present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two
things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and
he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop
might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view
and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging
energy in action. He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and
height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of
Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts
and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above
all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth
in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to
strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and
enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster
everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch
against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant
narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing
activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the
Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and
confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme
blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its
benefits would satisfy--this was the aim from which, however perplexed
or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really
swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom
and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his
purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of
high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of
it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its
foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite
doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of
very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.
When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a
Bishop's duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing
trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every
corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that
interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He
went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as
well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving
about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon.
The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once
in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once
less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal
presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer
and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the
view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never
more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and
worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about
him at one time; turning them to account, assigning them tasks,
pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at
another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer
inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal
which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it
together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.
What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the
Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit
was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he
who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less
familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He
never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied
intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he
worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from
local points which brought him into closer communication with his
flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions,
social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to
them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from
attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his
work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force,
of far-seeing judgment, of noble boldness and earnestness, of power
over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr.
Monsell[25] in our columns shows.
He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to
which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of
counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is
difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.
[25]
... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so
solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself,
had been, during the past week, closely associated with him in
anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various
difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present
surrounded.
He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons
and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church's interests; and in
his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never
had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological
soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.
... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day--questions which
require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He
divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party
condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and
which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every
man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a
veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly
expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and
cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction,
so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which
rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential
to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private
life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct
responsibility between God and the soul, which are some of the most
distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.
From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him
to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen's to hear him there
vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the
assaults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or
a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem
to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.
To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his
London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind
cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the
middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the
last effort of his toilsome day."
XXII
RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]
[26]
_Guardian_, 4th November 1874.
Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has
held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during
which he has presided over his college has been one of the most
eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time
of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes;
and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in
prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of
equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses
since the venerable President of Magdalen passed away. But Dr. Routh,
though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without
sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been
prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long
departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr
far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and
he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were
before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is
of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent
generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting
movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford,
its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its
failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every
one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public
duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at
Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward
look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies
and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.
He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and
independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical
intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of
distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade
of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and
self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered
and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the
questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold,
Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one
another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect
consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than
one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant
scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that
there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done,
and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use
their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their
generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new
activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and
employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the
customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were
too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in
harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by
impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made
the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant
conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the
College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of
the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the _Apologia_, has told us, in
touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty
years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what
intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He
tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work
in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally
characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of
thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an
obvious truth which had escaped other people--his work on
_Unauthoritative Tradition_. His logical acuteness, his habits of
disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of
thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial
reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble,
his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of
intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the
times in which he lived.
But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most
of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and
turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged
antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which
he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the
Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at
least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from
his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial
agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows
and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its
anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its
taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had
made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of
feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish;
and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable
dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed
purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring
about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded
the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate
change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised
scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By
degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had
purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the
Church movement itself untouched, to assume by degrees proportions
scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the
Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy
of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of
Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.
One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even
more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of
combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination,
the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old
ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and
his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he
could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford,
have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the
Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He
wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other
adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not
shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing
himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of
the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by
younger champions.
It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most
strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and
revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his
duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such
troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while
a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by
ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age
an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the
rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man
who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason
the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have
agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and
fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the
upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies
of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed
faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent
tasks, we do not inquire.
Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it
ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In
the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and noble
qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence
and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising
aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he
was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak
points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their
precipitate and untested assumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness
of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom
did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive
to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and
the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them
onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of
mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his
contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and
he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the passing fashions of
the hour.
This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men
on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much
there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears
harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A
hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the
remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who
suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better
sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious
life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public
spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was
wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest
and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt
the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things
unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the
account which he was one day to give at his Lord's judgment-seat. We
trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less
conscientious man would have claimed long ago.
XXIII
MARK PATTISON[27]
[27]
_Guardian_, 6th August 1884.
The Rector of Lincoln, who died at Harrogate this day week, was a man
about whom judgments are more than usually likely to be biassed by
prepossessions more or less unconscious, and only intelligible to the
mind of the judge. There are those who are in danger of dealing with
him too severely. There are also those whose temptation will be to
magnify and possibly exaggerate his gifts and acquirements--great as
they undoubtedly were,--the use that he made of them, and the place
which he filled among his contemporaries. One set of people finds it
not easy to forget that he had been at one time closer than most young
men of his generation to the great religious leaders whom they are
accustomed to revere; that he was of a nature fully to understand and
appreciate both their intellectual greatness and their moral and
spiritual height; that he had shared to the full their ideas and hopes;
that they, too, had measured his depth of character, and grasp, and
breadth, and subtlety of mind; and that the keenest judge among them of
men and of intellect had pirlud him out as one of the most original and
powerful of a number of very able contemporaries. Those who remember
this cannot easily pardon the lengths of dislike and hitterness to
which in after life Pattison allowed himself to be carried against the
cause which once had his hearty allegiance, and in which, if he had
discovered, as he thought, its mistakes and its weakness, he had once
recognised with all his soul the nobler side. And on the other hand,
the partisans of the opposite movement, into whose interests he so
disastrously, as it seems to us, and so unreservedly threw himself,
naturally welcomed and made the most of such an accession to their
strength, and such an unquestionable addition to their literary fame.
To have detached such a man from the convictions which he had so
professedly and so earnestly embraced, and to have enlisted him as
their determined and implacable antagonist--to be able to point to him
in him maturity and strength of his powers as one who, having known its
best aspects, had deliberately despaired of religion, and had turned
against its representatives the scorn and hatred of a passionate
nature, whose fires burned all the more fiercely under its cold crust
of reserve and sarcasm--this was a triumph of no common order; and it
might conceivably blind those who could rejoice in it to the
comparative value of qualities which, at any rate, were very rare and
remarkable ones.
Pattison was a man who, in many ways, did not do himself justice. As a
young man, his was a severe and unhopeful mind, and the tendency to
despond was increased by circumstances. There was something in the
quality of his unquestionable ability which kept him for long out of
the ordinary prizes of an Oxford career; in the class list, in the
higher competition for Fellowships, he was not successful. There are
those who long remembered the earnest pleading of the Latin letters
which it was the custom to send in when a man stood for a Fellowship,
and in which Pattison set forth his ardent longing for knowledge, and
his narrow and unprosperous condition as a poor student. He always came
very near; indeed, he more than once won the vote of the best judges;
but he just missed the prize. To the bitter public disappointments of
1845 were added the vexations caused by private injustice and
ill-treatment. He turned fiercely on those who, as he thought, had
wronged him, and he began to distrust men, and to be on the watch for
proofs of hollowness and selfishness in the world and in the Church.
Yet at this time, when people were hearing of his bitter and unsparing
sayings in Oxford, he was from time to time preaching in village
churches, and preaching sermons which both his educated and his simple
hearers thought unlike those of ordinary men in their force, reality,
and earnestness. But with age and conflict the disposition to harsh and
merciless judgments strengthened and became characteristic. This,
however, should be remembered: where he revered ho revered with genuine
and unstinted reverence; where he saw goodness in which he believed he
gave it ungrudging honour. He had real pleasure in recognising height
and purity of character, and true intellectual force, and he maintained
his admiration when the course of things had placed wide intervals
between him and those to whom it had been given. His early friendships,
where they could be retained, he did retain warmly and generously even
to the last; he seemed almost to draw a line between them and other
things in the world. The truth, indeed, was that beneath that icy and
often cruel irony there was at bottom a most warm and affectionate
nature, yearning for sympathy, longing for high and worthy objects,
which, from the misfortunes especially of his early days, never found
room to expand and unfold itself. Let him see and feel that anything
was real--character, purpose, cause--and at any rate it was sure of his
respect, probably of his interest. But the doubt whether it was real
was always ready to present itself to his critical and suspicious mind;
and these doubts grew with his years.