YALE
DIVINITY SCHOOL
LIBRARY

Gift of
JOHN R. MOTT

TYPICAL CHRISTIAN
LEADERS

TYPICAL
CHRISTIAN LEADERS

JOHN CLIFFORD
M.A., LL.B., B.SC. (LOND.), D.D., F.G.S. (HON.)
AUTHOR OF "THE INSPIRATION AND AUTHOKITY OF THE BIBLE
"CHRISTIAN CERTAINTIES," ETC., ETC.

LONDON
HORACE MARSHALL & SON
TEMPLE HOUSE, TEMPLE AVENUE
1898

Butler & Tanner,
The Selwood Printing Works,
FromEj and London. "

2>e6icatet» TO
THE MEMORY of
the Friends of Forty Years
Friends of my Mind and of my Heart
whose
Character and Works
are remembered with
Admiration and Thankfulness
though
they have passed into the presence of
Him
whom they loved and served
on
Earth

Preface

IT has been my custom all through my ministry
to "remember those who have exercised rule"
and leadership over our lives, to study their moral
ideals, trace their influence, and urge imitation of
their faith and courage, insight and devotion ; as
sured that they were all, in their several degrees,
and in divers manners, manifestations of the grace
and energy of Him, Who is the same yesterday,
to-day and for ever.
I have not attempted to sketch their story, or
recite the outward facts of their career, but rather,
as Browning says, "to keep God's models safe," by
defining the spiritual significance of their lives,

viii PREFACE
sifting the moral values of their service, and catch
ing and handing on, the real inspirations of their
ministries to men.
The Bible is the book of God's " models " ; and, in
it, Bezaleel, the inspired artist, has a place by the
side of Moses, the Builder of the State ; the sonorous
voice of the herdsman Amos blends with the more
solacing tones of Isaiah ; and the impetuous step
of Peter keeps pace with the steadfast march of
Paul. There is no narrow and unexpansive dogma
tism in the Bible. It is catholic in spirit and
method. It breathes the air of universality. Its
author is no respecter of ecclesiastical traditions and
social conventions ; but in every department of
human life, those who work for righteousness, beauty
and truth are accepted of Him and used for the
extension of His kingdom.
Great is the saying, "Be ye therefore imitators
of God as beloved children," and we find it a joy
humbly, though with faltering steps, to follow the
Divine plan. We welcome all God's gifts of men
to men, and try to make the most of their service.
Through men, God is still redemptively immanent
in the life of the world. He spake to our fathers

PREFACE ix
by the prophets ; but His clearest and fullest mes
sage is in His Son, the Eternal Word made flesh.
Christianity is Christ. Jesus Himself is the power
of the Gospel, and Christian ethics have their root
in Him rather than in His precepts. It is person
ality that is potent. God in Christ still interprets
man to himself by man, and enables the individual
to realize himself, through the energies, achievements,
character, and influence of his fellows. Mozley says,
a great act is like "a great poem, a great law, a
great battle, any great event ; it is a movement ;
it is a type which fructifies and reproduces itself."
Most of all is this true of a great character ; and
entirely without regard to the particular province
of our manifold life, in which that character
has been displayed. For sacredness is not in the
sphere, but in the man ; not in shop or studio, but
in the soul ; not in senate-house or warehouse, but
in the spirit and aim ; in the motive and worth of
the individual himself; in the spiritual qualities of
" The great of old ;
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns."
This volume contains illustrations ol workers in

x PREFACE
five different fields : Politics ; the Church ; Literature ;
Science ; and Art. Some of my friends will miss
sermons, they have asked to see in print, on women
like Christina Rossetti, Frances Willard, Harriet
Beecher Stowe ; and on men like Bismarck and
Bright, Samuel Morley and Daniel Macmillan,
Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, Lowell
and Whittier, and many others. I can only say,
that I hope to find time, by-and-by, to issue other
volumes on these, or other themes.
I have judged it best not to remove trom the
sermons the indications of the hour and day of their
deliverance.

Remember them that had the rule over you, which spak
unto you the word of God ; and considering the issue of the
life, imitate their faith.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day yea and
for ever. — Hebrews xiii. 7, 8.
Zechariah "had understanding in the vision of God."
— 2 Chronicles xxvi. 5.
He gave gifts unto men — some apostles, some prophets
and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the
perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto
the building up of the body of Christ : till we all attain unto
the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ— Ephesians iv. 8-13.

" A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one ;
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.
Such man are you, and such a time is this,
That your sole fate concerns a nation more
Than much apparent welfare : . • .
. . . man's mass remains, —
Keep but God's model safe, new men will rise
To take its mould, and other days to prove
How great a good was Luria's glory."
Tiburzio to Luria, Browning's Luria
In the sphere of common experience, we see some human
beings live and die, and furnish by their life no special lessons
visible to man, but only that general teaching, in elementary
and simple forms, which is derivable from every particle ot
human histories. Others there have been who, from the time
when their young lives first, as it were, peeped over the horizon,
seemed at once to
Flame in the forehead of the morning sky, —
whose lengthening years have been but one growing splendour,
and who at the last Leave a lofty name,
A light, a landmark, on the cliffs of fame.
Gladstone

Contents
Politics PAGE
GLADSTONE, THE TYPICAL CHRISTIAN
STATESMAN  i
THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE : A
STUDY FOR YOUNG MEN ... 25
GLADSTONE'S RELIGION : ITS CON
TENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS . 47
PRESIDENT GARFIELD .... 63
The Church
C. H. SPURGEON  83
CANON LIDDON  107
DR. DALE  129
DEAN STANLEY  151
Literature CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY . 175
BROWNING  191
Science CHARLES DARWIN  213
HENRY DRUMMOND  237
Art EDWARD BURNE-JONES .... 255
xiii

GLADSTONE AS A TOPICAL CHRISTIAN
STATESMAN
December 29TH, 1809— May 19th, 1898
The saint and poet dwell apart ; but thou
Wast holy in the furious press of men,
And choral in the central rush of life.
Yet didst thou love old branches and a book,
And Roman verses on an English lawn.
Thy voice had all the roaring of the wave,
And hoarse magnificence of rushing stones ;
It had the murmur of Ionian bees,
And the persuading sweetness of a shower.
Clarion of God ! thy ringing peal is o'er !
Yet not for all thy breathing charm remote,
Nor breach tremendous- in the forts of Hell,
Not for these things we praise thee, though these things
Are much ; but more, because thou didst discern
In temporal policy the eternal will ;
Thou gaVst to party strife the epic note,
And to debate the thunder of the Lord ;
To meanest issues fire of the Most High.
Hence eyes that ne'er beheld thee now are dim,
And alien men on alien shores lament. Stephen Phillips

He was the only man whose opinions on questions of
righteousness weighed much with the masses of the people.
He was therefore in a very real way the keeper of their con
sciences.
W. T. Stead

There is no man living who would have made so splendid
an admiral of the old type as Mr. Gladstone, if he had only
been in the navy. Once let him be convinced of the righteous
ness of his cause, and he would fight against any odds, nail his
colours to the mast, and blow up the powder magazine rather
than surrender. A Naval Officer

GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL CHRISTIAN
STATESMAN

T.CL.

Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not
ito men. — Col. iii. 23.

unto men. — Col. iii. 23

I
GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL CHRISTIAN
STATESMAN

GLADSTONE has gone. England has lost
her most distinguished son, and "the world
its greatest citizen." For weeks past the whole nation
has watched with pathetic solicitude at the bedside
of its most beloved political leader, keenly sympathetic
with his prolonged sufferings, eagerly listening for his
gracious words, and welcoming every sign of resolute
patience, courageous faith and undimmed hope. How
it comforted us to catch the refrain of his favourite
lines as they were wafted to us from his sick-room,
clad with a new beauty and rich in a new inspiration
from association with his last days : —
Praise to the Holiest in the height, )
And in the depth be praise !
Who of us did not feel himself strengthened for the
fight with the " Shadow feared of man," as we heard
the aged statesman say, as if he were uttering a final
witness to a listening world, " My faith is strong —
my faith is strong.' What infinite healing comes to

4 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
us as we think of this great genius, this keen intellect,
this disciplined soul, nearing its ninetieth year, "resting
on the Rock of Ages "; and who could keep back the
starting tear when the assurance reached us that in
response to the tidings that the Churches were praying
for him, he not only expressed his gratitude for " this
very practical sympathy of earnest intercession," but
entered into the fulness of Christian fellowship, and
added the words, " Let everything that hath breath
praise the Lord."
" Come and see how a Christian can die," said
Addison to his son. That message has come to us
in these recent days. We have seen with what fine
courage, benign serenity, and triumphant faith a
Christian can die, and we have been quickened and
strengthened by the scene. The Scripture hanging
over the dying statesman's bed, " Thou wilt keep him
in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee," has
received the completest fulfilment, and the hearts of
thousands have been soothed and fortified, as they
have watched this mighty chieftain, this greater Alfred,
this bolder Elijah walk into the valley of the shadow
of death, all-unfearing and all-hoping, graciously
sustained and comforted by the rod and staff of the
eternal God. II
But what is the powerful magnet that has drawn,
not only the British people, but the whole Anglo-

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 5
Saxon world, first to Hawarden, next to Cannes, then
to Bournemouth, and finally to Hawarden again, in
loving sympathy with the distinguished sufferer ?
What is the secret charm that has allured and held
us from day to day at his bedside ? What is it that
has set flowing this river of love, so deep and full, so
passionate and strong ?
Not the mystery of death, for death comes with
equal foot to the palace of the king and the cottage of
the poor ! Not the brilliance and splendour of his
eloquence, though we are proud of one who has
recalled the glories of Cicero and Demosthenes, of
Burke and Pitt. Not his inexhaustible power of work,
firm grasp of fact and principle, broad outlook and
lofty ideals, though all men have rejoiced in qualities
that gave him rank with the greatest of England's
sons. Not his triumphs as a conversationalist ; they
were the luxury of the few who were privileged to
share the intimacies of his friendship. Not his con
tributions to literature, for those were, in the main,
reserved for the elect. Not even the purity and beauty
of his home life ; though, Saxons as we are, there is
nothing that so kindles affection or wins from us a
loftier praise. Not his constructive statesmanship,
although it remains unmatched by the State-building
work of the Parliamentarians of the century. Not
even his brilliant achievements, although they compel
admiration and inspire wonder. No, not in one, not
in all of these things together, do we find the secret

.6 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
of his all-predominating influence, but rather in his
sincere, fearless, sympathetic, and whole-souled appli
cation of moral principles — that is, the application of
the principles of the Christianity of Christ Jesus to
the life and activities of the State. There is the soul
of his magnetic personality ; that is the real source
of his marvellous power over his age. Mr. Gladstone
has realized the ideal of the Christian statesman with
greater completeness and strength than any man of
this century or of all the centuries.
It is not simply that he has been a Christian ! We
have had many Christians whose life and service have
been the salt of the age. Unknown and unrecog
nised, they have wrought righteousness, subdued
kingdoms of cruelty and wrong, introduced benevo
lence and justice, and sweetened the life of the world.
It is not that Gladstone has been a Christian in
the collective and corporate life of the nation. Thank
God there are many godly men in parish and district,
city and county councils, and in Parliament ! No !
this Christian man, four times our Prime Minister,
has captured the imagination and heart of England
by being a Christian man in the highest offices of the
State, in the Cabinet itself — in the place where it is
the hardest to be a Christian at aliy^and a Christian
so absolutely selfless, heroically sincere, inflexibly
just and tenderly sympathetic, that, like the Matter-
horn, he towers above the landscape, and compels
every pilgrim's attention as the greatest hero of the

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 7
century. Whatsoever he has done in these difficult
places, he has done heartily, as to the Lord, and not
as to men. Ill
This is his distinction. He is the typical Christian
Statesman. (1) In his conception of the essentially
ethical character of the State. (2) In his dominating
sense of a Divine "call " to serve God and man through
the State. (3) In his transparent and conquering
sincerity. (4) In his splendid fearlessness. (5) In
his broad humanitarian sympathies. (6) And in his
manly, all-pervasive and impressive religiousness.
IV
At Bristol there is a monument erected to Burke,
the great statesman and orator, and on it are the
words quoted from one of his speeches, " I wish to be
a Member of Parliament to have my share of doing
good and resisting evil." No motto could more clearly
express Gladstone's purpose in entering upon \ his
political career. He was intensely religious. To him,
as to the great Oliver Cromwell, religion was life —
the very soul and substance of being, the one all-
determining factor in his long career. God was not
to him " like a man in the next street " ; He was
always in sight. To Him he felt directly responsible
for all he was, and thought, and said, and did. Hence

8 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
to him the State, not less than the Church, was
Divine. The distinctive idea of the State was, in his
judgment, that it had a conscience and a continuity
of existence and power ; an inward ethical impulse
amounting to a necessity for the condemnation of all
wrong and the vindication of every right, and per
sisted as an entity through all the changes of its
constituent persons. Nay, more ! He contended, in
the first book on The State Viewed in its Connec
tion with the Church, that the State must go further
and give an exclusive support to theological and
ecclesiastical truth, and make war upon theological
and ecclesiastical error.
In the course of his intellectual development, he
discovered the falseness of this latter extension of the
province of Parliament, and became the leader in
the work of separating the Church from the patronage
and control of the State. Speaking to Mr. Stead
concerning this and other alterations of judgment and
policy, he remarked, " There is one great fact which,
as I often say, is the key to all these changes. I was
educated to regard Liberty as an evil ; I have learned
to regard it as a good; That is a formula which
sufficiently explains all the changes of my political
'convictions. Excepting in that particular, I am not
conscious of having changed much. I love antiquity,
for instance, quite as much as I used to do. I have
never been a lover of change, nor do I regard it as a
good in itself. Liberty, however, is a good in itself,

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 9
and the growing recognition of that is the key to all
these changes of which you speak."
But though he clearly saw that Parliament could
not justly control any particular Christian society, and
forecasted their movement on entirely independent
lines, he never lost sight of the fact that the State has
to discharge functions that are really moral, broadly
but truly religious, towards its members. It must, as
far as may be, "make it easy to do right and difficult
to do wrong," and should take rank next to the
Churches amongst the instruments and agents for the
extension of the Kingdom of God.
It is a difficult task to serve God heartily in politics
at any time. It was especially so at the outset
of Gladstone's political life. The Rev. Samuel
Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford and of
Winchester, writing to him in 1838, says: "Almost
all our public men act from the merest expediency ;
and from this conventional standard it must be diffi
cult for one living and acting amongst them to keep
himself clear " ; and then he continues, " Suffer me to
add, what I think my father's life so beautifully shows,
that a deep and increasing personal religion must be
the root of that firm and unwearied consistency in
right, which I have ventured thus to press upon you."
That letter is itself a witness to the high aims and
lofty character of the recipient ; and the reply shows
that Gladstone felt acutely the extreme gravity of
the situation, the gigantic obstacles in his path, and

io GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
the imperative necessity of meeting and mastering
them. Referring to the truth of Bacon's observation
that " politics are of all the sciences the most im
mersed in matter," he says, "One has to go on
detaching as it were one's soul from clay all the way
through." And he did go on, strenuously, undespair-
ingly, and so successfully, that he has compelled the
whole world to gaze admiringly on the clear trans
parent soul immersed in the matter of politics, but
ever keeping itself far above the clay ; finding
principles in all the wearisome and complex details,
and dignifying everything he touched by the loftiness
and purity of his ethical ideals !
V
For Gladstone was no hireling in politics, no
mere actor getting through his part. He was an
apostle, a missionary, a prophet conscious of his
Divine "call," anointed by the Spirit to serve his
generation in the highest offices of the State. Bunsen
said of him when he read his book on The State
and the Church, " Gladstone is the first man in
England as an intellectual power, and he has heard
higher tones than any one else in this land." Those
higher tones, we know, came from the Eternal, and
were so insistent that they forced him forward from
stage to stage in his brilliant career, or forbade his
acceptance of positions where he would have entered
into alliance with what he felt to be untrue and

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN n
insincere. Necessity was laid upon him. He did
because he must. His life stands out with the
radiance of one who was " sent " with a mission for
the good of his fellows. He takes rank not amongst
financiers only, though he was one of the first ; not
amongst business men merely, though the qualities of
the business man reached their full development in
him ; not as a litterateur, though amongst them his
place is high and his work valuable ; not amongst
soldiers, though he was ever a fighter ; not amongst
ecclesiastics, though he was deeply versed in the lore
of Churches and of creeds ; but he is, before all things,
the consecrated missionary, the divinely-commissioned
apostle, carrying the mandate of God in his heart and
conscience "to loose the bonds of wickedness, to
undo the bonds of the yoke, to let the oppressed go
free, and to break every yoke, to deal bread to the
hungry, and to bring the poor that are cast out to the
nation's house ; hazarding in his political apostolate,
not life merely, but what is dearer than life — far-
resounding fame, lofty position and the sceptre of
power." Thus, he is our greatest soldier of the newer
type — the soldiers who fight to save lives and not to
destroy them ; who lead armies against the buttressed
wrongs and massed evils of men, and say in spite. of
every failure, and in the face of every foe : —
" I hold
That it becomes no man to nurse despair,
But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms —
To follow up the worthiest till he die."

12 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
VI
Gladstone is not only the incarnation of the
highest ethical ideals and convictions in politics, but
he is also a brilliant example of the fleckless sincerity
with which those ideals should be pursued. It can
never be fairly suggested that he sought politics for
any advantage to himself, or even for the sake of
politics as such. He was a forcible witness against
sordid egoism in political life. " Eh, mon," said
Carlyle, " what a conscience he has ! There never
was such a conscience as his. He bows down to it,
and obeys it as if it were the very voice of God
Himself." »And to him it was. He made mistakes,
no doubt, and had undeniable defects and failings,
but he was true to himself at all costs, at the risk of
place and power, and even of influence for good.
That obedience to his conscience often perplexed and
irritated his colleagues, confounded his foes, and
bewildered his friends. Sir Robert Peel said, with the
true official scorn, when, at the very threshold of
his parliamentary life, Gladstone published his book
on The State Viewed in its Connection with the
Church, " With such a career before him, why
should he write books?" It was inexpedient. It
was rash. It would endanger promotion. In fact,
such uncalculating selflessness as he displayed in the
needless publication of his ideas on thorny subjects
like the relation of Parliament and Church, and in

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 13
resigning his official position over the Maynooth
Grant, made men say that he was " too good for
politics," and set them predicting the speedy waning
of his influence and his final disappearance from the
political arena.
But what a splendid commentary on the wisdom
and perfect reasonableness of devotion to duty and
loyalty to Christ is the homage now given to this
great leader of men, this master-builder of our land !
How it vindicates the Divine counsel and the Divine
promise, " Seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and other things shall be added unto
you." His conduct seemed " ultra - rational," to
borrow Mr. Kidd's word ; but that it was actually
in accordance with the soundest and highest reason,
is manifest in the serenity and joy it brought to his
own spirit amidst storms of hate and hurricanes of
malignant opposition, in the imperishable good he
has wrought, in the wide admiration he has won from
the world looking on his career, and rendering homage
first to his goodness, and next to his greatness ; and
in the exalted place he has secured for himself in the
affections of the British nation. It is his sincerity,
simplicity, unostentatious and manly goodness, that
have lifted him to primacy amongst the leaders of the
political life of the world.

14 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
VII
Nor can we have any difficulty in tracing to its
roots that massive courage which has been so domi
nant a feature in his life. Timidity had no place in
his nature. " Are you ever nervous in speaking ? " he
was asked. "Yes, often," he replied, "in opening
a subject; never in reply." There spake the man.
He realized his responsibility, as few do, for his words
and work, and this mad* him apprehensive as he
faced his new task. But in reply, in attack, he knew
no fear, but marched right on, striking with all his
might and destroying his opponents at every blow.
The righteous are as bold as a lion. He was
conscious of his integrity, and, like Sir Galahad, " he
had the strength of ten because his heart was pure."
Did misery and wickedness exist in Naples in such
flagrant form that they seemed like " the negation
of God erected into a system ? " He could not and
would not rest till the iniquity was abolished and relief
brought to the sufferers. Did the atrocities of
Bulgaria call to Heaven for justice ? He heard the
summons and responded with a giant's strength, and
ceased not until the whole country was roused. Did
the Turk persist in his accursed butcheries? Glad
stone continued his heroic attack. I can never forget
going to hear him at Chester. He spoke for over an
hour in the Town Hall on behalf of the suffering and
down-trodden Christians of Armenia. The strongest

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 15
voice in Britain was uplifted with conscience-stirring
power for justice and humanity. Never did the grand
old chieftain seem in finer form. His eye was not
dim. It flashed forth withering scorn on hypocrisy
and hottest hate on wrong. His natural force was
not abated. His deeply-lined and pale face was soon
transfigured with the glow of passion, as of robust
health and unsubduable conviction. Once he lifted
his hands to his ear as though measuring the sound
of his voice, and for one moment, but only for one
moment, he looked weary. His voice was husky at
first ; but its strong deep tone soon rang out in the
old martial style, reminding me of what he once said
to me about that fine organ of his in response to a
sympathetic question as to his hoarseness : " Oh, my
voice always comes to me when I want it." Indeed,
all the way through, the octogenarian was in his old
House of Commons form. There was the same facile
movement of his body, and the same penetrating look
as though he would pierce the very souls of his
auditors ; the same triumphant march of sentence
after sentence to their chosen goal, and yet the same
subtle method of introducing qualifying clauses all
along the march without loosing the grip of his theme ;
the same ascent to lofty principles and commanding
generalisations, blended with the complete mastery of
detail ; and, above all, the same sublimity of outlook
and ringing emphasis of sincerity in every tone.
It was an altogether unforgetable occasion. To

16 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
read his speech, as thousands did, was much ; but to
have heard it, to have felt it— ah ! that is simply
indescribable, and will mark for many one of the
most memorable days of this last decade of this
closing century. The sweet cadences of his voice,
the fascination of his personality, and above all, the
consecration of splendid gifts to the cause of plundered
men and ravished women, raised the occasion into
prominence in the annals of a great people. Chiefly,
I felt the triumph of soul. His utterance of the
words " wives," " women," lifted them into an atmo
sphere of awe and solemnity, and his tone of speaking
of " rape " and " torture " gave them an ineffable
loathsomeness. It seemed as if so much soul had
never been put into our Saxon speech. Keen satire,
rasping rebuke, an avalanche of indignation, rapier
like thrusts to the vital fibre of the situation, and
withal the invincible cogency of the argument against
the Turkish Government, gave the oration a primary
place amongst the masterpieces of human eloquence.
VIII
But it is in his broad and full sympathies with
men as men that this Christian statesman reveals
the opulence of his nature and the measureless
reproductiveness of his service. Sympathy is the
heat, which, as motion, goes forth as quenchless
and irresistible courage. Sympathy discovers the

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 17
ever-widening spheres which he crowds with his
exhaustless activity. Sympathy is the human side
of his faith in God, his systematic devotion, his
love of the Church, his dominating religiousness.
He was a patriot ; but with such all-embracing
sympathies as made him eagerly responsive to the
cries and claims of the weak and downtrodden,
the suffering and oppressed of every clime ; it was
for the race he lived. British to the core of him,
he was British, not for the sake of Britain only,
or chiefly, but for the sake of mankind ; this was
the passion that mastered him, determined his choice
of policies, and made him not only the leader of
Greater Britain, but of the whole civilized world.
The finance of the country had to do with men,
and therefore it became to him a sacred trust, and
he sought to discharge that trust as ever in the
great Taskmaster's eye. He was the steward of the
nation's wealth, and responsible for lessening its
poverty, andj therefore he sought to deliver the
poor man's table from taxes, and to set the mind
free from fiscal fetters on its exercise and develop
ment. We do not know, and never can tell, the
blessings that came to the people through his
Budgets. That of 1853 opened the gates of the
commercial prosperity of the second half of this
century ; and he followed on, lifting burden after
burden from our trade, introduced cheap transit,
fought that fierce foe the monopolist, welcomed
T.CL. C

1 8 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
the "social idea," and, lamenting the misery brought
into society by centuries of legislation for the
" classes," took a straight course towards legislation
for the neglected " masses."
It was the same sympathy with men, controlled
by his love of justice, that dictated his policy towards ¦
Ireland. In his eyes '' Disestablishment " was a
tardy expiation of a historical wrong, the late
removal of a long-standing and exasperating in
justice. Speaking to M. Clemenceau concerning
Ireland, he said : " The curse of Ireland has been
centralisation. What I hope and desire, what
I labour for, and have above all things at heart,
is to decentralise administrative authority there.
We have disestablished the Church, relieved the
tenant class of many grievances ; we are now trying
to produce a state of things which will make the
humblest Irishman realize that he is a governing
agency, and that the Government is to be carried
on by him and for him." And nothing is finer
in the history of men than his sustained and heroic
fight with the ineradicable hatred of Ireland to
England — a hatred begotten of centuries of tyranny.
Say what we will about his method, we cannot
withhold our admiration of the pathetic figure, per
sisting in his heroic task in the face of fierce
opposition, awful disasters, and the withdrawal of
colleagues of many years ; like Ajax defying the
lightning, undismayed by defeat, confident in the

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 19
Tightness of his cause, and assured that England
herself cannot advance till Ireland has been brought
into the line of justice.
Nothing amazed me more in my visit to Australia
than to find that some of our fellow-citizens under
the Southern Cross imagined that Gladstone was a
" little Englander." He was the greatest Englander,
the truest and soundest Imperialist this country has
produced. It was he who laid the basis of that
self-government of the Colonies which has kept
them in happy alliance with and hearty loyalty to
the mother country. It is he who has preached
and suffered for the great principle of decentrali
sation more than any other statesman of our age,
and, though he could never indulge in cheap boasts,
or empty brag about our vast and growing Empire
because he saw with so clear an eye the increasing
responsibilities that growth entailed, no man was
less" afflicted with the craven fear of being great.
No! he had the sympathy which sees into other
human lives, interprets other hearts. He was truly
"cosmopolitan." Scotch by descent, Welsh in
residence, born in the North of England, trained
as a boy in the South, and further educated
in the Midlands, he found his workshop in our
city, the heart and centre of the life of the world,
and he has so wrought that to-day he is regarded
as one of the great teachers of the whole race of
men. He will take his place along with the leaders

20 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
and kings and seers of the world, with Alfred
and Cromwell, with Shakespeare and Milton, with
Lincoln and Garfield, with the bannered hosts of
believing men led by Him who is the Captain and
Prince of the armies of faith.
IX
Yes ! a teacher ! For a teacher is one who edu
cates the moral sense, and this was pre-eminently
Gladstone's mission in reference to the State. He
has given ethical teaching of the utmost value to
this generation, by showing the way in which a
spirit, fully equipped with faith in God, love of
justice and of men, sincerity, courage, and unselfish
ness, may, through the imperfect machinery of
Parliament, develop the conscience of the State,
raise the standard of justice, advance liberty, and
promote the happiness and well-being of all. By
his lofty example, by his illuminating words, by
his acts, he has aided in fulfilling the great mission
of Englishmen of " teaching the nations how to
live." Forgive me, then, if I say that I am proud
and grateful to see men from the East and
the West, from the far-off Colonies of the South
and the countries of the North ; men and women
of all ranks and creeds, of all Churches and of
no Church, of all parties and of no party, doing
homage to this saintly soul ! Men tell me*

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 21
the world is becoming worse and worse ; they say
wickedness is rampant and wrong aggressive. So
be it ; but surely the position this man has won
in our country and abroad, the love he has stirred,
is as cogent witness as we can have to indisputable
progress ! Here is one who has never truckled to
the people, but has rebuked their vices and exposed
their faults ; who has scorned all the suggestions
of expediency, and undeviatingly pursued the path
of justice. He had not in him a trace of the
"Jingo," but has gone from end to end of the
country rousing men to care for the oppressed
and suffering. The crowds have mobbed him, but it
did not matter — he has worked for them all the same.
They smashed his windows, but he bore them no
ill-will. Men opposed him, thwarted him, hated
him, maligned him, and yet he has not uttered
an unkind word of one of them. Why was it ?
He was a believer in God, and God hid him in
His secret pavilion from the strife of tongues.
This was his one hope for the future. " The main
stay of civilization," as he said, "is a living faith
in a personal God. After sixty years of public
life I hold more strongly than ever to this con
viction, deepened and strengthened by long ex
perience of the reality and the nearness and the
personality of God." This is the man ! This is
the exalted character England loves, loves passion
ately, and with a full heart. I will not, I dare

22 GLADSTONE AS A TYPICAL
not, despair of this old country whilst her children
give such proofs as these of admiration for the
best in character, the noblest in living, the most
just and beneficent in service.
It is this same sincere religiousness that "has
won for him the undying affection of the Free
Churchmen of England. Men express astonish
ment at the admiring love of Nonconformists for
this High Churchman, who has not placed a
single Act on the Statute Book which brings any
exclusive favour to us. But his measures have
been based on essential justice, and have issued
in the advantage of the whole of the people, and
whatever errors he has fallen into, he has never
encouraged sordid aims or yielded to low ideals ;
but he has kept an unfaltering faith in God, and
rendered an unwearied service to men : therefore
we have been amongst his foremost supporters,
and now whilst joining in the universal mourning
over his removal, we devoutly praise God that He
bestowed upon our race a man of the piety and
sincerity, courage and consecration of William
Ewart Gladstone.
Behold, then, the true consecration of politics,
and the one abidingly just and fruitful connection
between the State and the Churches ! In itself,
the government of a nation, the direction of its
mighty and manifold interests, the conception,
introduction and passing of just laws, and the

CHRISTIAN STATESMAN 23
wise, economic and fair administration of its affairs,
is a vocation next to the highest, if not, indeed,
the highest of all. I know there are people who
speak of the political realm as though Satan had
exclusive proprietary rights in it. They avoid it;
they condemn those who live in it, though they
do not shrink from enjoying the material advan
tages and liberties secured by the toil of those they
denounce. But here is one who will be proved
to be one of the greatest saints of our time, a
Daniel in his devotion to prayer, a Cromwell in
the Puritanic precedence he gave to religion, yet
consecrating the whole of his life ta politics. The
fact is, it is the consecrated man who consecrates
politics — the man consecrated in the conscience
and will to the love of man and the resolute effort
to be just and helpful to all. Such men lift politics
into means of grace, instruments of promoting the
rule of God over the lives of men.
Nor is the mission of the emancipator completed.
" Liberty is a good in itself." It is the good the
society of Jesus must have if its work is to be
free from irritation and strife, from injustice and
wrong, and its servants are to be unworldly, selfless,
and consecrated to the widest and highest good.
The " dead hand " still rules. There is much land
to be conquered for freedom. What is needed is
a successor to Gladstone ! Not one, not two, but
hundreds of thousands who will enter this apos-

24 A TYPICAL CHRISTIAN STATESMAN
tolic succession, of faith in God and devotion to
the welfare of men ! Young men and maidens,
admire his character, study his making, recognise
the secrets of his strength, imitate his lofty ex
ample, and, though you may fail of your reward
to-day and to-morrow, yet in the end you will
rejoice in the assurance that your labour is accepted
of God and made fruitful in the better and larger
life of the world.

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE

" In the most exciting political crisis," he once told a visitor,
" I dismiss current matters entirely from my mind when I go
to bed, and will not think of them till I get up in the morning.
I told Bright this, and he said, ' That's all very well for you,
but my way is exactly the reverse. 1 think over all my
speeches in bed.'" Seven hours' sleep was Mr. Gladstone's
fixed allowance, " and," he added with a smile, " I should like
to have eight. I hate getting up in the morning, and I hate
the same every morning. But one can do everything by habit,
and when I have had my seven hours' sleep, my habit is to get
up." " Believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will repay
you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most
sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you
dwindle, alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beneath your
darkest reckonings."
" The reading of Dante is a vigorous discipline for the heart,
the intellect and the whole man. In the school of Dante I
have learned a great part of that mental provision which has
served me to make the journey of human life. He who lives
for Dante lives to serve Italy, Christianity, and the world."
" Difficulty is the rude and rocking cradle of every kind ot
excellence.'' " Altogether apart from the question of the truth or falsehood
of religious belief, there is no doubt that, from a purely hygienic
point of view, a man who feels that there is outside of him and
above him a moral order, controlled by some being infinitely
wiser than himself, has advantages, from the point of view of a
life-insurance society, greatly superior to those possessed by a
man who has no such consolation." — Stead's Gladstone.

II
THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
A Study for Young Men
I
ON Saturday morning, the 30th of May, England
laid the body of her beloved leader in the
grave, and uttered her pathetic farewell to one of her
greatest sons. It was an entirely unique scene, crown
ing an entirely unique week. More than a quarter
of a million of men, women and children have in two
days passed beside the plain oak coffin in Westmin
ster Hall, and rendered homage to our statesman-
saint, our pattern Christian politician. Day by day
and all the day through, and all over the land, and in
the regions beyond, an increasing volume of witness
has gone forth, to the unblemished character and ever-
fruitful service of this servant of God and righteous
ness, of truth and peace. " All the hearts of Israel
have turned towards him." Everything else has
been eclipsed. Other events have been cast into the
shade, as by the steady movement of a heaven-filling
orb of light. Wherever men have met, his name

28 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
has been uttered with reverence, and often with
affection ; arid his character has been recalled with
admiration and often with gratitude. It is not too
much to say that thousands have mourned for him
as though they had lost a personal friend. Surely
there has been nothing like it in this generation or
even in this century.
Inside the Abbey, the occasion was one that can
never be forgotten by those who were present.
Great scholars and great statesmen, teachers and
preachers, judges and soldiers, surgeons and
physicians, artists and writers, rulers of schools and
colleges, of cities and towns, and diplomatic repre
sentatives, not only from the Governments of
Europe, but from China and Japan, and hundreds of
men and women besides, shared the solemnity and
awe, the hush and sympathy, the full tides of com
plex feeling, as they listened to the soothing and
thrilling music, or joined in singing the "Rock of
Ages," " Praise to the Holiest in the Height," and
" Our God, our help in ages past," or watched the
bent and fragile form of the faithful, patient, gentle
wife of nearly sixty years, and now a widow, going
with trembling step to her cherished husband's
grave. It was indescribably pathetic ! But more significant
still is the fact that multitudes of people outside
the ancient Church joined in the national memorial
service with no less sincerity, sympathy, and

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 29
thankfulness ; hundreds upon hundreds by atten
dance in the city of Westminster ; and thousands
more as they gathered in churches and chapels and
halls throughout the land, and thousands of others
in the quiet of their own homes. For the tribute
is universal. The voice of strife is hushed in the
presence of so unparalleled a career of duty and
devotion. The antagonisms of years are forgotten
before so long sustained and heroic an effort at
noble living. The " passing '' of our great master
bows all hearts.
For what is it that turns the hearts of Israel
towards our most distinguished Commoner? Not
curiosity ! That would not set those hosts in
motion towards such a goal ! Not servile adulation
of courtly forms and empty show ! They are absent
and in their place are severe simplicity and august
spirituality. Not the voice of authority ! For all is
spontaneous as the upleap of water from the full
fountain. No ! It is reverence and love for moral
greatness, for the finer qualities of a fine manhood,
for the heroisms of faith in God and in the eternal
principles of justice and right, of liberty and
humanity ; and it constitutes one of the most cogent
proofs of the solid progress of our race, and one of
the best guarantees for our future.
England can never forget him. " His body is
buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore."
And not only his name. He lives in heaven :

3o THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
For ever with the Lord,
Amen, so let it be ;
Life from the dead is in that word,
'Tis immortality.
He lives, top, in the love of myriad hearts, and will
live in the quickening and uplifting of the life of the
world. Farewell, great leader! No! not farewell!
Au revoir! We shall meet again in the presence
of the Redeeming God, when the strife is over and
the course finished and the crown won ; and through
all the generations to come thy name shall be a
fount of force, and thy character and work an inspira
tion to moral heroism and faith in God, and an
unceasing stimulus to the great cause of universal
progress. But the best homage we can render to his moral
greatness is to try to understand its sources, trace
its growth and development, and endeavour to
reproduce it. Too early is it to map out the
processes of his upbuilding with faultless accuracy ;
but we can follow him into his successive labora
tories, see him at his tasks, catch hints of his way
of work, perceive his ideals as a toiler, and so obtain
light as to the ways in which he set about the
labour of making himself a man, and the spirit in
which he persevered for nearly nine decades.
First, everybody recognises that he comes of a
good stock, and owes an incalculable debt to the
deep religiousness of his Highland mother, and the
robust strength and independence of his father, a

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 31
Lowland Scotsman. But stock does not go far.
It is a fine thing to come into the world well made
up, and enriched, like Emerson, by the accumulated
treasures of six or seven generations of high thinking
and pure living. Still we must not think too much
of it. It only provides a basis on which the super
structure has to be built ; and on the best founda
tions you may rear a sanctuary of God or a temple
for the idolatry of self. Absalom is the handsome
son of David the king of Israel, but so sore a rebel,
that he goes nigh to breaking his father's heart,
whilst Abraham descends from idolaters, and
becomes the founder of a pure and purifying
religion. Stock is much, but aim, ideal, spirit, will,
and work are more, infinitely more. No doubt
young Gladstone began life with a well-made and
well-equipped machine, well born — though not
"nobly born," with advantages of wealth, though
not immensely rich ; but it is not in these conditions
of body or of descent, or even of external means,
that we come upon the springs of his greatness — we
must go deeper and more inward before it is possible
to account for the majestic qualities of the man. Of
more importance to him than his " iron constitution "
was the direct and powerful influence of his Liverpool
home. There he breathed not only the atmosphere
of genuine evangelical religion, but also of sincere
thought, frank speech, and continuous discussion.
Mental indolence was hardly possible in such a

32 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
household. Father and mother eagerly argued and
lengthily debated with their children on everything ;
— on food, and how it should be cooked ; the signs
of the weather, and in what way they should be
interpreted ; the laws of health, and the relation of
obedience and happiness thereto ; and they discussed
these questions as expecting their children to think
and conclude for themselves upon them, and to find
reasons for these conclusions, and then express them
in clear and intelligible English. Such exercises
must have been a constant tonic — a fine drill for
future service. II
But in a full review, we can have no hesitation in
placing first and foremost amongst the formative
forces of Gladstone's character his conscious and
earnest religion, his strong faith in and fear of
God. It is there at the beginning. It grows with
his growth, and it reaches its full strength in the
unmurmuring patience, the steadfast hope, sublime
courage, and heroic fortitude of those latest months
of indescribable suffering in his old age.
Lord Salisbury, speaking of him in the House of
Lords, said — " He will leave behind him, especially
to those who have followed with deep interest the
history of his later years — I might almost say the
later months of his life — the memory of a great
Christian statesman set up necessarily on high, whose

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 33
character, motives and intentions could not fail to
strike all the world. He will leave a deep and most
salutary influence on the political and social thought
of the generation in which he lived, and he will be
long remembered, not so much for the causes in
which he was engaged, or the political projects which
he favoured, but as a great example of which history
hardly furnishes a parallel — of a great Christian
man." The same thought was echoed by Lord Rose-
bery : — " Sympathy," he said, " was one great
feature of Gladstone's character. There was another
with which the noble Marquis has dealt, and that
I would only touch on with a single word — I
mean the depth of his Christian faith. I have
heard, not often, and have seen it made a subject
for cavil, for sarcasm, for scoffing remarks. These
remarks were the offspring of ignorance, and not of
knowledge. The faith of Gladstone, obviously to
all who knew him, pervaded every act and every
part of his life. It was the faith, the pure faith, of a
child, confirmed by the experience and the conviction
of manhood."
Those testimonies are not in the slightest degree
over-weighted. They are verified by every witness
who has spoken and by everything that is known
of him, by his most inveterate foes and by the
most intimate of his friends. Personal religion,
living faith in God as his Father, Redeemer, and
T.CL. D

34 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
Renewer, takes primary rank amongst the forces that
made him the man he was. Summing up the results
of his long and ample experience, he said in October,
1 89 1, "Faith in Christ is the great and absorbing
interest for us all."
He could say with Obadiah, " I thy servant fear the
Lord from my youth." He was religious as a lad.
Uniformly that is the mark, says Froude, of great souls.
It was of Luther, of John Wesley and Richard Baxter.
Robert Hall, too, was a Christian at ten and the pastor
of a church at nineteen, and Charles H. Spurgeon
startled this metropolis before he was twenty-one.
Robertson of Brighton, Charles Kingsley and F. D.
Maurice received their vocation in early manhood.
John Wesley was only twenty-five when he planted
the first seeds of Methodism ; Calvin wrote his fnsti-
tutes before he was twenty-four; and Luther was
preaching the doctrines of faith when he was under
thirty. " St. Francis of Assisi renounced the world at
the age of twenty-four. St. Francis Xavier entered
the Order, in which he was to play so great a part, at
the age of twenty-eight, and was preaching at Goa
before he was thirty-six. St. Francis de Sales re
nounced the world at the age of twenty-six, and was
in full career as a religious preacher before he was
thirty." John, the youngest, if not the earliest, of the
disciples of Christ, saw farther into the recesses of the
mysterious nature of the Son of God than any of his
fellow-apostles. Paul, though last in arriving within

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 35
the apostolic circle, had been a strenuous seeker after
God as a "young man" ; and Jesus, the Son of Mary,
was fully set on doing the business of His Father in
Heaven at, and before, the age of twelve.
A man must start early if he is to be proficient in
any department of noble living. Gladstone began at
the beginning. He took his stand definitely and
decisively on the side of God and truth. He was at
Eton at twelve years of age animated with a religious
purpose and controlled by a religious conception of
life. God was in life, in the whole of it. That faith
gave him a moral virility by which as a boy he
repudiated the coarseness, and separated himself
from the vulgarity, of a scurrilous toast at an election
dinner ; that fired his zeal against the barbarity that
could torture a brute beast in so-called sport; that made
him a devoted teacher in the Sunday School, and a
diligent student of the Bible ; so that, like John Ruskin,
his mind was so well stored with the Scriptures that
he knew them more intelligently than many whose
specific work it is to master and expound them ; and
he had recourse to them as food for his faith in the
living God, for his high aims and aspirations after the
highest standard of manhood, and the widest and most
effective service of men. Ill
For he made a business of religion, and set himself
to cultivate faith in God, and pure desires and useful

36 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
works as other men do to make money, to gain fame
or to wield power. He devoted himself to the definite,
systematic and methodical development of the spirit
ual life. He did not leave it to itself, or to the chance
moods of a moment, or to the passing currents of the
hour. He nourished it on system and by system ; by
definite acts at definite times and in prescribed places
for the realization of God, of His presence, reality and
power. In the morning he directed his prayer to God
and looked up ; and he did it in the house appointed
for prayer. Whilst all life and all its contents were
means of grace to him, yet he recognised the advan
tage of a strenuous, severe, and unbroken dedication of
himself to a series of definite acts of communion with
God. He did not lapse into the vague and the weak.
He breathed the spirit and welcomed the spiritual
discipline of the Oxford movement, its fine simplicities,
its severe self-repression, its hatred of pomp and show;
its carefully defined religious ideas and most definite
religious convictions, and its recognition of the supreme
importance of reverent regard for particular religious
observances. But he was from the first and all the way through
intensely practical. Therefore one of his earliest
thoughts was to enter the ministry of the Word. That
was, or seemed to be, the nearest door through which
he could pass to a life wholly devoted to religion ; and
his soul, stirred to its depths by religious impulses and
convictions, yearned for a career entirely given to God.

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 37
But his father persuaded him to take another course.
One is tempted to wish that he had not, for what a
a preacher he would have made ! But surely h(| has
rendered far finer service to Christianity as a Christian
politician than he could have done as a clergyman.
For it is one of the disservices that has been inflicted
on Christianity, that the " ministry " has been con
verted into a profession, and thereby robbed of much
of its legitimate influence upon the thought and life of
the world. Gladstone took the more difficult path.
He went into politics against his desires and prefer
ences. To Mr. G. W. E. Russell he said, " politics
was a career he could not commend any young man
to adopt." He saw the peril. He knew the difficulty.
It is a hard lot : and a man needs to feel for that, as
for any place, a " call " from God to undertake it— not
a " call " from society, or from fame, or even from
ambition, but from God Himself — and then he will
stay at his post in the love and fear of God, and will
do his work — so that the work will develop and
strengthen character as well as contribute to the
progress of mankind.
Yes, " develop character," for politics reacted upon
him, and shared with the religion that was in him in
making him, in giving special shape to the qualities of
his being, as well as finding a sphere for his splendid
energies ; whilst for us all his consecration of political
life, by his eminent saintliness, has rebuked that wide
spread despisal of political and civic duties which has

38 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
grown like a parasite on the tree of our modern
Christianity, impairing its vitality and diminishing its
fruitfulness. This then, young men, is an indisputable fact. The
great source of all he was was his religious conviction.
From this he derived his power. By this he made
himself strong. In it was his haven of peace. Like
Abraham he went out " by faith," sometimes without
map or chart of the country he had to travel, but
never without the surest guidance of God. Like
Moses, he found rest in the assurance that God orders
all our life, for the individual and the State ; and he
esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than
the treasures of Cabinets and Parliaments, for he
endured as seeing Him who is invisible. " Godliness
is," believe me, " profitable for all things " — for muscle
and nerve, for brain and heart, for conscience and will,
for character and work. " A merry heart does good
like medicine," it is healing to the sick. A trustful
mind, stayed on God, does good like nourishing bread.
It prevents physical waste, steadies the nerve, and
enables a man to make the fullest use of all the
forces at his disposal. In all your getting, get a real,
manly religion, and let it fill your heart and mind,
yoiir days and nights, your hopes and aims, your work
and play, your life and death.

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 39
IV
Next to religion, in the making of Gladstone,
comes the influence of persistent, unflagging and con
centrated work. He made himself by hard work.
" He was not a boy," says one of his contemporaries
at Eton, " of any special mark during the first three
years of his scholastic career." But he could and did
" toil terribly." He learnt accurately all he learnt.
He crowded his school hours with studies, and did not
wholly remit his pursuit of learning in his holidays.
The same industry marked him at Oxford. Ten
hours a day he gave to his tasks, took part in the
debates, was assiduous in his devotion to religious
duties, and so laid the foundations, steadily and surely,
of his intellectual eminence. Mathematics he disliked,
and suggested to his father that he should devote him
self chiefly to the language and history of Greece and
Rome. His father saw the mistake, and told his son
that he did not think a man was a man unless he had
given himself to the exacting exercises of mathematics.
To his father's wish and wisdom he at once bent his
great energies, came out with a "double first" at
Oxford/and equipped himself for the day when, as
Chancellor of the Exchequer, he should astonish
Parliament by his budgets, and enrich the world by
the initiation of great economic and administrative
reforms. The main element in Gladstone as a worker was

40 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
his concentration. Mr. Russell writes: — "He him
self, I believe, the most modest of human beings,
specified it as the only point, so far as he knew, in
which he differed from his fellows. I know by experi
ence that when he was reading or writing one could
go in and out of his room, and move about in it with
out in the least disturbing him ; and I have been told
that it required the same effort to rouse him from study
which is required to rouse an ordinary man from sleep.
I hope it is not irreverent to say that the same faculty
of concentration was most manifest in the offices of
devotion. There Gladstone was ' solus cum solo', and
the outer world had disappeared."
Sir Isaac Newton disclaimed the possession of
genius, and said that "he only differed from his fellows
in the power of fixing his attention." But what a
difference ! It is just this so few of us can do. And
yet this " concentration " is not a gift. It cannot be
inherited or bought. It does not belong to the quali
ties of stock. It is an acquisition. It comes of the
toil expended in bringing the mind back for the
thousandth time to a repellent theme ; and when it
has come it stays, and makes and marks the man.
It is the most effective instrument in his mental
development. It secures order, regularity, dispatch,
memory, simplicity, analysis, force.
A number of years ago, a young friend ot mine
wrote to Gladstone asking for advice on the art of
public speaking. I was allowed to copy his reply.

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 41
It reads : — " I regret that it is not in my power to
afford any considerable satisfaction to your praise
worthy desire, but I offer you the following fragments
of suggestion : —
1. — Study plainness of language, always prefer
ring the simpler word.
2. — Shortness of sentences.
3. — Distinctness of articulation.
4. — Test and question your own arguments before
hand, not waiting for critic or opponent.
5. — Seek a thorough digestion of and familiarity
with your subject, relying mainly on these
to prompt the proper words.
6. — Remember that if you are to sway an audi
ence, you must besides thinking out your
matter watch them all along."
That is a photograph of the man at work. It shows
his ideal of oratory ; his drill, his patience, his foresight,
his method of preparing for attack, the source of the
numberless qualifying clauses with which he balanced
his sentences, his fixed attention, his intense practicality.
He has made himself by work, as all of us must, it
we are to be anything at all. Not by ignoble ease,
but by hard struggle and unceasing conflict ; not by
shrinking from discomfort, but by buckling on his
armour, and quitting himself like a man.
Every word that he speaks has been fiercely furnaced
In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest.

42 THE MAKING O* GLADSTONE
And he has done it gladly. Incessant and over
whelming demands on his strength and time he
described as the " opulence of opportunities." " Time"
itself is not a fixed quantity. " It is elastic, and you
never know what you can put into it till you try." It
has "odds and ends." He knew it and used them ;
" spare moments," and he seized them. " There are
always so many things with which to occupy your
mind, the difficulty is only in making a choice."
" Seest thou a man diligent in business ; he shall
stand before kings, not before mean men." Work,
work on, work hopefully, — " work while it is day " ;
" and whatsoever you do, do it with all your might."
His eager and open-minded quest for truth and fact
is not less remarkable than his ceaseless activity and
transparent integrity of soul, nor has it an inferior
place in the building up of his greatness. He was
always learning. Even old age did not turn his feet
away from the Temple of Knowledge ; but her doors
were open to him almost to the end. He had his
prejudices and predilections ; but he was so set on
getting at the truth of things that he sheared them off.
Sir Edward Clarke said many years ago : " When he
comes into the House of Commons, it does not matter
who is speaking, Gladstone is always anxious to
understand what it is that is being said to the House
and to realise what the speaker is saying and meaning.
However humble the position of the member speaking,
however little his authority in political life, Glad-

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 43
stone strives to realise his meaning, and is evidently
anxious to hear what every member of the House can
contribute to its information or to the arguments on
the question in debate. His mind is always in a state
of intense activity. He is marked by the singular
earnestness with which he strives to realise what is
being said either for him or against him in any part
of the House." Those words of a political opponent
deserve to be perpetuated as a witness to the broad
sympathies, intense interest in all that is human,
splendid self-suppression and vehement energy, of the
greatest statesman of modern times.
That is the key to the "changes" in his career.
He begins as the young Saul of the Tories, he becomes
the great-hearted Paul of Liberalism. His first speech
defended slavery : his latest expounded and defended
the principles of brotherhood amongst nations, the
rescue of the weak and suffering from tyranny, and
the duty and the right of self-government. At the
outset the connection between Church and State was
sacred, imperative : he lived to demolish the Irish
Church as a State institution. In his early days he
was clad with prejudice against Free Churches as in a
coat of mail ; in 1876 he found that no men rallied to
the flag held aloft for the rescue of the Bulgarians so
readily as the men who, by instinct and training,
ideal and conviction, are devoted td humanity and
justice. From that day forward he regarded the
Nonconformists as the " Ironsides " of his party : and

44 THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE
if we go forward, as we shall, with our Free Church
testimony, open-minded men, eager for truth and fact,
will discover in the future, as they have in the past,
the pre-eminent services rendered by Free Churches
to liberty and justice and humanity all over the
world. The same characteristic underlies his versatility,
his broad culture, his knowledge of art and invention,
of literature and science. Aristotle and Augustine,
Dante and Butler were his masters : yet his recep
tivity, breadth of thought and research, perennial
youthfulness and strength, made him a growing man
to the last ; and as Moses did his best work after he
was eighty years of age, so Gladstone has wrought in
his later years what will be found, in the end of the
day, to be some of his most reproductive services to
i mankind. But I am always telling you, young men, that you
are made by your ideals. It is so. Gladstone is
proof: for nobler ones no one ever formed, nor did
any one ever pursue them with more undeviating
strenuousness. They came from his religion, from
the revelation of God in Christ, and are through and
through spiritual and eternal. His ideal of man, of
the soul of him, of his culture and consecration, aims
and spirit, magnanimity and selflessness, is laid bare in
his own life. His ideal of woman is in his wife, so
truly his " helpmeet " during his long and exacting
career. His ideals of industry, of cities and nations,

THE MAKING OF GLADSTONE 45
of the Church and of humanity, shaped his speeches
and actions, as when he spoke " of our own flesh and
blood " in describing the weak and oppressed, the
defeated and down-trodden ; or declared, " If you
want a bulwark against despotism, there is no rampart
like the breasts of free men."
Believe me, you must make yourselves. But you
will not do it without God. Trust Him, love Him,
serve Him with all your heart and strength. He is
with you, " working in you to will " the highest and
the best, the purest and the noblest ; so that you may
work out your own salvation, and the salvation of all
men.

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION

The greatest hope for the future. — I should say we must look
for that to the maintenance of faith in the Invisible. That is
the great hope of the future ; it is the mainstay of civilisation.
And by that I mean a living faith in a personal God. I do not
hold with " streams of tendency." After sixty years of public
life I hold more strongly than ever to this conviction, deepened
and strengthened by long experience of the reality, and the
nearness, and the personality of God.
We live in an age when most of us have forgotten that the
Gospel of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which He came to preach,
and the sanction of which He sealed with His blood, in addition
to all else that it was, besides scattering blessings over every
class of the community, was above all the Gospel of the poor ;
that the lot of the poor was that which He chose for Himself ;
that from the ranks of the poor He selected His apostles, who
went forth into the world to found the most glorious kingdom
ever exhibited to the eyes of men ; and that from this Master
proceeded the words which showed us, in reference to temporal
circumstances, that a time would come when many of the first
shall be last and many of the last first.
Away with the servile doctrine that religion cannot live but
by the aid of Parliaments. That aid is a greater or lesser good
according to circumstances ; but conditions are also supposable
under which it would be a great evil. The security of religion
lies, first, in the providence of God and the promise of Christ,
next in the religious character and strong sentiment of personal
duty and responsibility so deeply graven on this country and
its people.
W. E. Gladstone

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
ITS CHIEF CONTENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS
I
I"N speaking of Gladstone I have already de-
-L scribed him as the typical Christian states
man ; and traced the working of the chief forces
which co-operated in the production of his rich and
mature character, and therefore I have, of necessity,
spoken again and again of his deep and strong
religious life.
But it seems to me I ought to say more. For my
first address dealt with his Christianity in its influence
upon his statesmanship : the high ideals it supplied,
the broad sympathies it nourished, and the courage
and consecration it inspired. In my second dis
course I went no further than to show the place which
religion had as a most important factor in the making
of his Manhood. I wish to ask now, what were the
chief notes of his religious life ; what were the con
tents of his faith ; and what were his relations to the
thoughts and criticism, the religious institutions and
activities of the age ?
And first, it must be remembered that religion was
T.CL. 49 E

50 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
with Gladstone, from first to last, a matter of
personal experience. That was its strength and
charm. It was life in God — a life " hid with Christ
in God " : a new life, beginning with what we of the
Free Churches still call " conversion " or " regenera
tion," and advancing, under the ministry of the
renewing Spirit of God, from strength to strength,
day by day.
Gladstone was fortunate in that the rootlets of
his being struck down into covenanting soil. He
inherited the cumulative traditions of several genera
tions of godly folk ; and breathed an atmosphere
saturated with piety. Quite early he was brought
under the influence of the great evangelical message
and motives ; for his mother was one in those great
crowds that in 1811 (when the boy was in his second
year) used to hear the preaching of the famous
Thomas Spencer, of Liverpool ; and under his brief
ministry she was led into the light and liberty of the
Gospel of Jesus. Afterwards she attended the ministry
of Dr. Raffles, and was in close association with the
Independents till 1815.
Under such a powerful influence it was natural that
his religion should be, as Mr. George Russell says,
" from first to last Evangelical, clinging to the great
central realities of personal sinfulness and personal
salvation through the Cross of Christ."
Of course his religion had great intellectual values.
That was inevitable; but the soul of his religion was

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 51
in the soul, not in the intellect. As the Spectator says,
" he was a Puritan " in the soul of him ; yes ! and
an evangelical Puritan, starting where all our Free
Churchmen start, in the exercise of repentance towards
God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. This
is the radical fact in his Christianity. It was of the
heart. " He had passed from death unto life." He
was, as we should say, a "converted man," or, as
Carlyle expresses it, he had travelled from the " Ever
lasting No " to the " Everlasting Yea." He knew
Whom he believed. All through his life, inward and
spiritual religion came first.
Therein is the deepest reason for the warm regard
and strong affection of Free Churchmen for him.
We are one with him in our fundamental convictions.
He belonged to us and we to him. We were akin in
faith, in life, in hope, in ideas, in experience, and
nothing could separate us from each other.
II
Next, and with no less distinctness and emphasis,
Christ was the Centre and Source, the Path and the
Goal of his religious life. Jesus was all and in all.'
In the fullest sense he belonged to the saints
described by Pliny, who sang hymns and worshipped
Christ as God. From Christ he derived his concep
tion of God as the Redeeming Father ; of life as a
divine order in the interests of Truth, Beauty and
Righteousness ; of Duty as absolutely sovereign, and

52 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
of immortal blessedness as the final issue of the life
of faith. Through Christ he realised God in his
experience, and knew Him as the Leader and Guide,
the Shepherd and Lord of all his thought and deed.
Christ had wrought in him mightily to will and to do r
and the consciousness of His power and grace was so
vivid that he carried the witness to the Divinity of
Christ, not merely or mainly in the letter of Scripture
or in the vocables of any creed, but in the abundant
and indefeasible records of his own experience.
Hence, in his fourth' premiership, he wrote to a young
man in America, " All I write and all I think and all
I hope is based upon the Divinity of our Lord, the
one central hope of our poor wayward race."
He had the most definite religious ideas and the
most definite religious convictions ; but they are all
summed up in the fact that Christ is the Redeemer
of men, and the one and only Master of the human
spirit. Ill
That life was, according to his belief and practice,
nourished by a regular and systematic use of the
Scriptures ; a use not restricted to the employment
of them as weapons for the defence of the faith therein
affirmed, but mainly engaged in treating them as
human nature's daily food. In a letter to the teacher
of a Bible Class Gladstone says : — " Two things
especially I commend to your thoughts. The first is

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 53
this— Christianity in Christ, and nearness to Him and
His image, is the end of all your efforts. Thus, the
Gospels, which continually present to us one pattern,
have a kind of precedence among the books of Holy
Scripture. I advise your remembering that the
Scriptures have two purposes — one to feed the people
of God in ' green pastures,' the other to serve for
proof of doctrine. These are not divided by a sharp
line from one another, yet they are provinces on the
whole distinct, and in some ways different. We are
variously called to various works. But we all require
to feed in the pastures and to drink at the wells.
For this purpose the Scriptures are incomparably
simple to all those willing to be fed. The same can
not be said in regard to the proof or construction of
doctrine. This is a desirable work, but not for us all.
It requires to be possessed with more of external
helps, more learning and good guides, more know
ledge of the historical development of our religion,
which development is one of the most wonderful
parts of all human history, and, in my opinion, affords
also one of the strongest demonstrations of its truth
and of the power and goodness of God." For him
Religion had its origin in Revelation — not, however,
in a revelation literal and external, and consisting of
words or propositions or doctrines merely, but chiefly
of facts — a revelation which begins with the creation
of man in and for the Divine image and likeness ; and
is, in short, an organic system of the whole work of

54 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
God to restore, redeem, and regenerate the human
family. It has its centre in Christ ; its continuous
growth by the Holy Spirit, working through the
Scriptures and the Church, the Scriptures being
inspired not in any mechanical way, but in and
through the whole personality of the writers with all
their faculties and qualities and experiences, and
verified as to its truth by the witness of the same
Holy Spirit within us.

IV
But whilst Gladstone insists on the too much
forgotten fact that the supreme purpose of the Bible
is the nourishment of the inward life, he is himself
also a most illustrious and convincing witness of
the capacity of Christianity to bring intellectual
content to minds of special strength, broad, full
and deep culture, and of inflexible honesty. He
is one more added to the long roll of mighty men,
who from early youth to old age, at every stage
and in every nook and cranny of life, cling to the
simplicities of the Gospel of Christ, believing in
them intensely and with all the heart, testing them
severely and with all the appliances of logic, ap
plying them fully and with all candour and open-
mindedness. For to him, Christianity was a reason
able and intelligent interpretation of the universe
and of life, of time and of eternity, susceptible of

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 55
the strongest vindication by logic, by history and
by personal experience. He said, "The older I
grow, the more confirmed I am in my faith arid
religion. I have been in public life fifty-eight years
and forty-seven in the Cabinet of the British Govern
ment, and during those forty-seven years I have
been associated with sixty of the master minds of
the country, and all but five of the sixty were
Christians." The splendid balance of his mind, his courageous
pursuit of truth, his frank surrender of positions
and beliefs he had long held and fondly cherished,
his method of supplying " qualifying clauses " to
his utterances, born of his recognition of the lights
and shades of argument, make his witness one of
special strength, and rebuke the empty sneer some
times directed towards the profession of Christi
anity, as though it were a sign of mental im
becility. There are men who speak as though
they had sounded the depths and soared to the
¦heights of Christianity, and found nothing but
superstition~and fable. To them it is at variance
with " scientific progress," with " intellectual develop
ment " ; but here is one who has investigated the
entire field, reasoned his way from point to point,
and returned to tell us that to him the evidence
has grown stronger and stronger of the perfect
reasonableness of Christianity as an exposition
of the universe and of life. Therefore I claim

56 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
Gladstone not only as a powerful witness to the
doctrine and fact of spiritual regeneration, to the
central place of Christ in the highest life and to
the Bible as the best food for manhood ; but also
as a witness to the capacity of Christianity to meet
and satisfy a nature that is endowed with the
strongest intellectual forces and marked by the
keenest sympathy with goodness, justice and pro
gress. In the apologetics of the Gospel Gladstone
takes a foremost place.

V
But some of you have been asking yourselves
whether Gladstone was not a " Romanist " or even
a "Jesuit"? Only the other day I heard it asserted as though
it were absolutely unchallengeable that he belonged
to the Roman Catholic Church, and was a "Jesuit"
in disguise ; and when the allegation was questioned
the speaker expressed as much astonishment as
would follow if you were to show any misgiving
as to the infallibility of the multiplication table.
On what does this charge rest ? On his opposition
to the Public Worship Regulation Act ; his pro
motions to the episcopate of the Anglican Church,
and his attitude towards Confession. Now, there is
no doubt that he was a " Churchman," and, if you
will, a "High Churchman," though that is just now

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 57
a very loose expression, and does not aid in fixing
a man's relations to ecclesiastical institutions. I
claim to hold an extremely "high" doctrine of the
Church of Christ ; for I regard the society of be
lievers in Jesus as the creation of the Saviour Him
self, bound to take its orders from His lips, and
not from Parliaments, subject to His authority, and
to no other, least of all to the House of Commons.
In that sense, too, Gladstone was, towards the
close of his days, a "High Churchman." To him
God was supreme in the conscience, and Christ
supreme in the Church.
But, in addition to that, there is no doubt the
ecclesiastical was a strong element in his nature,
though not so strong as the Puritan. Still the Oxford
movement, though it had not led him captive, had
affected him to a considerable degree. He had
modified his conception of the Church by allowing
himself to think of it as a visible organic whole, a
body with its various members and one possible
visible head. This accounts for his attitude towards
the question of Anglican "orders." But he saw
the dangers of the Oxford revival, and, in fact,
said "That the personal and experimental life of
the human soul with God, which profits by all or
dinances but is tied to none, dwelling even through
all its varying moods in the inner court of the
sanctuary whereof the walls are not built with
hands " might be forgotten or disparaged by that

58 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
movement. To him the " Church," with its services,
was a means of grace, a help and not a master, a
friend and not a tyrant.
But widely as it has been circulated and believed
that his attitude towards Rome was one of sympathy,
if not of cordial co-operation, it is certain that he
was not in any true sense a Romanist. In 1868
he took the trouble to state that " He did not
when at Rome make arrangements with the Pope
to destroy the Church established in Ireland, with
some other like matters"; and in 1874 he issued
his pamphlet on the " Vatican Decrees," in which
he demonstrated in the most masterly way : (1)
"That Rome has substituted for the proud boast
of semper eadem a policy of violence and change
in faith " ; (2) " That she has refurbished, and
paraded anew, every rusty tool she was thought to
have disused " ; (3) " That Rome requires a convert,
who now joins her, to forfeit his moral and mental
freedom, and to place his loyalty and civil duty at
the mercy of another " ; and (4) " That she has
equally repudiated modern thought and ancient
history." He spoke of Romanism as " a tyranny all through.
A tyranny of the priest over the layman, of the
bishop over the priest, and of the Pope over the
bishop " ; and his intimate friend and disciple, Mr.
Russell, declares emphatically : " He was not a
Romanizer, he was not a Ritualist, not a Puseyite,

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 59
not a Newmanite, not a Tractarian," and that ought
to be conclusive. Still, it is not to be denied that,
opposed as he was to Romanism and strongly as
he spoke and wrote against it, some of his admissions
suggest that he was not altogether and under all
circumstances averse to " Confession " as " a detailed
and systematic means of working Christian renova
tion," i.e., as a means of personal discipline. But
he argued for self-examination and self-judgment,
and the confession of sin as so far usable in the
Anglican Church, that no one need go to Rome for
them. He reasons thus : " When we have reached
it " (i.e., the practice of confession as enjoined by
the Church of England, not the Church of Rome),
" we may find we have passed by the point to which
belongs the system of auricular confession ; that
it is at the very best but a particular form of a
far broader Christian duty; and that it has fatally
altered its character when it becomes a perfunctory
and technical substitution for that work of self-
government which no man can perform for another,
while so few, alas ! will perform it for themselves ;
or when it makes the priest the proper and sole
depository of sins, which duty required to be more
specially confided to persons immediately affected
by them."
So that the whole of his contention is in favour
of the Anglican Church as against the Romish, and
in defence of self-discipline and self-correction, aided

60 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
by systematic means for promoting spiritual growth,
as against the Roman confessional.

VI
It was impossible that a religion so clearly con
ceived and tenaciously held should not be a source
of practical energy and of ever-advancing useful
ness. Emerson says : " The planter, who is man
sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom
cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his
ministry. He sees his basket and his cart and
nothing beyond, and sinks into a farmer, instead
of man on the farm." So, Gladstone said, a man
"who holds offices of public trust runs a thou
sand hazards of sinking into a party man instead
of man employing party for its uses — into a poli
tician instead of man in politics — into an adminis
trator instead of man in administration." That was
a capital element in his conception of religion. It
made manhood and conferred sovereignty over all
offices, all places, functions, and all things.
Nor was that all. His faith proved itself by his
works. He believed, and therefore he toiled to save
others. Pathetic stories are told of his persistent
and persuasive efforts to lift the fallen, to encourage
the timorous and distrustful to essay the higher
path, to hearten the defeated and broken. " Do
not forget," he said to his son-in-law, Mr. Drew,

GLADSTONE'S RELIGION 61
on the last Sunday of his life, " Do not forget all
who are oppressed, unhappy, and down-trodden."
The sons and daughters of affliction were near his
heart at the end of the day ; for they had been the
cherished objects of his service and prayers in the
time of his strength.
Many years ago two young men about whom
he had heard became notorious for their drink
ing habits, and it occurred to Gladstone that he
would make an attempt to reclaim them. He
accordingly invited them to see him at the Castle,
and there, alone in the " Temple of Peace," he
impressively appealed to them to change their ways,
and then knelt and fervently asked God to sustain
and strengthen them in their resolve to abstain
from that which had hitherto done them so much
harm. The sequel cannot be better told than in
the words of one of the men concerned, who says :
"Never can I forget the scene, and as long as I
have memory the incidents of the meeting will be
indelibly impressed upon my mind. The Grand
Old Man was profoundly moved by the intensity
of his solicitation. My companion is now a pro
minent Baptist minister, and neither of us from
that day to this has touched a drop of intoxicating
drink, nor are we ever likely to violate an under
taking so impressively ratified in Mr. Gladstone's
Library." Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death

62 GLADSTONE'S RELIGION
of His saints. He does not forsake them in the
final encounter. His rod and His staff comfort
them. Nothing had been so vivid, so intense in
the long life of the Christian Statesman as his
conscious communion with the Eternal ; and it was
the consciousness of the presence of his Saviour
that cheered him to the end. In acute and even
intolerable pain, yet he serenely and courageously
awaited his call in "absolute peace."
And so to the land's
Last limit he came,
And could no longer,
But died rejoicing.
There on the border
Of boundless ocean,
And all out of heaven
Hovered the gleam.
And he followed the gleam into the eternal light
and the eternal rest.

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD

In the stirring history of these fifty years, James Abram
Garfield stands forth a commanding figure — his life opening in
a humble log cabin in the wilderness, made illustrious by its
services to his country and humanity, and closing amid the
tears and lamentations of the world. Isaac Everett.
Hopes have precarious life ;
They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
In vigorous youth, and turned to rottenness ;
But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
And knows no disappointment.

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
Born, November lglh, 183 1
Inaugurated President of the United States
March 4TH, 1881
Yielded his spirit to God, September 19TH,
1881
" Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly ... I thy
servant fear the Lord from my youth." — 1 Kings xviii. 3-12.
THAT description of Obadiah, king Ahab's Lord
High Chamberlain or " mayor of the palace,"
translated into the English of the New Testament
and of the current hour, exactly defines the formative
spirit, dominant temper and supreme potency of that
strenuous student and devoted patriot, who, amid the
watchful sympathes and tearful regrets of the civilized
world, has joined "the noble army of martyrs."
Brief as it is, it carries us at once to the very heart
of his prolific life, reveals its springs and motives,
and goes far to explain and account for those fine
qualities of character which have won for him and
his the affectionate solicitudes and ardent homage of
the English race.
Rarely was the fellowship of sorrow more wide
spread or more real. All Saxondom pays the tribute
of a hushed moment and a genuine regret, in the
T.CL. 6s V

66 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
hurry of its impetuous life, to the simple manliness,
homely goodness, solid worth and mournful fate of
the murdered President. " North and South " clasp
hands in grief. The Thirty-eight States, with un
broken unity, honour the pure devotion and elevated
patriotism of their illustrious chief. Great Britain
realises its perfect oneness with the American
Republic and throbs from end to end — Queen and
peasant alike — with a profound sympathy for the
bereaved people and for the sorrowing and saintly
wife and widow, whose noble bearing, courageous
cheerfulness and beautiful Christian graces, did so
much to inspire the brilliant career which has just
received the " canonization of death." The world
over, we are one in sorrow for the General's decease,
in sympathy with the afflicted family and in good
wishes for the welfare of the fifty millions of the
magnificent republic of the West.
But, on this occasion, we rejoice to think of
General Garfield as first and before all things, a
Christian. "He feared the Lord, feared Him greatly,
feared Him from his youth." His being was per
vaded with and inspired by trust in and reverence
for God and His eternal laws and kingdom. Early
he became a sharply pronounced Christian, took a
definite place in a Christian society, and worked in it
as a Christian teacher and preacher, subsequently
fought as a Christian soldier, and at last died as a
Christian hero.

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 67
James Garfield, a Christian of the Highest
Type
That is a capital fact in his history, and the most
vital point in what our friends beyond the sea call
his " record." It is the focus where the living forces
of his being united their purest energy, and from
whence they proceeded into every detail, every
remotest nook, every hidden and unseen corner of
his diligent life. Christianity is not an attribute of
his nature, it is that nature itself ; not the covering of
the surface of his being, but the beating heart of it.
Therefore it explains him ; it is he ; he is it. It is j
the supreme spirit that broods over the chaos of his
being, and makes it a well-ordered and intelligible
unity, " a thing of beauty," symmetry, force and
boundless service. Leave out Garfield's thorough
going, out-and-out, inward and practical Christianity,
and, though you retain the name, you have lost the
man !
I do not forget that in several particulars he started
life well equipped. God forbid I should ignore the
cumulative blessings of godly descent ! Garfield had
the advantage of coming from the Puritan stock of
New England, that source of so much that is com-
mandingly noble and enduringly good in British and
American history. His ancestor, Edward, had
" metal " enough in him to join Governor Winthrop,
in his departure to New England, to find the precious

68 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
jewel of " liberty of conscience." In his mother the
Ballou capacity for goodness of half a score genera
tions was stored up, as far as nerve fibre and physical
tissues can retain such a fragile possession. She was
exceptionally trustful in God, far-seeing, courageous
and patient ; and being aware of the native energies
of her son James, she devoted all a mother's fond
solicitudes and high aims, and more than an ordinary
mother's tact and skill, in training them in the way
they should go. Meanwhile he is forced — no mean
or measurable gain ! — by the sharp discipline of that
severe mistress Poverty, to educate his faculties by
hard and prolonged toil.
Now, allow all you please for these advantages of
descent and oi position, and then look at the youth at
the "black salters," diligent in business, attractive and
winning in manners, but filled and fired to a white
heat by a passion for the sea. Follow him along the
Ohio canal as a boatman ! The sailor fervour is in
the ascendant. He cannot rest under its goads. It
threatens to master him ; it troubles his mother ; it
clouds his future. The topmost height of all his
ambition is to command a ship. Beholding him
tossed and bewildered on this foaming sea, we cannot
but " love him " ; but what prediction dare we
venture about his future ! what answer shall we give
to the enquiry — what will he become? The ways
are parting, which will he take ?
Unseen by himself the answer is coming. Driven

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 69
home, afflicted with ague, young Garfield in his
enforced solitude chats with his mother on this
passion for the sea, when she cuts him to the quick
by saying : " Above all things, I want you should
feel that the Lord has the first claim upon your love
and service. Dojv^tjjroji^ejfexJhlnkJjrrj^s, that you
ought to give youxJieart_.to .Him, and try for a more
usefayMife ? "
That question lifts his thought, awakens enquiry
and rouses the conscience. To her aid, the skilful
mother brings a young man (God's Ananias for this
stricken Saul), Mr. S. D. Bates, in 1848-9 the
teacher of a district school in the township of Orange,
Ohio, where the Garfield family resided. His visits
to the sick youth are most welcome ; awaken esteem
for himself ; stir the deep fervour of his soul towards
the student's life, and best of all, develop within him
the slowly growing purpose to become a Christian.
Soon the crisis is passed, health and being are
renewed ; and, grasping the hand of Christ as his
Leader and Chief, he starts on his course of ever-
heightening effectiveness and service.
Nor is it to aiy second or third place in his heart
and life that Christianity is henceforth assigned. At
Chester he becomes an active Christian, speaks and
prays in the meetings of the " Disciples," and urges
the subject of personal religion upon the attention of
his companions both publicly and privately. One
who knew him at College says : " His Christian purpose

70 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
is one of the remarkable things about him. His
talents, work, everything, appear to be subject to
this Christian aim." And so he endured to the end,
for the Sunday after his election to the presidency
he went to his own place of worship, and, when
called on, offered one of the prayers at the celebra
tion of the Lord's Supper; and an American of
authority speaks of him as the President who pos
sessed " the most pronounced Christian character we
ever had in that responsible and influential post."
Believe me, my brethren, that fact is vital to the
understanding of his life. His hearty espousal of
Christianity in its highest type is the primal element
in the " make " of the man. Illustrations of " self-
help " are by no means scarce. Stories of " successful
merchants" abound. The gospel of "getting on"
in the world lacks neither examples nor preachers in
this nineteenth century ; but the unique value of the
life of Garfield is that whilst it reveals the splendid
possibilities of " self-help," courage and patience, it
shows with unsurpassed force the splendid available-
ness of the Gospel of Christ for all the highest ends
of human existence. Young men, never forget, the
one thing needful and the first thing, is to be a real,
living Christian. You cannot attain to the loftiest
ranges of human excellence and world-service, with
out the saving and exalting aid of "the Man Christ
Jesus."

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 71
The Christian Student's Chief Aim
James Garfield becomes a student. What is his
aim ? What is he seeking to make himself?
A master ? A lawyer ? A merchant ? A
surgeon ? A physican ? A farmer ? A preacher ?
What does he mean to be ?
That is the question we put, and put early to our
children, and mostly in such a form as to indicate
that sphere is everything, and disciplined capacity
nothing ; that everything depends on where a man is,
and not on what he is, as though the end of life were
to ship goods, or write prescriptions, or settle law
cases, or preach sermons.
Young Garfield knew better. Mowing grass dur
ing a vacation for the purpose of earning money to
pay his school bills, he interested his strange com
panion in his aims and purposes, and the man
said :
"Well, what are you going to make! — a preacher?":
"That," answered James in a playful way, "is an'
unsolved problem. I have undertaken to make a
man of myself. If I succeed, I may make something
else afterwards ; if I don't succeed, I shall not be fit
for much any way."
That is his work in life. With clear vision he saw
life would only be worth living, if he could make
himself a man ; a sterling manly man, built upon the
foundation of New Testament teaching, Jesus Christ

72 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
Himself being the chief corner-stone. That is the
chief end of existence, and the supreme purpose of
his life. He has at eighteen definitely undertaken to
make a man of himself.
Could anything more definitely express the Chris
tian ideal ? Christianity does not undertake to make
merchants, or physicians, or lawyers ; not even
dignified ecclesiastics ; least of all does it profess to
make human " money bags " ; but it does expressly
undertake to make men, — new men in Christ Jesus.
That is its chief business, its supreme aim. All
Christianity is given by the inspiration of God, and
every line of it, and every influence in it, is profitable
for instruction in righteousness, that men of God
may be made ; and when made may be thoroughly
furnished unto all good works.
Garfield, the Student, had grasped the very pith of
the Christian enterprise, and converted it into the
vital purpose of his life.
Did he succeed ? Or was the brilliant purpose of
his youth the irritant poison of his middle life, mak
ing him bitter and cynical, sceptical and scolding ?
Listen : — Dr. Hopkins, the President of William's
College, in which Garfield graduated with such dis
tinguished success, says : — "A rise so rapid in the
civil and military life, is perhaps without example in
the country. . . . Obtaining his education
almost wholly by his own exertions, and having
reached the age when he could fully appreciate the

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 73
highest studies, General Garfield gave himself to
study with a zest and delight wholly unknown to
those who find in it a routine. A religious man, and
a man of principle, he pursued, of his own accord,
the end proposed by the institution. He was prompt,
frank, manly, social in his tendencies, combining
active exercise with habits of study, and thus did for
himself what is the object of a college to enable every
young man to do — he made himself a man."
For eight long years, in the face of gigantic difficul
ties, James Garfield pursued his cherished purpose,
with unflagging perseverance, severe self-restraint,
ever broadening wisdom and ever enlarging succcess.
Never did he sink his chief aim or lower his ideal.
When he sustained himself at the Free- Will Baptist
seminary by working as a carpenter after his
scholastic work was done, when he became janitor
and bell-ringer at the Hiram Eclectic Institute, he
took care that none of his work should hurt him ; he
swept the floors "splendidly," rung the bell punc
tually to the half moment, and mastered his lessons
so that he knew them "certainly." His eye was
always on tlie moral effect of his work, and what it
would do for his character as a man. Everything
was converted into Christian manhood ; libraries and
lessons, work and play, wood-planing and "gerund
grinding," college debates and prayer meetings, all
contributed, under the sway of his sovereign purpose,
to build him up in manliness. There was no feverish

74 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
excitement in his energy, and there was no pause.
"Not hasting, not resting" was his motto, as with
unsubduable courage he gave his days and nights to
the stupendous work of making a man of himself,
resolved that he would not put it aside for anything
else, or accomplish any part of it imperfectly. In
the language of Christ Jesus "he sought first the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness," assured
that other things would find him out as was best for
him. My brethren, the Christianity of the nineteenth
century has some grave defects ; but the one gaping
necessity of which we are reminded by the life of
President Garfield is not genius, not wealth, not
activity. Of genius there is an abundance. Never
were its treasures found in larger measure at the
feet of the Saviour. Gifted men are proud to name
the name of Christ and to use their cultivated
capacities to illumine His history and express
His teaching. As to wealth, it flows from east and
west, north and south ; and in energetic activity
and aggressive enterprise the Churches are exhaust-
less. The one thing needful is individual thorough
ness in the use of the available forces of Christ fesus
in nourishing manhood: and the consequent conse
cration of Christianly equipped men to every
department of human life and labour. Students of
medicine and art, of literature and business, aim
to be men ! Get sterling manliness. That is the

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 75
"article" of all others most in demand. There is
no lack of weak, soft, infinitely elastic, namby-pamby
creatures, plastic as the clay, unstable as water,
looking with keenest eye for personal favours and
waiting to be lifted up to fortune by the hands of
others. You know them, and you know their fate.
Be not like them, but aim, in every book you read,
by every stroke of work you do, every lesson you
learn and every pleasure you enjoy, to nourish
within you a right royal manhood, inspired by the
spirit, and conformed to the image of God's Son.
Never lose sight of the moral effect of your work.
The Christian Patriot
Leaving the student and tracing the developing
manhood of the man, we see it stamping with its
own clear impress every sphere he fills, and every
duty he performs. First of all, he is urged by
gratitude for the good that has been wrought in
him as a pupil to serve the " Institute " and the
" Church " that have been his foremost helpers, and
therefore goes to the post of teacher of languages
and literature at Hiram College. The next year
he is its principal ; the year following, and when
only aged twenty-nine — for to the prepared man
work comes with swiftest foot — he is a member of
the Ohio Senate ; thenceforward, to the end of his
career he is before us as the modest, manly, self-
knowing, self-oblivious, Christian patriot, now fighting

76 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
for his country's unity and the freedom of the
slaves, and now serving that united country as a
gifted statesman in the highest councils of the State.
But wherever we find him, we recognise at once
the manly ring of his voice, his inflexibility in
defence of right, a conscience void of offence towards
men, a glowing love of humanity, and a great and
holy fear of God.
When he was proposed as United States Senator,
it was suggested to him that he should go to
Columbus during the election, and be ready in
case he was wanted, but he sternly refused, saying :
" I shall not lift up my finger for the office. I
never sought an office yet except that of janitor
at Hiram Institute. If the people want me, they
will elect me."
He did not go. He did not grasp at power. He
was not an office seeker. He did the duty of the
day manfully, and was not solicitous about the
honours of the morrow. Not a trace of self-seeking
was in him, and therefore he would not step a
yard out of his course to secure his election. But
he was chosen, and after the election he uttered
these memorable words, showing the real spirit of
the man :
" During the twenty years that I have been in
public life, almost eighteen of them in the Congress
of the United States, I have tried to do one thing.
Whether I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 77
the plan of my life to follow my conviction at
whatever personal cost to myself. I have repre
sented for many years a district in Congress, whose
approbation I greatly desired, but though it may
seem perhaps a little egotistical to say it, I yet
desired still more the approbation of one person, and
his name is Garfield. He is the only man I am com
pelled to sleep with and eat with and live with and
die with ; and if I could not have his approbation I
should have bad companionship." That was his
humorous way of saying, with the Apostle Paul,
that he " always exercised himself to have a con
science void of offence towards God and men."
Akin to his fine conscientiousness and incorporate
with it, was his strong humanity. Conversing on
the subject of slavery, somebody said it was not
safe to emancipate the slaves. " Not safe ! " said he,
with burning indignation; "its always safe to do
rj£hij_a^ ^s_j^er^jafe_to___dp wrong, h especially
to perpetuate such a monstrous wrong as to buy
and sell men." Thirty years ago, his broad sym
pathies with humanity and his God-illumined con
science carried him into a position of fixed and
inveterate antagonism to slavery. When the pro-
slavery party was everywhere triumphant and
learned ministers and devout church officers de
fended the "institution" as divine, he fought for
the freedom of the slave, and did not cease fighting
until the accursed system was plucked up, root and

78 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
branch. Everywhere he set the voice of God,
speaking through his own conscience, against the
voice of the people. Never did he flinch from
fidelity to his convictions ; but was prepared to
stand alone with God, though all the world were
against him ; scorning to support safe measures,
though having the promise of all things ; nerved
with a courage that feared nought but to do wrong,
and fired with a love that made him, as he himself
said, that " he could not hate anybody."
These are the qualities we want put into our
patriotism everywhere and always. Selfishness has
been tried from the beginning, and it has favoured
the few and wrought mischief for the many. Greed
of place and power has failed. The great work
is to Christianise our statesmanship, to infuse into
it the spirit of humanity and justice, and so render
political government the defence of the weak, the
handmaid of individual and social progress and the
bond of universal brotherhood.

The Christian Martyr
And yet, alas ! it is one in whom- this spirit
of Christian patriotism was incarnate, whose sad
fate we mourn. President Garfield was a martyr.
He, was slain for his country ; for his efforts to
cleanse the republic of its peculators, and sweep
out the corruptions that sap its vitality.

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 79
Here is a life, a thoroughly Christian life, attaining
at once the maximum of fitness and of oppor
tunity, and then suddenly whelmed into a chaos ; de
feated just when it seemed most successful, eclipsed
when it was shining in its full strength. All human
judgment said he ought to live. Surely he had come
to the nation for such a time as this. President
Hayes, with the best intentions, had failed in his
attack upon the tremendous corruptions of American
politics: but General Garfield had taken his stand
with a courage never to submit or yield, and what
else is not to be overcome. The loving and
devoted wife thought her husband ought to live, <
and when told that " nothing but a miracle could
save him," said in her ardent hopefulness, "Then/
a miracle will be wrought, and he will be saved."
Think, too, with what urgency and faith men
prayed for his recovery : and yet the bullet of the
murderer did its deadly work, and the man
who seemed the fittest for this hour fell a sacrifice
to the insatiable Moloch of corruption.
Yes, brethren, our life still has its tragedy. It
is too much for us ; we cannot understand it. We
are pushed out on the dark and mysterious sea
which sleeps or moans around our little world of
knowledge, and we see no light by which to guide
our frail barque into the " haven of perfect rest."
Godliness has the promise of the life that now is ;
and it is often grandly fulfilled ; but it is a promise,

80 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
and therefore it may not always be fulfilled. The
gospel of " getting on " receives a harsh revision
by such terrible disasters as this. Providence seems
asleep when most it should be astir, and its energy
is motionless when it should be irrepressible. Mystery
of mysteries, great is the mystery of Providence.
Still, all is not dark ; nor are voices of infinite
sweetness and solace unheard. Our greatest poet
has with fine Christian force taught us that though
Cordelia, King Lear's daughter, is slain, yet her
loving ardours for her aged father have purified life,
and the inspiring traditions of her devotion have
enriched the world. So the Christian faith, the
perfect submission, the heroic effort to live if
possible, but to die bravely and calmly if he must,
the chivalric devotion to and careful thought for
his wife and children and mother, form a most
salutary exhibition of Christian manhood and
nobility of character.
Soon after the President was shot, and when the
indications of approaching death were exciting the
deepest anxiety among his physicians, he demanded
of them what the prospects were, saying : " Con
ceal nothing from me, for you know I am not afraid
to die ! I have faced death before. Tell me frankly,
— I am ready for the worst." Being informed
that his condition was critical, and that he could
probably live but a few hours, he exclaimed, in
a tone of heroic trust, " God's will be done ! I

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 81
am ready to go if my time has come." Later in the
day he rallied a little and again asked of Dr. Bliss :
"Doctor, what are the indications?" Dr. Bliss
replied, " There is a chance of recovery." " Well,
then," replied the President cheerfully, "we will
take that chance." Two or three days afterwards,
when the doctors looked grave at some symptoms
they thought bad, he said : " Keep up heart ; I have
not lost mine." He dies, as he has lived, as a
Christian, entirely calm and courageous, with per
fect resignation, and sublime Christian faith and
fortitude. That sight, beheld by the nations, will chasten
and elevate, and in ways unseen by us, help to
accomplish the supreme purposes of God and of
His faithful servant. For the works of God and
of His servants go on though the human worker
falls. Evil does not defeat good, although it may
displace the good-doer. As Lincoln died to make
his country one, and secured and cemented the
Republic by his blood ; so Garfield, dying for his
country's purity, will by that great sacrifice secure
the civil and political renovation of the United
States. The " blood of the martyrs " has been
and still is the seed of the best harvests the world
reaps. Therefore may we say with a courageous
spirit, " Let not your hearts be troubled, ye believe
in God, and in His Son Jesus Christ ; believe also
in the heavenly mansions for the blessed dead
T.CL, G

82 JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD
themselves, and in the perpetual fruitfulness of
their works to those who follow them."
Is not this, then, an argument for the accept
ance of Christianity as irresistible as it is recent,
as compact and complete as it is forcible, and as
persuasive as it is strong ? " You should feel " —
surely I may echo the words of James Garfield's
mother to you, Young Men — " You should feel that
the Lord has the first claim upon your love and
service . . . Don't you ever think that you ought
to give your heart to Him, and try for a more useful
life ?" Be a Christian ! That is the beginning
of wisdom. Be a thorough Christian, trust the
Lord Jesus fully, serve Him with all your heart
and soul and strength. That is the completion
and crowning of wisdom. Be a Christian and
adopt the Christian aim of life, sterling manliness,
unstained purity, a manhood fashioned on the
Divine. Cultivate your powers. Drill and discip
line your nature. Master yourselves. " Toil ter
ribly." Think, read and work, accumulate and
give, play, suffer and rejoice that you may in all
things be men ; and quit yourselves like men. And
having learnt from Christ how to live, you will,
as President Garfield's martyr-death testifies, have
learnt, in the best way, how to die.

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
June 18, 1834-jANUARY 31, 1892

Let every man, called of God to preach the word, be as his
Maker has fashioned him. Neither Paul, nor Apollos, nor
Cephas is to be imitated by John ; nor are John's ways, habits,
and modes of utterance to be the basis for a condemnation of
any one or all of the other three. As God gives to every seed
its own body as it rises from the soil, so to each man will He
grant his own appropriate development, if he will but be content
to let his inner self reveal itself in its true form. The good and
the evil in men of eminence are both of them mischievous when
they become objects of servile imitation ; the good when slav
ishly copied is exaggerated into formality, and the evil becomes
wholly intolerable. If each teacher of others went himself to
the school of our one only Master, a thousand errors might be
avoided. Spurgeon.
He was as good as he was great ; he was as sweet as he was
good. His genius for forceful, racy speech sets him by the side
of the great masters of our English tongue. His fervour of
devotion and intensity of love to the Lord Jesus Christ blazed
through all his work. He was absolutely self-forgetful, thinking
nothing of himself and everything of his message. His pathos
and his humour, his sagacity and his kindness, were equal.
His power of cheery work was unexampled, and all that he was
he gave to his Lord, with rare and beautiful simplicity and
faithfulness. Dr. Maclaren.

8-t

CHARLES. HADDON SPURGEON AS A
RELIGIOUS REFORMER
" I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I
have kept the faith." — 2 Timothy iv. 7.
THESE familiar words give a vivid and pathetic
picture of one of the most heroic souls of the
early Christian Church as he enters through the gates
into the Eternal City. Paul is an aged Christian,
passionately devoted to Christ Jesus, thoroughly loyal
to his conscience, fired and filled with unquenchable
enthusiasm to do good to men, undeterred by bonds
and imprisonment, steadfast as the immovable hills,
and as abundant in the work of the Lord as a tropical
sun in light and heat. He was
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would
triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
" / have fought the good fight" These are amongst
Paul's last words, and they are bathed in unutterable
pathos. The old man, his hair whitened with age, his
face furrowed with care, his body worn with disease
and damaged by brutal persecution, is a captive in a
miserable dungeon in Nero's Rome ; and although his
8S

86 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
speech breathes the calm of heaven, yet the wretched
ness of his imprisonment makes him regret that he
left " a cloak at Troas " that would have warmed him
in the winter's biting cold, or shielded him from the
dungeon's perilous damp. Still more keenly does he
regret that he has to face his loneliness without the
tender solaces of his son Timothy's presence, and the
cheering companionship of his " books and papers."
It is a hard lot for the aged Crusader ; but he is a
hardy and chivalrous knight who has braved a thou
sand perils in love for his Divine Leader, and therefore
he is not cast down. Cast down ! Never ! It is not
within the power of the cruel and murderous Nero to
stir a single nerve of the old man's frame or shatter a
single hope of the old man's heart. Let the tyrant, if he
will, set fire to Rome again — or send his executioner,
axe in hand, forthwith ; he does not fear. " What
can man do unto me ? I am not ashamed. I am
already offered. My life is now being poured out as
a libation to Jesus, and the hour of sacrifice is already
here. I have striven the good strife. I have fought
against sin and vice, against falsehood and irreligion,
against treacherous friends and open foes, against
principalities and powers, and against the rulers of the
darkness of this world. I have finished my course.
God's plan for me is filled in. My work is done. I
have kept the faith, and it has kept me, and therefore
there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness
which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 87
' at that day ; and not only to me, but also to all them
that have loved His appearing."
How often these farewell words have voiced the
gratitude and courage, the calm and hope, of the saints
of God, in the long course of the centuries, no tongue
can tell ; but assuredly no one in these later times had
more authentic right to use them of himself than our
beloved and ascended friend, who repeated them as
his last words at Mentone to his faithful secretary.
It, too, was a pathetic scene. The worn warrior lays
down his sword — a sword trusted in a thousarid fights
for God and right and truth, and says, " I have fought
the good fight." One can hardly read it without a
choking at the throat ; but at once we feel the great
utterances are as true of our nineteenth-century Paul
as they were of the Apostle of the first century. They
describe the entire purpose and distinctive temper of
his life, and indicate the exhaustless sources of his
boldness and fortitude, energy and valour. They are
true of him as a lad and a man, as a preacher and
writer, as a worker and builder. He was intrinsically
a Crusader of massive strength and sterling character,
imperturbable fearlessness and irresistible dash. Like
..Browning, he "was ever a fighter." The sword of the
Lord was in his hands from his youth, and he attained
to marvellous skill in the use of it. Sometimes, as
with a battering-ram, he went against his foes, and
overcame them. Verily he fought; he was always
fighting, and his fight was a good one. He battled man-

88 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
fully for righteousness, practical godliness, reality, man
liness, social progress, and, above all and before all,
for truth. He has "kept the faith." It has been his
pride and joy to defend it, as he conceived it, against
all comers. He has done it in his own way ; and
though many of us could not adopt or agree with one
or two of his mediaeval methods of defence, we have
always rejoiced in his incorruptible sincerity and
profound loyalty to Christ and conscience.
And now the brave Crusader and Defender has
finished his course! He has touched the divinely
appointed goal at the end of his race ! His life plan
has been wrought out with unsleeping vigilance and
enormous industry. For forty years he has engaged
in incessant labour and carried on his loving heart a
load of cares. In season and out of season, under
clouds of opprobrium and in the radiant sky of prosper
ity, he has preached the unsearchable riches of Christ,
trained men for the ministry, provided for the destitute
orphans, and ministered in a thousand ways to the
best life of mankind.
Strange as it may seem to those who take " short
views," yet it is indisputable that Mr. Spurgeon's true
place is in the long succession of Reformers. This is the
distinctive mark of his work. In his earliest days and
throughout the more potent period of his ministry he
was swayed by the passion for reform. He began as
an Iconoclast. Like the prophets of Israel he dealt in
condemnation. 'He was mighty in rebuke. Censure

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 89
was given out wholesale. Everybody was wrong and
everything. " The whole head was sick, and the whole
heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the
head there was no soundness in it, but wounds, and
bruises, and festering, sores." The depravity of Israel
was total. The evil was desperate. The remedy was
in genuine repentance and immediate reform. There
fore, like John the Baptist and Jesus, he began with
the shrill summons : " Repent ye," and appealed
directly and powerfully to the consciences of men. As
Luther in Germany, Savonarola in Italy, John Wesley
in England, Jonathan Edwards in America, so C. H.
Spurgeon, at the commencement of the second half of
this century, proclaimed with a prophet's fervour and
energy : " Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an
alarm in My holy mountain ; let all the inhabitants of
the land tremble, for the day of the Lord cometh, for
it is nigh at hand."
The People's Preacher
Being himself a preacher of the everlasting Gospel,
it is not surprising that his reforming energy should
show itself first of all in the spirit and methods of
preaching. From the fulness of his spiritual life, he,
a man without a bishop's authorisation or a uni
versity certificate, began that regeneration of modern
preaching, in the fruits of which we are now rejoicing.
Instead of preaching to selected classes he carried

go CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
the Gospel to man as man. Some newspapers tell
us his ministry was to the poor and neglected ; and
others describe it as directed to the lowest middle
class. The fact is, though he was first of all appreci
ated by " the common people," and knew, that of all
others they were the most neglected, yet he did not
address any class as such, but sought to reach the
universal heart so sorely weighed down with care,
baffled by sin, and beset by despair. Where others
appealed to taste and fancy, imagination or reason,
he sought to commend himself to every man's con
science in the sight of God. Instead of false and
stilted dignity, pointless speech and icy coldness, he
introduced natural manners, frank talk, and warm
human sympathy. He got rid of the pulpit ; and
the change from the pulpit to the platform was a
typical illustration of the freedom and homeliness,
directness and humanness he has sent into the
ministry of these latter times. But let him speak
for himself. He is writing as far back as April 24,
1855, to the editor of a Chelmsford paper, who was
independent enough to pen words in praise of the
young preacher, then startling our metropolis as a
religious revolutionist in his twenty-first year. He
says : " I am usually careless of the notices of
papers concerning myself — referring all honour to
my Master, and believing that dishonourable articles
are but advertisements for me, and bring more under
the sound of the Gospel. But you, my dear sir (I

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 91
know not why), have been pleased so favourably to
speak of my labours that I think it only right that
I should thank you. Amid a constant din of abuse,
it is pleasant to poor flesh and blood to hear one
favourable voice. I am far from deserving much
that you have said in my praise ; but as I am equally
undeserving of the coarse censure poured on me by
the Standard, etc., etc., I will set the one against the
other. I am neither eloquent nor learned, but the
Head of the Church has given me sympathy with
the masses, love to the poor, and the means of win
ning the attention of the ignorant and unenlightened.
I never sought popularity, and I cannot tell how it
is so many come ; but shall I now change ? To
please the polite critic shall I leave ' the people] who
so much require a simple and stirring style ? I am,
perhaps, vulgar, and so on, but it is not intentional,
save that I must and will make the people listen.
My firm conviction is that we have quite enough
polite preachers, and that 'the many' require a
change. God has owned me among the most de
graded and off-cast, let others serve their class ; these
are mine, and to them I must keep." Could we
possibly have a better revelation of the very soul of
the preacher? His ardour to save men, burning as
an all-consuming fire then and all through his
ministry ; his massive manhood ; his daring inde
pendence ; his unfaltering faith in the mercy of
God ! how they still throb in the lines of this thirty-

92 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
seven year old epistle ! A critic said of three suc
cessive ministers, " Our first minister was a man, but
he was not a minister ; our second was a minister,
but he was not a man ; and the one we have at
present is neither a man nor a minister." The New
Park Street pulpit had in it a preacher who was man
and minister both : a man and a " man of God," filled
with the Divine fulness, consciously sent to preach
the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ ;
and a minister of the New Testament, who was de
termined to make men listen to him, resolved to talk
plain English and not scholarly Latin, to preach the
Gospel itself and not something about it, to urge it
with all the earnestness of real conviction and the
passion of true pity for lost souls. Great as Mr.
Spurgeon's activities were in other directions, the
revolution accomplished in the spirit and aims of the
preachers of Christianity is second to none. All
Churches have felt it as well as our own, and not
least that section of the National Establishment which
is called the High Church Party. Anglo-Saxon
preaching generally has gained in naturalness, sim
plicity, freedom, homely directness, robust appeal,
and all the strong compulsions of human and Divine
love. No doubt the gains were not unalloyed. No
reform is without its defects ; but it is certain that
through the work of the Metropolitan Tabernacle
preacher, Evangelical Preaching entered on a new
epoch. He fought and won the good fight for reality

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 93
manliness, Saxon speech, and Christly humanness
in the Modern Pulpit.

A Spiritual Revolution
That revolution in preaching involved a radical
change in the spirit and tone, temper and aims,
methods and life of the Churches. They, too, must
cease from evil and learn to do well. Their apathy
must give place to wideawake aggressiveness, their
coldness to warmth and passion, their neglect of
souls to active pity. The Gospel of the grace of
God must appear to all men. It is given for all, and
it is the duty of the Church to see that it is made
known to all, in such a way that they can understand
it, and with such burning conviction that they shall
feel it. The great business of the Christian man is
to " save " his fellow ; not to gloat in his own fancied
security, and luxuriate in selfish anticipations of
eternal blessedness. The question is not, said the
preacher, "Will the heathen be lost if they do not
hear the Gospel ? " but " shall we be saved if we do
not take it to them ? " He urged Christians to pray
and think and toil for the "unreached majority"
beyond their walls. Hence his ministry has been
full of blessing. An unbiassed witness says, " This
Essex bumpkin by his own unaided energy has
done more for the civilisation and Christianisation
of South London than all the archbishops and

94 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
bishops of the Establishment." And not South
London only, but all the Churches, Established and
Free, have shared in the spiritual revolution he ini
tiated. Nonconformity has been a great gainer in
reality and life, in aggressive work and evangelistic
energy, in numbers and visibility. But it is fitting in
this place, opened for public worship by Mr. Spurgeon,
to recall the prodigious influence of Mr. Spurgeon on
our own Churches throughout the world. God gave
him to the people ; but in some special sense to us.
He became a Christian by the grace of God, a Puritan
by the force of inheritance and training, and a Bap
tist by reading the New Testament. His is the most
pronounced Baptist force of the last half century.
His works were as abundant as his position was
unique. The enthusiasm of the great Evangelical
revival reappeared in him ; and the passion for
"saving souls," characteristic of Whitefield, was su
preme. But he had, at the same time, the practical
and organising skill of Wesley, and made himself
the centre of a splendid system of energetic and
evangelistic beneficence. As no work has been
marked with more faith or zeal, tact or daring, than
his, so none has been more conspicuously repro
ductive. Surely the " faith that worked by love " in this
man-redeeming fashion, and was kept so loyally to
the end, is not difficult of discovery. He began
where Paul did. " It pleased God to reveal His Son

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 95
in Me." That was the key to his revolutionary
energy. There is the chief formative force in his
new character and the spring of his fruitful ministry.
His hereditary creed, though going far to make him
the man he was and to shape the form of his theo
logy, was never altogether absent, but it was not
the motive-power of his life and activity. God re
veals Himself to the individual soul. Spirit meets
spirit. The "faith" that is worth keeping is delivered
to the soul in its living substance — i.e. in Christ Jesus
Himself, and is the germ of the new creation, of the
new man in Christ Jesus. Conversion gave Mr.
Spurgeon a fresh grip of Christ, of His redeeming
love, and of His claims. He knew Him for Himself,
and was so filled with adoring love that he could
say : Yea, thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning,
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed ;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
As we all know, his inherited faith did not fit him
in all particulars. It was of the past ; he belonged
to the present. It was a fetter. He was for free
dom and independence, and in several directions he
showed that independence. It was Paedobaptist, he
became and remained Baptist. It was restrictive of
the free and loving mercy of God ; he loved every
sinner under heaven, and sought his salvation as far
as he could. It was for the few ; he lived for the

96 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
many. It had no express declaration of the love of
God for sinners ; in him that love was from the first
burning at a white heat, and spread with consuming
force through his whole nature. He had felt the
crushing misery of sin, and, like Bunyan's Pilgrim,
had groaned beneath its awful weight ; and he knew
the joy and transport of deliverance through be
lieving, and therefore he preached, as I heard him in
the Colston Hall, Bristol, with an unction and power
never equalled by any Methodist, from such words
as " The Spirit and the Bride say, Come ; and he
that heareth, let him say, Come ; and he that is
athirst, let him come ; and whosoever will, let him
take the water of life freely."
When, then, it is said that Mr. Spurgeon's theo
logy is his power, we must carefully look for the
working elements of his theology, for his "faith,"
as the force that inspired him in his evangelising
ministry ; and surely there can be no doubt that the
energy by which he revolutionised the Churches was
the "faith" as it is in Jesus, a sleepless and loving
search for the lost sheep, a sacrifice of himself for
sinners, a delight in mercy to the worst. He believed
with all his heart and soul and strength that the
sacrifice of Christ is God's one remedy for sinners ;
and whatever might be said about decrees and fore
going limitations (and in these he believed), yet he
taught that the real business of the Churches was to
bring the sinner and Saviour together. He himself

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 97
felt the pitying, self-sacrificing love of Christ the
Redeemer of men, and going amongst the Churches
throughout the country, with this yearning for the
salvation of sinners, he spread the contagion of his
enthusiasm, and so fought and won the good fight
for missionary and evangelical aggressiveness.
A Fight for Spiritual Religion
We should be unfaithful to character revealing
facts of special significance, if we were to forget one
of the most spirit-stirring and fertile crises of his life
— namely, that in which he fought the good fight for
the conviction that religion is essentially spiritual,
and is in no way whatever tied up with the obser
vance of the rites and ceremonies of any church.
1864 is a memorable year. Mr. Spurgeon was at
the zenith of his fame. The nation was proud of
him, and regarded him as the Prince of Preachers,
as Tennyson was its chief in song, and Bright its
most popular tribune in politics. All men were
speaking well of him. Society, always the last to
open its eyes to facts, had discovered his strength,
and fashion sat at his feet. Let him only prophesy
smooth things and all will go merry as a marriage
bell! But so long as error is alive the soldiers of truth
must strike out. This is not our rest. Protestantism
is not of one age, but of all. Falsehood renews self
through a thousand disguises, and those who keep
T.CL. H

98 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
the faith must not only jealously guard it against
open attack, but also against the mistakes of sincere
friends. The year 1862 reminded the Free Churches of Eng
land of the heroism and disinterested devotion of the
two thousand clergymen who two centuries before left
their cosy and quiet parsonages and attached congre
gations rather than declare their assent and consent to
everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer ;
and the leaders of those Churches felt constrained
to commemorate their self-sacrifice, defend their
decision, and advocate their principles. This led to
attacks from evangelicals within the Anglican Church
and to numerous replies. The Tabernacle pastor
was not the man to be silent at such a time, and
when he spoke men had to listen whether they liked
or not. On Sunday morning, June 5, 1864, came
the sermon on Baptismal Regeneration, " like a bolt .
from the blue." Conformity, said the preacher, is
sin. Look at the Catechism. Hear for yourselves
the words in the office for the ministration of the
Public Baptism of Infants.
" This, then, is the clear and unmistakable teach
ing of a Church calling itself Protestant. I am not
now dealing at all with the question of infant bap
tism : I have nothing to do with that this morning.
I am now considering the question of baptismal
regeneration, whether in adults or infants, or ascribed
to sprinkling, pouring or immersion. Here is a

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 99
Church which teaches every Lord's day in the
Sunday-school, and should, according to the Rubric,
teach openly in the church, all children that they
were made members of Christ, children of God, and
inheritors of the kingdom of heaven when they were
baptized ! Here is a professedly Protestant Church,
which, every time its minister goes to the font, de
clares that every person there receiving baptism is
there and then 'regenerated and grafted into the
body of Christ's Church.' "
Is that all? Is this the preacher who will leave
his words in mid-air, rousing no conscience, en
lightening no eyes ? You know he could not ! He
proceeded with startling energy, saying : " I am
told that many in the Church of England preach
against her own teaching. I know they do, and
herein I rejoice in their enlightenment, but I
question, gravely question, their morality. To take
oath that I sincerely assent and consent to a doctrine
which I do not believe, would to my conscience
appear little short of perjury, if not absolute down
right perjury ; but those who do so must be judged
by their own Lord. For me to take money for
defending what I do not believe — for me to take
the money of a Church and then to preach against
what are most evidently its doctrines — I say for me
to do this (I judge others as I would that they
should judge me) — for me, or for any other simple,
honest man to do so were an atrocity so great, that,

ioo CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
if I had perpetrated the deed, I should consider
myself out of the pale of truthfulness, honesty, and
common morality. Sirs, when I accepted the office
of minister of this congregation, I looked to see what
were your articles of faith ; if I had not believed
them I should not have accepted your call, and
when I change my opinions, rest assured that as an
honest man I shall resign the office, for how could I
profess one thing in your declaration of faith, and
quite another thing in my own preaching ? Would I
accept your pay, and then stand up every Sabbath-
day and talk against the doctrines of your standards ?
For clergymen to swear or say that they give their
solemn assent and consent to what they do not
believe is one of the grossest pieces of immorality
perpetrated in England, and is most pestilential in its
influence, since it directly teaches men to lie wherever
it seems necessary to do so in order to get a living or
increase their supposed usefulness : it is, in fact, an
open testimony from priestly lips that at least in
ecclesiastical matters falsehood may express truth,
and truth itself is a mere unimportant nonentity."
And then, waxing exceedingly hot, he cried
aloud, "We want John Knox back again. Do not
talk to me of mild and gentle men, of soft manners
and squeamish words ; we want the fiery Knox, and
even though his vehemence should ' ding our pulpits
into blads,' it were well if he did but rouse our hearts
to action. We want Luther to tell men the truth

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 101
unmistakably, in homely phrase. The velvet has got
into our ministers' mouths of late, but we must un
robe ourselves of soft - raiment, and truth must be
spoken, and nothing but truth ; for of all lies which
have dragged millions down to hell, I look upon
this as being one of the most atrocious — that in a
Protestant Church there should be found those who
swear that baptism saves the soul. Call a man a
Baptist, or a Presbyterian, or a Dissenter, or a
Churchman, that is nothing to me — if he says that
baptism saves the soul, out upon him, out upon him ;
he states what God never taught, what the Bible
never laid down, and what ought never to be main
tained by men who profess that the Bible and the
whole Bible is the religion of Protestants."
The effect that followed that blast of indignant
rebuke cannot be described of imagined. Good men
— men as sincere as himself, and as loyal to what
they thought truth and right— denounced him
without stint. He was a "young minister raving"
in total ignorance of "historical theology," and
" revealing the] presumptuous self-confidence with
which he was prepared to pronounce judgment upon
matters of which he was profoundly ignorant."
Nevertheless he continued the good fight. Blow
followed blow, and the air rang with the cries of
the combatants. Like Wiclif against the festering
corruptions of the monastery and church, like Hugh
Latimer indicting the Romish prelates and worldly

102 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
priests, like Luther attacking Tetzel for selling
indulgences, so this nineteenth century reformer
carried on his crusade against conformity to the
system which, in his judgment, set up an altogether
different Gospel to that which was given by Jesus
Christ ; and though, alas ! he did not win the good
fight against the growing sacramentarianism of
English religion, yet the whole impact of his life and
work has been in favour of an essentially spiritual and
practical Christianity ; not ascetic, but human ; not
fanatical, but sane ; not morbid, but manly ; not
outward and of the flesh, but inward and of the
spirit, and wholly freed from the corruption of pagan
and mediaeval times.

The "Down Grade"
Another foe against which Mr. Spurgeon has
fought with unrelenting zeal is what he has variously
named : " rationalism," " atheism," " rampant un
belief," and " Modern Thought." Some suppose
these wars are of yesterday, and began with what is
known as the " Down-Grade Controversy " ; but
that is far from being the fact. They go back to
the beginning, the very beginning of his work, and
they continue all the way through, although it is only
in these later days that the preacher felt it incumbent
upon him to speak as though such evils had tainted
some of his friends and fellow-workers.

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 103
No doubt, like Carlyle, he was really fighting
against the spirit of Denial, and against everything
that tended to breed doubt of God, doubt of the
truth and authority of His revelation, and despair of
His redeeming mercy in Christ Jesus. He himself
had no doubt, and little if any sympathy with those
who were its victims. Doubt was a poison to be
ejected as speedily as possible; and if criticism or
science or art tended to convey that poison, then
they, too, were to be condemned. He had seen the
Lord. Conversion was the ground of his faith, and it
verified everything for him within the covers of the
Bible ; and so it chanced that he acted and spoke as
though the men who tried to remove the intellectual
perplexities of young men and women, seeking a faith
that should assure their reason as well as one that
should soothe their conscience, were in danger of
encouraging doubt and feeding denial. He said, —
Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny ;
Yea, with one voice, O ! world, tho' thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.
Rather the earth shall doubt when her retrieving
Pours in the rain and rushes from the sod,
Rather than he for whom the great conceiving
Stirs in his soul to quicken into God.
Ay, tho' thou then shouldst strike him from his glory,
Blind and tormented, maddened and alone,
Even on the cross would he maintain his story,
Yes, and in hell would whisper, I have known.

104 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
From the very strength of that " I have known "
the Tabernacle preacher grew impatient with a
criticism that would ask questions and a reasoning
that did not assent on the spot to his Gospel. It was
part of the limitations of his condition as a Reformer.
Martin Luther held to a modified form of the Roman
Catholic doctrine of " the Real Presence " in the
Lord's Supper, and battled against'Zwingli as though
divergences of judgment involved difference of affec
tion ; Wesley spoke so dubiously as to the English
Church that men debate to this hour what he meant ;
so Mr. Spurgeon has written and spoken of " Modern
Thought" as though it were accursed, and its off
spring were evil and evil wholly : and yet we not
only know that he was transparently sincere, but that
he did not mean all that his words seemed to carry ;
for he kept himself in touch with physical science,
possessed himself of much of its extensive literature ;
had a hearer in John Ruskin, and was especially
pleased with his works ; accepted the " modern "
doctrine of total abstinence and became an avowed
and pledged crusader against intemperance ; pushed
forward the doctrine, " The God that answereth by
orphanages let Him be God," and publicly avowed
that his own " faith " had grown, saying that at fifty
he could not live in the doctrinal shell that was big
enough for him at nineteen ; altered his emphasis on
particular aspects of Christian doctrine, and in fact,
was himself only battling against denial and doubt,

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON 105
and what seemed to him to breed them, because he
felt that they stood in the way of man's acceptance
of the Divine mercy and his enjoyment of the Divine
life. Whilst, then, we fully recognise and easily under
stand this limitation of the marvellous reforming
work of this "foremost preacher of Christendom,"
we are also filled with unutterable thankfulness to
God for him as one of the most reforming and
remarkable men of the Victorian era, and welcome
the message which he, being dead, still speaks in
ringing tones, bidding us not to sorrow, as those
without hope or without memory, but to "glorify
God in him." To glorify God was his one aim ;
and we shall miss the meaning of his decease if we
do not use it in obedience to the same purpose.
" God was with him," God was in him. He had the
true Puritan sense of the presence and greatness of
God. Not more real was God to the singers of the
songs of the " Treasury of David " than to him. The
Lord went before him with the blessings of His
goodness in the spiritual qualities of his ancestry and
in his fine endowments of mind and heart and will.
God chose his work for him, gave him his place in
the life of our age, and he strove to fill it with the
unquivering assurance that he was called of God.
God revealed His Son in him as Redeemer and
Leader and World Saviour, and in the light of that
revelation he lived not to himself, but to Christ and

106 CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON
souls. He dared what he dreaded because God bade
him, saying, as he went on the hitherto unforeseen
roads, " Thou wilt show me the path of life ; in Thy
presence is fulness of joy ; in Thy right hand are
pleasures for evermore." He was a man of God ;
natural as flowers in summer, strong as the oak of a
century, gentle and tender as a mother with her
sickly child, courageous as Paul before Csesar or
Polycarp before Quadratus. May we all have the
same Saviour revealed in us, and so catch the spirit
of His servant that when our life ends we too may be
able to say, " I have fought the good fight, I have
finished the course, I have kept the faith."

HENRY PARRY LIDDON
August 2oth, 1829-SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1890

He is very wonderful both in voice and words. — Dean
Church. It is impossible to exaggerate the value of Liddon's pre
sence for these twenty years at St. Paul's, in the way of making
acceptable and justifiable to reasonable men the type of worship
which was to be asserted under the leadership which now made
it practicable.The crowds which came to Liddon's sermons had carried
the ordinary Sunday service out of the choir into the dome ;
and, once there, it never went back.
Chivalrous loyalty belonged to the innermost fibre of Lid
don's nature.— Canon Scott Holland.
Truths are related in numberless ways to each other ; or,
rather, Revealed Truth is a great whole, no part of which can
be withdrawn or denied without impairing what remains.
That which invigorates a Church, rendering it independent
of outward circumstance, and endowing it with a promise of
perpetuity, is — next to His Presence, who is the source of all
created good — the spiritual beauty of its members, and espe
cially that union in them of knowledge and holiness which in
vites the sympathies, nay, the entire confidence of their fellow-
men. — Liddon.

CANON LIDDON
GREAT PREACHER AND APOLOGIST
And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and per
suaded Jews and Greeks. But when Silas and Timothy came
down from Macedonia, Paul was constrained by the Word,
testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ. — Acts xviii.
4,5- THAT is a small but vivid picture of the greatest
Christian preacher and apologist of Primitive
Christianity. Paul, forced by the severe and intract
able conditions of his work, leaves Athens, the city
of culture, art and philosophy, and betakes himself
to the crowded, energetic and democratic city of
Corinth. At first he is alone, but soon finds friends
in Aquila and Priscilla, makes with them a home,
and earns his living by working at his trade as a
tent-maker. But he does not, he cannot, forget his
high calling as a preacher of " the unsearchable
riches of Christ " ; and therefore he goes to the
synagogue, where devout Jews and earnest Greeks,
the latter proselytes to the Hebrew faith, meet for
worship, Sabbath after Sabbath, and there devotes
his fine and well-drilled faculties to persuade them
109

no CANON LIDDON
to accept Jesus as the latest and most complete
revelation of God. It was not a welcome task.
Men do not easily surrender either the faith they
have inherited or that which, at the cost of painful
search, they have recently acquired. His toil seems
to have been fruitless, and he, weary and dejected ;
but Silas and Timothy, arriving from Macedonia,
quicken his conscience and stir his faith, so that Paul
"is constrained by the Word" — that is, "seized," as
it were, by the hands of a reinforced revelation, and
borne forward to witness to the Jews that Jesus is
the Christ. Opposition arises, but he faces it with
fearless courage and unbroken calm. God cheers
His servant, and he abides at his task, and lives to
rejoice in the manifold fruits of his steadfastness and
zeal. When, on Wednesday last, I opened a letter an
nouncing the sad news of the death of Canon Lid-
don, this picture of Paul — Paul " reasoning," Paul
"persuading," Paul "constrained" — urged and im
pelled by the forces and ideas of the unseen world
to witness that Jesus is the Christ, came at once to
my mind, as being in its permanent characteristics
a true and faithful portrait of the most distin
guished Christian preacher and apologist of this half-
century. Further comparison of that ancient and
this modern worker, whilst revealing important dif
ferences, has made more obvious the strong points
of resemblance, quickened my sense of the grave

CANON LIDDON in
and irreparable loss our English Christendom has
sustained, and deepened my grief, that so swiftly
after those master-lights, Delitzsch and Dollinger
and Newman, Lightfoot, Hatch and Elmslie, are
quenched in the darkness of death, we have to mourn
the sudden eclipse of one who must take rank as a
man of stainless purity, beautiful saintliness, trans
parent sincerity, fascinating lovableness, deep hu
mility, absorbing devotion to the Lord Jesus ; a
most able defender of the Divinity of the Redeemer,
a clear and cogent reasoner ; a speaker elegant in
style, of great splendour of diction and rich histori
cal allusiveness, and one of the greatest and most
influential preachers of modern times. We cannot,
therefore, but lament with a real sorrow as we think
how much poorer we are through his death ; but we
temper our sorrow with gratitude to God for all the
good He has bestowed upon us through this most
gracious gift of His faithful witness and devoted
saint. I. I can only speak of Dr. Liddon as a preacher
and Christian apologist, for it is only in these aspects
that I knew him. He was a teacher and trainer of
men for the Christian ministry, thorough in his
methods, strenuous, and probably somewhat exact
ing, in his demand, expounding the Scriptures with
clearness and beauty, casting the spell of his power
ful personality over young minds, and by the native
strength of his character stamping himself, his ideas,

ii2 CANON LIDDON
and purposes, upon them both at Cuddesdon and
Oxford. He was a writer of lucidity and distinc
tion, a bold and effective controversialist, and, within
the circle of his sacerdotal opinions, an earnest ad
vocate of Christian unity. " Those who have been
honoured by his friendship," says one who speaks
with authority, " will feel that some of the brightest
hours of their lives can return no more " : and my
friend, Mr. Stead, who knew him well, and was
talking to me about his breadth and catholicity of
spirit the last time I was with him, says, "Never
can I forget the tender kindness which he ever
showed to me and mine, the ready sympathy, the
friendly counsel he ever extended to me in all my
difficulties. We differed totally upon many things,
but, notwithstanding all antipathies and antagon
isms, he was always kind and sympathetic."
But it is in his preaching that he will live in the
imagination and heart of the English nation, and
it is through his preaching that he has served
his age. Unforgettable by me for ever are certain
Sunday afternoons, when I have hastened to our
Cathedral, and sat listening, absorbed and enriched,
and watchful for every revelation of the sources of
his wonderful power. He had — I quote from notes
made after hearing him — the preacher's tempera
ment, fervid, nervous, susceptible of great excite
ment, and, though reading his sermons, yet was
capable of an all-mastering self-abandonment.

CANON LIDDON 113
His thoughtful, earnest face, not ascetic, but
spiritual, as though the soul was master of the man,
attracted and held the listener. He had a fine, ring
ing, resonant voice that won and subdued you. It
quivered with soul, vibrated with earnestness, wept
with pathos, burned with rebuke, and scorched with
sarcasm. The man was in it, and filled it, and made
it the servant of his different moods. The elocution
was distinct and piercing, but pleasant ; incisive, but
sweet and silvery. He never lost a consonant, and
his vowels were pronounced with such emphasis as
to be almost painful to those who were near. His
language was elect, his phrases original, and his
periods affluent with thought and bathed with feel
ing ; he was often brilliant, but his brilliance was no
mere rhetorician's talk, but the out-flashing of a soul
aflame with great thoughts and noble ideals. Words
worth's lines fitly describe his successive sentences : —
Each in solemn order followed each
With something of a lofty utterance drest —
Choice word and measured phrase above the reach
Of ordinary men ; a stately speech.
The chief distinction, however, of Dr. Liddon's
preaching seemed to me to ^lie in its singular whole
ness, its balance, its proportion, its harmony of dif
ferent qualities and forces. It was severely intel
lectual, and yet throbbed with sympathy; often
learned, but so free from pedantry and self-display,
and so practical and human, that you listened as to
T.CL. I

n4 CANON LIDDON
something that immediately concerned you ; fre
quently denunciatory and sarcastic in tone, but al
ways after clear reason assigned ; compactly argu
mentative, but instinct with appeal ; doctrinal to the
core, and yet intended for work ; mostly dealing with
principles, but always with a view to their applica
tion to life ; rich in spiritual insight, and soaring into
the supernatural order, but never failing to attach
the hearer securely to the lowly duties of earth and
time. II. The student of Gamaliel "reasoned" with the
men of Athens and Corinth in order that he might
persuade them to believe in Jesus as the Christ. It is
what we should expect of him. For Paul, Christ had
brought peace to the intellect as well as to the con
science, supplied the best answer to the deepest
questions of his spirit, given a philosophy of life, of
God and His world, of human history and destiny, of
the awful mystery of sin, and had shown the way to a
pure and free and glad life. He is, therefore, the
theologian of the Primitive Church, and though he
writes some things " hard to be understood," yet it is
on themes men hunger to know, and must know,
something about, if they are to have intellectual rest
and power.
Henry Parry Liddon, going to Oxford two years
after the great crisis in the Tractarian movement,
coming into immediate touch with the busy intellectual
and religious enterprises of the University, associated

CANON LIDDON 115
with the young manhood around him, first as a fellow-
student, then as a teacher, himself like them, eager,
inquisitive and restless, was forced into the presence
of the intellectual conflicts of the time, and compelled
to conceive Christianity as a philosophy, a Divine
response to the inquiries of the intellect of man for
light on life in time and in eternity. This has given
to all his work, and eminently to his preaching, a
dominant intellectuality, made it a bold and tren
chant handling of the arguments of scepticism and
materialism, a chivalrous grappling " with the spectres
of the mind," and so rendered it to hundreds of
wearied seekers after truth a blessed evangel. This
is seen in his London sermons on Some Elements
of Religion ; in many discourses delivered in St.
Paul's Cathedral on such subjects as the soul's thirst
for God, the Incarnation, the Sacrifice, the Resurrec
tion of Jesus ; but chiefly in his masterpiece, the
Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of our Lord
given in the year 1866. He saw that the conflict
with unbelief was setting around the person and work
of our Divine Redeemer, and must be fought and
won on that ground. One had bluntly said, " The
study of the life of Jesus is the snare in which
the theology of our time is destined to be taken
and destroyed." He accepted the challenge, and
showed, with a cogency and completeness of proof
that are irresistible, that Christ Jesus is the Divine
Centre of Christianity and the Controlling Figure of

116 CANON LIDDON
Gospel history ; that His character is the keystone
to the arch of the New Testament teaching; and
that anything less than Divinity is fatal to the
truthfulness and modesty and perfection of His
character. Allow the Supernatural Person of Jesus,
and the body of Christian fact and truth has coher
ence of statement, precision of purpose, symmetry of
proportion, and fulness of life-giving power ; deny it,
and we have nothing left on which to rest — life is a
chaos, history a riddle, God a problem, death a terror
and the future an abyss.
A preacher so severely intellectual in the cast of
his teaching could not fail to draw thoughtful and per
plexed minds. They came in crowds and they
listened to sermons an hour long, forming one con
secutive and closely-reasoned argument. They felt
that he was an earnest and sincere thinker as well as
a fluent and forcible speaker, and yielded for the
time to the authority of the knowledge and insight of
the scholar not less than to the candour and saintli-
ness of the man. He knew and sympathised with
the needs, the temptations, the difficulties of his
hearers. Not from him came the cheap and easy
scorn of science, though he rebuked the spirit that
treats guesses as established laws, and facility in
using the tools of the laboratory as an adequate
qualification for the interpretation of the spiritual
phenomena of life. He knew the worth and appre
ciated the contributions of scientific workers to the

CANON LIDDON 117
life of the world as the gifts of the Father of Light
and Source of Redemption. Not from him came the
unworthy notion that when you enter the Church you
must leave your reason on the doorstep, and resume
it when you go out into the world ; he had heard the
command to love God with " all the mind" and felt
it his joy to assist men in bringing the homage of
their whole intellectual and moral being to God.
Fervid he was, but he never set fervour to do the
work of brains, or allowed a lithe and brilliant tongue
to seduce him to neglect the use of exact and
believing study. If his was the eloquence of Bossuet,
he had also the eye of Pascal, the industry of Eras
mus, the holiness of Fenelon, and the free boldness of
Luther. Oh, how I wish our churches, our Free
Churches, in this age of extraordinary intellectual
vitality would understand the times, and see that the
coming Israel must have leaders that do not affront
the intelligence of the age by their intellectual barren
ness or cowardice ! Why should we neglect our
educated and thoughtful youth because we want to
reach and save the dwellers in the slums ? Christ
called to His apostolate the courtly and mystical
John, and the well-drilled and richly-furnished Saul
of Tarsus, as well as the valorous Peter. Thank
God ! some of our younger men are giving up their
pastorates and returning to student- life, resolved to
know more completely the revelation of God in the
Testaments and in the history of the Church. Ignor-

n8 CANON LIDDON
ance is not God's ordinance. He is the Infinite
Wisdom, and His Spirit leads into all truth. We
must have a ministry in full sympathy with the intel
lectual life of the age, so that it may win its confidence
and become its guide to the school of Christ. That
Dr. Liddon did not, however, give intellectual culture
the precedence over moral is made patent by the fol
lowing words from his lips : —
" The highest created intellect may be utterly fallen
and perverted ; there is no reason to think that the
greatest powers of a human mind, cultivated to the
utmost in the first universities of Europe, could for a
moment compare with the intellectual splendour of
the hateful and apostate spirit who reigns in hell.
Greatness in man is that in man which corresponds
with the Eternal Moral Nature of God ; it is
obedience to the law of truth and duty, first of all
controlling a man's own life, and then radiating
from him with the persuasive eloquence as well of
example as of language upon the lives around him.
' He that shall do and teach the same shall be called
great in the kingdom of heaven.'"1
III. Our picture of Paul reminds us that "persua
sion " was also one of the distinctive notes of his
ministry. He sought to persuade Jews and Greeks
to understand and accept his message as the message
of God, and to regulate their life according to its ideal.
1 Edward Bouverie Pusey. By H. P. Liddon, D.D.,
D.C.L. Page 6.

CANON LIDDON 119
Not only the softer and gentler aspects of God, His
tender pity for the lost, His brooding and all-encom
passing love for men, filled his speech with pathetic
appeal ; but " knowing the terrors of the Lord," the
sombre and solemn aspects of Judgment and Destiny,
he was stirred to the deepest pity, and urged men to
be reconciled to God. God's righteous rule moved
him to compassion, and looking back on his work he
could appeal to the elders at Ephesus, saying,
" Wherefore watch ye, remembering that by the
space of three years I ceased not to admonish every
one night and day with tears" Having to watch
for souls as one who must give an account, he
sought with a mother's yearning to win the trust of
those he addressed to the acceptance of Jesus -as
God's Christ, sent to redeem them from all their
iniquities. Can one who has listened to the late Canon
Liddon forget the way in which all the forces of his
heart co-operated with the subtler energies of the
brain to bear the message with the increasing pressure
of a sweet suasiveness right on to the inmost soul ?
Who could help feeling the burning fires of passion,
converting arguments into appeals, logic into life, and
clothing the strongly-knit reasoning with such win
some beauty as to secure the intelligent and active
concurrence of the whole man ? Carlyle, speaking
of Chalmers, says, " No preacher ever went so into
one's heart," and, again, he says, " His tones in

120 CANON LIDDON
preaching would rise to the piercingly pathetic."
This same living warmth and glowing persuasiveness
was to me the superlative charm of Dr. Liddon's
sermons. It was, therefore, my habit to go to St.
Paul's, when Dr. Liddon was preaching, as early
as I could, that I might get as near as possible to
the speaker, and so feel the magnetism, the en
thusiastic passion of the man, catch the contagion
of his intense sympathy — a sympathy that made more
manifest the uniform sobriety of his judgment, a fire
that enforced his masculine reasoning. What Vinet
calls "the passion for souls" filled and swayed him.
He was alive to the weariness of the age, knew its
corroding cares, its oppressive wealth of privilege, its
overwhelming fulness, its over-mastering duties, its
much disguised but ever-present sense of sin and
wrong and loss ; and as a prophet of God, he cried,
in vibrating tones, "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my
people, saith your God." He appealed to the heart
through the intellect, never forgetting that the heart
reasons more quickly than the intellect, and is almost
always before it when a spiritual and practical con
clusion is to be reached.
We are told that the daughter of an Oxford don,
who knew both the Master of Balliol and the Canon
of St. Paul's, said : " How ill Liddon looks, while
Jowett is the picture of robust health ! " " Ay,"
said her friend, " one does not know what care
means ; the other is always worrying, not about

CANON LIDDON 121
himself, but about others." Sympathy with and
care for others lies deeper than all else amongst the
secrets of preaching power. Without it the reading
of the Scriptures will be hard and mechanical, prayer
a mockery and sermons a weariness. With it the
old message becomes new, prayer lifts the soul into
the presence of God and sermons are refreshing as
the breezes of the sea.
Paul's sympathy was quickened by his contact
with the actual life of man, his observation of the
practical godlessness of Athens and of the seething
depravity of Corinth, its worship of glitter and
luxury, its debasing sensuality. So Dr. Liddon re
veals himself as a man of his age, shaken but not
destroyed by its storms, narrowed, perhaps, by its
ecclesiastical strife, but still strongly human ; mis
taken for an ascetic, but well-versed in the dark and
devious ways of our city life ; knowing those fearful
soul-struggles going on all around us which make
our life so tragical and mysterious ; a student of the
newspaper as well as of the Bible ; eager for social
justice and righteousness as well as for ecclesiastical
unity ; exposing the sins of the wealthy and leisured
classes, laying bare the vices of our civilisation, and
urging, by the example and spirit of Christ, an
enthusiastic devotion to the cause of human well-
being with a noble elevation of tone and a sustained
energy of spirit. Our Christian work, in all its
varieties of form and development, and not less, but

122 CANON LIDDON
more, in its teaching and preaching, must derive its
abiding helpfulness from Christ-like compassion.
IV. Looking once more at this clear-cut cameo
of Paul's ministry in Corinth, we see him "con
strained by the Word," and compelled by its ideas
and forces to testify to the Jews that Jesus is the
Christ. Like Jeremiah, he felt the Word of God, as
a fire in his bones, and he was weary with forbearing
and could not stay. He must speak out. " Necessity
is laid upon me, and woe is me if I preach not the
Gospel ! " He feels the pressure of a Hand he
cannot resist. An impulse which brooks no delay
or hesitation urges him onward. That constraint is
twofold— "The Word" and the "Spirit" of Him
who speaks it — the " Word " standing for ideas which
have become working principles, principles that
have become soul-compelling convictions — and the
" Spirit," God Himself in all, and through all, and
over all.
What, then, were Paul's working ideas ? (i) " God
was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself,
not imputing unto men their trespasses." (2) God
effectively deals with sin by the sacrifice of His Son
and the gift of His Spirit, taking out of the way the
obstacle to communion with Himself by the first,
and purifying the heart from the love of evil with the
second — Christ crucified, the wisdom of God and the
power of God. (3) " God is the Saviour of all men,
specially of those who believe." (4) The Redeeming

CANON LIDDON 123
God is the God of history. The purpose to save
man is older than the ages, and is the key to in
terpret human history, and the light to lighten the
future issues and destiny of the human race. (5)
The ministry of the truth of salvation is open to
all who have the gift to understand and interpret it,
and are taught and trained of the Spirit. (6) The
Christian Society is a brotherhood of regenerated
men, enjoying equality of privilege though differing
in capacity, but all responsible to Christ for the
measure and quality of its contribution to the ex
tension of the kingdom of heaven. These were the
chief ideas of Paul's ministry, " the faithful sayings "
expressing the all-powerful convictions of his spirit,
and through which God urged and sustained him in
his work of faith and labour of love.
Who that ever heard Canon Liddon could question
the strength of his belief, the sincerity of his convic
tions and the yielding of his whole soul to the con
straint of principle ! He spoke as one having no
misgiving as to the existence of absolute Christian
truth. He believed strongly, for he knew what he
believed. The bases and contents of his faith were
clear to him. He rested his whole weight without
any misgiving or fear as on a granite rock, and his
soul was calm and serene. His was no cold and
reluctant assent, but the embrace of his whole nature.
Entering into the revolt against a cold, formal and
soulless Evangelicism — an Evangelicism "wanting,"

124 CANON LIDDON
as he says, "in that affectionate devotion to our
Divine Lord which was inculcated by the earlier
Evangelicals" — hating everything that was hazy,
and passionately longing for certainty, he was
swept into the stream coursing with ever-increasing
fulness and rapidity towards the highest of High
Churchism. Nor has he left us in doubt of his
ideas, or striven to hide his convictions and opinions.
First and foremost come the broader facts of the
Evangelical faith — (i) The reality and awful mystery
of sin ; (2) the mediatorial work of Christ ; (3) the
regenerating and sanctifying influence of the Spirit.
These positive contents of the faith he accepted ; but
this was not enough. Why ? He had come into
the Tractarian movement, which he himself has de
scribed as "in its first days addressing itself largely
to the task of supporting and defending threatened
institutions," 1 and, before all others, the Church as
by law and Prayer Book established. To protect
that Church against the on-rushing waves of Radical
ism and scepticism, was the first duty of every Trac
tarian ; but, adds Dr. Liddon, " it was soon perceived
that institutions can only be defended successfully
when the truths which they are intended to guard
and set forth are sincerely believed."
Therefore — and this shows the place of the fol
lowing ideas in the development of Canon Liddon's
faith and work — therefore to the Evangelical faith
1 Edward Bouverie Pusey, by H. P. Liddon, D.D., p. 17.

CANON LIDDON 125
there were added— (4) The doctrine that " a Christian
bishop is an esssential element of the organic struc
ture of the Church of God";1 (5) that Church
authority is necessary to determine the true con
tents and frontier of Scripture, and therefore, also
valid for its interpretation;2 (6) like his "revered
master," Bishop Hamilton, he asserted, with " fearless
clearness," the doctrine of " the real presence of the
Holy Communion " — a presence of Christ irrespec
tive of the faith of the communicant, and "strictly
in connection with the elements after the act of con
secration ; " 3 (7) " the Eucharist is also a sacrifice ; a
presentation of the ever-living and present Christ
once for all sacrificed to the Eternal Father as being
the All-prevailing Mediator, through union with
whom we can hope for acceptance and mercy " ; and,
lastly (8), he asserts the doctrine of absolution, and
claims that the priests of the Church of England can
exercise powers not entrusted to any layman, how
ever saintly." 4 These additions of " Church princi
ples " were the constraining ideas of his life and
labour, urging him to zeal and devotion when such
professions were met with scorn and obloquy and
persecution ; but none of these things moved him,
because to him these ideas were the mirrors of the
1 Ibid., p. 18. Cf. also A Father in Christ, by H. P. Liddon.
2 Ibid., p. 18.
3 Walter Kerr Hamilton, Bishop of Salisbury, by H. P.
Liddon, pp. 115, 123, 125. * Ibid., p. 125.

126 CANON LIDDON
Divine Mind, part of the will of God, and obedience
to them was not a choice but duty.
For myself I have not a moment's doubt that these
additions to the Evangelical faith would have been
repudiated, one and all, with indignant energy by
the Apostle Paul, as forming "another gospel," essen
tially opposed to the spirit and teaching of the
Founder of Christianity ; but these ideas were
veritable convictions with Canon Liddon, held with
sincerity, defended in the face of opposition and
suffering, and they show how grave misconceptions
may arouse a splendid devotion, and anti-Pauline
principles inspire a Pauline loyalty and consecration.
V. Notwithstanding this contrast, suggestive in so
many ways, we may surely learn, (i) once more, that
a true and real preacher of the good news of God's
redeeming love is one of the choicest gifts of the
Father to His children — a gift to be prayed for by
the Churches of Jesus Christ, and to be enjoyed and
used with an ever-quickening sense of responsibility
for the continuance of the service to succeeding gener
ations. The birth of preaching is nearly coincident
with the birth of that Christianity which is God's
fullest gift of Himself in redeeming love and energy
to the world. The ascended Christ received gifts of
men for men, and He gave some, apostles ; and some,
prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors
and teachers ; for the perfecting of the saints, unto the
work of ministering, unto the building up of the body

CANON LIDDON 127
of Christ. Our Free and Evangelical Churches have
been charged with ignoring the claims of the Christian
ministry, and we cannot altogether deny the impeach
ment ; but the advocates of the Tractarian movement
made assertions about the ministry not contained in
the Scriptures and their system issues in claims being
made for that ministry to which Paul and Christ
were complete strangers. But the progress of error is
chiefly secured, not by the proclamation of error, but
by neglect of the truth. Let us therefore understand
our obligation, and whilst protesting against all
sacerdotal pretensions give our best men to God, and
secure for them the best possible training for the
ministry of His word.
(2) Nor may we fail to see that notwithstanding
differences of opinion there is a brotherhood of
preachers through all time and in all lands. They
constitute one great spiritual and apostolic succession ;
they are one group ; the youngest realises his com
radeship with the oldest, and the lowliest feels his
kinship with the highest. One goal is theirs — the
salvation of the lost ; one theme — the love of God
for men revealed in the Incarnation, Sacrifice, and
Resurrection of His Son ; one power is theirs — that
of the Holy Ghost, for there are diversities of gifts
and differences of ideas, opinions, and systems, but
the same Spirit, for Isaiah and Luther, for Paul and
Liddon, and for the lowliest soul that voices the
truth received from the Infallible Christ.

128 CANON LIDDON
(3) The work of this departed Church Leader
summons us to increased faithfulness to our New
Testament ideal of the Christian brotherhood.
Charged as we are by High Churchmen with ignoring
the august dignity of that society, denying its sacra
ments their rightful power, and depreciating its place
in the development of the spiritual life, we ought to
be the more anxious to vindicate the truth of our
interpretation by the charm of our fellowship, the
purity and ardour of our worship, and the aids we
give to one another and to all men in living the best
life. (4) And, lastly, our hearts are lifted in gratitude
and prayer to that Eternal Spirit who is the source
of all life, grace and strength. As Dr. Liddon said
of Bishop Hamilton, so we say of him, " It is by the
Holy Spirit's work in lives such as his that both the
Church and society are braced and sanctified ; it is
from such lives that a truer, loftier, more disinterested,
sterner, yet withal not, most assuredly, less affection
ate spirit than that of common men, radiates into and
purifies and elevates an entire generation. God who
has summoned him to his rest knows how little, as it
must seem to us, such a man could be spared by the
Church. May He inspire others with the faithful,
heroic, and tender spirit " 1 of Henry Parry Liddon,
the Christian preacher and apologist of the closing
decades of our nineteenth century.
1 Walter Kerr Hamilton, Bishop of Salisbury. By H. P.
Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., p. 151.

ROBERT WILLIAM DALE, M.A., D.D., LL.D
I 829-1 895

T.CL. K

If ever I lose heart when I think of the magnitude of the
claims of the friendless, the desolate, the oppressed, on the help
and service of those who are happier than themselves — if I begin
to fear that men will be too selfish to discharge obligations so
immense, and demanding such enormous self-sacrifice — my
courage returns when I think of Christ. I know that the story
of His grace will continue to inspire the hearts of men through
future centuries, as it has inspired them in centuries gone by.
I see that, notwithstanding the intellectual confusions by which
we are environed, it is exerting a greater power on the moral
life of the race at the present moment than it has ever exerted
before. I believe that the will of God which received so noble
an expression in the incarnation, the miracles, the sufferings
and the death of Christ will at last be done on earth even as it
is done in heaven.
Dr. Dale.
The right of private judgment " is the most sacred of rights
because it guarantees the most sacred of duties."
Dr. Dale.

DR. DALE
THE TYPICAL NONCONFORMI&T PREACHER AND
PASTOR
THE ideal chief of our modern Nonconformity
has been taken away from us. We sin
cerely and deeply lament, for a " prince and a
great man has fallen " in our Israel : not indeed
before he has contributed immense and far-reaching
services to his generation and to the generations
following ; but certainly at a time when we might
have anticipated to share yet more largely the
matured fruits of his genius and wisdom, of his conse
cration and stainless sainthood. "The Lord hath
given," and we adore Him for His gift ; " the Lord
hath taken away," and though we miss "our comrade
brave and true," yet " we bless the name of the
Lord."

We bless Thee for his every step
In faithful following Thee,
And for his good fight, fought so well,
And crowned with victory.

132 DR. DALE
We bless Thee that his humble love
Hath met with such regard,
We bless Thee for his blessedness
And for his rich reward.
Dr. Dale was one of the makers of our living
Nonconformity. His natural gifts were large and
various, and he multiplied them by a full, wide, and
assiduous culture. Few men had a more robust
intellect, and yet his piety was as simple as a child's,
and his goodness as unaffected and as natural as the
flowers of opening spring. There was a fearlessness
in his daring, a boldness in his initiative, and an
aggressiveness in his service that compelled the ad
miration of many, and inspired the fears of a few ;
but he was as magnanimous as he was bold, and as
considerate as he was cogent.
No one could listen to him without a quickening of
confidence in his serene and balanced judgments, and
yet all felt the throb of his glowing earnestness. His
capacity for abstract thought linked him with philo
sophers, his insistence on conduct gave him first rank
amongst practical citizens ; his keen spiritual insight
and strong spiritual sympathies made him at home
with revivalists and mystics. He was tireless in his
activity, and yet marked by deep repose. As a
friend he was true as steel, as an opponent he was
just as the fairest judge, as a citizen he was not less
faithful to the mastery of detail than in the main
tenance of lofty ideals. Above all, he was devoted

DR. DALE 133
to God his Saviour, and rejoiced in the exposition of
His thoughts and the extension of His kingdom. No
one suspected him. No one doubted his motives.
Friends and foes alike felt the nobility of his
character. Hence he has been a capable leader of
large breadths of the best life of our generation ; and
being dead he will yet speak from many a pulpit and
on many a platform and in many a home. Students
for the ministry have found in him a Gamaliel or a
Paul ; patriots have nourished their faith in righteous
ness by the food he has supplied ; theologians have
had their minds quickened by his teaching ; the
young have been glad to respond to his summons to
self-sacrifice and to devotion; and the Nonconformist
churches of the land, specially those, like our own, of
the Independent order, have been braced for the
defence of threatened principles, and inspired to the
maintenance of menaced institutions. No tongue
can tell the obligation of the Nonconformity of the
last forty years to the courage, the strong sense, the
fine ability and good name of the pastor of Carr's
Lane. In short, to me he appears, and has long appeared,
as a pattern Nonconformist preacher, a model Free
Church pastor ; soaring in his solid strength and
mystic devotion far above the average ; but in his
ideals and impulses, in the impact he received at
his "conversion," in his firm grasp of the cardinal
principles of the Gospel of Christ, in his manly

134 DR. DALE
spirituality, in his reasonable earnestness and free
dom from violence and exaggeration ; in his fidelity
to and sacrifice for the fundamental principles of the
New Testament Church, he is a type of the ideas
and forces that dominate hundreds upon hundreds
of those Free Church pastors who are feeding the
spiritual life of the world and inspiring an unflagging
devotion to Christ and men. In him, more than in
most men of the last four decades, you see the quali
ties and energies of the ideal preacher and pastor
of the Independent Christian Society.
Just as Browning and Tennyson are the typical
singers of the whole of our era ; Lord Shaftesbury, the
pattern Christian Socialist of the fifties and sixties ;
Cardinal Manning, the masterly ecclesiastic of the
seventies and eighties, and C. H. Spurgeon, the type
of the great-hearted evangelist, with his "messages
for the multitude " ; so Robert William Dale is in
many most vital respects the exemplar of the English
Nonconformist preacher and pastor.
I. First and mainly, he was a great preacher. As
with Paul, so with him—" necessity was laid upon
him," and preach the Gospel he must. He wrote
and published books ; but the books were made up,
as he himself confesses, of the sermons through which
he had ministered the thoughts of God and the life
of his own spirit to his people. He was an editor ;
but again the sermon, sometimes with and sometimes
without a text, appears to witness for the irrepres-

DR. DALE 135
sible preaching gift within him. He was a politician
—wise, sagacious, clear-headed, strenuous, and with
what seemed to some the temper of a partisan ;
but his politics were "applied Christianity," and his
devotion to civic and national welfare was only the
practical side of his exposition of the mind of Christ.
Having listened on one occasion to John Bright,
in the Birmingham Town Hall, he said to him at the
close of his speech, thereby revealing himself as well
as passing judgment on the great orator, "I have
been thinking what a preacher you would have
made," and John Bright replied, " I hope I have
always been a preacher of righteousness," thus blend
ing in one photographic picture the inmost soul of
the two men. Dr. Dale conducted worship with deep
solemnity and awe, as though filled with an over
powering sense of the august majesty of the Eternal
God ; and he read the Bible as one who felt himself
in fellowship with the " Word of the Lord " ; for to
him, as a preacher, the worship of God in spirit and
in truth was not only an offering sought and wel
comed by the Father of Spirits, but it created the
atmosphere in which convictions are converted into
conduct, and ideas clothe themselves with the powers
of redemption. He felt that his business was to
interpret and apply the unchanging revelation of
God to the changing needs and unchanging elements
in the troubled life of men, and he bent every energy
and consecrated all 'his powers to that supreme task.

136 DR. DALE
Greatly as he loved theology, he refused to be re
garded as a theological expert; capable as he was
of exact scholarship, yet he would not spend his
days in the quiet pursuit of learning ; preaching was
his vocation, his inevitable vocation. "Seeing," he
would say with Paul — " seeing we have such a revela
tion of God in Christ, we must speak the things we
have seen and heard " ; for the things are " Christ
crucified the power of God, and the wisdom of God ":
God in the tenderness of His sympathy and the ful
ness of His love, as the inexhaustible hope of simple
men ; they are mercy and peace, the forgiveness of
sins, the deliverance from death, the harmonising of
the conflicting elements of life, the triumph over evil
and the life for evermore.
True, his sermons are not homely and popular like
Spurgeon's, nor packed with original thought like
Robertson's, nor charged with passion like Liddon's,
nor piercing to the bones and marrow like those of
Dean Church ; but they are always marked by strong
and nourishing qualities. The basis is always Scrip
tural, and the exegesis careful, acute, and luminous.
The themes are large and central ; the thought is
robust and practical ; the style is always clear, often
elaborate, and sometimes thrillingly eloquent. He
is pre-eminently a preacher ; and as a preacher, he is
pre-eminent among those in the first rank.
Nonconformity, like Glasgow, prospers by the
preaching of the Word. We do not make ritualists,

DR. DALE 137
we make preachers ; and sad will the day be for us
when we fail to attract to the service of the ministry
amongst us men of great natural powers and of
quenchless devotion. Elijah has gone up in the
chariot of God. May the God of the prophets cast
the mantle of the departed leader this day on many
a young Nonconformist Elisha !
II. Central to Dr. Dale as a preacher, and as a
Christian man, is his " vision of Christ " ; his " con
version," i.e., his personal experience of the grace of
God in the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. This
is the beginning and the basis of his ministerial
service. He passed through a real spiritual crisis.
The Anxious Tnquirer, written by his predecessor and
colleague in the pastorate at Carr's Lane, opened
his mind to the realities and claims of the spiritual
world ; and he passed from the " Everlasting No "
to the "Everlasting Yea," from death to life, from
conscious subjection to Satan to glad submission to
the august authority of the living God.
As to Paul and Augustine, Ambrose and St. Ber
nard, Angell James and Spurgeon, and thousands
more, this profound experience was a fountain of
power. It gave impact to his message. It put heart
into his logic. It fused his arguments. It converted
exposition into persuasive appeal. He spoke as one
with authority. He was the conscious echo of a
Divine voice. To him had come the vision of the
eternal mercy of God in Christ ; he had realised for

138 DR. DALE
himself the forgiveness of sins and he was sharing
the supernatural life, and therefore he preached as
one who knew the supernatural by inward experi
ence, and felt the mind of God flowing into his mind,
and through it into the minds of those who listened
to him.
This is the key to his ministry and to the Non
conformist ministry at large. It explains Dr. Dale's
eager and prolonged study of the Word of God,
and his unbroken and emphatic insistence on the
" Atonement " and the " forgiveness of sins." It
accounts for the warm welcome he gave to the
evangelising fervour of Moody and Sankey, for his
papers on the necessity for an ethical revival, and
for his intense sympathy with the effort to quicken
zeal for holiness. It throws light on his wish to be
free from his manuscript in preaching : for as he
once said to me, his literary faculty had been culti
vated and strengthened till he was impatient of the
slightest defect in literary form, and hesitated to
commit himself to the perils of constructing his
sentences as he stood, though in the soul of him he
yearned to speak out all he felt in perfect freedom to
his fellows concerning Christ and His Gospel. But
whether his sermons were read or preached without
reading, he always uttered his message as one who
stood on the granite of certainty. He was no hesi
tating apologist. He believed and therefore spoke.
He understood, and therefore argued, appealed and

DR. DALE 139
persuaded so that men might know that Jesus is
the Christ, and that believing they might have life
through His name.
To our churches their preachers are always wit
nesses to spiritual facts and to a spiritual order.
They are in the true apostolic succession, and testify
to the facts they have tasted and handled and seen
of the Word of Life. Rhetoric, learning, presence —
all are sounding brass if the man has not himself
the knowledge which comes from an actual personal
experience of the powers of the spiritual world.
Nonconformity could suffer no more fatal blight than
a ministry that had not tasted the Word of God.
III. Nor can it be doubted that Dr. Dale is a
typical Nonconformist preacher in his strong ad
herence to the fundamental facts and abiding truths
of the Gospel of God. He held the evangelical faith :
held it firmly because he held it intelligently ; held it
as his own, as that which he had himself derived from
his first-hand study and comprehensive experience of
the grace and power of Christ. His own faith it was,
and therefore he did not express it in the formulae of
the Councils of the Church, in the creeds of the
seventeenth century, or the language of John Wesley
or Charles Spurgeon, Frederick Denison Maurice or
Dr. Pusey, but in his own language and with his own
distinctive emphasis.
He was a great theologian, a Biblical theologian,
but the theologian of a Church with a regenerate

140 DR. DALE
membership and a conscious spiritual life; and, there
fore, whilst he was in general and substantial agree
ment with evangelical theologians of all Churches, he
differed from some members of the evangelical school
(i) in his principles of exegesis and criticism; and
(2) in his acceptance of the doctrine of " conditional
immortality," or that the " potency of immortality is
in the race, and that all men will survive death, and
be judged, but only those who consent to find the
root of their life in Christ will live for ever ; the rest
of the race will sooner or later cease to exist." His
theology (3) was dominated by the fact that Jesus
Christ is the true Lord of the human race and of all
its life ; that indeed " the race was created in Christ
Jesus, and therefore has special relations to the eter
nal Son of God," " In Him all things consist " ; but
(4), like all Nonconformists, he held to that ultimate
principle of Protestantism which affirms that Christ
Jesus is our one Teacher : and to all pretensions of
exclusive knowledge on the part of any Christian man
or class of Christian men, he says : " There are many
Christian men who are holier than I am and wiser
than I am ; but if they assert authority over my faith
I resent the claim. To all their pretensions I reply
One is our Teacher : you may have been a better
scholar than I have been, you may have more native
power, you may have been more diligent, you may
have made greater progress because you have been
more saintly and devout, but we sit on the same

DR. DALE 141
form, and we belong to the same class, though you
may be at the top and I at the bottom. One is our
Teacher, and if you claim to be anything more than
a scholar, like myself, I am bound to protest and to
refuse submission. If you have a brotherly spirit,
you will share with me your larger knowledge, and
will assist me in mastering difficulties which I have
never been able to master for myself, and I shall be
grateful. I gladly recognise and willingly reverence
your superior attaiments. I confess my own inferi
ority, and shall be thankful for your help ; but if you
leave the form where we sit side by side, and get a
desk of your own, and claim to be a teacher yourself,
and to speak with authority, then I decline to follow
you. I remain in the class under the great Teacher
of us all, who, according to Christ's promise, will lead
us into all the truth.
" Protestantism affirms that the illumination of the
Holy Ghost is granted, not merely to priests, or to
bishops, or to councils, but to all Christian men.
We are all taught of God. It was to ordinary Chris
tian people that St. John was writing when he said,
' We have an unction from above, and know all
things.' " 1
Moreover, he had the Nonconformist habit of care
fully discriminating between the unchanging sub
stance and the changing modes of men and their
varying modes of expression. He saw the tradi-
1 Protestantism ; Its Ultimate Principle, pp. 39, 40.

142 DR. DALE
tional theology of his youth was undermined in every
direction, and he soon came to regard it as vanishing
away, and to treat it as a valuable historical relic,
but nothing more, and to calculate the losses and
gains of the change. In an article he contributed to
The Daily Telegraph on Nonconformity, he said
briefly, and somewhat brusquely, as some thought,
" Calvinism is dead." Certainly he himself believed
it to be dead. Talking to me in Dr. Allon's study,
he reported a conversation he had with the Rev. J.
Angell James in which Mr. James claimed that he
held the doctrines of Calvinism with a firm grasp.
"But you never preach them," said Dr. Dale. "Well,"
said he, "there is not so much about them in the
Bible." Thus, said Dr. Dale, Angell James was
clinging to an old creed, but so swayed by other con
victions and ideas that he rarely brought it into use.
Dr. Dale's beliefs were working forces. He was
not of those of whom it is said, " Dogma is necessary
to them ; but not a vision." With him it was the
reverse. The vision was the necessity, dogma the
accidental form in which the interpretation of the
vision was harmonised with preceding experiences
and revelations. He had the courage to be sincere,
thoroughly true. He resisted haziness in religion
and fought for clear perception. Not for him the de
structive notion that Christianity is "ultra-rational,"
and that progress is only secured in defiance of
reason. He did not regard Christianity as built on

DR. DALE 143
unreason, as a faith of despair, the clutch of a drown
ing man at a swiftly-passing raft.
He did not imagine that human life grows best in
mists and gloom ; but recognising the mind of man
as a gift of the Eternal mind, he sought a rational
basis for his faith and struggle and service; and main
tained that it was the duty of Congregationalists,
whilst not forgetting the lowest and feeblest, the
most ignorant and most vicious of mankind, to
minister directly to the claims of the intellect in re
ligion, whosoever else might neglect them.1 It is a
position that may easily be misunderstood ; but it is
not to be denied that our Free Churches ought to be
most fearless in their welcome to criticism, resolute
in their search for all truth since they contain in their
spiritual basis of fellowship the best guarantee of
theological unity and the surest pledge for the per
petual maintenance of truth as truth is in Christ
Jesus. IV. Nor may we forget that one of the most beau
tiful traits in the character and career of Dr, Dale
was his devotion to the New Testament ideal of the
Christian Society. It was absolutely sacred to him.
It was the creation of Christ. Congregationalism
derived its being directly from Him, and He was its
life and goal. His confidence in its possibilities of
development and achievement was unbounded. He
knew as well as most that it was despised and re-
1 Dr. Dale. International Congregational Council. XXIX.

144 DR. DALE
jected of men, and that he himself was regarded as
not belonging to the " true Church " ; but that did
not diminish his admiration or dim his hope. His
one long and loving pastorate, with all its tender
associations and beneficent ministries, is at once
the witness to, and the vindication of, his faith. His
services given to the little village community, and to
the struggling town church, on anniversary and on
revival occasions, repeat the same testimony to his
loyalty as a Free Churchman, whilst his prodigious
labours for the disestablishment and disendowment
of the Anglican Church, and his writings in defence
of the order and polity of Congregationalism, have
demonstrated both the tenacity of his convictions and
the heat of his enthusiasm. Once, he tells us, when
spending a holiday in the Lake Country, he fell into
conversation on ecclesiastical questions with an able
and distinguished Broad Churchman.1 "We were
walking together from the head of Ulleswater up to
wards the head of Grisedale Tarn, and he asked me,
with an expression of astonishment and incredulity,
whether I really thought that if the shepherds of
Patterdale — a dozen or score of them — determined to
constitute themselves a Congregational church, it was
possible for such a church to fulfil the purpose for
which churches exist." The Churchman was not kept
waiting for an answer. Without underrating culture
and theology, Dr. Dale held that, while the gifts of
1 Congregationalist, 1872, p. 4.

DR. DALE 145
Christ are in the Church, it is able to dispense with
both. " Our system of government," he says, "is the
expression of our faith that those who believe in
Christ and enter His Church have received the very
life of God, possess the direct illumination of the
Holy Spirit, and have the supernatural presence and
help of the Lord Jesus Christ whenever they meet
together in His name." " Christ's presence with the
shepherds of Patterdale would be a sufficient reply to
all who challenged their competency to discharge the
functions of Church government."
That faith in the perfect adequacy of the society
that was fashioned according to the laws of the New
Testament was associated with a fixed antagonism
to " clericalism," " sacerdotalism," " ritualism," and
all other modes of sapping the strength of the
ultimate principle of Protestantism. Still, determined
as was his resistance to fatal and mischievous error,
and whilst he refused to countenance the evil he
opposed in any way — in the dress he wore, the style
by which he was designated, or the customs he fol
lowed — he always cherished a kindly judgment of
those who differed from him, and met all facts and
persons with absolute fairness. To him the cardinal
fact that the soul does not need to approach God
through any priest, but can enter into His presence
alone, required to be kept intact, if religion is to be
preserved in its purity, and the authority of Christ
maintained in its integrity. He was not only a Non-
T.C.L. L

146 DR. DALE
conformist, but he was as thorough-going as he was
intelligent and generous.
And he was faithful to his early ideals of Church
life to the last. It is most painful for us to hear The
Church Times speaking of him "as gradually draw
ing away from his co-religionists, as his experience
widened, and as patient study enlarged his sym
pathies." It is untrue. He was an out-and-out
Nonconformist to the end. Not a jot did he bate
of faith or hope. His independency was absolutely
unsullied, and his allegiance to the simple and Divine
societies of the New Testament was unbroken.
Save on the one political question of Home Rule
for Ireland he was in perfect sympathy with his
brethren, and to the full limits of his decaying
strength served them to the last. Did he not preside
over the International Congress of Independents in
1 89 1 ? Was not his friendship with the comrades
of his earlier years unimpaired ? It is sad indeed
that The Church Times could not pay a tribute to the
memory of Dr. Dale without attempting to blacken
the reputation of the Christian societies to which he
belonged. But it is for us to remember, first, that
these are the mistakes of ignorance, and, next, that
our opponents cannot hurt Nonconformity if only
we are true to our Master and His teaching. The
fleeting victories of error need not alarm us. The
growing popularity of a sensuous religion must not
corrupt us from the simplicity that is in Christ.

DR. DALE 147
Stand fast in the liberty wherewith He has made you
free. Vindicate your simple organizations by the
beauty of your character, the nobility and wealth of
your service, the ease and completeness of your self-
effacement, and the glorification of Christ.
V. Again, you all know that whilst Dr. Dale's
lofty conception of the dignity and glory of the
Christian Church prevented him from identifying the
Christian Society with the social and political move
ments of the age, and converting the Church into an
organisation for the definite promotion of social
advance ; yet not only was he himself one of the
most practical and energetic of men, but he was the
cause and reason of incalculable social ardour and
devotion in others. His spiritual life was robust
from centre to circumference. He was a man of
God. There was nothing feeble in his piety. His
step was that of decision, strength, and victory.
Conduct was the goal of devotion. Prayer was a
means to manhood. Worship was the nurse and the
food of work. Municipal life was sacred, and he
gave himself to it without stint. The city children
belong to God, and education is their primary need
and right, and therefore he laboured on the Bir
mingham School Board. Politics are part of the
machinery for advancing the kingdom of God, and
therefore he was an alert and aggressive politician.
Like John Owen in constructive theology and power
of masterly exposition ; like John Howe in lofty

148 DR. DALE
thought and sublime eloquence ; like John Robinson'
in his open mind and splendid daring ; like Richard
Baxter in his earnestness and pity for men ; with a
strain of the mysticism of Samuel Rutherford in his
make ; yet Dr. Dale was intrinsically Cromwellian
in the breadth and practicality of his Puritanism, in
the passionate energy with which he flung himself
into the Radical life of Birmingham in the fifties and
sixties, in the fine magnanimity of his treatment of
religious opponents, and in the fulness of his trust in
the living and ruling God. Cromwell is not dead
whilst such men are given to us.
In the preface to his exposition of the " Ten
Commandments " he says : " It has always seemed to
me to be a principal part of the work of a Christian
minister not only to insist on the duty of ' repentance
towards God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ,'
but to illustrate in detail the obligations both of
private and public morality ; and I have felt it right
to discuss in the pulpit on Sunday the questions
affecting the moral life of individuals or of nations,
which I knew were being discussed in workshops and
at dinner-tables during the week."
The Free Churches will soon be removed out of
their place, if they cease to lead the life of the world,
to utilise and direct the forces that make for good
ness and righteousness, to suppress the evils that
prey on the weak, the innocent and inexperienced, to
build the manhood of the city and of the State.

DR. DALE 149
What is the life of devotion and faith for, if not to
ennoble character and inspire conduct, if not to
brace the soul for duty, cleanse it of selfishness ; and
by contact with God make the man more fit for fel
lowship with and service to his fellows ? Believe me
the real test of the divinity of our churches is on
"change," in the market and office, in council and
Parliament, in street and home. " Let your light
so shine before men, that they may see your good
works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
Dr. Lightfoot used to recommend the study of
" Church History as an excellent cordial for drooping
spirits." I say the same for biography. I know few
better. To-day I look back upon the career of this
Nonconformist preacher and pastor with unspeakable
thankfulness ; it bids us be of hope. Through it I
hear the message, Let not your heart be troubled,
believe in God. Dark and difficult days are before
us. Our churches are in the furnace. The forces
of fashion and taste, of social power and wealth are
massed together against us. The mandate has gone
forth that we are to be suppressed. Dissent is to be
extirpated with kindness where that promises the
speediest exit ; with scorn and persecution where
they are likeliest to hasten the result. The Non
conformity Dr. Dale expounded and defended will
sorely need men of his temper, of his massive
strength and winning charities, of his intellectual
sincerity and martial courage, of his deep piety and

150 DR. DALE
beautiful love. Will you not respond, Here am I !
This is my work, and I will do it. We have always
been under arms. Devoted as we are to the
" trowel," we have had to grasp and use the " sword,"
and we must still battle and build. Our Churches
have never dwelt in the sunshine of popular favour.
It is for us to serve, to be faithful as witnesses for
Christ and His truth ; and He and it are both great,
and shall finally prevail.

ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY
December 13TH, 1815-JuLY i8th, 1881

In 1844 Stanley made a mark in Biographical literature by
his Life of Arnold, a book said at the time to set everybody
talking about the hero, rather than the author — a sign of the
wonderful success he had achieved. — Dr. Stoughton.
Dean Stanley seems more and more to be coming into
somewhat of a place of leadership among broad churchmen,
partly because of his courage, and partly, I think, because of
his indefiniteness ; for they are a party rather as asking free
dom to think than as having formed thoughts. — DR. J.
McLeod Campbell in 1866. Life, II. 148.
He told me that conduct was far more important than
theory, and that he regarded all as " Christians " who recognised
and tried to follow the moral law of Christ. — MRS. Besant,
Aittobiography, 124.
A. P. Stanley once said to me, " How different the fortunes
of the Church of England might have been if Newman had
been able to read German !" That puts the matter in a nutshell.
Newman assumed and adorned the narrow basis on which Laud
had stood 200 years before. — Mark Pattison, Memoirs,
p. 210.

DEAN STANLEY
But desire earnestly the greater gifts. And a still more
excellent way shew I unto you. . . . But now abideth
faith, hope, love, these three ; and the greatest of these is love.
Follow after love. — I Corinthians xii. 31, xiii. 13, xiv. 1.
THESE simple but comprehensive words express
the spirit, state the ideal, expound the aims and
illumine the course of that great and beautiful life,
dear to the Church and the Nation, which has been
exalted to the fuller glories and perfecter service of
the heavens.
Dean Stanley is no longer with us, except — vital
and blessed exception ! — in the charming books he
has written, the wise and weighty words he has
spoken, the noble memory he has left us, and the
influence which for years he will exert upon the
religious temper and life of the age. In innumerable
ways he has profited us above many. As an author
of one of the most captivating biographies in our
British literature ; as a brilliant photographer of
Sinai and Palestine, surpassing all others for the
fineness of his pictures, and the rich suggestiveness
'53

154 DEAN STANLEY
of his backgrounds; as a luminous expositor of
Paul's letters to the Corinthians ; as the accomplished
historian of the Jewish and Eastern Churches ; as
the custodian of our most cherished Abbey, the great
home of England's illustrious dead ; as a preacher of
winning grace and quiet earnestness ; as a contro
versialist of serene temper and imperturbable cour
tesy — in all these and many other respects his
singularly opulent life appeals for the grateful
recognition and tender remembrance of all good
and true men.
But at this time we desire chiefly to think of him
as an embodiment (far too rare, alas !) of the central
ruling and magnetic element of vital Christianity.
We recognise and rejoice in his strenuous and eager
intellect and large and catholic heart, in his indomit
able heroism and benignant kindliness, rich genius
and enormous toil, large capacity and vast learning,
clear purity and burning force, deep love of every
thing historic and keen interest in the living present,
splendid imaginative susceptibility and sweetly simple
and graceful style ; but on this occasion we prefer, in
his own spirit, to seek the secret of his life, of its
defects and excellencies, its activity and calm, its
soaring hopefulness and its thorough-paced practi
cality ; and we believe we have it, in that he, like
the Apostle Paul, held that the more excellent way
in all things is love ; that good and necessary as
faith and hope are, love is better and more necessary,

DEAN STANLEY 155
and that therefore Love is Lord and King, and to be
followed with unstinted devotion and unreserved
loyalty whithersoever it may lead.
I cannot think it a flimsy fancy which detects,
amid many differences, some points of solid harmony
between the spirit and calibre of the greatest of
apostles and the broadest and most sympathetic of
English Deans. That tiny, fragile and bowed figure
reminds us of him whose bodily presence was by no
means impressive. The finely courageous ring of
his speech at grave crises and on behalf of forlorn
and jeopardized interests, may at least call to memory
those letters of " our beloved brother Paul," so full
of biting energy and instinct with a rare heroism.
Was Saul of Tarsus more assiduous in his studies
than many of his fellow- pupils in Gamaliel's school ?
So young Stanley was seen at Rugby fairly bur
dened with the prizes he had won at Dr. Arnold's
hands ; and his subsequent career at Balliol College,
Oxford, was an unbroken series of brilliant scholastic
successes. Did the Apostle excel in the two oppo
site fields of writing and action ? So the Dean of
Westminster blended together in admirably effective
proportions the differing, but often complementary
functions of the " man of letters " and the " man of
action," being as vigilant and industrious for the
wide welfare of the nation, as he was painstaking and
sedulous in his study. Paul was no cleric, and re
jected with ineffable scorn the very idea of priestly

156 DEAN STANLEY
domination ; the preacher of the Abbey turned with
less scorn indeed, but with little less aversion, from
all ecclesiastical pretence and hierarchical assump
tion. Few men were ever more tenacious of work
than the Missionary to the Gentiles. Arthur Pen-
rhyn Stanley loved toil, could not live without it,
and by his self-denying labour wore down to sheer
exhaustion the slender instrument with which he
worked. Of all the teachers of that first century,
Paul more than any other incarnated the spirit of
glowing catholicity, invariable kindliness, pure friend
ship, and noble charity, which has shone with such
effulgent radiance for the last eighteen years in
Westminster Abbey. And yet as the large-hearted
Apostle withstood Peter to the face, and refused to
have Titus circumcised at the bidding of those in
authority ; so Stanley could stand alone, fight for
his own hand, champion a failing cause, and face
defeat with a cheerful heart. No doubt the con
trasts are as deep and strong as the harmonies
are clear and emphatic. Paul was a philosophical
theologian. Stanley treated theologizing with but
scant respect. Paul held the balance amongst related
but differing truths with a firm and unquivering
hand. Stanley failed to maintain that perfect
equilibrium which is the unimpeachable sign of
mental and moral greatness. And, indeed, Paul's
was a richer and deeper and fuller life throughout,
but in the most essential respect, — in their grand

DEAN STANLEY 157
ideals, in their principal themes, in their governing
spirit and impulses, they were the same, and agreed
in saying, faith is good and love uses it and depends
upon it ; hope is good, and some men are saved by
it ; but greater than faith, greater than hope is love ;
yea, greater than splendid rhetoric, or prophetic
insight, or boundless beneficence or superhuman
power ; greatest of all is love ; love of God and love
of men.
Starting then, from this basis, we will look for a
few moments, first, at Dean Stanley's
Ideal of Character ; secondly at
The Governing Spirit of his Career ;
thirdly at
The Principal Theme of his Ministry;
and fourthly at his
Influence upon the Religious Life
and Progress of the Age ;
cherishing the desire that we may, by God's good
spirit, not only know better the brave and pure life,
taken from us, but also be aided, each in his measure,
to continue and advance all that was incorruptibly
good and-enduringly true in his life and labours.
I. There can be little question that the Dean's
Ideal of Character had for its central force
and living root a strong, manly, and true love of God
and of men, with all other virtues gathering round
it or springing from it, and directed or modified in
their orderly and beautiful development by it. The

158 DEAN STANLEY
love that suffereth long and is kind, that envieth not,
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave
itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked,
taketh not account of evil, rejoiceth not in unright
eousness, but rejoiceth with the truth, beareth all
things, hopeth all things, and endureth all things —
that was his highest ideal. For that he strove with
unappeasable yearning. To it he was faithful as
few are faithful. He saw it clearly and distinctly, as
the mark of the prize of his high calling, and he
pressed towards it with unrelaxed endeavour. Help
ful holy and living love practised always and every
where, in judging of men and their efforts, in reading
the past and studying the present, in confronting
adversaries and in fellowship with friends, he held
to be the very marrow of Christian living, the
criterion and evidence of a regenerated state, the
vital substance of all enduring religion, the life-blood
of all theology, the fulfilling of all law, the one
universal duty and the end of all life.
That sublime conception of character was obtained,
in the first instance, from the testimony of the
Scriptures. Like the lawyer of the Gospels, but in
another mood, young Stanley had asked: "Master,
which is the great commandment of the law ? " And
the answer of infallible intelligence came to him
saying, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind. This is the great and first Commandment.

DEAN STANLEY 159
And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments
hangeth the whole law and the prophets." " For he
that loveth his neighbour hath fulfilled the law.
For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou
shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not
covet, and if there be any other Commandment, it
is summed up in this word, namely, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to
his neighbour ; love, therefore, is the fulfilment of
the law." 1
But this ideal of character, taught by Christ, and
realized with immaculate perfection in His unique
life, reached Bishop Stanley's son, as so much good
reaches all of us, through the wise, faithful, and strong
ministry of human love. It entered into the fibre of
his being. It made radiant the godly home into
which he was born. Reared at the knee of a father
whose heart was as full of true affection as his eye
was quick in observation, whose daring catholicity
was matched by the variety of his tastes and pur
suits ; and nourished by a mother " of quiet wisdom,
rare unselfishness, calm discrimination, and firm de
cision," his structural habit of mind was powerfully
strengthened and carefully developed. Then, he
passed under the potent formative sway of that
famous teacher, Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, a
1 Cf. Gal. v. 13, 14 ; ibid. v. 22, 23, 24. 2 Cor. v. 14, 15.

160 DEAN STANLEY
king of men, a prince of teachers, and a chief
amongst Christians, and here he added other quali
ties to, and gained fresh force for attaining, the noble
ideal begotten within him. Later on, came the rich
est treasure of all, in the wedding of another life to
his, a life cast in a different mould, but breathing
the same spirit of affection, gently expanding and
elevating his own sober picture of manhood, and
carrying him forward in his persistent and unfalter
ing efforts to attain his accepted and confirmed con
ception of what is the best thought, the best speech,
the best spirit, and the best deed for Christian men.
But let no one be misled by the narrow use of
words, as though the love of God and of men in
Dean Stanley's conception gave room for anything
weak and timorous, flaccid and nerveless, fearful of
frank speech and opposed to perfect sincerity and
unwavering loyalty to conviction. Few men have
ever stood out more boldly than he. His was a
martyr's temper though he he had a woman's ten
derness. He was marked by intrepid candour not
less distinctly than by broad sympathies. He did
not seek the retention and " comprehension " of every
one in the " Established " Church of England, be
cause he had no convictions of his own or was afraid
to avow them. Members of Convocation knew well
enough that he did not practise timidity or conceal
ment, and injuriously lax as he was on "subscrip
tion " to creeds he was by no means reticent about

DEAN STANLEY 161
his own. In the work of securing for us that Re
vision of the Scriptures he took a forward part,
contending for the co-operation of representatives of
all the Churches, and risking severest censures by
gathering these diverse Christians together in a
common and united celebration of the Lord's Sup
per. Truly says, one of our week-day preachers of
the press concerning him : " No man had a deeper
love for that highest kind of truth which consists in
expressing your convictions with absolute sincerity,
and adhering to them with unwavering fidelity."
Brethren, that ideal' of character, its love of truth,
its truthful love, its courteous persistence in the ser
vice of the right and its generous and liberal con
sideration of the erring, its boundless sympathy and
its exhaustless helpfulness — it is Divine, it is Christ-
like. God reveals it in revealing Himself. The veil
is withdrawn from Deity, and in Christ, the realized
ideal, surpassingly winsome and majestically power
ful is before us ; and all who are partakers of His
nature have at least that ideal dwelling in their
minds. Let it fill and fire our fancy, stimulate our
faith and hope, inflame our zeal, win our speech and
deed, that we too may serve our generation according
to the will and pattern of the ever-loving God, " who
is the Saviour of all men, though specially of those
who believe."
II. The nature that held in its grasp, and was
T.CL. M

i62 DEAN STANLEY
itself held and constrained by such an ideal of life,
was pervaded by a spirit that perfectly matched it
and strove ever towards it with a joyful hope and
a patient zest. Dr. Stanley's was a life filled and
rounded with a great love, dyed through and through
with that forgetfulness of self which could sacrifice
leisure to graceful ministry to other's needs and deli
cate treatment of other's rights ; — a leisure in which
he might have filled out his knowledge with those
rich results of time he was so qualified to enjoy, or
might have painted those exquisite pictures of the
unity of the great past of humanity in which he so
profoundly delighted. Perhaps this was not more
noticeable in anything than in his surrender of his
Saturday afternoons (as the members of the West-
bourne Park Institute gratefully remember), welcom
ing parties of visitors to the Abbey so that he might
explain to them the glorious memories it contains
and imbue them with that love of the workers of
the past which swayed so largely his own spirit.
The same governing presence is radiant in his
readiness to help forward the Temperance movement
by the loan of his national pulpit for Temperance
Sermons ; in his work amongst the Westminster
poor, his efforts to promote thrift and flower-culture,
and, indeed, in his willingness to engage in any acts
that contemplated the alleviation of the ills and
sores of social life. It is a ray from the same sun
that shines along the nave of the Abbey when Dr.

DEAN STANLEY 163
Caird and Dr. Moffat lift up their voices within
those ancient walls on behalf of Foreign Missions,
and Professor Max Miiller, a layman, is welcomed
to join them in the same world-saving work. No
wonder the tired spirit should discover consolation
in the thought he expressed shortly before his de
cease : " I have laboured amid many frailties, with
much weakness, to make this Institution more and
more the great centre of religion and national life
in a truly liberal spirit." The Abbey won from him
a burning love, and now its precincts will for ever
enshrine it.
But the most signal victory of this loving spirit
stands recorded in those ecclesiastical, theological,
and ritualistic discussions into the heart of which he
was so often thrust, and in which he bore himself
with such singular patience, complete sympathy and
cheerful goodwill. Concluding one of these contro
versies, he says in language which images his abid
ing emotions : " Let us be firmly persuaded that
error is most easily eradicated by establishing truth,
and darkness more permanently displaced by diffus
ing light ; and then, while the best parts of the High
Church party will be preserved to the Church by
their own intrinsic excellence, the worst parts will
be put down, not by the irritating and often futile
process of repression, but by the pacific and far more
effectual process of enforcing the opposite truths,
of creating in the Church a wholesome atmosphere

164 DEAN STANLEY
of manly, generous feeling, in which all that is tem
porary, acrid, and trivial, will fade away, and all that
is eternal, reasonable, and majestic, will flourish and
abound." III. With such an ideal of life, and such a ruling
spirit, it was inevitable that Dean Stanley should
freely and often discourse, as was his wont, both to
little children and grown men, on truthfulness,
charity, tolerance, courtesy, kindliness, purity, liberty,
patriotism, goodwill to men, nobility of soul ; repre
senting these and similar qualities as the essential
things without which it is impossible to please God.
It was natural that he should be the eloquent advo
cate of a "peace neither sluggish nor selfish, but
busy with good works and adorned with all the arts,"
and delight to dwell in what he described as " that
larger sphere of religion which is above and beyond
the passing controversies of the day."
Like Paul, though many thought otherwise, he
was determined to know nothing amongst men save
Christ, and Christ the crucified ; for " Christ " was to
him the full-orbed manifestation of the Divine love
to us, and the perfect example of our love to one
another ; whilst " Christ the Crucified " was its ten-
derest, most self-denying and most suasive expres
sion. " The Blood of Christ " was the historical and
sacrificial language in which the redeeming and
world-saving love of Christ found its most appro-

DEAN STANLEY 165
priate rendering : and the ascension and eternal reign
of Christ his chief hope. Thus he sings : —
He is gone — towards their goal
World and Church must onward roll ;
Far behind we leave the past ;
Forward are our glances cast.
Still His words before us range
Through the ages as they change ;
Wheresoe'er the truth shall lead
He will give whate'er we need.
You catch the ring of this key-note in the music of
his teaching, in a passage from his pen, in the last
article he wrote on the Revised Version of the New
Testament. He asks : " Is there any change pro
duced in the doctrine presented in the New Ver
sion ? " and to this question his answer is " No and
Yes." " There is no change in any of the great
doctrines which all Christians alike hold. The im
portance of charity, of mercy, of judgment, the
transcendent and Divine beauty of the Character in
the gospels, and the force of the incidents and argu
ments in the Acts and Epistles are beyond any pos
sibility of alteration from a new reading or a new
collocation of phrases."
You meet the same CAPITAL THEME everywhere.
In his historical studies the Dean always penetrates
to that religion which is, as it were, behind the re
ligious forms in which the spiritual life clumsily
clothes itself: and with faultless skill he seizes that
element which gives those forms whatever vitality

1 66 DEAN STANLEY
they have. Hence, even in ghastly errors and revolt
ing superstitions he sees strange but real versions of
the Christian Idea, and in the coarse and rough
speech of half-civilized peoples his sensitive ear de
tects the yearnings for a noble life. To him the
act that fixed the statue of Peter on the column of
Trajan was a devout assertion of Christ's claims ;
the conversion of the Pantheon into a Christian
sanctuary, and the appropriation of the costly mar
bles of heathen temples and palaces to enrich Chris
tian Churches, were victories of Christianity. The
Pope is in his eyes "a perfect museum of ecclesi
astical curiosities — a mass, if we wish so to regard
him, of latent primitive Protestantism," who being,
according to Stanley's quietly humorous conception,
possessed of "ordinary courage, common sense,
honesty and discernment, may yet have the grace to
see that the highest honour he can confer on the
Church is to speak out to the whole world the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The
Eastern Church had many attractive features, and
cast a spell over his imagination, and yet he appre
ciates the fidelity, if not the "refinement" of the
Baptist who, in a northern clime, clings to what seems
even to Dr. Stanley himself, the scriptural and apos
tolic, though now uncongenial, rite of immersion.
Amongst my most cherished memories is a con
versation I had three weeks last Friday with the
genial Dean, in which he entered most sympatheti-

DEAN STANLEY 167
cally into a historical description of English Baptists,
asked questions about their past and present rela
tions amongst themselves, and to the great body of
American Baptists, betrayed a sincere eagerness to
understand their condition, and spoke, as was his
habit, with a generous and kindly sympathy, of
efforts for the promotion of fraternal feeling amongst
different bodies of Christians. Indeed few men have
more completely illustrated in speech and book the
saying of Jean Paul Richter — " God is more pleased
with those who think everything right in the world
than with those who think nothing right." Dean
Stanley spoke out of the abundance of his loving
heart, and therefore his words are radiant with loving
judgments of men's differences and faults, loving
sympathy with their aspirations and faiths, and
loving co-operation with their manifold though often
mistaken endeavours after an enduring joy in the
service of the everlasting God.
It is undeniable that self-forgetting loyalty to
supreme convictions is the soul of individual good
ness, the basis of true worth, and one capital con
dition of human progress. The disciples of universal
assent, and the facile repeaters of the ready-made
opinions of the World and the Church, do not ad
vance human well-being in any noticeable degree.
One man with a real burning conviction is worth a
thousand pleasant echoes, and an unflinching though
harsh utterance of that conviction is infinitely to be

1 68 DEAN STANLEY
preferred to indolent though elegant indifference and
the guilty suppression of personal belief. But Dean
Stanley's spirit and work show us that such strenu
ous fidelity to the inward life has not to be pur
chased by the surrender of gentle courtesy, winning
kindliness, and sympathetic treatment of opponents.
Let us speak the truth as we see it, all the truth,
and speak it with distinctest accent and fearless
emphasis, but let us always speak it in love to the
men who hear it, and who reject it, or fail to see it ;
speak it with a determination to use it, not for
divisiveness and strife, but for unity and the en
largement of thought and the ennobling of life, —
speak it in love of the God of truth and with an
unfaltering faith, and whatever may become of us
and our little systems, the truth itself endureth to
all generations.
IV. And now briefly we will ask, what is likely
to be the permanent influence of the Dean's spirit
and work upon the religious life and progress of
the age. " All things," says our greatest poet, " by
season, seasoned are to their just praise and due
perfection " ; and every man's work is surely tested
by its fitness to meet the specially urgent necessities
of the generation he is appointed to serve.
(i) Notably, the time covered by the Dean's
active life is one of theological decay and recon
struction, and the influence of the religious teacher

DEAN STANLEY 169
of this hour must be gauged by his attitude towards
this momentous fact. The " articles " and " creeds,"
" confessions " and " standards of faith " of past
times, interesting as they always must be as registers
of the religious thought and mirrors of the religious
struggles of our fathers, fail to be largely nourish
ing to the men of our day. The Christian Faith
has lost much of its old coinage, and what we
have in hand, we cannot pass in the busy markets
of the world, hence we are in difficulty ; for though
we have, as of old, the solid gold of fact and
truth in abundance, yet we have not minted a fresh
medium of exchange. This we need and must
have. Now, it must be confessed that the Dean
has done little or nothing to facilitate the exodus
of the Church from the present chaotic condition of
theological thought. He has not aided in elabo
rating a new set of articles in keeping with the
latest teachings of the Spirit of God through His
word and His church ; but this he has done : he
has cleared many difficulties in the way of such a
task, irreparably damaged the authority of an over
shadowing and obstructive theological system, and
lifted up the stumbling stones in the way of the
soul's apprehension of Christ and Christianity, Nay,
more, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said, he has,
by exhibiting a life of saintliness and preaching
the faith which is the common root of all the
Churches, and the common truths at the basis of

170 - DEAN STANLEY
all theologies, made more tenacious the relaxed grip
of Christian truth on the part of many thoughtful
and perplexed men. He has shown that though
the fires of criticism may burn up the " wood, hay,
and stubble " of religious opinion, the " gold, silver,
and precious stones " of the Eternal Ideas will only
shine with a purer lustre and a richer value. That
is still a much needed work, and blessed is he whom
God shall anoint to continue it !
(2) Nor can observant minds fail to see that Dr.
Stanley's teaching has done much to secure the
ethical completion of the great Evangelical revival
of the last century, which on its doctrinal side had
already been so fully developed. His perpetual
insistence on loving mercy, doing justly, and walking
humbly with God ; on the necessity of vindicating
faith by loving work lovingly done, has aided in
giving us a nobler and more Christian ideal of life.
The notion of permeating all life with the teaching
and spirit of Christ, and making His beneficent spirit
dominant in literature and in art, in politics and
in religion, in the conflicts of classes and the strife
of parties, has received a forcible setting in his
career ; and by the application of the eternal prin
ciples of the gospel to conduct, he has done not a
little to give a practical solution to those ethical
problems that have grown, up in our new world,
with its gaping separation of classes, fierce competi
tions, engrossing money-getting, and advancing de-

DEAN STANLEY 17 1
mocracy. Even his opponents will allow ere long
that Dean Stanley has this distinguishing merit,
thas he has continued and perfected the great ethical
revolution latent in the Protestant Reformation and
the Evangelical Revival.
(3) Closely akin to this, if not a part of it, is
the effect of the Dean's work in developing the
sentiment of our national unity through our historical
religion. In the judgment of some it will seem that
it is here his toil will fail of its reward. So it
will as to the particular groove in which he sought
to confine it ; but not in its essential spirit and
complete aim. He laboured for a_ "comprehensive
National Church" as though State and National
Church covered the same area, and set himself
against that stream of tendency towards " Disestab
lishment" which is flowing with such irresistible
energy throughout the world. To him, with his
strong sentiment of the unity of history, it seemed
portentous of disaster and likely to wash away the
foundations of morality and religion, and therefore
he lifted up his standard against it. We warmly
appreciate his brave efforts to unify and consolidate
the religious life of the nation, and cannot doubt,
that, though they must fail in that least necessary
and least just element of a formal connection with
Parliamentary Government and support, they have
already succeeded in creating a sentiment of unity
and continuity in the religious life and progress of

172 DEAN STANLEY
the nation such as never before existed amongst
us. We see further and deeper than we did. Dean
Stanley's telescope has enlarged our vision of the
Spiritual System, and though at various distances
from the solar centre of the Eternal Love, yet we
see all the Churches of Christ as veritable portions
of that system moving in their divinely predestined
orbits and fulfilling their God-appointed tasks. We
are not merely more tolerant of one another, and
less given to misjudging each other, but we are
all eager to contribute our largest and best gifts
to the common fund of righteousness and spiritual
power at the disposal of the whole nation, and are
prepared to believe we shall do it not less generously
because we do not repeat the same forms of worship,
or dwell under the same ecclesiastical roof.
Brethren, let us thank God for this great boon ;
a good, pure and useful human life. It is one of
God's best gifts, and whilst from the Queen on her
throne to the humblest dweller in Westminster, we
mourn the nation's loss in his removal, let us rise
to the hearty acceptance of the Dean's ideal of life,
breathe his loving spirit, consecrate our speech and
deed to his attractive theme, and so " stretch out
a loving hand to wrestlers with the troubled sea"
of doubt, sanctify commerce, Christianize literature,
educate the national conscience, cleanse politics,
regenerate the nation, and practically assert the
sovereign claims of the Redeeming Christ over all

DEAN STANLEY 173
we are, and all we have, individually and nationally.
And knowing that we are not sufficient of ourselves
for this sublime work, let us pray in the Dean's own
beautiful words : —
O Thou, of Comforters the best,
O Thou, the soul's most welcome guest,
O Thou our sweet repose :
Our Resting-place from life's long care,
Our shadow from the worlds' fierce glare,
Our solace in all woes.
O Light Divine, all light excelling,
Fill with thyself the inmost dwelling
Of souls sincere and lowly :
Without Thy true Divinity
Nothing in all humanity —
Nothing is strong or holy.
Wash out each dark and sordid stain,
Water each dry and arid plain,
Raise up the bruised reed :
Enkindle what is cold and chill
Relax the stiff and stubborn will,
Guide those that guidance need.
Give to the good who find in Thee
The Spirit's perfect liberty
The sevenfold power and love :
Give virtue strength its crown to win ;
Give struggling souls their rest from sin-
Give endless peace above.

THOMAS CARLYLE

Born, December 4th, 1795. On February 5th, 1881, at half-
past eight in the morning, he passed, to use his own beautiful
words, " Into that still country, where the hail- storms and the
fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest laden wayfarer at
length lays down his load."
" I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workmen in
this vineyard of the Highest."
"Strength is seen not in spasms; but in stout bearing of
burdens." " It seems to me a great truth, this fundamental principle ot
yours, which I trace as the origin of all these hopes, endeavours,
and convictions in regard to pauperism, that human things
cannot stand on selfishness, mechanical utilities, economies,
and law courts ; that, if there be not a religious element in the
relations of men, such relations are miserable, and doomed
to ruin." — Letter to Chalmers, October nth, 1841.
The world has not many shrines to a devout man at present,
and perhaps in our own section of it there are few objects hold
ing more authentically of Heaven and an unseen better world
than the pious, loving soul, and patient heavy-laden life of this
poor old, venerable woman. The love of human creatures, one
to another, where it is true and unchangeable, often strikes me
as a strange fact in their poor history, a kind of perpetual
gospel, revealing itself in them ; sad, solemn, beautiful, the
heart and mother of all that can, in any way, ennoble their
otherwise mean and contemptible existence in this world.
The older I grow — and I now stand on the brink of
eternity — the more comes back to me the sentence in the
Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and
deeper it becomes. "What is the chief end of man?" To
glorify God, and enjoy Him for ever. Carlyle.
He (Carlyle), more than any other English writer, was the
instrument of the change from the Deism of the eighteenth
century, and the despair which followed it, into the larger faith
of our own.
Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,
by Henry Jones, M.A., p. 50.
i/6

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
WHAT was the attitude of Carlyle towards New
Testament Christianity ? What will be the
effect of his long, energetic life, copious and original
genius, on the progress of the kingdom of God on
earth ?
Confessedly Carlyle was at the head and front of
the intellectual forces of this nineteenth century ; and
more than any of his peers, bore down with all his
matured force, cultivated ability and terrific down-
rightness, on the chief moral and spiritual questions of
the day. He was a " Man of Letters " ; but in his
hand literature was chiefly a spiritual agent, and its
work and aims were supremely moral, and therefore
his immense influence centres on those profounder
problems of man, — his place and work in the
universe, his relation to the Infinite and Eternal, his
duty and his destiny. For daring thought, piercing
analysis, searching gaze, free, frank and fearless
expression, " the Chelsea sage " is unsurpassed ; and
it is undeniable that the exercise of mind on the
deeper spiritual questions attains its climax of energy
T.CL. '" N

178 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
and of achievement in him ; so that if he has not dis
placed the Christianity of Jesus, and given us a new
religion, we, at least, may expect to die without
seeing that said deed done.
No doubt the path of this worker was strewn with
fire and not with flowers. He came brandishing a
sword, and not waving a palm branch : and it is
scarcely without reason that some have thought that
his fiercely iconoclastic spirit has marred the fortunes
of Christianity, and alienated many from the teaching
and worship of Christ. We disguise none of his
errors. We do not attenuate his mistakes. His
faults, like David's, are flagrant; but, like David's,
they are separable from the main current of his life ;
and, in our judgment, the defence he gives for Israel's
greatest King ought not to be withheld from
England's greatest Thinker. The defence of the
Jamaica Massacre was a ghastly and revolting
blunder. His sympathy with the South in the
United States conflict was a proof that he was
" lamed by his own excellence," and corrupted by
his own protests against corruption. His uniform
forgetfulness of the quivering tenderness and universal
pity of the Gospel of Christ is the darkest spot on
this brilliant and blazing sun. Hence, in obedience to
the teaching and spirit of one to whom we owe
measureless debts of gratitude, we at once allow the
largest discount severe truth and hard fact demand,
and dare not, for his sake, if we had no higher reason,

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 179
twist a thread of the evidence to be quoted in
illustration of his attitude to the Christianity of Christ
Jesus. To fail of thorough veracity in writing of a
man who wrought with such disastrous energy on the
empire of falsehood, and proclaimed with such fiery
emphasis the eternal necessity for being true, were
surely to commit an unpardonable sin.
I. What, then, let us ask, is Carlyle's verdict on
Religion ? Where does the Man of Letters, the
sworn and implacable foe of all shams and pretence,
of everything that cannot give a just account of itself,
that is not able to verify itself as a real fact — where
does he place Religion ? Does it take rank after
Culture ? Never. Does it follow in the leading
strings of Art, of Literature ? Not for a moment. Is
it second to philosophy, or politics, or commerce?
He resents the idea with ineffable scorn. " In every
sense," he says, with accumulated emphasis, "in
every sense, a man's religion is the chief fact with
regard to him. A man's or a nation's. By religion
I do not mean the church-creed which he professes,
the articles of faith which he will sign, or in words or
otherwise assert ; not this wholly ; in many cases not
this at all. . . . This is not what I call religion,
this profession and assertion ; which is often only a
profession and assertion from the outworks of the
man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if
even so deep as that. But the thing a man does
practically believe, the thing a man does practically

180 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
lay to heart and know for certain, concerning his
vital relations to this mysterious universe and his
duty and destiny there, that is in all things the
primary thing for him, and creatively determines all
the rest" Thus to Carlyle the heart and soul of life
is Religion ; the heart and soul of a man's life ; ay,
and of a nation's life. Neither man nor nation lives
by bread alone, or commerce alone, or art alone, or
grinding its " logical mills " alone, but by the words
which proceed from God, and become the living and
nourishing food of individuals and peoples alike.
Both must survive the " hot Harmattan-wind " of
doubt ; " awake to a new heaven and a new earth " ;
and learn that the " universe is not dead and
demoniacal, a charnel house with spectres ; but God
like, and our Father's."
II. Religion is the very heart of life; but to us
Christianity is the beating heart of Religion, and
Christ is the soul of Christianity. What, then, is the
witness of Carlyle to Christ Jesus ? Does this Seer
reject the revelation of God in Christ Jesus His Son,
and content himself with describing " Christianism,"
as " faith in an Invisible, not as real only but as the
only reality ; Time through every moment of it
resting on Eternity ; pagan empire of force displaced
by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness ? "
(i) Hear him as he answers this question in his
chapter on Symbols. " Highest of all symbols are
those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen into

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 181
Prophet. ... I mean religious Symbols.
Various enough have been such religious Symbols,
what we call Religous. ... If you ask to what
height man has carried it in this matter, look on our
Divinest Symbol : on Jesus of Nazareth, and His
Life and His Biography, and what followed there
from. Higher has the human thought not yet reached :
this is Christianity and Christendom ; a Symbol of
quite perennial, infinite character ; whose significance
will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew
made manifest."
To appreciate that testimony to the Nazarene as
our Divinest Symbol we must remember Carlyle's
use of the word Symbol, and his theory of Man and
of the Universe. Like Goethe he taught that
" Nature is the living Garment of God," and he
exclaims, "O Heaven, is it in very deed He then
that ever speaks through thee, that lives and
loves in thee, that lives and loves in me." With
Chrysostom he held that " the true Shekinah is
man"; and after Novalis he declared "there is but
one Temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of
Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. Bend
ing before men is a reverence done to that Revelation
in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we lay our
hand upon a human body." And of all men, the
highest, the divinest, is Jesus of- Nazareth. He is the
brightness of the Father's glory, and the express
image of His person. He is the Revealer of the

182 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
Father : and by Him we come to know and enjoy,
love and worship and obey the Father.
(2) Hear Carlyle again ! Speaking of Heroes,
he says, " Hero worship, heartfelt, prostrate admir
ation, submissive, burning, boundless for a noblest
godlike form of Man — is not that the germ of
Christianity itself? The greatest of all Heroes is One
— whom we do not name here ! Let sacred silence
meditate that sacred truth : you will find it the
ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout
man's whole history on earth." So Christ Jesus is
placed at the topmost height of all the men fitted to
lead men ; the true King of men, the real Chieftain
of souls, as He is the supreme and perfect Revelation
of God the Father.
(3) Once more let us hear him. Replying to the
efforts of Voltaire to destroy Christianity, and asking
him whether he has a " torch for burning and no
hammer for building," he says, "To the ' Worship
of Sorrow' ascribe what origin and genesis thou
pleasest, has not that Worship originated and been
generated ; is it not here f Feel it in thine heart,
and then say whether it is of God. This is Belief;
all else is opinion — for which latter whoso will, let
him worry and be worried." Nor should this word be
omitted — " Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea,
eighteen hundred years ago ; his sphere-melody
flowing in wild native tones, took captive the ravished
souls of men ; and being of a truth sphere-melody

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 183
stills flows and sounds, though now with thousand
fold accompaniments, and rich symphonies, through
all our hearts ; and modulates and divinely leads
them." The heart of Christianity is Christ. This
Christ was to Carlyle the Divinest Symbol, the fullest
and clearest Revelation, the greatest of all Heroes,
the most capable of all soul-compelling leaders, and
by His death and sacrifice the object and inspiration
of " the Worship of Sorrow." Ask for the "letter"
of the theologies and dogmas of the churches, and
you ask in vain. Ask for the essential spirit, cardinal
principles and fundamental facts of New Testament
Christianity, and they meet you, expressed with
startling intensity and marvellous freshness. Demand
the phrases of a pulpit that talks by rote, and gets all
its thinking " ready-made," and your demand is
spurned with inexpressible loathing and fiery indig
nation. Seek realities, insist on the substance of
religion and of the redeeming mission of Christ, and
the acutest thinker of our day will take you, though
by a seemingly fresh route, to the feet of Jesus, the
Son of the Highest, and the Saviour and Leader of
souls. III. This will be more apparent if we can
penetrate to the Spirit of Carlyle's Life and
Work, and compare it with the more marked and
distinctive features of New Testament Christianity.
(1) Christianity in Christ fesus is the incarnation
of holiness, of inward rectitude, of spotless sincerity

1 84 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
of am, of absolute reality, and of immediate and
thoroughgoing consecration to present duty. Is it not
so ? Is not Christ the true, i.e., the real Vine, the
real Bread, the real Light, the faithful and real
Witness ? Was it not in Him that truth — i.e.,
Reality — as well as grace, dwelt in their divinest
fulness? Was He not almost fierce in His de
nunciation of the mere religious acting and hollow
theatricality of His day ? Did he not warn His
disciples of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is
hypocrisy ?
That spirit of inflexible rectitude and defiant scorn
for all that is false, vacuous, and pretentious, has had
many embodiments — in Paul and John, Luther and
Knox — but in these later days surely not one fuller
and finer than the earnest, burning soul at Chelsea ?
It is he who describes " hypocrisy as the worst and
the one irremediably bad thing." It is he who ex
claims, " What can it profit any mortal to adopt
locutions and imaginations which do not correspond
to fact ; which no sane mortal can deliberately adopt
in his soul as true ; which the most orthodox of
mortals can only, and this after infinite essentially
impious effort to put out the eyes of his mind, per
suade himself to ' believe that he believes ? ' Away
with it ; in the name of God, come out of it, all true
men ! " It was he who protested with such flaming
vengeance against "Coleridgean moonshine" as a
guide to the acceptance of f orders" in the Estab-

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 185
lished Church, as he had himself long before hotly
refused to be a preacher in the Scotch Church, be
cause he could not be a preacher and be true at the
same time. Brave and heroic soul, discharging the
highest function of prophets and teachers ! An idol-
breaker ! A bringer-back of men to reality, to truth
and fact, to sincerity and duty ! Carlyle has said
to this generation — Beware ! these dogmas, these
elaborate creeds, they are semblances ; they cannot
save you ! The kingdom of God is within you. It
is not big talk, loud profession, long creed, and ever
lasting ritual ! — it is righteousness in the spirit, and
doing the duty that is next you. Ah, it is a good
thing he has done ! He has smitten the " idols " of
the Westminster Assembly. They are gone, and will
never come back again, let us call ever so loudly.
They are blasted with the stern breath of his strong
reality. (2) Christianity, again, is power; power from on
high : it is not the spirit of fear, but of love and of
a sound mind. Christ Jesus is the strong Son of
God : He clothes His disciples with power and
authority, and as they go forth even devils are sub
ject unto them through His name. Pentecost is the
beginning of an era marked by a special influx of
spiritual power. The " weak " ages end at Bethlehem.
The mighty centuries begin at the Cross. Chris
tianity is the spirit of ever-aggressive, ever-active,
ever-conquering energy.

1 86 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
Who, then, in the Christian name can object to
Carlyle's doctrine of Might engaged in the propaga
tion of the Right and of the all-Holy ? Who does
not rather welcome his shrill clarion call to shake off
the lethargies and idlenesses so native to us, and go
forth, doing whatever we do with our might, strug
gling hard and long, striking with stunning blows all
that belong to the empire of Darkness and Evil ?
Speaking to what he thought a weak and puling
generation, afraid of its own shadows, and unready
to assert its convictions, and " indiscriminately hash
ing up right and wrong into a patent treacle," he
disparages the function of sympathy and exaggerates
his doctrine of Might ; but in its earliest and clearest
expressions it is a doctrine of Might engaged as the
doughty and loyal servant of Right. Says he — ¦
" Crabbedness, pride, obstinacy, affectation, are at
bottom want of strength." "All faults are properly
' shortcomings.' Crimes themselves are nothing other
than a not doing enough ; a fighting, but with defec
tive vigour." " That pity which does not rest on
justice is maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on
blinkard dimness of head — contemptible as a drunk
ard's tears." " Valour is the basis of virtue " ; — all
of which is not out of joint with the teaching that
God is light as well as love, and that Christianity is
the influx of power, but of power, not from beneath,
but from on high.
(3) But how does Carlyle say this sincerity and

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 187
valour, righteousness and strength, shall be attained ?
Will you receive it? He positively reiterates the
cardinal directions of Christianity— faith, self-renun
ciation, unselfish and heroic work.
(a) Carlyle is the apostle of Belief. " A philosophy
of denial, and world illuminated merely by the
flames of destruction could never have permanently
been the resting-place of such a man." Even " the
proper task of literature lies in the domain of Belief."
" The believing man is the original man." " For of
all feelings, states, principles of mind," he asks, "is
not belief the clearest, strongest, against which all
others contend in vain ? " Surely it is a singular irony
which has represented one of the most emphatic
preachers of Faith as a sceptic, and that talks of
him as an agnostic ! " You touch," says he, " the
focal centre of all our diseases, of our frightful
nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on
this — there is no religion — there is no God." His
main contention was that men suffered, and must
suffer, because they did not really believe, but only
"believed that they believed." In the sum of things
we believe it will be found that few men have helped
the real and sincere faith of this century more than
Carlyle. (b) Nor is it less cheering to find that the way to
the life of faith is Self-Renunciation. This is man's
first duty. Carlyle says man must be born again.
Christ says the same, and adds that he may. Man

1 88 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
must pass from the Everlasting No through the
Centre of Indifference to the Everlasting Yea —
Yea to the will of God, and the desire that His rule
shall be supreme. " The first preliminary moral act,
annihilation of self," must " be accomplished, so that
the mind's eyes may be unsealed and its hands un-
gyved " ; then we reach that Higher in which we can
do without happiness and find blessedness, and " love
not pleasure, but love God." This is the beginning
and end of Carlyle's religion ; and undeniably it is
the each of His teaching who bids us lose our life,
if we mean ever to find it.
(c) Carlyle's familiar doctrine and spirit of Work
— work at our own special task, work in love of our
neighbour and for his good — needs only to be set
out in a few words. " Properly speaking, all true
work is religion ; and whatever religion is not work
may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomi-
ans, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will ; with me
it shall have no harbour." "The essence and out
come of all religious creeds and liturgies whatsoever
is to do one's work in a faithful manner. What is
the use of orthodoxy if with every stroke of your
hammer you are breaking all the Ten Command
ments." Principles these, which Carlyle has enabled
many to see afresh, but which are central to the re
deeming and regenerating Gospel which declares
"that we are created in Christ Jesus unto good works,
which God hath before ordained that we should walk
in. them."

CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY 189
Was Carlyle a Christian then ? Not' an ecclesias
tical Christian, in all probability ! Very likely there
is not a Church formed that would have contented
him. Had he been asked if he believed the
Thirty-Nine Articles, or the Westminster Assembly's
Catechism, likely enough he would have replied with
a tornado of denunciation of the attempt to fix the
Infinite in a phrase, and label the Everlasting in a
sentence. Had you asked him for a theory of the
Atonement, you would probably have been over
whelmed by some cyclone of indignant eloquence
against the " logic mill " being set to grind on such a
profoundly solemn theme. Then, was he a Christian ?
That depends upon your definition of a Christian.
He was not a Churchman, nor was he a strong be
liever in the institutions of Christianity ; but Christi
anity is not an institution. Pie had a little respect
for theologies ; but Christianity is not a theology.
But he was a Christian of the New Testament
pattern, i.e., he had a real faith in the Son of Man,
in His revelation of God and of life, a deep and full
reverence and a sincere worship for him. His de
votion to the aims of Christianity was supreme,
and his "method" of attaining the highest life is
essentially Christian.
Christianity, then, is not incompatible with gigantic
mental power, wide reading, vast culture, blazing
fearlessness in the pursuit of the real and the true;
but is so Catholic, so universal, so fundamental, that

1 90 CARLYLE AND CHRISTIANITY
the greatest minds are sure to get down_to it, rest on
it, embody it and inculcate it, if their search is but
honest and their purpose sincere. The chief of the
thinkers of this century has not given us a new
religion, but in his own way, and through his own
living thought and speech, has set out the facts and
principles of the Eternal Religion of the Son of God
— yea, moreover he has, with a voice of " authority,"
called men away from the Paganized, unreal, and
corrupt accretions about Christianity to the simple
essence, strong energy and practical aims of the
Christianity of the New Testament and of Jesus
Christ.

ROBERT BROWNING
May 7th, 1812 — December 12TH, 1889

The Christian will not find in Browning the articles of the
Apostles' Creed, to say nothing of the Athanasian Creed or
the Westminster Confession ; but he will find much, if he
knows how to look for it, that will strengthen his Christian
faith, deepen his Christian love, and wonderfully animate and
revitalise his Christian hope.— Dr. W. T. Davison.
Twenty years ago, after a long course of reading the works
of Agnostic teachers, I ceased to believe in the fundamental
doctrines of Christianity. About two years after this painful
necessity of breaking with all my old associations in religious
matters, ... I read "Paracelsus," "Men and Women,"
and "A Death in the Desert," and the feeling came over me
that in Browning I had found my religious teacher, one who
could put me right on a hundred points which had troubled my
mind for many years, and which had ultimately caused me to
abandon the Christian religion. — Dr Edward BERDOE'S
Browning and the Christian Faith. Preface.
Browning was a witness for God in the midmost dark,
where meet in deathless struggle the elemental powers of right
and wrong. For God is present for him, not only in the order
and beauty of nature, but in the world of will and thought.
Beneath the caprice and wilful lawlessness of individual action,
he saw a beneficent purpose which cannot fail, but " has its way
with man, not he with it." — Browning as a Philosophical and
Religious Teacher, by Henry Jones, M.A.

192

ROBERT BROWNING
THE TYPICAL CHRISTIAN POET OF THE AGE

OF the Old Testament the book of Psalms is
the crown. In it the revelation of God reaches
its clearest expression, its fullest spiritual suggestive-
ness and inspiring power. More precious than rubies
are the songs of David, Asaph and the glorious
company of unnamed and otherwise unknown He
brew singers. The hearts of men repair to them
now, as of old, as to fountains full of faith and joy
and having been refreshed by copious draughts of
these perennial streams, dare the difficulties of duty,
tread down the temptations of sense and passion,
patiently serve their generation and rejoicingly trust
their God. " Every scripture inspired of God," says Paul,
speaking of the Old Testament, "is also profitable
for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction
which is in righteousness, that the man of God may
be complete, furnished completely unto every good
work." Its function is, in a word, man-making. But
T.CL. »»3 O

194 ROBERT BROWNING
the poet has ever been regarded as by pre-eminence
called to this high office of building men. He is the
maker — not of musical rhymes or of fascinating
pictures merely ; but of men and women, of souls,
of character. Browning says :
I find first
Writ down for every A B C of fact :
" In the beginning God made heaven and earth."
Man — as befits the made, the inferior thing —
Repeats God's process in man's due degree,
Attaining man's proportionate result-
Creates — no, but resuscitates, perhaps.
For such man's feat is, in the due degree,
Mimic creation. . . .
But still a glory portioned in the scale.
The ministry of song in the Old Testament has held,
and still holds, a unique place in the man-making
work of the world.
II. Now, as the Psalms thus easily obtain regal
inspirational sway in the older part of the Bible, so
the poet wins the foremost place amongst the inter
preters of an age, both to his contemporaries and
successors. His personality is sensitive to all the
currents of thought and feeling around him, as the
gold-leaf of the electrometer to the faintest pulse
of electricity. His nature is open at every pore ;
and the life of the world presses in, as at open doors,
and he becomes, in the degree in which he is a God-
born poet, the best revelation the age has of itself
to itself — of its limitations and capacities, its per-

ROBERT BROWNING 195
plexities and victories, its evil and good ; its entire
moral and inward life.
Not that he is without fellow-workers. They
abound. But he is without a peer in the revelation
of life and of God, save in the prophet-preacher,
who is himself of closest kin with the sons and
daughters of song. Scientific men like Darwin, ex
pound the relation we hold to Nature, to the long
and mysterious past of the world's life, to the fixed
order and progression of things, and so they inter
pret to us the material investiture and the material
tools of our existence. Philosophers and critics,
such as Hegel and Hamilton, Scherer and Matthew
Arnold, enlighten us as to the movements and
functions of the intellect ; historians and newspaper
men illuminate the social and political life of the
world ; but the interpreters of life in its wholeness
and inwardness, debasement and aspiration, struggles
of faith and springs of activity, are the poets. As
Job is more spiritually quickening than Ecclesiastes,
and the Psalms of David than the Chronicles of
Israel and Judah ; so Dante is a better mirror of life
than Duns Scotus ; and Chaucer and Shakespeare
reveal more of God and men than Roger Bacon and
Roger of Wendover. God says His best things to
His children by His poets.
III. Now, of all the poets, by whom in these later
days God has spoken to us, no one takes precedence
of Robert Browning, as distinctively representative

196 ROBERT BROWNING
or typical of our age. It is he who has sent the
plummet of his genius to the very bottom of our
consciousness, and mastered its mysterious and con
flicting contents ; " seen our life steadily and seen
it whole," studied it on all sides and pierced it to
its living centre. With an intensity of sympathy
and wealth of imagination unsurpassed he has en
tered into our turbulent modern life, its wide ranges
of human interest, its opulence of ideas, its mar
vellous expansiveness, its baseness, its nobility, its
sensuousness and its spirituality ; its painting and
music, its science and its philosophy ; and he has
lived in and through all, lived fully and strongly, for
he is intensely and abundantly alive ; so abundantly,
that he makes us feel the throb of his strong soul
in all his work. He has put his ear to the heart
of humanity and listened, as a skilled physician, to
its beat. He has tracked the windings of our
modern thought, so that he knows its intricacies,
bewilderment and struggle, its venturesomeness and
blundering, its wreckage and constructive work, as
ordinary men know their alphabet. Hence in his
vocation as interpreter of life he has given not a
series of songs or dramas merely, but a literature,
marvellous in the range of its themes, the strength
of its ideas, and the variety of its characters.
But this, too, is demonstrable in all his work — he
is Christian, Christian through and through. Chris
tian thought rules his thinking, even " the mind that

ROBERT BROWNING 197
was in Christ Jesus." His conceptions of God and
man, of duty and destiny, are cast in Christian
moulds. The Christian spirit inspires his courageous
optimism, even the faith and love and hope of Paul,
which as the three winning graces are rarely absent
from his orchestra of song chanting their harmonious
and inspiring strains. He is Christian in the indis
putable sovereignty he gives to the spiritual over the
material, to the soul over the sense ; in the fine
courage with which he faces the darkest facts of
man's debasement, and dares to say they mean good
and not ill to us ; in the faith that sings songs of
calm in the night of terror, and shouts the shout of
victory in the day of defeat. He is Christian in his
noble scorn of pessimism and the "unshaken con
viction" that says because God is in heaven, therefore
" All's right with the world " ; in his hatred of shams,
and hypocrisies, and prophet-like insistence on
reality. He is Christian in quick sympathy with the
intellectual doubt and mental unrest of men, in the
serenity of soul that waits patiently amid heedlessly
hurrying crowds for the long delayed harvest of his
work ; in- his ardent enthusiasm for all men, and his
pity for the suffering and battling individual — in his
hope of salvation and his passion for progress. In
short, our greatest poet is Christian through and
through, intrinsically evangelic with the deep, broad,
full, strong evangelicism of the New Testament and
of Christ our Lord.

198 ROBERT BROWNING
IV. Browning's chief power lies in his IDEAS, in
the profound and sublime truths he teaches — truths
reached not by expositions of Scripture texts (though
Puritan traditions influential in early life may have
some share in them), but as the poet's interpretations
of the revelations given by God in Nature, history,
and human life. Poet's create and rule not by the
splendour of their imagery, nor by the sweetness
of their music, nor by the melody of their language,
nor even by the masculine energy and power of their
thinking, but by their truths. For Browning, as for
us — There's nothing in nor out of the world
Good except truth.
And early he appears — even in his " Pauline " — as " a
searching and impetuous soul," breathing out its
strong life in " a yearning after God," struggling to
see not as man sees, but as God sees ; to get at the
primary elements of thought and know what IS, and
to separate it from what is only apparent. As he
so often reminds us, he is a " subjective " poet, a
thinker, travelling through that mysterious world, his
own soul, towards the only true goal of man, " the
great Soul of souls." For
Truth is in ourselves :
* * * *
There is an inmost centre in us all
Where truth abides in fulness.
Therefore, Browning is a philosophical poet ; and,

ROBERT BROWNING 199
as his critics say, sometimes obscure, because he can
not, and will not, rest content with the surface of
things ; but must clearly see and adequately interpret
human life in its deep, hidden relations to the whole
universe, to the past and future, to God and eternity.
That last photograph of him fixes the character
istic mood of the man ; intense in thought ; eyes
peering through the shows of things, in a sustained
effort to catch some glimpse of the infinite and
absolute realities. From " Asolando " back to
" Pauline," from the yearnings of the young man in
London to the reposeful " reveries " of the aged
singer in Venice, there is an inter-relation of ideas
that gives unbroken unity to the long and faithful
work of his life. All his songs are linked together
by a broad and strong philosophy, essentially Chris
tian, in that (1) the spiritual is always the key to the
material ; (2) the personal God is immanent in all
Nature and life, but revealed in the Only Begotten of
the Father, as merciful towards men ; and (3) the
redemption arid progress of humanity appears as the
law and method of the Divine rule.
V. This is strikingly manifest in his conception of
God ; for it is that of our two Testaments. I say of
the r two Testaments; for true seer that he is, he
raises from comparative oblivion, and embodies in
his representations of the Divine, the central doctrine
of the immanence of the Deity in Nature and in life,
as it appears in the Psalms and Prophets of Israel,

200 ROBERT BROWNING
and blends it with the fatherly love of the Eternal
as it shines forth in the life and work of Jesus.
(i) The universe in its vastness cannot dwarf man,
for it reveals God. Nature is not personal, man is ;
and the personal soul is supreme. Mortal though
we are, we need not quail, because, forsooth, we are
"matched with symbols of immensity," " a quiet sea
or sky " ; for Nature is man's servant and minister,
given and appointed by God, and itself shrinks into
nothing apart from men, who see and use it. In an
age of increasing science, and of the marvellous
unveiling of Nature's power, he is insistent in his
proclamation of a present God, vitalising Nature
itself, and through sun and stars and seas Himself
pressing in upon the soul of man ;
Now, as formerly He trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth.
David, in the poem called the " Epilogue," gives
voice to the religion that localises God, and contracts
the infinite to the conditions of the human, and
Renan is a type of the scepticism that treats the
heavens as only astronomical, and sees the last star
disappear ; but for himself the poet says —
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.
(2) And God is equally inseparable from human
life as from Nature. The whole past is His highway

ROBERT BROWNING 201
and every yard bears His footprints. The genera
tions of men have never been forgotten by Him.
Civilisation is a unity in itself, though it appears as
fragments and splinters to us ; for God has poured
Himself into individual souls, and life has been fed
by unseen streams, and so has grown and expanded
from age to age. Progress is life's law and indeed
life's goal. To-day is the supplement of yesterday.
Greece, with her imperishable art, her love of beauty,
and genius for philosophy and song, is the comple
ment of Palestine with its inexorable conscience,
strong love of righteousness, and glad abandonment
to God. Life is moral and growing because it is of
God, the God of righteousness and love.
" Why," he asks :
Why ever make man's good distinct from God's
Or finding they are one, why dare mistrust ?
(3) Now of all this Christ is the infallible and
all-sufficing guarantee. God, the God of righteous
ness and love, is self-revealed, brought near to our
comprehension in the incarnate Christ ; so that we
know Him, awful, majestic, living, loving, redeeming
and educating man. Pompilia says :
I never realised God's birth before,
How he grew likest God in being born.
In " Saul," David comes from the sheepfold to
chase the fixed depression out of the spirit of the
king and win him back again to sanity and God.
First he sings of Nature and her loveliness, but the

202 ROBERT BROWNING
king sits moodily in his prison. Next he chants the
heroic deeds of the monarch ; but the talons of the
vulture of despair pinion him still. Then the singer
expands and soars Godward, and the Spirit fills and
stirs him till at length his rapt soul sings of the love
of God, and he looks into the future and beholds
the Divine taking human form, and exclaims : —
As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved ;
He who did most shall bear most, the strongest shall stand the
most weak.
'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! my flesh that I
seek
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee, a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever : a Hand like this
hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the
Christ stand !
That is the deliverance ! " Thanks be to God who
giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
In his earliest poem the same faith in the Incar
nate as "Emanuel" appears.1 It is repeated in
" Men and Women."
The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here !
" Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself !
" Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
" But love I gave thee, with myself to love.
" And thou must love me who have died for thee ! "
1 Vol. i. 37.

ROBERT BROWNING 203
And we have it in its fullest form in "A Death in
the Desert " —
I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Wouldst thou improve this to reprove the proved ?
In life's mere minute, with power to use that proof,
Leave knowledge, and revert to how it sprung ?
Thou hast it ; use it and forthwith, or die !
VI. But as with our age so with Browning ; his
interest in theology springs out of his deeper interest
in man ; in his mysterious nature and suffering condi
tion ; in the painful discords of his spirit and the fierce
struggle he wages to keep head erect and heart in
hope ; and in the visions that like a spell allure him
on through sorrow and joy to his all-rewarding goal.
(1) With undimmed clearness and strongest em
phasis he declares that the " Soul is the Man," makes
him what he is, gives him his place in the universe,
creates his vocation, interprets Nature, uses suffering,
and unites him with the Divine. Whilst frankly re
cognising that sense is the basis of life, he asserts
that from the physical basis, right through the super
structure to the crown, the Spiritual has sovereign
rights ; for
How should this earth's life prove my only sphere.
Can I so narrow sense but that in life
Soul still exceeds it ? *
1 Pauline, vol. i. 29.

204 ROBERT BROWNING
and again —
How should externals satisfy my soul ? '
Never does he shrink from the sight of the ghastly
debasement and fearful spiritual poverty of men, but
every soul is redeemable, and by God-given right is
sovereign in and over the man ; is predestined to
rule, and not to be ruled, save of God and goodness ;
to triumph over the lower, baser self and over cir
cumstance, and not to be the victim of passion or
of environment. Moreover, to every man luminous
moments are given in which the soul sees its true
nature and rights.
Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows !
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us,
When the spirits' true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noondays kindle
Whereby piled-up honours perish,
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a lifetime
That away the rest have trifled.2
Oh ! it is worth untold gold to remind men so
1 Sordello, vol. i. 121. 8 Christina, vol. vi. 40.

ROBERT BROWNING 205
persuasively of the sovereignty of the spiritual in a
world whose far-stretching greatness and crowding
myriads crush out of us the sense of our individual
worth and will, and force us down to a pigmy's
condition and make us content with a pigmy's
work !
(2) And these spiritual prerogatives and possi
bilities are claimed for each one of us. Browning
does not drown the individual in the race. No
illusion from the seething masses of men blinds him
to the infinite value and tragic significance of each
life. Every man is dear to God, has place in His
plan, is sunlit by His love, visited by His Spirit, and
guided in his course by His Providence. Every life
is a channel through which God seeks to pour new
force into the world ; so that " by the advance of
individual minds the slow crowd may ground their
expectations eventually to follow."
God ! Thou art love ! I build my faith on that,
Even as I watch beside Thy tortured child,
Unconscious whose hot tears fall fast by him.
So doth Thy right hand guide us through the world
Wherein we stumble. '
VII. But how is the soul to regain its lost
dominion ? How are the painful conflicts of sense
and spirit, of head and heart, to be ended, and man
become one harmonious whole, travelling with sure
steps towards his true perfection ? This is the
1 Paracelsus, vol. ii. 142.

206 ROBERT BROWNING
problem of our time, the question of all time no
doubt, but present with tragic energy in our day
owing to the marvellous impulses to intellectual
progress received from modern science, and the pains
caused by the goads of modern agnosticism, posi
tivism and unbelief. Does Browning flinch from
this problem? Will he dwarf the real magnitude
of the difficulty and so feign an easy triumph?
Flinch ? He goes at a bound to its centre. Dwarf?
He states the difficulty with Titanic strength, and
expresses the problem with all his masculine dramatic
power. To solve it is the leading motif of many of
his dramas, as it is also the chief solicitude of our
century ; the burden of his song, as it is the strife of
our time. Pauline is the " fragment of a confession "
of a mind at war with itself, a series of pictures of
the combats of a soul, capable, impulsive, self-con
tradictory, aspiring, eager for reconciliation with
itself and its world, and finding rest in so far as it is
found, not by the fulness of knowledge, or in the
treasures of art, but only by love. Sordello prolongs
the inquiry, and demonstrates that genius in its
sublimest achievements, when it has quaffed every
goblet of intellectual pleasure, and wreathed all the
glories of the world into a crown on its brow, leaves
the soul irritated, rent, torn, bereft of " central peace "
by its partial and fragmentary work, mocked by its
ideal and " frittered incessantly " by its deep dis
cords.

ROBERT BROWNING 207
Weeks, months, years went by,
And lo, Sordello vanished utterly,
Sundered in twain ; each spectral part at strife
With each ; one jarred against another life.
The Poet thwarting hopelessly the Man. '
In Paracelsus the combat is between Love and
Knowledge — Love dedicating itself to the duty of
the day, but heedless of the claims of Thought ; and
Knowledge, insatiable in its greed to discover and
invent and win, but dissociated from actual life. For
both Aprile and Paracelsus miss the truly human life,
the sound, . full-rounded, complemental life of re
deemed and regenerate souls. The heart cannot live
without the head, nor the head without the heart.
Man is a unity, and must live a harmonious life.
Even love is not enough. Aprile fails as well as
Paracelsus. Both miss the complemental life.
I, too, have sought to know as thou to love —
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.
Still, thou hast beauty, and I power. We wake :
What penance canst devise for both of us ? 2
The penance is to learn the truth of the reconcilia
tion of life by the co-ordinate consecration of love
and knowledge ; and of both to the duty of the
hour and the service of the world.
Die not, Aprile ! We must never part.
Are we not halves of one dissevered world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more ? Part ? never !
1 Sordello, vol. i. 117. 2 Paracelsus, vol. ii. 64.

208 ROBERT BROWNING
Till thou the lover, know ; and I, the knower,
Love ; — until both are saved.1
Different phases of the same deep controversy are
illustrated in Christmas Eve, Strafford, Pippa Passes ;
but the crowning enforcement appears in the serene
trust, the unbroken calm, the clear harmonies of the
spirit of Rabbi Ben Ezra, as it sings : —
How good to live and learn ? 
Praise be Thine !
I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too :
Perfect I call Thy plan :
Thanks that I was a man !
Maker, remake, complete— I trust what Thou shalt do ! 2
So, take and use Thy work :
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim !
My times be in Thy hand !
Perfect the cup as planned !
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same ! 3
This is the victory which overcometh the discords
of the heart and home, the falsehood and strife of
the world, even our love — our love of God, and of
wife, and of child — of our fellows, our State, and our
race. In this, not in knowledge or genius, for
All is beauty ;
And knowing this is love, and love is Duty.
1 Paracelsus, voj. ii. 64.
2 Rabbi Ben Ezra, vol. vii. 112.
3 Rabbi Ben Ezra, vol. vii. 1 19.

ROBERT BROWNING 209
VIII. So Browning, like John the Divine (1 John v.
3, 4, 5), of whom he so frequently reminds us, passes
over to the other side of this great reconciliation, as it
is accomplished by strenuous and persisting faith ;
an actual identification of the soul with God, and
with God's aim and spirit, a union with His will, the
will that is shaping the man from day to day to
finest issues. On that New Testament conception of
faith Browning is more accurate than half the theo
logians, and more strenuously insistent than half the
preachers. With splendid strength and clear sense
he rebukes unbelief for its shallowness and cowardice,
and asserts the subtle and strong creative power of a
man's faith. Belief or unbelief
Bears upon life, determines its whole course,
Begins at its beginning.1
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt :
We called the chess-board white, — we call it black.2
But the Christian faith is not dependent upon the
settlement of questions of geology, and ethnology,
and chronology ; on the answer to the question,
" How old is man ? " or on
Greek endings, each the little passing-bell
That signifies some faith's about to die.3

1 Bishop Blougram's Apology, vol. iv. 247.
2 Ibid., 246. 3 Ibid., 265.

T.CL.

210 ROBERT BROWNING
It is a force that feeds enthusiasm, and warms and
enriches the man, for Belief's fire, once in us,
Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself ;
We penetrate our life with such a glow
As fire lends wood and iron — this turns steel,
That burns to ash — all's one, fire proves its power
For good or ill.1
And such a faith will achieve for its possessors real,
if imperfect gains, though they be ignorant, as in
" Zion's Chapel," superstitious, as in St. Peter's at
Rome, and "rationalising" as at Gottingen — not,
however, will it bestow " the fulness of the blessing
of the Gospel of Christ " ; for there is always loss
from any imperfect and faulty action of the man ;
but Christ Himself responds to the feeblest finger-
touch of trust, and is present on " Christmas Eve," in
the fervid gatherings at the watchnight service, in
the lecture-room of the German professor, and in the
cathedral at Rome. This, then, is the victory that
overcometh the world, even our faith.
IX. But the burden of the poef s message is, " Be
brave and always brave. Do your work where you
are. Serve your age. Take hold of the duty next
you with a maris grip, and never let go. Do not
dream ! Work. Shut out fear with all the strength
of Hope." The singer tells the worst, and yet says,
1 Bishop Blougranis Apology, vol. iv. 260.

ROBERT BROWNING 211
This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good ;
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.1
Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world.
" God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."
"The joy of the Lord is your strength." This
world is not the devil's, but God's. "No make
shift, no mere foil of some fine life to come."
Temptation is not a mistake.
Only the prism's obstruction shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white,
So may a glory from defect arise.2
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go !
Be our joys three-parts pain !
Strive, and- hold cheap the strain ;
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe.3
It is, therefore, in beautiful keeping with his whole
ministry that his last word in " Asolando " should be
one of hope — hope for all the sons of men : —
I know there shall dawn a day —
Is it here on homely earth ?
Is it yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth,
That Power comes full in play ?
1 Fra Lippo Lippi, vol. iv. 217.
2 Deaf and Dumb, vol. vii. 167.
8 Rabbi Ben Ezra, vol vii. 1 1 1.

212 ROBERT BROWNING
To-day, then, we give God thanks for His gift to
us of one whose life-work is a powerful defence of
the Christianity of Christ, an inspiration to the
resolute and faithful doing of each day's duty, and
an unfailing nourishment of joyful trust in God and
bright hopes for all men.

CHARLES DARWIN ; OR, EVOLUTION AND
CHRISTIANITY
February 12TH, 1809-APRiL 19TH, 1882

Issue of Origin of Species, 1859.
In fact, those who have watched the progress ot science
within the last ten years will bear me out to the full when I
assert that there is no field of biological inquiry in which the
influence of the Origin of Species is not traceable ; the fore
most men of science in every country are either avowed cham
pions of its leading doctrines, or, at any rate, abstain from
opposing them ; a host of young and ardent investigators seek
for and find inspiration and guidance in Mr. Darwin's great
work ; and the general doctrine of Evolution, to one side of
which it gives expression, finds in the phenomena of biology a
firm base of operations whence it may conduct its conquest of
the whole realm of nature. — The Commg of Age of the Origin
of Species. HUXLEY, in 1880.
Darwin's great title to our respect is his life-long diligence
as a reverent observer and student of the works of God. —
Canon Liddon.
There is in point of fact a second factor, which one might
venture to call the Struggle for the Life of Others, which plays
an equally prominent part with Darwin's " Struggle for exist
ence." That struggle for the life of others is the " missing factor
in Current Theories." — Drummond, The Ascent of Man, p. 17.

CHARLES DARWIN ; OR, EVOLUTION AND
CHRISTIANITY
Romans viii c, 19-22. Ephesians iv. c, 13.
Exodus xx. c, 5. Genesis i. c, 27 ; ii. c, 7.
ALTHOUGH nearly a fortnight has elapsed since
the conclusion of the life and work of that dis
tinguished and epoch-making scientist, Charles Dar
win, yet I feel I should be unfaithful to my concep
tion of my duty as your Pastor and one of your
teachers, if I did not avail myself of one of the
earliest opportunities occurring to me to say a few
words of grateful reference to the quantity and
quality of the work he has done, and the character
or the influence he has exerted upon the expression
of the Christian Faith.
That work has been of no ordinary kind ; and that
influence appears to me to have affected the thought
and speech, the conceptions and faiths of men, Chris
tian and otherwise, more profoundly than any other
scientific force of this nineteenth century ; a century
pre-eminently opulent in scientific influences and
victories. You will have seen from your papers the qualities

216 CHARLES DARWIN
of Mr. Darwin's character, and must have felt that
as a man he is a pattern, first and mainly, to the
students and investigators of nature ; but also to us
all, in the splendour of his patience, the strenuous
thoroughness of his work, the depth of his calm, the
beauty of his candour, the keenness of his vision of
the limitations of science, the mastery of what Canon
Mozley sagely calls "that important department of
knowledge," human ignorance ; in his far-away look
in arranging his experiments, his unfeigned modesty,
and crowning and completing all, his noble humility.
Indeed, it is most refreshing to remember that this
chiefest son of modern science was as conspicuous
for the simplicity of his spirit as for his indomitable
industry, and as notable for his moral thoughtfulness
as for his clearness and power as an expositor of
the facts of science. Nor may we forget his long-
laid and far-reaching plans for the elucidation of
knowledge, his quiet waiting for the full evolution
and perfect verification of truths, the fringe of whose
garments had swept across his peering vision ; his
fearless devotion to all he knew and felt to be true,
and, above all, the fact that though himself copiously
maligned in the name of the Bible, he never spoke a
word against real religion, but always exhibited a
spirit of reverence for the Great Creator, the Source
of all Order, and the Lord of all Life.1
1 A letter purporting to have been written to a student at
Jena by Mr. Darwin has been widely quoted as an authoritative

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 217
But his work ! What shall we say of it ? The
doctrines " labelled with his name ! What ought
the Christian teacher to say of them, and of their
bearing upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ ?
It is not for me to sit in judgment on the scientific
competency of his theories. I know too little to
qualify me for the post of Censor ; but I know too
much to allow me to meet the results of his life-long
toil with indiscriminate resistance. I approach the
work of Charles Darwin, as I would the work of all
God's workers, in the spirit of a learner, immovably
convinced that genius is God's gift : that truth is one
in its substance, though millionfold in its expression,
and that Christianity opens its windows to every ray
from the sun of truth and welcomes to the freest and
fullest play the whole solar radiance, well knowing
that it can only gain in beauty, brilliance, and useful
ness by the process.
It would not be difficult to record a massive pro-

statement of its author's disbelief in Revelation. I refer to it
to cite the suggestion of the Academy, that by a mistake in
punctuation it is made to misrepresent Mr. Darwin's views. The
letter read, " As regards myself, I do not believe that any reve
lation has ever been made. In respect to a future life every
man must make his decision between contradictory and un
determined probabilities." The words "in respect to a future
life " are part of the first sentence, and the full stop should be
placed after life. So read, it affirms no more than that in his
view the door of the future has not yet been opened, and does
not state the non-existence of Revelation. This interpretation
is in perfect keeping with other allusions to this great theme.

2i8 CHARLES DARWIN
test against the theories of the most eminent biologist
of the century, to resent with scorn the intrusion of
such an earthly influence upon the sacred grounds of
Biblical criticism and theological statement, to pit
the letter of Scripture against the letter of Darwinism
— yea, it would be easy, and might not be unplea
sant, to excite laughter at the expense of some of
his representations, to demand the " missing links ''
in the long evolutionary series of the life of the globe,
and to insist, with reiterated energy, on palpable
evidence for every transitional condition in the whole
course of vegetable and animal development — but I
prefer to gather up some " fragments " of coincidence
between the advancing and conquering science of
these latest days and the Revelation made at sundry
times and in divers manners in the ages past, by
prophet and apostle, and chiefest of all by our Lord
Jesus Christ.

I
And the first point to which I call brief attention
is the forcible illustration of a forgotten aspect of
the Biblical conception of creation, supplied by Dar
win's familiar doctrine of " the struggle for exist
ence." You know that in the pre-Darwinian period, say
twenty-five years ago, most of us who thought and
spoke of the creation described it as a very paragon

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 219
of perfectness in its plan and its detail, in its flowers
and plants, in its trees and herbs, frisking lambs and
playful kittens, and throughout its entire and mani
fold ranges, — save that to all this unbroken loveli
ness and spotless perfection man stood out a gloomy,
gaunt, and ghastly exception ! Artist and poet had
recently opened our eyes to the free and harmonious
beauty of the world, dismissed "the gorgons and
chimseras dire " that tenanted the dark recesses of
the mountains, and suffused universal nature with an
ethereal radiance and a glorious completeness. The
universe was to us only a unique exhibition of the
Divine beneficence. Of gigantic efforts that come to
nothing, of incalculable tons of wasted power, of un
registered hosts of baffled life, of fierce conflict and
hourly collision, widespread decay, and chaotic con
fusion, we heard little or nothing ; but sang without
misgiving in response to the cry, " Earth with
her thousand voices praises God " —
And every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile.
This too we did, although our own Paul, standing
on the broad basis of the entire fact, had said, " We
know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
in pain together until now ; for the creation was sub
jected to vanity" to emptiness and failure, imperfec
tion and struggle, " not of its own will, but by reason
of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation it
self also shall be delivered from the bondage of cor-

220 CHARLES DARWIN
ruption into the liberty of the glory of the children oj
God." Charles Darwin has restored Paul's teaching to its
share of dominion over our thought, saved us from
the half truths by which we were being misled, and
compelled us to recognize not only an infinite wealth
of goodness through which " all God's works praise
Him," but also a fathomless mystery of pain and
imperfection, of " vanity " and " corruption," before
which we bare the head and bend the knee. Beauti
ful as is the foliage of oak and ivy, not a leaf is
perfect. Helpful as is the eye, there are faults in its
make. Tumours are found in trees, and fiercely
destructive diseases ravage the animal world. Na
ture fights and fails. There is, it is undeniable, a
wide-spread and overflowing goodness for which we
cannot be sufficiently grateful ; but it is equally un
deniable that the universe is not yet at its best. It
struggles, it endures, it suffers, it groans in agony,
it yearns and travails for the hour of its final and
supreme achievement.
Geology, moreover, tells us that such suffering and
struggle are not new. The rocks bear witness that
Dragons of the prime
Tare each other in their slime.
Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieks against the creed
of a sorrowless and perfect universe. Innumerable
races of living beings have through countless ages

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 221
started forth on their perilous career, spent a
chequered life and perished, leaving their memorials
in the very structure of our globe, a witness to the
" vanity " and " corruption " of God's material works,
and a proof that the history of this planet is a
history of tragic conflict, of acute suffering, accumu
lated calamity and death ; that man does not sit
solitary in his pain, imperfection and warfare, but is
head and chief of a universe of beings in which " the
struggle for existence " is an irrevocable law.
Well I remember noticing with blended sadness
and joy the uncovering of one of the frescoes of the
buried city of Pompeii, and as line after line of the
unknown artist's work came up to view, the concep
tion of the greatness of his genius enlarged, and
admiration for his work deepened ; but so dim were
the colours, so deep the decay, that one could not
bar the heart against a feeling of regret at the
thought that so much loveliness and beauty had been
lost, and the painter's work so sadly marred. So the
uncovering of these geological " frescoes " discloses
the Divine power and greatness, and makes luminous
the order and continuity and unity of the world, fills
the thoughtful with reverence and awe, and forces in
upon us the saddening conviction of the "vanity"
and "corruption" of that creation to which we are
so closely akin ; but we are thereby prepared to give
a glad welcome to that gospel which proclaims a
glorious redemption, not only for us men, but also

222 CHARLES DARWIN
for this very creation that is still in the birth-throes
of its anguish. Darwin says> backed by manifold
and incontrovertible data, " We know that the whole
creation is subject to vanity, and that the struggle for
existence is universal." We do not deny it, we have
no wish to deny it ; but we welcome with rapture the
assurance of "our beloved brother Paul," that this
" creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage
of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children
of God." II
Akin to this doctrine of "the struggle for exist
ence " is the correlative theory of " the survival of
the fittest " — a theory affirmed to be " a law," a law
of life ! a law of all life ! a part of the fixed order
of the universe that you cannot evade, do as you
will, as applicable to man as to other creatures, and
illustrated in the decadence of once powerful multi
tudinous races, and the ascent to prerogative and
primacy of particular peoples.
I am not going to quarrel with this statement ; it
has some truth in it, and I can believe that with
proper qualifications it may find general acceptance.
But when we consider it as projected into the sphere
of human morals, it becomes necessary to ask, Who
are the fittest ? By what qualities are they known ?
And on what conditions do they survive ?
Renan's answer is a fascinating dream of a splen-

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 223
did millennium, in which intellect is King of kings
and Lord of lords, and an intellectual aristocracy
bears sway in a just and beneficent spirit over all
the world. Brain is supreme. Scientifically cultured
brain holds all resources, directs all forces, guides all
life. The survival of the fittest is the survival of
scientifically drilled intellect.
Others anticipate the victorious reign of imperial
will, the irresistible triumph of the man of energy,
moving towards his elected goal with resolute daring,
unflinching fortitude and crushing force. The "sur
viving" man is he of strong and compact make, in
vincibly determined, terribly earnest, defiantly self-
assertive, a revived Frederick the Great, a returned
Oliver Cromwell, without the pity and gentleness of
the famous hero of the Commonwealth. The fittest
to " survive " is the mightiest. He can, therefore he
will. ' It is the glorification of brute power.
But here, before all others, Christianity has a right
to be heard, and to be heard and judged by scientific
men, since it is their joy to see the whole fact, and
omit nothing from the data on which they base their
conclusions. In speaking of Christianity, I do not
mean Christianity simply and only as it is found in
the New Testament, but as it has wrought itself into
the solid and irremovable substance of human his
tory. And what see we ?
The insertion of the Gospel of Christ into the life

224 CHARLES DARWIN
of the world at a critical time in human affairs, at a
time of abysmal despair, wide-spread vice, and in
tense misery : and it comes, mark it, with a pre
diction, that the type of thought and feeling it in
spires, and the type of character it produces, are pre
destined to outlive every other. In "the struggle
for existence " amongst human beliefs, human hopes,
human emotions and human ideals, this Christianity
itself says its own shall survive. Revelation is as
full of that prediction as spring water of compressed
air, it is a part of it, incorporate with it, and yet,
speaking after the manner of men, as unlikely of
fulfilment as any word that could fall from human
lips. For what does it proclaim ? What are the quali
ties destined to endure ? What are the conditions on
which they claim their perpetuity and presidency?
Listen ! and be astonished ! Survival by death !
Victory by defeat ! Conquests won by yielding to
injustice, and baring the breast to the indignities of
men ! Survival beyond the " struggle " by giving it
up; and the attainment of the highest place by
going down to the lowest. Glorification through
shame. The Cross the way to the Crown ! Hear
the great law : " He that will save his life shall lose
it, but he that will lose his life for My sake and the
Gospel's shall find it." The survival of self by the
sacrifice of self !
Has that prediction been fulfilled ?

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 225
Unhesitatingly and undeniably I say "Yes " ! The
fact is before you. It is Christendom ! The Christian
type of belief and feeling and character is supreme.
The Leader of the world's best life at this hour is
the Crucified Nazarene. The dominant races of the
earth are those in whom His type of character is
most nearly realized. The forces that the world
labels "weakness," — forces of gentleness and com
passion, of righteousness and fairness, of peace and
patience, of consideration and self-sacrifice, — these
are the "strong" and conquering forces of modern
life. Therefore, interpreted and qualified by the Gospel
of the Lord Jesus Christ, we need not hesitate to
believe in " the survival of the fittest," assured that
the type of character destined to permanence is essen
tially Christian, marked by unreserved obedience to
the law of self-sacrifice by the Spirit of the Cross,
by pity and help to the weakest, and heroic effort for
the salvation of the lost. Such a survival is the sur
vival of God, and of humanity through Him.
Ill
Thirdly, the doctrines of Charles Darwin illustrate
the Scriptural representations of the continuity of
the life of man, and of the " solidarity " of the genera
tions of the earth. The law of heredity, or "that
the offspring tend to inherit the peculiarity of their
T.CL. Q

226 CHARLES DARWIN
parents," has a foremost place in the evolutionary
system of thought. But on this point I will not
speak in my own language, but in that of the Lancet,
the chief medical authority in Great Britain, if not
in the world. In the issue of April 15th it is writ
ten :
" Such scepticism as is alleged to prevail in the
medical profession would be especially untimely and
unaccountable at this stage of our history and pro
gress, seeing that recent discoveries in science have
thrown new light on the facts of nature and on the
subject of Revelation, removing many stumbling-
blocks out of the way of belief, and conspicuously
confirming the faith of the Christian.
" The doctrine of ' original sin,' with the cognate
proposition of indwelling and transmitted evil, has
through all historic time been a profound and per
plexing mystery. The oldest of the Chaldaic and
Jewish writings contain laborious attempts to explain
this most inscrutable and embarrassing subject of
belief and experience. ' The fathers have eaten sour
grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.'
Man is 'born in sin and shapen in iniquity.' How
can these things be? Who has not felt his inner
sense of justice startled and his heart chilled by the
representation of the Deity as a God of supreme
love and righteousness, yet ' visiting the sins of the
fathers upon the children,' as omnipotent, but refus
ing to cut off the entail of misery which human

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 227
nature undoubtedly inherits, or to put a stop to the
increase of those who are born to struggle and suffer
under its burden of grief and ignominy? To the
scientist of the last and even the early part of the
present century, it appeared that the only way in
which the sins of the father could be visited upon the
children involved a special act of avenging anger,
while the only sense in which evil could be said to be
transmitted implied a re-introduction of evil into the
stock of humanity with each generation. The Dar
winian doctrine of evolutionary development — which,
be it observed, has no necessary or even natural con
nection with the figment of spontaneous generation,
which speculative savants have tried to hang upon it
— at once and clearly explains how, if there ever was
evil in human nature, it must of necessity be per
sistent throughout the whole progeny of our first
parents ; and if the fathers sinned, the children can
not by any possibility escape the penalty of their
offences. Thus science has by one discovery re
moved the difficulty which has perplexed the mind
of man through countless generations. It is now no
longer inexplicable that innocent children should be
' born in sin and shapen in iniquity.' This is an
inevitable consequence of the physico-mental con
tinuity of that nature of which they partake. . . .
In short, the facts of human nature are of scientific
necessity precisely as Revelation has described them."
I cannot dwell on the immense suggestiveness of

228 CHARLES DARWIN
this weighty citation, but I may remind you (i) ot
the special value in such times as ours of this re
moval of "stumbling stones" in the way of the
acceptance of some of the more severe and painful
teachings of the Word of God ; (2) of the prophecy
which this instance supplies to us of the sure though
slow verification of all the principles of Revelation ;
and (3) of the unspeakable accession of force to the
consciences of men in favour of righteousness and
truth and goodness, from the demonstrated certainty
that our acts do not terminate on or with ourselves ;
that the evil-doing of to-day and of to-morrow has
a fatal reproductiveness, and may if not counter
worked, run on through three and four, and perhaps
forty, generations. Oh, let us be warned ! God is
not mocked. " He who sows to the flesh " sows cor
ruption not for himself alone, but for myriads more !
Oh, let us be charmed and allured, for " He who
sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life ever
lasting" himself; and shall "save other souls from
death and hide multitudes of sins."

IV
So far, as to man's present condition and his future
progress ; but what shall we say concerning Mr. Dar
win's theory of the ORIGIN of man ? Does it not
flatly contradict our Sacred Books ? Is it not in

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 229
violent antagonism to the representations in Genesis ?
Let us see! Go straight to the Bible and read
for yourself. Leave behind you all pre-conceived
and traditionary ideas, divest the figurative repre
sentations (where you are sure you have figure) of
their pictorial garb and so get down to the naked
truth, and then see how far that truth clashes with
a theory of physical life, which Darwin himself says
was not originated by him, but which we know he
has lifted to supremacy amongst present-day ideas.
(1) Certainly our Bible does not give a very ex
alted rank to the body of man in the initial stages
of its career. "And the Lord God formed man of
the dust of the ground" is the brief but momentous
record of the materials out of which man is made.
They are not, you see, even living. Darwin does give
a man a start in something alive ; but Genesis points
to the dull, dead, inert dust, and bids us see in that
lowly element the "stuff" from which immortal man
takes his rise. Holding fast that Scripture, listen to
the saying of the expositor of evolution as he con
cludes his work : " I have given the evidence to the
best of my ability, and we must acknowledge, as it
seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities,
with sympathy which feels for the most debased,
with benevolence which extends not only to other
men, but to the humblest living creature, with his
godlike intellect, which has penetrated into the move
ments and constitution of the solar system — with all

230 CHARLES DARWIN
these exalted powers — man still bears in his bodily
frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
Is not that in perfect accord with the Bible ? Must
we not, nay, are we not even eager to acknowledge
that man does bear in his bodily frame the indelible
stamp of his lowly origin ? He is made of the
"dust" — what else could we expect than that he
should bear traces of his descent ?
(2) The next fact in our Genesis record is the
capital assertion that man owes his being to God.
" The Lord formed him." God said, " Let us make
man." We are all His offspring. This is central
and supreme in the Biblical account of man's origin,
and as certainly it is nowhere denied, but distinctly
asserted, in the work we are speaking of to-night.
At no point does Charles Darwin deny the divine-
ness of life, or ignore the witness for the action of
the Omniscient Creator. Let us be fair to our scien
tific teacher. In the concluding pages of Animals
and Plants under Domestication, he speaks of "the
Omnipotent and Omniscient Creator, who ordains
everything and foresees everything," and, indeed, he
maintained that his theory served to illumine the
power, and make manifest the unsearchable great
ness of the Eternal, saying in a remarkable passage :
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds
singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting
about, and with worms crawling through the damp

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 231
earth, and to reflect that these elaborately con
structed forms, so different from each other, and
dependent upon each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us.
. . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with
its several powers, having been originally breathed
by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and
that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a begin
ning endless forms, most beautiful and most wonder
ful, have been and are being evolved."
Whatever then may be said of others, it is certain
that the author of the Theory of Evolution was
wholly free from that spirit of universal denial which
flattens the level of life, slays our loftiest aspirations,
narrows the horizon of our outlook, enfeebles charac
ter, and saps the springs of service. He is always
reverent in spirit, patient and earnest in investigation,
and anxious only and supremely for the truth. He
held with Sir James Paget, that as "the rays of
knowledge have extended and diverged, so has their
relation to one common centre become more evident,
and Jthe unity of nature has become more significant
of the Unity of God " ; in short, another and the
latest proclamation of the message which came by
Moses, " Hear, O Israel, our Lord is one Lord." On
no account ought he to be cited as a denier of the
Divine birth of man. Like the distinguished M.
Pasteur just admitted into the ranks of the French

232 CHARLES DARWIN
Academy, he would be ready to affirm, "Every
where I see the inevitable expression of the Infinite
in the world, ... for the notion of the Infinite
has the twofold character of being irresistible and
incomprehensible." It is to that living intuition
Christianity speaks, saying, " That which ye call the
Infinite declare I unto you. The Infinite is the lov
ing Father of men, manifested in Jesus Christ, who
is the way, the truth and the life. Seek Him, trust
Him, obey Him, and so experimentally discover the
origin of the highest life."
(3) These points of agreement between Evolution
and Revelation being allowed, where then is the dif
ference? First, it is here, and it is simple. The
Bible says God " made man," and made him from
" dust," and Darwin says " Yes " ; but (and here
comes the critical addition) man was evolved from
the " dust " through innumerable gradations of being.
Of those gradations Genesis has no hint. It is silent:
and it seems to speak as if God made man, the whole
man, instantly, and placed him on the earth there
and then, and at one particular moment of time.
" He spake and it was done." The creative act was
special, immediate and instantaneous. Such, at least,
has been the interpretation usually given of the
Scriptural statements.1
1 Dean Fremantle has called my attention to the fact that
our Genesis record does say that " the waters brought forth
abundantly," etc., and that "if the writer had intended to make

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 233
But we must not forget —
(a) That no one contends that the evolutionary
theory is positively proved} It is only a high prob
ability, and it is accepted simply in that character.
But I am anxious to say, —
(b) That even if it were proved, it does not seem
to me that it would conflict with a fair and just in
terpretation of Scripture, or in any way lessen the
force of the witness for design borne by the physical
nature of man. For the words " He spake and it
was done" are not intended to declare the imme-
diateness of God's creative deeds, so much as the
ineffable ease and invincible certainty with which
the Almighty works ; and it is a childish illusion
which sees in the startling visit of a comet a greater
proof of power than in the steadfast brilliance of the
daily sun ; and cites the instant flash of lightning as
a mightier marvel than the slow evolution, from the

an absolute line between man and the brutes he would not
have placed the creation of the beasts and man in the same
day." 1 Prof. Virchow says, " I should neither be surprised nor
astonished if the proof were produced that man had ancestors
among other vertebrate animals ; but I am bound to confess
that every positive advance which we have made in the pro
vince of pre-historic anthropology has actually removed us
further from the proof of such a connection."
" We cannot teach, we cannot designate as a revelation of
science, the doctrine that man descends from the ape or from
any other animal."— The Liberty of Science in the Modem
State.

234 CHARLES DARWIN
tiny dweller within the acorn-cup, of the gigantic
and far-spreading oak. Hence I have felt from the
beginning of this controversy that even supposing
the evolutionary theory of our origin indisputably
proved, the Biblical record remains intact; for in
saying that the " Lord made man " and made him
"from the dust," it declares nothing concerning any
gradations of being, any processes of formation ; and
where God's Word is silent, surely we do no wrong
in getting to know all we can from God's works.
(4) Chiefest of all, we must remember that man's
real dignity, according to revelation, is due, first of
all, to the fact that God not merely made him — He
made all creatures, but He breathed into man's nostrils
the breath of life, and he became a living soul: He
made him in His own spiritual image. That is his
unique privilege amongst the creatures of God. His
dignity is not in his flesh, that is of the earth, earthy ;
but it is in his spirit, and that is of the heavens,
and relates him to God, and to the Unseen and the
Eternal. God breathed into him, — that is the real
beginning of his career, that is his exaltation. It is
the God-breathed Divinity in man that is his dis
tinguishing glory.
And the Gospel of Christ assures us that God will
not suffer that glory to be finally lost. The Incarna
tion renews the Divine breathing into the souls of
men. " God was in Christ, reconciling the world
unto Himself, not imputing to men their trespasses."

OR EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY 235
Christ takes upon Himself our nature, becomes one
of us, lives with us and suffers for us, that He may
deliver us from this present evil world and invest us
with that spiritual greatness which springs "from
partaking of the Divine nature " and issues in holi
ness, service and joy.
Friends, that blessed life is the privilege of every
one of us. Eagerly seek it. Seek it at once and
with all your heart. Suffer not the Lord Jesus to
say, " Ye will not come unto Me that ye may have
life." Do not permit any speculative questions as to
the origin of our physical life to rob you of the
immediate and full enjoyment of this practical good,
this life of faith and peace, of inward power and
holy desire and self-denying ministry. Whatever
may have been man's start, it is certain that God
his Father offers him a present career of salvation and
service, of help and holiness, and a future wherein
is fulness of joy and pleasure for evermore.
Young men, do not, I earnestly beg you, be driven
from your steadfast hold of, or strenuous quest for,
the truth of Christ by any winds of scientific opinion.
Rest assured that Christianity is based upon immov
able foundations, and that no man of science who is
worthy of his name will ever oppose real religion. He
may denounce the religion of the " priests " ; he may
protest against a religion done to death in the cast-
iron limits of a false orthodoxy ; but the real religion
of Jesus Christ the true scientist will revere, for what

236 CHARLES DARWIN
it is in itself, what it has done in the past, and what
it offers for days to come. You need have no fear of
him, or the result of his work. He and it have illus
trated and verified the Gospel of Christ in manifold
ways, and we run no risk in saying that coming
generations will regard scientific workers as valuable
expositors of the truth of God and important auxili
aries in the progress of Christianity upon the earth.
Make sure yourselves of that truth, now, and aid in
the advance of the Gospel, by the contribution of a
pure and helpful life.

HENRY DRUMMOND
1851-1897

He received, I venture to say, more of the confidences of
people untouched by the ordinary work of the Christian Church
than any other man of his time. He was an ideal confessor.
Dr. W. Robertson Nicoll.
Henry Drummond was the most perfect Christian I have
known, or expect to see this side the grave. Ian Maclaren.
The power to set the heart right, to renew the springs of
action, comes from Christ. The sense of the infinite worth of
the single soul, and the recoverableness of a man at his worst,
are the gifts of Christ.
The freedom from guilt, the forgiveness of sins, come from
Christ's cross ; the hope of immortality springs from Christ's
grave. Personal conversion means for life a personal religion,
a personal trust in God, a personal debt to Christ, a personal
dedication to His cause. These — brought about how you will
— are supreme things to aim at, supreme losses if they are
missed. If you ask me why I do not write whole books on these
themes, I reply that I believe one's only excuse for writing a
book is that he has something to say that is not being said.
These things are being said. Hundreds of books and
millions of tracts are saying them afresh every month and year.
I therefore feel no call to enter literature on that ground. My
message lies among the forgotten truths, the false emphasis,
and the wrong accent. To every man his work.
Professor Drummond.

238

HENRY DRUMMOND, THE TYPICAL
EVANGELIST
GOD gave us men a great treasure when He sent
us Henry Drummond. He was a good man
• — full of faith and of the Holy Ghost ; aflame with
instructed zeaffor the Kingdom of God — and through
him many people were added to the Lord. His
goodness was as conspicuous as his knowledge of
the movements and processes of Nature. Those
who had had the ineffable advantage of his friend
ship felt the charm of his character and the spell of
his sincere devotion to human well-being.
According to the witness of those who knew him in
his youth, he was magnetic and handsome, and had
an air of distinction about him, whether batting at
the nets in the cricket ground at Crieff College, or out
with boys fishing on Loch Earn.
As a young man, his " notes " were winsome
gentleness and exquisite sympathy ; a modesty as
gracious and fragrant as that of the violet under the
hedgerow ; a reasonableness strong and sweet ; a
courage that would not submit or yield to difficulty ;

240 HENRY DRUMMOND
and a faith in God and God's doings that knew no
tremor and felt no limit.
As a worker he has enriched our life in many
ways, but in none more abundantly than as a God-
given and God-inspired evangelist, who, appealing
to men — face to face with the perplexing but ex
panding revelations made by God through the
students of his wonderful works — persuaded them to
reverse their course ; so that instead of sailing
towards '' sunless gulfs of doubt," they steered for the
haven of a soundly-bottomed and clearly-reasoned
faith in God and in His Gospel. Like the Apostles,
he stood on the firm basis of fact. He could not
defend a position because it was traditional, or utter
a message because it was orthodox, or close his eyes
on a truth because it was new, or hold his peace
because it was opposed. Like Peter and James and
John, he must speak that which he himself believed
— which he had felt, and tasted, and handled — and
that only. He was the foe of makeshifts and pre
tences, and would push his way through the hundred
plausible superficialities and timid conventionalities
to get his feet firmly planted on the solid ground of
Nature ; and once there, he must bear his witness
alike to the findings of science and the findings of
souls, to the facts of geology and the facts of the
Christian life, to the meaning of the flowers of the
field and the charm and fragrance of the flowers of
character.

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 241
In a gathering of young University men, held for
the discussion of the best evangelistic methods, the
question was addressed to him, "What should you
say to a man who comes up to you and says that he
believes there are errors in the Bible ? " He paused
a moment, and then — this man who had done more
than any man living to win young University men
to Christ — said quite gravely, though with a little
sparkle in his eye, " I should say that I agreed with
him." " It was," says a witness, " as if a bombshell
had exploded in the assembly." But it was entirely
characteristic of the man. He could do no other.
He must be faithful to the whole fact. He could
not stand securely save on the rock of truth, and he
must get down to it, though it were bared even of
the heather that covered his native Perthshire hills.
The evangelist is a witness, and a witness of what
he himself knows to be fact.
God's evangelists differ in many ways. Some,
like Richard Weaver, are fitted to pluck men out
of the fires of sin as with the grip of a masterful
will, remembering that they themselves have been
scorched with the flames, and saved only by the
marvellous grace of God, They have no need " to
determine " to " know nothing save Jesus Christ and
Him crucified," for that is all the knowledge they have
or want ; and it is a mercy if they do not, in the
excess of their joy, despise anybody else whom
God may have taught one or two other things con-
T.C.L. R

242 HENRY DRUMMOND
cernino- Him who is the fulness of Him that filleth
all in all ! But there are others, like Paul, rich in
gifts, and stored with the treasures of wisdom ; they
have been to school, and learned of many masters.
In Tarsus they have found the thought of Greece ;
in Jerusalem, Gamaliel has led them through the
books of Moses, the teaching of prophets, and the
lore of the Rabbis ; and in Arabia they have sifted
and subordinated and co-ordinated their knowledge.
They rejoice in the manifold or "many coloured"
wisdom of God. Whatever the time has to teach
they possess. Greece as well as Judaea, Cilicia not
less than Palestine, add to their equipment for their
evangelizing work.
These differences are part of the plan of God.
He has many fields, and works with many tools.
Each worker is unique. No other can do my work ;
I cannot do another's. Different souls call for dif
ferent kinds of evangelists. All ages need the same
Divine redemption, and it is adequate for all ; but
the generations call for specific applications of its
exhaustless stores.
Drummond was specially equipped for the special
work he had to do. He came of an evansrelizine
stock— a fact not to be forgotten, for racial and
family stock has counted for much in the progress
of the Kingdom of God. He belonged to the Drum-
monds of Stirling, the founders and promoters of the
famous " Stirling Tract " enterprise. He sought all the

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 243
training he could get — first at Crieff Academy ; then
at the University and New College, Edinburgh ; and,
finally, at Tubingen, in South Germany. Subsequently
he came under the influence of Dr. Marcus Dods, and
confessed that he owed more to him than to any man
living. But all the time he was becoming more and
more familiar with the methods of science — observing
in what ways they were worked, watching their pro
cesses of repeated check and counter-check, with a
view to the total elimination of error — and having
graduated in Physical Science, he was at length pro
moted to the post of Lecturer on Natural Science
in the Free Church College, Glasgow. He kept up
his scientific studies. He geologized with Professor
Geikie, botanized and geologized in Central Africa,
and wrote his brilliant book on Tropical Africa.
But he was always and essentially an evangelist,
intent on reconciling men to God ; to God's thoughts
about Himself and His work, about sin and life,
salvation and duty ; and intent on accomplishing
this reconciliation by the use of the methods of
science on the materials of Christianity.
Thus, in 1873, he read a paper before the New
College Theological Society on " The Importance
and Necessity of Spiritual Diagnosis," in which he
maintained that every pastor should treat individuals
spiritually as a physician treats them physically.
The Gospel is to be applied personally. Preaching
often leaves the people unaffected, and therefore it

244 HENRY DRUMMOND
must be supplemented by clinical or bedside work ;
in fact, personal application, and not preaching, is
the chief work of the man who has the "cure of
souls." That was his theory of evangelism. Is it not sound?
Is it not as scriptural as it is scientific? Is it not
in accord with common sense and experience ? Are
we not told to " confess our faults one to another " ?
And why ? Not that we may supply material for
parlour gossip 1 not that we may play into the hands
of power-seeking priests ! — but, surely, that our faults
may be cured, and we may attain to perfect health.
At all events, that was the conception Drummond
held of his work ; and though he was preparing for
the degree of Doctor of Science, yet as soon as
Moody and Sankey visited Edinburgh he saw his
opportunity, seized it with ardour, put himself in
living and sympathetic touch with men in the
" enquiry-room," " diagnosed " them, learned to know
the human heart to the bottom (as he knew his
fossils and flowers), and "acquired an amount of
experience which few are able to collect in the course
of a lifetime " !
After these two years of direct evangelizing, he
resumed his studies of science, preparing to direct
his evangelistic activities chiefly towards young men.
We cannot master the scientific method in a week
or a month, or by a few glances at a book. It needs
a long apprenticeship to acquire skill in biological

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 245
or chemical method, and still longer drill is needed
for the perfect use of that method in evangelism.
But Drummond was willing to go through any
routine of preparation for his chosen task. He
saw the primary need of the age. The recent
scientific awakening had alarmed the Churches,
and disturbed the faith of the young. Huxley had
roused their fears. Tyndall had shaken their con
fidence. Religion and science were thought to be
opposed to one another. The puipits were ringing
with vehement denunciations and proposed " recon
ciliations." With the trained eye of a seer, he saw
what Israel ought to do. First, he chose to present
those phases of the Gospel to young men which are
immediately related to living, to duty, to character
and service. He told them, not that they could not
die without Christ, but, on the contrary, that they
could not live the life that is life indeed without His
presence and inspiration. He preached a present
and instant use of the energies of Christ in resisting
temptation, in the choice of high ideals, in the build
ing of manhood. He translated the Gospel of the
New Testament into the language of Goethe's motto
— " Gedenkezu leben " — and so brought the Gospel into
accord with the dominant thought of the age concern
ing the seriousness and gravity of human living.
He was indeed a path-finder, a son of light, a
courier, heralding the approach of the advancing and
conquering King, a pioneer of Jesus along the ways

246 HENRY DRUMMOND
crowded with an increasing number of the students
of science, and menaced by the spirits of agnosticism
and materialism. Standing equally in the region of
hard scientific facts and in that of the realm of the
Spirit, he shows their interpretation, their unity ; and
so acts as a mediator between the old and the new
in religion, aiding in the disappearance of the worn-
out and effete, and in the introduction of the fresh
and original. He gave a new and living language
to old religious facts and ideas ; taught men to think
of "regeneration" in terms and metaphors made
familiar by biogenesis ; of "the imitation of Christ"
as conformity to the Divine type ; of " life " as
accord with " environment," i.e. with God, " in whom
we live, and move, and have our being" ; of death as
a further evolution, really mors janua vitcs ; of " self-
sacrifice " as the struggle for existence under the
terms and conditions suggested by maternity, and
therefore incompletely represented till seen and
described as a struggle for the life of others ; and of
" love " as the spring and crown of a scientifically •
conceived evolution, and a phase in the story of the
divinely predestinated " ascent of man."
Faraday used to talk about keeping his religion
and his science in two different compartments of his
being, as though he were himself, or could be, two
beings— one religious, and the other scientific. So
it was with Drummond at the first ; but after a time
a connection was established between the two com-

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 247
partments, and by-and-by the partition was wholly
removed, and the two became one. He saw that
religion was made up of facts — based on facts, wholly
concerned with facts — and that, therefore, it offered
the same material as the sciences. The facts differed,
but they were not the less facts. The facts of
chemistry were not precisely the same as the facts
of astronomy, nor those of medicine the same as
those of psychology ; but they were all facts, and so
were capable of scientific treatment — of observation,
experiment, classification, and arrangement under
certain " natural laws." Handling the facts of re
ligion and life in the same way as he did the facts
of Nature, he set out their unity and harmony in his
world-famed books, Natural Law in the Spiritual
World, and The Ascent of Man.
It was alleged that Drummond was one-sided in
his treatment of theology and religion. He admitted
the truth of the charge in a certain sense. He did
not seek to say everything. His business was to
save the age from agnosticism and doubt. He was a
spiritual physician, and his work was fixed for him
by the condition of his patient, and he wrestled with
himself, so that he might find in the Divine pharma
copoeia the medicine that would certainly heal. His
first book was not without its errors ; but its goal
and spirit, its method and materials were right in the
main, and altogether reconciling in their effect. He
conveyed the impression that he denied all spon-

248 HENRY DRUMMOND
taneity of action to man and ignored his capacity
for God ; though, whilst admitting that some por
tions of his book favoured that fatal and pernicious
mistake, he asserted that he had represented the
soul of man as yearning and longing for God, and
incapable of rest till it found Him.
Allowing all you desire for mistakes, it cannot
be questioned that his books accomplished seven
things : (i) In an age of wide-spread fear of science
his first book made it easy for thousands of per
plexed men and women to believe that there is
no essential antagonism between the conclusions of
science and the teachings of Jesus Christ ; (2) it
gave a new coinage to the speech of the Churches,
carried the thought-moulds of the schools to religion,
and employed them to express its unchanging facts
and elements ; (3) it supplied a series of beautiful
metaphors to express the spiritual processes common
to souls in all ages and under all religions ; (4) it
aided in emancipating us from the depressing
tyranny of the materialistic interpretation of the
universe and of human life, and introduced us to
that spiritual conception which is now in the ascen
dant in all realms of thought.
All this was advanced and crowned by his later,
more brilliant and more enduring work, The Ascent
of Man. This not only showed that the universe
from base to superstructure is moral and spiritual ;
but (5) it proved that the original doctrine of the

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 249
" struggle for life " is fractional and incomplete, and
requires to be expressed in the fuller form of "a
struggle for the life of others " if it is to embrace
the whole facts in their true meaning. Taking
advantage of the investigations of Professors Thom
son and Geddes,1 he shows that the " struggle for
life " is not anti-ethical ; it is altruistic, and finds its
truest type not in the clash and collision of the wild
beasts of the forest, but in the patient, love-begotten,
and hope-inspired experiences of motherhood !
The "ethical world" is not, as Huxley said, an
"artificial world within the cosmos." It is. a part,
and an essential part, of the entire structure of the
universe. It is in its primordial germ. It is not a
by-product. It is intrinsic, part of the foundation
of the world ; embedded in the fundamental func
tions of living organisms. "The path of progress
and the path of altruism are one."
Hence (6) the Christianity of Christ Jesus is not
only in perfect keeping with the processes and pur
poses of evolution, but is also God's most important
and effective instrument for attaining the ethical
ends of Nature. It is rooted in Nature. The final
expression of life is in religion, and in the Christian
religion. " The Lamb was slain from before the
foundation of the world."2
1 The Evolution oj Sex. By Professor Patrick Geddes and
J. Arthur Thomson. Published by Walter Scott, London.
2 Cf. Professor Joseph Le Conte, Evolution and its Relation
to Religious Thought, published by Chapman & Hall, London,

250 HENRY DRUMMOND
(7) For the universe is full of purpose, high, holy,
ethical purpose ; a purpose to make man, to make
him by the method of evolution, to make him a
spiritual being, in the image and likeness of Christ
The world is not the outworking of blind forces,
and redemption is not an after-thought suggested by
failure, but an aim appearing in the very beginning,
in the elementary stages of animal life, in the germs
of sympathy, of reverence and love, of goodness and
character. Evolution proves that " man is a spiritual being,
and that the direction of his long career is towards
an ever larger, richer, and more exalted life."
"An engineering workshop is unintelligible until
we reach the room where the completed engine
stands. Everything culminates in that final pro
duct, is contained in it, is explained by it. The
evolution of man is also the complement and cor
rective of all other forms of evolution. From this
height only is there a full view, a true perspective, a
consistent world. The whole mistake of naturalism
has been to interpret Nature from the standpoint of
the atom — to study the machinery which drives this
great moving world simply as machinery, forgetting
that the ship has any passengers, or the passengers
any captain, or the captain any course. It is as
for one of the best expositions of the theory of evolution and
its evidence, and also for the treatment of its relation to the
doctrine of God in general and to Christianity in particular.

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 251
great a mistake, on the other hand, for the theo
logian to separate off the ship from the passengers
as for the naturalist to separate off the passengers
from the ship. It is he who cannot include man
among the links of evolution who has greatly to
fear the theory of development. In his jealousy for
that religion which seems to him higher than science,
he removes at once the rational basis from religion
and the legitimate crown from science, forgetting
that in doing so, with whatever satisfaction to him
self, he offers to the world an unnatural religion and
an inhuman science. The cure for all the small
mental disorders which spring up around restricted
applications of evolution is to extend it fearlessly in
all directions as far as the mind can carry it and
the facts allow, till each man, working at his sub
ordinate part, is compelled to own, and adjust
himself to, the whole.
" If the theological mind be called upon to make
this expansion, the scientific man also must be
asked to enlarge his views in another direction.
If he insists upon including man in his scheme
of evolution, he must see to it that he include the
whole man. For him at least no form of evolution
is scientific or is to be considered which does not
include the whole man, and all that is in man and
all the work and thought and life and aspiration
of man. The great moral facts, the moral forces so
far as they are proved to exist, the moral conscious-

252 HENRY DRUMMOND
ness so far as it is real, must come within this scope.
Human history must be as much a part of it as
natural history. The social and religious forces
must no more be left outside than the forces of
gravitation or of life. Man, body, soul and spirit
are not only to be considered, but are first to be
considered in any theory of the world. You cannot
describe the life of kings, or arrange their kingdoms,
from the cellar beneath the palace." x
Finally, we must not forget that the root of
Drummond's evangelizing life was his imperturbable
faith in God, and his personal experience of His
grace in Christ Jesus. This gave him his strength
and serenity, his courage and self-sacrifice ; this
opened his mind to welcome all the gifts of science,
and his heart to receive all the gifts of Christ. He
was not afraid, trusting in the Lord. He " believed,"
and was not in a hurry to deny what he had not ex
amined, and denounce what he did not understand ;
but retained his soul in peace, confident that the
movements of men are under the sway of God, and
that their study of His works will not fail to make
manifest His power and wisdom, His righteousness
and goodness. Atheism is the root of antagonism to
science. Fear of criticism springs from practical
disbelief in the living God. He felt " the vastness of
the agony of the earth," but he was sustained in the
assurance of God's redeeming love, shown every-
1 The Ascent of Man, pp. 236, 12-14.

THE TYPICAL EVANGELIST 253
where, but revealed in its fulness and glory in the
Cross of Christ. He " had a profound sense of the
ruinous bent of innumerable lives," and appealed
directly to the will, and besought men to hear,
repent, believe and live.
We need his faith and experience if we are to
continue his work. Distrust of the righteous pur
pose and redeeming love of God breeds despair of
men. We must know God in Christ for ourselves, if
we are to " wrestle " patiently, wisely, and with ex-
haustless passion to bring men to the enjoyment of
the life of Christ. Our experience may then find
expression in Drummond's favourite hymn : —
I'm not ashamed to own my Lord,
Or to defend His cause,
Maintain the glory of His cross,
And honour all His laws.
Jesus, my Lord ! I know His name !
His name is all my boast :
Nor will He put my soul to shame,
Nor let my hope be lost.
I know that safe with Him remains,
Protected by His power,
What I've committed to His trust,
Till the decisive hour.
Then will He own His servant's name
Before His Father's face,
And in the New Jerusalem
Appoint my soul a place.

EDWARD BURNE-JONES
1833-1898

" This nineteenth century peer of the masters of all times."
— Ford Madox Hueffer.
In the life of the Church, as in all the moral life of man
kind, there are two distinct ideals, either of -which it is possible
to follow ; two conceptions, under one or the other of which
we may represent to ourselves man's effort after the better life.
The ideal of asceticism represents that moral effort as essen
tially a sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that
it may live in what survives more completely ; while the ideal
of culture represents it as a harmonious development of all
the parts of human nature in just proportion to each other-
— Walter Pater. Marius the Epicurean, vol. ii. p. 136.
Is there place in the land of your labour,
Is there room in your world of delight, .
Where change has not sorrow for neighbour,
And day has not night?
In their wings, though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there,
Made green with the running of rivers,
And gracious with temperate air ;
In the fields of the turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and beautiful pities,
And loves without stain ?
In a land of clear colours and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers ;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers —
For these is there place ?
Though the world of your hands be more gracious,
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times j
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes."
—A. C. Swinburne.
256

BURNE-JONES, AND THE SERVICE OF
ART TO RELIGION
IN speaking of the service of Sir Edward Burne-
Jones, as an artist, to Religion, I do not profess
to be in any sense a judge of his rank amongst the
painters of this or of any other age ; but ever since
I was introduced to his works by Ruskin, in his
lectures on " The Art of England," I have been in
creasingly interested in him and in his pictures ; and
I am so conscious of the debt under which he, has
laid our country and the world, that I feel we owe
it to his memory, and to ourselves, to attempt some
estimate of his place in the manifold ministries of
our time for the extension of the Kingdom of God.
No one can doubt the variety and opulence of his
gifts ; the strenuousness and zeal of his pursuit of
his own culture ; the loftiness and purity of his
ideals ; the stainless loyalty of his spirit to his
convictions ; the breadth of his sympathies ; the
rich spiritual suggestiveness of his interpretation of
Beauty ; his wizard-like skill in the use of colour ;
or his intense devotion to Art, not merely for the
T.CL. 2S7 S

258 BURNE-JONES AND THE
sake of Art, but for the sake of the service Art may
render to the highest interests of the human race.
Nor is it less certain, that the influence of the
artist on the thought and action of men is increasing
every year. Art is becoming more and more a social
and educational power. Its expositors are a great
host, and their missionary zeal is quite apostolic.
Every year they understand their work more fully,
and lend their interpretations and their magnifiers
to an increasing number of those who visit our Art
galleries. Every year a greater number of persons
realize that Art has a message for the soul, an in
spiration for the love of beauty, a real religious
significance ; that it is essentially a spiritual product,
and that it is fatal to any spiritual ministry to exist
for itself, first and only. They see that the greatest
art is fullest of thought, emotion, and spiritual
quickening for the whole man ; they are conscious
of a divine call ; they are stirred by strong human
sympathies ; they tell us that poverty and ugliness
are not necessarily inseparable ; that Art may, and
must, brighten the lot of the poor, aid in the removal
of social burdens, and give a real uplift to the souls
of men through the imagination. Thus Art has been
taking its place, through men like William Morris,
Burne-Jones, Madox-Brown, and Walter Crane, in
the distribution of the " social idea," and furthering
social regeneration.
Literature has become pictorial. The artist sums

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 259
up in one brilliant sketch the ideas that fill a page
or a. chapter. The Press multiplies the painter a
thousandfold, so that he finds a pulpit in every home,
an audience in every village and town. The cottage
is turned into a picture gallery, and there is scarcely
an article in daily use that does not derive an addi
tional charm from the artistic revival of the later
years of this century.
Therefore the question of the service of Art to
Religion is one of keenest interest, and I do not
know that it can receive a better answer than that
supplied by the career of the illustrious painter who
has just been taken away from us.
I. For it is demonstrable that whilst Burne-Jones
owed something to the Celtic strain in his nature,
more to the influence of his master Rossetti, and
more still to his persistent and life-long self-culture,
yet he owed most to the fact that he pursued Art in
a thoroughly religious spirit.
I do not mean that he chose religious themes, or
expounded texts of the Bible with his brush, after
the fashion of Dore, for he did little of that, though
his picture of Mary, arrested by the voice of the
risen Lord, on The Morning of the Resurrection sur
passes in suggestiveness and in inspiration anything
I have met in print, or heard from human lips. Still,
a man's religion is not evinced by the themes he
elects to treat. He may discuss the contents of the

260 BURNE-JONES AND THE
Bible in an absolutely irreligious spirit, or he may
choose a subject outside the realm of Christian ideas
and facts, and yet treat it so as to make it a vehicle
of religious truth and the source of religious emotions.
Burne-Jones is in the soul of him a prophet. " The
word of the Lord," as Jeremiah says of himself, was in
him "like a fire in his bones, and he could not stay"
its course. It must flame out. In his early days he
thought of "taking orders" as a clergyman ; but the call
to Art came to him with such imperiousness, that he
was compelled to obey. His parents, not unnaturally,
objected. The rewards for his toil in Art were in the
dim distance; mordant ridicule and fierce persecution
were at the doors : but he clung to his choice like a
man of conviction, and wrought at his task with the
heroism of faith. Sir John Millais, leader in the same
Art school, " fell from grace," to use the language of
the theologians ; he started with high aims, but
permitted himself to be caught in the snare of fame,
and used his matchless gift to make money. Neither
fame nor money could tempt Burne-Jones from his
allegiance to his ideas or make him surrender his
individuality. The Academy made him an Associate
in 1885; but he resigned his connexion with it,
stood aside, and became a " Dissenter " in Art, that
he might save his soul. He would not hurry his
work or diminish his devotion because he had secured
the command of the market; "he endured as seeing
Him who is invisible."

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 261
Now, wherever such faithfulness is shown it is
accepted of God, and it is helpful to men ; whether
in teaching a church or painting pictures, in building
a house or writing a book, it is a spiritual and
religious service. Cornelius puts it into his " alms
and prayers," and they go as a memorial up to God.
Socrates exhibits it in his searching questions to the
young men in the market-place of Athens, and their
echoes are still heard amongst us. In Buddha it is
utter self-suppression, and wheresoever this gospel of
Buddhism is preached in the whole world, that also
that this man hath done is told for a memorial of
him. In Ambrose it is defiance of a tyrannical
emperor ; and we continue to honour his memory and
"live" by admiration of his courage. In Burne-Jones
it is supreme loyalty, manifested through long years,
in the face of many difficulties, to his spiritual con
ception of Art ; and therefore, whilst the legacy of
his pictures will always instruct and inspire, his pursuit
of Art in this spiritual and religious temper has added
to the forces making for the final triumph of truth
and goodness and beauty in the world.
II. The second characteristic I note is, that Burne-
Jones used his art to aid in the emancipation of the
Christianity of Jesus Christ from the hard and
fettering literalism in which he saw it ; and in
securing freedom, enlargement, and religious progress.
As you know, his themes are frequently chosen

262 BURNE-JONES AND THE
from the exhaustless treasures of Mythology. Ruskin
says, "his essential gift and habit of thought is in
personification." "And in this gift, he becomes a
painter, neither of Divine History, nor of Divine
Natural History, but of Mythology, accepted as such,
and understood by its symbolic figures to represent
only general truths, or abstract ideas."
"And here I must at once pray you, as I have
prayed you to remove all associations of falsehood
from the word romance, so also to clear them out of
your faith, when you begin the study of mythology.
Never confuse a Myth with a lie, — nay, you must
even be cautious how far you even permit it to be
called a fable. Take the frequentest and simplest of
myths for instance — that of Fortune and her wheel.
Enid does not herself conceive, or in the least intend
the hearers of her song to conceive, that there stands
anywhere in the universe a real woman, turning an
adamantine wheel whose revolutions have power over
human destiny. She means only to assert, under
that image, more clearly the law of Heaven's continual
dealing with man, ' He hath put down the mighty
from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and
meek.' " *
If you ask, as you are likely to do, why Burne-
Jones made choice of mythological subjects, Ruskin
will tell you, it was because " the thoughts of all the
greatest and wisest men hitherto, since the world was
made, have been expressed through mythology." 2
1 The Art of England, by John Ruskin, pp. 49, 50. 2 lb., p. 53.

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 263
Still, that answer does not exhaust the reasons for
this choice. Burne-Jones and his fellow-artists felt
that they could move with greater freedom in the
realm of Grecian and Scandinavian mythology than
was possible within the covers of " the idolized Bible,"
and thereby could more effectively serve their age.
Those old myths and tales throb with the deep religion
of humanity, a religion more akin to the heart of
Christianity than that which was dominating the
Churches of England in the middle of our nineteenth
century. So the Greek and Norse heroes were better
organs for the new ideas, passions, and inspirations
the artists were eager to express. They helped to meet
the hunger of man to know himself, to have his ex
periences interpreted to himself, better than the timid
conventionalisms which were being preached in the
pulpits, or voiced in the greater part of the literature
of the time. The old "riddle of the painful earth"
could be stated with more clearness and passion; the
awful tragedy of evil, the inevitableness of penalty,
the mordant fierceness of temptation, the total
inadequacy of the brain to do the work of the heart,
the perennial charm and subtle mastery of soul, — these
and kindred facts central to human experience could
be set out in the many-coloured mythological crea
tions of the human race, with a fulness and power of
ethical regeneration absolutely impossible to the
severer and stricter forms used by the logical under
standing.

264 BURNE-JONES AND THE
You ask, for example, why does Burne-Jones elect
the Grecian story of the maidens dancing round the
golden-appled tree in The Hesperides, instead of the
Hebrew account
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.
Set his picture in the clear atmosphere in which it
was produced, and you will see that the artist finds in
the ancient symbol a better tool for interpreting to
the men and women around him their own world —
the world in which they had to work out their own
destinies. For the women are not the daughters of
Greece ; they are English ; and the island itself is
in the Western main, and may as well be England.
Grecian women are not so weary and heavy-laden
as these Englishwomen of to-day, emerging into
their larger life, accumulating knowledge, claiming
rights their grandmothers never dreamt of, incapable
of content with the narrow and cramped life of the
past, facing spiritual problems and quivering with
sensibility to the perils of the new. It is a warning.
It tells us that the expanding tree of knowledge has
a serpent coiled in its branches ; that the richest
fruits for the intellect yielded by our marvellous
age ; an age surpassing all its predecessors in that
knowledge grows from more to more, will not be
enough for a heart that is made to find its most
abiding satisfaction in fellowship with the Eternal

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 265
God. All that, and more, is taught; and taught at
once, without raising one critical question, or stirring
a single religious prejudice through this old myth ;
whereas, if Burne-Jones had taken his materials from
the book of Genesis, men would have missed the
eternal soul of the narrative, in petty questions about
" verbal " inspiration, allegory and fable, poetry and
history. But a further reason may be added for the recourse
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the legends of
our race, the myths of all the ages for their materials
and instruments of teaching : and that is, that just as
the Christian genius has fathomed the infinite signifi
cance of the Old Testament as Hebrew Rabbi never
did or could, and found a wealth of meaning and of
practical applications of which many Jews are still
unaware ; so that same genius has found spiritual
treasures, in the old mythology of Greece and Rome
and of the northern nations, altogether unsuspected,
and made their wealth available in our modern life as
no Greek or Roman or Norseman ever could.
Our moderns have found the Ariadne clue, and
have set forth the meaning of the " unconscious pro
phecies of heathendom" in the clear light of the
problems and passions of our own day.
See that picture of the " Beguiling of Merlin " to
his doom. An irresistible spell is upon him. His
evil heart is leading him downward and ever down
ward ; and before him there is the lid of the sepul-

266 BURNE-JONES AND THE
chre rising to admit him, and then to seal him
safely for ever and ever ! Could any scene reveal the
fearful fate of a man who sees and knows his end,
and yet goes with wide-opened eyes step by step,
feeling himself in the toils of the evils he has created.
It is the painter's summing up of the teaching of
George Eliot in novel after novel, " Our deeds are
our fates." " Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he
also reap."
You know the story of Pygmalion. Pygmalion is
King of Cyprus, and an artificer, who makes an ivory
image of a maiden and falls in love with it ; then he
prays to Aphrodite to breathe life into it. The re
quest is granted, and Pygmalion marries the maiden.
Burne-Jones illustrates this parable in four pictures,
under the key-words, "The heart desires," "The hand
refrains," " The Godhead fires," " The soul attains."
" The heart desires." The sculptor, chisel in hand,
goes to work on the marble before him ; he hews
from morn till night, for his soul is intent upon his
task, so intent that he is not fascinated by the frivo
lous fribbles outside. But his work is pain ; and pain
goads him to hurry and restlessness. He falls short
of the glory of his ideal. Therefore the " hand re
frains." The sculptor rests his hand ; for " over
work " is bad work, and excess in the hand is weak
ness in the head and heart. He thinks and thinks
till he " repents," and rises to a higher conception
and a fuller force. The rest of the hand is the

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 267
growth of the soul. For while he muses " The God
head fires." Love is born, and the marble begins to
live and glow. And as with the sculptor Donatello's
horse, whilst you look you are ready to say, "March,"
and almost expect the horse to step forth before you.
Hammer and chisel, be they never so active, are not
enough ! Love is more than skill. Cleverness is only
half; it is not even that, for cleverness is hard and
mechanical, cold as marble and lifeless as stone. It
is love that is alive. And so by love " The soul
attains " its goal. Desire is satisfied. It is as Brown
ing has taught in so many ways, " Love is all and in
all " for art and for life : intellect alone fails, desire
alone fails, it is only when the whole man is fused by
the heat of the heart that is divine that the ideal is
reached. Is not that the religious teaching needed by our
age ? Could it be expressed with greater force and
beauty than in Burne-Jones' parable of Pygmalion ?
I say the " religious teaching " ; for it cannot be
doubted that the movement to which Burne-Jones
belonged, and of which he was at once a follower
and a leader, was in its original impulse religious,
and formed one stream of the general movement
starting in the third decade of this century, proceed
ing with increasing strength through the forties and
fifties and sixties, and now making itself beneficently
impressive all over the world. The Service of Art
to Religion is to be considered in its relation to the

268 BURNE-JONES AND THE
Age. It has not existed alone, or worked alone.
We are not face to face with one original impulse,
but with a series of manifestations of the national
life ; and we cannot interpret Burne-Jones accurately
without tracing his relations to the forces operating
in his day. If Dante is not so extremely individual
as to be separable from his century, even though
Florentine history leads up to and flowers and fruits
in him, so Burne-Jones must be set in his true historic
place in the evolution of our religious life.
The religious " movement " is seen in the Churches,
and is there called the "Oxford Revival," and has
wrought mightily for good, and also for some evil
amongst the English-speaking people. In Science, it
is manifested in the remorselessness with which the
fact, the whole fact, and nothing but the fact has been
allowed to stand. In Literature, it voices the passion
for sincerity, reality, and the expulsion of all shams
and falsehoods. In Social life, it asks for the recon
struction of civic and political and industrial life, on
bases of justice, of equality, of opportunity, of liberty of
conscience and of brotherhood ; and in all the Arts, —
not in one or two, but in the whole of them, music
and sculpture, architecture and painting, — it is a de
mand for a return to nature, to life and to fact, made
by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their dis
ciples. Thus their services became part of the
awakening of the nation to a higher and fuller life,
a regeneration of the ideas and emotions of the mass

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 269
of the people as to the true, the beautiful, and the
good : as to the true, in fact and in interpretation ;
as to the beautiful, in Nature and in life ; and as to
the good, in a heightening conception of ethical ob
ligation, a keener sense of justice, and a deeper and
broader Charity. It is for this English Renaissance ;
a Renaissance that gives us the brightest hopes for
the coming century, that Sir Edward Burne-Jones
has wrought so effectively as to entitle him to the
admiration and gratitude of all who seek the triumph
of a religion, deeper than that of any one organi
zation, and as wide as the interests of the human
race. III. Notice again, Burne-Jones has rendered im
measurable service to Religion by the energy with
which he has insisted on Truth in Art. Truth in
Art was his motto, and he held to it in the face of
the mockery of the world. Sincerity is the key-note
of his work. Every detail is accurate. Nothing is
slurred over. The true man must do true work for
truth's sake. Ruskin says,. " Truth is the vital power
of the whole school, — Truth its armour, — Truth its
war- word ; and the grotesque and wild forms of ima
gination which, at first sight, seem to be the reaction
of a desperate fancy, and a terrified faith, against the
incisive scepticism of recent science, so far from being
so, are a part of that science itself; they are the
results of infinitely more accurate scholarship, of in-

270 BURNE-JONES AND THE
finitely more detective examination, of infinitely
more just and scrupulous integrity of thought, than
was possible to any artist during the two preceding
centuries ; and exactly as the eager and sympathetic
passion of the dramatic designer now assures you of
the way in which an event happened, so the scholarly
and sympathetic thought of the mythic designer now
assures you of the meaning, in what a fable said." x
And in additional confirmation of this statement he
testifies that " It is impossible for the general public
to estimate the quantity of careful and investigatory
reading, and the fine tact of literary discrimination,
which are signified by the command now possessed
by Mr. Burne-Jones over the entire range both of
Northern and Greek Mythology, or the tenderness at
once, and largeness, of sympathy which have enabled
him to harmonize these with the loveliest traditions
of Christian legend." a
It was a moral revolt ; a protest against falsehood,
against the mechanical and effete, the hollow and
insincere ; a return to Nature as an inspiration and
a guide. It was a distinct ascent in thought, in
ideal, in execution, and in breadth of view ; and
thereby it became another assertion of the Protestant
reverence for truth, for Nature's truth and life's
truth, and for God's glory therein. It was thus an
auxiliary to the work of the Reformation ; a regener-
1 The Art of England, by John Ruskin, p. 52.
2 Ibid., p. 57.

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 271
ation, an uplifting of the soul of the nation by Art ; in
the language of the New Testament, a " repentance,"
a progress to a higher plane of thinking and feeling
than was commpn in that day. All its " key-words "
involve this: "earnestness" is one, "sincerity"
another, "reality" a third, and "Nature" a fourth.
But whatever the word, what is meant is, an effort to
get at the truth of things, to work honestly, with
singleness of eye, with loyalty to fact and conscience.
It is not Art for Art's sake, nor for Pleasure's sake,
but for Truth's sake, — that is for the sake of
Conduct and Character.
Art which I may style ; love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the very truth of things,
For truth's sake, whole and sole, not any good truth brings
The knower, seer, feeler, beside.
That is, it is a question of order amongst motives.
Set Beauty first, and Truth last, and you fail to reach
character, the all in all of our being. Put Truth
first, and let Beauty be seen and felt as the reality of
things, and you serve at once Beauty and Goodness
and Truth. Art for Art's sake is, or may be, selfish
ness ; Art for Truth's sake is Art for the sake of
being, of manhood, of service, of humanity, of
righteousness, of the best in time and in eternity.
Put conduct first and you may use your Art safely ;
this work Burne-Jones did, and so has brought the
best nutriment to lofty aims, unselfish service and
harmoniously developed character.

2 72 BURNE-JONES AND THE
IV. Once more, you will have noticed the fact that
our artist has served Religion by interpreting the
spiritual experiences of the age. His texts are taken
from the far-away past ; but his appeals and warn
ings, rebukes and instructions are for the living
present. He starts amidst the thoughts and problems
of the old world ; but he lives close to the throbbing
heart of our modern life, hears its sighs, and responds
to its pathetic appeals. Look at his large water-
colour picture of " Love amongst the Ruins," with its
marvellous blending of greys and blues ; its mystic
arrangement of golden light and darkening glooms ;
its vivid and moving interpretation of the break up
of old faiths and the shattering of old hopes, and its
one beautiful prophecy of a love that conquers and
rebuilds all.
Standing (says M. de la Sizeranne) before " Love
among the Ruins," before the two solemn lovers
dressed in blue, seated on the ruined columns of an
old Renaissance Palace, amidst the wild rose bushes
— our thoughts were with the present, with the ruins,
all too real, amidst which we live. . . . The
young people who are entering upon life, like those
whom Burne-Jones introduces into his picture, find
the ground strewn with fragments. What are they
to do ? To love as his do. In this disorder of the
conscience, in this dispersion of all efforts for good,
some men, believing that good will come out of evil,
are rushing to attack what is left of the social edifice

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 273
under pretext that there is not enough left of it to
give us shelter ; others are demolishing it because
too much of it remains — all of them, from various
motives, joining in the work of total ruin, from hope
or from despair, from indecision or from indifference,
from audacity or from timidity. One flag alone is
respected, only one remedy takes effect, one feeling
unites all good wills, and seems a safe path for the
devoted ones in search of duty ; it is pity for human
misery, charity, self-surrender, love. Love is the
Saviour, and the Saviour will make all things new.
What sermons there are in his " Fortune's Wheel,"
with its powerful rebuke of the sciolism that shuts
God out of the rule of His world, and puts in His
place a grey, impassive, hard-hearted Task-master,
called " Work " ; in " Blind Love," with its Pilgrim
feeling his way with an arrow along the road, and
telling us in Shakespeare's words,
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind ;
in " Pan and Psyche," where he shows us how our
age has learnt at once the strength and the limita
tions of the ministry of Nature to the Soul of Man ;
and in the " Chant d' Amour," with its revelation of
love as the supreme consecration of human life.
But it is in his representations of women, as in
" The Golden Stair," that he has penetrated closest
to the chief revolutionary change of our time. More
T.C.L. T

274 BURNE-JONES, AND THE
than most he sees what has happened to woman, and
knows what it means. She is no longer a mere
madonna. Motherhood is not her all. She is find
ing herself, claiming the education that is due to her
as a person, and preparing herself for emancipation
from the tyranny that has so long crushed the
energies of her soul. It is a struggle ; and she is
weary. The old peace has given away to discord
and strife. She is entering into the turmoil of the
world, and needs another strength than her own to
preserve her in uprightness, to heal her wounds, and
to carry her to her true goal.
That is a distinctively modern message. The old
pagan myth did not know it. We do. These aches
and pains are ours. This intolerable fatigue, these
subtle languors are due to the fulness of our life.
They belong to our developing consciousness, to the
richness of our opportunities, to the wide range of
our possibilities ; to the larger universe opening
before us ; and they tell us that, women and men
alike, we need God, God and His redeeming love, as
our daily light and peace, strength and joy.
And this gift of God is in His Son Jesus Christ ;
who said to Thomas, "T am the Way, the Truth, and
the Life;" and now by many voices adds to that
great saying, " and I, too, am Goodness and Beauty,
and whosoever serves them serves Me."
" Be not deceived, My beloved brethren. Every
good gift and every perfect boon is from above,

SERVICE OF ART TO RELIGION 275
coming down from the Father of lights, with whom
can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by
turning. Of His own will He brought us forth, ' He
mothered us ' by the word of truth, that we should
be a kind of first fruits of His creatures,"

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