making her way back to their beloved Borrowdale, where some of their
intensest happiness had been experienced, and to Patterdale, where their
first love was awakened. In the latter place there are 'exquisite shade
of birch-trees on high ground' where she and her lover read together and
recited poetry--his or hers or another's; peeps of Ullswater through the
woods; mossy knolls and sequestered grassy walks; and all had
memory-voices for her in the midst of their outward quietude. She had,
as might have been foretold, imbibed much of her husband's philosophy,
and in some directions her cherished 'orthodoxy' of opinion had reached
its vanishing point, but her orthodoxy of heart was not touched
adversely. It actually grew as life passed onward, and her sunset-lights
glowed with the radiancy of heaven. William's real creed, 'God,
Immortality, Progress'--a noble residuum, after all--was hers with great
assurance, and she writes that she shared 'his craving for fellowship in
Christ's deep love, and for a willing acceptance of His sufferings.'
They both looked to being united--to quote her own words from her
verses--'In, life more high in seeing, serving God, in nearer, nobler
ways.' She ripened in character, in lovable ways, in self-forgetting
devotion to her friends, till her poet-heart ceased to beat, and her
yearnings after a fuller and more perfect soul-life were at length
realized through the mercies and merits of the One she knew but in part,
though He knew her, and her aspirations and difficulties, through and
through.
THE BIBLE AND ITS REVELATIONS
Wherever its Revelations of the essentials of Deity and Humanity
occur they may and must be considered as the most solemn and
precious of all the contents of the Bible. But even of these it
should be specially noted that they are for the most part
progressive. The Bible contains, in fact, a series as well as a
collection of Revelations--a series, of which the earliest terms are
the least, and which very gradually, and not quite uniformly, rises
to its height, and only after long centuries reaches its final terms
in Him who was Himself the highest Revelation which man can be
conceived capable of receiving in the flesh. That there is such a
progression in the Revelation of truth and duty in the Bible must be
obvious at once to anyone who considers the gradual manner in which
those two greatest of all ideas--God and Immortality--are disclosed
in it, and how the great duty of loving all men as ourselves, and
considering every man as our brother, was never at all insisted on
under the older dispensations.--REV. FREDERIC MYERS: _Catholic
Thoughts on the Bible and Theology_.
XV
TWO BROAD THINKERS
FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MYERS
(FATHER AND SON)
'Must then all quests be nought, all voyage vain,
All hopes the illusion of the whirling brain?
Or are there eyes beyond earth's veil that see,
Dreamers made strong to dream what is to be?'
F. W. H. MYERS: _The Renewal of Youth_.
Frederic Myers, of Keswick, is still known by his once-celebrated
'Lectures on Great Men,' and by his two volumes of 'Catholic Thoughts'
on the Church and on the Bible and theology. The lectures were delivered
to his parishioners. The series commenced about 1840, in accordance with
his strong conviction that a clergyman should be the educator as well as
the spiritual guide of his flock, and as a consequence of his horror at
the 'dreadful separation and want of sympathy of the various orders and
classes of modern society.' Remember the period to which these words
were applied. It was several years after this that Maurice, Kingsley,
Ludlow, and their friends commenced their remarkable movement for
bringing the influence, learning, and wealth of the better social strata
to the aid of the poorer. Since those early days of awakening to the
claims of human brotherhood many things have happened to draw 'the
various classes and orders of men' nearer together. Cruel taxes upon the
food of the masses, for the further enrichment of the rich, have been
swept away. The awakening of the democracy has brought it political
power, and with this power the felt necessity for national education.
The abolition of child-labour, the regulation and inspection of
factories, mines, and workshops, the removal of many sectarian
restrictions upon religious equality, an interest in sanitation and the
preservation of public health, and many other such things for which the
great 'middle classes' have steadfastly laboured side by side with the
wage-earners, are results of the transfer of power from the few to the
many. Such matters as these, now looked upon as among the common-places
of civic life, were then hardly deemed by their most sanguine advocates
as within the reach of 'practical politics.' Kindly-hearted Christian
pastors, of the type of Frederic Myers, were few and far between, though
wherever they existed they provoked among the people that element of
'Divine discontent' which found many voices ere it was appeased, from
the decent respectability of Christian Socialism to the plebeian, and
often extravagant, cries of Chartism.
Myers, and such as he, fitly began the movement, though scarcely
consciously, by seeking 'to call forth the powers within man, by the
culture of his whole nature; energy of all kinds--with the simultaneous
cultivation of his sympathies, the nurture of truthfulness, justice,
love, and faith.' He strove to awaken a spiritual ambition among his
hearers by setting before their mental vision the struggles and the
conquests of men who had resolved to achieve something worth the
winning, and who had in their day become epoch-makers--who had possessed
in eminent degree the qualities we all ought ever to cherish, according
to our capacities, and our opportunities for self-development. His dozen
specimen characters are well chosen from the regions of religion,
adventure, and statesmanship. His two other books are devoted to the
solution of questions then being much debated after the commencement of
the Romeward Oxford movement known as 'Tractarianism.' The earlier
one--that on the Church--was originally printed for private circulation.
It is well for us that it was fully published at a later date, for
though that era was prophetic of the coming of political advancement, it
also set in motion a retrograde religious stream of thought and practice
which is still flowing through the Anglican Church, and affecting the
spiritual well-being of the nation. The principles enunciated in this
masterly reply to Newman's doctrine of the Church, and his thorough
examination of the sacerdotal claims of the Puseyite Oxonians can never
become antiquated. With him the primary idea of the Christian Church is
of a brotherhood of 'men worshipping Christ as the revelation of the
Highest.' Equality of Christian privilege is, in his view, so
characteristic of its constitution that the existence of a priestly
caste within its borders is destructive of it. Christian faith is in
Christ Himself, and not in doctrines or formulas of even the holiest and
wisest men. In the true and universal--_i.e._, the Catholic--Church
there can be no majestry, only a ministry. It is a Spiritual Republic in
which no worldly distinctions can be recognised. 'Apostolic Sucsession,'
in the High Anglican and Romish sense of the phrase, has no place
therein, and no room exists for any human assumption over the minds and
souls of believers in Christ within the purely spiritual Church, which
is His body. Many readers will naturally see some lack of logical
sequence in the argument which follows as to the relation of the
Established Anglican Church to this Catholic and Spiritual one. That the
conclusions reached on this point do not seem necessarily to flow from
the premises must surely be conceded by all. Either legitimate
conclusions must be drawn from the assumed fundamental position, or
fresh premises must be granted. Nevertheless, as the Scriptural ground
of his position was generally accepted, his timely work certainly helped
to save the Church of England from the medievalist enemies within its
own borders. Instead of their carrying the Establishment over to Rome,
several of the ablest leaders of the new ritualistic movement severed
themselves from its communion, and, as is well known, entered the Papal
fold, some rising to great honour and dignity within it.
The 'Thoughts on the Bible and Theology' involve the theory that sacred
literature 'contains, rather than consists of, special revelations.' In
it, though not wholly Divine, 'the Divine Spirit may mingle with the
human, and mingling, overmaster it.' It has infirmities and
imperfections, but, he hastens to add, 'less in proportion to its holy
truths than the chaff is to the wheat in any harvest--yea, is even only
as the small dust of the balance compared with the greatest weight that
the balance will weigh.' His theological teaching cannot be presented
satisfactorily in a few lines, and it must be, therefore, dismissed with
the sole remark that, though far from being rationalistic, it appears
highly rational, as it is based on the written words of God, and is not
derived from the dogmas and traditions of Churchmen.
Frederic Myers was born in London in 1811, educated at home and at
Cambridge, and became perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, in 1839,
holding that living till his death in 1851, thus giving twelve years of
his prime to the thoughtful activities of his ministry, and to the
liberalizing of the Church of England.
Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Frederic by his second wife.
He was born at Keswick, and this town was, of course, the headquarters
of his boyhood and youth. Therefore we claim him for the Lake District,
though the necessities of his official life made it expedient to reside
afterwards in the Metropolis. The year of his birth was 1843, Blackheath
and Cheltenham were the places of his school education, and Cambridge
was his Alma Mater. His classical knowledge and his memory were
especially good. He could recite the whole of 'Virgil,' and had a love,
spoken of as 'enthusiastic,' for Pindar, Æschylus, and Homer. His
culture was widened by a trip to the East, and another to America.
Somewhat of an athlete and a good swimmer, he once swam across the
Niagara River below the Falls. Returning to England, he became one of
her late Majesty's School Inspectors. He died in 1901. This brief
summary of his life must suffice.
His literary output is of more value to us than are the details of his
personal career. This output all thinking men will be grateful for,
whatever their opinions about his teaching on telepathy, hypnotism, and
so forth. Had he only given the world his well-known poem on 'St.
Paul,' he would have contributed more than most hymn-writers have done
to its moral profiting. If the old Hebrew Seer was one who saw visions
of the future through Time's manifold veils, and visions of Jehovah
behind the marching cohorts of human generations, and who also had the
Divine gift of 'discernment of spirits,' surely F. W. H. Myers may be
called a nineteenth century seer. He solved in his prose works for many
an earnest seeker after the truth many a scientific doubt respecting God
and Immortality, while in his principal poem he seems to identify
himself with the great Apostle in the yearning and the self-abandonment
essential to such a herald of the Cross. As he wrote, he must have
entered into close sympathy with the flaming desires with which Paul's
breast was burning, and the love with which he ached for souls whom he
set himself to win for the Kingdom of Heaven. To present the inner life
of him whom Christ Himself chose to fill the vacant office of the fallen
Judas was a daring venture, but successful. He makes Paul say:
'Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound Him nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.'
Myers made the great choice, ranking himself among those 'who,' as he
puts it, 'suppose themselves to discern spiritual verities,' amid a
tumult of Agnosticism and positive philosophy which arose about that
time, partly, perhaps, as a result of the reaction from that exaggerated
High Church teaching opposed by his father. Accepting the actual
discoveries of experimental science without question, he yet maintained
there is both direct and indirect evidence that the cosmic laws of
uniformity, conservation of energy, and evolution, do not exhaust the
controlling laws of the universe, nor explain all classes of phenomena.
There is, at least, a fourth cosmic law as ascertainable as any of the
others by observation and experiment. To this fourth law the greatest
poets, such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, to say nothing of the still
greater Semitic Poets, have helped to introduce mankind, and psychical
research has demonstrated their scientific truth. 'Life, consciousness,
and thought' are facts not fully explained by physiology. The communion
of mind with mind without speech or bodily contact or proximity is as
certain as that of X rays or wireless telegraphy. The communion of the
human soul with the Oversoul of the Universe is not a dream, but a fact
as indubitable as the fact of gravitation. The study of these facts,
their modes of motion, and the laws which govern them, bring careful
philosophers to the conclusion that behind the natural law is an active
will, and behind natural force and evolution one universal and
intelligent motive power. Mental and spiritual phenomena are
ignored--or, for some obscure reason, at any rate neglected--by the
ordinary man of science. No real all-round student of cosmic
appearances, and the laws and influences that control and guide them to
cosmic ends, can afford to shut his eyes to the existence of clues
which, whenever they have been loyally followed, have led along the
chain of cause and effect to the ultimate discovery of God and
Immortality. He who follows the Gleam, everywhere shining before him,
arrives sooner or later, whatever he thinks of the creeds of the sects,
at the abode of the Eternal Presence, leaving the Land of Negations far
behind him. This is the substance, or at least the fair interpretation,
of the ideas woven throughout the series of Essays written by our author
on 'Science and a Future Life,' 'Charles Darwin and Agnosticism,'
'Tennyson as Prophet,' and 'Modern Poets and Cosmic Law.' At a later
period he put forth in support of his views, in collaboration with two
others, a large collection of instances, gathered from definite
experiences of witnesses, of 'Phantasms of the Living.' These evidences
occupy two bulky volumes. He may have been sometimes too credulous. Some
of his alleged facts may have needed closer examination. His deductions
from observations may not always have been accurate, yet his argument is
strong in itself, strongly fortified, and apparently, as a whole, still
unshaken. He was, as he says of Tennyson, 'the proclaimer of man's
spirit as part and parcel of the Universe, and indestructible at the
very root of things,' and as such he has restored to many a doubter,
unsettled by scientific materialism, his latent self-hood, his
'subliminal soul,' his realization of the invisible world, and a belief
in that intellectual 'Cosmic Will' which common men persist in calling
'God.'
Myers wrote a few sketches of men and women of the hour, under the title
of 'Classical Essays,' terse, readable, and displaying literary insight.
The most recent 'Life of Wordsworth,' with whose semi-pantheism he had
much sympathy, is his also. Nor was St. Paul his only excursion into the
realms of poesy. 'The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems' is his. Little
of its contents, however, rise to the level of his religious poem, and
some are distinctly trivial. Since penning this sentence I have
happened upon an 'Appreciation' of the volume mentioned, by the late
John Addington Symonds. He likens the muse of Myers to a 'flute of
silver, or a fife of gold,' through which he breathed strains, now
stronger, now weaker, according to the degree of his inspiration. 'To
some ears this instrument may seem too artificial, too metallic,' for
his wont was to select words for their colour-values and their
sonority--for the mode of saying things rather than for the expression
of new and original thoughts. Symonds finds in the poetry not only a
special message of God and Immortality, but a declaration of the happy
influence of womanhood in human affairs. Whether or not this judgment is
right on the last point, it is certain that the all-absorbing intuition
of the poet's soul was that of an eternal life for mankind, not an
immortality of the species at the expense of the individual, by
sacrifice and extinction, but of every separate being:
'Oh, dreadful thought, that all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be--
Stones which are thrust in earth, to build thereon
Some white delight, some Parian Parthenon!'
THE VIEW FROM HELVELLYN
'There to the north the silver Solway shone,
And Criffel, by the hazy atmosphere
Lifted from off the earth, did then appear
A nodding island or a cloud-built throne.
And there, a spot half fancied and half seen,
Was sunny Carlisle; and by hillside green
Lay Penrith with its beacon of red stone.
'Southward through pale blue steam the eye might glance
Along the Yorkshire fells, and o'er the rest,
My native hill, dear Ingleboro's crest,
Rose shapely, like a cap of maintenance.
The classic Duddon, Leven, and clear Kent
A trident of fair estuaries sent,
Which did among the mountain roots advance.
'Westward, a region of tumultuous hills,
With here and there a tongue of azure lake
And ridge of fir, upon the eye did break.
But chiefest wonder are the tarns and rills
And giant coves, where great Helvellyn broods
Upon his own majestic solitudes,
Which even now the sunlight barely fills.'
FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: _Poems_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Brunskill, Bowness_
VIEW OF WINDERMERE.
Summer Lake and Copse-wood Green.'--FABER.]
XVI
A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST
FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER
I.--THE MAN
'Especially did he endeavour to study the spirit of the Church at
its foundation head, in the City of Rome, under the shadow of St.
Peter's Chair. Fully recognising the claims of his own country to
his labours, he made it his business to introduce into it in every
possible way the devotions and practices which are consecrated by
the usage of Rome.'--FATHER BOWDEN'S _Life of Faber_.
Of Huguenot descent, his ancestors having fled from France to England to
avoid the persecutions arising out of the 'Edict of Nantes,' and of
Evangelical Church of England training, he early developed an unexpected
'spurt' towards Romanism, and that rather of the medieval Italian than
of the modern English type.
Starting from such a parentage and such environments as this, it becomes
an interesting study of character and temperament, and of the forces
that mould and direct them, to trace the gradual development of ideas,
and habits, through boyhood to youth, and youth to manhood. The key to
his having ultimately become a priestly devotee of a mystical form of
Mariolatry, is only secured by a careful perusal of his letters, books,
and poetry; of his memoir by Father Bowden; and such fragmentary
notices of him as contemporaries have given us. His life itself, as we
read it, must furnish us with clues by which to follow the labyrinths of
his mind to the end it reached.
He was born in 1814 at Calverley, near Leeds, of which parish his father
was the vicar. The family removed the following year to Bishop Auckland
on Mr. Faber becoming secretary to the Bishop of Durham. As he grew to
boyhood the circumstances of his home-life wrought a development of
character beyond his years, his precociousness was stimulated by his
parents, and his ardent devotion to work or play gave promise of future
eminence. The beautiful scenery around him encouraged his romantic
tendencies. Sent to a private clerical school at Kirkby Stephen, he was
never really free from ecclesiastical influences at any point of his
outlook on the world. His imaginative disposition was still further
quickened, and his poetical tastes and instincts acquired a direction
for life in the midst of the wild Westmorland hills, for 'solitude is
the nurse of enthusiasm.' He took long rambles over mountain and fell,
rebuilding in fancy the ruined castles of the eastern borderland, and
the abbeys of the western, repeopling them with steel-clad knights, and
ladies fair and gay, or with monks chanting their vespers as the great
sun went down in glory beyond the clear-cut ramparts guarding the blue
inland meres. If one reads no farther than the index to his verses one
sees at a glance how firm a grasp the enchanted region had upon his
affections, beginning to secure them even then, intensifying the grasp
while he lived in young manhood at Ambleside, and recurring to his
memory when far away by 'Adria's sapphire waters,' or beneath the shadow
of St. Mary's in his 'dear City' of Oxford. Helvellyn and Loughrigg,
when sunshine and storm combine to throw rainbow-bridges from peak to
peak; the little babbling rivers Rothay and Brathay, when their
glittering foam-bells danced beneath the autumn-tinted trees; the green
vale of Rydal, where the thrushes pipe the whole day through--were each
as much, or perhaps more, to him, and appealed as clamourously for the
weaving of a lay, as great Parnassus himself, or even as 'the sweet
Styrian Lake.' Amidst the wind-sounds in the 'brotherhood of trees' and
the bird-voices of the daytime--nay, in the very night-silences of the
towers and fastnesses of the 'awful sanctuary God hath built' in the
Lake District--he heard 'the echoes of Church bells,' and dreamed dreams
of fonts and altars at which he might serve his 'mother' as her priest.
Educational progress compelled him, after a short tariance at
Shrewsbury, to go forward to Harrow. Here he would ride and swim, but he
would not play. Instead of giving himself up to the healthy commingling
of learning and the usual school athletics, he thought and thought, till
he began to think himself an unbeliever in Divine mysteries. From Harrow
to Balliol College, Oxford, was a natural transition. He left his
infidel doubts and temptations behind, only, however, to come under the
influence of the Tractarian flood then streaming through the University,
and sweeping some of its best sons towards Rome. He was specially
attracted by the preaching of Newman, who was then engaged in
constructing a theology from the writings of Anglican Fathers, showing
that the Church of England was Roman in its teaching though not Papal in
government.
While at Oxford he remained, as all through his career, pure, truthful,
sincere, and studious, though ever romantic and impulsive. One of his
best impulses was to read his Bible twice from beginning to end,
prayerfully and meditatively, without note or comment. This brought him
back for a season to the Evangelicalism he had been reared in. Attending
Newman's sermons and lectures turned him once more to Church tradition
and authority. He soon left his Bible for sacramentalism and all its
concommitants. His friends accused him of vacillation. 'No, not
vacillation,' he answered; 'but oscillation.' Perhaps we may say his
course was like the Borrowdale road, which an old guide-book says
'serpentizes.' Under Newman's more intimate friendship and guidance he
was set to the translation of Patristic writings, while still reading
for ordination, and began to hope Tractarianism would 'soon saturate'
the Church of England. Pursuing his theological studies, winning the
Newdigate Prize, and receiving a Fellowship from his college, he, of
course, took in due time deacon's and priest's orders, and left Oxford
to undertake a tutorship in the household of Mr. Harrison, of Ambleside.
Into the parochial work of Ambleside he threw himself _con amore_, the
incumbent being old and feeble. From thence he went on a brief tour
through Belgium, returning with another set-back from Rome owing to what
he had seen of the low intellectual state and morals of the Belgium
priesthood. It was during the period of his Ambleside tutorship that he
became acquainted with Wordsworth, whom he accompanied on long walks,
the elder poet 'muttering verses to himself' in the intervals of
conversation.