ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON
_Let us be flexible, dear Grace; let us be flexible!_--HENRY JAMES.
. . . _the Archbishop recalled both to the gravity of the
issue_.--LORD MORLEY.
Because of his great place and his many merits, both of heart and head,
and also because his career raises the question I desire to discuss in
my Conclusion, I have left the Archbishop of Canterbury to the last of
these brief studies in religious personality.
More admirably, I think, because more entirely, than any of the other
men I have attempted to study, Dr. Davidson sums up the virtues of
Anglicanism. He stands, first and foremost, for order, decency, and good
temper. If he has a passion it is for the _status quo_. If he has a
genius it is for compromise. Lord Morley, who knows him and respects
him, describes him as "a man of broad mind, sagacious temper, steady and
careful judgment, good knowledge of the workable strength of rival
sections." Pre-eminently the Archbishop is a practical man.
I know not out of how many crises he has contrived, both as a fisher of
men and a good shepherd, to lift the Church of England by hook or by
crook.
When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health
and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of
the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is
visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad
state of weakness. For long weeks together--once it was for a whole
year--his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.
In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a
harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of
the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every
one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate
nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are
working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire.
He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to
relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has
cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so
moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness,
may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth,
the greatest of all the Christian Churches--greater, more catholic, than
Rome.
To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which
only those immediately about him can properly appraise.
Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take
a day off he spends it in bed.
His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ignoble
idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have
succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable,
have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who
encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the
good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes
in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of
civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising
for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a
secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the
goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and
his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of
the English nation.
He gives most of us the feeling of a very able man of business, an ideal
family solicitor; but there is a quite different side to this character.
He is by no means a mystic, as that word is usually understood, but he
is a man who deeply believes in the chief instrument of the mystic's
spiritual life, that is to say, in prayer. He is not a saint, in the
general acceptance of that term, but his whole life is devoted with an
undeviating singleness of aim to effecting the chief ambition of the
saint--a knowledge of God in the hearts and minds of men. Because he
believes that the best method of achieving that consummation, having
regard to the present level of human intelligence, is by moderate
courses, one must not think that he is lukewarm in the cause of
religion. With all the force of his clear and able mind, he believes in
moderation. Anything that in the least degree savours of extravagance
seems to him impolitic. He does not believe in sudden bursts of
emotional energy; he believes in constant pressure.
In my intercourse with him I have found him eminently sane and judicial,
cold towards excessive fervour, but not cold at all towards ardent
faith, inclined perhaps to miss the cause of spiritual impatience,
constitutionally averse from any understanding sympathy with religious
ecstasy, but never self-satisfied, intolerant, or in the remotest
fashion cynical. Always he expresses his views with modesty, and
sometimes with healthy good-humour, disposed to take life cheerfully,
never moved to mistake a molehill for a mountain, always quietly certain
that he is on the right road, whatever critics may care to say about his
pace.
It is perhaps unreasonable to expect height and depth where there is
excessive breadth. The Archbishop might make a bad captain, but he could
have few rivals as an umpire. He is an admirable judge if an indifferent
advocate.
His grave earnestness is balanced by a conviction that humour is not
without a serious purpose. He looks upon life in the average, avoiding
all abnormality, and he sees the average with a genial smile. He
thoroughly appreciates the oddities of English character, and would ask
with Gladstone, "In what country except ours (as I know to have
happened) would a Parish Ball have been got up in order to supply funds
for a Parish Hearse?"
His attitude to the excitements and sensations of the passing day may be
gathered from a simple incident. During the most heady days of the War,
that is to say, days when people made least use of their heads, I
encountered him at the country-house of a well-known statesman. One
morning, while we were being lined up for a photograph, the boar-hound
of our host came and forced himself between the Archbishop and myself.
"What would the newspapers say," exclaimed the Archbishop in my ear, "if
they knew that his name is--_Kaiser_!"
In this manner he regards all sensational excitement of every kind. When
people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such
affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn
and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people
are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and
when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of
Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy,
nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia.
Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the
gods, has the serpent for his effigy. "The Devil tempts the busy man,"
says a Turkish proverb, "but the idle man tempts the Devil."
One of those who has worked with the Archbishop for many years, although
his views are of a rather extreme order and his temperament altogether
of the excessive kind, said to me the other day, "When Randall Davidson
went to Canterbury, I told those who asked me what would be the result
of his reign. He will leave the Church as he found it. I was wrong. He
has done much more than that." He went on to say that there was now a
far greater charity between the different schools than existed at the
beginning of the century, and that if unity had not been attained, at
least disruption had been avoided.
One of the most eloquent and far-sighted of the Evangelicals puts the
matter to me in this fashion: "It is possible that fifty years hence men
may ask whether he ought not to have been constructive; but for the
present we, his contemporaries, must confess that it is wonderful how he
keeps things together."
"Pull yourself together!" was the admonition addressed to a somewhat
hilarious undergraduate. "But I haven't got a together," he made answer.
If it be true that a house divided against itself cannot stand, then we
must admit that Dr. Randall Davidson is not merely one of the Church's
greatest statesmen, but a worker of miracles, a man whom we might expect
to take up serpents and drink any deadly thing.
But it will be safe to keep the Archbishop's reputation in the region of
statesmanship.
The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if
I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the
whole modern world, than this word statesmanship. It is a word of which
the antonym is drifting. It signifies steersmanship, and implies
control, guidance, direction, and, obviously, foresight. Now, let us see
how this word is used by those who are supposed to instruct public
opinion.
The settlement of the Irish Question was hailed as a triumph of British
statesmanship. One of the Sunday newspapers of the higher order
acclaimed Mr. Lloyd George as the greatest statesman in the history of
England and perhaps the greatest man in the world. But it needs only a
little thought, only a moment's reflection, to realise that this welcome
settlement was a triumph, not of statesmanship, but of murderous
brutality. There would have been no pæns if there had been no volleys,
no triumph if there had been no violence.
Statesmanship was defeated in the eighties, and those who defeated it,
those who exalted prejudice and racialism and intolerance above
rationality and foresight, are now among those whom the world salutes as
immortal statesmen. In truth, they have bowed the knee to violence.
By the same power, and not by reason, the Government extended the
franchise to women. Statesmanship held firmly on the contrary course
till the winds of violence rose and the rain of anarchy threatened to
descend in a flood of moral devastation.
Look closely into the great achievements of the Washington Conference
and you will find that the nations are not voluntarily seeking the
rational ideal of peace, but are being driven by urgent necessity into
the course of reason. Statesmanship would have disarmed the world before
1914. It was only after 1918 that the spectre of Universal Bankruptcy
drove the poor trembling immortals who pass for statesmen to embrace
each other as heroes in search of an ideal. Humanity has achieved
nothing noble or glorious in the last thirty years; it has been driven
by the winds of God into every haven which has saved it from shipwreck.
With a clear understanding of the meaning of the word statesmanship, one
may ask with some hope of arriving at an intelligent answer whether
Randall Davidson is a great statesman.
Under his rule a divided and distracted Church has held together; but
religion has gone out of favour. During his reign at Lambeth there has
been a sensible movement towards reunion; but the nation is
uninterested. If the Romanists have been less rebellious, the
Evangelicals have lost almost all their zeal. If the Church still
witnesses to the truth of Christianity, it is with all her ancient
inequalities thick upon her, turning her idealism to ridicule, and in
the midst of a nation which has become steadily more and more
indifferent to the Church, more and more cynical towards religion.
If there is peace in the Church, there is little of that moral
earnestness in the life of the nation which in past times laid the
foundations both of English character and of English greatness. We are
becoming swiftly, I think, a light and flippant people, the only
seriousness in our midst the economic seriousness of our depressed
classes. It is not to any other class in the community that the zealot
can address himself with an evangel of any kind. Only where a sense of
bitterness exists, a sense of anger and rebellion, can the idealist in
these dangerous times hope for attention.
The Bishop of Manchester preached some few weeks ago a sermon to the
unemployed of that city. He was asked at the end of his sermon if the
workers could get justice without the use of force. He replied, "It all
depends what you mean by force." And at that the congregation shouted,
"Murder." They were to have concluded the service with the hymn, "When
wilt Thou save Thy people?" Instead, it concluded with the singing of
"The Red Flag."
Now let us ask ourselves what might have been the course of religious
history during the last twenty years if Dr. Randall Davidson, instead of
contenting himself with composing clerical quarrels, had used his high
office to control the Church and to steer it in the direction of greater
spiritual realism.
Suppose, for example, that after presiding over a conference of warring
Churchmen, he had turned to one of the champions of a party, and had
said to him, in the manner of a true spiritual father, "I have
something to ask of you. What was the first command of our Risen Lord to
the apostle Simon Peter?" He would have been obliged to answer, "Feed My
lambs." "And the second command?" And he would have been obliged to say,
"Feed My sheep." "And the third command?" And again he would have been
obliged to say, "Feed My sheep." Then, what had they all said if the
Primate had turned to both sides and admonished them in these words, "My
brothers in Christ, I think there would now be no disputation among you
if instead of concerning yourselves with the traditions of men you had
rather given yourselves entirely to obeying the commandment of our Risen
Lord"?
But the question would remain, With what food is the flock to be fed?
Is it possible to give an answer to this question which will not open
again the floodgates of controversy? If that is so, then those of us who
acknowledge the moral law had better abandon Christianity altogether,
and set ourselves to construct a new and unifying gospel of ethics from
the works of the moralists. For the world is torn asunder by strife, and
contention is the opportunity of the wolves. Humanity has begun to
apprehend this truth. It has begun to find out that disarmament is
practical wisdom; and now it is beginning to wonder whether counsels of
perfection may not serve its domestic interests with a higher efficiency
than the compromises effected by unprincipled politicians. It is in the
mood to listen to a teacher who speaks with authority; but in no mood
to listen to a war of words.
If religion cannot speak with one voice in the world, it had better
adjourn, like the plenipotentiaries of Sinn Fein and the representatives
of the British Government, to a secret session. It must come to an
understanding with itself, an agreement as to what it means, before
mankind will recover interest in its existence.