PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE
_I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge;
I intend no Monopoly, but a community in learning; I study not for
my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.
I envy no man that knows more than my self, but pity them that know
less. I instruct no man as an exercise of my knowledge, or with an
intent rather to nourish and keep it alive in mine own head, then
beget and propagate it in his; and in the midst of all my
endeavour, there is but one thought that dejects me, that my
acquired parts must perish with my self, nor can be Legacied among
my honoured Friends_.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
Mansfield College, Oxford, has been happy in its Principals. Dr.
Fairbairn created respect for Nonconformity in the very citadel of High
Anglicanism; Dr. Selbie has converted that respect into friendship.
There is no man of note or power at Oxford who does not speak with real
affection of this devoted scholar, who has been dubbed up there "an
inspired mouse."
He is a little man, with quick darting movements, a twinkling bright
eye, an altogether unaggressive voice, and a manner that is singularly
insinuating and appealing. As it is impossible to think of a blustering
or brow-beating mouse, or a mouse that advances with the stride of a
Guardsman and the minatory aspect of a bull-terrier, so it is impossible
to think of Dr. Selbie as a fellow of any truculence, a scholar of any
prejudice, a Christian of any unctimoniousness. Mildness is the very
temper of his soul, and modesty the centre of his being.
He is a Hebrew scholar who has advanced into philosophical territory and
now is pushing his investigations into the field of psychology. Modest
and wholly unpretentious he sets up as no original genius, and is
content with his double rôle of close observer and respectful critic. He
is rather a guide to men than a light. He has nothing new to say, but
nothing foolish. His words are words of purest wisdom, though you may
have heard them before. You feel that if he cannot lead you to the
Promised Land, at least he will not conduct you to the precipice and the
abyss.
Above everything else he is a scholar who would put his learning at the
service of his fellow-men. Education with him is a passion, a part of
his philanthropy, a part of his religion. It is the darkness of man, not
the sinfulness of man, that catches his attention. He feels that the
world is foolish because it is ignorant, not because it is wicked. And
he feels that the foolishness of the world is a count in the indictment
against religion. Religion has not taught; it has used mankind as a
dictaphone.
He has spoken to me with great hope and confidence of the change which
is coming over the Church in this matter of religious teaching. Dr.
Headlam, the Regius Professor of Divinity, has lighted a candle at
Oxford which by God's grace will never be put out. There is now a fairly
general feeling that men who enter the ministry must be educated not to
pass a test or to prove themselves capable of conducting a service or
performing as rite, but educated as educators--apostles of truth,
evangelists of the higher life.
Religion, according to Dr. Selbie, is something to be taught. It is not
a mystery to be presented, but an idea to be inculcated. The world has
got to understand religion before it can live religiously.
But all education stands in sore need of the trained teacher. Our
teachers are not good enough. They may be very able men and women, but
few of them are very able teachers. The first need in a teacher is to
inspire in his students a love of knowledge, a hunger and thirst after
wisdom. But, look at our schools, look at our great cities, look at the
pleasures and recreations which satisfy the vast masses of the
population! As a nation, we have no enthusiasm for education. This is
because we have so little understanding of the nature and province of
education. We have never been taught what education is.
With his enthusiasm for education goes a perfervid spiritual conviction
that intellect is not enough. He tells the story of an old Scots woman
who listened intently to a highly intellectual sermon by a brilliant
scholar, and at the end of it called out from her seat, "Aye, aye; but
yon rope o' yours is nae lang enough tae reach the likes o' me."
Something much more mysterious and much more powerful than intellect is
necessary to change the heart of humanity; but when love and knowledge
go hand in hand there you get both the great teacher and the good
shepherd. Knowledge without love is almost as useless to a teacher as
love without knowledge.
In his study at Mansfield, a large and friendly room book-lined from
floor to ceiling, with a pleasant hearth at one end of it, where he
smokes an occasional pipe with an interrupting fellow scholar, but where
he is most often to be found buried in a great book and oblivious of all
else besides, this little man with the darting eyes and soft voice is
now invading, with sound good sense to save him from nausea or
contamination, the region of morbid psychology.
He would perfectly agree with Dr. Inge's characteristic statement, "The
suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is
ridiculous to anyone who has prayed"; but he is, I think, much more
aware of the power and extent of this suggestion than is the Dean of St.
Paul's, and therefore qualifies himself to meet the psychologists on
their own ground.
He has confessed to me that in reading Freud he had to wade through much
almost unimaginable filth, and he is driven to think that Freud himself
is the victim of "a sex complex," a man so obsessed by a single theory,
so ridden by one idea, that he perfectly illustrates the witty
definition of an expert--"an expert is one who knows nothing else." All
the same, Dr. Selbie assures me that his studies have been well worth
while, that modern psychology has much to teach us of the highest value,
and that religion as well as medicine will more and more have to take
account of this daring science which advances so swiftly into their own
provinces.
So far as my experience goes no man of the first rank in Anglican
circles is preparing himself for this inevitable encounter with anything
like the thoroughness of Dr. Selbie, a nonconformist.
He makes it a rule never to interfere with the troubles of another
communion; but I do not think I misrepresent him when I say that he
regrets the immersion of the Church of England in questions of
theological disputation at a time when the true battle of religion is
shifting on to quite other ground.
Not many people in Anglo-Catholic circles realise perhaps that to the
educated nonconformist all this excitement about modernism seems
strangely old-fashioned. Long ago such matters were settled. The scholar
nonconformist is no longer concerned with dogmatic difficulties; he has
abandoned with the old teleology the old pagan theology, and now,
believing in an immanent teleology, in an evolution that is creative and
that has direction, believing also that Christ is the incarnation of
God's purpose and the revelation of His character, he is pressing
forward not to meet the difficulties of to-morrow, but to equip himself
for meeting those difficulties when they arise with real intelligence
and genuine power.
"If medicine," said Froude, "had been regulated three hundred years ago
by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-Nine Articles of Physic,
and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and
penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the
Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state
of health the people of this country would at present be found."
Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has
suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake
so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they
could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men
who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a
time when knowledge was at its lowest level.
It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or
thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its
future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of
nonconformity.
Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and
preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the
old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox
communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.
One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and
from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to
contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the
difficulty of punishment for sin. In a little book of his called _Belief
and Life_ he has the following passages:
In the long last men cannot be persuaded to deny their own moral
nature, and they will not be content with a theory of the universe
which does not satisfy their sense of right.
And because of this very sense of right they entertain no soft and
sentimental notions concerning the universe:
They believe in judgment, in retribution, and in the great
principle that "as a man sows, so shall he also reap." They
therefore require that room shall be found in the scheme of things
for the working out of this principle. They recognise that such
room is not to be found in this present life, and so they accept
the fact that God hath set eternity in our hearts, and that we are
built on a scale which requires a more abundant life to complete
it.
In corroboration of their faith, it may be said, as John Stuart
Mill used to argue, that wherever belief in the future has been
strong and vivid, it has made for human progress. There is no doubt
that the deterioration of religion and the more material views of
life so prevalent just now are due to the loss of faith in the
future.
Religion, he says, can never live or be effective within the narrow
circle of time and sense. Nevertheless he has the courage to say: "The
future life, like the belief in God, is best treated as an hypothesis
that is yet in process of verification."
But this hypothesis explains what else were inexplicable. It works. And,
confronting the hypothesis of immortality, he insists that a future life
must embrace retribution. "As a man sows, so shall he also reap."
Immortality is not to be regarded as a sentimental compensation for our
terrestrial experience, but as the essential continuity of our spiritual
evolution. "For many, no doubt, it will mean an experience of probation,
and for all one of retribution."
He sees clearly and gratefully that "the moral range of the work of
Christ in the human soul, His gifts of grace, forgiveness, and power,
lift men at once on to the plane of the spiritual and fill their
conception of life with a new and richer content." But he does not shut
his eyes to the fact of the moral law, and with all the force of his
character and all the strength of his intellect he accepts "the great
principle that as a man sows, so shall he also reap."
In this way Dr. Selbie prepares his students, not only to meet the
intellectual difficulties of the future, but to stand fast in the
ancient faith of their forefathers that the moral law is a fact of the
universe. He helps them to be fighters as well as teachers. They are to
fight the complacency of men, the false optimism of the world, the
delusive tolerance of materialism. There is no need for them to preach
hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it
a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that
just and inevitable word, Retribution. In a moral universe, selfishness
involves, rightly and inevitably, suffering--suffering self-sown,
self-determined, and self-merited.
He is the last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching
to emanate. He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely
aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who
inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise. But
approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never
deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his
interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is as vivid
and consuming as that of any social reformer.
There, in Oxford, among his books, and carrying on his duties as
Principal of Mansfield College, Dr. Selbie, back from holidays spent in
watching the great working world and listening to the teachers of that
world, finds himself not alarmed, but anxious. The voice of religion, he
feels, is not making itself heard, and the voices of churches are making
only a discord. Men are going astray because they have no knowledge of
their course, and the blind are falling into the ditch because they are
led by the blind. How is this dangerous condition of things to be
remedied?
He replies, By the teachers.
What we need at this hour above all other needs is the great teacher,
one able to proclaim and explain the truths of religion, and filled with
a high enthusiasm for his office. We need, he tells me, men who can
restore to preaching its best authority. At the present time preaching
has fallen to a low ebb because it is despised, and it is despised
because it has lost the element of teaching. But let men recover their
faith in the moral law, let them see that retribution is inevitable
justice, let them realise that the life of man is a progress in
spiritual comprehension, let them understand that existence is a great
thing and not a mean thing, and they will feel again the compulsion to
preach, and their preaching, founded on the moral law and inspired by
faith in the teaching of Christ, will draw the world from the
destructive negations of materialism, and wake it out of the fatal
torpors of dull indifference.
Happy, I think, is the church which has such a teacher at the head of
its disciples. Though its traditions may not reach far back into the
historic twilight of ignorance, the rays of the unrisen sun strike upon
its banners as they advance towards the future of mankind.
ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON
CANTERBURY, Archbishop of, since 1903; Most Rev. Randall Thomas
Davidson, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D.; Prelate of the Order of the Garter,
1895-1903; G.C.V.O., cr. 1904; Royal Victorian Chain, 1911; Grand Cross
of the Royal Order of the Saviour (Greece), 1918; Grand Cordon de
l'Ordre de la Couronne (Belgium, 1919); First class of the Order of St.
Sava (Serbia), 1919; b. 7 April, 1848; s. of Henry Davidson, Muirhouse,
Edinburgh, and Henrietta, d. of John Swinton, Kimmerghame; m. Edith, 2d
d. of Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1878. Educ.: Harrow; Trinity
College, Oxford (D.D.), Curate of Dartford, Kent, 1874-77; Chaplain and
Private Secretary to Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1877-82; to
Archbishop Benson, 1882-3; Examining Chaplain to Bishop Lightfoot of
Durham, 1881-83; Sub-Almoner to Queen Victoria, 1882; one of the six
preachers of Canterbury Cathedral, 1880-83; Dean of Windsor and Domestic
Chaplain to Queen Victoria, 1883-91; Clerk of the Closet to Queen
Victoria, 1891-1901; to H.M. the King, 1905-3; Trustee of the British
Museum from 1884, Bishop of Rochester, 1891-95; Bishop of Winchester,
1895-1903.
[Illustration: ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON]