letters and
journal give but superficial passing indications of his
inmost thoughts.

FOUNDATION OF SACKVILLE COLLEGE 139
Six days after the entry from his journal just quoted,
on January 5th, he wrote —
"Anderdon came in before dinner, and mentioned
incidentally that the Wardenship of Sackville College is
vacant ; " and again, on the following day, the Epiphany,
" I must tell you that I have a likelihood of getting a little
piece of preferment — such as it is — but it would suit me.
It is the Wardenship of Sackville College, East Grin
stead, a Caroline foundation with chapel and refectory,
wretchedly out of order, but capable (I hear) of great
things. The Warden's house is in the College, the value
£24. It is in the gift of the De la Warrs, and was first
offered to Anderdon. Such a thing might quite realize
one's dreams of S. Cross."
To most men of his age the charms of such a post
would not have been great. To accept it was practically
to relinquish any hope of advancement. The daily Offices
necessarily tied the Warden to the College ; he would
be isolated, unknown, in all probability forgotten, by
those absorbed in public questions and borne along
upon the strong current of passing events. On the other
hand, he would be foregoing possibilities that he had
never prized ; and able to exercise his office, ministering
to a few humble souls in uninterrupted peace, with leisure
at his disposal for ecclesiastical studies to benefit the
Church at large. " There are wonderful capabilities," he
wrote after his first visit to the College, " and uncommon
disadvantages." One of its recommendations in Neale's eyes was the
religious antiquity of the foundation : —
" It was founded in 1608 by Robert, second Earl of
Dorset, for the shelter and maintenance of thirty poor and
aged householders, under the charge of a warden and two
sub-wardens ; the latter to be non-resident, the former to
reside in the College. Interminable lawsuits, consequent
on sale of property, reduced the funds of the establishment
to an exceedingly low ebb fifty years after its foundation,
the inmates were reduced to starvation, and painfully and

140 JOHN MASON NEALE
urgently petitioned parliament for help. . . . Finally the
College, though shorn of a large portion of its original
revenues, was enabled to afford a stipend of £14 per
annum to each of twelve poor pensioners, and double that
sum to the warden."
It was also determined that the wardenship should be
given to a priest ; and to this post Neale was appointed
by the Ladies Amherst and De la Warr, co-heiresses of
the third Duke of Dorset. He took up his residence at
the College on the 26th of May, 1846, and on this day
still every year the pensioners, after a service at the parish
church, partake of a dinner provided in perpetuity, by a
clause in his will, in commemoration of his arrival.
Twenty years of residence amongst them left much cause
for thankfulness. They were years of much labour, full of
trouble and disappointment ; but they were years of which
the gains outweighed the losses, when tranquil hours of
study and days of humble ministry might well obliterate
the memories of strife and misunderstanding.
On April 21st he went by coach to East Grinstead, and
spent the day in going over the rooms and making arrange
ments. He read prayers for the first time to the pensioners,
and made acquaintance with the old people " whom, on the
whole, I like much."
We can well believe that as his advent at Crawley had
been an astonishment and excitement to the villagers,
so his arrival in the midst of this small circle of
aged pilgrims with their old-established fireside habits
and jealously guarded privileges, must have been some
what in the nature of a bewildering novelty. They
had an instinctive distrust of change. Their limbs were
stiff, their minds inert. To look beyond the narrow
precincts of their parlours was to gaze into an open grave.
They had no desire to be roused from a not uncomfortable
state of torpor. And now, on this bright April afternoon,
when it was pleasant to hear the drowsy murmur of bees,
and feel the first warmth of the spring sunshine, inducing
an agreeable languor and disinclination to be disturbed,
there came a quick footstep, and the courteous, but

mss&siSLi,
SACKVILLE COLLEGE: THE QUADRANGLE.

SACKVILLE COLLEGE : THE SOUTH ENTRY.

THE PENSIONERS 141
uninvited intrusion of the new Warden, a tall slight figure,
with keen-glancing though shortsighted eyes, who is full of
questions and alarming plans for their welfare. To them,
in spite of the wisdom of his words, he is but a boy.
Eight and twenty ! what is that when they think of their
three score years and ten ! The most he can expect from
them at present is a kind indulgence extended to his youth
and inexperience.
With these old people Neale had unregretfully chosen
to throw in his lot. "The more he sees of them," so
he writes during this first month of preliminary visits,
" the more he likes them." Moreover the quaint old-world
aspect of the place cast a spell upon him : the grey pile
of buildings upon rising ground which dominated the
village ; the terrace, on the southern side, overlooking a
wide expanse of country, meadow and copse and corn
field, arrayed, as he saw them first, in spring's light
green livery; Saxonbury Hill rising in the distance,
and the heavier leafage of Ashdown Forest breaking up
the foreground. How dear and familiar it became ! how
pleasant it was, even to the eyes of a stranger ! Ivy and
vine and clustered roses half covered the ancient walls,
where lichens had scattered in careless profusion their
gold and silver coins. The deep porch was flanked by
wooden benches where the old men might sit on summer
evenings to exchange neighbourly greetings. The date
on the heavy oak door is the oldest in the building,
1616, and above the gate is a sundial with the inscription,
" Horas non numero nisi serenas." How many hours have
been numbered since the legend was engraved, and for
these old bedesmen with what a measured pace they slip
by ! Indeed, sometimes it may be that " time lags withal."
Hearing and seeing are dulled, and it is not easy to quicken
that joy in living which makes us catch at the moments as
they pass.
All day long the wicket is on the latch, for charity
must needs exemplify her spirit by an open door, and
Sackville College is a building owing its very existence
to the generosity of a noble family. Once inside the

142 JOHN MASON NEALE
paved, oak-panelled porch, you see the welcome shelter they
have provided for indigent old age. No bare, unfurnished,
unadorned dwelling, but a group of quaint, hoary buildings,
dedicated to very various purposes — the chapel, the warden's
lodgings, the rooms of the collegians, and the earl's
chamber, built to accommodate the Dorset family when, in
their journeys from Buckhurst to London, their coaches
stayed there for rest and refreshment, and possibly too
that they might indulge a lawful sense of pleasurable
satisfaction in the embodiment of their house's piety.
Those days were, alas ! over, never to return. But
their recollections no doubt mingled pleasantly with the
young warden's dreams as he paced the terrace on summer
evenings or stepped out from his study into the green
quadrangle, where upon the close-shaven turf white
pigeons strut and plume themselves, and an old pensioner
with bent head passes slowly down the path before him to
his rest — the rest that, even here, has been provided for
the servants of God.

CHAPTER XIII
Sackville College — Its position and statutes — First months in the
College — Address to the pensioners — Christmas in the College
— Sermons in the Chapel.
When Neale went into residence at Sackville College
he found great need of external improvements as well as
internal reforms, to each of which he at once devoted his
energies. The building was in a state of decay : the great
hall in so bad a condition as to be barely safe, the chapel
scarcely fit for use, and many of the rooms intended for
inmates unboarded and consequently tenantless.
The patrons, fortunately, shared his anxiety to put
matters in order. They restored the hall at their own
charges; the long-disused fireplace was opened out
again, great dogs set in its midst, and the hearth on
each side flanked with chimney corners, where the old
pensioners might find warmth and comfort. The ruinous
rooms were made habitable as refuges for the homeless,
who, though not entitled to college pay, might yet end
their days in a peaceful retreat; and in this way, by
degrees, its benefits were extended to more inmates
than before. Neale had every desire to enlarge what he
regarded as a family circle, drawing into it all those forlorn
and solitary beings who, bereft of ordinary ties and house
hold enjoyments, had an especial claim upon his com
passion. It was in intercourse with such persons that
his best qualities shone forth. In argument he might be
inclined to dogmatize, in converse with his equals tempted
to self-assertion ; but to the poor and ignorant he was
ever gentle, deferential, and sympathetic. Their want of
understanding roused his pity, their weakness appealed to
i43

144 JOHN MASON NEALE
his youth and strength, their poverty disarmed hard judg
ments. It might be otherwise in the world outside, but
within the walls of a religious house "crabbed age and
youth " might dwell together in concord.
He averred that he had a preference for corporal works
of mercy, and in this respect his wife shared to the full his
ideal of service, putting it, after a woman's fashion, more
effectually into practice.
It must have all seemed very strange and new to the
old people, who had for long had ineffectual supervision
and no clerical care. Here was an impetuous new-comer,
full of projects and ideas, who talked to them like a father.
They had an amazed admiring reverence for his book-
learning, but what could he know of the fret and fatigue,
the small recurring needs, the jealously acquired allevia
tions of pain and sickness, that made up for them the sum
of life ? Moreover, he was about to revive old customs, and
amongst others some they were inclined to regard as more
honoured in the breach than in the observance. He had
studied the statutes of the College, and declared they
must be carried out Here was an old rule, hitherto
irregularly kept, now found to be of daily obligation.
"Statute 6. — Item; that the said Warden shall care
fully see the said brethren and sisters morning and even
ing to meet at a certain hour in the Chappell, there to
pray serve honour and praise Almighty God, according to
the true intent and meaning of the said Robert the late
Earle of Dorsett, expressed and mentioned in his last will
and testament ; and the said service and prayers there to
be made by the said Warden for the time or such of his
brethren as he shall there-unto appoint."
These stated hours of prayer were, to the Warden,
the sanctification of the daily life of the College, but
to the pensioners (not, as Neale had thought, twenty-four
brethren, but five brethren, six sisters, and the probationers
accommodated with rooms in the establishment) they were
not, at first, so much the satisfaction of spiritual instincts
as a routine to be gone through with as little physical
and mental exertion as possible. To raise their conceptions

FIRST ADDRESS 145
of worship, to enlighten their understandings, to lead them
on to a true appreciation of increased opportunities for
communion with God, was a task well worthy of his best
endeavours. He was fitted for it by an "energy of
self-devotion, an aggressive ardour of love," that gladly
spent its best in working out for the good of humanity
what, in the eyes of the world, appeared to be super
fluous and impracticable reforms. Thus he gathered
the old people around him in the chapel soon after
his arrival, and, in plain language, gave them his first
address : —
" My dear friends, it is but natural that, on first coming
among you, I should wish to say, and you to hear, some
thing about the manner in which we are to go on together.
Both you and I have new duties given us by God, and
new privileges : duties which we have to perform, and
privileges for which we shall one day have to give an
account. I have never yet had the privilege of living in
a place which, like this, is set apart for the immediate
service of God by supplying the wants of those whom He
loves and for whom He cares ; of dwelling in such a place
and being one of you, so as to have our cares and thoughts
and wishes very much in common. And you have never
had the privilege of having a priest dwelling among you,
to be entrusted with the care of your souls, and to minister
to you the Holy Sacrament and the Word of God. We
read in the Old Testament of one who said, ' Now I know
that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a priest in mine
house.' And it was a just and true feeling. And I would
always wish you to remember that, however unworthy be
the person who has the priest's office, it is the office and
not the person to which you are to look. . . . Now, in the
first place, I wish to say that I came among you for the
sake of doing as much for you in all ways as lies in my
power. And I wish you to believe that it will be, not only
my duty, but my delight, to read to you, and to pray with
you, and to pray by you, at any time, and at all times
that you may need it or may wish it. Now that I am
among you, my time is not more my own than yours ; and
therefore I do trust that none of you will hesitate about
coming to me, or sending to me, when my seeing you could
do you any good, or give you any pleasure." L

146 JOHN MASON NEALE
He then goes on to explain the order of services as
set forth in the statutes, and points out that here they
may give themselves up to the worship of God, "Who
has been pleased so graciously to give us a home and
so many other blessings here." The whole address very
happily and truly illustrates the spirit moving him to
seek this (in one sense) restricted sphere of work. He
was to be more than a spiritual director, the centre of a
home, their servant for Jesus' sake, that together they
might advance towards the attainment of " the high prize
of their calling," the hope of everlasting life.
He has come to do them good, and also to give
them pleasure, to brighten their darkened lives, to cheer
their solitude, to minister to their bodily needs and
relieve their pain, freshen languid aspirations and re-
invigorate dulled sensibilities ; and he struck a note
that must have gone straight to their hearts in the
last paragraph of this first address, with its quaint, old-
fashioned, stereotyped opening, ending so pleasantly in the
description of a well-filled earthly board to which they
are invited : —
"Lastly, forasmuch as all the feasts of the Church,
whether Sundays or Saints' days, are intended to be days
of rejoicing and gladness, I shall hope to see all of you
who are able to come, to dine with me in the hall on
Sundays and Saints' days at one o'clock. And thus I
trust we shall the more feel to be, as we are indeed, one
family." Here is a manner of keeping days of obligation all
may understand ; here is a proposal which might make
one well desire to enlarge the Church's calendar !
"It is this feeling," he adds, "that has the power of
changing what might be otherwise disagreeable in our
position into comfort and pleasure. A family like this is,
as it were, a little type of the Church. 'Whether one
member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one
member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it'
And God grant that we, who are to dwell together on

CHRISTMAS AT THE COLLEGE 147
earth, may, in His good time, dwell together in Heaven,
for Jesus Christ's sake."
This plan was faithfully carried out. The new
Warden's first Christmas Day in Sackville College must
have made an epoch in the uneventful lives of its
inhabitants. As we recall the scene, a curious picture is
presented to us. The beautiful old hall, with its panelled
oak walls hung with garlands of glossy evergreens and
bright-berried holly; the glowing fire of logs upon the
wide hearth ; the long table with the aged pensioners
gathered about it, in very literal fulfilment of the gospel
command to call in the poor, the maimed, the halt, and
the blind that the house may be filled ; and at their head
the young Warden — his dark face all alight with the happy
reflection of kindness given and returned, looking down
with unbounded hospitality upon his guests. He was, in
all probability, transgressing the code of the enlightened
philanthropist, and certainly setting aside the laws of
hygiene, since they feasted, not on the usual homely fare
suited to his old and invalided friends, but indigestibly, if
royally, upon mince-pies and plum pudding. Then, when
the meal was over, and the board removed, they drew
their chairs in a circle about the blazing fire, and Neale
poured out a glass of wine for each, and they drank
together to the pious memory of their founder. His mode
of celebrating the Festival might be misjudged and
criticised — he was never very wise with the wisdom of
this world — but who can doubt that it brought the Christmas
message of good will home with an especial force to hearts
that had long been strangers to joy ?
In chapel likewise Christmas had been well kept ; the
band of communicants had been gathered about the altar,
and the Blessed Sacrament carried to those unable to be
present ; and the new Warden had delivered a discourse
after prayers " mostly from St. Leo, ' Quia hodie Deo,' etc."
The mention of this, one of his early sermons, and the
text, indicates a method often repeated in the history
of Sackville College, when, with a wonderful power of

148 JOHN MASON NEALE
conceiving his audience, he adapts all kinds of scriptural
expositions to their understandings. The three volumes
of "Sermons in Sackville College" are the strongest
evidence of his sympathetic knowledge of the spiritual
needs of the poor and ignorant, and of the insight he
displayed into the workings of unlettered minds. They
came to hear him at first, it is true, with excusable
curiosity, or merely from a wish to respond to his
invitation with civility. Indeed, one old woman can be
hardly said to have fully realized her religious privileges,
since, when asked to attend chapel, she amiably replied,
" Well, sir, I wish to oblige you ; and I'm sure I wish to
oblige God Almighty whenever I can." Neale is con
strained, in justice to himself, to add, that she had not
been in the college more than six weeks. But as time
went on his work bore fruit, and in gaining their affections
he had already done much to lighten their lot.
For these simple scriptural sermons Neale drew largely
from early and mediaeval sources. They are said to echo
more especially the style of the great preacher Vieyra ;
and often he went back to more ancient authorities,
S. Augustine, S. Bernard, Rupert of Deutz, and Peter
of Blois, who were among some of his favourite authors ;
and yet it is perfectly true to say that there is not a
single sermon, indeed scarcely a sentence, unsuited to the
mind and heart of his hearers.
• When in the gospel story he brings our Blessed
Lord Himself before them, with what tenderness he
speaks to these poor way-worn travellers of the Sacred
Humanity ! In his sermon on our Lord sitting by
the well, for instance, how he dwells upon the whole
scene. " I do not find that His disciples were weary. He, being
weary, sat thus on the well ; but they were gone into the
city to buy food. It follows then, that it is not always
those who have most of this world's strength, who are
most ready to stir hither and thither, that really do most
for the service of God. Our Lord in His weariness kept
still by the well ; and by His stillness and weariness, He

USE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE 149
was pleased to bring in many to the knowledge of the
truth. . . . He, being weary, sat thus by the well, — and all
that he might convert one sinful woman. Now notice : it
was a well ; not a fountain nor a running stream. Every
man that likes can help himself from a river or a fountain ;
no man can satisfy his thirst from a well, unless he have a
bucket, and a rope, and strength to draw. This well is a
type of God's grace, which brings us salvation. ... It is
as if God gave us the bucket and gave us the rope ; now
that we have the means of working out our salvation He
expects us to work it out ; and all this because Christ has
come among us, has lived for us, has died for us, has risen
again for us."
We can fancy how the old people, sitting tired and
passive beside their own well house, may have treasured
the picture in their minds, and found their Lord still
sitting beside them in the heat of the day. Neale
so well understood that if you are to bring a passage
of Scripture home to the uneducated, it must have a
setting. Any one who tells a child a story must be
prepared to answer the questions : Where did it happen ?
who was there ? and each detail enchances the interest of
the narrative. Thus, on Palm Sunday, preaching on
the Feast of Palms, he gives them a description of the
scene of our Lord's entry into Jerusalem, and by its
definite truthfulness, brings each stage of the journey
before their eyes.
" From the house in which He had restored Lazarus,
He came into the village of Bethany. From a gentle rise
there, the Mount of Olives, with its three round heads, rose
about a mile before Him. Between that and the ground
where He stood, the little straggling hamlet of Bethphage,
which is by interpretation ' the House of Early Figs ; ' some
where in its outskirts was the fig tree that had nothing
but leaves, and was so soon to be accursed. To the right,
about a mile and a half off, He must have seen the village
of Bahurim, where of old the messengers of David had so
narrow an escape. To the left was a bleak bare piece of
tableland, afterwards to be called Aceldama — that is, ' the
Field of Blood.' . . . Between two of the round heads of
Mount Olivet, the higher olive trees in the Garden of

150 JOHN MASON NEALE
Gethsemane were just visible; and beyond and above
them Mount Moriah and the Temple, glittering in the
south-eastern sun like a mass of driven snow. More to
the left, and rather further than the Temple, was the city
of David, and the tower of Ophel ; still more to the left,
that which was then called the Mount of Offence, but
which is now named the Hill of Evil Counsel. Off that
hill then stood, in its gardens, a large white house ; as our
Blessed Lord then looked at it, it must have been some
what in the shade. It was the country house of Caiaphas
the High Priest ; and there, the night before, as soon as
the Sabbath had passed, the chief priests had gathered a
council, and had determined that it was expedient that one
man should die for the people. Lastly, between that hill
and the city of Jerusalem, was a deep narrow valley, the
Valley of the Son of Hinnom — then in very dark shade.
And that was the scene, as our Blessed Lord beheld it, on
the morning of the first Palm Sunday."
This is no mere word painting, not one phrase has
been put in for effect ; his only desire is to give in the
most graphic manner some idea of the country our Lord
was traversing. To them, he knows well, it may be as
though it happened yesterday. Like the child who added
to his mother's perplexities at Christmas by the repeated
inquiry, " Have the wise men set out yet ? When will
the shepherds get to Bethlehem ? Are they there already? "
they, too, are full of wonder, and as the gospel story is
unfolded, each event has a reality which brings it rather
within the sphere of the present than of the past.
On other more ordinary occasions, he enters into
every circumstance of their everyday life, declaring the
inestimable value of each act of love and service. He
instructs them to remember in prayer their friends and
neighbours, the sick, the sinful, and the sad, and shows
them the true value of intercessions : —
" God knows they have no merit in themselves. But if
He gives them worth, then they have it. If He promises
to hear them, then they are worth that promise. . . .
When I pay you your half-year's money, I sometimes,
instead of gold, give you a piece of dirty paper which is to

ILL USTRA TIONS 1 5 1
stand for five pounds. Why ? Is it worth anything in
itself ? not one farthing. Why do you take it then ?
Because, by the law of the land, a certain value has been
given to it ; because, worthless in itself, you know when
ever you choose to demand them for it, you will receive
five pieces of gold. And God thus stamps your prayers.
He gives them a true value."
An illustration, it might be said, fit for childish minds,
and yet suited to encourage them in their poor prayers for
others with the promise of Divine assistance. Every trivial
incident, every lesson from nature, can be used in illustra
tion or in parable ; for warning, example, or instruction.
On Christmas Eve, he preaches on the evergreens hung up
before their eyes. " O all ye green things of the Earth,
bless ye the Lord : praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever." These things are holly, yew, and laurel. By the
holly we confess what our Lord was ; by the yew we
confess what we ought to be ; by the laurel we confess
what our Lord now is, and what we hope to be also. And
then he goes on to quote the quaint old carol : —
" The holly has a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn ;
And it was for to be crucified
That Jesus Christ was born.
The holly has a berry,
As red as any blood ;
And Jesus Christ did shed forth His,
To do poor sinners good."
Then, from some other old author, he shows how the yew
is a fit emblem of a Christian, and ends with the laurel of
victory. " Thus you see," he says, looking down from the
wreathed walls to the upturned faces of his hearers — " Thus
you see a man may read a lecture to you from a tree."
Within that small enclosure there were many tempta
tions to sins of the tongue. " We make good resolutions,"
he says, " and break none so easily, none so entirely, as in
this matter of words." And for their edification he tells
the story of the holy hermit Pambo, one amongst those

152 JOHN MASON NEALE
" who served our Lord with prayer and fasting, dwelling
by himself in the wilderness for seventy years. When he
first began this life, he went to a very aged servant of God,
and inquired how he ought to live. The old man took
down the Psalter, and began to read the psalm, ' I said, I
will take heed unto my ways, that I offend not with my
tongue.' ' Stop,' said Pambo, ' that is enough for a whole
life ; let me go home and practise it.' "
Thus he brought the old pensioners into touch with
these two yet more aged men, as looking down the long,
dim vista of bygone years, they saw them bending
together over the sacred page, and were disposed
to profit by an experience even longer than their own.
It is not unlikely that Neale may have sometimes felt
that his eight and twenty years hardly furnished him
with sufficient credentials as a leader on this last stage
of the journey. But at least he could accompany their
weakness, and uphold their faltering steps.
Nor does he confine himself to the Bible stories most
easy of apprehension. Sometimes we might say that he
fixes upon strange texts and abstruse subjects. For
instance, he preaches out of the Book of Revelation on
the seven Churches, and shows how the words of the
promise "to him that overcometh" would have appealed
with especial force to the members of those Churches —
" Philadelphia was a city which had many fine temples
and other buildings, which, after the fashion of those days,
had a great number of beautiful pillars round the whole
of the outside. . . . Now listen to our Lord's promise 'to him
that overcometh ' in this city. ' Him that overcometh will
I make a pillar in the temple of My God, and he shall go
no more out.' How well the Philadelphians must have
understood this. Again : Sardis was a very rich and
luxurious place, with multitudes of rich people in it. And
it was so much given up to enjoyment and feasting that
the luxury of Sardis passed into a proverb. It was the
fashion at that time for those who were present at banquets
to wear white robes ; so that the citizens of Sardis must
have been accustomed to see rich persons in such a dress.
Now, see how our Lord's promise ' to him that overcometh '

THE SEVEN CHURCHES 153
at Sardis must have come home to the hearts of those who
lived there. 'Thou hast a few names, even in Sardis,
which have not defiled their garments ; and they shall
walk with Me in white, for they are worthy.' Pergamos
was another Church to which an epistle was sent. To him
that overcometh there, our Lord says : ' I will give him a
white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it' Now, at
first sight, this seems a very strange promise. But, I have
read that, even to this day, all the ground near Pergamos
is covered with small white stones, so that the Christians
who read the promise must have entered into it at once,
and could never have gone out of their town without being
reminded of it."
These are samples, taken from Sackville College
sermons, of his way of presenting scriptural facts and gospel
truths to the poor. He [preached, of course, on other
occasions and to very different congregations, but possibly
felt himself most at home with simple hearers, to whom
he was not merely a preacher, but a guide, counsellor,
and friend.

DOMESTIC LIFE 155
voices echoed along the corridors which had recently only
known the uncertain steps of age. Always carelessly
lavish in expenditure, the merely nominal emoluments of
Sackville College had in no way detracted from its value
in his eyes. Pecuniary concerns, in some rare cases, fail
to bring care in their train. With respect to these matters
he sat lightly to life ; there were many holes in the pocket
in which his money lay, and it was easily spent (some
might say squandered) upon any object which appealed
to his generosity — a church, a book, a friend, a pauper.
In this respect, as in some others, he clung to the habits
of mediaeval times, and loved the free charities, the un
chartered doles, which have long since been condemned by
the Charity Organization Society. When there was room
at the hall dinner-table he rejoiced to send for the poorest
villagers to share the Feast Day repast with himself and
the regular inmates of the College, and a great part of the
alms dispensed in the village came from his own private
purse. " The poor shall eat and be satisfied," so the text
runs upon the screen within the hall, " and they who seek
the Lord shall praise Him." Undeserved poverty was, in
his eyes, the fulfilment of a beatitude, and misfortune a
passport to his favour. The early letters of this year
breathe a spirit of tranquil enjoyment. The seriousness of
his boyhood and early manhood was, to a great extent,
banished by domestic pleasures ; and duties which were
regular, but not arduous, left him ample leisure for
the pursuits he loved. The search for happiness is,
as we most of us know, not usually successful. The
strong desire inducing effort defeats its ends. But here,
indifferent as to this world's goods, and contented with
the humble post to which he had been appointed, happi
ness came to him unsought. Unfortunately, it was not
to be long undisturbed.
It must be remembered that it was a time of un
usual religious unrest, when suspicions were readily
excited and doubts as to orthodoxy and good faith too
easily entertained. To unauthorized inquisitions, Neale
was not apt to give conciliatory replies. The patrons

156 JOHN MASON NEALE
and the bishop had alike been perfectly aware of his
principles, and must have anticipated that he was not
a man to allow either them or the statutes of the
College to remain a dead letter. Sackville College was
not subject to episcopal jurisdiction, and though Neale
had wished to apply in the usual course for the Bishop's
licence, out of deference to the patron's wish he had not
done so. His position was practically that of Chaplain
to Lord De la Warr; and it was, therefore, in some
respects more secure and independent than that of others.
Nevertheless he soon became aware of a spirit of adverse
criticism foretelling trouble to come.
As early as June 22, 1846, he had written in his
journal —
" I never should be surprised (and I put it down here
in case the evil day should come, when it may be a comfort
to me to know that I anticipated it) if, from one side or
the other, we have a very considerable storm to encounter.
However, we have the right on our side, and this is the
comfort." For some eleven months after his arrival there was no
practical interference with the designs for the improvement
of the buildings and the services, and the plans for the
increased moral and physical well-being of his small flock,
that he was so happily and successfully carrying out.
The Bishop of Chichester (Gilbert) had shown no dis
position to find fault.
On the Feast of S. Michael and All Angels, 1846, Lord
and Lady De la Warr had paid an official visit to the
College. They attended the service in the chapel, and
dined in hall with the Warden and the pensioners. That
winter was one of unusual severity ; Neale's bounty was
freely bestowed on any cases of distress, and, as ever,
without any distinction of creed ; the Sunday dinner circle
was enlarged, and a committee was formed to relieve the
poor by a distribution of food and soup from the College.
Neale had his wish gratified in being called to the
performance of many corporal acts of mercy ; and though

UNFOUNDED REPORTS 157
in the small village community there was some jealousy
and discontent, it was insignificant in comparison with the
affection and gratitude, which was none the less pleasing
because unsolicited.
Unhappily, towards the close of the year, a country
house, not in the parish or the diocese, yet situated
at no great distance from East Grinstead, became
tenanted by a Mr. Hutton, who was not only curious
as to the new doings at Sackville College, but seems
to have been persuaded that it was his duty to investi
gate the chapel and the order of services, and, if he
found them displeasing, to make his objections public.
Neale received him as a stranger with his usual courtesy,
but felt some doubt from the first of his good intentions.
The doubt was turned into a certainty when, on seeking
him in his study, he acknowledged that the purpose of his
visit had been to discover suspected innovations that he
might present the Warden to the Bishop.
He accordingly wrote to the Bishop of Chichester,
stating that he had visited the College, and had found in
the chapel the Vulgate edition of the Scriptures and a
Roman breviary. He should " at once have concluded it
to be a Roman Catholic chapel, had [he] not found the
English Bible, though this was a Bible with notes."
He does not explain why notes upon the text of Holy
' Scripture appeared to him to be so especially dangerous ;
nor does he think it necessary to add that there were
plenty of English Prayer-books, not exactly indicative of
a Roman Catholic place of worship. However, he in
conceivably succeeded in arousing the Bishop, who may
have received equally well-authenticated complaints from
other quarters. The Bishop thought it necessary to bring
the matter before the patron, Lord De la Warr, who at
once communicated his letter to the Warden.
The facts were in themselves of no great moment, but
it was clear that a wrong interpretation might be put upon
them. Neale at once explained that one of the brethren
usually read the lessons in chapel, of course from the
authorized version, but that the Vulgate was kept there

158 JOHN MASON NEALE
for his own use. As to the breviary, his study was full of
office-books of all sorts, used for liturgical studies, and
it was very natural that in constantly passing in and out
of the chapel he had accidentally left it there ; at the
same time, as he justly observed, it was no more out of
place than any other book of prayer or hymns constantly
to be found in parish churches.
Lord De la Warr was satisfied. He communicated
Neale's answer to the Bishop, and there one might have
supposed the matter would have been allowed to die a
natural death. Neale does not appear to have been
perturbed ; and the following note from the Bishop, dated
April 12, 1847, The Palace, Chichester, came to him as
an unwelcome surprise : —
"Reverend Sir,
" Having been informed that you have recently
come to reside at Sackville College, East Grinstead, I write
to request that you will have the goodness to communicate
with me before you officiate, if it be your wish to officiate,
in any church or chapel in this diocese.
" I remain, Reverend Sir, your faithful Brother,
"A. T. Cicester."
This communication, which could neither be called brotherly
or fatherly, was the more unexpected, inasmuch as Neale
had taken up his official duties in May, 1846; and the
bishop, in speaking of his recent residence, betrays
his ignorance of the arrangements at the College. It
was, in point of fact, outside his jurisdiction. Neale
hastened to claim this exemption, referring to his
previous proposal to apply for a licence, negatived by
the patrons as infringing their rights. His tone is perfectly
temperate when, in referring to the Bishop's letter, he
says —
" If it were intended, as I cannot but fear it was, as a
mark of your displeasure, I am deeply grieved that you
should have thought it necessary to pass such a censure on
me ; though, as far as the matter of fact goes, I have very
seldom officiated, and was not likely to officiate in the
diocese of Chichester."

THE BISHOP OF CHICHESTER'S ACTION 159
When the Bishop returned no answer, Neale naturally
supposed he had acquiesced in the exemption claimed ;
an exemption never before disputed. Nothing further
was heard of episcopal interference until the Bishop came,
a month or so later, to hold a confirmation at East
Grinstead. Mr. Hutton, on this occasion, made his com
plaints in person, and the Bishop asked Neale's permission
to visit the chapel. It was, of course, willingly accorded,
and the Bible put into his hands, that he might see for
himself that it was the authorized version. Mr. Hutton,
on being confronted with this plain evidence, could only
prevaricate. He said, " It had notes, and the notes
were not authorized." The Bishop also remained dis
satisfied. He objected to the whole arrangements of the
chapel, and, in fact, to all Neale had done to raise the
character of the services, though he readily acknow
ledged that he had no "visitorial authority." On this
point, if on no other, he and the Warden were agreed.
No alterations were made, though, on the following day,
the 8th of May, another yet more peremptory mandate
was sent forth : —
"Reverend Sir,
" I feel it to be my duty to inhibit you, and I do
hereby inhibit you, from the exercise of clerical functions
in my diocese.
" I am, Reverend Sir, your well-wisher in Christ,
"A. T. Cicester."
This was accompanied by a private letter, speaking in
very severe terms of what he conceived to be unspiritual
emblems and adjuncts of worship introduced into the
chapel, concluding with the prayer, exasperating, even to
the humble-minded, that Neale's eyes may be opened to
see the error of his ways.
The Warden took counsel as to what course to pursue,
and he came to the conclusion that it was his duty to
defend the rights of the College, and to obey the Bishop's
inhibition only so far as it affected his ministrations in
the parish church or in other churches in the diocese of

160 JOHN MASON NEALE
Chichester. Lord De la Warr shared his views, and
wrote to thank him " for saving, as far as in you lies, the
rights of the College."
Neale was manifestly not a man to be intimidated:
he had taken up what he believed to be an impregnable
position, and he was not inclined to abandon' it. His
letters were written with the moderation befitting one
who is sure of his ground, although the Bishop unhappily
lost his temper, and declared that he felt it his duty " to
stop Mr. Neale from continuing to debase the minds of
these poor people with his spiritual haberdashery."
For five months hostilities were suspended, but on the
14th of November, 1847, the Warden received an intimation
that articles were to be exhibited against him in the Court
of Arches for withstanding the Bishop's inhibition. Lord
De la Warr protested and pleaded in vain. Neale, he
said, would still remain the Warden of Sackville College,
and the sole effect of an adverse judgment would be to
deprive a few old people, too infirm to attend their parish
church, of the daily ministrations of a priest and of oppor
tunities for Communion. Nevertheless, the judgment was
given against him, and until November, i860, it virtually
remained in force. It was not formally removed until
November, 1863.
It would be easy to enlarge upon the arbitrary injustice
of a line of action that would, in these days, be subjected,
not alone to outraged public opinion, but to the severest
ecclesiastical censure. It cannot be denied that personal
feeling had arrogated to itself the name of episcopal duty,
and no arguments could remove a prejudice the Court of
Arches had confirmed. Webb, though of necessity a friendly
advocate, had a well-balanced and judicial mind, and he
writes in respect of the trial : —
" Neither of the advocates nor the judge, got up the
case. I never heard such astounding ignorance on all
sides, such a mockery of justice. There was not a single
good thing said on either side."
It is quite possible that Neale's manner and words,

APPEAL TO THE BISHOP 161
spoken in haste, may have caused irritation. When
unjustly accused, his tendency was not towards concilia
tion. His written appeal to the Bishop, in March, 1849,
however, is respectful and straightforward : —
" If in anything that I may before have written, I may
either have inadvertently said what has given your Lord
ship offence — or if I have been carried away by what
seemed to me the necessity and hardship of the case, to
say more than I intended or more than I ought, I earnestly
hope that your Lordship will forgive it. I should be
unworthy to be a priest in our Church did I not severely
feel the deprivation of the power of acting as one, where
I am placed. And what I feel strongly, I may possibly
have expressed too strongly. . . . All we ask is that the
suspension may be withdrawn as far as regards the Col
lege. We ask for no formal removal, only a tacit allow
ance. I have neither time, strength, nor wish to officiate
elsewhere in the diocese. But in this place to be able to
officiate, there is nothing right, nothing allowable, that I
would not do — no trouble that I would not willingly take."
It is a long letter, pleading on behalf of those who were
less able to plead for themselves. It received a curt reply.
The Bishop disclaimed personal offence, but refused to re
consider his determination, or to regard the wishes of the
pensioners as in anywise affecting the case.
During the three following years, many attempts were
made to induce the Bishop to state definitely the grounds
on which his inhibition was founded, or to withdraw
it. Then, all efforts proving vain, in 1851 the inmates
themselves laboriously compiled a petition representing
their sorrow at the deprivation of Mr. Neale's services,
" who is most kind to his people, and very much beloved
by them." If he has leave once more to officiate in
their chapel " they will be very much comforted and very
grateful to your Lordship, and will pray that he may
long live in health and happiness here below, and finally
after this life attain everlasting joy."
This was again fruitless. The twenty-six pensioners
who affixed their names to this document were informed
that Mr. Neale must have "perplexed their minds with
M

162 JOHN MASON NEALE
new and strange shows and observances ; " that the Bishop
feared for ill effects upon their " religious views," so he had
had no resource but to remove them from the danger of
such influences.
The poor, decrepit, simple-minded pensioners, to whom
the letter was addressed, were naturally incapable of
entering into the episcopal argument. They were pro
bably quite unconscious of having any religious views at
all. They had liked their young Warden's kindly ways,
his expositions of Holy Scripture, and the chapel ser
vices ; and, above all, he had taught them much of the
ever-abiding Presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacra
ment of the altar, that Presence Which had now been
withdrawn. They were aggrieved and desolate. They
met again in council, and determined to make one more
effort to regain the religious ministrations they had learnt
to value. This time their petition was addressed to Lord
De la Warr : —
" We all heard the Bishop's letter read in the hall and
it did in no ways satisfy us," so they wrote, " as we are all
ready to swear that Mr. Neale has taught us no new
doctrine, or perplexed our minds with any vain shows as
the Bishop says. That he should say this puzzled us and
made us determine to ask your Lordship to get Mr. Neale
righted, for it was a good day that brought him to the
College, and we do all look upon him as our clergyman,
and want that he should have the care of our souls, which
he is so fit and so willing to have, and which nobody else
has, as we see. If your Lordship choose to shew this letter
to the Bishop, we don't mind his seeing of it ; only we
know he has no calling in the College, and it does seem so
vindictive like to punish Mr. Neale all this four years and
so keep us out of our rights which was our reason for
writing to him instead of your Lordship, where-as some
say Parliament would be our best friend, as we stand by
an Act of Parliament. We, pensioners on your Lordship's
bounty are most of us old and infirm and we don't like
the end of our days to be troubled as we have been. . . ."
It was a difficult task for the unlettered brethren
and sisters to frame the memorial, hardly knowing to

LORD DE LA WARRS ACTION 163
whom to address their complaint, since the Bishop was
obdurate, and " Parliament," a word representing an un
known far-off power dwelling in impenetrable courts of
justice, might fail to entertain their suit unless it were
presented by some accredited envoy. Lord De la Warr
they had seen. He had dined at their table, and shown
himself gracious and friendly ; nor did his answer belie
his former bearing. It was no wonder that the pitiful
document drew forth a quick and sympathetic response.
He had read it, so he wrote, with " lively interest but great
pain," since he was powerless to do more than give them
the assurance that he would spare no effort in his power —
" to obtain for you a restoration of those spiritual advan
tages to which you are entitled as members of an institution
founded to the honour and glory of God ; with fervent
prayers to Whom for your welfare, temporal and eternal,
in which I am most cordially joined by Lady Dela Warr
and my family, I remain,
"Your affectionate friend, and one of
your patrons and visitors,
"De la Warr."
"Buckhurst, Jan. 27, 1852."
Such a letter could not but have cheered and consoled
the old people to whom it was addressed, but it was, un
fortunately, of no practical use in removing their grievance ;
and it was impossible to avoid the sense of bitterness which
is most keenly felt when events make epochs in lives lived,
amid the still shades of evening, in a natural quietism. No
explanations could soften disappointment, no external
circumstances could save them from brooding with the
helpless persistency of age upon their loss. It was the
chief sufferer who himself did most to allay irritation and
alleviate inevitable trials. On Whitsun Day of that year
he gathered the melancholy little company about him in
the hall, and in an affectionate address spoke of what
had taken place, an address so manly in its absence of
personal feeling that it is well to record the sentences
especially evidencing its spirit.

164 JOHN MASON NEALE
"Whenever any misfortune happens to us — for I am
sure that we all feel this that has come upon us to be a
misfortune — we may be sure that God has some lesson to
teach us by it. It is not our duty to sit down idly and
grieve about it, still less is it our duty to be angry and
quarrelsome about it, but it is our duty so to consider it,
that we may apply our hearts to wisdom. . . . We have
not valued our privileges enough, we have not improved
them enough. And some of us may have done worse than
this. Some of you may have said, as the Jews of old, what
a weariness it is, to have to go so often to chapel, to hear
the same prayers over and over again. . . . Now, in cases
like this, where people have had great privileges and have
either been weary of them or have not improved them as
they ought, . . . God sees that by missing them for a time
we may value them the more. . . . And this we must
remember — that though He has taken away much from
us, He has still left us much. . . . God the Holy Ghost, to
Whom we keep this day holy, is not tied to time or place
or circumstance. He generally works by means. But,
blessed be His Holy Name, He can work without them
also. . . . We have done nothing, so far as man is con
cerned, to deserve the deprivation, and we may therefore
hope that if we call upon Him, He will restore to us what
He has taken away, and, as He said to Job, will bless our
latter end more than our beginning.' "
The words speak for themselves. They were not
merely preached for edification ; they were the result of a
prayerful consideration of God's dealings ; his resigna
tion was no formal acceptance of the inevitable, but
an act of filial love.
His was not • a mind naturally inclined to cherish
resentment ; even just indignation was short-lived : but,
later on, one blow fell with crushing weight upon his heart,
for it was dealt by the hand of a friend who had ranged
himself amongst his adversaries. It is related that, on
receiving the intelligence, he was struck dumb ; and, going
into the chapel, he shut himself up there, alone, for hours,
until he could feel that he had given a full and free
forgiveness to the man who had deserted him in his
necessity.

CHAPTER XV
Panegyric on the Eastern Church— William Palmer's visit to Russia —
Desire for reunion — Introduction to the " History of the Eastern
Church " concluded — Friendship with the Rev. Eugene Popoff —
Letters from Mouravieff— Acknowledgment of Neale's work from
the Czar.
There is no doubt that Neale was preserved from taking
an exaggerated view of his trials, and also from morbid
reflections upon their possible causes and results, by his
happy perennial spring of literary activity ; and he took
refuge in his study from the useless and wearisome dis
cussion of ecclesiastical differences and religious quarrels.
If that study was a haven of peace, it was also a
work-room fitted to overflowing with books as his neces
sary tools and implements. He might well have written
with Southey :
" My days among the dead are passed,
Around me I behold,
Whene'er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old ;
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day."
The room was lined with book-cases filled with
volumes of every date and kind: curious manuscripts,
ancient liturgies, treatises on ecclesiology and architecture ;
books in every European language ; Coptic and Syriac
grammars and dictionaries, side by side with old editions
of the classics. Folk-lore, hymnology, history and theo
logy were all represented upon the shelves. They covered
the walls, and stretched across the room, leaving but a
narrow passage-way and space for the reading and writing
165

166 JOHN MASON NEALE
desks at which he stood, intent upon his work, with
nothing within that old grey enclosure to distract a
student, or break upon his seclusion.
Here he spent some of his happiest hours. When
threatened with another form of misfortune in the shape of
sickness, he had, as we have seen, taken sanctuary in
literature. Now, once again, when disaster fell upon him,
he withdrew himself within the precincts of the Eastern
Church. He was engaged upon various other subjects : liturgical
studies, some children's books, hymnology, and many
translations, as well as upon another important work — a
commentary upon the Psalms ; but, as his two volumes of
the "History of Alexandria" were published in 1850, it may
be said that during these special years he was principally
occupied with researches and studies bearing upon this his
greatest work.
He brought to it, together with a deep sense of
responsibility, a spirit of enthusiastic admiring devotion,
only restrained by a sincere desire to be just and accurate.
Bishop Wilberforce observed that " the intensity of his
religious convictions hardly keeps down the natural genius
of a master of fiction," but the restraint shown in his
more serious works is no less remarkable than the labo
rious amount of historical research they display. It is
only in the first pages of the " Introduction " that words,
animated by irrepressible feeling, vibrate as if to compel
a corresponding emotion in the paragraphs containing
his panegyric on the Eastern Church.
" In the glow and splendour of Byzantine glory, in the
tempest of the Oriental Middle Ages, in the desolation
and tyranny of the Turkish Empire, the testimony of the
same immutable Church remains unchanged. Extending
herself from the sea of Okhotsk to the palaces of Venice,
from the ice-fields which grind against the Solevetsky
monastery to the burning jungles of Malabar, embracing a
thousand languages, nations, and tongues, but binding
them together in the golden link of the same faith ; offering
the tremendous Sacrifice in a hundred liturgies, but offer
ing It to the same God and with the same rites ; fixing her

PANEGYRIC ON THE EASTERN CHURCH 167
patriarchal thrones in the same cities as when the disciples
were called Christians first at Antioch, and James the
brother of the Lord finished his course at Jerusalem;
oppressed by the devotees of the False Prophet, as once
by the worshippers of false gods, — she is now, as she was
from the beginning, multiplex in her arrangements, simple
in her faith, difficult of comprehension to strangers, easily
intelligible to her sons, widely scattered in her branches,
hardly beset by her enemies, yet still and evermore, what
she delights to call herself, One, Only, Holy, Catholic and
Apostolic." And how does he answer the accusations of her
enemies that she exists only because she has so long
existed, and acts with the mechanism of an automaton ;
that her want of missionary zeal proves her deficiency in
vital energy, and that the hour of peril will crush her, like
a hollow image, to dust ?
"For eighteen hundred years, it might be answered,
this venerable Communion has fought the good fight and
borne about in her body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
Since she armed Athanasius against Arius, and sent forth
Cyril against Nestorius, unnumbered heresies have assailed
her, . . . her existence itself has oftentimes been a very
agony, yet the gates of hell have never prevailed against
her. Idolatry and Apostasy have attempted her subjuga
tion, and confessed her invincible ; kings and caliphs,
emperors and sultans, have stood up against her, but
the King of kings, and Lord of lords has been on her
side." And then, after a long list of her conquests, he
prophesies " that in the great regeneration of the Church,
in the second and more blessed Pentecost, the Oecumenical
Throne of the East will bear no small part." At the
same time, he admits " that the Oriental Church has not
been able to adapt herself to the wants of her members
with the happy flexibility of machinery which characterizes
the Church of Rome. That Church begins with hermits ;
she forms them into communities, and they become monks ;
she sends them into the world, and they are friars ; she
bids them go to the great men and speak, and they are
Jesuits. In an ignorant age, the Benedictine went out
into his garden and planted cabbages; in a learned age,
he sat in his cell and edited the Fathers."

168 JOHN MASON NEALE
Extolling the unity of Eastern doctrine, of which the
stiffness, so to speak, has preserved her orthodoxy, he
laments the —
"tedious repetitions, the endless canons, the immense
prolixity of the services outside the liturgy, which make
them unedifying to the ordinary worshipper, and contrast
most unfavourably with the well-chosen lessons, the beau
tiful antiphons, the short appropriate responses of the
breviary." Again in this preface he refers to the almost over
whelming difficulties confronting the historian of the Greek
Church. The writers to whom he had to refer had no
common language. Greek, in various degrees of corrup
tion, Arabic, Syriac, Russ, Armenian, were the principal
sources from whence material was derived.
"Add to this the great difficulty of arriving at the
fountain-head of information ; the precious MSS. moulder
ing in far distant monasteries, . . . the unexplained and
inexplicable contradiction of Eastern writers, the unfortu
nate pertinacity with which they relate at greatest length
those matters of which they themselves had least personal
knowledge ; the want of any faithful clue to the labyrinth
of doubts and hesitations in which the historian of the
Eastern Church is involved, these things might well deter
the warmest lover of ecclesiastical history from attempt
ing — whatever be its interest — that of the East."
In seeking an explanation of his determination to
undertake this laborious work upon so large a scale,
there are several motives we must take into account.
The most obvious is the strong personal attraction he felt
for a subject embracing such varied interests and in
separably connected with studies in ecclesiology, liturgies,
and hymns, doctrines and heresies, to which he devoted
lifelong attention. William Palmer and George Williams,
to mention two amongst the distinguished theological
students of his day, had preceded him in their practical
acquaintance with the Orthodox Church in Russia ; William
Palmer, Fellow of Magdalen College, and brother of Lord

PALMERS VISIT TO RUSSIA 169
Selborne, having paid his visit to the Russian Church as
early as 1840.
When the Grand Duke Alexander had, in the spring of
1839, come with the Duke of Wellington to Oxford, a
singular petition had been prepared by Palmer to be there
presented to him, which had before been submitted to the
still more singular corrections of the president, Dr. Routh.
Some of its clauses may be quoted : —
"To obtain that there be sent here some Russian
ecclesiastic, capable of examining the theology of our
Churches " — this presumably teachable ecclesiastic was to
live in Magdalen, and Palmer himself undertook to give
him lessons in English ; — " so that through him the contents
of our best books may be made known to his Imperial
Majesty and to the bishops of the Eastern Communion. . . .
If the whole Catholic Church ought to aspire after unity,
nothing can be more worthy of the piety of a great prince
than to facilitate the reunion of two Communions separated
only by misunderstandings and want of intercourse. While
the Catholic Church of England  "
" Leave out the word ' Catholic,' sir," cried the Presi
dent ; " it will not be understood."
" While the Church of England constantly defends the
rights of Christian sovereigns, . . . she is isolated in a
corner of the West, unsupported by the civil Government,
and  "
" I would leave that out, sir."
" Threatened by the hatred of all Protestant sects."
"Leave out the word 'Protestant,'" cries the ruthless
censor; and upon Palmer's final peroration of goodwill
and blessings invoked upon the Imperial throne, he makes
this heartless Johnsonian comment : " I would leave out
the last sentence, sir. The first clause will not be under
stood, and the second will seem un-English."
It is not surprising that the petition, thus shorn of all
its salient points, bore no fruit ; but Palmer was not
discouraged, and, in the following year, he set out for
Russia, his object being — in the words of Dr. Routh's
letter of commendation —

170 JOHN MASON NEALE
"to present himself with all reverence to the Russian
bishops, and especially to the most Holy Spiritual Synod,
that by their favour and protection he may become
acquainted with the doctrines, rites, and ceremonies of
the Russian Church ; . . . and I ask and even adjure in
the name of Christ, all the most holy archbishops and
bishops, and especially the Synod itself, that they will
examine him as to the orthodoxy of his faith, and with a
charitable mind, and if they find in him all that is necessary
to the integrity of the true and saving faith, then that they
will also admit him to communion in the Sacraments."
It is certainly a strong witness to the desire for unity
prevalent amongst those who were even incidentally
affected by the religious temper of the times, to find the
Fellow of an Oxford College setting out with the sanction
of the president and the tacit, though unwritten, approval
of the Archbishop of Canterbury, upon a quest which some
might have considered quixotic.
The conception of unity had had from "the first"
(so Cardinal Newman, in his preface to Mr. Palmer's book,
allows) " its measure of success in Russia ; " nevertheless,
it was limited to their own Communion, and though he
does not impute to the distinguished ecclesiastics to whom
Palmer presented his credentials any discourtesy, they
seem, so he avers, to have had but one reply reiterated in
a disheartening and wearisome refrain —
"We know of no Church besides our own. We are
the only Church in the world. The Latins are heretics,
or all but heretics : you are worse ; we do not even know
your name. There is no true Christianity in the world,
except in Russia, Greece, and the Levant ; and as to the
Greeks, many as they are, they are, after all, but a
poor lot."
Neale was animated by the same desire for reunion
without having encountered any of these practical rebuffs.
He had, then, two strong and sufficient motives — an
ever-increasing interest in his subject, and a hope that
the accomplishment of the work might remove misunder
standings ; but, besides this, he undoubtedly felt, in the

DR. PUSEY 171
words of one of his reviewers,1 that in the face of the
fears entertained by some of the apostolicity of—
"a Church separated from the jurisdiction of Rome, it
cannot but comfort and strengthen wavering minds to
withdraw for a little space to another Communion, pre
senting all the notes of a true Church, and withal for a
thousand years cut off from Western Christendom."
And, with a renewed ardour of investigation, as in the
library at Funchal, he set to work upon languages, liturgies,
and all the historical material available for his purpose.
Every now and again chance passages in his letters
reveal the detailed labour it involved. In 1847 he
writes —
" I am hard at work on the ' Introduction ' to the
' Greek History.' I give in parallel columns, with notes,
the Anaphora of the Liturgy of S. Chrysostom, S. Basil,
S. Mark, S. James (Ethiopic), S. Basil (Jacobean), and
All Apostles (Nestorian), and it is rather interesting work,
though somewhat slow."
The " History of Alexandria " had been already
published, and, in reference to it, Webb wrote —
" Dr. Pusey spent a long time with us most pleasantly.
I showed him your book, which he looked over with great
interest, and expressed a great joy that you had devoted
yourself to anything so solid and valuable. He said we
wanted nothing more than ecclesiastical history done by
our own Church. He himself is full of schemes, and
devotion, and energy."
During these years Webb's letters furnished him with
a chronicle of contemporaneous ecclesiastical events — of
the progress made in matters of ritual, since at Margaret
Chapel (All Saints, Margaret Street) they have now a com
plete musical Mass ; the Commandments, Epistle, Gospel,
Preface, etc., sung to the ancient music ; of new publica
tions, and the state of public feeling in London — for
Webb was in the vortex of London life, being curate to
1 Presumably Professor Freeman.

172 JOHN MASON NEALE
Mr. Dodsworth, at Christ Church, Albany Street: yet
Neale never responds by any desire to leave his retire
ment ; so congenial to him, in spite of all his troubles,
is the spot where he lives.
And, fortunately, his extensive correspondence brought
him into touch with those most able to throw light
upon his special subjects. From Palmer,1 Blackmore (late
Chaplain of the English Russia Company at Cronstadt),
and the Rev. Eugene Popoff (Chaplain to the Russian
Embassy in London), he writes that he has really had
surprising kindness. With the Rev. Eugene Popoff,
his relations were of the most friendly description. He
afforded incalculable service in explaining and defending
the ceremonies and principles of the Greek ritual ; and
mutual respect in course of time engendered a sincere
and affectionate esteem. In his visits to London Neale
attended his services, and consulted him upon points which
must have presented difficulties to any outside the Greek
Communion. His " History of Alexandria " found warm
admirers amongst its members, and any praise or criticism
from Russia is at once recorded in his letters. " I have
had mighty commendations from another Russian priest,"
he writes, " about my ' Greek History ; ' and one Nortoff,
a great traveller, is to get me information."
He was also in communication with William Palmer,
for he says that if a very rare book — " Zoernikov on the
Procession of the Holy Ghost " — cannot be found in the
British Museum, Palmer of Magdalen is to lend him his
copy. By June 20, 1849, he writes that he has —
" absolutely no news, being taken up with the ' Introduc
tion.' I have received, through Count Pratasoff, Ober-
Procurator of the H. G. Synod, the Emperor's formal
permission" (that the work may be dedicated to him).
" The Russ translation of the first sheet of the ' Introduc
tion ' was given to Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, who
1 This appears to have been William Palmer of Worcester College,
author of the " Origines Liturgicse," not William Palmer of Magdalen.

LANGUAGES 173
approves of it extremely. Still, I see some difficulty
when we come to the question of Procession." Again :
" Popoff works like a horse for me. Now I am busy with
the Slavonic Calendar, and find my Slavonic very useful."
Webb, too, was an intermediary between him and
Popoff, and wrote of the latter appreciatively ; though he
thought his Erastianism strange, he vastly admired his
laboriousness. He might equally have admired Neale's.
On March 29, 1849, he wrote —
" I have begun Russ, which I can't do without, and find
it a very queer language. The ecclesiastical language has
forty-two letters. ... I have a very curious account to-day
of the Armenian liturgy as actually performed. The
Patriarch ordered it to be celebrated with the greatest
possible magnificence, in order that Mouravieff might
appreciate it. Again, I have hardly done anything these
last days but Slavonic, which I take to amazingly. It is
so absurdly like Latin. . . . The distinction of Saints in
the Calendar is even more perfect than the Greek. I have
now, thanks to Popoff, mastered the seven degrees of
festivals in the Eastern Church." And such is his aptitude
for languages, that already, at Michaelmas the same year,
he writes : " I can now consult the Russ books with some
ease." Here is another note, somewhat startling to precon
ceived notions —
"I have just got 'Zoernikov on the Procession' — a
small, closely written octavo of 1080 pages. It is
extremely interesting, and seems quite to exhaust the
subject. Depend upon it, the Greeks are right."
Webb, to whom he sent some of his printed sheets,
was a frank critic. He objected, amongst other things, to
his employment of terms unfamiliar to the majority of
readers ; and Neale writes in reply —
" You would surely not wish me to neglect the terms
that five-sixths of the Greek Church uses. . . . Your first
objection is that I have only comparatively of late times

174 JOHN MASON NEALE
studied Slavonic. It is true that when I began the
'History of the Eastern Church, I had no idea how
necessary it was. But it would have been no use to me
in Alexandria, and I did not feel the want of it there.
Directly I began the ' Introduction,' I wanted it, and in a
clumsy way I had it. I had only to send any Slavonic
to Popoff, or Blackmore, or Palmer of Magdalen, and I
had the translation. But as early as p. 120 of the ' Intro
duction ' I began to use my own knowledge of it. ... I
don't say learn Slavonic that you may understand my
book, but if you don't learn Slavonic, don't set up to know
much about the Eastern Church."
However much engrossed in these studies he never
forgot the end in the means, and as the work proceeded
the hope of reunion with which he had started burned
with a stronger and brighter flame. Beneath every page
there lay the wish nearest to his heart — " the hastening of
that blessed day when the misunderstandings and suspicions
and unkindnesses on which I have so often had to dwell
may be for ever swept away."
He received welcome commendation of his work from
those upon whose opinion he put a high value. Mouravieff,
to whom he was indebted for so much information, wrote
from Smyrna on the 8th of February, 1850, in warm terms
of eulogium of the " History of Alexandria," though he
took exception to certain passages. He offers his "plus
sinceres remerciments pour le don pr^cieux," and adds,
" II m'a 6t6 aussi bien doux de voir l'esprit vraiment
orthodox d'Orient qui rdgne dans tout l'ouvrage, comme
s'il dtait ecrit par un Catholique d'Orient." And he
especially admires the striking portraiture of the person
and times of Cyril Lucar.1 " Votre exposition du Patri-
archat de Cyrille Lucar est magnifique, et c'est vraiment
un service rendu a 1'Eglise d'Orient."
" Shall I really congratulate you for the ' finis qui
coronat opus ' ? " wrote the learned Rev. Eugene Popoff,
Chaplain to the Russian Embassy in London. " If so, I
do it quite heartily. May I ask you only to make me one
1 See Chapter IX.

MESSAGE FROM THE CZAR 175
favour ? It would be to look on the whole work before
it is quite out. Again, can you not make some kind of
provision for some future accidental insertions, omissions,
or supplements ? "
Apparently about this time Neale attended the Greek
service in London, for, when Popoff writes, " Your ' Intro
duction,' I suppose, is to-day at S. Petersburg," he adds —
"I would be happy to see you on any day. The
service on Sunday begins at eleven o'clock, though the
Matins we read for ourselves much earlier. The Liturgie
will be that of S. Basile, as it is on all Sundays in
Lent. For the hearers, the difference between the Liturgie
of S. Basile and that of S. Chrysostom is felt principally
in the chanting. It is a very old one, and pure Church-
chanting. As for the Liturgie of the Presanctified, it will
be on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in our Passion
week — your Easter week."
His work, it was clear, had moved the minds of those
members of the Russian Church who, though like Eugene
Popoff imbued with a spirit of placid resignation as to the
inevitable divisions of Christendom, were yet ready to
welcome with fraternal cordiality any steps taken to
extend the knowledge of their creed and ritual. The
Emperor himself had taken great interest in the progress
of the " History of the Eastern Church," and on the 10th
of June, 1851, Popoff wrote —
" My dear Sir,
"His Excellency our Ambassador, Baron de
Brunnow, has kindly charged me to announce to you,
that His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia, in acknow
ledgment of the value of your arduous and useful work
on 'the History of the Holy Eastern Church,' as well as
an encouragement in its continuance, has been graciously
pleased to grant you the sum of £100.
" The Rev. J. M. Neale,
" Warden of Sackville College, etc., etc."
These sympathetic praises, sounded from the very
stronghold of Eastern orthodoxy, fell upon Neale's ears

176 JOHN MASON NEALE
more agreeably than those of the ordinary critic and
reviewer. Though subject to many interruptions, his
studies and writings to his life's end bore constant reference
to the great subject, ever to him of such supreme impor
tance. The "History of the Patriarchate of Antioch,"
being, as before stated, left in a fragmentary condition
at his death, to be completed and edited with an intro
duction by the Rev. George Williams — so distinguished
for his ecclesiastical researches, and so firm a defender of
the position of the Russo-Greek Church, as to be pre
eminently fitted to undertake its publication.

CHAPTER XVI
The Gorham judgment — Its effect — Neale's letter and pamphlet on
the subject — Offer of the Deanery of Perth — The Scotch Office —
Reasons for refusing the Deanery — The English Church Union
— Letters from Archdeacon Denison and the Bishop of Exeter.
EARLY in 1850, the Privy Council judgment in the Gor
ham case aroused indignant astonishment in the Church
of England, and created a crisis threatening ruin and
disruption. Its possible consequences were supremely
disquieting to many of her most earnest and devoted
members lest the ignorant should, for a moment, imagine
that the Church's voice had been heard in that of the
Council. Others were inclined to remain passive under
"the profound conviction that no secular decision of
fallible men could affect the truth so plainly and de
cisively taught by the Church in her formularies from
the beginning." There were again men amongst whom
Neale must be numbered, who, though uncertain of ultimate
issues, were determined to contest the true position of
the Church of England, and fight her battle with every
weapon at their command. The unexpected blow had
fallen heavily, but there was yet time to draw her adherents
together, and, by the combined force of the clergy and
faithful laity, send forth a great protest against the
authority in spiritual matters of " a body absolutely with
out ecclesiastical authority owing its existence to an act of
parliament, never accepted nor recognized by the Church,
. . . the constitution of which is entirely at variance with
the theory of Royal Supremacy accepted by the Church
at the eve of the Reformation."
The above is an extract from the schedule Neale had
prepared. A second clause asserts that —
177 N

178 JOHN MASON NEALE
"the Catholic Church from the beginning has ever held
that regeneration is conferred in and by Baptism, and
by that alone," and "that the English Church, as a branch
of the Church Catholic, has ever taught and held the
same doctrine in her Offices, in her Catechism, and in her
Articles." The document ended with a declaration that if Con
vocation were to confirm the Privy Council decision (which
God forbid) those who signed would be compelled to
regard " the Church of England as no longer an orthodox
branch of the Church of Christ, and would leave her
accordingly." It is inexpedient to enter into the voluminous details
of this important controversy; but, to Neale it was a
vital question. He had been unshaken in his allegiance
to the Church of England by personal privations and
episcopal censures. This danger to the Church at large
affected him far more strongly. For the first time, so far
as we can learn from his letters and journals, he regards
secession as an ultimate possibility. Thoughjie is —
"perfectly satisfied as yet with the position of the
English Church, ... in case of that worst which I know
may come, I should like a harbour under my lee. ... I
had far rather see those who, like you, are doubtful of the
Church of England turn to the East than elsewhere.
Because, if we should be in the smallest degree the means
of bringing about inter-communion between the Eastern
and the Western Churches, it would be a blessed result
indeed." On this emergency he puts aside all other projects and
work, as well as his own daily difficulties and pressing en
gagements, to throw himself, with an unreserved generosity,
into the breach. He soon discovers that the Church is
not to be betrayed into the hands of her enemies. She
has not forfeited her rights. A spoliation is not a sur
render. As usual, in advocating the organization of an
active militant defence, and in condemning the counsels
of timorous moderation and passive patience, he goes
back to lessons drawn from the early Christian centuries : —

THE GORHAM JUDGMENT 179
" When Nestorius first propagated his heresy at Con
stantinople, the court being negatively at least on his
side, did the clergy occupy themselves more sedulously in
the care of their flocks and leave the defence of the faith
to those whose business it might be ? Look at the facts.
Nestorius first committed himself to his heresy on Christmas
Day. There was a brief pause of indignant astonishment ;
but in three weeks' time a pamphlet was published by
Eusebius of Dorylaeum, the Badeley or Palmer of his day,
and a week later another by Marius Mercator, in opposi
tion to the new teaching. These tracts made a great
sensation. Still the bishops did not stir. On this, the
clergy, far from considering the priestly character injured
by what is now called ' agitation,' organized it systemati
cally. . . . Public meetings were held, though, as in the
present troubles, the season was Lent. . . . The orthodox
priests and monks used every method of agitation : uniting
with some of the nobility (we should now say, forming
a committee with them), they sent addresses to Cyril ;
they memorialized the Emperor ; they appealed to Rome.
Some of the clerical agitators were scourged ; still the
movement spread. The clergy insisted on a council, and
its issue at Ephesus we all know. Now, when at the
present I find priests blamed for journeys to London,
anxious discussions, paper wars, absence from parishes in
holy seasons, irreverence in the open discussions of such
topics on platforms, I turn to what S. Cyril wrote on
similar conduct. ... If the view (a narrow and onesided
view, to my mind) now taken of the priestly office be
right, certainly that held by S. Cyril was wrong, and
none I suppose will deny that the Council of Ephesus
was completely got up by agitation."
His reference to this and other early precedents is very
characteristic. Those who pleased might consult con
temporary authorities, weigh modern arguments, or defer
to the public opinion of the day. Neale turns to see
what S. Cyril would have done, and derives encourage
ment from the remembrance of traitors within and other
foes without who had been powerless to destroy the life
of the Church or the integrity of her Faith. He shows
in a pamphlet, entitled "A Few Words of Hope in the
Present Crisis of the English Church," that, " while there

180 JOHN MASON NEALE
was every call to exertion, there was no cause for despair,
that the Lord was only asleep in the vessel."
His intimate acquaintance with Eastern and Western
offices of baptism enables him to state with authority —
" that of no other Church under the sun could it be
affirmed with such plenitude of certainty, that it asserts
the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, as of our own. . . .
On all possible battlefields baptism is that, not even
excepting absolution, on which we fight to most advantage,
and on which we shall conquer most triumphantly. For
we shall conquer. God allows us to judge of His future
by His past dealings with men. It is contrary to all
experience, to all ecclesiastical history, that a Church
assisted through so many struggles, brought through so
many difficulties, protected by such wonderful events, the
mother of saints, placed on a vantage ground among the
nations, should have been, after a manner unknown to
former ages, filled with life, endued with energy, armed
with courage, should have seen a revival, to which history
cannot afford a parallel, brought to pass through her whole
body ; and all this, only that in the very height of her
energy and efforts and usefulness, she should be destroyed
by a human hand."
Here it is evident that the call to battle has quickened
his pulses, and brought him forth from his retirement to
strike blow after blow, with cheerful confidence, in defence
of what he believed. He fought, moreover, as an expert
whose weapons were well tried ; and it is no wonder that
numerous letters bear witness to the gratitude felt by
those who recognized the assistance he had given to the
cause. Neale himself was surprised by the large circula
tion of his letter, proving that it expressed the views of a
great number of persons, who were not in a position to
make them public. The Rev. W. J. E. Bennett wrote of
his " admirable tract," and begged him to preach one
of the sermons in the octave of the consecration of
S. Barnabas, Pimlico, a sermon afterwards published en
titled, "The Church's Extremity, God's Opportunity."
Meetings were held, and much discussion ensued, bring
ing into prominence powers and knowledge that when

" WORDS OF HOPE " 181
once roused, made him so able a controversialist. Un
doubtedly, as he asserted, the immediate result was the
greater stress laid in sermons throughout the country upon
the orthodox doctrine of regeneration, and unexpected
rallying power shown in its defence. Neale writes, on
the Friday in Passion Week of the year 1850, " I never in
my life was worked harder than just now. You have no
idea of the quantity of letters I have about my pamphlet."
And in the midst of these agitations and troubles, he was
preaching his tranquil sermons every day. He felt that
daily sermon, as he said in one of his letters, a " moral
drag," but he never allowed other business, however im
portant, to curtail the time he gave to spiritual ministra
tions ; and it may be quite truthfully asserted that, in one
sense, the small colony of poor and aged people whom he
addressed were of more consequence in his eyes than
those more intellectually sympathetic readers who looked
eagerly for his articles in the Christian Remembrancer,
or sought his opinion upon public or ecclesiastical ques
tions. In fact, he was apt to under-rate his influence
outside his own circle, and with regard to his "Words
of Hope," he wrote to Webb that he had been wiser
than himself, for he " had not the smallest conception that
a hundred would have sold. The edition was 1250."
It was soon after this publication, in the August of
the same year, 1850, that he received the offer of; the
Deanery of the newly consecrated cathedral at Perth —
the only piece of so-called preferment which ever came
in his way.
Perth, though the most important town in Bishop
Torry's diocese of S. Andrews, up to 1846 had no episcopal
congregation. In that year a small mission was started
by the Rev. J. C. Chambers, (afterwards of S. Mary's,
Soho), who, by means of his services, his Day and Sunday
schools, and his energetic and faithful personal ministra
tions, succeeded in gathering in many converts from the
poorer Presbyterians. In 1848, the Rev. Joseph Haskoll,
an intimate friend of Neale's, joined the mission as a
volunteer ; and he it was who first wrote suggesting that

1 82 JOHN MASON NEALE
the Warden of Sackville College should leave his retire
ment and come to their aid.
By this time matters had progressed to an extent
hardly to have been anticipated.
In 1847, Lord Forbes originated a scheme for the
erection of a cathedral in Perth, with a staff of missionary
priests attached, to itinerate in places where there were
no resident clergy. The project was warmly taken up,
the building was begun, and the consecration appointed
to take place so soon as a portion of the structure — the
chancel and the nave — were completed. This was not
accomplished until the December of 1850, the same year
that saw the consecration of S. Barnabas', Pimlico, S.
Mary Magdalene's, Munster Square, and S. Mary's, Soho.
In the preceding May, Haskoll had written, " We are
grievously in want of a Dean, a head, some one to take
the lead and be responsible. Dodsworth was asked to
come, but refused." And again, on June 5th —
"Of all things which I can think of, there is none
which I should like better personally, and, still further,
there is nothing which I believe would be better for the
Church in Scotland, than for you to come here. You have
no idea of the capabilities of Perth, but we want a Neale
to set them going."
In course of time the offer of the Deanery was officially
made by the Hon. G. F. Boyle — afterwards, Lord Glasgow
— and the Canons of S. Ninian's ; and the venerable Bishop
of S. Andrews wrote as follows : —
" Rev. and dear Sir,
I beg to thank you for transmitting to me the
last number of the Ecclesiologist, and further to say that
I was very much gratified by your observations made
therein on the Scottish Prayer-book, lately published with
my sanction and under my authority. From the principles
and sentiments enunciated in those observations, you
would, in my opinion, be a valuable acquisition to the
Perth Cathedral ; but I scarcely dare indulge the hope of
your becoming one of the staff of clergy in that institution,
which, although designed for the noblest and most holy of

THE DEANERY OF PERTH 183
purposes, my eyes shall never be blessed with a sight of;
being now more than half through my eighty-seventh
year, and, by God's will, borne down with many increas
ing infirmities, to which I desire humbly to submit, as
proceeding from the Giver of all Good. ... It would,
however, cheer the evening of my days were you to accept
the office proposed to you."
Nor was he alone in his wish. Neale himself was
taken by surprise at the unanimity expressed, and wrote
to a friend, " You have no idea of the number of letters
I receive from Scotland."
This was, in a great part, the consequence of the
interest he had manifested in the Church of Scotland, and
in the efforts being made to restore her true position.
Always disposed to range himself upon the side of the
oppressed, he was more conversant than most people with
her history, since she had been supplanted at the Revolu
tion by the Presbyterian establishment The bishops,
with seven hundred clergy, left destitute of churches,
houses, or means of maintenance, had subsequently still
ministered the Word and Sacraments to their faithful
people, though they were consequently exposed to the
severest penalties ; the laity, if known to attend these
proscribed ministrations, being punished with the loss of
their civil rights.
Persecution for the time fulfilled its purpose. Many
were driven from the country ; the weakhearted aban
doned their rights and forfeited their privileges. When
the penal laws were repealed, for a while it seemed as if
the Church had no power to reinstate herself, either
in her proper place, or in the affections of the people.
" It must not be forgotten, however, that what the Church
lost in numbers and external accommodation, she, during
the gloomy time of her history, gained in purity and in
ward strength."1 Now, with an increased Episcopate
and a restored Liturgy, she was visibly renewing her
spiritual strength. Her poverty and distresses appealed
to Neale's generosity, whilst he fully concurred, with Bishop
1 See letter from Bishop Torry, of S. Andrews.

184 JOHN MASON NEALE
Torry's assertion, "that her chief glory was to return to
the ancient and Catholic use in the celebration of the
Holy Eucharist, by adopting as her national Communion
Office one formed after the purest models of antiquity."
Neale had contributed papers, both to the Ecclesiologist
and the Christian Remembrancer, on the Scottish Prayer-
book, as he says, " entering into all the minutiae of the
affair." These letters had attracted much attention, espe
cially in Scotland, as Bishop Torry, the oldest of the Scotch
bishops, was at this time reprinting the Liturgy. A
Liturgy that, in his own words, " recognizes, I hesitate not
to say, the truth of the primitive Eucharistic doctrine, and
the warmth of primitive piety beyond any other Office
now in use in the Church." Neale, in writing to the
Bishop, endorses his opinion —
"The Liturgy is now nearly what one could wish.
Indeed, there is but to substitute an Introit for the part
which precedes the Collect, and to put the Gloria in
Excelsis into its right place, and I know not what we want
much more. The great blot in the book is the Savoy
addition at the beginning of Confirmation. Well ! if we
have to come over to you, we shall not have much cause
to complain." Nevertheless, though strongly attracted to the Scotch
Church by the purity of its doctrine and revived ceremonial,
and with a natural love ^for the arduous work of an
ecclesiastical pioneer, when the formal offer of the Deanery
was made, he declined it, for the reasons stated in the
following letter : —
"My principal reasons for declining the Deanery are
these : i. Had the Church of England acquiesced in the
late decision,1 I should have accepted with more than
thankfulness any offer, and more especially such an one as
would have removed me from her. But, by like reasoning,
now that she does not acquiesce, but is engaged in a
struggle for life and death, I think that it is the duty of
her sons to remain in her. ... 2. If I came, I should, of
1 The Privy Council decision in the Gorham case.

REFUSAL OF THE DEANERY 185
course, come as a missionary. I would not come without
a licence from the Bishop to preach anywhere and every
where — in lanes, streets, markets, fields, or roads ; that, I
am sure, is the only way to convert Scotland. But, if I
were to do this effectively, I should be dead in a year, and
that without any adequate advantage gained. 3. It would
be most highly desirable that the Dean should be ac
quainted with music. I have a zeal for it, but not
according to knowledge. . . . My decision has been very
much influenced by the course of events in England ; and
this I could not foresee. After all, I assure you, it has
been a very near point."
The earlier part of the letter (too long to quote in its
entirety) touches upon two matters further emphasizing
what has been said on other occasions of his readiness
for militant service, and his indifference to worldly gain.
"You know," he writes, "that I have no objection to a
little fighting ; and anything which I could have done to
oppose the Anglicanism at Perth I would have done most
cheerfully and strenuously ; " and again, " Had the deanery
been richly endowed, I can assure you it would have made
no difference in my answer."
Upon this latter point few men with a family of young
children growing up about them could have spoken with
such genuine unconcern. Improvidence, it has been said,
seems sometimes to be regarded as an act of faith, and it
may certainly be conceded that Neale had a tendency
to look upon it in that light. He was less concerned
with practical consequences than with the literal fulfil
ment of the gospel precept to take no thought for the
morrow. "There seems to me to be much more in the
New Testament in praise of poverty," said Professor
Jowett, " than we care to acknowledge ; " and the subtle
excuses by which men are blinded as they laboriously heap
up treasure upon earth had never presented themselves
to Neale's mind. His charity was not curtailed by pru
dential considerations. In the regulation, or, rather, in
the want of regulation, of his expenditure, in his repeated
acts of mercy, he never forgot that his Lord Himself had

186 JOHN MASON NEALE
been poor, outcast, and a stranger, and that such as these
were His representatives upon earth. As a natural con
sequence, it followed that his motives were misunderstood,
and his indiscriminate charity not unreasonably censured.
At the same time he was free from earthly anxieties,
those recurrent disquieting apprehensions of loss of for
tune or insecurity of worldly station which harass many
religious-minded persons, and divert attention from more
important considerations. In so far as the Perth Deanery
might have brought him increased distinction or emolu
ment, he relinquished it without regret, but he never
lost his deep concern in the fortunes of the Episcopal
Church in Scotland, and in 1856 he published "The Life
and Times of Patrick Torry, D.D., with an Appendix on
the Scotch Liturgy" (Masters). He had accepted an
invitation to the consecration of the cathedral (the first
British cathedral, with the exception of S. Paul's, which
had been consecrated since the Reformation), and in a
passage of that Life he thus describes the event.
" It was just about sunset on a fine December day that
I reached Perth. There had been a slight fall of snow on
the Grampians, and the stillness of the Fair City, and the
setting in of the frost, seemed to bring out in greater relief
the bustle within the walls of the cathedral ; and the glare
of its lights, as the workmen were hurrying to the conclusion
of their task, was in strange contrast to the darkness and
quietness of the adjacent street. That night I shall ever
remember as one of the strangest of my life. Many of the
most necessary arrangements had been driven off till the
very last: the carpenter's hammer and the mason's chisel
were still to be heard ; a crowd of workmen were yet
engaged in putting the finishing touches to their respective
departments ; the frescoes were still incomplete, and, in
the later hours of the evening, the choir was practising the
chants and hymns for the next day. An English reader
can hardly form an idea of the interest and curiosity with
which our proceedings were regarded by the Presbyterian
spectators, to whom the whole ritual of the Church was so
utterly unknown, that, as I remember, the leading Perth
newspaper of the following week gave an elaborate de
scription to its readers of what was meant by chanting.

PERTH CATHEDRAL 187
Perfect silence settled down over the city, but still, as we
visited the cathedral at twelve, at two, at four, and at six,
the workmen were still engaged in their various occupations,
nor was it till the late morning of a Scottish December day
had fairly broken that everything was prepared for the
approaching solemnity."
It was, as he said afterwards, in a letter to the Guardian,
" an epoch in the revival of ecclesiology, as it is to be
hoped it will be also in the moral history of the Church."
The Bishop of Brechin officiated in the place of the aged
Bishop of S. Andrews, and in the morning Neale preached
from S. Matt. vi. 5. There was a great gathering of
clergy, and the building was filled to overflowing at each
service. In the evening seven adults were baptized,
and several who had received Presbyterian baptism were
admitted into the Church according to the Scottish form,
and Neale went home with an eager desire to extend
the knowledge of the Faith, and enlist fresh and well-
instructed adherents in its defence.
These were the early days of the English Church
Union. In reference to its action, he had written —
" In the absence of an acting ecclesiastical system, an
irregular organization must perforce be adopted. If a
country attacked by an enemy cannot send forth dis
ciplined regiments, she must make the most of guerillas.
And such are our Church Unions, especially those of
London and Bristol."
He was constantly speaking at their meetings, and regarded
it as a duty on the part of parish priests —
" not to hesitate in giving the time, the trouble, the money
that may be needful for a united plan of action. Let
them remember that it is for their flocks that they are
now called to act ; that they may be instructed in the
truth of the Church, not in the opinions of the State. Let
them remember that a parsimony of time in the great
struggle now may prove a sad, prodigality hereafter ; that
if the Church loses this battle, then parochial care will
little avail their people. . . . ' Is not this the fast that I

188 JOHN MASON NEALE
have chosen — to let the oppressed go free, and that ye
break every yoke ? ' "
The Church's undisturbed slumber, even in remote
and peaceful villages, was over. Youthful indiscretions,
hasty acts, and ill-considered words might arouse the dis
approbation of older and wiser people, but, as Bishop
Wilberforce with his wide knowledge of country parishes
asserted, "for good or for evil, all were awake." It was
inevitable that party spirit should in some cases excite
undesired passions, but there was no doubt that cor
porate action increased the sense of Christian brotherhood,
and strengthened a desire for Christian unity.
Personal intercourse with some of the Church leaders,
was no doubt, a moral support, as well as an intellectual
pleasure, to a man whose ordinary mode of existence was
monotonous and circumscribed. Neale's letters to papers
and periodicals drew attention to his more important
works ; his correspondence increased, and from many
fresh quarters he received valued encouragement and
approbation of his various literary and evangelistic enter
prises. Amongst many others, he was brought into new
or renewed contact with Keble, Forbes (Bishop of Brechin),
the Rev. E. S. Ffoulkes, Dr. Mill, Revs. A. Wagner, and
George Williams, Butterfield, Bodley, Archdeacon Denison,
and the Bishop of Exeter. Letters from these last relate
to his public action in Church defence, and should there
fore be inserted in this chapter.
In reference to his "Words of Hope," Archdeacon
Denison writes, in 1850, from East Brent —
" I have never thanked you as I ought to have done for
your most valuable little tract. We will, by God's help,
do what we may before we are driven to say that the
Establishment and the Church of England can no longer be
one thing, but the task is so immense that I fear some of
the stoutest hearts will quail. But if we all defend the
Faith God will be for us, and then all will yet go well.
The Bishop of Exeter's letter appears to point out plainly
the line of action ; will the other bishops act with him ? "

THE ENGLISH CHURCH UNION 189
With Archdeacon Denison's stalwart and belligerent
attitude Neale was in the fullest accord, and later corre
spondence as to meetings to be held and action to be taken
kept them in touch with one another ; but more gratify
ing than the Archdeacon's unsolicited approval, was the
following letter, which concerns matters of a like nature
though it is of a later date (February, 1854) from Phillpotts,
the old Bishop of Exeter.
" I have just risen from the perusal of your lecture at
Birmingham on ' Confession and Absolution,' for a copy of
which I heartily thank you. If I have been tardy, as I
confess, in doing this, you will forgive me. I have little
leisure, and feel the weight of seventy-six years, pressing
more heavily on my mental than on my bodily powers.
" Let me now say, that the ability and manliness, not
the less effective by reason of the truly Christian — in other
words, not mawkishly indulgent — tone in which you main
tain the truth without undue bitterness to yours and the
truth's opponents — entitles this little work to more con
sideration than an ordinary brochure. I wish it could be
widely circulated, especially among the laity of my own
diocese. But this is, I fear, hopeless."
From this time forward English Church Union meet
ings and other business made him better acquainted with
the temper of mind of both clergy and laity in their
advocacy of religious principles and their attitude towards
the questions of the day. Yet he was clearly still more
or less solitary. One reason may be found in the charac
ter of his occupations. He was whirled and drawn into
divers currents of thought, and his opinions were not
sufficiently systematized to attract converts. They were
distinct in shape and substance, but, like unstrung beads,
likely to slip through other men's fingers. Moreover he
did not see his way so clearly as to commit himself to
any definite line of future action. At one of the English
Church Union meetings he writes that, in drawing up the
report, he —
" put in a sentence expressing our hope to live and die
in the Communion of the Church of England. Layard

190 JOHN MASON NEALE
and Matthews were very strong for ' determination,' which,
as I told them, was more than I could say. On which
Matthews inveighed against half-hearted men. It would
certainly have been carried, but that Hunt said, ' hope and
purpose ' might perhaps do ; so it was settled." And again,
in a letter of the 19th of October, 1850 : " As to dying in
the Communion of the Church of England, I can have no
objection to saying I hope it ; if in the Church of Rome
also, so much the better."
Again, on December 19th : —
"It strikes me that there is a remarkable parallel
between the Church of England now, and that of Scotland
under the regency in the sixteenth century, all the right
in both cases being on the side of the Church : all the
might on the other. ... I confess I very much doubt
whether we get over this storm."
These and others are the words of a man too sincere
to take up an attitude of impregnable certainty, too re
gardless of public opinion to aim at consistency. Whilst
engaged in weighing evidence he would not pronounce a
premature verdict. He was too indifferent to the popular
vote to be elected a leader ; nor indeed had he any wish
to usurp that office. He went back from meetings, and
interviews, and controversy, to bury himself again in his
books ; and was most at ease at home, in his quiet study
at Sackville College.

CHAPTER XVII
Work in connection with the Morning Chronicle — Petition to the
Eastern Church — Troubles at Sackville College — Letters respect
ing them — Mediaeval preachers.
THE year 185 1 was one of much literary activity ; works
being issued, or in course of preparation, of which more
detailed accounts have been given, or will be given in
later chapters. Neale's own list, not altogether com
plete, is dated March 29, 185 1, and certainly gives a
notion of much work projected or accomplished. 1. "The
Followers of the Lord," a book for children, just finished.
2. " Translations of Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences "
(Masters), not quite finished. 3. Sermons, or rather essays,
published under the title of "Lectures on Church Diffi
culties," half finished. 4. "The Hymnal for Cambridge
Camden Society," the first part almost finished. 5. Tract
on "Funerals" for Camden Society, just finished. 6. "Hymni
Ecclesiae" (Parker), finished. 7. "Commentary on the
Hymnal for the Use of the Poor." 8. " History of Antioch "
(not published till after his death). 9. Articles in Eccle
siastic and Ecclesiologist. 10. "The South Church Union
and its Tracts." 11. "The London Union," "where, how
ever, I have hardly been this year." No wonder he adds
that, in the doctor's opinion, he has been working too
hard. In this year also, at Mr. Beresford Hope's request, he
undertook to contribute regularly to the Morning Chronicle.
He was offered good terms for three leaders, a week, and,
when Parliament was not sitting, was free to choose his
subjects. It was not altogether congenial work, but he had
begun to feel that remuneration was of importance, " and
191

192 JOHN MASON NEALE
this," he says, " will enable me to pay a governess for the
children." This journalism he managed, in an amazing
manner, to wedge in amongst his other avocations.
" I don't find," he says, "the writing for the Morning
Chronicle half so laborious as you thought it would be.
One advantage I have over S. : he may be as long as ever
he likes ; I, on the contrary, cannot begin till 12.30, when
the coach comes in ; and, unless I pay for sending the
parcel to Three Bridges, must get it off by 2.30, when the
coach goes out. So, I have the morning and evening clear.
Just now subjects are plentiful."
Rapidity in execution, if not in conception, was
habitual. A few months later, he observes —
" I cannot write more now because of this miserable
Seatonian : I only began him on Monday, and he must go
off on Friday evening. ... I have made verses until
I have the headache. " And this self-same epistle
Most manifestly shows,
Whatever I may do in verse,
I cannot write in prose."
He won the Seatonian thus easily, ten years running ;
though he was often so hurried that it barely caught the
last post, and one year when two prizes were given he took
them both. He was asked to reside in London altogether
to be of more use on the staff of the Morning Chronicle,
but this offer was of course declined. It would not have
coincided with his liturgical studies, " Dalmatian History,"
and " Hymnology," of which he speaks much at this time.
There had been some talk in January of an appeal to the
East, presumably on the subject of re-union, and he was
very urgent as to the necessity of consulting experts
personally acquainted with their customs, William Palmer,
George Williams, or Blackmore, as to the proper manner
of approaching Eastern prelates. A tentative petition was
framed and sent to him for revision, for we find reference
made to the document in a letter to Webb, Feast of King
Charles the Martyr, January 30, 185 1.

" THE FILIOQUE " 193
" I don't see much to object to in the form of the
petition, except that it should state more plainly what we
want. No one could say whether we are asking them to
consecrate us Bishops, or receive us to communion without
Bishops. . . . But I think that the letter might be much
better done. It is so thoroughly English. Fancy 'a
dubious theory of development,' in Greek ! The way
should have been to write in Greek, and then translate
into English for the subscribers' benefit. Then again, no
one in their senses will give names till the authors of the
scheme give theirs. It would be a work of immense corre
spondence. The Holy Greek Synod will not decide for
themselves, and who is to carry all this on ?
" In my judgment it cannot answer ; but that makes no
difference if it is right to try. The Filioque will upset it. I
suppose that Blackmore, Palmer, and I are the only men in
the English Church who are thoroughly convinced that
the Latin doctrine is grievously erroneous, suspected of
heresy, and, even if logically carried out, heretical. Half
our men would never ' alter the creed,' as they would call
it. The Bishop of Brechin is very strong on the point. . . .
I will write to Mouravieff, all well, in a day or two, and
perhaps to Philaret of Moscow, and you shall see the
letter." His energies were thus expended generously and
happily in divers directions, when he was suddenly startled
by the unexpected outbreak of internal troubles in the
College. Even after all the evidence has been weighed,
and facts and statements verified, their cause is more or
less inexplicable. An intimate acquaintance with the
underground workings of the uninstructed rustic mind
can alone throw any light upon the subject. It must be
remembered that when the new Warden first came to East
Grinstead, he had come in the guise of a revolutionist, a
revolutionist, moreover, whose methods and ideas were
altogether foreign to the pensioners, though they were
ready to regard them with indulgence as youthful and
possibly harmless experiments. But there were inevi
tably malcontents. The Collegians had a sort of tradi
tional respect for his position which silenced outward
expressions of dissatisfaction, but when inconvenienced, O

194 JOHN MASON NEALE
or as they conceived wronged, by the enforcement of rules
or the privation of unauthorized indulgences, they pon
dered, with the curious suspiciousness of old age and
ignorance, upon the incomprehensible liberality and zeal
of their Superior. This discontent was no doubt confined
to a small minority. After the Bishop's inhibition, as late
as 1853, they all put their names to the petition in defence
of their Warden and their rights. One little root of sus
picion however is easily propagated. In the village and
countryside Neale had many enemies, and one or two
powerful neighbours, anxious to find occasion for strife,
and ready to fix upon any pretext to raise a no-popery
cry. The element of fanaticism, that had to a certain
extent excused the riots of the past century, was not
present to justify this movement. It was rather one of
individual spite and rancour, and from its indulgence the
inmates had a vague notion of reaping personal advantages.
The actual occasion was a chance spark from an unknown
hand, thrown almost at hazard upon smouldering embers
of dissatisfaction. The immediate cause of the disturbance at this distance
of time seems incredible, and even then might have well
been regarded as merely an excuse for the attack. Neale
had taken a very decided part in what was termed
" funeral reform," a subject exciting a good deal of atten
tion, and more especially designed to relieve the un
necessary burden placed upon the poor, who, in the hour
of bereavement, were often compelled (by the imperative
force of public opinion and the exigencies of custom)
to spend their scanty means in the ostentatious para
phernalia of woe. If solely for this reason there was
urgent need of important alterations in the mode of con
ducting burials. But the Christian point of view went
deeper, though in some respects its outward expression
was the same. Simplicity and reverence were to mark
attendance upon the dead ; and dreariness and gloom
were to be banished as far as possible, since the grave had
become to the believer the gate of immortal life. It was
about this time that Neale had written to the Ecclesiologist,

FUNERAL REFORM 195
suggesting the formation of a burial guild. Probably
he had received the idea from the useful and pious work
done by the Misericordia that he had witnessed abroad.
His mind was occupied with the subject He had en
deavoured to improve matters in Sackville College ; he had
provided a bier and a pall ; and to their use, as he justly
observes, it was supposed no one in their senses could
object. Every one who has been with the poor at the last,
knows how their minds dwell upon adjuncts of death which
some of us would prefer to forget. Indeed the prospect of
a well-attended and respectably conducted funeral has
sometimes been known to afford consolation when con
siderations of far more moment have been of no avail ; and
it need not therefore surprise us to learn, that one of the
old pensioners on her death-bed had earnestly entreated
that these accessories should be used at her funeral. Her
relations raised a storm of opposition, and soon found that
upon this frivolous pretext they were able to enlist upon
their side a large number of undisciplined forces — rough
lads and evil-minded persons from the village and neigh
bouring hamlets, ready to seize the opportunity to show
what brute force could do under the guise of religion.
A martyr is not usually canonized in his lifetime by
the popular vote ; and the unfortunate are more severely
judged than the successful. Every one knew that the
Warden of Sackville College, though he might be famed for
his learning, was out of favour with his superiors. His own
Bishop had done everything possible to silence and pre
judice him in the eyes of his flock. The law, as the rustic
mind understood it, was a great irresistible power, chiefly
employed for the punishment of evil-doers. When people
were summoned or taken before the magistrate the in
ference was that they were guilty, or at any rate persons
whose company it would be wise to shun. Now the
Warden himself had been brought into court, though what
was meant by the Court of Arches no one could rightly
tell. He had, it is true, faithful friends, and the small
band of helpless pensioners, with one or two exceptions,
were firm in his defence ; but all about them there buzzed

196 JOHN MASON NEALE
noxious busy assailants, who asked questions it was hard
for the simple-minded to answer. Were not the rites
practised in the chapel foreign inventions ? Was not the
Warden himself a Papist in disguise ? What object could
he have in his charities : was he not feeding men's bodies
that by his dangerous doctrines he might destroy their souls ?
This spirit had been abroad, and it was not one easy to
deal with, possibly it might be better ignored. But at
length it reached a climax, bringing trouble and distress
that had to be faced, upon a peaceful household. On the
occasion of the funeral, a riotous mob surrounded the
College, the poor coffin was taken from the bearers and
carried to the village inn : no decency, not to say respect,
was shown to the dead. It was in vain that Neale
harangued a crowd mad with excitement and drink, and
before the tumult could be quelled an additional force of
police had to be called in. Bonfires were lighted in
dangerous proximity to the buildings, missiles thrown and
windows broken and, as so often happens, the respectable
inhabitants were useless in defence, for fear of being con
founded with the insurgents.
The ringleaders were discovered and committed for
trial, and, for a time, there was outward peace, but the
episode had revealed a disquieting state of feeling. It was
impossible for any man in Neale's position to be indifferent
to it. The smaller the circle the more disturbing would
be the force of adverse currents. Ever since he came to
East Grinstead he had freely given his time, his substance,
and his affections to the College. He had not been at
pains to explain the motive-power of his life : and obviously
it could only be comprehended by those who had them
selves experienced the love of God constraining an un
conscious self-sacrifice of service.
The knowledge that in one sense he had spent himself
in vain, even failing to uphold in the eyes of the ignorant
and prejudiced the sanctity of his office and the nobility of
the Christian character, pressed heavily upon his heart.
Fortunately resentment, though strong and keen, was
short-lived : his elastic spirits had great recuperative

ADDRESS TO PARISHIONERS 197
power : but there were elements of unusual bitterness in
this trial rendering it hard to be borne. There is a dignity
in sorrow, a glory in suffering persecution, but it is most
apparent in retrospect, and in this case the sordid cha
racter of the opposition, and the triviality of the charges,
rather enhanced their results, so far as his own peace of
mind was concerned.
There was no cause, it might be said, for heroism,
but much need of that patient meekness in the face of
injustice, that unretaliating charity in word and deed too
frequently regarded by the world as a confession of
weakness. Soon after this lamentable occurrence he addressed a
printed letter, wherein this temper is manifested, to the
inhabitants of East Grinstead, though he does not refrain
from an expression of just indignation at the cowardly
and unjustifiable conduct of his enemies.
" You will observe," he writes, " that while I do not
pretend to dictate to you what you should believe and
how you should act (for this is none of my duty), you do
pretend to dictate to me what I should think and do ; and
some of you have had recourse to the last resource of
a bad cause — brute force. You hear much of Popish
bigotry, intolerance, oppression, and persecution. Did not
the riot of last Tuesday week prove that these things can
be practised by some who are loudest in exclaiming
against them? . . . Let what you call Tractarianism,
Puseyism, Popery, but what / know to be the Faith of the
Church of England, heartily held, and honestly expressed,
be as bad and dangerous as it may — is this a likely way to
put it down f Is it not certain that such outbreaks must
strengthen it? Must they not necessarily confirm the
sufferers in that for which they suffer? Will not they
lead others to say there must be something in these
doctrines ? Will they not induce all fair men to regard
with suspicion principles allied with a disguised mob and
supported by a riot ? . . . And now in conclusion, it is my
hearty wish that what is past may be past. I am only
sorry that the postponement of the trials of those who
were committed for the riot must keep alive till August,
some soreness on their parts, and on those of their families.

198 JOHN MASON NEALE
But for the rest, I trust that we have seen an end, not only
of open deeds of violence, but, as far as may be, of hard
thoughts and bitter speeches : at all events an end of
calumnies which, if persevered in, will oblige us to bring
their; propagators to legal punishment. Give me credit
for every good wish as regards yourselves, for the most
perfect determination in no way to interfere with the con
cerns of the parish, and an equally resolute determination
not to suffer any interference with those of the College."
These extracts from the letter exemplify his tone
and attitude. They might have appealed to those who
desired to judge justly, and only required to be informed
and guided ; but such was by no means the position of his
antagonists, and the saddest part of the whole matter was
the deliberate attempt to poison the minds of the pen
sioners against their best friend. " Prejudice," it has been
truly said, "is the child of ignorance;" and the strong
hold it has over illiterate minds is to many of us a
matter of personal experience. "The man convinced
against his will " is well known to us all. In Neale's case,
the consequences of single words of misrepresentation
were far-reaching and ineradicable.
It must not, of course, be supposed that they marred
his work or persistently overshadowed his life ; but for
some years they created an atmosphere of distrust and
hostility in quarters where he might have most con
fidently expected to meet with sympathy and support.
As late as 1855, discontented spirits within the College
itself made formal complaints of regulations being en
forced and Statutes broken by order of the Warden. The
closing of the College gates at certain hours had given
offence, and they now for the first time discovered that,
by the law of the old foundation, no one under the age of
fifty was eligible for the office of Warden. All kinds of
reports were circulated. The Bishop's inhibition was cited
as condemnatory of Neale's continued ministrations ; in
vestigations were set on foot and brought before the
Charity Commissioners, with the result that charges
remained unproved and grievances unredressed ; whilst

LETTER TO THE PENSIONERS 199
Neale and the pensioners alike were troubled and harassed
by examinations and inquiries into the most minute
details of the everyday life of the College. Again he
addressed a letter (perhaps too long and too explanatory),
not to his accusers, but to the inmates themselves. It was
a difficult thing to do, as it was necessarily a vindication
of what should have needed no defence, and it is ever
invidious for a man to plead his own cause. But strong
feeling had been roused, and he may have felt it wiser to
write than to speak. At any rate he believed it would
make a more lasting impression.
" I have lived with you," he says in this letter, " for
just nine years. During that time we have all seen a great
many changes, but one thing you have never seen and
never will see change — my love for this College. Through
evil report and good report I have fought its battles and
worked in its interest. Some of you can remember the
state in which I found it ; many of you can recollect step
by step what I have done for it. . . . When I came among
you the College was in the last state of decay. ... As you
know, the patrons built the hall, I built the chapel. These
two between them cost a thousand pounds, a far larger sum
than had, till then, been laid out on the College for two
hundred years. . . . But all this in itself would be of little
use to you, unless yourselves were taken care of as well as
the College. Now, I appeal to you whether, when other
people have been so kind as to leave us alone, we have not
gone on quietly and happily together ? . . . We well know
that, for the last three months, we, who used to live so com
fortably and happily, have been exposed to annoyances
and troubles of which it would be difficult to make any
one at a distance understand the full extent. You have
been overwhelmed with all sorts of inquiries, investigations,
questions, examinations. Why, no one can tell, and we
least of all. ... It is no secret that the end and aim of the
present proceedings is to remove me from the Wardenship.
, . . Suppose that we were driven away, it is certain that
no clergyman would ever take the Wardenship again. Who
would expose himself to annoyance, insult, vexation ?
And all for what ? The College would soon return to the
condition out of which, with so much labour, Lord De la
Warr and myself have dragged it.

200 JOHN MASON NEALE
" I do not forget that I am writing in Passion Week.
I wish to forgive — I do most heartily forgive — those who
have done me wrong. But I wish you not to be deceived.
I wish you to see who are your true friends, and who are
not. Is it those who work among you, care for you, help
you, pray with you, comfort you, know you ; who are one
with you in all that you hope, fear, or wish; who see
you daily, who give to you daily, who have none but your
selves to attend to, who belong to you ? Or is it those
who never come near you but to inquire and investigate,
to wrong and vex, to stir us up against each other, to
exaggerate or to invent complaints? Your own good
sense can tell you."
No one can pretend to judge what course it would have
been best to pursue. To an outsider it might certainly
appear that an attempt to justify himself to his poor bedes
men was derogatory to his position, and an appeal to the
uncertain quality of their own good sense not likely to
be effectual. At the same time, the terms upon which
he had associated himself with them must be taken into
account. They were those of a frank equality. They
were to be members of one family. He was wiser, they
were older. They might defer to his knowledge ; he must
reverence their age. It was, at any rate, an effort, upon a
small scale and within a limited area, to put in practice the
ideal of a Christian Brotherhood. Yet it was an attempt
likely to be misunderstood ; and those who had most
benefited by his efforts had misjudged him.
There are few notes of despondency, and very seldom
complaints even to intimate friends. But, as he said,
he " did not underrate these vexations ; " and in one letter
wondered "if any one had more troubles." Nevertheless
his disposition was so sanguine, that though all around
him might be dark, he always saw light on the horizon.
When public matters were in question it was the same;
for instance, with respect to some unfortunate resolution
passed at a committee-meeting, he writes —
"I fear, indeed, that the game is eventually lost.
However, we may make a good fight with pawns yet.

FUTILE WARS 201
Anyhow, don't let us give up until we are actually check
mated. ... If we could but last ten years, all the religion
in the professing Church would be on our side. I don't
know why, but sometimes I think we shall beat after all."
Possibly the onslaught of massed forces in the open
field helped him to forget the petty wounds inflicted by
single skirmishers ; and all through his life, when harassed
and wearied, in sickness or discouragement, he found un
failing strength and refreshment in the history of the past.
It is curious, in relation to this fact, to note the words of a
man of entirely opposite views and prepossessions.
"The mediaeval Church," writes Henry Sidgwick,
"seems to me almost the only interesting thing in the
dreary confusion of futile little wars that fill the chronicles
of feudalism. It is such a strange mixture of sublimity,
and meanness, unselfishness, and grovelling corruption."
" The futile little wars " at East Grinstead were also
gladly forgotten, as Neale plunged into studies of the
elaborate symbolism, the mystical interpretations, the per
plexing controversies, the noble confessions of faith and
the acts of martyrs, composing the history of those times.
In this year he undertook a very laborious and little
known piece of work — a translation of the " Moral Con
cordances of S. Anthony of Padua : " " which form an
index of Scripture, according to sense and not according
to words, the principle of arrangement being the moral
and practical bearing of the passages ranged together
under one head." And this, he says, "may well com
pensate for occasional instances of far-fetched allusion or
allegory." This publication did not take place until 1856, and Dr.
Littledale had hoped with his co-operation to compile a
much fuller " Moral Concordance," with texts commented
on by patristic, mediaeval, and post-Reformation writers.
At the time of Neale's death this scheme had not been
carried out, and Dr. Littledale looked upon its fulfilment
" as distant and doubtful."
In 1854, also, Neale collected for the first time "The

202 JOHN MASON NEALE
Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church," with an Intro
duction ; and in this serious undertaking he was assisted by
the Rev. G. Forbes, brother of Bishop Forbes of Brechin,
the work being subsequently printed by Mr. Forbes him
self, at the Pitsligo Press. The liturgies were proved in a
great measure to be based on the Mozarabic.
Another publication to be specially noted as bearing
upon his work as a preacher, was the small volume, with a
preface dated Trinity, 1856, on "Mediaeval Preaching."
Long study and intimate knowledge had dispelled
many illusions. He could not share the idea Pugin de
scribed as the first conception he had formed of the Middle
Ages — " holy priests, holy monks, happy people, holy
everybody." But the language and thoughts of mediaeval
writers had an irresistible fascination. He withdrew him
self from this world of pressing disquieting incongruities
into the regions of mysticism ; the curious mosaic of
fanciful imagery gratified his tastes ; and deep spiritual
meanings were disclosed in ingenious expositions of Holy
Scripture. "Mediaeval preachers indeed knew perfectly well that
such interpretations are powerful engines, as all sermons
ought to be," and he extols in no measured terms their
great acquaintance with the text as well as their dis
cerning intuitive sense of its hidden meaning. He asserts
in his preface " that every one who has studied the
ritual and calendar of the Church must have speedily
convinced himself that its whole aim and design is to be
dramatic : " and he delights in the striking or grotesque
illustrations whereby mediaeval preachers fixed the atten
tion of their hearers, just as he might have taken pleasure
in some quaint sculpture or frightful emblem of evil in
ancient architecture. He contrasts their methods with the
formal and stilted delivery of sermons in fashion at the
beginning of the century, to which even Charles Simeon,
though himself lengthy and ponderous in exordium, had
taken exception when he sat in judgment upon a young
preacher. As the writer read over his composition he
naturally emphasized the following eloquent passage : —

MEDIAEVAL PREACHERS 203
"Amidst the tumult and ecstasy of the children of
Israel, the son of Amram stood unmoved ! "
" The son of Amram ! Who was he ? "
" Why, sir, I meant Moses ! "
" Then," thundered the critic, " if you mean Moses, why
not say Moses ? "
And he cites Vieyra, the Portuguese divine, born 1608,
whom his countrymen styled the last of the mediaeval
preachers, in favour of simplicity.
"Let us learn from Heaven the way in which we are
to arrange our matter and our words. How ought our
words to be ? Like the stars. The stars are very distinct
and very clear. So should be the style of sermons, very
clear and very distinct. And have no fear lest on that
account it should appear low and vulgar. The stars, clear
and distinct as they are, are most lofty. Style may be
very clear and very lofty. ... So a sermon might be,
stars that all can see and very few can measure."
He likewise commends the mediaeval preachers for
striking one note only in each discourse. Bede, for
instance, a most effective preacher, sought to make but
one impression, whilst "we, on the contrary, think it
necessary to add something at the end of a sermon lest
the auditors should go away with a one-sided idea of
truth. If we have been terrifying them by the prospect
of God's vengeance, we cannot be content without throwing
in something about His mercy as a make-weight We
forget that sermons addressed to the poor must necessarily
be treated strongly and coarsely ; and so we act much
as a painter who would finish with the elaboration of a
miniature a fresco intended to be looked at from a
distance only."
In the same way he is indulgent towards the tendency
to anecdotes and clerical jokes, that to the modern and
more conventional hearers would certainly have a flavour
of irreverence. As instances of popular preachers who
dealt with jests as means of edification, he instances
S. Robert of Arbrissel, the Apostle of Central France ;

204 JOHN MASON NEALE
Peter of Celles, towards the end of the twelfth century ;
S. Thomas da Villanova, in the sixteenth century; and,
amongst the Portuguese, Simon Rodriguez, Ignacio Mar-
tinz, and others. The first, he must confess, descends to
absolute buffoonery, and this he repudiates, as well as the
ecclesiastical inclination to make Latin puns in the pulpit,
— one valued accomplishment of celebrated preachers.
Nevertheless, as he points out, they gave good advice
to their successors, especially with regard to brevity: S.
Atto, Bishop of Verceil, who died about 960, and whose
simple discourses can have lasted but a quarter of an
hour in delivery, striking a decidedly modern note, as
upon one, with possibly reluctant humility, he has inscribed
this title, " The same sermon abbreviated, lest the common
people should be disgusted."
This volume contains extracts from celebrated preachers,
ranging from the Venerable Bede to Vieyra. It was re
printed by Mozley in 1873, but became too little known
to those for whose assistance and instruction it had been
especially designed.

CHAPTER XVIII
Hymnology in the past — Webb's disapproval of hymns in the ver
nacular — Neale's taste in poetry — Southey's letter to Cornelius
Neale — Neale's translations from the Latin and Greek — Examples
of his original hymns.
FROM his earliest years, as we have seen, Neale had had
what Webb described as a " fatal facility " for versification.
Already in 1843, Webb had written in strong depreciation
of hymns in the vernacular. If he could not have the old
Latin hymns in the Offices of the Church, he would have
none at all. Neale's answer is —
"Why not have English hymns, if we have English
prayers ? Surely English hymns, if good, are better than
none ? Depend upon it we shall be acting more upon the
general principles of the Church, in making the best of a
bad thing — allowing the universal abrogation of Latin to
be so — than in saying, if we can't have that, we'll have
none." It was a strange phase of the reaction from the
evangelical revival at the close of the eighteenth century,
that one of the chief spiritual weapons for the instruction
and encouragement of the unlearned disciples and converts
of Christ should have been deliberately condemned by
those in earnest about reawakening the conscience and
extending the influence of the English Church. Fortunately
these views were confined to a minority of the most rigid
advocates of Church principles. "The Christian Year,"
with its unprecedented success (no less than 108,000 copies
being circulated in twenty-six years, in forty-three editions),
bore witness to the demand for religious poetry ; the " Lyra
205

206 JOHN MASON NEALE
Apostolica" had gathered together many distinguished
theologians of the day as its contributors ; and food for
meditation was provided, in the shape of translations from
old standard books of devotion, to supply "Sunday
reading" for a generation who had discarded Young's
" Night Thoughts," the " Pilgrim's Progress," and Tupper's
" Proverbial Philosophy."
There were, however, comparatively few hymns well
adapted for public worship besides those found between
the covers of the Olney Methodist Hymn Book. And
these seemed to some, for that very reason, hardly adapted
to be bound up with the Book of Common Prayer. It is
strange that the old Latin hymns and sacred songs, that
since the days of Caedmon (who became a monk for the
express purpose of devoting himself to religious poetry)
had so greatly assisted devotion, should have been dis
credited and almost entirely excluded from the service
books at the Reformation. Edward the Sixth's Primer
(1553) had no hymns, though a few reappear in Elizabeth's.
In fact, when the Latin tongue was discarded, there
appears to have been no inclination to preserve the old
carols, sequences, and office hymns in English. It was
far otherwise in Germany. Paraphrases and translations
of Latin hymns formed an integral part of Lutheran
worship, and, after a time, found their way back to
England. In Bishop Cosin's " Houres of Prayer " (1627)
there are many translations of well-known hymns, such as
the " Lauda Sion ; " but during the times of the Civil War
psalm singing was a distinctive note of the Puritan party,
and Charles remained hidden in the oak, —
" While far below the Roundhead rode,
And humm'd a surly hymn."
In fact, good Church people still shared the contempt
expressed by Queen Elizabeth for what she was pleased
to term " Geneva jigs."
With comparatively few exceptions, the devotional
poetry of Herrick, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan
was not suited for congregational purposes. Bishop

HYMNOLOGY 207
Ken's three great hymns for morning, evening, and mid
night, as well as those for " all the Festivals," published
posthumously in 172 1, marked a revival of Church feeling,
and, in their sober self-restrained piety, formed a strong
contrast to the fierce and sanguinary psalms in which
Roundheads and Covenanters invoked God's vengeance
upon their enemies. After the time when metrical versions
of the psalms were supposed to satisfy all devotional and
poetical instincts, the greatest revival of spiritual song
took place in 1736, with the publication of the "Methodist
Hymn Book." Sung by countless multitudes under the
open roof of heaven, prayer, penitence and praise were
swept into the overflowing measures of Charles Wesley's
verse, resembling an instrument responsive to every touch,
and expressing, in tones of unsurpassed beauty, the
contrition, confidence, and triumph of each sin-stained
ransomed soul. Since the days when Clement Marot's
sanctes chansonnettes were sung alike by Catholics and
Protestants, in the palace, in the fields, or upon the
scaffold — days when Diane de Poitiers was moved to sing
the metrical version of the " De Prof un dis " to a dance
tune, and their power was for more than a century one
of the most important elements in the successes of the
Huguenots, — no hymns had attained to so effectual a
popularity.1 " Even Catholics," as Faber writes, " may be
found poring with an unsuspecting delight over the ' Olney
hymns ; ' " and upon himself " they acted like a spell, strong
enough to be for a long time a counter-influence to very
grave convictions."
The cantiques of the French Missions, and the laudi
spirituali of Italy are organized weapons of spiritual
warfare, and it was inevitable that a revival of missionary
zeal in the Church of England should bring with it a
desire to employ every legitimate method of evangelization
at her command.
Neale was anxious not to limit his authorship to
religious poetry which, like the " Christian Year," provided
spiritual reading; but to translate the Latin hymns, to
1 Prothero, " The Psalms in Human Life."

208 JOHN MASON NEALE
be once more employed in the services of the Church, and
write original hymns for use in the congregation. Webb
attributed this desire to the slough of Evangelicalism which
clung to him ; and, in a long letter, of September, 1849,
wrote with discouraging candour —
" I don't believe that we subjective men can write
hymns, which should be altogether objective. You and
others may make uncommonly pretty imitations ; but they
are only like leaves of the 'Rejected Addresses.' The
ancient hymns are bald, meagre, rude, etc., but with all
this there is in them a simplicity, a vigour, a heart, that one
loves them. ... I am more and more convinced that the
age of hymns has passed. Happy those who can use the
ancient Latin ones ; with our vernacular we have lost our
privilege. It is the same thing throughout ; the translation
into English reduced everything to common sense — the
curse or glory (as you choose) of our present ritual. ... I
doubt, in short, the possibility of the language of common
life, in such an age as this, being fit for this sort of
composition." Neale was not to be disheartened. He contemplated
translating some hymns from the Breviary as a tentative
hymnology, and he adds —
"As to what you say about my not having cast the
slough of Evangelicalism, I don't think it is true — at least
in the sense you mean. Subjectively it may be. And as
for my standing up for hymns because I — or any fool —
can write rhymes, that is too absurd. No ; you profess not
to like any poetry — therefore of course not hymns. I am
more liberal. I don't enter into painting, but I don't pooh-
pooh pictures in churches, though I don't enter into them
myself." The years, as they passed, had only confirmed the con
victions thus expressed in his youth, and, in the midst of the
multitudinous undertakings he had in hand, he constantly
went back to the translating or composition of hymns — ¦
just as a musician, engaged upon more arduous work, may
adapt some old melody or improvise a simple air in
intervals of leisure or recreation.
He had great qualifications for the work ; and, so

POETICAL TASTES 209
far as his translations are concerned, the facility Webb
condemned had no power to lead him astray. He had
too deep a reverence to touch the work of great saints
and writers with a rash, unpractised hand. Upon his
translations he spent an unstinted and elaborate care
sometimes lacking in the case of his original verse. It is
one striking evidence of his love for the past, that the old
gems which he reset were neither dimmed nor defaced in
the process.
He had a genuine love for poetry, informed by much
varied reading, and altogether independent of public
opinion and established codes. A drama, a ballad, or a
lyrical poem, were not only valued for their poetical merit,
but for the tale they told. Though he readily recog
nized subtle forms of poetic beauty in quaint mediaeval
attire, he was impatient of the vague sweetness of much
modern poetry. Amongst modern dramas he gave a pre
ference to Taylor's " Philip van Artevelde ; " but strangely
failed to appreciate either the deliberate majesty of
Wordsworth's poems or the high dignity of the thoughts
they enshrined. In fact, in the regions of the imagina
tion, he would have wished philosophic considerations and
abstract truths to be subordinated to the movement of the
verse and the personal interest of the subject. It was a
land of mystery and enchantment, where he sought swift
effects and dramatic surprises. He was more at home
in " the wizard twilight " Coleridge knew, than in the
calmer realms of meditative thought. He had, more
over, an hereditary admiration for Southey. His father,
Cornelius Neale, had sent some dramatic work to Keswick,
and from the laborious, overburthened poet, always at
leisure to be kind, had received greatly valued encourage
ment. "Your tragedy," Southey wrote, on January 15, 18 14,
" reached me last night, and I could say much in its praise.
. . . Should any occasion lead you into this part of the
world, I trust you will give me an opportunity of becoming
personally acquainted with one who, I think, is destined to
hold a high place among our dramatic writers." p

210 JOHN MASON NEALE
This carefully preserved and treasured appreciation of
his father may have directed Neale's attention to Southey's
writings, and the easy versification of the Laureate's lengthy
stories read in youth, remained in his memory, and made
them favourites with him to the end.
To turn from questions of taste and appreciation to his
own productions, it may be said that, unlike some of the
masters of sacred song, neither his style nor his metres were
those of a school. He had a very correct and sensitive ear
for melody in verse, but no technical knowledge of music.
Ken sang, " Glory to Thee, my God, this night," before he
laid down to rest ; George Herbert played anthems and
psalms upon his lute ; but Neale, though he enjoyed music,
especially Handel or some oratorio, had no real musical
capacity. Nevertheless, his hymns are well adapted for
music, his sense of rhythm and poetical cadences naturally
lending themselves to harmonious accompaniments. There
is frequently a vigour, a spirit, and marching measure in
his verse especially fitting it for processional use. His
hymns are often in the nature of spiritual war songs — the
triumphant trumpet note of victory sounding above the
stress and strain of conflict ; and though he was fond of
experiments in metre, his best-known hymns have a sim
plicity of construction and unity of purpose likely to ensure
popularity. Before going further into his original merits as a com
poser, it may be useful to consider, as illustrative of his
character, the large amount of labour spent upon metrical
translations. His earliest efforts, as we have seen, were
in the shape of translations from the Latin, and one of
his last publications in 1866, just before his death, was a
translation of the " Stabat Mater."
It is very significant that, in spite of his consciousness
of original gifts, he should have thrown himself with un
tiring enthusiasm into the elucidation and reproduction
of other men's minds and works. It would not be so
remarkable in a student, who, however profound and
accurate his learning, yet felt himself deficient in powers
of expression, but with Neale to feel and to know was to

METRICAL TRANSLATIONS 211
speak and to write. It is therefore peculiarly interesting
to note the unselfish diligence with which he set aside
any projects of his own in order to make known the
great writers of the past to those who might otherwise
have been unacquainted with them. He was no mere
imitator. Accuracy of expression and perfection of form
might in themselves have failed to preserve the beauty and
the essence of a poet's conceptions. Like the artist of
whom Nathaniel Hawthorne writes, Neale's translations
had " that evanescent and ethereal life — that flitting frag
rance, as it were, of the originals — which it is as difficult
to catch and retain, as it would be for a sculptor to get
the very movement and varying colour of a living man
into his marble bust."
His acknowledged success was the result of religious
endeavour and reverent perceptions. Archbishop Trench,
to whom Neale over and over again pays a grateful tribute
of praise and admiration for his labours in the same field,
speaks with the authority of a distinguished expert as to
Neale's exceptional gifts as a translator. In his preface
to his " Sacred Latin Poetry," 1864, he affirms, that
"by patient researches in almost all European lands,
he has brought to light a multitude of hymns unknown
before ; in a treatise on sequences properly so called, has
for the first time explained their essential character, while
to him the English reader owes versions of some of the
best hymns, such as often successfully overcome the
almost insuperable difficulties which some of them present
to the translator."
The fact was that Neale was not merely a classical
scholar, he was thoroughly versed in the prevalent ideas
and liturgical customs of mediaeval times ; and one of
his first translations from the Latin is " Mediaeval Hymns
and Sequences," 1851 ; second edition, 1861 ; third edition
1863. "It is a magnificent thing," he says, "to pass along
the far-reaching vista of hymns, from the sublime self-
containedness of S. Ambrose to the more fervid inspira
tion of S. Gregory, the exquisite typology of Venantius

212 JOHN MASON NEALE
Fortunatus, the lovely painting of S. Damiani, the crystal
like simplicity of S. Notker, the scriptural calm of Godes-
calcus, the subjective loveliness of S. Bernard, till all
culminate in the full blaze of glory which surrounds Adam
of S. Victor, the greatest of them all."
This volume included " Hora Novissima," afterwards
separately published under the title of the "Rhythm of
Bernard de Morlaix, Monk of Cluny," and dedicated to
the Sisters of East Grinstead, as their favourite hymn.
His extracts from the three thousand lines of the original
poem are said to give little idea of the scope and pre
vailing tone of this wonderful composition, which con
tains a scathing condemnation and a bitter satire upon
the luxurious vices of the age. The well-known hymns,
"Jerusalem the Golden " and "Brief life is here our
portion," are bright with the jewelry of the New Jerusalem,
and echo in jubilant reiteration the triumphant song of
the redeemed ; but the dread of judgment and the terrors
of hell are left unexpressed in the translation, hidden
from ordinary readers in the "dactylic hexameters " of the
awestricken monk.1
But in the generality of Neale's translations he most
faithfully preserves the spirit, as well as the phrases and
frequently the precise metre, of the original. As we turn
over the leaves of his journal day after day, in the midst
of other records of business or correspondence, there come
such notes as these — February n, 185 1 : "In the coach,
"turned" (his expression for translating) " Sancte Dei
Preciose. 13th. At night turned Jesu quadragenarice.
22nd. At night turned Christe Salvator Omnium" and so
on, day after day, or rather night after night, for this
work was often accomplished in the quiet hours of dark
ness. Sometimes it seemed as if no obstacle could check
his natural fluency; such a perfected habit that, in later
years, with the Latin only before him, he would read the
lessons to the Sisters in English without the slightest
hesitation. This faculty, natural or cultivated, was once
1 See Julian's " Dictionary of Hymnology."

VISIT TO HURSLEY 213
exercised to surprise and mystify Keble, and is exemplified
by the following anecdote. When the Bishop of Salisbury
and Keble were compiling a hymn-book, Neale was invited
to assist them. He called at Hursley Parsonage, and, after
talking with his guest, Keble left the room to search for
papers, and was unexpectedly detained. When he returned,
Neale observed with a touch of reproach that he had
always understood the "Christian Year" to be entirely
original. Keble replied that it most certainly was. " Then
how do you explain this ? " and Neale drew forth a Latin
version of one of the poems, and placed it before him.
Keble, too simple-minded to be suspicious, was confounded,
and could only protest in distressed astonishment that he
had never seen the original before ; but, though relieved, he
can hardly have been less surprised when Neale explained
that he had taken advantage of his absence to turn the
English into Latin.
This ease, however, never led him into careless haste ;
and, in the case of some hymns, he would spend hours
and even days in seeking for an English word most
faithfully expressing the mind of the writer.
To many, who have no idea of their origin or antiquity,
how dear and familiar have his translations from the
Latin hymns become ! Sung in cathedrals or humble
village churches, hymns like the " Vexilla Regis " — " The
royal banners forward go," for Passion Sunday ; the long
triumphant Easter story, told in the three parts of " Light's
glittering morn bedecks the sky ; " " The Lamb's high
banquet called to share," for a Paschal Eucharist ; the
Alleluia hymn with its irrepressible gladness breaking out
in each verse —
" Sing Alleluia forth in duteous praise,
Ye citizens of Heav'n ; O sweetly raise
An endless Alleluia.
This is sweet rest for weary ones brought back,
This is glad food and drink which ne'er shall lack
An endless Alleluia."
The "O quanta qualia" — "O what the joy and the
glory must be," — and other equally well-known hymns,

214 JOHN MASON NEALE
too numerous to mention, seem to contradict Faber's
theory that translations could not express Saxon thoughts
and feelings, and would fail to satisfy the wants of the
poor; and whilst Faber was writing some of his most
beautiful and popular hymns to satisfy their needs, the-
compilers of the " Hymnal Noted " and others were turning
back to old sources, and seeking to make from them
" satisfactory provision for this important part of Christian
worship." The first part of the "Hymnal Noted" appeared
in 1852, and the second in 1854. Out of one hundred and
five hymns, ninety-four were Neale's translations from the
Latin ; and he always retained the pleasantest recollections
of his work in connection with this compilation.
" Some," he writes, " of the happiest and most instruc
tive hours of my life were spent in the sub-committee of
the Ecclesiological Society appointed for the purpose of
bringing out the Second Part of the ' Hymnal Noted.' It
was my business to lay before them the translations I
had prepared, and theirs to correct. The study which
this required drew out the beauties of the original in a
way which nothing else could have done ; and the friendly
collisions of various minds elicited ideas which a single
translator would in all probability have missed."
Later, he accomplished a yet more difficult task ; a
volume of translations from the " Hymns of the Eastern
Church," published in 1862.
"It is," he saysjin his preface to the first edition, "a
most remarkable fact, and one which shows how little
interest has been hitherto felt in the Eastern Church, that
these are literally, I believe, the only English versions of
any part of the treasures of Oriental hymnology ; " and he
begs his readers " not to forget the immense difficulty of
an attempt so perfectly new as the present, when I have
had no predecessors, and therefore could have no master."
It was a field in which Neale found himself especially
at home. The general character of Greek hymnology
is objective, breathing a spirit of self-forgetful praise or
rapt contemplation of the Divine attributes, with little

ORIGINAL HYMNS 215
reference to the needs, in prayer and penitence, of the
human soul ; and since its varying moods are for the
most part ignored, these fine productions have a certain
sameness, and the long canons, rich in jubilant repetitions,
..are set in one key. Neale's versions, though eminently
successful in embodying and expressing their spirit, do
not profess to be accurate reproductions of metres or
language ; " Come, ye faithful, raise the strain " x being the
only one amongst them which can be called exact. Some
of these Eastern hymns are more widely known and more
constantly sung than even those from Latin sources.
His original hymns have a freshness, and vigour, and
animating hopefulness calculated to strengthen and refresh
the weak and faint-hearted. Their authorship is often
unacknowledged, since he freely gave them for the use of
the Church and retained no copyrights.
To give but one instance, the verses —
i " Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed ?
' Come to Me,' saith One, ' and coming
Be at rest ! '
" If I still hold closely to Him,
What hath He at last ?
' Sorrow vanquished, labour ended,
Jordan past.' "
are familiar to many who have never heard his name,
and the same dominant note of triumph is sounded even
above the grave. " The prize, the prize secure !
The athlete nearly fell ;
Bare all he could endure,
And bare not always! well :
But he may smile at troubles gone
Who sets the victor garland on."
His hymns are for the most part free from sentimentality,
either of thought or diction. There is a sense of pressing
1 " Hymns Ancient and Modern," 133.

216 JOHN MASON NEALE
forward, a hurrying towards a goal, and notes of encourage
ment to cheer the toilworn traveller on his way. As Dr.
Littledale observed, there was a masculine strength in
his writings, the more remarkable as they were so often
addressed to women, and the same observation may be
applied with equal truth to his hymns. Perhaps one of
the most characteristic is the long sequence, "The foe
behind — the deep before,"1 with its varied metre, bursts
of triumph alternating with cradle songs of peace : —
" Seals assuring,
Guards securing,
Watch His earthly prison ;
Seals are shattered,
Guards are scattered,
Christ is risen ! "
And then, in soft, smooth accents —
" No longer must the mourners weep
Nor call departed Christians dead,
For death is hallowed into sleep
And every grave becomes a bed."
To be followed by the lines in which we hear the tramp
and song of the soldiers —
" Where our banner leads us
We may safely go ;
Where our Chief precedes us
We may face the foe.
" His right arm is o'er us,
He our Guide will be :
Christ hath gone before us,
Christians, follow ye ! "
A complete list of his hymns would fill many pages ;
his first collection,. " Hymns for Children," was published
in 1842, his thirteenth and last, "Original Sequences,
Hymns, and other Ecclesiastical Verses," being issued
under Dr. Littledale's direction after his death. Dr.
Littledale, indeed, had often collaborated with him in
1 " Hymns Ancient and Modern," 498.

CAROLS SUNG IN THE COLLEGE 217
this as in other literary undertakings. His own well-
known original hymns and translations from the Danish,
Swedish, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Italian bearing witness
to his knowledge and proficiency.
With the exception of his writings on the Eastern
Church, there was probably no part of his literary work
that, in retrospect, gave Neale such unmixed pleasure.
His hymns not only appealed to the scholar and the
student, but they quickened and inspired public and
private devotion. Little children learnt them by heart ;
the old and solitary turned to them for comfort. Christ
mas after Christmas his "Good King Wenceslaus" and
other carols have been sung by countless young and
happy voices in almost every land where the English
tongue is spoken. When his children grew older, he
would often gather them, and the servants and pensioners,
around him, and there, within the hall at Christmas,
or in Easter time in the quadrangle, the carols were sung
again to the familiar melodies, some original, some brought
and transcribed from long-past times and distant lands.
It is no wonder that, over and over again in his journals,
as he sends forth another volume of sacred verse, or notes
some message or letter of approval, he humbly thanks
God for what he has been enabled to accomplish in
these several ways for the good of the Church and her
members.

CHAPTER XIX
Travels in Holland and Denmark — Visit to the Bollandists — Tours
in Spain and Portugal — Political views — Memorial with regard
to Bishop Gobat's action in Palestine — Doctrine of the Real
Presence — First idea of the formation of S. Margaret's
Sisterhood.
In spite of Neale's love for Sackville College and the
peaceful meadow lands and wooded hills surrounding it,
it must at times have been a relief to shut the doors of
his study behind him, quit the daily round of duty within
those limited precincts, and, not in imagination only, seek
fresh scenes and wider horizons.
He not infrequently went abroad, often for the purpose
of studying the ecclesiology or history of the countries
he visited — a study always to him a form of recreation.
A tour in Holland was undertaken in 185 1, when he was
on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, to which paper he
contributed a series of letters on the Churches of Holland,
and the so-called Jansenist Church of Utrecht.
As usual when he was travelling, he was on the alert to
pick up every sort of information about the architecture,
history, habits, and customs of the country he was visiting,
not from guide-books and ordinary sources open to the
casual stranger, but from those qualified to speak with
authority. Utrecht he found to be —
" very like Cambridge, with its walks by the canal ; the
cathedral even now not 'less than Archangel.' The
curator of the library was very civil indeed, and I wrote
out four sequences and two hymns from two very scarce
books not existing in England. He also mentioned M.
Werkhoven, a Jansenist priest, as likely to tell me all that
218

TRAVELS IN HOLLAND AND DENMARK 219
I wanted to know. On him I called, and we had a long
conversation. They have three bishops, thirty priests,
and about five thousand laity. He told me there would
be no objection to my calling on M. Van Santen, the
Archbishop, so I went to his house and sent in my name,
and after a little time he came down. A most venerable-
looking old man he is : he has been Archbishop twenty-
six years. With him I had a long and very interesting
talk, and he gave me a book of his, the 'Declaration des
Ev£ques de Hollande adressee a toute l'Eglise Catholique.'
He has a very fine library. There are in Utrecht seven
Catholic, seven Protestant, and three Jansenist churches.'
The following year he was in Hamburg —
" a princely merchant city : the planted ramparts and the
hundreds and hundreds of vessels that fill the Elbe are
indeed a wonderful sight. I have been all over the town,
and never saw one which more strongly gave me the idea
of being wholly given up to idolatry of gold and silver.
There are only five churches for a population of a hundred
thousand ; and some of these, my guide told me, have not
fifty at morning-prayer on Sundays, and they all women.
They are quite the worst Lutherans I have seen."
In Denmark he had also a delightful tour, gathering
up memories of blue seas and green islands, afterwards
commemorated in the descriptive passages of his stories
for children —
"You can scarcely imagine the loveliness of those little
blue fiords running up between beech and pine groves,
reflecting those wonderful wooden belfries in which the
Danes delight, tall, ladder-like erections on the summit
of the town, with the little, shapeless, barn-like church
lying in the valley beneath ; a bright, sunny, rippling sea,
so blue that it maps itself out against the grey holms or
green islands that rise from its bosom, so shallow that
mile after mile you catch, on the golden sand beneath it,
the net-work of the sunbeams."
All this natural beauty must have been an open door
into a purer, higher region than that of religious strife,
though even here he was occupied with the ecclesiastical

220 JOHN MASON NEALE
problems of Denmark. He discourses upon them at
length, having become acquainted with some of the leading
theologians, and he has come to the conclusion —
"that what we call Christian, they call Catholic. They
do believe in the Incarnation, and in the Trinity, and in
the Real Presence — and that is about the amount of what
they mean. All this I must dilate upon in the Morning
Chronicle. It will not please Hope, I am afraid. How
ever, I have now quite made up my mind about the
Danes, and will fight against them to the knife."
In the August of this same year, he took his mother
out to Aix for her health — a deliberate journey on the
invalid's account, so that he saw a good deal by the way.
At Tournay he visited the cathedral, the grandest
Romanesque building he knew, and there, too, he was
able to copy out sequences in the library. Then to Brus
sels, where he found " a very religious picture of Giotto's,
and a great many irreligious ones of Rubens." And here
he had one of the most interesting interviews he ever
recorded — a memorable visit to the Bollandists. He ever
afterwards looked back to it with the greatest gratitude
and gratification.
" I went to the College," he writes, " being rather
doubtful whether I could see the Bollandist Library with
out an introduction. I was shown into a waiting-room
with a synopsis of the course of education at the College,
and I was told that the Bollandist Father Bosser would
come presently. I knew him by name well enough, and
he, it seems, knew me also. He is about forty ; and I also
saw Father Van Hecke — he is rather younger. The library
is in two oblong rooms, and very well arranged : Ecclesi
astical history — general, local, — Bulls, Councils, Fathers,
Schoolmen, Missals, Breviaries and miscellaneous books.
Down the middle of the room is a low book-case, filled with
cases for the succeeding days of the year, into each of which,
when one of the writers finds anything connected with that
day, he puts it by for future use. I saw the proofs of the
fifty-fifth volume; they have printed five hundred pages,
and have three proofs a week. They showed me several
letters of the ancient Bollandists and one of Bellarmine's.

VISIT TO THE BOLLANDISTS 221
Then they took all possible pains about sequences ; they
had, however, but two missals that I did not know. . . .
This was the first time that I ever had an opportunity of
comparing myself with a first-rate ecclesiastical scholar,
and I think we were mutually edified. I sat with Father
Bosser in his room (for they work in their rooms) some
time ; he was correcting a revise of the ' Life of S.
Vervanus.' I don't know when I have spent a pleasanter
afternoon. I marked such sequences as I have not, and
they will copy them out for me. I, on my part, am to
resolve an English question for them about the reign of
Stephen." There must have been something engaging in his
single-minded desire to gain fresh knowledge from every
possible quarter ; it overcame his natural shyness, and sent
him eager and unabashed into unknown places and the
presence of strangers, and we repeatedly find a record of
the greeting and welcome he received.
The Bollandist Fathers were exceedingly civil. The
curators of the libraries gladly displayed their books, the
superior of the Beguinage at Mecklin was all courtesy;
Dutch ecclesiastics and Greek priests explained their
views and liturgies. From one he gains a sight of some
ancient manuscript, from another an interpretation of a
disputed passage ; a rare missal is shown, or a copy
furnished of a sequence, in kind and willing response to
his acquisitive inclinations. To accurate knowledge, in
conjunction with impetuous research, some ebullitions of
frank egotism might well be pardoned.
No one could have been better fitted to receive oral
instruction in foreign countries, so great was his capacity
for getting into relations with the inhabitants, his linguistic
powers facilitating mutual understanding.
In 1853, he accepted Mr. Murray's invitation to write a
"Hand-book of Portugal." He was anxious to explore
the comparatively little known ecclesiology of that country,
and his first tour was made in the congenial society of
Bishop Forbes of Brechin, the Rev. H. L. Jenner, afterwards
Bishop of Dunedin, and Mr. J. H. Rogers.
He wrote long letters from Portugal, some of a dry and

222 JOHN MASON NEALE
technical character, for the Ecclesiologist, others full of the
strong lights and shades, the little coves and fishing villages,
the red-grey ruined buildings, the glittering brooks and
dark Basque mountains — a rambling itinerary, to be sent
home. It evidences close and detailed observation of the
natural features of Spain and Portugal —
"the high plateau of Castille, more colourless than the
Cambridgeshire fens — it might be drawn with chalk and
ashes, it gives the effect of one perpetual February after
noon ; the vast plains of grass with low hills skirting the
horizon on the road to Valladolid ; the way from Foro,
through valleys among bare sandcliffs, and then through
pleasant woods or rather chases, the air everywhere per
fumed with the may, which here is most lovely ; lupins,
and yellow jasmines, and the night-blowing stock, making
the hedge banks beautiful ; a kind of holm oak with
bunches of yellow flowers, and the Judas tree with its
bright pink blossoms, scattered over the common. The
hoopoes, too, with their enormous crests, and bright green
lizards, studded with all the colours of precious stones,
served to remind us how far we were from England."
Again, in the wildest part of Portugal they " passed over a
high table-land, covered with gum cistus in full flower,
acre after acre, and in the barer parts, under every group
of ash trees or elms was the wild peony, and the whole
landscape quite purple with a kind of lavender with very
large flowers."
Altogether another scene lay before them on descending
to Miranda, looking down upon the Douro from the top of
a rocky hill : " the grand scarped mountains on the other
side, their bluff bold heads, the black foaming river dash
ing from a ravine on the left, the confusion in which the
wild peaks are tossed together, the abrupt rocks towering
up all around," rendering the descent one of the finest
things he saw in Portugal.
The discomforts of travel in these unfrequented routes
were of no account in Neale's eyes. The Bishop was
compelled at times to forego his company, but in the
poorest places and dirtiest inns he always found the
greatest civility and kindness, and the Portuguese as

TOUR IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL 223
inquisitive and affectionate as children. One of his resting-
places he describes as an example of what travellers may
expect : a two-storied house, with wide-spreading gable
and projecting balcony, the entrance to the upper story
being by an exterior staircase. In the lower were stables,
hen-coops, and pig-sties. No wonder that the apartment
into which the travellers were thrust swarmed with vermin.
The tiles, fortunately, were loose and open to the sky, and
the mules were seen littered below through the crevices
in the floor. Yet Neale cheerfully observes that the
greatest hindrance to sleep was the mule-bells ; and by
the light of a candle, stuck in a bottle, he courageously
partook of the only supper provided, six small fishes
swimming in rancid oil, a dish his companions more
discreetly declined.
What were such trifling inconveniences as these com
pared to the mountain ravines, the moon-rises and sunsets,
the chestnut groves and wild vines of that untrodden land,
not to speak of the cities and cathedrals he had come
to study !
From Burgos he had written : " I do thank God that
we have seen Burgos Cathedral." And they had all made
up their minds to see Palencia, at whatever cost ; for its
cathedral " almost rivals that of Burgos." They found the
churches there " most excessively dark, the windows few,
high, and small ; wonderfully effective and religious, but
exceedingly gloomy ; a sort of Philip II. style of religion."
Then on to Valladolid, once the great school of Castilian
art, "the cathedral the design of Herrera, the architect
of the Escurial, an immense Grecian pile, beautified by
Churriguera." Here, as usual, he made friends, and
found all doors readily opened at his pleasure. He was
introduced (probably by some chance acquaintance) to the
Rector of the Philippine College, spared in the dispersion
of religious Orders as a school of clergy for the Philippine
Islands. The Master of the Novices took him over the
buildings; the sub-Rector joined company, and described
the desecrated convents and the present condition of the
Order; and, still the indefatigable inquirer, restlessly

224 JOHN MASON NEALE
anxious to see and hear, goes on to talk to the Jesuits
at the English College, and finds his way to the Museum
Library, with its collection of fourteen thousand books
upon theology, the melancholy result of suppressed
monasteries. No missals! but a Palencia breviary of
1545, and a Compostella one (1569) from which he got
some hymns. Then, reluctantly leaving these precious
relics of the past and his agreeable companions behind
him, on through a region of olives to Braganga. Here,
through the treasurer of the provinces, who speaks English,
he obtains an entry into the Bishop's Palace, containing
a good library, but again no missals! Nor were they
content to pass by more or less well-known tracks from
one town to another. They crossed the mountains, rested
at country villages, Neale always ready to make a jest of
disasters. He found the people, though courteous, some
what grave, for on one occasion he notes that for the
first time they heard a child's laugh ! Yet the obstacles
encountered were real enough ; mules were refractory,
guides not always reliable and more easily influenced by
fears of mountain spectres and spell-haunted regions than
by the reasonable desire of their employers to reach their
destination by the shortest road. Even Neale, on a pitch-
dark night, slowly making his way down a steep rocky
descent, whilst the rain came down in torrents and a terror-
stricken peasant proved an uncertain guide, was obliged to
confess that he had no time to recall the apostolic founda
tion and the many ecclesiastical memories of Braga.
The following year (1854), when he returned to Portugal,
he had another experience, with an element of unauthorized
adventure, well calculated to gratify the natural tastes of
an author of fiction.
He was with some friends at Vigo when an alarming
outbreak of cholera interfered with their plan of travel.
Matters were looking very serious ; all communications
with Valenga were forbidden, and the whole extent of the
frontier strictly guarded. They called a council of war,
and, rejecting two other plans involving long delay or an
ignominious retreat to England, determined to force the

AN EVASION 225
lines, and pass, according to their prearranged project,
into Portugal. This, Neale somewhat inappropriately
remarked, required " great caution, for the last man who
did so was shot at three times, though not touched."
Under these circumstances, "caution," one might have
supposed, would have dictated another course of action.
But, to Neale, a voice of warning was apt to fall upon
deaf ears, and he gaily embarked upon the enterprise,
undeterred by any respect for legal prohibitions and
inspirited by a friendly and substantial alliance, hastily
cemented, with the principal smuggler on the Minho,
"a very clever fellow," whose principles were not likely
to interfere with the successful accomplishment of their
designs. The plans were laid with the foresight of those
accustomed to circumvent unreasonable officials. They
were to embark at an early hour, and drop down the river,
as if to land at Guardia, on the Spanish side of the mouth.
A boat had been engaged to come out with two other men,
and also drop down the river, as if going out to sea —
" This boat will join us : we take one man on board, and
our smuggler " (here, it is evident, he cannot suppress a
touch of pride in his confederate) "our smuggler takes his
place, and goes on shore without exciting attention. There
he is to bribe the one or two guards we shall have to pass,
so as to let us go by safely ; and we are then to be landed
in a lonely part of the sand. Here we must leave our
baggage in some cottage, and walk on till we meet with
mules, which can fetch it to us at Vianna, where we hope to
sleep. This plan was arranged by the superintendent of
the smugglers, who is a woman, and very famous here."
Again, we seem to detect a note of triumph ; for no
one can say that he is in unknown company, and such
an accomplice almost guarantees success. He thinks this
plan "very feasible, though of course the guards may
refuse to be bribed ; " and, if so, he does not " know what
will be the next plan."
However carefully concerted, the evasion was not to
be carried out without encountering reverses. They made
a fortunate start at the appointed hour, but "it was
Q

226 JOHN MASON NEALE
curious to see the guards, thick on the Portuguese side;
and once, when we went down to the shore to deliver a
message, they came down with their guns, ready to fire."
Nor was this the only incident to enliven the tedium of
the voyage. The elements conspired against them. It
blew fiercely, " the river swelled like the sea," and it became
doubtful if they could proceed at all. The storm increased
in violence, and when the boat put in to get fresh hands,
" the guards were there with their guns, and we dared not
go in." But it was not in vain that Neale had put his faith
in smugglers. Their captain, guessing how it would be,
came up the river in his boat, and directed them to run
ashore at a little village called Peixas, where he had
contrived to arranjado the guards less obdurate than their
fellows ; and, to such good purpose, that on landing they
found a deserted beach and not a man or a gun in sight.
Their trials were not yet over, for, though horses were
procured, it was six hours before they arrived at their
destination — the horses staggering under the violence of
the storm, the weary travellers drenched to the skin and
without baggage, but Neale, at least, by no means de
pressed, valiant smugglers and corruptible guards having
alike combined to give him a pleasant taste of unlawful
risks safely run.
It must have been hard to come back to find malicious
tongues at home still insinuating charges against him,
even asserting that he had appropriated the funds of the
College; though he had already, in 1855, spent £2000
upon it, and was receiving a salary of £28 a year. Very
few of his letters give any indication of what he suffered
from rumours which, though easily and authoritatively
refuted, left upon many people's minds the unjust im
pression of an unproved accusation. One letter, therefore,
to an intimate friend, upon discouragement under trials
(though it belongs to a later year — 1856), may fitly be
quoted here.
"It is," he writes, "mere natural feeling, and has
nothing to do with a most real and earnest love of our
Lord.

DISCOURAGEMENT 227
" I will show you that I only say to you what I say
to myself. I think even you have no idea — and yet you
have more idea than any one else — how much I suffer
from this persecution against the College ; how it distracts
my thoughts in prayer ; how it hinders my rest ; how (for
I am speaking to you without any reserve) it would tempt
me, unless I were very watchful, to think that God is
suffering me to be tempted above what I am able to bear.
But, though all this is so, I am not discouraged, as though
my feeling the thing so bitterly were any reason for my
believing that I were less in earnest in serving God. It is
merely natural temperament. ... So I tell myself to take
courage, notwithstanding all these feelings."
No two letters could better portray the distinct, or
as some might have thought, the incompatible qualities
of his strong personality, bewildering and dismaying
the ordinary observer, by the sharp contrasts it pre
sented. From Portugal we have a letter breathing in
every line the exuberant spirit of a careless school
boy ; and here, again, from East Grinstead, the chastened
utterances of a soul in spiritual distress. This distress
might readily have become mentally disabling. Those
who have experienced it know how a daily, hourly,
irritating pain lessens energy and robs life of all its zest.
This for successive years he was fated to suffer, and yet
he was as eager as ever to embrace new opportunities, to
throw himself into every fresh scheme, to be absorbed in
his studies, to plan literary work of various kinds, and
write at high pressure for newspapers or periodicals;
prepared to teach his children, and minister to his small
flock at East Grinstead, and, at the same time, legislate
for the Church at large ; revise Scotch Offices, attend
committees and English Church Union Meetings, and take
a keen and well-informed interest in politics from the
liberal point of view. Upon this subject we find him
advocating discretion, and deprecating the fierce attacks
upon Lord Derby in the Morning Chronicle. He predicted
such animosity would ruin its circulation in the country.
" Hope, who knows as much of country clergy, as I do

228 JOHN MASON NEALE
of members of the House of Commons, will not, or cannot,
see the danger. . . . Remember if I, a free trader and
hating Lord Derby, can see a good deal of force in the
general feeling, what must those who see in Lord Derby
not only their own politics, but, as they think, a Church
ministry — what must they think of this, especially when
the Church is brought forward in a political article — e.g.
that offensive one, persuading the clergy from their
pecuniary interests to be free traders. I plainly see I shall
be between two fires. Hope will be disgusted that I don't
swear by the Morning Chronicle, Newland, Gresley and Co.
that I don't swear at it. I must do what I can to keep
the peace — a new office for me."
In 1853 he was engaged about another matter in favour
of peace, though purchased by the discomfiture of some
dissentients. This was the protest signed by a large and
influential body of clergy and laity against Bishop Gobat's
unjustifiable proselytizing action in the Holy Land. The
committee for drawing up the document was a very strong
one, and Neale's feeling about it (partly no doubt the
result of his attachment to the Greek Church) is embodied
in a letter to Webb. " I never before had anything that
seemed to me so important as this." There is no full list
of those who drew up the memorial, but it was signed by
several bishops; and Keble, Dr. Mills, Charles Marriott,
Dr. Pusey, Pearson, and others assisted in framing it.
In reference to the part he had taken, Eugene Popoff
wrote, in an undated letter, —
" I wish you from my heart every kind of success. At
least, there will remain some shadow of the link which
might possibly connect the present extremities.
" As for the reconciliation you mention, I am quite at
a loss. The Westerns — indeed civilized but, suffer me
this expression, too much materialized — won't and cannot
sympathize with our traditions and history. What can be
then expected ? Thy Will be done."
Popoff had also corresponded with him with regard to
the definition given in his history of the doctrine of
the Eastern Church, respecting our Lord's Presence in

DOCTRINAL QUESTIONS 229
the Blessed Sacrament. Neale, though he had made a
painstaking study of the question, had failed in the exact
orthodox expression of the faith, and, at the request of
the Eastern authorities, some pages were revised and
rewritten. Upon this same subject he had difficulties with the
Bishop of Winchester, who took exception to a passage
in " Readings to the Aged." On this occasion, Neale fell
back with confidence upon the teaching of the Primitive
Church and the Catechism.
"We ought, of course, to keep from a dispute upon
this point if we can," he writes. " If we do come to it we
shall have this advantage, however, that we can bring
forward, such clear dogmatic expressions in the early
Church — so much clearer than we could about Baptism
or Absolution." He cannot, he affirms, be condemned
" without condemning S. Cyril ; that is, the ruling of the
Primitive Church, and men professing to be orthodox must
be on my side when I use the words of the Catechism."
These important doctrinal questions and agitating con
troversies, in conjunction with literary work which often
kept him at his desk for eight or ten hours out of the
twenty-four, might have been supposed to absorb his
whole attention. He had gradually been drawn more and
more within the widening circle of the Anglo- Catholic
party. It had awakened all his chivalrous instincts and
his keenest sympathies; not, indeed, for an isolated Com
munion, but for the Church of Christ herself, invincible in
strength, endowed with the principle of everlasting life ;
suffering in her members, wounded in the house of her
friends, with Lazarus at her gates and Dives in her palaces,
her Lord Himself to so many still a stranger, ignored or
neglected in the person of His poor.
Neale's pitiful sense of the embittering contradistinctions
between the condition of the wealthy and the indigent, first
instigated what was destined to be the great practical work
of his life, the foundation and supervision of S. Margaret's
Sisterhood, East Grinstead.
He conceived the floating idea of some such Order in

230 JOHN MASON NEALE
1854. It marked an altogether new phase in his existence,
and from this time onwards his aims and efforts were
concentrated upon its development. Dreams of the past,
historic personages, creations of his fancy in the realms of
fiction, literary schemes of every sort and kind, forming
henceforth, as it were, but a background to the spiritual
fabric of S. Margaret's Convent, as it was built up in the
foreground.

CHAPTER XX
Conditions of rural life — Neale's idea of a nursing Sisterhood— Advice
from various quarters — Training and reception of Sisters — Their
work amongst the poor — Beginning of community life at East
Grinstead.
"Sackville College in East Grinstead," to quote
Neale's words, " stands on very high ground on the
eastern edge of the town, itself a city set on a hill, and
overlooks a vast, and, for the most part, wild extent of
country — from the Surrey hills, round by Tunbridge
Wells, to Crowborough, and so right over to Ashdown
Forest, now a wild waste of heath and down, where the
trees have been recklessly felled for timber ; . . . the
parishes of East Grinstead, Hartfield, Withy ham, Rother-
field, Buxted, Ardingley, West Hoathly, and one or two
chapelries abut upon it, but can hardly be said to pene
trate it."
The inhabitants had few opportunities for public worship
or instruction, nor were the resident clergy to blame. The
scattered farms and isolated cottages were often miles
distant from a church : it was difficult adequately to supply
the needs of the population ; and still more difficult in
casual visits to awaken religious instincts in those too long
accustomed to dispense with the Sacraments and other
means of grace. Their bodily wants were not more easily
supplied. In times of sickness, doctors, medicine and
attendance were hardly obtained, and, in many instances,
unavailable. And when Neale looked out from his study
window over the wide expanse of country, the crying
physical necessities and the spiritual destitution of its
inhabitants pressed heavily upon his heart.
It might have been said that it was not his concern.
231

232 JOHN MASON NEALE
He had his hands already full of worthy work, engrossing
occupations, domestic interests — for his children were now
older, and claimed much of his attention. These stray
sheep were of other men's flocks, his restricted ministry
could not affect them : he might have been exonerated
from any responsibility so far as they were concerned.
But it was not under this aspect that the matter presented
itself to him. No parochial boundaries could set limits to
Christian charity ; no prudential considerations or personal
preoccupations be allowed to outweigh the primary duty
of Christian ministry. In every circumstance and position
in life he was ready with rash self-sacrificing generosity to
constitute himself his brother's keeper. He felt compelled
to share at whatever cost the burden and heat of the day.
The cottages were badly built and unsanitary ; when sick
ness and fever laid its hand upon the peasantry they had
no defence. In those picturesque, innocent-looking, white
washed hamlets the morality was on a lower level than in
a city slum, and deadly evil lay hidden from sight in the
lovely sequestered woods and lanes, as a poison may be
concealed beneath the fair semblance of a flower. The
same spirit prompting Charles Kingsley's uncompromising
denunciations of conditions of life under which social virtue
might hardly be maintained ; the fire of indignation that
scorched the pages of "Yeast," and "Alton Locke," set
Neale's heart aflame with a desire to save the souls and
bodies of these his benighted and oppressed compatriots in
the kingdom of grace.
Naturally his mind reverted to the methods of mediaeval
times. Modern parochial organizations and philanthropic
efforts were not then formulated and developed. The
charity dispensed from the rectory door or the squire's
gate scarcely touched the evil, though in many instances
it strengthened a bond of mutual dependence and affection ;
extraordinary means, it seemed, must be employed, if any
radical change were to be effected or lasting impression
made. No wonder that Neale recalled the itinerant labours of
S. Francis and his companions; the missions carried on

REVIVAL OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 233
and the conversions wrought by S. Francis de Sales in
remote rural districts ; S. Vincent de Paul with his con
fraternities of women to fulfil the details of actual
service : and the longer he pondered the question the more
evident it became that, the ordinary parochial machinery
being insufficient, some other means must be found for the
efficient accomplishment of the work. Something like a
body of preaching friars, he wrote, was needed, could they
be found ; and, if not, what would come nearest to them ?
It was at this time that two persons who seemed
especially fitted for arduous and self-sacrificing work
amongst the poor, with whose aims and capabilities he
had been long acquainted, offered themselves as ready to
engage in such works of mercy with a lifelong devotion.
And a few weeks later, the daughter of the aged Rector
of Rotherfield, who had an intimate knowledge of the
conditions of life and character of the rustic population,
came forward with a similar desire to be entirely con
secrated to this service, as soon as she was free to leave
her home.1
This then was the first, and, as it seemed, insignificant
beginning of a Sisterhood, now embracing important branch
Houses in ever-increasing number.2
The revival of the religious life in England was one
natural result of the Tractarian movement ; it is both " a
holocaust and a consecration," and, as such, it appealed to
those who, touched by its spirit, would escape from the
1 She was the first Mother Superior of the Sisterhood.
2 S. Saviour's Orphanage, Hitchin ; S. Margaret's Mission, Cardiff ;
S. Catherine's Home, Ventnor ; S. Margaret's House of Mercy,
Roath ; S. Margaret's Convalescent Home, Plymouth ; S. Margaret's
Orphanage, Middle School, and Bishop's College, Ceylon ; S. Alban's,
Worcester (Home for Girls) ; Home of the Good Shepherd (Boys'
Orphanage), Hoar Cross, Burton-on-Trent ; The Sisters' House, S.
Columba's, Sunderland ; S. Cuthbert's Mission, Newcastle-on-Tyne ;
S. Barnabas' Cottage Hospital, Saltash ; S. Margaret's Rest, Durham ;
Free Home for the Dying, Clapham ; S. Margaret's, Johannesburg ;
S. Margaret's, Chichester (Mission and Rescue Work) ; S. Mary's,
Dundee. There are also three daughter Houses — S. Margaret's of
Scotland, Aberdeen ; S. Saviour's Priory, Haggerston ; S. Margaret's
Home, Boston, U.S.A.

234 JOHN MASON NEALE
earthly exigencies and worldly ties that set bounds to
self-sacrifice. It had found its expression throughout the
ages of the Church's history in ways as various as the
notes of a musical instrument, which may yet, when struck
by the master's hand, be combined in one harmonious chord.
Neale was versed in the chronicles of the monastic orders
and the lives of the Saints, but at this moment he was
inspired not so much by the desire to restore conventual
discipline as by an impulse of pity to raise the fallen,
convert the unbelieving, and minister to the sick. .,
Miss Nightingale's noble work in the Crimeahad
for ever silenced those who would have contended that
delicately nurtured women were incapable of bearing
physical hardships, or that voluntary work, undertaken
from the highest motives, had not a special value of its
own. But there remained an undefined prejudice against
feminine incursions into the field of philanthropy ; joined
to a dread of new obligations with a tendency to break
old-established domestic ties, and invade the inner circle of
homes and families.
The Sisterhoods already founded had undertaken peni
tentiary work. For this it was conceded that those living
apart from ordinary social relationships and in a religious
community were peculiarly fitted ; but the work Neale
had in his mind — the active mission and nursing work
of a Sister of Charity in the Church of England — had
hitherto been unattempted, and indeed considered to be
impracticable. The Rule of S. Margaret's, East Grinstead, was founded
upon that of the Visitation of S. Francis de Sales before
he converted his community into a cloistered order ; but
it had its origin in the principles governing and animating
the Society of S. Vincent de Paul. It will be remembered,
S. Vincent's first confraternities of women were framed
upon the simplest and most elastic lines — what we should
now call district visiting, parochial relief, and nursing,
sanctified by religious observances and subject to clerical
direction. Like Neale, his object at first was to provide
for the needs of neglected rural districts, the first members

S. VINCENT DE PAUL 235
being persons still living in the world, who enrolled them
selves for the purpose of giving their spare time, with the
sanction of the parochial clergy, to the relief of the sick
and poor. The difficulties incident to a system of district
visiting very soon arose. Zeal waxed cold, domestic duties
intervened, unforeseen engagements supplied hindrances or
excuses, and it was not left to the ladies of the twentieth
century to discover that it was culpable to run personal
risks of infection, and that uncongenial duties involving
inconvenient discomforts might be delegated to their paid
domestics. In fact, the organized system broke down,
and, as so often happens, apparent failure led the way to
unlooked-for success. These troubles directed S. Vincent's
mind to the enrolment of those who could devote their
whole heart and time to the work ; and with a few peasant
women, gathered under a pious Superior, there was first
formed a Community of the Sisters of Charity, whose
devoted, world-wide labours have made his name known
and honoured in every place and generation.
" Instead of a convent," so their founder wrote, " they
have only the dwellings of the sick ; for a cell, some poor
chamber, often a hired one ; for a chapel, the parish
church ; for a cloister, the streets of a town ; for enclosure,
obedience ; for a gate, the fear of God ; for a veil, holy
modesty." No words could better describe the spirit which
Neale desired should govern his community ; but the
internal rule was in parts identical with that framed by
S. Francis de Sales for his nuns, and the instructions the
Founder gave to the S. Margaret's Sisters breathe the
same spirit as that of S. Francis' " Entretiens Spirituels."
It must not be supposed that he had endeavoured
to transplant into England a system of foreign growth,
without regard to national characteristics and English
habits. He had long and anxiously pondered the matter
and taken counsel with those who, in his own Communion,
were best fitted to give him advice. He had been in
communication with the Rev. T. T. Carter, of Clewer;

236 JOHN MASON NEALE
with W. Butler, of Wantage ; with the Mother (Harriet
Monsell) of the Clewer Sisterhood ; moreover, he had
taken steps to ascertain which hospital would be most
likely to give the requisite training in nursing to any who
might offer themselves for the work.
"At Westminster," he writes, "I succeeded. The
house committee at once passed a resolution, granting
those we might send admission, and the senior physician
and the chaplain both evinced the greatest interest. While
I was meditating on the question of lodgings, comes a
spontaneous offer from Shepherd, Master of the S. John's
House, to take them in there. . . . By this time (February i,
1855) I had a pretty certain prospect of seven or eight, but
I wanted more. I wrote jto Mrs. Sidney Herbert, asking
if there were any list of applicants for the East, and, if so,
whether she would give me the names of some who would
be likely to do for me. I saw her, and she gave me a first
list. . . . Out of that list I think I shall get two, and I may
get more. The week after next, all well, we send the first
to Westminster to be trained. . . . When there will be
enough, or what will constitute enough, to make them into
a community I cannot say. ... I have given you very
little idea of the eagerness of co-operation I have met
with. . . . But you have little idea of the constant hard
work and driving it takes ; it requires one's shoulder to be
always at the wheel." x
Though, as he said, sympathy was widely evoked, and
voluntary contributions came in from all quarters from
those who desired to further the work, it was a great
venture of faith, not only on the part of the founder, but
also of those who co-operated with him. It was an
experiment of which the not improbable failure might
have far-reaching and disastrous consequences. Yet he
had valued encouragement from others most fitted by their
hardly won experience to raise his hopes of ultimate
success. Lord Salisbury wrote from Hatfield : " A scheme for
organizing a Society of Nursing Sisters, under proper
regulations, would undoubtedly be one in which I should ,
1 This letter is given in extenso on p. 334.

LETTERS OF ADVICE 237
be most happy to join, and I should be really glad to
assist such an establishment as far as lies in my power ; "
though he added his fear lest the project, if carried out by
Neale, might be made the ground for another attack upon
Sackville College. Mr. Bennett, of Frome, wrote :
" I am sure you will see that I can do no more than
fully sympathize with the good work you have in hand.
If I had some of your Sisters here I could give them work
enough ; but the name of a Sister would set the town in a
blaze." The Mother of Clewer was full of strong, cheerful
encouragement. "I most fully enter into the value of such a plan of
sisterhood work as you propose," she writes, " and shall be
very thankful if I can in any way aid you. ... I believe
much the wisest course is to say little of one's plans ; to
make up your mind very fully beforehand what you want
to have, and what to accomplish, and to prepare as care
fully as you can the rules on which the Sisterhood is to
work, and then let people join, or not join, as they like.
We have now in our part of the Church gained experience
enough to start new works with a certain degree of
fixedness, which will make it easier to carry on anything
that suggests itself."
Father Benson, the Superior of Cowley, was com
municated with, and wrote a long reply, suggesting altera
tions to some of the proposed rules. These he makes
with " great diffidence," and only because he is asked for
advice; "for the rules appear to him very good, and he
hopes the Sisterhood may have every success." The Rev.
W. Butler forwarded him the Wantage rules, and added —
" My impression is that you have too many, especially
for a beginning. Rules should shape themselves as the
work goes on and need occurs. With good people, such
as Sisters of Mercy are likely to be, one can risk a little,
and wait to buy experience. Have you seen the rules of
S. Saviour's, Regent Park? They are short sermons,
expansions of S. Augustine's, which of course you know.
The advantage of the Sermonic rule is that the reading of
it gives a devotional atmosphere to the house."

238 JOHN MASON NEALE
From the Assistant Superior of Clewer he also received
much useful advice, and he was very fortunate in secur
ing for his first Superior one fitted by exceptional gifts
to attract, train, and govern those committed to her care.1
It was a small, and as some might have supposed, a
doubtful and unformed beginning. Until the end of 1855
the Sisters did not live in community. The seed was
sown, as it were, in the open field. No scrutiny was
shunned from ecclesiastical and possible hostile autho
rities. In the May of that year, Neale wrote —
" The Sisterhood was brought up at the meeting of the
Rural Deans at Chichester. There was some little dis
putation about it ; on which Otter, the Archdeacon, who is
for the plan, said that the numbers were too great to allow
of fair discussion then, and that it had better stand over.
The Bishop approved of what he had done, but told Sir
H. Thompson, whom we had made our promoter, that
whenever the rules came before him he would give all the
help he could. If, as Sir H. T. says, he then stated that
I was at the bottom of it, this was very favourable."
A few months later he mentions that the Archdeacon
was busy with the rules, and that the Bishop had asked
very kindly about the Sisterhood.
Impelled by his enthusiastic conceptions of what the
life of a Sister of Charity might be, he had drawn to
gether those who, though desirous of entering upon the
religious life, hardly understood what that life involved.
This was the frank admission of one of the first members
of the community. The Founder himself was its in
spiration and its guide. The literal acceptance of gospel
precepts involved in his eyes a service, not alone of theo
retical self-surrender, but of actual unmeasured self-
sacrifice, to which all things should be possible and all
things easy. He fully realized the dangers besetting
external work, and compiled for the Sisters' use when on
duty devotions for every hour of the day and night : " A
Horology of the Passion," "The Hours of our Lord's
1 Miss Ann Gream, daughter of the Rector of Rotherfield.

CORPORAL WORKS OF MERCY 239
Passion ; those of the Holy Ghost," and a book of medi
tations and prayers, entitled " The Virgin's Lamp." He
was convinced, as he wrote to one of the Sisters, " that if
we are not really living nearer to God the more we engage
in His outward service, it will bring a curse on us instead
of a blessing." At the same time, there was an especial
joy in performing those corporal works of mercy repugnant
to a self-indulgent nature and a luxurious age, which are
the consistent exemplification of Christian ethics.
To these duties the Sisters went forth, with what might
have been termed an undue disregard of conventionalities,
and an indiscreet zeal, to share, as far as lay in their
power, the sorrows, pains, and poverty of those to whom
they ministered. It is evident that Neale rejoiced at
every fresh demand made upon them, and at the pressing
cases demanding desperate remedies, justifying the steps
he had taken.
The low, .marshy, and unwholesome valleys of the
Rothe and Eden in Kent are frequently subject to fever
epidemics. Here the Sisters gained their earliest experi
ences. At any hour of the day or night they might
be summoned to a fever-stricken family, from whom the
neighbours had fled in dread of infection. Day after day
the nursing Sisters lived in a wretched hovel, in the midst
of a flooded swamp. The whole work of the house, the
washing and cooking added to the actual duties of a
nurse, devolving upon her as the sole person in the cottage
besides her patients. Some instances may be given from
Neale's record of the work accomplished : —
"Application was made for a Sister in a case of
diphtheria. She went instantly. It was of a most malig
nant kind — spread through the household, and in five days
she had, in that one household, attended four deathbeds.
Again, yesterday afternoon, a message that Mr. Whyte had
sent for a Sister for the most malignant case of scarlet
fever he ever saw at Ashurst Wood. We agreed that
Sister K. should go. I went up to the cottage first The
mother, a widow out of her senses (with anxiety, not
disease) ; a boy, and two girls, wildly delirious, only kept
alive by port and brandy ; all the cases Mr. Whyte thought

240 JOHN MASON NEALE
desperate. I back to town, ordered a fly, and Sister K.
was off in half an hour. The woman in one of her lucid
intervals said, ' I will not have any ladies that worship
images in my house.' However, Mr. Whyte talked very
reasonably to her, and finally she consented."
It would have been no wonder if even prejudices
against " image worship " had been dispelled when, though
the next day her boy lay dead, the Sister had nursed the
other children back to life.
Testimonies as to the Sisters' unwearied kindness and
skill poured in from every quarter, from rectors, doctors,
and the patients themselves.
" On Saturday," the Vicar of Cuckfield writes, " I was
called to a sad case of scarlet fever in my parish. On
visiting the house, I found six children suffering under the
most malignant form of that disease, with no mother to
take care of them, she being in a lunatic asylum. The
cottage could only be compared to a bad Irish cabin.
The poor father sat in one corner of the room, with a child
four years old in his lap, in the last stage of disease, the
picture of helplessness. I soon found that no one in the
parish could be got in to help them, and I sent for one of
the Sisters. They received my note at nine on Saturday
evening, and at nine on Sunday morning one of the most
efficient nurses I ever met was at the Vicarage, who went
immediately to the house, where the state of things may
be imagined when I believe that with six children nothing
had been washed for a fortnight ! The man was a Baptist,
of a most peculiar temper ; but everything in the house,
the man included, became different a few hours after the
Sister made her appearance, and from that time to this
she has never left the house, working incessantly by day
and by night, with the most entire cheerfulness and kind
ness, in a place where there is scarcely room to lie down.
The poor child had not been baptized. Sister A. did not
interfere in this matter at all. She left it to me ; but her
kindness towards the man had, I doubt not, a considerable
effect in inducing him to permit me to baptize the child,
which he did. ... I believe the work is one calculated,
under God's blessing, to do more to advance the interests
of the Church than almost any other now being carried on,

CLERICAL TESTIMONY 241
appealing, as it does, so directly to the kind and good feel
ings of the people."
Once more, another parish priest writes —
" A poor girl, servant to her bedridden sister, was ill
with fever at Edenbridge. I found her lying in a state of
unconsciousness ; no one was attending on her. No nurse
could be procured from the parish. . . . The girl was
absolutely dying from sheer neglect. . . . The husband
seemed disposed first to try if he could procure a nurse
from the union. He could not understand how a lady
could undertake such an office ; how she could live in a
cottage, and partake of cottagers' fare, and I dare say
thought she would rather be in the way than any assist
ance. So I sent him up to Tunbridge to the Union, but
in vain. The next day, therefore, I sent over to S. Mar
garet's, and he brought back Sister  . Until the follow
ing Friday, the whole household work — cooking, scrubbing
floors, etc., including attendance on two sick women, and
washing clothes left unwashed for a fortnight, devolved on
her alone, for the dread of the fever had by this time
increased ; — incessant labour and watching day and night.
On Friday they kindly sent another Sister to her aid. . . .
A few days after this the poor girl died. The doctor, then
said, ' Had either of you been here from the first, in all
probability this life would have been saved.' After the
death a coffin was sent from the union, but the bearer
would only leave it at the outer door of the garden. . . .
This work the Sisters had also to do unaided. They con
veyed the coffin up the difficult staircase, placed the body
in it, and screwed it down."
It would be easy to multiply these reports vividly
portraying the application of the high ideal the Founder set
before his small band of Sisters. These few are gathered
from contemporaneous letters or records. All was to be
done in unconscious simplicity, without any sense of
unusual or heroic effort. Of one Sister, exposed to a
specially dangerous trial, he wrote that he found her just
as he would have wished : " not enthusiastic but cheerful."
This service of the poor was not only rich in spiritual
blessings, but one that inspired him with gladness and
awakened all his tenderest feelings. As S. Francis of
R

242 JOHN MASON NEALE
Assisi drew within the circle of a universal brotherhood
those dumb, wild, or timid creatures of God, the wolf, the
leveret, or the lamb : so Neale would draw into the
circle of love, and friendship, and Christian fellowship
the poorest and most forsaken, the most abject and
despised, with an ever-recurrent spring of hope that,
beneath their sad sin-stained livery, he might discover
the marks of their Lord. Their bodies as well as their
souls were objects of his compassion ; and to the first, it
seemed that women might best minister. The com
pany were united in a spiritual bond strengthening
each individual effort. " You can hardly understand yet
what is the closeness of the tie that binds those who are
fighting this hard battle in common," he wrote to one
about to join the Community. " I trust you may soon
learn it." It was a tie at first hardly represented by the
ordinary externals of Community life ; for it was not
until June, 1856, that the Sisters began to occupy their
first house at East Grinstead.
Their habit, by Neale's desire, was grey ; for, he said,
black was gloomy, and children were afraid of it. Thus,
in a small, barely furnished house, between Sackville
College and the Church, the nine Sisters began what was
to be the nucleus of S. Margaret's Convent. They had
their own oratory, in which the Founder daily ministered.
The dormitories were divided into small cubicles, and the
refectory was a semi-underground shed. From this
humble home they went out at any moment when their
services were required. Here, in seasons of respite from
active work, they learned more and more of the object
of their foundation and of the interior practices of the
spiritual life. Here they had won for themselves, in one
year, such good report that the Bishop of Chichester, who
had inhibited their Founder, called, when confirming, to
give them his blessing.

CHAPTER XXI
S. Katharine's Orphanage — Dealings with children— Catechetical
instructions — " Duchenier " and other children's books — Scenes
drawn from nature— " Child's History of England " —The " Pil
grim's Progress."
Already, in September, 1856, Neale wrote that most of
his time was taken up by the Sisterhood. It was anxious
work, and naturally somewhat of a tentative character.
The ideal was high : likely to discourage the most sincere
and humble-minded ; whilst, at the same time, it might
attract recruits whose enthusiasm outweighed their per
severance and discretion. In that rough cottage building,
vocations were tested, and, in the practice of a Rule which
is substantially the same as that now governing the large
bodies of East Grinstead Sisters in England and abroad,
the Community life of S. Margaret's Sisterhood began.
Deadly sickness fell upon them in the very first year,
an outbreak of scarlet fever, from which they barely
escaped with their lives. " They were all," as Neale
writes simply, " as I could have wished ; " though it was
a tremendous tax upon the strength of those who in the
small struggling household were well enough to attend
upon the sick. The Mother Superior herself was danger
ously ill, but mercifully recovered.
Early in 1857 an unexpected call was made upon them
to take under their care some orphan girls whom Neale's
sister, Miss Elizabeth Neale, had gathered together in a
Home at Brighton. She was relinquishing this undertak
ing to start a small Sisterhood in S. George's in the East,
later established under the name of the Holy Cross
Community. 243

244 JOHN MASON NEALE
Nine orphans were accordingly despatched, and received
by the Founder and his Sisters with great pleasure at
East Grinstead. To Neale any child was a welcome
visitant, and these solitary homeless little creatures at once
found their way into his heart.
" Leur douce clarte" nous effleure.
Helas ! le bonheur est leur droit.
S'ils ont faim, le paradis pleure ;
Et le ciel tremble, s'ils ont froid.
" Quand Dieu cherchant ces Stres freles
Que dans l'ombre ou nous sommeillons,
11 nous envoie avec des ailes,
Les retrouve avec des haillons ! "
A small house was taken to accommodate the children,
the Orphanage started under the name of S. Katharine's,
and put under the charge of two Sisters. To those who
found their happiness in ministering amongst the most
repugnant circumstances to the outcast and degraded, it
must yet have been a joy to meet with innocent smiles and
clean pinafores, and it is evident that Neale spent some
of his happiest hours with the children. On certain days
of the week he celebrated at S. Katharine's : on Sundays
he would not only catechize, but he would tell them stories,
of which he had an inexhaustible store. On weekdays, if
he found a teacher absent, he gave them original lessons
on geography and arithmetic — lessons so happily illus
trated and so pleasantly bestowed as to lose all the
distasteful flavour of a task. In one of his "Sunday
Afternoons at an Orphanage," he writes of the little house
with the most affectionate remembrance.
"It was built of brick, but in summer it had white roses
that climbed very prettily over it. On the one side was a
fruit garden, on the other a little paddock ; and in the
distance there were pretty blue hills, which, when I lived
in these parts, used to remind me of that saying in the
Psalms, ' The hills stand about Jerusalem : even so standeth
the Lord round about His people, from this time forth for

THE ORPHANS 245
When, in 1858, the Sisterhood moved into more com
modious premises, the Orphanage, also, had quarters better
fitted to accommodate increasing numbers. Eventually
about twenty orphans were sheltered there. They were
received at almost any age, sometimes quite gratuitously :
for Neale consistently carried out the principles of the
Christian Commonwealth, and no lack of means was
permitted to exclude either Orphans or Sisters.
The girls his sister had sent to him from Brighton
soon fell into the ordered and happy routine of the
Orphanage. The hills surrounded a tended enclosure,
where under good influences hopes might bud and
virtues freely blossom : but the very sight of these
guarded lives brought to mind the children who, in city
alleys and haunts of wickedness, knew no more of piety
and prayer than of open blue heavens and sunshine on
green country fields. Neale could not be content without
seeking to alleviate the evil, and he sent for two children
from Wapping, rescued from some den of infamy, to
see what could be done to eradicate old habits and
arouse better instincts. In the Eden of childhood the
tree should at least bear the fruit of the knowledge of
good as well as that of evil. Nevertheless, these learners
in another school, could not be put amongst the orphans.
They slept in a house opposite the Orphanage. They
had much to learn and unlearn, " and I," adds a Sister very
simply in a letter of that date — " I slept with them." To
her, their recitals of the exciting incidents of public and
private life at Wapping were immensely interesting — so
dramatic, that we may suspect these astute denizens of
the city of colouring them highly for her benefit. But
with her sanguine view of human nature, she found them
both "good girls," and it is a characteristic touch that
Neale's first attempt at turning their minds to holy things
was to bring down an old French book, of the time of
Louis Quatorze, with such quaint Bible pictures that it
amused both the Sister and her charges.
When the Fair Day came round, with all the country
people crowding into East Grinstead with much shouting,

246 JOHN MASON NEALE
and bustle and confusion, and galloping of horses, he at
once thought of his town children. The Welsh drovers
on this day brought in all kinds of cattle ; the dealers
tried horses, wildly racing them up and down the village
street ; there was such pleasant stir and confusion, as might
awaken delightful recollections of an East-end market on
a Saturday night ; and Neale's chosen companions upon
this exhilarating occasion were the little sharp-featured
bright-eyed Londoners. We may well hope that the
superior orphans could not peep round the corner, to see
their Chaplain and the children enjoying the forbidden
exuberant joys of the roundabout, the agility of the clown,
and the man on stilts, and the less fleeting pleasures of the
gingerbread stall; or for once the pharisee might have
reasonably desired to change places with the publican.
One of the Sisters, again, recalls the energetic manner
in which he threw himself into all the active work of the
Community, in all kinds of ways, either big or little. If
it was a fine bright half-holiday, and he thought it would
do the orphans good to take them for a ramble into some
distant wood, or to see a quaint church in an out-lying
village, he would take out the Sisters and the older girls,
intermingling with his explanations of the special things
to be seen, anecdotes of his travels, stories of Saints,
memorable word-pictures of days gone by ; or he would
tell of places he had seen in Spain and Dalmatia.
He was ever ready to bring forth treasures from the book
shelves lining his study, either to instruct or amuse those
who found admission. " Clumsy leather-bound volumes,"
writes the Sister again in her Memories — " ' Lettres
Curieuses et Edifiantes,' being letters from French Jesuit
missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
full of faith and marvels," or "Didron's 'Iconographie Chrd-
tienne' with its curious and wonderful pictures." To many
the valuable and beautiful icons which enriched and gilded
the dark walls had a yet greater charm. They were gifts,
brought to him by Popoff, from the Patriarch at Moscow,
and from the Monastery of S. Sergius. Another rare
present, a volume of the "Liturgies of the Staroviertsi,"

TRAINING OF CHILDREN 247
or Old Faith Dissenters, was sent from Philaret, the
Metropolitan, by the Rev. George Williams.
This study, with its literary treasures, was often turned
by his children into a playground. There were five children
in all — Sarah Agnes, Cornelius Vincent Webster, Mary
Sackville, Katharine Ermenild (the present Mother Superior
of East Grinstead), and Margaret Isabel, all born between
the years 1844 and 1853.
He taught and trained them from infancy, and was
never fretted by noise or interruptions. His own real love
of the marvellous led them into strange regions of the
imagination ; whilst, when it was a question of religious
instruction, each Scriptural story set before their eyes had
the reality of a personal experience. One of the orphans
indeed observed that Mr. Neale must be very old, to have
talked to so many Saints and Martyrs !
He recalled the severity of the religious rule under
which he had suffered, and determined that to them these
sacred truths should come in other guise.
There is a melancholy recollection of childish days, so
painfully engraved upon his mind as to find a place in
one of his sermons, evidencing the grim, inconceivable
harshness of Calvinistic tenets.
When he was about eight years old, he tells us, on a
winter's evening he was reading from Isaiah xvi. 1 : " Send
ye the lamb to the ruler of the land from Sela to the
wilderness, unto the mount of the daughter of Zion," and
already the boy had thoughtfully pondered the meaning
of the text. Was not the wilderness the world in which
God's people still wandered, and the lamb, Jesus the Lamb
of God, not his Judge but his Saviour ? It was a figure
appealing to the poet and the child.
" Rest for the Lamb of God
Up on the hill-top green,
Only a cross of shame,
Two stark crosses between.
" All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad ;
I saw the sheep with their lambs,
And thought on the Lamb of God."

248 JOHN MASON NEALE
And so it had been with little Mason Neale. He had
been trying to pray, as he said that afternoon, and
found some comfort in it. And, " making a great effort,"
for, as a child, he was always reserved, he ventured to
murmur to the person who instructed him that it was
beautiful to think of our Lord as a Lamb. And then
upon his moved and trembling soul there fell the reply,
crushing each tender aspiration, every sweet trustful im
pulse of love : " Till you are converted it would be far
truer if you were to think of Him as a Lion ; if you were
to die to-night — and who can tell but you may ? — He would
be in no wise a Lamb to you."
He went to bed " crying those bitter tears that
children never forget," in a miserable conviction of his
unconverted condition, and a passionate recoil from the
injustice of the sentence leaving him nothing to hope
for but the blank chill terror of death, which at any
moment might find him cowering in vain beneath the
bed-clothes. No wonder if, gathering together some
remnants of boyish courage, he made up his mind that
it was no use to think of being saved. " Let us eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die," he cried to himself, in
deliberate and sorrowful daring. There was nothing else
to be done.
"And yet," he adds, "she who gave me the answer"
(probably his mother) "was kind and good." The im
pression " made by this kind of teaching," he says, " was
traceable throughout life."
It had certainly a beneficent effect upon his dealings
with his own children. We seem to see traces of it in
the prayers, still preserved in his journal, written for
Agnes' use at five years old. It may seem a counsel
of perfection to arrange set forms for morning, midday,
evening, and bedtime ; but at any rate they breathe a
happy childlike Christian spirit. She prays to remember
always that she is God's child ; and intercedes for the sick
and the poor, the living and the dead, as all belonging
to her Heavenly Father. She remembers she has the
safeguard of Holy Angels to keep her from everything

SUNDAY AFTERNOONS 249
that might hurt or frighten her ; and asks for comfort in
this life, and everlasting joy in that to come.
When this same child was two years old, he had noted,
in his journal, " First told Agnes about God." If in some
measure the instruction seems unduly forced or unfitted
to his children's years, it must be remembered that the
atmosphere surrounding them was that of a religious house.
Sacred emblems were before their eyes, sacred truths were
inculcated and shown to be the motive-power of conduct.
Sundays were red-letter days in the domestic calendar.
After service the Sunday walk, an invariable institution ;
then a leisurely afternoon spent with favourite story
books until the four o'clock Vespers at S. Katharine's.
The sermons preached on these occasions are published
in the two volumes entitled, "Sunday Afternoons at an
Orphanage." Later in the evening, the children were
gathered in the parlour to repeat their verses of Scripture,
or look out texts and types on some special subject.
Sometimes their father led them into paths difficult and
bewildering to little feet and childish understandings, but
they Iwillingly followed so sure and kind a guide. We
may be forgiven for wondering if Agnes, at nine years old,
might not have been better employed in nursing her doll
than in making " an alphabet of heresies," whatever that
may mean ; or if, even in mediaeval literature, the children
might not have found something more adapted to their
age than their father's translation of S. Anthony of Padua's
" Moral Concordances ; " but it was evidently their ambition
to share as far as possible his studies and occupations ; a
disposition he did his best to foster. Here is a note in
his journal, in Christmas, 185 1, proving how little he felt
their companionship to be irksome. Agnes, on this occa
sion, sat up to supper, and " read me a story while I was
writing the Generatio from the Salzburg Missal." In the
same year, he remarks that he read to his seven-year-old
child " about the Council, of Ephesus." As the children
grew older, he would read aloud to them from Shakespeare,
Milton, Spenser, Coleridge, Southey, or Hood— all the
poetry he himself loved best, "sometimes," to quote his

250 JOHN MASON NEALE
daughter's recollections, " varying the readings by passages
from Homer and Aristophanes, translating as he read with
wonderful fluency into beautiful and well-chosen language.
. . . When we were out with him he told delightful stories.
At other times, natural history or literature formed topics
of conversation." One of his daughters remembers how, during a walk,
a science was briefly explained in the most interesting
way, and it was not until home was nearly reached that she
discovered he had been teaching her the first principles of
political economy.
When he was writing his " Commentary on the Psalms "
he asked his two eldest girls each to learn an alphabet
(the one was Georgian and the other Syriac) that they
might be able to help him by reading aloud. The
younger, then a child of ten, recalls the pride and delight
with which she set to work to master Syriac ; and for the
next few years at intervals she and her father studied it
together. It was the same with all his pursuits, as far as
possible they participated in them ; more able to do so
than most children of their age, for his little girl at nine
years old was construing S. Augustine.
As he walked through the town the village children
might often be seen running by his side or holding on
to his cassock. When in friends' houses, he constantly
bore the children company ; and it is related that on the
occasion of a visit to some Orphanage, where to the
officials he had appeared abrupt and reserved, he was
discovered in a corner surrounded by a pressing, clustering
group of children, at whose imperious commands he was
writing verses " to show how they were made."
In his home circle and amongst intimate friends the
tide of fancy sometimes broke in sparkling waves of merri
ment, such as his precocious boyhood had never known ;
evanescent intangible ebullitions, family jests too perish
able to be recorded, nevertheless appreciably lightening
the domestic atmosphere ; and, as we hope, diverting
his children's attention from theological questions and
ecclesiastical history.

CATECHIZING 251
As a teacher he was concise and exceptionally lucid.
There might be very different opinions as to his preaching
powers. His sermons at Sackville College undoubtedly
fulfilled their purpose ; but his delivery was abrupt, his
voice harsh and unmeasured ; and his power lay in the
directness with which he delivered his message, rather than
in the words which clothed, or in the gestures that enforced
it. A not altogether unworthy desire to cultivate preaching
as an art, an attempt at style founded upon the model of
the great preachers with whom he was well acquainted,
some slight element of oratorical ambition, might have
possibly made his discourses better adapted to educated
congregations ; but the unstudied presentment of eternal
verities ; theologically exact, and brought to bear with a
convincing reality and a tender solicitude upon aspects of
human life and the individual needs of single souls, had
a power and an effect sometimes denied to more eloquent
preachers. In catechizing (an important part of his work
when the Orphanage was once started) he could not be
excelled. He retained the children's attention by the
simple force of his personality, took infinite pains in
preparation, and was quite content in a quarter of an hour
to press home a single lesson.
" His Bible Classes to the Sisters," writes the present
Superior of S. Saviour's Priory, "were most marvellous.
He walked up and down the little oratory with his Bible
in his hand, reading, explaining, asking questions, giving
the key to the wonderful mystical interpretation of the
Old Testament, with quotations from the mediaeval
writers bearing upon the subject, so that one saw Christ,
and Christ only, in every chapter from Genesis to Reve
lation." This was not merely a proof of his zealous devotion
to their spiritual advancement, but the result of the
direction in which his own mind was working. It was
manifested not only in private meditations, but in a novel
simplicity of catechetical methods.
He studied educational systems, but he never lost sight
of the individual child. This, in part, no doubt, accounts

252 JOHN MASON NEALE
for the freshness and vigour of the children's books which,
though in the first place addressed to the " children of the
Church," reached a much wider circle of readers.
" Duchenier, or, The Revolt of La Vendue," is in all
probability the best -known and most popular of his
historical tales, and upon many schoolroom bookshelves
the battered copies of that delightful story bear unanswer
able testimony to its fascination for children. There is
little doubt that, in its smart new red and gold binding,
(as lately re-issued by the S.P.C.K.) it will exercise its old
ascendency over the minds of another generation. It may
well have a charm, for it has the force and reality of a
narrative related by an eye-witness. It is not, indeed, told
in the first person (a somewhat doubtful expedient for
confounding truth with fiction), but we are never for a
moment allowed to inquire into the mechanism of the
scenes presented, nor tempted to imagine that the
author in the background prompts the actors in their
parts. The scene is laid in the western provinces of France,
where a last desperate effort was made to rally the
scattered Royalists round the standard of a well-nigh
hopeless cause, in the spring and summer of 1793 ; and
we are swept along upon the rapid and turbulent current
of the story to find ourselves in Paris, in the Hall of
Convention, in the prisons of S. Lazare or the Luxem
bourg, when the terror of powers of cruelty and evil hung
over the city like a cloud of thick darkness, breaking now
and again in a blinding dangerous glare, over its doomed
inhabitants. The incidents of the story are facts easily
gleaned from the pages of history ; what is surprising is,
not so much the course of the narrative, nor even the
descriptive passages in their detailed and striking accuracy,
but the manner in which the personages move and act in
accordance with their character. Whether aristocrats or
peasants, they are all so undeniably French, as they
severally display the national irresponsible gaiety of
heart, the dignity of outraged womanhood, and the un
conquerable loyalty, in itself a religion, in the face of death

"DUCHENIER" 253
and disaster. The dialogue is as unconstrained and fresh
as the characters. The jests upon the scaffold, the brutal
unconcern, or aimless cruelty, the unquenchable lust for
blood, indelibly staining the records of the French Revolu
tion, are faithfully chronicled, together with the impulses
of pity, and the heroic courage, in so many instances
redeeming the honour of the nation. Moreover, with its
breathless escapes and hurrying movement, it is emphati
cally a book for the young. As G. P. R. James, the
novelist, wrote, in acknowledging a presentation copy, —
" It is a most interesting and powerful tale, depicting
scenes from history with which I am well acquainted from
reading, and scenes in nature which, from having lived
amongst them, have become familiar to me as household
words. Both for the work, and for having written it, I beg
you to accept the best thanks of
" Yours faithfully,
"G. P. R. James."
It was published in 1848; "The Triumphs of the
Cross," " Shepperton Manor," " Stories of the Crusades,"
" Stories from Heathen Mythology," and " Poynings," a
tale of the Revolution, having preceded it. Though his
fertile brain produced this light literature with extra
ordinary ease and rapidity, he bestowed much care upon
the elaboration of details, and was especially desirous of
ensuring the truthful delineation of scenery. His local
and topographical knowledge often stood him in good
stead. His frequent excursions into Normandy and
Brittany supplied the background for " Duchenier." The
Cevennes were described in a shorter story, Wales in the
" False Signals of Rhosilly ; " and other tales are concerned
with the green lands and low shores of Holland. His
accounts of places he had never visited bore a remarkable
resemblance to scenes drawn from nature, from his power
of picturing to himself what he read ; and sometimes,
again, in another manner he would seek to impress a
landscape on his mind. When writing about the Holy
Land, for example, it struck him that a valley near East

254 JOHN MASON NEALE
Grinstead had in its natural features a likeness to the
district of Palestine he wished to depict, and he would
go out alone and rest his mind upon it, until he had,
as it were, taken possession of its aspect and its spirit.
One of his daughters recalls a visit to Cambridge with
her father and a conversation on the subject of his story,
" The Lily of Tiflis," with the Rev. George Williams, of
King's, Professor of Oriental Languages : and his question
put to her father, " When did you go to Georgia ? " When
the Professor was told that he had never been there, he
expressed himself as altogether amazed at his faithful
reproduction of the features of the country.
This conscientious accuracy possibly impressed children
less than their elders, but he undoubtedly reached the
schoolroom public for whom he wrote. Pathos rarely
appeals to it, and in his stories of Saints and Martyrs
there were tortures and tragedies, but nothing so moving
and pathetic as children's premature death-beds in modern
books — a species of literature from which the healthy-
minded child instinctively recoils, though it may take an
in comprehensive delight in grim ferocious deeds of wild
Indians and scalp-hunters. Neale's books were, of course,
written for a purpose, to establish a principle or illustrate
a truth ; they are tales such as a Chaplain might tell to
convent children : and yet as we are transported into
distant lands and unknown regions there is no sense of
unreality in the predominant note being that of creed
rather than character ; for he wrote of times when religion
not only concerned the individual destinies of men, but
governed the fate of nations. Graphic and spirited, they
were calculated to fix in a child's mind a very true con
ception of historical events or personages ; and in two
instances only his attempts in this line of literature may
be acknowledged to be failures.
His "English History for Children" (1845) is com
piled for edification. Constitutional reforms are sub
ordinated to ecclesiastical order, and upon the chequered
board the King as well as the Knight give place to the
Bishop. An intelligent child would fail to gain any

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 255
coherent historical ideas from its perusal, though he
might find episodes and incidents well engraved upon his
memory. Eight years later, in 1853, he made an unnecessary
attempt to adapt Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " for the
use of the children of the English Church. Bunyan's
creed repelled him, but at the same time he was irresistibly
fascinated by the spiritual meaning, the dialogue, the
humour and the personages of that marvellous allegory.
For the unregenerate Bunyan he could have found
excuse ; he might have condoned his Sunday sports and
Church-going, in the days when he confessed that he was
so overrun with the spirit of superstition, that he —
" adored with great devotion even all things, both the
high-place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and what else
belonging to the Church, counting all things holy there-in
contained, especially the priest and clerk most happy and
without doubt greatly blessed."
If we except the clerk, we may say that in these
respects Neale was in agreement with him; but the
Calvinism of Bunyan shocked and distressed him, and
he shrank from presenting to children the terrors of the
Law, the piercing sense of transgression, and the uncom
promising message of wrath to come. He might have
been assured that the average child would rest content
to read of the Miry Slough, the Hill Difficulty, the Wicket
Gate, and all the picturesque incidents and surprising
adventures to be met with on the road, without acquiring
any definite idea of the spiritual meaning they conveyed,
or exposing his orthodoxy to any risk of contamination.
Bunyan, Mr. Froude assures us, was born to be the
" Apostle Poet of the middle classes ; " Neale was the
exponent of mediaeval worship and Catholic verities.
Between the two there were great irreconcilable differences,
and, though they might meet together with Christian at
the Interpreter's House, such divergences would infallibly
hinder mutual understanding.
For these and other reasons, it might be asserted that

256 JOHN MASON NEALE
the task of compiling an expurgated " Pilgrim's Progress "
had been better left unattempted. But when an artist
has given us so much that is beautiful and enduring, it
would be ungrateful to complain if, in the selection of an
impracticable subject, he may chance now and again to
spoil a canvas.

CHAPTER XXII
"Essays on Liturgiology and Church History"— The Bollandists —
The Greek liturgies- — Reminiscences from Sackville College —
Renewed opposition — The Lewes riots — Bishop Wilberforce's
action.
From this time onwards, Neale's life assumed a more
practical character, being much occupied not only with
spiritual supervision, but also with the homely details of
the organization and management of the Sisterhood and
Orphanage. He yet found, not indeed leisure — for leisure
formed no part of his scheme of existence — but sufficient
spare hours and opportunity to pursue some of his most
important literary undertakings. His great project of a
" Commentary on the Psalms " was already taking shape
and form, though the first volume was not published till
i860 ; and in various directions he was engaged in liturgical
studies. His papers on this subject alone, " Essays on Litur
giology and Church History," in one volume, chiefly
reprinted from the Christian Remembrancer in 1862, have
a wide and varied range from the earliest breviaries to
contemporary ecclesiastical history, from the Ambrosian
Rite to the revision of the English Prayer-book. Every
page bears evidence of the most conscientious research,
together with an apprehension of realms of knowledge
beyond his reach, at once inspiring and humbling to
the serious student. At the head of one of his articles, he
quotes a dialogue, recorded by Boswell, between General
Paoli and Dr. Johnson. "I have been studying," said
General Paoli, "the ecclesiastical writers of the middle
ages." "Why, sir," replied Dr. Johnson, "they are very
257 S

258 JOHN MASON NEALE
curious," and Neale observes that they each spoke of the
pursuit as one worthy to occupy some six or eight
weeks of a man's spare time. And then he goes on to
describe the " gradual compilation of Liturgy, Office, Sacra-
mentary, the living kernel of devotion enshrined in its art
shell : ... on which of these subjects might not volume
upon volume be written ? " In another paper, on the first
four Bollandists, with what sympathetic delight, he writes
of their literary journeys. " They gleaned a life here, a
sequence there, a proper office in this church, a passion in
that ; " how merrily they travelled onward, from city to
city, so secure in the sanctity of their mission, so joyfully
discovering the acts of the saints. He relates how Papen-
brock, one of the little company, who began his labours in
1659, "luxuriates, revels, runs riot in his descriptions,"
as he tells how proud the sacristan of Mayence is of the
dust of the cathedral, because it is older than the Re
formation ; how they dined with a very apostolical Dean,
where there were thirty-six covers and twelve men-servants,
and where they drank Bolland's health in hock one hundred
and twenty years old ; how very surprisingly venerable
Papenbrock looked in the chasuble of S. Witegisus at
Mayence, and how Henschenius (one of the companions),
" who had never seen a mountain, was frightened out of
his wits in the descent of the Alps, and lay like a heap at
the bottom of a carriage." As we turn over the pages,
and Neale, like Papenbrock himself, writes of " the glorious
folios, rough in their yellow hogskin, and clamped and
knobbed with wrought iron, and dotted down the face
with the well-thumbed finger-holds, with their illuminated
initials and flowing margins, their quaint abbreviations and
lovely letters ... all hastened as into a treasury for the
glory of the saints ... to swell the twelve thousand
volumes of the Bollandine library," we may fancy that
Neale, himself, would have been happier had he been
born in days when such a quest might have absorbed a
lifetime. Then as he flies from Parisian breviaries to a
paper on the connection between Church festivals and
household words, it would appear as if, in whatever

PRINCIPLES OF DIVINE SERVICE 259
generation he had been born, his mind could never have
been exclusively relegated to a single task.
It was at this time that the question of Prayer-book
revision had been brought prominently forward. Pro
fessor Freeman's "Principles of Divine Service" had
been published, and men of separate schools of thought
were delivering opinions. It is strange to find Neale
advocating greater elasticity, making suggestions, reverting
to liturgical precedents, and at the same time considering
the needs of different congregations. Cardinal Quignon's
"Reformed Breviary" he pointed out, had supplied the
model for our Prayer-book services ; and he much desired —
"to fall back upon the responses which follow all the
lessons in the Breviary, and thus develop in a fuller sense
the doctrine which we are at that especial time endeavour
ing to teach. I may well say," he adds, "that daily
service in anything approaching what may be called a
national scale is a thing as yet unknown amongst us.
What wonder if we find difficulties, drawbacks, incon
veniences ! "
Many of his suggestions have since been adopted,
though others were regarded as of a retrograde character,
and the matter raised a good deal of controversy and cor
respondence. The two volumes, "Greek Liturgies of SS. Mark,
James, Clement, Chrysostom and Basil," and the English
translation of "Greek Liturgies" appeared in 1859, as also
the " Rhythm of S. Bernard," the annual Seatonian Poem,
some of his " Children's Sermons," and " Voices from the
East" — documents on the present state and working of
the Eastern Church. The two previous years had been
probably the least productive as regarded literary work.
The reason is not far to seek. In the first place, the
charge of the Sisterhood occupied much time. Hours of
study might be carefully planned, but they were more
liable to interruptions; and though change of work was
unquestionably a gain, it must have been hard, even for
his obedient brain, to give concentrated attention to such
varied duties in succession.

26o JOHN MASON NEALE
Nor was he left to pursue his way undisturbed.
His publications, as well as his pastoral work, had earned
an increasing measure of notoriety and admiration, to
gether with the more valued intelligent approbation of
qualified critics ; but in the narrower circle of the College,
jealousies and discontents, rank weeds cut down to the
root but never wholly eradicated, spread and overran the
fair growth of confidence and affection, the well-merited
recompense of his patient husbandry.
Tempus fugit, and many things around and within the
College are altered, but still it stands, overlooking the red
roofs of the little town, as in the days when the Earls of
Dorset stayed their horses at the gate, or in those later
times when Neale went in and out, crossing the quadrangle
to talk with some garrulous pensioner at the low-arched
doorway, or mounted the wide staircase dividing the low-
raftered rooms to sit by a bed-ridden inmate.
The slope outside, then carefully tended, was in the
July of this year, (1906) in uncut flowered grass, but
as you pass through the deep porch with its oak benches,
the green quadrangle, intersected with narrow brick walks,
lies before you ; the Dorset Arms surmount the central
entrance, and the well, Butterfield designed and Neale
solemnly dedicated, is so closely covered with honeysuckle
and clambering roses as half to conceal the pious in
scription : " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst
again ; but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall
give him shall never thirst. ... O ye wells, praise ye the
Lord." All along the border, beneath the grey walls and
mullioned windows, all manner of bright-tinted flowers —
yellow and crimson-throated snapdragons, stocks and
marigolds, pinks and larkspurs, bud and blossom. In
Neale's day great vines, rich in beautiful emblems and
scriptural teaching, almost overspread the buildings, but
since his death they have been unfortunately destroyed,
and ivy planted in their stead. The peacocks, too, have
removed their stately presence, that once proved Sack
ville College to be no exclusive refuge for the indigent;

REMINISCENCES 261
but the white pigeons are fanning themselves in the sun
shine, and flutter down from their station upon the eaves.
The hall, with its dark-panelled walls and gallery —
the wide hearth, where he gathered the old men and
women on winter nights to listen to his tales or share his
hospitality — is as it was then, though the plain, long oak
table and wooden benches have been replaced by more
modern furniture. The view from the study windows
over the wooded country, with Saxonbury Hill and Crow
borough heights in the blue distance, has been circum
scribed by the growth of trees and the erection of one
or two new buildings, but it is green and peaceful as
when he looked upon it first ; and the chapel, a shrine
around which such fierce wars were raged, with its simple
altar and ornaments, stands as a silent reproof to con
tentious spirits and sectarian animosity.
Here Neale's memory is green, though forty years
ago he was laid to rest in the adjacent churchyard.
Those who knew him best, the aged people to whom he
ministered, and the discontented spirits who so unhappily
endeavoured to destroy his peace, have departed to the land
of fuller knowledge and surer hope, but in the pensioners'
quarters there are friends and descendants of former inhabi
tants, ready to tell of the old days, of his pleasant, friendly
ways, and the trouble he would take to secure some small
boon or relieve some trivial discomfort. An inmate
remembers how her old father, when admitted to the College,
came back from his first interview with the Warden, the
slow tears of old age and weakness in his eyes ; and when
she asked him anxiously what had passed, he could only
say that it was "the kindness, the gentleman's kindness
that had overcome him." For, with true delicacy of
feeling, Neale had perceived how one who had seen better
days found it bitter to accept the shelter of a charitable
institution. Then again, how ready he had been to make
allowance for the old pensioner who could not forego his
tobacco ! On this occasion, Dr. Turnbull, the Presbyterian
minister, had been employed as an intermediary, for every
one in East Grinstead knew how much he thought of

262 JOHN MASON NEALE
Dr. Turnbull. They were such good friends, it was no
wonder he would have no one but the Warden to minister
to him on his death-bed !
The old people asserted that he was never put out;
— an unexpected tribute, for his best friends in other
positions of life acknowledged him to be a quick-tempered
man, as ready to take fire, and hasty in speech as he was
eager to forgive and to atone ; but his instinctive love and
reverence for helplessness and old age, and a generosity
towards those unable to retaliate, forbade him to be
angry with the poor or with children.
There is no necessity to stir the dust raised by violent
passions raging with unreasoning virulence around the
College during the years 1856-1860, years that, owing to
the increase of the Sisterhood and literary successes,
would have otherwise been exceptionally peaceful and
happy. The opposition had all the infectious rage of a
no-popery cry, undoubtedly stimulated by personal enmity.
It was evident there was some traitor within the gates,
and for years internal disturbances as well as outbreaks of
fire took place for which no reason could be assigned.
Naturally an ancient foundation like Sackville College
was not without its ghost. A very well authenticated
spirit haunted the room known as the Earl's lodging, and
Neale at first appears to have laid some inexplicable noises
and doings unjustly to its charge, and to have con
sequently regarded any carnal weapon of defence as
out of place. His mind easily and credulously accepted
manifestations of inter-communion between ourselves and
the departed. In his book on the "Unseen World,"
published in 1847, he writes, " There can be no subject
more interesting — perhaps also more perilous — than the
union and sympathy of the seen with the unseen world."
Dreams, witchcraft, astrology, and all supernatural mani
festations had from his youth had an immense attraction
for him ; whilst he instantly sought a spiritual inter
pretation of physical facts. Lacordaire said of himself
before his conversion, " J'ai l'ame extr&mement religieuse
et l'esprit tres incrddule," and no doubt the two things

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 263
are often combined. It was otherwise with Neale: his
impulse was to believe. As early as 1844, he relates as a
fact a curious instance of supernatural protection afforded
to some people in a lonely house, all the bells of the house
ringing continuously of themselves, and saving its tenants
from a projected burglary. Again, in 1853, we find him
investigating mesmerism and spiritualism popularly so
called ; he writes : " All this matter deserves to be most
seriously thought about ; for that ' sleepless beast,' as S.
Cyril says, will not leave it alone, whether we do or not.
I think it shows remarkably good sense in the Pope to
have it [viz. table-turning] done before him."
These were the early days of psychical research. Neale
had apparently no connection with any society and no
opportunity for pursuing discoveries by quasi-scientific
methods, or formulating theories, but the whole question
was to him an open one, to be approached with a" mind
disposed to credence rather than to disproof.
His own experiences tended to confirm these preposses
sions. One example may be recorded, especially as a
witness to the protective care he believed the dead were
permitted to exercise over those with whom they had been
connected whilst on earth.
One evening, when he was crossing the churchyard
between the College and the Sisterhood, he relates that he
met with the figure of a lady who had died not long before,
and she begged him to give a warning to her husband
respecting some journey or some work he was about to
undertake. Neale of course faithfully delivered the message.
The husband was unconvinced and sceptical. Neale's
fertile imagination might have conjured up a vision ; he
did not doubt that, to a dreamer of dreams, apparitions
might appear as realities ; but one thing was clear to him,
he had not seen his wife. When Neale still persisted in
his belief, he asked questions as to the appearance ; and,
amongst other things, inquired what dress she had on.
Of this Neale had taken special note. It was a green satin
of a remarkable colour and pattern, and he minutely de
scribed it. The husband's doubts were at once removed ;

264 JOHN MASON NEALE
and he said, "It must have been my wife. I gave her
that dress just before she died, and I believe no one else
ever saw her in it."
These persuasions as to the possible intervention of
visitants from the unseen world, seeming to many but as
idle tales, added to the perplexing mystery in which the
disturbances of the College were involved. In 1856, how
ever, they reached another climax, and there was now no
possible doubt as to the perpetrators.
Unfortunately, Neale himself had appointed a Mr.
Rogers, with whom he had once taken a tour in Portugal, as
Assistant Warden. This man became his bitterest enemy,
and instituted annoyances of all sorts, " to an extent that "
(Neale writes), "one could hardly have believed possible in a
civilized land." He contended that the Warden had no
right to certain rooms in the College, and, at his instigation,
doors were broken open and windows smashed, the police,
until the question had been legally settled, not daring to
interfere. The contention was aggravated by furious
attacks in local papers. To these Neale would make no
reply ; but life became so unbearable that, in July, 1856,
when he was offered a small living, he determined to accept
it. The Sisters professed their willingness to work any
where with him, and he wrote, fortunately as it proved, too
late, to find that the living had just been given away.
In the mean time matters had brightened in the College.
His brother-in-law, Mr. T. Webster, Q.C. (the father of the
present Lord Chief Justice), concurred with the Charity
Commissioners in advising that stronger steps should be
taken to restrain evildoers and re-establish order. Lord
De la Warr gave Neale his support ; the law was brought
to bear ; the Bishop of Chichester visited the Sisterhood,
and was kind and encouraging ; and peace was for the
time restored. " A host of friends," Neale writes, " have
risen up to us ; and, with six or eight exceptions, the
town is quite on our side. . . . Though I tell you all this,
don't think that it worries or hinders me in the least. We
are like the eels now, and are used to it."
But, all the same, at times his elastic spirits were

VOWS OF POVERTY 265
depressed. One clean open wound might have been more
easily healed than these reiterated pinpricks of pain. The
enforced truce did not last long, and in the following year
the Lewes riots supervened, and once again deprived
Neale and the Sisterhood of the Bishop's countenance.
There must indeed have been much smouldering enmity
to account for an outbreak, of which the funeral of one of
the Sisters formed the pretext.
Neale had undeniably little worldly wisdom, and, with
regard to money matters, very imperfectly developed
business qualifications. He was culpably careless in regard
to his personal expenditure ; would drop a cheque out of
his pocket and never miss it, and leave five-pound notes
scattered upon his table, or simply thrust into a chimney-
piece ornament as into a money-box. He had clearly a
mistaken idea that other people were likely to share his
indifference to temporal possessions. The little book en
titled "Dicit Fundator"— "The Spirit of the Founder,"
is very exact and distinct as to the Sisters' duty in respect
to the vow of poverty. The instructions are too long to
quote in detail, but, in view of the troubles about to be
related, and their ostensible cause, it is well to give some
explanatory sentences.
"Let us imagine a Sister wishing to join us with a
certain income belonging unrestrictedly to herself, when
she makes the vow of poverty what does she promise, and
what does she not promise ?
" She promises, in the first place, to give up what is
called the usufruct of it; that is, neither directly nor
indirectly to lay out a farthing of it upon herself. . . .
She does not promise— God forbid — to devote all her
income to this House. When I say ' God forbid,' I mean
what I say. There have been some griping, grasping
religious Houses, which have been satisfied with nothing
less ; but they have always been regarded as the plague-
spots of religious Communities. She does not promise
necessarily to lay out all her money in charity ; for there
may be relations who have a right to part of it. . . . What,
then, is a Sister who has this £100 a year bound to do
when she joins us ? In the first place, she is bound to tell

266 JOHN MASON NEALE
the Superior what part of it she may lawfully dispose of
to this Sisterhood. And here relations have the first claim ;
old charities the second, but the Sisterhood ought to take
precedence of all new charities."
These quotations are sufficient to show that, in money
matters, he was as unexacting for the Community as for
himself. On October 30, 1857, he wrote : " The success of
the Sisterhood is really surprising. . . . Considering the
tremendous opposition we have encountered, is not that
a triumph over prejudice?" And then, only a fortnight
later, the storm broke.
The occasion was the death of a Sister who had but
lately joined the Community. Her father had been
summoned, but the end was somewhat sudden, and he
arrived too late to see her alive. In the mean time, she
had been permitted (perhaps, under the circumstances,
indiscreetly) to make a will, in which she left the bulk
of her little property to a favourite brother, a legacy to
her sisters, and ^400 to S. Margaret's. She had ex
pressed a wish to be buried in the family vault at
Lewes, and her father, on his arrival, at first professed
to be satisfied that everything right and possible had been
done, and was prepared to make funeral arrangements
in accordance with her request. Before the funeral (which,
contrary to the wishes of Dr. Neale and the Sisters he had
fixed for the evening) he appears to have conceived an
unreasonable hostility towards those under whose care
she had died, an hostility possibly aggravated by natural
distress and the provisions of the will. His displeasure,
unrestrained and violent in its expressions, set all manner
of exaggerated reports afloat in the town ; and by the day
fixed for the interment an adverse party had organized
a public protest. Carried out by an uncontrollable mob
drawn from the lowest dregs of the population, it assumed
proportions and led to actions it may be trusted its pro
moters had not anticipated. A threatening crowd filled
the churchyard, and it was with difficulty that the mourners
followed the coffin to the vault. There was nothing unusual

A SISTER'S FUNERAL 267
to excite angry feeling, all arrangements having been left
to the Sister's family ; but during the service the rabble in
the churchyard raised turbulent shouts, their attitude every
moment becoming more inimical. In the half-darkness
the worst characters had no fear of recognition. They
made way for the family to pass out ; and then lights
were extinguished, or flashed in the faces of those they
attacked, so as to make confusion worse than darkness,
and a fierce rush was made upon the band of Sisters.
Neale was knocked down before he could prevent them
from being hustled and insulted, and the whole com
pany were borne along the street at the mercy of the
crowd, until at last the police gathered sufficient force to
secure their retreat — some into the schoolmaster's house(
and some into a friendly inn, where, at least, a siege was
less intolerable than a street fight. It was not till after
strenuous police efforts that the train could be reached,
for the return journey to East Grinstead, the rabble
besetting the station to the very last.
Still the father's vindictive instincts were not appeased.
He published a scandalous account of the cause of the
disturbance, asserting that his daughter had been en
trapped into the Sisterhood, purposely placed in the way
of infection (she died from nursing scarlet fever), and then
induced to make a will in favour of the Community.
The Bishop of Chichester (who unaccountably gave
ear to the most inaccurate reports in any way affecting
Neale and the works connected with him) withdrew from
his position as Visitor of S. Margaret's. Many difficulties
arose, subscriptions declined, friends fell away, false
rumours of all kinds were circulated ; and it was found
easier to accuse than to defend. But Neale was not
without well-informed and influential friends, and amongst
them three conspicuous laymen— Colonel Moorsom, the
Hon. Richard (afterwards Lord Richard) Cavendish, and
Mr. John David Chambers— took action on his behalf.
Mr. Cavendish wrote at great length to the Bishop, and in
the most straightforward terms denounced his proceed
ings as absolutely unjust and indefensible.

268 JOHN MASON NEALE
"Your Lordship has condemned the Sisterhood," he
writes, "simply on the ground that it has been under
Mr. Neale's influence. Your Lordship does not assert
that that influence has been mischievous in its effects.
Had such been the case, the institution could hardly have
produced fruits to the uniform excellence of which Arch
deacon Otter has borne such unexceptionable testimony.
I am therefore led to conclude that your Lordship declines
to sanction any institution with which Mr. Neale is con
nected, solely because he holds theological opinions which
you believe to be at variance with the doctrinal standards
of the Church of England, and because you disapprove of
his views on the subject of Confession.
"With regard, my Lord, to the first of these points,
I entreat you to bear with me, while I humbly call your
attention to the fact that, be those opinions right or wrong
which, so far as the public are informed, have induced you
to inhibit Mr. Neale, they are precisely similar to those
held by the greatest divines of the English Church, some
of whom were actually concerned in the revision of the
Prayer-book as it now stands. . . . But, my Lord, you
ground your censure also on the fact that Mr. Neale
advocates Confession. . . , With reference to this subject
I may venture to remind your Lordship that the Church
of England does most undeniably recommend Confession
in certain cases. . . . She has laid down no rule as to
the frequency with which, under certain circumstances,
Confession should be resorted to. . . . Mr. Neale may be
thought by some to have committed errors of judgment,
his conduct was throughout dictated by a conscientious
sense of duty and responsibility. ... I do not appeal to
your Lordship's justice and generosity on behalf of women
admirable for their Christian zeal and self-denial, who have
been lately subjected to a brutal assault at the hands of
a mob of ruffians. Persons who, like these ladies, endeavour
to tread as closely as possible in the footsteps of our
Blessed Saviour while on earth, cannot be dependent on
any merely human support, however much they may be
cheered and encouraged by it ; " and then he goes on to
entreat that the Bishop will, at least, hear testimony from
both sides, and institute an impartial inquiry into the
Sisterhood. Mr. Chambers, one of the first legal authorities in eccle
siastical matters, also wrote a statement of the law as

BISHOP WILBERFORCE'S ACTION 269
to Confession and Absolution. It was forwarded with a
letter from Neale. But the Bishop's attitude had been
a foregone conclusion, and he declined to reconsider
the question ; Mr. Cavendish's outspoken but temperate
remonstrance producing no effect.
It must be confessed that in very various positions of
life, from the lawless rioters of Lewes to the Bishop of his
own diocese, Neale had many irreconcilable enemies ;
nevertheless, the opposition he encountered confirmed and
augmented the loyal affection of his friends. Not only
so; the injustice with which he had been treated, as it
became known to impartial judges, roused public sym
pathy, both on his behalf and on that of the Sisterhood.
In the early part of this same year, 1857, to his surprise,
his name was suggested for the vacant Bishopric of
Aberdeen, eventually bestowed on Dr. Suther.
Bishop Wilberforce had from the first stood his friend.
It is probable that upon many points they were by no
means in agreement, but during Neale's first troubles he
had tried to arrange matters for him with the Bishop of
Chichester, and he frequently invited him to Lavington.
On one of these occasions, September 1856, Neale had
written —
" This week I have been paying a visit to the Bishop
of Oxford at Lavington — it was a very pleasant party —
principally to consult what we are to do in the Denison
case. It is next to certain that the judgment will be
reversed, on the legal point, in the Court of Arches."
Again, in 1861, when the prejudice against him in
certain quarters had by no means subsided, he writes :
" On the 15th [January], all well, I go to Cuddesdon for a
few days. When I have been with S. Oxon. before, it has
been at Lavington ; and Cuddesdon I have a curiosity
to see." At a later date, Wilberforce again took the
unpopular side in his defence. When the section of rail
way between Tunbridge Wells and East Grinstead was
opened, on the 18th of July, 1864, by Lord West, there was
a great gathering of county people, the principal inhabitants

270 JOHN MASON NEALE
of the town, and the neighbouring clergy. After the
ceremony, about three hundred met at a public banquet ;
but the feeling against Neale was still so strong on the
part of those who organized the proceedings, that he was
the one man of any consideration who received no invita
tion. No doubt many missed him and silently regretted
his absence, but Bishop Wilberforce did not hesitate to
openly proclaim his disapproval of the slight put upon him.
As his eyes, from the head of the table, took note of the
assembled guests, he asked at once, " Where is Neale ? "
We are not told what reply was given, but at any rate, it
was not such as to diminish the Bishop's generous indigna
tion. As he left the table he went straight to Sackville
College, to call upon the man who had not been judged
worthy to meet him.

CHAPTER XXIII
Tours in the South of France and Dalmatia— Interview with Michael,
Prince of Montenegro— Neale's social qualifications— Lecture
on Sisterhoods— Degree of D.D. conferred by Hartford Uni
versity—Autograph letter respecting it.
Occasionally, the routine of life at East Grinstead was
broken, and the harassing daily cares besetting it for
gotten, even during these later years of Neale's life, 'in
revisiting or exploring some new tract of country abroad.
In June, 1857, he had gone to the South of France, in
company with Bishop Forbes of Brechin, and now, bearing
his own Sisters at home in mind, he was particularly
anxious to visit conventual establishments. At Bourges
he visited the cathedral, "grand beyond all description,
and its windows on fire with ruby glass," and also the
"Couvent des Soeurs (Bleues Brigittines)," to ask ques
tions about their work ; then on to Puy-en-Velay, to see
the large schools of Marist Sisters and a Convent of
R6collectines, fifteen Sisters and two hundred and twenty
children. "Their infant school and its exercises were
excessively pretty."
At Nismes, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, he saw
the great procession, not allowed in the days of Louis
Philippe for fear of disturbances. The civil authorities
were holding a strong body of gendarmes in reserve,
lest any indignity should be offered; but it was need
less, everything was successfully and reverently carried
out. There was an enormous concourse of lay people,
sappers and miners, young girls and matrons, twelve
boys, from six to eight, dressed like cardinals, and a boy
bishop ; the lines of soldiers presenting arms, and bright
271

272 JOHN MASON NEALE
hangings from the windows, making a brilliant spectacle ;
the only contretemps being, that little Saint John the
Baptist, with his bare legs and his sheepskin coat and
cross, was so tired that his mother had to carry him !
The following year he had hoped to take a yet more
congenial journey. The Bishop of Brechin was in all
probability to confirm at S. Petersburg, Moscow, and
perhaps Archangel, and he had offered to take Neale as
his chaplain. " I should learn more ecclesiology in a
month than in a year anywhere else," he writes. "Just
imagine seeing Novgorod ! " But this project fell through,
and he never saw Russia.
In i860 he was enabled to carry out a desire long in
his mind. His deep interest in the history of the Oriental
Church roused a wish (as he says, in his " Notes on
Dalmatia") to observe for himself — "the mutual action
and reaction of the Eastern and Western Communions
in their border lands on the East Coast of the Adriatic.
As devoted to liturgical studies, I wished personally to
examine, in the only country where it is still in use, the
questions which arise from the venerable and mysterious
Glagolita rite. And, finally, as an ardent student of
ecclesiology, I promised myself no small gratification
from the churches of Istia and Dalmatia, and, above all,
Aquileia." " Through Gladstone," he writes, in a letter to Webb,
when about to set out, " I hope to get a special recom
mendation from the Austrian ambassador, formally written.
I had one in Portugal which was of the greatest use." And
in this he was successful, for Count Apponyi, the ambas
sador to this country, favoured him with a very strong
official recommendation to the authorities, both ecclesi
astical and civil, in Dalmatia and the neighbouring pro
vinces. This document proved most truly a golden key,
opening every door, and surmounting every difficulty.
On this journey, again, he was supremely happy in
taking notes of ehurches, pursuing architectural studies,
searching for missals and manuscripts in monasteries
and libraries; and received everywhere with the greatest

FOREIGN LIBRARIES 273
kindness and courtesy, owing to his credentials. At the
monastery at Lambach, for instance, (the Foundation of
the eleventh century still in life), the library was not to be
seen, but when he sent in his recommendation, one of the
fathers, a very pleasing man, came out and took him all
over it. " There were fourteen thousand volumes, manu
scripts of great value, an almost priceless collection of
Incunabula (the name Germans give to books printed
before 1500), some pretty little manuscript breviaries,
but no manuscript missals."
He applied to the Abbot, a very striking man, by far
the most intellectual-looking of the whole set, for leave
to copy sequences, and permission was graciously given,
whilst he sent for some wine of the monastery's growth,
and before Compline the visitors and Fathers each had
a tumbler! From Gratz, again, he wrote —
"Great as has been the kindness I have always
received in foreign libraries, that which I here experienced
surpassed them all. ' Name your own time, sir,' said the
first librarian, 'and I will give you two clever under
graduates to wait on you.' I spent nearly a day -in that
cinquecento room, and the heartiness with which the
young men threw themselves into my pursuits, and the
courtesy with which they seemed to be receiving rather
than giving a favour, I shall never forget. The library
contains 42,000 volumes (of which 3,500 are Incunabula),
and 7,500 MSS."
Not only was Neale's enthusiasm infectious, but
nothing, and nobody, from intelligent innkeepers and
polite undergraduates to learned university professors
and dignified prelates, came amiss to him. In the eager
ness of his search his shyness was forgotten. At ease in
foreign languages he found less difficulty than most
travellers in understanding the spirit of the country and
the point of view of the natives, and was undeterred by
the etiquette of small foreign courts from venturing,
unembarrassed by insular reserve, into the presence of
royalty. At Cettinje, the first thing he saw— T

274 JOHN MASON NEALE
" was a crowd of people, surrounding a man, alone covered,
addressing them. This was the Prince ; it was a council
of war. At the end, the oldest peasant said, ' O Vladika,
let it be as thou wilt ! ' And then they moved to another
place. We sent our introduction to the Prince, and fol
lowed it at a little distance. Presently came the high
marshal, in a most gorgeous red and green dress, to bring
us to the Prince. He was with the senators (yeomen) and
the heads of the army, about to overlook the games. He
speaks French fluently, wears bagging green trousers like
a Dutchman, a waistcoat crimson and passemented with
silver, a jacket green and lined with crimson and slashed,
and a green cap set with jewels. He spoke very politely,
asked me to honour them by seeing the games, and set
me by him."
For a taciturn Englishman it might have been an
embarrassing position. But Neale evidently enjoyed himself
almost as much as if he had been in a convent library.
He remained looking on at the sports till dusk, when the
Prince ordered a room to be made ready for the travellers,
and sent them a royal present, white bread, a lamb ragout,
potatoes, and ices, for their supper. In his "Notes on
Dalmatia," published in 1862 by Hayes, Neale adds —
"I little thought as I listened to him then, so full ot
life and strength, discussing with the brightest anticipa
tions the future fortunes of his little state, that in a few
months he would be lying in a bloody grave." For this
Michael, Prince of Montenegro, was assassinated at Cattaro
in the August of this same year, i860.
With a definite object in view, and freed from the
ordinary conventionalities of life, Neale was perfectly un
constrained, both in manners and conversation. When
at home, he greatly valued the visits of those who shared
his tastes ; and opportunities of intercourse with eccle
siastical authorities, more particularly with those actively
engaged in the guidance and government of the Church,
were especially welcome to one whose student life had to
a certain extent debarred him from taking a practical
part in public affairs. But in ordinary society he was
absent-minded, and reserved. In a tite-d-tete with a

SOCIAL CAPABILITIES 275
chosen companion he gave of his best. He was ever
ready to answer inquiries, clear up disputed points, and
freely bestow information upon almost every conceivable
subject, turning from one thing to another with extra
ordinary facility : his mind was a labyrinth, but it was
one to which he never lost the clue. All this stood him
in good stead when his conversational powers were put in
requisition. On the other hand, he was deficient in those
social capabilities either natural or acquired, enabling a
man to take his right place in mixed company. As a
guest at a country house or a London dinner party, he
might easily have given a poor or wrong impression of
his powers. Indeed, on one of his visits to Lavington, it
is recorded that, though he had been expressly invited to
meet the Bishop of Oxford, when the dinner-hour arrived he
could nowhere be found ; and when a search was instituted
it was discovered that in a sudden access of shyness he had
gone to bed as the only possible excuse for not appearing
at dinner! Shyness, as it so often happens, took the
semblance of conceit, and a want of deference in argument
with equals or superiors, formed a remarkable contrast to his
gentleness with children and the unfailing courtesy of his
manners to the poor. He was in touch with the majority
of the men who, in his day, were distinguished for the part
they played in the public affairs of the Church, or for their
achievements in the various departments of art and litera
ture engaging his attention ; but communications were
carried on chiefly by means of letters. He was constantly
invited to take the principal part at English Church Union
and other meetings ; and as a lecturer his lucid expositions,
decisive, clear-cut judgments, and concise methods, made
him pre-eminently successful. One of his last lectures, in
1865, on "Sisterhoods in the Church of England," made
much impression. It was delivered at Stafford, but after
wards printed and widely circulated ; and some paragraphs
evidencing his manner and his method are worth quoting.
" As I remarked just now, we are all inclined to believe
that women ought to work for God, and work more for
Him, too, than they have done in the last century — not so

276 JOHN MASON NEALE
much from any unwillingness on their part, as because the
weight of the world pressed down upon them. Still,
nevertheless, we all know, and it is absurd to say or profess
that we don't know, there are difficulties and objections
made about Sisterhoods. Now I will be as quick as
I possibly can in going through these, because argument
is not very profitable ; and then I will tell you some things
which may perhaps interest you more."
His answers to dissentients are to the point, and so
sensible as to at once strike a popular audience. For
instance, with regard to the vows taken by the Sisters,
he explains the preliminary two years of novitiate or
probation. "I wonder how many people are engaged two years
before they are married, and how many people have to go
through a severe scrutiny as to whether, in the first place,
they are fit to be engaged at all, and then, after undergoing
two years' probation, as to whether they are fit to be
married. I fancy any of us would say : ' That is a very
needless scrutiny ' — needless in this world it may be, but
not needless so far as regards the world to come."
And then he goes on to describe the Sisters' life of
devotion and their labours of love. One anecdote may
well be recorded.
" About four years ago, in a very stormy November, a
Sister was sent for by a doctor to go to a place in Sussex,
about thirteen miles from their Home, to nurse four or five
cases of diphtheria. The doctor wrote : 'They are all, I
am afraid, hopeless cases, but still the patients' sufferings
may be relieved, the passage to death made easier, and
one or two may be saved.' The Sister went, and the next
day, towards afternoon, we had a message from her, asking
for things she stood in need of to nurse the sufferers. It
was one of the stormiest evenings I ever remember in my
life. I would let no one else go, and I went myself. The
village where she was nursing was about three miles from
the station, and I had hard work to persuade any one to
drive me over. When we came to the farmhouse, five out
of the six patients were dead, and the sixth was struggling
between life and death. The man who had driven me

ITINERANT NURSING 277
came and sat in the kitchen, drying himself by the fire, and
there was nothing to be done except just to pray with the
Sister and leave her, which I did. The man, who had been
very talkative when we came over, was very silent on our
way back. At last he said, just as a man might do who
had made some wonderful philosophical discovery, 'Do
you know, sir, I begin to think that perhaps there is some
use in prayer after all' I told him such was my opinion,
and asked him to see whether it was not correct. He
said, ' Well ! I think I will.' There the matter stood 1 for
two years. At the end of that time, another Sister had to
go and nurse in the same part of the country. . . . The
same man drove her over who had driven me, and, knowing
her by her dress, he told her of the wonderful recovery of
the woman for whom prayer had been made two years
ago. He added that the circumstance had made such an
impression on him, that he became a communicant, and
induced his wife to follow his example, and now they were
both trying to serve God."
Then he told of the thanksgiving services, held in a
Methodist Chapel, for a Sister's efficiency in nursing one
of their class leaders, of the gratitude and courtesy shown
by the roughest labouring men ; how, in one case, when
the husband of a woman whom a Sister was nursing found
she had nothing to sleep upon in the wretched hovel but
her own cloak laid on the floor, he said she must lie down
by her patient, and he would go out to " the house of a
friend ; " and it was not till the next morning he allowed
her to discover that, with the ground covered with snow,
he had slept in the courtyard, with his head in a big dog's
kennel. Again, in an outbreak of scarlet fever in a small
town in Hertfordshire, during the three weeks before a
sister arrived thirty-six deaths had occurred, but in the six
weeks she was there, though there were many more people
ill, there were only nine deaths.
We can imagine how the actual facts related formed
the most eloquent appeal. Organized women's work was
almost as new as sisterhoods themselves. Sanitary reforms
vigilance committees, philanthropic institutions had hardly
been called into existence. The Sisters had to grapple
single-handed with infection and disease without the most

278 JOHN MASON NEALE
necessary and ordinary modern appliances. In other
countries the work of religious orders had long been
recognized as in every respect superior to that of paid
nurses ; but in the Church of England Sisters of Charity
were yet untried, and until after the Crimean War, strange
to say, there was no such order in Russia. Anxious to
learn how the system worked in England, the Russian
Church sent two ladies to gather information at East
Grinstead ; and acting upon their report and upon the
knowledge gained during their residence with the S.
Margaret's Sisters, determined to establish Sisterhoods
upon the same lines. It was a circumstance that, in
the midst of many discouragements, greatly gladdened
their Founder's heart; one of the things for which he
said he thanked God most, that, in some measure, he
had been able to benefit the Communion he so deeply
venerated. He threw himself with his accustomed vigour into the
itinerant work of a lecturer, sometimes delivering speeches
at different centres on three consecutive days, on various
subjects ; very often to crowded and enthusiastic audiences.
He also frequently preached in London and elsewhere, the
Bishop of London having formally withdrawn his inhibi
tion in December, 1852. This inhibition appears to have
been based on a printed sermon, and with regard to it
Neale wrote to Webb —
"The proposal was my own. I offered, without re
tracting or qualifying anything I had said, to substitute
another sermon, stating in the preface that, as what I had
said in that sermon had been, in my opinion, unaccount
ably mistaken, I had put another in its place. Now I
hope you do not think that I have made any concession
I ought not. To my mind I have absolutely conceded
nothing, but if you think that I have at all betrayed the
truth, I will retract at once what I have offered. . . . The
Bishop x opened the door as wide as ever he could ; he
never even hinted at my qualifying in the preface what I
said. . . . Still, if you think that I have done too much,
1 Bishop Blomfield.

AMERICAN DEGREE CONFERRED 279
let me hear by return of post. I will take your opinion
here as against my own, for I am dreadfully afraid of
seeming to give up a point."
He need never have been afraid of doing so for any
personal advantages or for the sake of worldly gain. He
might be at times injudicious, or indiscreet. Both in
speech and in writing it would have been better if he had
paused to weigh his words, but his instinct was to fight
with any legitimate weapon at his command in defence of
what he held to be the truth. His daughter remembers
how, in his teaching, one of the lessons most often enforced
was as to the Christian's position as a member of a militant
Church, and the obligation it involved to war against the
world, the flesh, and the devil. Yet it would have been
no wonder if he had wearied of a struggle with those who
seldom took the trouble to weigh his arguments or under
stand his position.
To his old friend, though separated from him, he could
write freely ; he leaned with confidence upon the just
discernment of Webb's impartial judgment, and was
satisfied by his prompt and undoubting approval. Later
on differences arose, not merely in matters of taste but
of principle — divergences of opinion not unlikely to result
from their different positions in the Church and the circum
stances in which their lot had been cast; nevertheless,
almost to the last years of Neale's life, the correspondence
between them was of the most confidential character, and
rarely intermitted.
In i860 Neale received the degree of D.D. from
Hartford, Connecticut. There was some question of it in
1855, when he wrote : " One thing more which will amuse
you : the University of Hartford,1 the organ, you know, of
the American Church, has offered me a D.D. ; so at all
events a man may be a prophet out of his own country."
The degree was actually conferred in i860. The fact was
communicated to one of his friends by the Rev. Arthur
Cleveland Coxe, afterwards Bishop of Western New York,
in the following terms : —
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ERRATA.
Page 281, line 26, for " mean and awkward " read " mean and unkind.''

NEALE'S VIEWS ON THE DEGREE 281
distinction as conferred by such a University as Hartford.
The autograph letter subjoined gives a full explanation of
Neale's position. " S.C.
"Dec. 19, 1861.
"My dear Webb,
" I have been for some time wishing to write to
you about a part of your last letter, — namely, touching my
American degree.
" I neither care, — nor do not care, — whether people call
me by it, or not. But I certainly will not reject it, — for
these reasons :
" 1. It has always been accepted before, in the very few
instances where given. Caswell — though I may by no
means agree with his views — is, e.g. no fool.
" 2. So are medical degrees.
" 3. But this is my real reason. You do not know — as
how should you ? — how much better known I am in
America than in England ; — how much more liked ; — how
much more of an authority. You would be surprised were
I to reckon up all the Americans who have made their
way here.
" Well : — it would be mean in me — because some few
fellows in London may laugh — to hurt the feelings of those
in America who gave me all they had to give — (and the
less, mind you, the more mean and awkward it would be).
Go to the bottom of the matter — and how absurd is a D.D.
— paid for — of one of our Universities !
"No: — I feel about that, as Southey about the
Laureateship. It is no honour now, but, if God gives me
life and health, I will make it honourable.
" As to being laughed at (and especially — you must not
be angry — by Saturday Review people, who laugh at
everything), I care for it oiic-e ypv (or ypv — I don't know
which). "I was amused — or rather, I felt sorry, — that the
Guardian, holding your own views about Austria and
Naples, should yet be more generous in that way to me
than the Ecclesiologist. You there spoke of my strong
feeling for Austria and for poor Francischiello as if it were
— or approached to — a moral fault."

CHAPTER XXIV
Neale's correspondents — Letters from Gladstone and Dean Stanley —
Visit and letters from Ambrose de Lisle — Proposed " History of
the Church " — The " Commentary on the Psalms " — Mystical
interpretations of Holy Scripture — Dr. Littledale finishes the
" Commentary."
It has been necessary to anticipate events in order to give
a clearer idea of Neale's connection with public questions
and the world at large; but it must not be forgotten
that the parti-coloured threads of his life's work were
ceaselessly woven together in the narrow precincts of his
study. Here he gathered knowledge and material for his
books ; here he studied and pondered the foundations
and rules of religious Orders ; here he wrote his sermons,
rarely delivered extempore ; here he received the many
visitors who sought his counsel on literary, ecclesiological,
historical, or spiritual matters ; and from thence, from the
year 1854 onwards, he ruled and guided the Community,
founded in a faith that surmounted all difficulties and
misgivings and was the surest pledge of continuity.
Here, too, he carried on an extraordinarily voluminous
correspondence. For years he wrote to Webb every week,
sometimes even more frequently ; whilst during the last
years of his life his letters to his friend, Canon Haskoll,
are nearly as numerous. Of the letters preserved, a few
may be quoted.
In August, 1855, Gladstone writes to him in respect
to the Scotch Office and Neale's proposed " Life of Bishop
Torry." " It is quite true that I have felt a most deep interest
in the preservation of the Scotch Office ; a treasure from
282

CORRESPONDENCE 283
which, it appeared to me, that no consideration upon earth
ought to induce those who possessed it to depart.
" I regret that it should be said, even in the letter, that
you write to me as a stranger, but I hope we may at any
rate consider this as the beginning of our acquaintance,
and that time may improve it.
" I am well aware of your labours in connection with
the Eastern Church, which one cannot but believe has its
own special work to do for Christendom as well as for
itself. I lament that the attitude of partial opposition
between us should now be aggravated and complicated by
political causes ; but I pray God that when this sad strife
is at an end it may leave the atmosphere clearer than it
was before. " I remain Rev. and dear Sir,
" Your very faithful servant,
" W. E. Gladstone."
Canon Carter of Clewer consults him upon a contro
versial question, and will " be glad of the support of his
authority for " his " own private convictions."
Sir Henry Baker sends a long letter inviting criticism
on various translations of hymns, and begging Neale " to
gather out of his abundant store such Greek hymns and
others as you think most suitable to congregational use "
for " Hymns Ancient and Modern."
Canon Bright, from University College, in 1865, asks
his opinion upon " an important point connected with our
Latin translation of the Prayer-book."
And the Bishop of Connecticut writes, in December,
1864— " I have just had the pleasure and edification of reading
— surely unless you wrote it nobody in England did — your
article in the Christian Remembrancer, on the Filioque. . . .
The paper is read far and wide among us, and is having,
among the very best men, a great effect. It was just what
we needed. I do not know how it is in England, but here,
those who know the most about the Eastern Church are
only ' borgnes parmi les aveugles.' "
Hawker, of Morwenstow, writes from his Cornish
vicarage, in 1850 —

284 JOHN MASON NEALE
"Your name is so linked with the Eastern mother
that it is to me almost a household word. . . . Neither is
there any scholar of our day to whom my thoughts and
sympathies more frequently turn."
When the Sisterhood was being started, the Rev. R.
W. Sibthorp sent his congratulations from Lincoln —
"January 8, 1855.
" I sincerely wish you success. I can scarcely say that
I anticipate it ; but I would not discourage you. When
you speak of having met me twenty-seven years since, that
may remind you that I am come to an age when the
couleur de rose no longer tinges our plans and prospects.
I have seen enough of conflicts to long for rest, and enough
of the world and Church militant on earth to apprehend
that the place to set the sole of my foot is a very narrow
one, and I wish that others may not find it too narrow to
carry out enlarged plans of ecclesiastical and Catholic
usefulness. Your motto, I suppose, is Christo duce, nil
desperandum, and I won't put any shadows in your way.
" Believe me, dear Sir,
" Yours very faithfully in Christ,
" R. Waldo Sibthorp."
The packet of affectionate and confidential letters from
Bishop Forbes of Brechin bring their testimony to bear
upon a close and enduring friendship. He asks Neale's
opinion as to the admission of laymen into synods, dis
cusses Eucharistic doctrine, and demands help in framing
occasional services.
Butterfield makes an impossible request, that he would
write a short popular History of the Greek Church.
Archdeacon Denison discusses Church matters, and the
Gorham case in particular. From Beresford Hope (though
in later years they were estranged in opinion) there must
have been many letters ; only one has been preserved.
Mr. Boyle (afterwards Lord Glasgow) consults him
as to the Consecration of a ruined mortuary chapel, the
most convenient method of reciting the Seven Hours of
Prayer at Cumbrse, and the arrangement of shortened
services. Next in the packet we find a letter in Latin, from

LETTER FROM DEAN STANLEY 285
a Professor Karsten, respecting Neale's writings on the
Dutch Church.
A series of letters from Dr. Mill, the great Oriental
scholar ; as well as one from Dr. Malan, with inquiries
concerning Eastern liturgies.
Bishop Wilberforce returned thanks for assistance given
in connection with a speech of his in the House of Lords ;
and Dr. Pusey, in an undated letter, explains his reasons
for retiring from the London Union.
There are interesting letters from George Williams
upon Oriental problems, and one asking Neale to solve a
question as to Greek Church doctrine for Dr. Pusey.
Then comes a letter from Dean Stanley —
"I have to thank you for your kindness in sending
me your poem on Sinai. It was interesting to me to
see how naturally the subject flows into poetry, and I am
glad to think that my descriptions have enabled you so
thoroughly to enter into the scenery. ... I wish you all
success in the [illegible] of Chaldea.
" There are many points, as doubtless you are aware,
on which we should widely differ. But I cannot but admire
your courage in undertaking such a laborious work ; and I
have derived great assistance, even in my slight studies on
the same subject, from the extent and accuracy of your
research. " I was very glad to see your statement of the disgrace
ful affair at Lewes. "Yours faithfully,
"A. P. Stanley.
" Precincts, Canterbury."
Wordsworth, Bishop of S. Andrews, requires information
regarding the " Moral Concordances of S. Anthony," " a
remarkable performance, and, in the form which you have
given it, I should hope likely to be very useful."
These letters, selected from those preserved, mingled
with many from other countries, France, Russia, Holland,
and Spain, as well as from our colonies, afford some
indication of the place Neale held in the estimation of
very different types and classes of men ; and show upon
what important subjects his advice was sought as that of

286 JOHN MASON NEALE
an expert. In Russia his name was widely known and
honoured, and in i860, on the receipt of a magnificent
present of icons, he writes, " I had no idea until now, how
big a man I was in Russia." Every mark of recognition
from that country was most especially prized. His Holiness
Philaret, of Moscow, on sending him a rare book, wrote his
name in it with the following inscription : " God's blessing
and help to them who investigate the truth in the ancient
books and traditions of the Church, for the peace and
ultimate union of the Churches of God. Phil. M., Moscow,
July 13, i860."
Pursuing with a light heart the ideal of a reunited
Christendom ; no sense of present isolation could chill
his ardent desires, no dust of controversy could conceal,
though it might for the time obscure, the brightness of
his hope. Each step, tardily or timidly taken, in the
right direction received his glad support ; each sign of
amity, however trivial, was welcomed as a herald of peace.
He was delighted when the Bishop of Bruges asked per
mission to have some of his stories for children translated
into French and Flemish, and published with his sanction.
They had been translated into German for the Lutherans,
and into Russ for the youthful members of the Orthodox
Church, and this was a crowning gratification.
He was more than ready to respond to a request
from Bishop Forbes of Brechin to bring his friend Mr.
Ambrose Phillips, better known as Ambrose de Lisle, who
from another Communion had done so much to advance
the cause they had at heart ; and two letters to Sackville
College after the visit had taken place were full of sympathy
and encouragement.
" I can assure you I shall never forget the happy day
I spent with you yesterday — I was deeply edified. I
bless God from my inmost soul for the great work His
grace has wrought in you, and I pray Him to complete
what He has begun, and to bring our Churches to perfect
unity in His own good time. But go on, nothing doubt
ing, nothing fearing. Pray for me, and believe me heartily
yours in Christ Jesus,
"Ambrose Lisle Phillips."

AMBROSE DE LISLE 287
And from Gracedieu Manor, July 22, i860, he wrote
again —
" I have often thought of my agreeable visit to East
Grinstead, and I feel much indebted to my friend, the
Bishop of Brechin, for having given me such a valuable
introduction, for I can truly say that I attach a deep value
to your acquaintance. I trust we may turn it mutually to
the greater glory of God, and the promotion of the future
union of our respective Churches. What I saw, both in
your parish and in other localities, of the Anglican Church,
particularly at Clewer^ affords a most striking and undeni
able evidence of a most wonderful growth of Catholic
principles and life in your Communion, and I cannot
doubt that Providence is thus gradually preparing your
Church for a reunion with the other great Churches of
Christendom in which the normal principle of Catholicity
prevails. But much remains to be done. The Anglican
Church must be brought to greater unity in herself before,
as a whole, she can reunite with the Latin and Greek
Churches. So, also, a very different feeling must be
established between Greeks and Latins, before a healthy
union can be brought about. In the mean time we must
cultivate kindly feelings and mutual forbearance, and,
above all, strive after holiness, and the avoiding of all that
is evil, in order to draw down God's blessing on the
work. ..."
Then there follows a cordial invitation to Neale to visit
him at his home, an invitation circumstances unfortunately
hindered him from accepting.
But neither Neale's short tours abroad, nor valued and
welcomed guests at home, were allowed to interfere with
his unceasing labour with his pen. He rose frequently
at five, and worked on till night, often writing a sermon
before he said Prime with the Sisters. The daily Eucharist
was at seven, and his ministrations to the Sisters, pensioners,
and orphans were never set aside for any literary occupa
tions, however important and pressing. Of these latter he
had occasionally more than a dozen on hand at once, his
tenacious grasp upon a subject being relaxed only to take
up another.
During these last years his " History of Antioch," and

288 JOHN MASON NEALE
the " Commentary on the Psalms " (one of the publications
by which he is best known) were the chief objects to which
his hours of study were devoted. " I stick to ' Antioch '
daily," he writes ; and, in 1859, he was making way with
the " Psalms." But this great work went on slowly, and
he was not destined to complete it No wonder, when so
many other books and duties intervened ! In a letter to
Webb, typical of many others, he proposed to undertake a
translation of the fifth book of " Durandus." He is sending
off some Greek hymns, and he adds —
" My name must be looking up, I think. To-day I
had a proposal from Saunders & Otley, with whom I never
had any dealings, to write a large History of the Church ;
at my own terms, and at my own time — all books of
reference to be supplied gratis. They repeat, that they
would give any sum I asked. Of course, I was forced to
decline, but fifteen years ago, how I should have jumped at
such an offer ! "
Ten days later, Saunders & Otley returned vigorously
to the charge, and Neale, athirst for work he loved, recon
sidered his answer. A big Church history (four octavo
volumes of 600 pages each) could surely, somehow, be
wedged in between the "Commentary on the Psalms"
and "Antioch," without interfering with his translations,
and hymns, and children's stories, and yet leave plenty of
time for his direction of the Sisterhood, and the lectures
and sermons he was delivering in London and elsewhere ;
and he offered to write the four volumes for ^500. In
this case, he had overrated his exceptional powers. Not
even his indomitable industry could conquer increasing
difficulties in the way of strenuous and uninterrupted
application to one subject, and this particular scheme was
never carried into effect. "The History of Antioch,"
(though it remained unfinished), in 1857, occupied a large
portion of his attention. "I am tooth and nail on
' Antioch,' " he writes, " and have quite got into the spirit
of it. I do four octavo pages every day ; and can answer
to keep that on." Later it became impossible. Hours
of study were carefully planned out, but services and

PRIMITIVE COMMENTATORS 289
devotional exercises had to be observed with the strictness
and regularity of a religious House, and demands upon his
time were multiplied on every side.
The " Commentary on the Psalms " had been in his mind
for years, and at intervals he had done a great deal of
work in connection with it, the first volume, however, was
not published until i860.
In this immense undertaking Dr. Littledale co-operated
with him. He was a constant visitor at Sackville College
(for years he spent Holy Week and Easter there), and
in many respects his tastes were identical with Neale's.
They were both unusually versed in Holy Scripture ; not
merely with respect to verbal and ethical knowledge, but
with that deeper sense of its significance, and love for
mystical interpretations which, as Neale himself states in
his preface to the first volume, " appear beyond measure
wild and unreal to persons who are not used to primitive
and mediaeval commentators."
Their " holy ingenuity " filled Neale with admiration.
The fanciful intricacy of words or sentences, the design
in various forms expressing a central idea, was as beautiful
as the delicate fretwork and elaborate carving of rood-
screen or capital ; and just as the close observation of an
expert may be required to discover the initial beneath the
embossed and gilded foliage surrounding it, so spiritual
insight might alone discern the truths hidden in the inspired
pages of prophets and evangelists. Here he found the
secret of the Lord emblazoned in pure untarnished colour ;
here he caught evasive, remote, and yet illuminating
glimpses of the mind of Christ.
To him it was no question of literary excellence or
decorative art. The barest statements of historical facts
were types and symbols or prophecies ; all rich in inner
meanings, clearly manifested to an enlightened and re
ceptive mind. In the society of Saints and Mystics he
sought the heights where they enjoyed more intimate
communion with God, and attained to a clearer knowledge
of His Attributes ; yet he had neither the temperament of
the contemplative nor the vocation of the solitary. He
U

290 JOHN MASON NEALE
made no prolonged sojourn upon the mount, descending to
unfold the message to the people upon the plain ; to
interpret the allegory, to connect type with anti-type, and
re-establish emblems of faith tradition had consecrated.
His discourses on the " Apocalypse " and on the " Song
of Songs" are naturally most full of mystical interpreta
tions, and to a large extent these permeate all his sermons.
In his third dissertation on "the Literal and Mystical
Interpretation of the Psalms," he vindicates the principle
upon which his Commentary is based ; — a principle that
must be recognized- if it is not to be condemned " as an
aggregation of the wildest conceits and the most worthless
fancies." He brings forward strong historical arguments
for the legitimate use of metaphor, and shows that such
explanations were enlarged and sanctioned by the universal
voice of the Church. For instance, he points out —
" a conventionalism which, from the time of S. Augustine
downwards, directed and influenced the whole mediaeval
course of Scriptural interpretation, . . . the appropriation
of the name Jerusalem — the Vision of Peace — to the Church
Triumphant ; that of Sion — Expectation — to the Church
Militant. . . . That they may declare the Name of the
Lord in Sion, and His Worship at Jerusalem. . . . His
Name in the earthly Sion now ; His Worship in the
Heavenly Jerusalem. . . . Again, 'O be favourable and
gracious unto Sion ; ' and then by a very beautiful sequence,
' Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem ; ' because, through
God's love and mercy to the Church here, those spiritual
stones are prepared by which the walls of the eternal
temple are to be built on high."
In like manner he dwells much upon —
" the additional depth of meaning, given to almost every
Psalm, by taking the Word to mean the Incarnate Word.
. . . ' The Word of the Lord also is tried in the fire ; ' how
more truly can His sufferings be described ? ' Thy Word
hath quickened Me.' 'Whoso eateth My Flesh and
drinketh My Blood, hath eternal life.' ... ' I am as glad
of Thy Word as one that findeth great spoils ; ' take it of
the Church, when, after four thousand years she could say;

MYSTICAL INTERPRETATIONS 291
' Unto us a child is born.' The 1 19th Psalm taken in this
sense is transfigured into a beauty which cannot exist for
those that reject Mysticism."
If inexperienced novices in that school might grasp
these obvious and appropriate interpretations ; in other
places we find him delighting (like those who had preceded
him) in extracting harmonies from strange combinations
of texts as he played upon the words. Examples may
be given from his curious sermon upon the number seven ;
in which he illustrates its " especial holiness." " It means,
and it is the sign of, God's covenant relation to man,
and especially to His Church, Jewish or Gentile." And
then he gives instances too numerous to mention. Seven
is the number of sacrifice. Hezekiah and Job's friends
offer seven bullocks and seven rams, etc. Balak is com
manded to build seven altars. The priest sprinkles the
blood seven times before the veil ; and so, on the day
of Atonement, he sprinkles the Mercy Seat. " It is the
number of forgiveness ; I say not unto thee seven times,
but until seventy times seven." He might, as he says,
"go on almost endlessly" — seven clauses in the Lord's
Prayer, seven words from the Cross, seven parables con
cerning the Church ; and yet further, Neale (possibly also
some of the Fathers) divides the number again to show that
3+4 has a mystical significance —
"Three sets forth God, four the world. ... In the
Lord's Prayer three petitions about the Glory of God . . .
four for the good of man. In the seven great parables of
the Church : four spoken by the sea-side, then a pause,
then three in the house. ... In the seven words [from the
Cross] three are addressed to man ... the other four to God
in marvellous analogy with the Lord's Prayer. So in the
Beatitudes, four have to do with earth, three with Heaven.
. . . And what the God of Grace orders, the God of Nature
typifies. What is the sign of the covenant between God
and man, but the rainbow with its seven colours."
Nevertheless verbal types and analogies, though often
set forth in treatises and discourses of medieval writers,

292 JOHN MASON NEALE
have no necessary connection with the inner spirit of
Christian mysticism, defined "as the attempt to realize,
in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal
in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal.1 Of
speculative and philosophic mysticism under its "form
less " aspect Neale had not the knowledge that can only
result from conscious intuitions and personal experience.
Of the two ways of attaining to the knowledge of God as
set forth by Molinos, " meditation or discursive thought
and pure faith or contemplation," he would probably have
chosen the former ; and when he writes of the Saints he
dwells more upon the asceticism of anchorites, the faith
of virgins, the labours of theologians, and the constancy
of martyrs than upon their passive reception of Divine
revelations. His knowledge either of the systematic and
tabulated mysticism of S. Teresa, or of such morbid
quietism as that of Madame de Guyon, was not experi
mental; though his imagination, unfettered by chilling
prejudices or rationalistic dispositions, easily lifted him
into a region where supernatural occurrences or heavenly
visions were natural indications of the Divine Presence.
In the study and interpretation of Holy Scripture, he
invariably sought the assistance of the Fathers, and used
texts for his sermon, full of significance, but with a mystical
rather than a literal relation to his subject Dean Randall
remembers his preaching on the slaughter of the sons of
Rizpah and Michael, 2 Sam. xxi. 9 : " And they fell all
seven together, and were put to death in the days of
the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley
harvest ; " and the sentence following the text : " These
words, my brethren, as you all know, refer to the Apostles ;"
and how he spoke of their fall before the Crucifixion, in the
beginning of the great harvest they were one day to gather
in. Other texts, appropriated to certain times and seasons,
or bearing upon sacramental teaching, are more obviously
suggestive. For the absence of the Blessed Sacrament from the
Altar on Good Friday and Easter Eve : " Saul said unto
1 W. R. Inge, " Christian Mysticism."

HIDDEN MEANINGS 293
Jonathan his son, Wherefore cometh not the son of Jesse
to meat, neither yesterday, nor to-day ? "
For Spiritual Communion : " And this your heave-
offering shall be reckoned to you, as though it were the
corn of the threshingfloor, and as the fulness of the wine
press." For Christmas : " David earnestly asked leave of me
that he might run to Bethlehem, his city."
In the preface to the second edition of his Sermons on
the " Song of Songs," published a year after his death, his
friend, Canon Haskoll, observes that, in the meditations
and addresses given to the Sisters, he was especially
anxious to draw out " the mystical interpretation of Holy
Scripture, that thereby a celestial glory might be thrown
on the common things of everyday life." It was, he
deemed, "a true way of brightening the road to the
Heavenly Country."
In every word he saw a hidden meaning, some sweet
ness to be drawn from the efflorescence of each verse.
These discourses were best suited to the Religious for
whom they were written, who, meditating upon the verbal
metaphor, might grasp the truth it enshrined. To those
who had foresworn earthly consolations, he appropriately
spoke of the Palm of rest, and the Palm of victory, and
of the words of the Bridegroom, " I have come into My
garden." The garden, in its literal sense, the world over
grown with weeds and thorns to which He came in the
Incarnation, and where He laboured for three and thirty
years, a garden " in years to come to be beautified by the
roses of martyrdom and the lilies of chastity." Another
garden — the garden of the Agony, where His disciples,
may be with Him in temptation. The garden, again, of
the Resurrection, where He appeared very early to Mary
Magdalene, " and she supposed Him — and oh, how rightly
— to be the Gardener;" and then, again, His garden, to
which He comes in "the closest, liveliest sense" when
He visits the soul " to eat His pleasant fruits, and to find
there the myrrh of sacrifice and the spice of prayer."
The whole little discourse is representative of many

294 JOHN MASON NEALE
others, full of spiritual knowledge brought to bear upon
the religious vocation and the details of a Sister's life.
From the time that he began to hold services at the
College, Neale had made a close and constant study of the
Psalms ; and when he sought for instruction, he became
aware that the Church of the Primitive and Middle Ages,
in adapting the Psalter to her own needs, had —
" employed all the luxuriance of her imagination to elicit,
to develop — if you will to play with — its meaning. There
is, to use the word in a good sense, a perfect treasury of
mythology locked up in mediaeval commentaries and
breviaries — a mythology the beauty of which grows upon
the student, till that which at first sight appears strange
and unreal, making anything out of anything — perfectly
fascinates. The richness and loveliness of this system of
allegory have never been done justice to in our language."1
Again, in the same volume, Neale lays great stress
upon the recital of the Psalter as one great means of
quickening devotion and sustaining a sense of communion
with God, not only in religious communities and in the
Church at large, but in individuals. He recalls how S.
Gregory the Great declined to consecrate a Bishop who
did not know the Psalter by heart, and how the Council
of Toledo (653) ordered that "none henceforth should be
promoted to any ecclesiastical degree who did not know
the whole Psalter ; " how many of the Saints made vows
to recite it daily, though he much laments that S. Dominic
the Cuirassier should have turned so pious an occupation
into task-work by going through two Psalters every day,
and given a penitential character even to the song of
praise by taking the discipline all the time.
Just as Neale's love for the Bible seems to have been
in some measure the result of his early evangelical training,
so his affection for the Psalms was strengthened by attend
ance upon the Offices of the Church and his knowledge of
mediaeval customs and Patristic commentaries. In the
1 See introduction to the first volume of the " Commentary on the
Psalms."

USE OF THE PSALTER 295
use of antiphons, for instance, he sees a means of illumina
tion, brought out in a very characteristic passage : —
"The same Psalm was said at Easter, said in Lent,
said at Whitsuntide, said on the Festivals of Martyrs, said
in the Office for the Dead ; it could not at all these seasons
be recited with the same feelings, in the same frame of
mind. The different emphases required to be brought
out ; the sun-ray from the Holy Ghost rested, indeed, at
all times on the same words, but the prism of the Church
separated that colourless light into its component rays,
into the violet of penitence, the crimson of martyrdom, the
gold of the highest seasons of Christian gladness."
Pages of this introduction are taken up by the list of
different versions of the Psalms, and the long roll of com
mentators consulted.
" To my mind," he writes, " the Commentary of Michael
Ayguan (1416) is, on the whole, the best of those that
have been contributed to the treasury of the Church,
though wanting the unction of Dionysius and the marvel
lous Scriptural knowledge of S. Augustine. To me it has
been, as it were, a dear companion for the last fifteen
years ; during that period I have read it through three
times, and each time with a higher admiration of its
marvellous depth, richness, and beauty."
The passage quoted is selected from many affectionate
comments upon the authorities consulted ; but it opens,
as it were, the door, and gives us a sight of his mental
laboratory. Here revelations were vouchsafed, and rays of
knowledge illuminated the dullest pages of antiquity. The
very touch of an old missal or manuscript inspired hope
that patient study would receive a full reward. The books
that filled his study, lining the walls and stretching in
extra shelves across the room, hardly affording space to
pass to his desk, were familiar friends and dear com
panions. From the Office-books of the Church, Roman, Mozarabic,
Ambrosian, Gallican, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac,
he derived even more assistance than from the early

296 JOHN MASON NEALE
commentators, and he emphatically disclaims originality of
interpretation, having sought, above all, to follow in the
steps of the saintly men who expressed the mind of the
Church; yet, without Neale's setting, to many these primi
tive jewels would have been buried, unknown stones of no
price ; and it may well be said that the collector was best
qualified to appraise them at their true value. In allegory
and type, in prophecy and parable, he gathered rich sheaves
of divine meanings ; fanciful, unfounded, obscure as they
might seem to some, to him they were but the natural and
legitimate exposition of words necessarily to be regarded
as symbolic of heavenly truths.
" Our Blessed Lord Himself," he writes, " seems to
invite us to discover mystical interpretations by the very
structure of His parables." And he shows how very soon
such were discovered by ecclesiastical writers, until mystical
interpretation in "the fourth century, had acquired all the
characteristics of a science. ... It is the distinguishing
mark of difference between ancient and modern commen
tators. To the former, it was the very life, marrow, essence
of God's Word — the kernel of which the literal exposition
was the shell — the jewel to which the outside and verbal
signification formed the shrine ; by the latter it has almost
universally been held in equal contempt and abhorrence."
" I claim nothing," he writes again, " but the poor thread
on which the pearls are strung. To collect them has been
the happy work of many years — work which has consoled
me in trial, added happiness to prosperity, afforded a theme
of profitable conversation with dear friends, furnished the
subject-matter for many sermons. I pray God to accept
it as an offering to the treasury of His Church."
Dr. Pusey heard of his work in 1858, when he himself
was engaged upon " S. Cyril of Alexandria " with a view
to a new edition. He was, as he wrote to Neale, —
"especially much occupied in collecting and enlarging,
as far as I could, the fragments on the Psalms, ... I
bethought myself that I was running some risk of losing
my labour by carrying it about to foreign libraries for the
purpose of collection. I therefore had three or four copies
of the ' Psalms ' roughly printed, but I thought you would

DR. LITTLEDALE 297
be, most likely, too far advanced to use it. However, on
naming this yesterday to the Bishop of Brechin, he was
inclined to think it would still be acceptable to you. I
therefore send you the sheets, eighteen in number, by this
morning's post."
The Commentary was advertised as early as 1858, and
no doubt there were other living authorities from whom
Neale sought and obtained information and advice ; but
in this special work Dr. Littledale was chiefly concerned,
and it was proper that his pen should finish the task
Neale's death left incomplete.
Littledale had not only been an intimate friend, but
they had had constant conversations and discussions upon
scriptural questions. Though lighter themes were intro
duced, and quaint sayings and odd rhymes would be
repeated, interspersed with stories from every land and
time ; those who formed part of the family circle re
member how, sitting in the evenings one on each side of
the fireplace, they would most often seek out obscure
Biblical texts, divine meanings, or explain disputed
passages by reference to theologians or fathers of the
Church. Littledale, an untiring student and prolific writer,
with great stores of learning, had a more caustic wit and
controversial mind, but his faculties had been exercised
in the same school as Neale's. He had the sympathetic
interest of a fellow-labourer in his schemes and writings,
and in his preface to the second volume of the " Psalms,"
published in 1868, he pays a just tribute to his memory.
This was two years after Neale's death, whose commentary
ends abruptly at the fifth verse of the fifty-ninth Psalm.
Though the work " is chiefly a mosaic from old writers,"
Dr. Littledale declares himself to be conscious of the
inferiority of the part for which he is responsible.
" The vast stores of Dr. Neale's learning," he writes,
"were hardly less remarkable than the readiness and
certainty with which he could draw on them, the ease with
which he could illustrate any subject he treated, with apt
classical allusions, parallels lying hid in history or legend,

298 JOHN MASON NEALE
hymn or song, of ancient or modern times. Any one
coming after him in the many paths of his labours is at a
disadvantage in comparison, but especially in a field so
peculiarly his own as the mystical interpretation of
Scripture." The work was executed to fulfil the wish of a dying
friend, and much gratitude is owing to one who, in the
midst of other pressing duties, and in incessant ill-health,
did not fail to carry out that bequest.

CHAPTER XXV
Development of the Sisterhood — The Spirit of the Founder — Inner
life— Spiritual dealings and letters — Attention to details — The
Sisters' work in Soho — Penitentiary work.
The last years of Dr. Neale's life were perhaps among
the happiest he had ever spent. He had borne the burden
and heat of the day, he had laboured with cheerful, un
remitting courage at tasks of which the magnitude might
have easily disheartened a less indomitable spirit ; he
had seen the Church he loved weather storms at times
threatening to overwhelm her, and for the moment her
anchor was cast in smooth waters. From East and West
he had received a due and instinted meed of praise for
his successful incursions into almost untrodden regions
of knowledge. Reinstated by time's laggard justice in
the estimation of the authorities of his own Communion,
he had so completely put the past aside as to dedicate
the volume of his collected "Seatonian Poems" to the
Bishop of Chichester, apparently without a thought that
the offering might come to him in the undesired shape of
coals of fire. On November 23, 1863, he writes —
" It is really providential that now, about three weeks
ago, the Bishop formally, as he did three years ago virtually,
withdrew his inhibition ; so, I hope, ends a battle of more
than sixteen years ; I having not withdrawn a single word
nor altered a single practice (except in a few instances,
by way of going further). . . . You saw that I got the
Seatonian again — my tenth. I have now had it oftener
than any one before. These are to be reprinted together,
for the booksellers want them, and they are to be dedi
cated to the Bishop of Chichester. Of course I know
299

3oo JOHN MASON NEALE
what horrible trash they are, but if the bookseller likes
to give something and the Bishop likes the honour, I ought
to be content."
It was not that he had not deeply felt the injustice
of the treatment he had suffered and the opposition he
had had to encounter. He had been occasionally de
pressed ; indeed, in referring to the year of the Lewes
riots, he says that he does not know how he and his
wife could have lived through such another, though
throughout all trials her calm and courageous attitude
had strengthened his defences, and she had been ready
to share and lighten his cares. But it was not in his nature
to allow an injury to rankle ; happy in his home, in his
literary occupations, and in the growing religious Com
munity he had been privileged to found, the skies above
him were serene, and he went forth to his work without
any presentiment of how soon the evening shadows were
to fall. Never strong, slight lapses from health became more
frequent, his journals often taking note of some pro
ject or work for this reason interrupted or abandoned ;
nevertheless his mental energy remained absolutely un
impaired, and he was not content with having his
present time filled to overflowing, but, with all his old
enthusiasm, was planning fresh undertakings for the years
to come. "Do you wish to know what I have set myself—
smaller books being omitted — for my life task ? " he writes
to his old tutor, Mr. Russell, on January n, i860. "This.
Of the Greek History — ' Antioch and Jerusalem,' making
in 8vo 2. ' Constantinople,' 2. The remainder of the
•Psalms,' 3. 'History of Hymnology,' 2. 'Eucha:
Bibliar,' 1. 'History of the Cross,' 1-11. Reckon each
at two years' hard work, and I fear I must not even
hope for much more."
His faithful affection for his tutor exemplifies a very
engaging trait in his character — his unalterable attach
ment to old friends. Mr. Russell had taught him as

COMMUNITY LIFE 301
quite a little boy, and he never forgot his kindness.
Every year, if possible, he visited him upon his birthday ;
he kept him perpetually informed by correspondence of all
his thoughts and projects, and one of the last letters he
was able to dictate from his death-bed was addressed to
him. From 1859 to 1866, the year of his death, the Sister
hood increased and prospered, more than fulfilling his
most sanguine expectations. Already, in 1859, he wrote :
" Our numbers at S. Margaret's have so increased that at
Michaelmas we enter upon five houses. Our income this
year will have amounted to ^1000."
It is strange, after all the years that have gone by, to
walk down the lane between the churchyard and these
five houses, of which he speaks with the pride of a fortunate
possessor; stranger still to pass through the yard, and
up the narrow stairs to what was originally the Com
munity room ; the oratory, built for a workshop, long
and narrow, once furnished with dark wooden benches
for the Sisters, where the chief part of his sermons on the
Religious Life were preached. This oratory connected
the houses used for the Orphanage with S. Margaret's ;
the first refectory being a sort of semi-underground shed,
now used for lumber. Neale's grave on the edge of the
raised churchyard is close to the place where so important
a part of his life's work was done.
In this rough and rudimentary dwelling, the vow of
poverty could hardly fail to be literally kept. This was
the home to which a wearied Sister thankfully returned
from dispiriting struggles with some deadly form of
disease or sin. Here she found spiritual rest and re
freshment, and the Founder ready to console, encourage,
and minister to each individual soul. To one who re
proached him with devoting too much of his time to the
Sisters, he replied that when at home they justly demanded
all the help and spiritual comfort their position as mem
bers of a Religious Community could afford. Called upon
to face danger and death, at a moment's notice, when
on nursing duty, they were necessarily debarred from

302 JOHN MASON NEALE
Sacraments, religious instruction, and even from formal
prayer. With respect to daily Communion, for instance,
he says —
" I do not wish to put a difficulty in your way of re
ceiving Him, as I should in any Sisterhood but this ;
I mean where the Sisters were from year's end to year's
end always in the oratory, and able to communicate. It
is not so with you. Some of you by to-morrow night may
be fifty miles off, and never see the Blessed Sacrament
again for a month." In their chapel they were constantly
in that Presence : " Scarcely an hour when this little oratory
will not be His Court ; scarcely an hour at which it will
not diffuse its blessings all around it, if only your hearts
are pure and holy to receive them."
No one could possibly accuse him of undervaluing the
observance of the religious rules, " which, if in themselves
worth nothing, are yet the heart's blood of a Sister's
spiritual life;" at the same time, he was anxious that in
keeping the letter they should not sacrifice the spirit of
the order. " It has pleased God," he writes, " to give you
a Sisterhood banded together for work, sometimes terrible
work. Your motto is, ' He that works well, prays well.' "
Though two hours a day was the minimum of time for
Sisters' private prayers, he constantly exhorted those on
duty to let no rule, no personal acts of devotion, no
fulfilment of other obligations stand in the way of their
single-hearted attendance upon the sick to whom they
were sent. There was to be no restriction of service.
Where others might reasonably shrink back from difficulty
or danger, there the Sister was most especially bound to
go. In cases of necessity he asserted that she need not
be disquieted if she found no time and opportunity
throughout the day for formal prayer. In the lonely
wayside cottage as in the crowded street she might still
keep her hand upon the Lord's garment, though no words
might be framed.
In other lesser respects he allowed more freedom than
some Superiors of convents would have approved.

RULE OF LIFE 303
"We should all agree," he writes to a friend, "that
they should have modern books to read, if they like, at
certain times. But now — what about novels ? Would
you absolutely say, 'You shall never read one;' or would
you rather say ' I will choose for you, and you may read, if
you like, those ' ? I confess that, whether right or wrong,
and however much it might shock some people, I believe
that this is the right way. I say this without any pre
judice whatever. You know what an inveterate devourer
of novels I used to be. The only thing in which I see I
am getting old is, that now it is a positive bore to me to
read them. Yet some that I look at, I do really think, our
Sisters might read with real profit."
He did not for an instant seek to depreciate the stricter
rules of other orders ; the long vigils of solitaries, the
austere devotions of ascetics, the unintermitted prayer
and adoration of cloistered nuns had inspired and hallowed
the lives of Saints, preparing them, in Montalembert's
words, " par une douce transition l'acces de la vie dternelle."
At the same time he most fully realized the nobility
of the service to which his Sisters were more particularly
pledged. " What I feel strongly myself," he says, " that I want
you also to see ; namely, that this is the exact Sisterhood
of all others which must have the strongest temptations.
The rapid change from complete isolation to a Sister's life,
from weeks without a service, to days full of service,
makes everything more difficult. A simply ascetic Sister
hood is comparatively easy."
He is profoundly desirous to impress upon them the
sense of unity and intercommunion no distance or absence
may destroy : — " That is one dear use of a House like this.
There is no such thing — to use a technical term — as a
Limited Company here. You are each answerable, not
only for your own sins and shortcomings, but, to a certain
extent, for those of all your Sisters. Had you, each of
you, prayed more for them, they would have fallen less.
. . . And thus we must endeavour more to resemble that
Jerusalem which is built as a city in unity with itself."

304 JOHN MASON NEALE
When the Sisters were absent from the Home he
wished the rules of behaviour to be as simple and
unconstrained as possible. When a Sister was nursing a
private case she was to take her meals, for convenience
sake, with the family. If they had a friend or two to
dinner she was to dine with them as usual. " This scanda
lizes the Clewer people, with whom we are on intimate
terms," but to Neale it seemed the " height of unreality "
for her to withdraw on account of the presence of one or
two visitors.
It might be said that these were of necessity but
tentative untried lines upon which to work an organization
yet in its infancy. This is perfectly true ; as time went
on there were extensions in one direction, restrictions in
another, but, in the little book entitled " Dicit Fundator,"
compiled for the Sisters' private use, the spirit actuating
the Founder is breathed into the Community.
"It is not external poverty," he writes, "it is not
external obedience, it is not your profession of chastity
which will make you brides of Christ. It is love first, love
midst, love last ; love that makes you resign all possessions
and all appearance of them ; love that makes you delight
in submitting your own will to that of others ; love that
cannot endure to think of any love but His own."
This spirit ensured an unhesitating response. To Neale
and to the Sisters alike the post of danger was the post
of honour ; and a call to the lowest and most repugnant
form of service the one to be most anxiously coveted.
There is an unmistakable note of triumph in Neale's
sentences, when it is a question of ministering to exceptional
misery or destitution. In one terrible outbreak of typhus,
he writes of —
"the only case where as yet it has been necessary to
send two Sisters. The terror was so great that no one
would bring even water from the river (the only water
they have) to the door ; and when they first went, the girl,
too weak to turn in bed, had literally not been touched for

ORDER AND METHOD 3°5
a week. Again, there is an application for a Sister to take
charge of the temporary small-pox hospital at Salisbury,
where it is raging. I am very well pleased to get a footing
in that diocese."
When the sick were not too far from East Grinstead,
he would always visit the nursing Sisters and their patients
himself, often walking long distances at night across
ploughed fields to bring some food or necessary drug ;
and when unable to reach them in any other way, prayer
for their individual needs was daily sent up from the
Home. He prayed like a Saint or a child, as readily for
temporal as for spiritual blessings. If he lost his keys
he prayed that he might find them ; and if he was hoarse,
and had to preach or lecture, he would ask the Sisters to
join in prayer at the appointed hour, that he might not
break down in his sermon. On the one side there was
an ever-abiding sense of the supernatural, and on the
other a large measure of what has been termed " sanctified
common sense." At the beginning of Lent, whilst setting
self-denial before them as an absolute duty, he observes
he has often had occasion to remind them that it is the
duty of those who need all their physical strength for
God, not to do more in the way of fasting than they are
fully able to bear. Again, he is severe upon reckless
exposure to infection ; the Sister has no right not to care
in this respect for others, and, as far as is possible, for
herself. In insisting upon the importance of little things he
displayed an intimate knowledge of detail. Just as, in
another department of work, he had shown extraordinary
patience in unravelling some disputed point or examining
a defaced missal, so he now set himself to master the
intricate daily order of the Sisterhood and Orphanage.
Example, it might have been said, was better than precept.
His study littered with papers, disarranged books, and
old letters, hardly bore out his teaching, and to the
impartial observer might have afforded an object lesson
of another kind. But he realized the importance of
method in a Community in regard to the training of
X

306 JOHN MASON NEALE
children, and had a keen eye and a sharp reprimand for
failures in this respect.
The work was increasing beyond the capabilities
of the number of Sisters available to cope with it. In
1858 the Rev. J. C. Chambers, Vicar of S. Mary's, Crown
Street, Soho, asked Dr. Neale for two Sisters to work in
the worst quarters of his poor parish. A graphic account
of that work may be found in " Memories of a Sister of
S. Saviour's Priory." It is the story of a movement for the
enfranchisement of the slaves of sin and oppression, by
individual effort, not yet fully organized, and subject to no
public support or control, and for seven years a small
band of Sisters did what they might to lighten ignorance
and misery in one of the poorest districts in London ; until,
in the spring of 1866, they removed to Haggerstone to form
the nucleus of their present Home, S. Saviour's Priory, now
a branch House, with one of the early Sisters whom Dr.
Neale professed, as its Mother.
L The Sisterhood was thus stretching out its arms in all
directions, to the sick and poor and fallen. At first
Neale had shrunk from undertaking what is technically
called " rescue work." ° Other Sisterhoods had made this
their object, and, though usually hopeful, in a sermon he
had openly stated his belief that such work was seldom
satisfactory, and but a small percentage of women affected
by it. That same night he dreamed that he was coming
out of his door, into the College quadrangle. It was mid
night, and perfectly dark but for a great light about the
figure of our Lord, who stood before him, holding a lantern
in His hand as in Holman Hunt's picture. And our Lord
asked, " How many books have you written about the
victories of My Saints ? " and he gave the exact number in
reply without hesitation, although waking he would have
found it hard to recall them. And then there came another
question, " Can you number all the deeds and triumphs of
My Saints ? " And he answered, " No man can." Then
our Lord said, " How then can you dare to limit the extent
of My mercy ? " and vanished out of his sighO
Thus Neale believed he was rebuked for his want of

PENITENTIARY WORK 3°7
faith. He remembered the exact spot in the quadrangle
where the heavenly light had shone, glorifying and trans
figuring each small herb and blade of grass, and ever
afterwards passed it by with reverent recollection. More
over, as time went on, he perceived that some penitentiary
work was necessarily interwoven with his Sisters' vocation.

CHAPTER XXVI
Spiritual work — Retreat at Clewer — Neale's appreciation of others —
The foundation-stone laid of S. Margaret's Convent — Preaching
engagements — Last illness — Letter from Keble — Death on
August 6, 1866 — Funeral.
There seems a danger lest, in an existence so full of
mental activity, so abounding in scholarly and literary
preoccupations, fruitful in work accomplished — all com
paratively easy to chronicle — the inner life, the spiritual
struggles, the penitence, and the power of the Divine Love
should be ignored.
These only Neale's good angel could record, and into
that sanctuary of the soul we may not penetrate. Possibly
a reaction from the set phrases of conventional piety, over-
familiar in childhood, induced reserve, with regard to
religious experiences. Yet, without unwarrantably seeking
to intrude, we may discern in words and thoughts and
deeds, the impress of a profound knowledge of Divine
things, and of secret communion with God.
His temperament, in spite of his attraction to allegory
and mysticism, was not meditative, although his imagina
tion preserved him from too great absorption in immediate
issues, and idealism shed its illuminating, if sometimes
misleading, radiance over a world of sense.
Knowledge, as a revelation from God, was to be both
treasured and communicated. The desire to instruct and
evangelize permeated his writings, inspiring the single-
minded love for the individual soul that marks an apostolic
mission. During the latter part of his life he gained much
experience as a confessor in dealing with those who sought
308

SPIRITUAL LETTERS 309
him from a distance, as well as within the sphere of the
Sisterhood and College ; and for their help and consola
tion. He grudged no pains, and no time. " Never mind
what you call trouble," he writes, "if an hour of my
writing can give you half an hour's comfort, it will be
very well spent ; " but spiritual letters cannot be included
within the prescribed limits of this memoir. Quotations
tend to give misleading impressions, and without knowledge
of the circumstances, and the persons to whom they were
addressed, they would be as useless and incomprehensible
as pages taken haphazard from the works of a voluminous
writer. With all this personal work of the ministry increas
ing every week, any fresh demand upon his energies met
with a prompt response. In October, 1862, the Sisters
were invited to start a House of Refuge at Ash, in con
nection with the camp at Aldershot. " In five months,"
Neale writes, " they have been able to send twelve poor
women to various Houses of Mercy, who, all but one, are
doing well. . . . One, I trust, though it is hard to judge in
such cases, died the death of a true penitent." The next
year he was laying the foundation of an independent
daughter Sisterhood at Aberdeen. The Middle School
at East Grinstead as well as the Orphanage grew quickly
in numbers ; and when the line of rail between Tunbridge
Wells was in prospect he started a mission for the
navvies ; the Sisters visited and read to them in their
dinner-hour, and on Sundays and week-days they gathered
in the men at S. Margaret's for a night school.
He was continually preaching at a distance; often
pleading and collecting money for the Sisterhood, and
was so successful, that, in August, 1864, he was able to
write : " You know that we have bought the ground for
our new house. . . . The view to the north is very lovely,
over the Surrey hills. The field is ten acres. We have
also bought a quarry about three hundred yards off, so
that we shall have no expense in cartage. Our quarry is
white with a few iron stains. The plans are in Street's
hands."

310 JOHN MASON NEALE
It was during this year, also, that he took the Clewer
Retreat. His subject was the three Marys at the tomb,
as the type of the Religious life. The three days were,
he said, among the happiest he had ever spent.
" I liked the work, and I liked the place, and I liked,
of course, where all hearts are open, to see how much or
how little their Sisters were like my own. It is the custom
there (and it is a good one) that the priest who gives the
Retreat takes the Offices. So with the Eight Hours, the
three Meditations, and the Confessions, there was enough
to do. ... I was quite sorry when it was over. ... I
have been asked to take it again, and I hope I shall."
But his death so soon followed that this was the
first and last Retreat which he gave to any religious
Community. In 1856, Randall of Lavington, afterwards Dean of
Chichester, gave a Retreat to the S. Margaret's Sisters.
" I knew," wrote Neale, " that he would do it well ; but
some of the meditations were the most eloquent things
I had ever heard." He was always ready to show a
generous appreciation of other men ; and on another
occasion, after listening to one of Dean Randall's sermons,
he said in his simple way, "You ought to thank God for
helping you to preach like that." He very occasionally
preached extempore himself, but did not consider that he
was qualified to do so ; and he would take as much
trouble about a Bible-class for the Sisters, or an address
to his old pensioners, as in the preparation of a sermon for
a London congregation.
Dr. Littledale, who constantly heard him at Sackville
College, bears testimony to the power he possessed of
" reaching the recesses of minds which others might have
thought impenetrable." He never confined his teaching
"to the mere primer and rudiments of religious know
ledge." He selected obscure texts, and communicated
some portion of the mystical theology in which he was a
proficient, but with such a perfect limpidity of diction as
to engage the interested attention of his rural congregation.

S. MARGARET S CONVENT, EAST GRINSTEAD.

FOUNDATION STONE LAID 311
The same testimony is given from every quarter where
his " Sermons at Sackville College " or his " Readings to
the Aged " have been used for the comfort or instruction
of the unlearned ; and it is certainly remarkable that a
mind engaged in the elucidation of theological problems,
and often, as it were, buried beneath a mass of obsolete
learning, should have so clearly presented the truths and
precepts of Christianity to those whom Dr. Littledale
describes as " specially disabled souls." The constraining
love of humanity, ever sacred to him in the Person of His
Lord, happily redeemed daily reiterated acts of service
from becoming wearisome or commonplace, and led him to
regard each poor trembling decrepit inmate of the College
as one who might secure a place in the courts of the
Heavenly City.
The stone of the great building now known as S. Mar
garet's Convent was laid on the Feast of S. Margaret, the
20th of July, 1865.
To Neale it was a day of unclouded rejoicing and of
humblest and deepest thanksgiving. The foundation was
not only the promise of a great and enduring work, but it
was a symbol of victory. Nine years before, even in the
presence of death, it had been difficult to afford ordinary
protection against the assaults made upon him and the
Sisters by a brutal and organized mob. Upon this
occasion the townspeople united in a request that the
procession of clergy and Sisters should pass through the
streets ; the whole of East Grinstead was in festal array,
and, as Neale wrote, the ceremony " was an uninterrupted
and brilliant success." The procession of two hundred was
nearly a quarter of a mile long. Numbers of well-known
clergy were present ; the Communities of Clewer and Holy
Cross sent representatives. Neale himself blessed the
stone (which was laid by F. Barchard), prayers were said,
and the Alleluiatic Sequence chanted to its ancient
melody. An incident followed full of meaning and value for
the Founder, as typical of union between the Eastern
and Western Churches. His dear friend of many years,

312 JOHN MASON NEALE
Eugene Popoff, Chaplain to the Russian Embassy, was
present, and with him the Archimandrite Stratuli ; and all
knelt whilst the Archimandrite, standing over the stone,
gave his blessing, after the Eastern rite, to the new
undertaking and to the congregation.
The bells of the parish church (where Neale had
not for so many years been permitted to take a service)
rang out, three hundred and sixty guests were enter
tained, and the collection amounted to seven hundred
and thirteen pounds. As the Guardian of the day
observed, "the occasion bore a striking testimony to the
changed feelings with which the Religious life is now
regarded in England." It might have added, that it
bore an equally strong witness to the courageous attitude
and labours of the Founder. The subject of ecclesiastical
censure, singled out, in many instances, for personal
attacks of an insidious nature especially difficult to repel,
the victim of a popular outcry, condemned without defence,
abused in the public press, misjudged, or misunderstood,
by some of his own party, he had yet gone on his way
with persistent, unflinching determination. At times,
dejection had laid its heavy hand upon him, but the grasp
was soon cast off; and more often he had been invigorated
and exhilarated by the storm, and found a keen and lively
pleasure in breasting the waves.
Hostility had not simply died out, it had been dis
armed and destroyed by the cheerful and unresentful
nature of the defence. The present was fair and un
clouded by fears or perplexities, and hope shed bright
though changing lights upon the future. The vision of
a re-united Christendom had haunted Neale through life ;
he saw at the last a nearer prospect of its fulfilment.
" You do not know," he writes, " how hopeful matters
are. The American Church has had a semi-official request
from the Holy Governing Synod, through Philaret of
Moscow, for information on five points : i. Our Suc
cession. 2. Tradition. 3. The Articles. 4. The Filioque.
5. The Seven Sacraments. In the Eastern Association
we have divided these among ourselves for a short, plain

HOPES AND VISIONS 313
treatise. I have the Filioque. S. Oxon. sent for me the
other day to Lavington, where a number met. There was
an attache" to our Legation at Brussels, who had lately seen
Prince Orloff, the Emperor's great favourite, who promised
to do all he could ; and the Empress, who prays for reunion
every day. I have to draw up a series of propositions about
the insertion of the clause (not the doctrine) Filioque,
which Archdeacon Randall is to get through Committee,
if he can, and then through the Lower House, and S. O.
will fight it through the Upper. Is not this like business ? "
No wonder that, as the vision grew clearer, the blessing
of the Greek Church given in the English meadow from
which the walls of the great Convent were to rise, seemed
a happy augury of peace.
Thus a seal was set upon the dual character of Neale's
work. First upon the formation of a Religious society,
with its constitutive elements of purity, faith, and self-
sacrifice systematized and harmonized, not by mere
mechanical methods, but by an all-pervading spirit of
love; and secondly, upon that other task so devotedly
pursued from his youth, the serious mission to display the
dazzling spectacle of a Church, impregnable, immovable,
divinely appointed, of which the inward unity should one
day receive open and universal recognition.
This year (1866), as it advanced, saw no abatement of
his exertions. His very success demanded fresh efforts,
lest a work projected upon so large a scale should languish
for want of support. One list of his preaching engage
ments, though this is for the autumn of 1865, may give
some idea of his itinerant labours in connection with the
Sisterhood —
" On Saturday, all well, I go to Manchester again, to
preach at the reopening of Huntington's church. On
Monday I have a lecture on Sisterhoods at Liverpool ; on
Tuesday, a lecture on the ritual question at Manchester ;
on Wednesday, a lecture on Sisterhoods at Stafford. I
hope to come up by the night express, and spend
Michaelmas Day here ; and at the second Vespers I have
to preach at S. Mary's, Soho, which is rather in my line,
and I like it. On October 12th I have to preach at

3i4 JOHN MASON NEALE
Bradley Abbot's harvest home at Clapham. So you
have my engagements."
In the same year, he mentioned that the Bishop of
Oxford had again asked him to pay him his "autumn
visit," but that the work connected with the Convent
hindered him from accepting the invitation ; he " was sorryi
as he wished to impress on him the importance of the
ritual storm."
In politics Neale was naturally, we had almost said,
inevitably, a Liberal. He was a constant readef of news
papers, and, at the time of the war in America, absorbed
in public affairs. He had an unbounded admiration for
Abraham Lincoln, and felt his death to be a personal
bereavement as well as a national calamity. He never
narrowed his interests or allowed himself to be so much
engrossed by his special subjects as to ignore questions
that from the social or political points of view might be
regarded as of supreme importance ; and even during the
unceasing occupations of his last years, he found time to
study the position of parties and the course of public
events. His imagination, never brooding, but always on
the wing, left little leisure for metaphysical or speculative
thought. An historian and apologist, he was rather con
cerned with facts and persons than with abstract theories
or schemes of philosophy. Ubiquitous, aggressive, persis
tent, with decided antipathies and equally strong predilec
tions, he went on his way, unsparing of effort, indifferent
to censure, in his sanguine search for buried knowledge; his
endeavours sanctified by reverence for each manifestation
of grace or truth.
But in spite of his vigorous vitality and inordinate
efforts, there were disquieting symptoms in the early
part of 1866, indicative of approaching disabilities. The
flesh would impose limitations, though, like a recurrent
wave, the spirit beat against the barriers. In very literal
truth, he went forth "to his work and labour until the
evening." He had been doomed by physicians to an early death,
yet their prognostications had remained unfulfilled. He

APPROACHING DISABILITIES 315
had conquered in that first struggle against disease, and
though at intervals he had suffered and failed, he had
rarely experienced the lassitude and depression attending
upon sickness in its various forms ; and it is possible that
thus he had unconsciously led others to over-estimate his
strength. It was not a gift he had ever thought it his
duty to measure or husband. He had been a generous,
if unwise, spendthrift of his talents, his powers, and his
time. He had let the world's prizes slip through his
fingers ak things of no account, but he had amassed a
strange medley of possessions, for which he counted them
well lost.
The journals of 1866 show that he toiled as long as he
was able with energy and hopefulness for the development
of the Sisterhood. He took no warning from increasing
weakness and attacks of illness ; in the intervals of services
and other spiritual work he was out in all weathers super
intending workmen and revising plans. He often came
back wet, chilled, and exhausted ; and still, with restless
unflagging courage, he refused to abandon his post.
Nevertheless, it was apparent to those who knew him
that the sands of life were too rapidly running out. He
was only forty-eight, and it is possible that precautions
might have preserved his health for many years. It would
have been, however, hard if not impossible to associate the
passive serenity of old age with his unbounded spirit of
enterprise and insatiable love of work. He had delighted
in spiritual discoveries and literary adventures, and had
climbed the hill of difficulty with a light heart. Even in
the ante-chamber of death he would have welcomed a
reprieve. He was no tired traveller seeking repose, no
weary warrior anxious to lay down his arms ; the world
for him was still in its spring-time, and the sunshine lay
not alone upon untravelled realms of thought, but upon
the familiar roadway beneath his feet.
Every now and again it seemed to the anxious watchers
that their hopes might be realized. Temporary amendments
were hailed as omens of returning strength, and as, with
all his old creative, constructive power, he dictated hymns

316 JOHN MASON NEALE
and sequences from his bed, it was difficult to believe
that they were the final entries in his well-worn book
of life. All that care and skill could do was done to relieve
his sufferings. Many old friends (amongst them his life
long friend, B. Webb) found their way to East Grinstead.
Prayers were specially offered for him in more than thirty
churches, and messages of gratitude and sympathy from
all quarters caused him to exclaim, in pleased wonder,
" I did not know that I had so many friends ! " One
letter gave him particular gratification : it was from Keble,
now himself upon his death-bed.
To Mrs. Neale.
" Bournemouth, Fourth Sunday in Lent, 1866.
"[March nth].
"Dear Madam,
" Only within these few days have we become
aware of Dr. Neale's very serious illness, and though I
read this morning that he is by God's blessing much
relieved, I cannot resist the inclination I feel to say to
you, and if you think well, to him through you, how
earnestly we remember him — my dear wife (who is herself
very ill) and myself — in the best ways that we can think
of — in common with others — who can say how many ? — who
owe to him in various ways such help as One only can
recompense him for. May his valuable life and health be
spared for a good while longer to do his Master's work,
and to see it prosper more and more, until a goodly
number have grown up to take his place, and transmit the
impression he has made to other generations! . . . One
thing I would ask : that you would remember us at those
times when one most desires to be remembered. But you
are not to write to say so — we shall take it for granted.
Pray assure him of our sincere love and respect, and believe
me, dear Mrs. Neale, though unknown to sight,
" Truly and cordially yours,
(Signed) "J. Keble."
Keble died on the following Maundy Thursday, and
Neale lived to write an elegy on his death.

LAST ILLNESS 317
During these months, as long as it was practicable, he
would be drawn in a chair to watch the progress of the
Convent buildings. He was, perhaps, the only one who did
not realize the shadow of mournful foreboding, gradually
deepening into a melancholy certainty, that he would not
see its completion. He had desired to live. The laying
down of his life was not the result of passive resignation,
but a conscious act of willing and unqualified surrender ;
and, when it was accomplished, he remained, as his sister
wrote, " calm and thankful, only asking for prayers."
True to the habits of a lifetime, he reverted to the con
solatory study of the Greek Offices of Our Lord's Passion,
a desk upon his bed supporting the books he was too weak
to hold. He had never lingered over a task, and Death itself
made no long delay. The conflict was short, though sharp ;
but a few days of acute suffering and fever, and upon the
Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 1866, his work and
life upon earth were over.
Twenty years before, full of young and generous hopes,
he had come without a regret within that remote enclosure.
Twenty years had passed of strenuous unremitting labour.
Thoughts and aspirations had been wrought into divers
forms in the crucible of his restless brain. Numerous
schemes for alleviating the lot of the poor and desolate, and
bringing the light of Divine Truth to shine into misguided
or darkened understandings, had been evolved. In a
patient study of the past, uniting a monk's love for an old
missal to a scholar's value for the treasures of antiquity,
he had unearthed and discovered jewels of great price — the
crown jewels of the Church.
Now, when his active brain was quiet, when the hot
pursuit of ideals was ended, and the pen had dropped
from his fingers, it was fitting that he should rest in the
room next to his study. Thence might be seen, framed
in the vine-leaves about the window, the soft lines of
woods and hills rising against the horizon where his eyes
had so often rested, which had prompted thought, silenced
anxieties, and brought peace to his soul.

318 JOHN MASON NEALE
" I must by all means keep this feast that cometh at
Jerusalem." So the text ran upon the wall behind the table
supporting the crucifix and candles at the coffin's ;head — in
reference to the next day's Feast, the Festival of the Holy
Name, to which he had a special devotion ; a text most
faithfully expressing the desire of that hurrying ardent
spirit. And upon the plain wooden coffin was engraved
beneath the cross, " J. M. Neale, miser et indignus sacerdos,
requiescens sub signo Thau."
Until the day of the funeral (August ioth) watch
was kept beside the body. On the evening before the
burial it was removed from the College to S. Margaret's,
where it remained until the first Eucharist. The Requiem
was sung in the College Chapel, and those who could not
gain admittance knelt outside. An immense and reverent
crowd filled the streets and churchyard as the procession
passed ; a long line of more than sixty representative
clergy from far and near, including several personal friends.
E. J. Boyce and J. Haskoll, co-founders of the Cambridge
Camden Society, T. Helmore, R. F. Littledale, Le Geyt,
J. Purchas, R. W. Randall, Upton Richards, C. F. Lowder,
C. Gutch, R. Liddell, A. H. Mackonochie ; Father Benson
and Father Grafton representing the newly formed Society
of S. John the Evangelist, Cowley, and others. The coffin
was carried, at their request, by the workmen at the Convent
buildings, to whom some of his latest pleasant words of
encouragement had been given ; and his own hymn was
sung as they carried him to his grave —
" Safe home, safe home, in port !
Rent cordage, shatter'd deck,
Torn sails, provisions short,
And only not a wreck :
But oh ! the joy upon the shore
To tell our voyage-perils o'er."
The slab, with a cross, paten, and book engraved upon
it, lies on the green slope of the churchyard above the
little street down which at one time he daily walked to
minister to the Sisters in their humble home ; and around it
may be read the inscription : " In gratia et misericordia

DEATH AND BURIAL 319
JHESU Hie requiescit Johannes Mason Neale Sacerdos
quondam conventus Sanctae Margaritae capellanus; qui
obiit VI. die mensis Augusti MDCCCLXVI. Cujus animae
propicietur Deus. Amen. J HESUS FILI Dei, miserere
mei." About a mile away, amidst woods and lawns and
sheltered gardens, there is another monument raised to his
memory — the Mother House of the East Grinstead Sister
hood. The beautiful pile of grey stone, with its tiled roofs
and belfry tower and long double cloisters bordering a
wide quadrangle ; its schools and orphanage, and guest-
chambers, affording accommodation to over sixty Sisters,
and more than two hundred inmates ; and the lofty dignified
chapel of severe Early English design ; — all bear a strik
ing silent witness to what his life and death have wrought.
Faithful to that pitiful affection for the poor and destitute
so often in life the motive power of action, his last bequest
was an annual dinner to the pensioners at Sackville College.
But more honoured in his death than in his life, the Great
Convent was erected to his memory at the cost of over
£70,000. The quest was over. His labours were ended. His
dreams had found an interpretation. Sorrow and sickness
and poverty could no longer cast a shadow of vicarious
suffering, for beside the river there stood the tree whose
leaves are for the healing of the nations. The mysterious
problems of life were solved, and the perplexing divisions
of Christendom forgotten within the walls of a city at
unity in itself, and the unslaked thirst for active service
satisfied in that land where the servants of God for ever
serve Him.

APPENDIX I
Genealogy
It is interesting to note that Dr. Neale's poetical powers, his
pre-eminence as a translator, as also his devotion to the study of
Holy Scripture, were inherited. On the maternal side he was
descended from Cyprian de Valera, a Spanish reformer, who in
1560 made a translation of the Bible into Spanish, still in use.
His grandfather, Dr. John Mason Good, was an accomplished
linguist, with exceptional talents for versification. Whilst the
strong Puritanic strain exhibited in his grandmother and mother
may be traced back to their ancestors, three of whom were
Nonconformist ministers; one of them preaching in London
during the great Plague, and suffering imprisonment under the
Conventicle Act.

321

APPENDIX II
Chronological List of the Works of the late Rev. J. M.
Neale, from the Catalogue in the British Museum.
A.D.
1841. Account of Restoration in the Church of Old Shoreham,
Sussex : T. Stevenson, Cambridge.
History of Pews : Parker, Rivingtons.
1842. Supplement to ditto.
Bishop Montague's Visitation Articles, with Memoir :
Stevenson.
1843. Songs and Ballads for the People : Burns.
The Private Devotions of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes,
Part II. : translated from the Latin (Part I., from
the Greek, in "Tracts for the Times," was by J. H.
Newman): Parker.
Hymns for the Sick : Burns [Masters].
Agnes de Tracy : a Tale of the Times of S. Thomas of
Canterbury.
Ayton Priory : or the Restored Monastery : Rivington,
Stevenson.
Herbert Tresham : a Story of the Great Rebellion,
Rivingtons.
A Song for the Times : Burns (?) [Masters].
Hierologus : or the Church Tourists : Burns.
Hymns for Children ; series 1 and 2 : Burns [Masters].
Symbolism of Churches : translated from the first book of
Durandus by J. M. Neale and B. Webb : Stevenson
(re-published 1893?).
1844. Letter on Private Devotion in Churches : Burns.
Songs and Ballads for Manufacturers : Burns [Masters],
1845. On the Ecclesiology of Madeira : a paper read before the
CCS. : Rivingtons. 322

APPENDIX 323
1845. English History for Children (Juvenile Englishman's
Library) : Burns [Masters].
History of Portugal (J. E. L.) : Burns.
Triumphs of the Cross : Tales of Christian Heroism
(J. E. L.) : Burns [Masters].
History of Greece (J. E. L.).
Shepperton Manor: a Tale of the Times of Bishop
Andrewes : Cleaver.
A Mirror of Faith ; Lays and Legends of the Church in
England : Burns.
1846. Annals of Virgin Saints : Masters.
Illustrations of Monumental Brasses (partly edited by
J. M. N.).
Sir Henry Spelman's History of Sacrilege, edited by
Revs. J. M. Neale and J. Haskoll.
Stories of the Crusades : Masters.
Triumphs of the Cross, 2nd series; Tales of Christian
Endurance (J. E. L.) : Masters.
1847. Tales from Heathen Mythology (J. E. L.) : Masters.
Poynings : a Tale of the Revolution (J. E. L.) :
Masters.
History of the Holy Eastern Church ; the Patriarchate of
Alexandria. Vol. I. Masters, Parker, Macmillan.
Ditto. Vol. II.
The Unseen World: Communications with it, real or
imaginary : Burns.
1848. Duchenier, or the Revolt of La Vendee : Masters.
Ecclesiological Notes on the Isle of Man, Ross, Suther
land, and the Orkneys : Masters.
The Ecclesiastical Latin Poetry of the Middle Ages;
(an Essay in Encyclopedia Metropolitana, vol. xxv.) :
Griffin.
1849. Tetralogia Liturgica : Leslie.
1850. The Church's Extremity, her Lord's Opportunity (in
" Sermons preached in the Octave of S. Barnabas',
Pimlico ").
Documents connected with the Foundation of the Anglican
Bishopric in Jerusalem, and with the Protest against
Bishop Gobat's Proselytism (collected and edited by
. J. M. Neale).
Deeds of Faith ; Stories for Children from Church His
tory : Mozley.

324 APPENDIX
1850. A Few Words of Hope on the Present Crisis of the
English Church : Masters.
A Letter to the Ven. Archdeacon Hare with respect
to his Pamphlet on the Gorham Question :
Masters.
Readings for the Aged : Masters.
Victories of the Saints ; Stories from Church History :
Cleaver.
A History of the Holy Eastern Church. Part I. General
Introduction, 2 vols. Masters, Parker.
185 1. The Followers of the Lord ; Stories from Church History :
Masters.
Hymni Ecclesise : Parker.
Hymnal Noted ; Part I. : Novello.
" Joy and Gladness ; " a Christmas Carol : Masters.
A History of the Holy Eastern Church ; Appendix, con
taining lists of the Sees : Masters.
Lectures on Church Difficulties of the Present Time :
Cleaver.
1852. The Bible, and the Bible only; a Lecture : Masters.
Evenings at Sackville College ; Legends for Children :
Masters.
Sequentias ex Missalibus : Parker.
1853. A History of the Church for Children ; Part I. : Masters.
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, for the use of Children in the
English Church : Parker.
A Statement of the late proceedings of the Lord Bishop
of Chichester against the Warden of Sackville College :
Masters.
Carols for Christmastide : Novello.
1854. Carols for Eastertide : and Hymnal Noted, Part II. :
Novello.
Confession and Absolution ; a Lecture.
Sermon for proposed new Church in Liverpool.
Readings for the Aged ; 2nd series : Masters.
The Egyptian Wanderers ; a Story of the Tenth Persecu
tion : Masters.
The Warnings of Christmas Eve ; Two Sermons : Masters.
The Farm of Aptonga; a Story of the Times of St.
Cyprian : Cleaver.
1855. The Railway Accident (Tales for Young Men and Women) :
Parker.

APPENDIX 325
1855. The Ancient Liturgies of the Gallican Church, with intro
ductory dissertation, edited by J. M. Neale and G.
H. Forbes : Burntisland.
Lent Legends ; Stories from Church History : Masters.
1856. The Life and Times of Patrick Torry, D.D. , with Appendix
on the Scotch Liturgy : Masters.
Epistola Critica de Sequentiis (Daniels' " Thesaurus
Hymnologia," torn. 5) : Leipsic : J. T. Loeschke.
A Handbook for Travellers in Portugal : J. Murray.
The Moral Concordances of S. Antony of Padua :
Hayes.
Judith ; a Seatonian Poem : Cambridge : Deighton.
Mediaeval Preachers, etc. : Mozley.
Readings for the Aged ; 3rd series: Masters.
"Tractarian Delusions," Catholic Truth; an Answer to
Rev. E. B. Elliott : Masters.
A History of Sackville College : Masters.
The Two Huts ; an Allegory : Masters.
1857. Tales on the Apostles' Creed : Masters.
The Lewes Riot, its Causes and Consequences ; a Letter
to the Bishop of Chichester : Masters.
Theodora Phranza (reprinted from Churchman's Com
panion of 1853-54) : Masters.
The Hours of our Lord's Passion, translated from the
Latin : Masters.
The Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, translated from
the Latin : Masters.
1858. A History of the so-called Jansenist Church of Holland :
Parker.
Sermons on the Canticles : Painter.
Readings for the Aged ; 4th series : Masters.
Egypt ; Two Seatonian Prize Poems : Deighton.
Gill's Lap (reprinted from Fenny Post) : Parker.
1859. The Rhythm of Bernard de Morlaix on the Celestial
Country : Hayes.
Greek Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysostom,
and Basil : Hayes.
English Translation of Greek Liturgies : Hayes.
The Disciples at Emmaus ; Seatonian Prize Poem :
Deighton.
" He said, Come ; " a Sermon : Masters.
Sunday Afternoons at an Orphanage : Masters.

326 APPENDIX
1859. Voices from the East; Documents on the Present State
and Working of the Oriental Church : Masters.
i860. A Commentary on the Psalms. Vol.1. Masters.
The Christian Nurse: translated from the French of
Gautrelet; edited by J. M. Neale : Hayes.
Ruth ; Seatonian Prize Poem : Deighton.
Oeoov<opa4>pa.yTsr (Romaic) : Athens.
The 29th Canon, and Reasons for its Abrogation ; a Letter
to the Bishop of Oxford : Masters.
1861. [Letterpress of] Text Emblems : Hayes.
Additional Reasons for the Abrogation of the 29th
Canon : a Second Letter to the Bishop of Oxford :
Masters.
[Preface to] The History of the Council of Florence;
translated by Basil Popoff: Masters.
1862. Notes on Dalmatia, etc. : Hayes.
An Earnest Plea for the Retention of the Scotch Liturgy ;
a Letter to the Bishop of Brechin : Masters.
King Josiah ; Seatonian Prize Poem : Deighton.
Hymns of the Eastern Church : Hayes.
1863. Essays in Liturgiology and Church History: Saunders
and Otley.
The Seven Churches of Asia ; Seatonian Prize Poem :
Deighton.
1864. Seatonian Poems [collection of eleven] : Masters.
1865. Extreme Men : a Letter to A. J. B. Hope, Esq. : Masters.
Hymns, chiefly Mediaeval, on the Joys and Glories of
Paradise : Hayes.
1866. Hymn for use during the Cattle Plague : Novello, S.P.C.K.
Stabat Mater Speciosa; Jacopone de Todi; Latin and
English : Hayes.
Sequences, Hymns, etc. : Hayes. (This was passing
through the press at the time of the author's death.)

Posthumous Publications.
1867. Hymns suitable for Invalids : selected by Rev. R. F.
Littledale : Hayes.
Sermons for Children, edited by Rev. J. Haskoll : Hayes.
Sermons on the Song of Songs (a reprint, with additions,
of Sermons on the Canticles) edited by J. H.

APPENDIX 3=7
1868. Sermons for the Minor Festivals (a reprint, with additions,
of Readings for the Aged, Vol. II. ; forming Vol. IV.
of Sackville College Sermons) : Masters.
Commentary on the Psalms (by J. M. N. to end of ioth
sheet : the remainder, and subsequently the 3rd and
4th volumes, by the Rev. R. F. Littledale).
Revision of the Lectionary; Letter to Bishop Hamilton
of Salisbury (a fragment, begun shortly before the
author's last illness, and never completed), ed. J. H.:
Hayes.
The Virgin's Lamp : Devotions for English Sisters, chiefly
selected by J. M. Neale : Wakeling, Rivingtons.
1869. Catechetical Notes and Class questions : Hayes.
Sermons preached in a Religious House ; ist series, 2 vols.,
ed. J. H. : Masters.
Via Fidelium ; Litanies, Stations, and Hours, chiefly trans
lated by J. M. Neale : Wakeling, Hayes.
Sermons on Passages of the Psalms : Hayes.
1870. The Night Hours of the Church (Breviary Night Offices).
Vols. I. and II. : partly translated by J. M. N. :
Hayes.
Sermons on the Blessed Sacrament : Wakeling, Hayes.
1 87 1. Sermons on the Apocalypse, the Holy Name, etc. : Hayes.
Sermons preached in Sackville College Chapel : Vol. L,
Advent to Whitsuntide (reprint, with large additions,
of Readings for the Aged) : Masters.
1872. Vol. IL, do.; Trinity: Masters.
1873. Occasional Sermons preached in various Churches : Hayes.
Sackville College Sermons, Vol. III. (Lent and Passion-
tide): Masters.
1875. Sermons for some Feast Days : Hayes.
1876. Sermons for the Church Year ; 2 vols. : Hayes.
1877. Sermons on Passages from the Prophets; 2 vols. : Hayes.
The Night Hours of the Church, Vol. III. : Hayes.
1878. Readings for the Aged: selected from Sermons in Sack
ville College, by Rev. R. F. Littledale.
History of the Eastern Church : Patriarchate of Antioch :
completed by the Rev. G. Williams.
Note. — To this catalogue might be added innumerable articles, pub
lished between 1843 and 1866 in the Ecclesiologist, the Christian
Remembrancer, the Ecclesiastic, and other periodicals.

APPENDIX III
Arch-sological Studies
"Taxing Churches" is an expression often met with in Dr.
Neale's Church tours. It signified the filling in of such a scheme
as is here reprinted from the sixteenth edition (in a compressed
form), for the benefit of those who are not acquainted with
the diligent and exhaustive manner in which the Cambridge
Camden Society carried on its researches, and directed its
Associates.
ECCLESIOLOGICAL, LATE CAMBRIDGE CAMDEN,
SOCIETY.

The Society trusts that its Members, white pursuing their Antiquarian research,
will never forget the respect due to the sacred character of the Edifices which
they visit.
Date Name of Visitor
Dedication County Archdeaconry
Parish Diocese Deanery

I. Ground Plan.
r
2

iSSJoidt )NH }^i }*«*-( }
Transepts j }Tower| Jchapels{ 1

3. Orientation.
4. What division between Choir and Sanctuary.
II. Interior.
/. Apse.
1. Plan.
1. Windows.
3. Apse-Arch.
4. Groining. 328

APPENDIX

329

//. Chancel.

1. East Window.

2. Window Arch.

3. Altar.

(a) Altar Stone, fixed
or removed.
Ifi) Reredos.
(7) Piscina.
(1) Orifice.
(2) Shelf.
(J) Sedilia.
(e) Aumbrye.
(0 Niches.
(ij) Brackets.
(0) Easter Sepulchre.
(1) Altar Candlesticks.
(k) Steps — number and arrangement.
(A) Altar Rails.
(ji.) Table.
4. Clerestory, | '
9. Pier Arches, •] _ '
( N
5. Triforium, j „ '
10. Chancel Arch.
1 1. Stalls and Misereres.
6. Windows, ¦} „ '
12. Chancel Seats, exterior or
interior.
f N.
7. Window Arches, < ~
13. Elevation of Chancel.
14. Corbels.
8. Piers, | g *
15. Roof or Groining.
III. North Chancel Aisle. IV. South Chancel Aisle.
(E-
(E
1. Windows, \ N.
1. Windows, < S.
1 W.
( W.
2. Roof or Groining.
2. Roof or Groining.
K. Afor£% Transept.
VI. South Transept.
(E.
jE.
1. Windows, | N.
1. Windows, < S.
( W.
( W.
2. Transept Arch.
2. Transept Arch.
3. Roof or Groining.
3. Roof or Groining.
W7. Lantern.
1. Windows.
2. Groining.
J7//. ASw«.
1. Nave Arch.
3. Rood Screen.
2. Panelling above Nave Arch. 4. Rood Staircase.
Y 2
33°

APPENDIX

5 Rood Door.

12. Window Arches, ¦! „

6. Rood Loft.

1 S.

i N.
7. Piers, X g

13. Belfry Arch.

14. Parvis Turret.

( N.
8. Pier Arches, s «

15. Roof or Groining.
16. Eagle Desk.

' N. ist tier.

17. Lectern.

9. Triforia,

2nd tier.
S. ist tier.

18. Poppy-heads.
19. Pulpit {position and de

2nd tier.

scription).

( N.
10. Clerestory, < „

20. Hour Glass Stand.
21. Reading Pew.

11. Windows, j ^'

22. Pews.
23. Galleries.

IX. North Aisle.

( E.
1. Windows { N.

1 W.
( (0) Piscina.
2. Chantry Altar, W Aumbrye.
j (7) Niches.
1 (8) Bracket.
3. Roof or Groining.
X. South Aisle.
( E.
1. Windows, j S.
1 W.
¦ (a) Piscina.
(0) Sedilia.
2. Chantry Altar, ¦
(7) Aumbrye.
(8) Niches.
. (e) Bracket.
3. Roof or Groining.
XI. " Ornaments."
1. Parclose.
9. Corbels (dale of head-dress
2. Shrine, fixed or move
etc.).
able.
10. Arches of Construction.
3. Niches.
11. Interior Surface of Arch
4. Brackets.
towards Aisle.
5. Mouldings.
12. Spandril Spaces.
6. Arcades.
13. Vaulting Shafts.
7. Sepulchral Recesses.
14. Woodwork.
8. Benatura.
15. Pavement.
APPENDIX

33i

XIIL Font.

f E"
1. Position.
XII. Belfry,
N.
2. Description.
W.
3. Cover.
v S.
4. Kneeling stone.
5. Measurements.
III. Tower.
1. Form.
8. Belfry Windows.
2. Stages.
(S.
3. Spire Lights.
4. Lantern.
9. Windows of Tower,
W. N.
5. Parapet.
E.
6. Pinnacles.
10. Buttresses.
7. String-courses.
11. Construction and age
of Woodwork and Floors of the
Tower and Spire.
' (0) Number.
(0) Tone.
(7) Inscription
(8) Chime. /
and Legendal History.
/
12. Bells..
5
) —
(«) Remarkable Peals rung.
(0 Saint's Bell.
(i?) Arrangement, etc. of Frames.
13. Beacon or Belfry Turret
(a) Situation. (7) State of Defence.
((8) Form. (5) Line of Beacons.
{(o) Construction.
(0) Doorways.
(7) Spiral Bead.
15. Defensive arrangements of Tower.
16. Thickness of Walls.
17. General Character of Tower as peculiar to the district,
or adapted to scenery and situation.
IV. Exterior. 1. West Window.
2. Window Arch.
3. West Window.
4. Porch, N.
(o) Inner Doorway.
(0) Benatura. {E W.
(8) Roof.
(e) Outer Doorway.
Porch, S.
(«) Inner Doorway.
(0) Benatura.
(7) Windows, J ^
(8) Roof.
332

APPENDIX

5. Parvise.

Windows,

E.N. or S.
W.

6. Doors in (0) Chancel or

I N
Chancel Aisles, 1

( N
(0) Nave or Aisles, > '

(7) Transepts,

etc.

7. Niches.

18. Sancte-Bell Cot.

8. Buttresses.

19. Lych-Gate.

9. Pinnacles.

20. Coped Coffins.

10. Arcades.

21. Rood Turret.

11. Parapet.

22. Masonry.

12. Mouldings.

23. Nature of Stone.

13. Pinnacle Crosses.

24. Composition and age of

14. Gurgoyles.

Mortar.

15. Eave Troughs, and

25. Joints in Arches.

general arrangement

26. Door and Stanchions.

of Drains.

( (0) Present pitch.

16. Crosses in Village or

27. Roof, | (0) Original pitch.

Churchyard.

( (7) Nature.

17. Yew in Churchyard.

. Crypt.

1. Form.

6. Windows.

2. Arrangement.

7. Door.

3. Vaulting.

8. Stairs.

4. Piers.

9. Altar Appurtenances.

5. Dimensions.

10. Lavatory.

I. 1. Evangelistic Symbols.

11. Church Plate.

2. Confessional.

12. Church Chest.

3. Hagioscope.

13. Faid Stool.

4. Lychnoscope.

14. Reliquary.

5. Encaustic Tiles.

15. Oratory.

6. Texts (Canon 82).

16. Chrismatory.

7. Church Terriers(Canon

17. Sun Dials.

87).

18. Royal Arms — date and

8. Homilies, etc. (Canon

position.

80).

19. Paintings on Wall or

9. Chest for Alms (Canon

Roof.

84).

20. Tradition of Founder.

10. Commandments(Canon

21. Connection of Church with

82).

Manor.

APPENDIX 333
23. Time of Wake or Feast.
23. Conventual Remains.
(0) Situation of Church with respect to other buildings.
(0) Situation and Description of Cloisters.
(7) Situation and Description of Chapter-House.
(8) Abbot's or Prior's Lodgings.
(s) Gate-House.
(0 Other Buildings.
24. Antiquity of Registers.
25. Funeral Achievements, viz. Banners, Bannerets, Pennons,
Tabard, Helm, Crest, Sword, Gauntlet, Spurs, Targe.
26. Embroidered work.
27. Images of Saints.
28. Stone Sculptures.
29. Merchants' Marks.
30. Library attached to Church.
31. Well connected with Church.
32. Heraldry.
33. Form of Churchyard, and situation of Church in it
34. Brasses.
35. Monuments.
36. Epitaphs.
37. Lombardics.
38. Stained Glass.
39. Chapel. N. (o) Dedication. S. (o) Dedication.

(0) Sides,

N.E.W. S.

(0) Sides,

N. E.
W. S.

(7) Roof or Groining. (7) Roof or Groining.
4a Dedication Crosses.

GENERAL REMARKS.

General state of repair.
Late alterations— when— by whom— and in what taste.

Notice to be taken of any recess E. or W. of the Sedilia ;
of the capping of Norman and Early-English Towers ;
of niches in the West soffit of the S.E. Nave Window ;
and of gabled Towers.

APPENDIX IV
A Letter from Dr. Neale, dated February i, 1855,
WITH REFERENCE TO THE FORMATION OF St. MARGARET'S
Sisterhood. J. M. N. to B. W.
" February ist, 1855.
"You know that five or sis years ago it was a favourite
speculation of mine how it would be possible ever to get at the
scattered collections of houses in our great Sussex parishes, so as
positively to evangelise them, as you might do a heathen countiy
— for they are heathen to all intents and purposes. Some three
or four years ago Fowler had an idea that, by nurses trained both
physically and religiously, something might be done. He laid the
subject before the rural deanery ; every one was pleased with it,
but nothing was effected. The idea remained in my mind, and I
worked it out by degrees. After this I saw the incalculable good
that was done at Horley by the daughter of a master brickmaker,
who had been partially trained at Oxford, and who was afterwards
most energetic in the cholera hospital there. I was brought a
good deal into contact with her, and all this kept up the matter.
After that — but long before the Nightingale affair — I happened
to know three persons who were anxious, and to whom the way
was open, to join a Sisterhood — but which? Then I saw the
nucleus of what I wanted to do, if I could get co-operation.
I first wrote to, or saw, the most prononcis of our friends — Fowler,
Maberley, Wheeler, Weguelin, Carnegie, Hunt, Gream, Antrobus,
Joyce, of Dorking, Harrison, of Reigate, &c. — and they were all
enthusiastic in favour of trying what we could do. Then I went
to Clewer twice, and leamt all that I could there, and had a long
correspondence with the Superior, who is one of the most sensible
women I ever saw. Before I could do more, it was necessary
334

APPENDIX 335
for me to have a Superior for our future Sisterhood. Her I
found in Miss Gream, the very exact person of all others that
I would have chosen, just about the right age — forty-five — used
all her life to parish work, used to nursing, and most anxious to
be employed in some such way. With the help of some of our
friends I drew up some rules, based on those of Clewer as far as
the great difference of the design would permit. The scheme
then resolved itself into this, to have a central house at present
somewhere, hereafter— if it can be so— connected with this chapel
(Sackville College), in which we may have a community of
trained Sisters, ready to be sent out at the Superior's discretion,
gratuitously, to any parish priest within a circuit of (say) twenty-
five miles that may need their services in nursing any of his
people ; he to be responsible, so far as may be, for their manage
ment, safety, &c, while they are in his parish. In that circle
from here we have about twenty-five villages and five towns where
they would be thankfully received at once. Now my little cub
was beginning to take good proportions ; the next thing was to
feed him. Just then came the Scutari business. On this I took
courage, and wrote to everyone in our part of the diocese that
had a chance of being in favour of the plan — high and dry,
moderate, hard-working men, etc. Then I first learnt how
completely I had hit the right nail on the head; I had not a
single demurrer to the scheme, though in some cases my selection
might almost have provoked it. Then I began to beg : and
certainly I succeeded there quite beyond my hopes. The next
thing was to find a first-rate, and yet morally respectable hospital,
where the Sisters might be trained. . . . First I tried the
Sussex County Hospital — but, after some negotiations, that
failed. At Westminster, I succeeded. The House C'°° at once
passed a resolution granting those we might send admission,
and the senior Physician and Chaplain (Hill) both evinced the
greatest interest. While I was meditating on the question of
lodgings, comes a spontaneous offer from Shepherd, Master of the
S. John's House, to take them in there. I went over the Hospital,
was introduced to the officials, and was perfectly satisfied with
what I saw : I did the same with S. John's House (the fact of
their having been there will tell in our favour with moderate men).
By this time I had a pretty certain prospect of seven or eight, but
I wanted more. I wrote to Mrs. Sidney Herbert, asking if there
were any list of applicants for the East, and if so, whether she
would give me the names of some who would be likely to do for

336 APPENDIX
me. I saw her, and she gave me a first list : promising another
when I had exhausted mat (which is an episode : I never saw
any woman in my life who so took my fancy). Out of that list,
I think I shall get two : and I may get more. The week after
next, all well, we send the first to Westminster to be trained, and
shall then hope to keep on with them. When there will be
enough, or what will constitute enough, to make them into a
commnnity, I cannot yet say. All my copies of the rules are out,
but as soon as I can get one, I will send it you. You know they
are only as yet proposed, so any suggestions win be most accept
able. Now we are raking another step. I have printed a little
statement of our scheme — simply speaking of nurses, " whether
ladies or others," and dropping all name of a Sisterhood. This
is to be sent to the 210 parishes which he in our district — not in
my name, bnt in that of old Gream, who enters heartily into
the plan. What the result of that will be, remains to be seen.
I have given you very little idea of the eagerness of co-operation
I have met with."

INDEX

Aberdeen, branch house at, 309
Advice, lclters of, 237
" Agnes dc Tracy," 68, 76
Aitkin, visit to, 73
Alexander, Grand Duke, 169
"Alexandria, History of," 83, 89,
101, 109, no
All Saints', Margaret Street, 171
Andrewes, Bishop, Devotions, 77,
126
Anglican bishopric at Jerusalem,
61
" Antioch, History of," 287
Apocalypse, discourses on, 290
Ars, visit to, 115
Artemius, Pope and Patriach of Alex
andria, 102
Assisi, S. Francis of, 242
Baker, Sir Henry, 283
Ballads, 77
Benson, Father, 237, 318
Bible-classes, 251
Blachford, Lord, 137
Blackheath School, 12
Blomfield, Bishop, 278
Bollandists, 258, 259
 , visits to, 220, 221
Boyce, Rev. E. J., 35, 42
Boyle, Rev. G. F., 182
Brechin, A. V. Forbes, Bishop of,
272, 284, 286
Bright, Canon, 283
Bruges, Bishop of, 286
Building, principles of, 71, 72
Butler, Rev. W., 237
Butterfield, 2S4

Cambridge, 22
Cambridge Camden Society, 40, 41,
42, 43, 46, 116
 , seal of, 116, 118
 , dissolution of, 119
Carter, Canon, 283
Carols, 217
"Catena Symbolica," 95
Cavendish, Hon. Richard, 267
 , letter from, 268
Challis, Dr., Professor of Astronomy,
22
Chambers, Rev. T. C, 181
Chambers, Mr., 268
Charity, Sisters of, 233, 239, 278
Chichester, Bishop of, 157, 161, 267,
299
Children, dealings with, 246, 247,
249, 250, 251
Chiswick, residence at, 9
Christian Remembrancer, 120, 181
Clewer, Mother of, 237
 , Retreat at, 310
Connecticut, Archbishop of, 283
Corpus Christi procession, 271
Coxe, Rev. A. Cleveland, letter from,
280
Crawley, 59. 63
•  , residence at, 64, 65, 66
Dalmatia, tour in, 271, 273
Dalmatian History, 192
Denison, Archdeacon, 188, 284
Denmark, travels in, 219
Derby, Lord, 228
Disturbances at East Grinstead, 193,
194. 196. 197

337

INDEX

Doctrinal questions, 229
Duchenier, 252, 253
Dnnedin, Bishop of, 221
" Durandus, " 68, 76, S2
" Eastern Church, History of," 90,
98, 99, 100, 166, 167, 168
Eastern hymns, 215
Ecclesiological Society, 51
Ecclesiologist, The, 49, 136
Ecclesiology, 49
English Church Union, 187, 189
Evangelical movement, 2
Faber, F., 214
Farnham School, 19
Filioque, 193
Forbes, A. P. See Brechin, Bishop of
 , J. S., 120
 , Lord, 1S2
Free trade, 22S
Freeman, Professor, 259
Froude, Hurrell, 41
Funchal, library at, 83, 94
Funeral reform, 195
Gallican liturgies, 202
Gladstone, \V. E., 272, 282
 , letter from, 2S3
Glasgow, Lord, 284
Gobat, Bishop, 22S
Good, Dr. John Mason, 4
Goodwin, Harvey, 22, 42
Gorham judgment, 177, 17S, 179, 1S0
Gream, Mother Ann, 233, 23S
Greek services, 175
Guardian, The, 40, 41
Haskoll, Rev. Joseph, 181
Hawker of Morwenstow, 283, 284
" Hierologus," 68, 69, 70
Holland, Canon Scott, 41
Holland, travels in, 218
Hook, Dr., 47
Hope, Beresfoid, 46, 126, 227
Hursley, visit to, 213
Hutton, Mr. 157, 159
" Hymns for the Sick," 68, 131
" Hymns for Children," 70, 130
" Hymnal Noted," 214
Hymnology in the past, 205, 206,
207, 208

Inhibition, 159, 160
Jambs, G. P. R., 253
Jenner, Rev. H. L., 221
Jesuits, 122
Juvenile literature, 57, 58
Keble, Rev. John, 213
 , letter from, 316
Lewes, riots at, 266, 267
Liddon, Dr., 113, 123
Lincoln, Abraham, 314
Littledale, Dr., 201, 216, 289, 297,
310
Liturgies, 171, 259
Liturgiology, essays on, 257
Lucar, Cyril, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107
Madeira, arriTal at, 77
 , description of, 115, 116
Malan, Dr., 285
Mediaeval preachers, 202, 203, 204
Mill, Dr., 285
Miracles, 113, 114
Montalembert, 7S, 79, 80, 92, 93
 , letter from, 79, S4
Monumental brasses, 36, 43
Moral Concordances of St. Anthony
of Padua, 201
Mouravieff, 174
 , lettei from, 174
Morning Chronicle, 191, 192
Mystical interpretations, 296
Mysticism, 292, 293
Neale, John Mason —
 , birth and parentage, 1
 , early childhood, 9
 , maternal training, n
 , boyish letters, 13
 , school days, 15
 , boyish verses, 15, 16, 19, 25
 , courtship, 23
 , undergraduate days, 28
 , patristic studies, 31
 , interest in Early Church, 32
 . University course, 33
 , appointment asFellowand tutor
of Downing, 33, 48

INDEX

339

Neale, John Mason (contd.) —
 , archaeological studies, 35, 36,45
 , first publications, 47
 , descriptive powers, 49, 50
 , ordained deacon, 53
 , clerical work at Guildford, 53
 , tour in France, 54
 , visit to Wells, 55
 , resignation of chaplaincy, 55
 , marriage, 56, 68
 , ordained priest, 59
 , health, state of, 66, 70, 75
 , mental activity, 84
 , address to the inhabitants of
East Grinstead, 197
 , letter to the pensioners, 199
 , poetical tastes, 209
 , metrical translations, 211, 212,
213
 , original hymns, 215, 216
 , on discouragement, 227
 , his childhood, 248
 , "English History for Chil
dren," 254
 , social characteristics, 95, 275
 , D.D. degree conferred, 279,
280
 , letter concerning, 281
 , spiritual work, 308, 309
 , preaching engagements, 313
 , politics, 314
 , health, failure of, 314, 315
 , last illness, 316
 , death of, 317
 , burial of, 318
Neale, Cornelius, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8
Neale, James, 2
Neale, Elizabeth Simpson, 2
Neale, Mrs. Cornelius (Susannah
daughter of Dr. John Mason Good),
4, 9, 10
Neale, Cornelius Vincent, birth of,
138
Newman, J. H., influence of, 124, 125,
135
 , on development, 125
 , secession, 90, 91, 124
Nicsea, Council of, 108
Nightingale, Miss, 234
Nursing, 239, 240, 241

Oakley, 91
Oriel School, 20
Orphanage, S. Katherine's, 244, 245,
3°9
Paley, Professor, 42, 134
Palmer, William, 169, 192
Papal claims, 93
Penitentiary work, 306, 307
Pensioners, appeal from, 162
Penzance, visit to, 75
Perth, deanery of, 181, 184
Perth Cathedral, consecration of,
186, 187
Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow,
172, 286
Phillips, Ambrose de Lisle, 286
 , letters from, 287
Philpot, Bishop of Exeter, 189
"Pilgrim's Progress," 255, 256
Popoff, Rev. Eugene, 173, 175, 312
Portugal, tour in, 222, 223, 224
Portugal, Handbook of, 221
Portuguese Church, in, 112
Psalms, Commentary on, 288, 289,
290, 294, 295, 297, 298
Pusey, Dr., 61, 89, 296
Randall, Dean, 310, 318
Reigate, residence at, 132
Religious life, revival of, 233
Religious parties, state of, 88
Reunion, 192, 312, 313
Revolutionary spirit, 29
Rio, 89
Rogers, Mr., 263
Routh, Dr., 169
Ruskin (".Stones of Venice "), 37, 71
Russell, Rev. W., 10, 11, 300, 301
S. Margaret's Convent, 319
 , stone laid, 311, 312
S. Margaret's, East Grinstead, Rule
of, 234, 235, 301, 302, 303, 304,
30S» 3°6
Sackville College, 138, 139, 140, 141,
142, 143, 231, 260, 261, 262
 , statutes of, 144
 , Christmas Day in, 147

340

INDEX

Sackville College, sermons at, 145, 146,
148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 311
 , chapel of, 154, 157, 159
Salisbury, Lord, 236
Seatonian Prize Poems, 129, 192, 299
Scotland, Church of, 183, 184
Scotch Liturgy, 184, 283
Seven, mystical meaning of, 291
Shepperton, residence at, 9
Sherborne, 16, 17, 18
Shilleto, Mr., 24
Sibthorp, Rev. R. W., 284
Sidgwick, Henry, 201
Simeon, Rev. Chas., 24
 , death of, 25
Sisterhood, 242, 243, 265, 266, 301,
306
" Songs and Ballads for the People,"
68
Southey, Robert, 209
Spain, tour in, 222, 223, 224
 , adventure in, 85, 225, 226
Spelman (" History and Fate of Sacri
lege"), 127, 128, 129
Stafford, lecture at, 276, 277
Stanley, Dean, letter from, 283
Stratuli, Archimandrite, 312
Sumner, Bishop, 55, 56
Supernatural appearances, 263
Sussex village churches, 49
Symbolism, 18, 26, 62, 69, 71

Thorp, Archdeacon, 42
Torry, Bishop of S. Andrews (letter),
182
 , Life of, 186
Tractarian movement, 21, 22, 38, 40,
41. Si. "3
"Tresham, Herbert," 59
Trinity College, Cambridge, 25
Verb, Aubrey de, 137
Ward ("The Ideal Church"), 94,
122
Warr, Lord De la, 139, 156, 158,
160, 163
Webb, Benjamin, 33, 34, 35, 109,
124, 125, 279
 , letter from, 88
Webster, T., Q.C., 264
Webster, Sarah Norman, 56
Wilberforce, Bishop, 166, 269, 270,
285
Williams, Rev. George, 1 76, 192,
254. 285
Wordsworth, Bishop of S. Andrews,
285
Young, Rev. J. G., vii
Zoernikov, 172, 173

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