Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
our pulpit, though the noble patron made the request.) He was entirely
insensible to poetry, beauty, romance, and enthusiasm; but his mind was
essentially logical, and he followed his creed to its extremest
consequences. Baptismal grace, of course, he absolutely denied. He
prepared me for Confirmation, and he began his preparation by assailing
my faith in the Presence and the Succession. He defined Confirmation as
"a coming of age in the things of the soul." I perfectly remember a
sermon preached on "Sacrament Sunday," which ended with some such words
as these, "I go to yonder table to-day; not expecting to meet the Lord,
because I know He will not be there." I have seldom heard the doctrine
of the Real Absence stated with equal frankness.
All my religious associations were with the Evangelical school, of which
my parents were devoted adherents. My uncle, the Rev. Lord Wriothesley
Russell (1804-1886), had been a disciple of Charles Simeon at Cambridge,
but had completely discarded such fragments of Churchmanship as lingered
in his master's teaching. My mother (1810-1884) had been in early life
closely allied with "the Clapham Sect"; and our friendship with the last
survivor of that sect, Miss Marianne Thornton (1797-1887), linked us to
the Wilberforces, the Venns, and the Macaulays. My acquaintance with
Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885) I have always esteemed one of the chief
honours of my life. He combined in a singular degree the gifts which
make a Leader. He had an imperious will, a perfervid temper, unbounded
enthusiasm, inexhaustible energy. Any movement with which he was
connected he controlled. He brooked neither opposition nor criticism.
His authority was reinforced by advantages of aspect and station; by a
stately manner, by a noble and commanding eloquence. But all these gifts
were as nothing when compared with the power of his lifelong
consistency. When he was a boy at Harrow, a brutal scene at a pauper's
funeral awoke his devotion to the cause of the poor and helpless.
Seventy years later, when he lay on his deathbed, his only regret was
that he must leave the world with so much misery in it. From first to
last, he was an Evangelical of the highest and purest type, displaying
all the religious and social virtues of that school in their perfection.
Yet he left it on record that he had been more harshly treated by the
Evangelical party than by any other. Perhaps the explanation is that
those excellent people were only kicking against the pricks of a
too-absolute control.
Such were the religious associations of my early life; and I am deeply
thankful for them. I have found, by much experiment, that there is no
foundation on which the superstructure of Catholic religion can be more
securely built than on the Evangelical confession of man's utter
sinfulness, and of the free pardon purchased by the Blood of Christ. A
man trained in that confession may, without sacrificing a jot of his
earlier creed, learn to accept all that the Catholic Church teaches
about Orders and Sacraments; but to the end he will retain some
characteristic marks of his spiritual beginnings. For my own part, I
hold with Mr. Gladstone that to label oneself with an ecclesiastical
nickname would be to compromise "the first of earthly blessings--one's
mental freedom[64]"; but if anyone chose to call me a "Catholic
Evangelical," I should not quarrel with the designation.
I said in an earlier chapter that I had an inborn fondness for Catholic
ceremonial, and this, I suppose, was part of my general love of material
beauty. Amid such surroundings as I have described, it was a fondness
not easily indulged. When I was twelve years old, I was staying at
Leamington in August, and on a Holy Day I peeped into the Roman Church
there, and saw for the first time the ceremonies of High Mass; and from
that day on I longed to see them reproduced in the Church of England.
During one of our periodical visits to London, I discovered the
beautiful church in Gordon Square where the "Adherents of a Restored
Apostolate" celebrate Divine Worship with bewildering splendour. The
propinquity of our house to Westminster Abbey enabled me to enter into
the more chastened, yet dignified, beauty of the English rite. At Harrow
the brightness and colour of our School-Chapel struck my untutored eye
as "exceeding magnifical"; and the early celebrations in the Parish
Church had a solemnity which the Chapel lacked.
But the happiest memory of all is connected with a little Church[65]
about two miles from my home. It is a tiny structure of one aisle, with
the altar fenced off by a screen of carved oak. It served a group of
half a dozen houses, and it stood amid green fields, remote from
traffic, and scarcely visible except to those who searched for it. There
an enthusiastic and devoted priest spent five and twenty years of an
isolated ministry; and there, for the first time in our communion, I saw
the Divine Mysteries celebrated with the appropriate accessories.
My walks to that secluded altar, in the fresh brightness of summer
mornings, can never be forgotten until the whole tablet is blotted. On
the sky-line, the great masses of distant woodland, half-veiled in mist,
lay like a blue cloud. Within, there was "the fair white linen cloth
upon the wooden table, with fresh flowers above, and the worn slabs
beneath that record the dim names of the forgotten dead"; and there
"amid the faint streaks of the early dawn, the faithful, kneeling round
the oaken railing, took into their hands the worn silver of the Grail--
"The chalice of the Grapes of God."[66]
Perhaps it was just as well for a boy that these glimpses of beautiful
worship were few and far between. One was saved from the perils of a
mere externalism, and was driven inward on the unseen realities which
ceremonial may sometimes obscure. And then, when one got up to Oxford,
one found all the splendours of the sanctuary in rich abundance, and
enjoyed them with a whole-hearted self-abandonment. I need not repeat
what I have already said about St. Barnabas and Cowley and the other
strongholds of Catholic worship. I am eternally their debtor, and the
friends with whom I shared them have helped to shape my life.
But, in spite of all these enjoyments, religious life at Oxford between
1872 and 1876 was not altogether happy. A strong flood of Romanism burst
upon the University, and carried some of my best friends from my side;
and, concurrently with this disturbance, an American teacher attacked
our faith from the opposite quarter. He taught an absolute disregard of
all forms and rites, and, not content with the ordinary doctrine of
instantaneous conversion, preached the absolute sinlessness of the
believer. The movement which, in 1874, he set on foot was marked by
disasters, of which the nature can best be inferred from a
characteristic saying, "The believer's conflict with Sin is all stuff."
This teaching had its natural consequences, and the movement issued in
spiritual tragedy.
In the following year we were touched by the much more wholesome
enterprise of Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Their teaching was wholly free
from the perilous stuff which had defiled the previous mission; and
though it shook the faith of some who had cultivated the husk rather
than the kernel of ritualism, still all could join in the generous
tribute paid by Dr. Liddon on Whitsun Day, 1876:
"Last year two American preachers visited this country, to whom God had
given, together with earnest belief in some portions of the gospel, a
corresponding spirit of fearless enterprise. Certainly they had no such
credentials of an Apostolic Ministry as a well-instructed and believing
Churchman would require.... And yet, acting according to the light which
God had given them, they threw themselves on our great cities with the
ardour of Apostles; spoke of a higher world to thousands who pass the
greater part of life in dreaming only of this; and made many of us feel
that we owe them at least the debt of an example, which He Who breatheth
where He listeth must surely have inspired them to give us."[67]
When I came up to London after leaving Oxford, "the world was all before
me where to choose," and I made a pretty wide survey before deciding on
my habitual place of worship. St. Paul's Cathedral had lately awoke from
its long sleep, and, under the wise guidance of Church, Gregory, and
Liddon, was beginning to show the perfection of worship on the strict
line of the English Prayer-Book.
Being by temperament profoundly Gothic, I hold (with Sir William
Richmond) that Westminster Abbey is the most beautiful church in the
world. But it had nothing to offer in the way of seemly worship; and,
while Liddon was preaching the Gospel at St. Paul's, Dean Stanley at
Westminster was delivering the fine rhetoric and dubious history which
were his substitutes for theology, and with reference to which a Jewish
lady said to me, "I have heard the Dean preach for eighteen years, and I
have never heard a word from him which I could not accept." At the
Temple, Dr. Vaughan was at the height of his vogue, and Sunday after
Sunday was teaching the lawyers the effective grace of a nervous and
finished style.
All Saints, Margaret Street, St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, and St.
Barnabas, Pimlico, showed a type of worship refined, artistic, and
rather prim. St. Alban's, Holborn, "the Mother and Mistress" of all
ritualistic churches, combined Roman ceremonial with the passionately
Evangelical teaching of the greatest extempore preacher I have ever
heard, Arthur Stanton. St. Michael's, Shoreditch, and St. Peter's,
London Docks, were outposts of the ritualistic army. The Low Church
congregated at Portman Chapel, and Belgrave Chapel, and Eaton Chapel
(all since demolished), at St. Michael's, Chester Square, and St.
John's, Paddington. Broad Churchmen, as a rule, were hidden in holes and
corners; for the bizarre magnificence of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street,
had not yet superseded the humble structure in which Henry Blunt had
formerly preached into the Duchess of Beaufort's[68] ear-trumpet; and
St. Margaret's, Westminster, had only just begun to reverberate the
rolling eloquence of Dr. Farrar. At St. Peter's, Eaton Square, amid
surroundings truly hideous, George Wilkinson, afterward Bishop of St.
Andrews, dominated, sheerly by spiritual force, a congregation which,
having regard to the numbers, wealth, and importance of the men who
composed it, was the most remarkable that I have ever seen. Cabinet
Ministers, great noblemen, landed proprietors, Members of Parliament,
soldiers, lawyers, doctors, and "men about town," were the clay which
this master-potter moulded at his will.
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 at a ball till two, and then say 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 never been confirmed. Never too
late to mend. Join a Confirmation Class at once, and try to remedy, by
good example now, 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 St. Peter's pulpit in its days of
glory.
When I look back upon the Church in London as it was when I first knew