tombs of what has been and can be no more, and I fancy that Old
Mortality's opinions on youth and beauty would have been justly
disregarded.
XI
THE SINS OF SOCIETY
In the year 1870 a flame of religious zeal was suddenly kindled in
the West End of London. In that year the Rev. George Howard Wilkinson
(now Bishop of St. Andrews) was appointed Vicar of St. Peter's, Eaton
Square. The church in the Belgravian district was as dry as tinder;
it caught fire from Mr. Wilkinson's fervour, and the fire soon became
a conflagration. This is Matthew Arnold's description of the great
preacher at the height of his power: "He was so evidently sincere, more
than sincere, burnt up with sorrow, that he carried every one with
him, and half the church was in tears. I do not much believe in good
being done by a man unless he can give _light_, and Wilkinson's fire is
very turbid; but his power of heating, penetrating, and agitating is
extraordinary." This description belongs to the year 1872, but it might
have been written with equal truth at any date between 1870 and 1883.
In all my experience of preaching (which is long, wide, and varied) I
have never seen a congregation dominated by its minister so absolutely
as the congregation of St. Peter's was dominated by Mr. Wilkinson. I
say "congregation" advisedly, for I should think that at least half
the seatholders belonged to other parishes. The smartest carriages in
London blocked the approach to the church. The great dames of Grosvenor
Square and Carlton House Terrace rubbed shoulders with the opulent
inhabitants of Tyburnia and South Kensington, Cabinet Ministers fought
for places in the gallery, and M.P.'s were no more accounted of than
silver in the days of Solomon.
And this was not a mere assemblage of hearers. The congregation of St.
Peter's were pre-eminently givers. £4000 a year was the regular product
of the alms-bags, let alone the innumerable sums sent privately to the
Vicar. "I want a thousand pounds." This simple but emphatic statement
from the pulpit one Sunday was succeeded on the following Sunday by
the quiet announcement, "I have got a thousand pounds." What was the
secret of this attraction? It was entirely personal. It did not in the
least depend on theological bias. Mr. Wilkinson belonged to no party.
He had begun life as an Evangelical, and he retained the unction and
fervour which were characteristic of that school at its best; but he
was feeling his way towards a higher churchmanship, and had discarded
most of his earlier shibboleths. The fabric was frankly hideous, and
the well-meant attempts to make it look less like a barn and more
like a church only resulted in something between a mosque and a
synagogue. There was no ritualism. The music was too elaborate for the
choir, and the curates were feeble beyond all description. The Vicar
was everything; and even he had none of the gifts which are commonly
supposed to make a Popular Preacher. He was not the least flummery or
flowery. He was reserved and dignified in manner, and his language was
quite unadorned. His voice was a monotonous moan, occasionally rising
into a howl. He was conspicuously free from the tendency to prophesy
smooth things, and he even seemed to take a delight in rubbing the
pungent lotion of his spiritual satire into the sore places of the
hearers' conscience. If Jeremiah had prophesied in a surplice, he would
have been like the Prophet of Belgravia; and as for Savonarola, his
sermon, as paraphrased in chapter xxiv. of "Romola," might have been
delivered, with scarcely a word altered, from the pulpit of St. Peter's.
And here we touch the pith and core of Mr. Wilkinson's preaching. He
rebuked the Sins of Society as no one had ventured to rebuke them since
the days of Whitefield and the Wesleys. The Tractarian Movement, so
heart-searching, so conscience-stirring at Oxford, had succumbed in
the fashionable parts of London to the influences which surrounded it,
and had degenerated into a sort of easy-going ceremonialism--partly
antiquarian, partly worldly, and wholly ineffective for spiritual
revival or moral reformation. Into this Dead Sea of lethargy and
formalism Mr. Wilkinson burst like a gunboat. He scattered his fire
left and right, aimed high and aimed low, blazed and bombarded without
fear or favour; sent some crafts to the bottom, set fire to others,
and covered the sea with wreckage. In less metaphorical language, he
rebuked the sins of all and sundry, from Duchesses to scullery-maids,
Premiers to pageboys, octogenarian rakes to damsels in their teens.
Then, as now, Society loved to be scolded, and the more Mr. Wilkinson
thundered the more it crowded to his feet. "Pay your bills." "Get up
when you are called." "Don't stay till three at a ball and then say
that you are too delicate for early services." "Eat one dinner a day
instead of three, and try to earn that one." "Give up champagne for
the season, and what you save on your wine-merchant's bill send to
the Mission Field." "You are sixty-five years old and have not been
confirmed. Never too late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once,
and try to remedy, by good example now, all the harm you have done your
servants or your neighbours by fifty years' indifference." "Sell that
diamond cross which you carry with you into the sin-polluted atmosphere
of the Opera, give the proceeds to feed the poor, and wear the only
real cross--the cross of self-discipline and self-denial."
These are echoes--faint, indeed, but not, I think, unfaithful--of
thirty years ago, and they have suddenly been awoke from their long
slumber by the sermons which Father Vaughan has just been preaching at
the Jesuits' Church in Farm Street, Mayfair. The good Father, exalting
his own church, perhaps a little unduly, at the expense of the Anglican
churches in the district, observed complacently that "Farm Street, in
spite of its extension, was all too small" for its congregation. For my
own part, I do not belong to that fold, and I never wander to strange
churches for the pleasure of having my ears tickled; so I only know
Father Vaughan's utterances as they reach me through the newspapers. A
report in the third person always tends to enfeeble rhetoric; but, in
spite of that hindrance, Father Vaughan's style seems to lack nothing
in the way of emphasis or directness. Here is a fragment of his sermon
preached on Sunday the 10th of June 1906:--
"It was no easy task for the votaries of pleasure when Sunday came
round to all of a sudden forget their class distinctions, their
privileged sets, their social successes, their worldly goods, and to
remember that they were going into the presence of Him before whom man
and woman were not what they happened to have, but what they happened
to be--that the debutante beauty might be before God less than her
maid who waited up half the night for her, nay, less than the meanest
scullery-maid below stairs; while the millionaire with means to buy up
whole countries might be in God's sight far less pleasing and very much
more guilty than the lowest groom in his stable yard."
Not less vigorous was the allocution of June 17.
"If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would
most surely have the _entrée_ to London's smartest set to-day. He
would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so
well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so
well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He
would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,'
and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good
time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear
of being bored or dull!"[5]
[5] Here I seem to catch an echo of Dr. Pusey's sermon on "Why did
Dives lose his soul?"
And yet again:--
"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then
there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid
something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of
the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not
more Socialists than there actually were."
All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan.
Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of Farm Street, the
tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father
in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his
works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant
those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential,
and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present
Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over"
London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of
spoiling the London Season.
I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating
the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father
Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson"
never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a
kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which
had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called
Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such
questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was
a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or
whether he was all four at different stages of his career.
XII
OXFORD
"Once, my dear--but the world was young then--
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,--
Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times--
Careless we and the chorus flung then.
Under St. Mary's chimes!
"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway flits the gown;
Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it--when _you_ go down."
What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the
medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium
of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he
conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and
elusive charm of that incomparable place.
"Know you her secret none can utter--
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"
It is a hard question, and susceptible of some very prosaic and
therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be
given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past:
"Tell it--when _you_ go down."
Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are
subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them
from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense
of them abides with us for ever.
"If less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"
all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical
pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on
the religious life of England.
"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."
There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest;
and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains
undiscovered, or at best half-discovered--felt and guessed at, but
not clearly apprehended--until we have passed away from the "dreaming
spires"--the cloisters and the gardens and the river--to that sterner
life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.
"Know you the secret none discover?"
If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought
to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping
your mind and, still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and
twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to
tell.
To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are
misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life
lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all
knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human
tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And
so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The
bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the
well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa
in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in
cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the
actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion,
all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for
"Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble
like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling
Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in
some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate
Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding
poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to
herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her
earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending
sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies
of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the
opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of
philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory,
have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare
irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of
our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has
borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them
would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that
we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we
have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the
shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most
dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and
nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the
resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the
irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was
cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.
"Never we wince, though none deplore us,
We who go reaping that we sowed;
Cities at cockcrow wake before us--
Hey, for the lilt of the London road!
One look back, and a rousing chorus!
Never a palinode!"
It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a
few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never
discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We
thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no
quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their
uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But,
when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to
perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of
our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and
that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely
right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have
learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and
fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding
us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really
learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity.
We could differ from another on every point of the political and
theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the
best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we
came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and
propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to
that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion, is analogous
to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.
"Tell it--when _you_ go down."
Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering
of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and
controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition
of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed
on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was
inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can
confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a
"typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.
But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for
a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to
state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place
which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it
was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of
an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of
"the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined
with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That
man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names
which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke;
and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed
with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character:
"It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in
private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be
patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships
and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected--in the
one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that
ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.
XIII
SCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS
"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."
Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their
business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime
Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely
the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide
instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not
properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers
were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from
a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests
some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that
Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much
more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their
Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies
from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards
their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin
and Greek as subsidiary to higher studies; he spends, I believe,
two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by
incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the
Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in
other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not
learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of
public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to
his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean
you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."
Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School,
Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary
Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History--these constitute
his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages
of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological
equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely
nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her
doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from
his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well
remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford
from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there
are two Sacraments. That there was a religious ceremony called "The
Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service,
he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled;
but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced
to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better
on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching,
with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew
of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the
Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process;
but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The
Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was
destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire.
He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and
held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College,
Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the
canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's
Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as
to his preparation. The examiner--ah, would that there were more like
him!--wrote back:--
"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a
gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted
as I am with yours to any examination except as a matter of form, for
which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of
England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."
This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on
the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon
and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst
the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates
amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play."
And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.
The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some
improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other
departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not
yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was
made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of
what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford,
"the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became
evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which
the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather
than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected
in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the
examination a reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and
he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men
about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to
face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example
set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on
the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been
developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that
epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false
step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.