Occasional Papers by R.W. Church

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It was a position open to obvious and formidable criticism; but against
this criticism is to be set the fact, that in a long and energetic
life, in which amidst great trials and changes there was a singular
uniformity and consistency of character maintained, he did unite the
two--the most devout Christianity with the most fearless and
unshrinking boldness in facing the latest announcements and
possibilities of modern thought. That he always satisfactorily
explained his point of view to others is more than can be said; but he
certainly satisfied numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were
discontented and disheartened both by religion as it is presented by
our great schools and parties, and by science as its principles and
consequences are expounded by the leading philosophical authorities of
the day. The other point to which we have adverted partly explains the
influence which he had with such minds. He had no system to formulate
or to teach. He was singularly ready to accept, as adequate expressions
of those truths in whose existence he so persistently believed, the old
consecrated forms in which simpler times had attempted to express them.
He believed that these truths are wider and vaster than the human mind
which is to be made wiser and better by them. And his aim was to reach
up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonious hold of these
truths, which in their essential greatness he felt to be above him; to
reach to it in life as much as in thought. And so to the end he was
ever striving, not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and
core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life and
significance of the letter, of which he was always loth to refuse the
traditional form. In these efforts at unfolding and harmonising there
was considerable uniformity; no one could mistake Mr. Maurice's manner
of presenting the meaning and bearing of an article of the Creed for
the manner of any one else; but the result of this way of working, in
the effect of the things which he said, and in his relations to
different bodies of opinion and thought both in the Church and in
society, was to give the appearance of great and important changes in
his teaching and his general point of view, as life went on. This
governing thought of his, of the immeasurably transcendent compass and
height of all truths compared with the human mind and spirit which was
to bow to them and to gain life and elevation by accepting them,
explains the curious and at present almost unique combination in him,
of deep reverence for the old language of dogmatic theology, and an
energetic maintenance of its fitness and value, with dissatisfaction,
equally deep and impartially universal, at the interpretations put on
this dogmatic language by modern theological schools, and at the modes
in which its meaning is applied by them both in directing thought and
influencing practice. This habit of distinguishing sharply and
peremptorily between dogmatic language and the popular reading of it at
any given time is conspicuous in his earliest as in his latest handling
of these subjects; in the pamphlet of 1835, _Subscription no Bondage_,
explaining and defending the old practice at Oxford; and in the papers
and letters, which have appeared from him in periodicals, on the
Athanasian Creed, and which are, we suppose, almost his last writings.

The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as
was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more
than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and
comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal
one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to
remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not
altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral
characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at
any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of
statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just
as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care
for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he
considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of
varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of
expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between
a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete
and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist's aim was
high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the
imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other
cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal
shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from
their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their
own account and by their own title the deference of all who read them;
and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted
to see--the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is,
no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men's experience
and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to
see with another's eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice's desire to
give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in
his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others
from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his
place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.

But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness,
and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with
one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and
unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school
and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him
here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those
who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand
simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the
irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They
remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of
singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of
interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the
hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of
our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he
took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on
debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a
philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his
great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the
modern English Church may well be proud.

XX

SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]

[23]
_Guardian_, 26th March 1873.

General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English
travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have
heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated
with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present
with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may
remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly,
the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps
the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a
type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim
on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his
name was much in men's mouths. He was prominent in a band of
distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by
what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved
self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion,
and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in
favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have
followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of
revolutions--the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless
tyranny of the Turks.

He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had
taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting
from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations,
and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign
in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir
Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the
shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the
most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more
irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of
personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to
himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His
adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy,
his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high
spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks,
not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to
English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and
that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and
resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose
characteristic faults they were impatient.

His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young
staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity,
activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had
he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for
English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among
those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps
which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty
numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening
demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this
service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and
his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was
commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek
irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania,
from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare,
half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek
highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The
operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great
account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made
Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were
hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of
the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium
of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies
which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the
decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the
English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy
in 1814 and 1815.

At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was
tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had
left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary
freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and
resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it
down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and
threats of assassination; he was known to be no sanguinary and
merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and
inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet
with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the
scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at
last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his
fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can
show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts
resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which,
as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown
less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after
it--his unshaken, silent fortitude, the power with which he kept
together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened
volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them,
the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face
of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so
earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare
customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to
the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from
the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new
nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up
everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all
prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the
necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could
command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his
lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to
take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he
has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps
the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who
permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for
another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared,
for good and for evil, their fortunes.

For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of
the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the
Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in
modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part
in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence
on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was
not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But
whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there
never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his
opponents--enemies he could scarcely be said to have--as to the
straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything
that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one
deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had
pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the
intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free
from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so
natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece
and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of
truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and
shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that
might be risked in his presence.

The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more
and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of
Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man
who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return.
His blameless unselfishness, his noble elevation of character, were a
warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to
the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no
one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more
anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to
the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be
rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of
self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit,
public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church
has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them
for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but
in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to
impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English
principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and
that noble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in
vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and,
some of them, to love it.

XXI

DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]

[24]
_Guardian_, 23rd July 1873.

The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this
week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity,
the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country
on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at
last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as
people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at
railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible
tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had
been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial
of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our
generation had passed away from the scene in which his part was so
large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst
of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a
friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking
forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet
Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant
country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville
remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He
was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of
the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of
trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited
them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a
slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself
unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things
earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind.
It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a
lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.

A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and
appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is
that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the
proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and
opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any
circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us,
probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among
us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of
each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying
circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see
him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial
disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the
true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance
and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we
are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of
it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
both in the Church and the country.

For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there
is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond
dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has
seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the
greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who
most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the
Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately
fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this
because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his
versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that
interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of
thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or
persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals,
though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his
powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect,
but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at
once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society,
to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to
enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic
congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and
not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the
surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the
whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges,
disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was
often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as
unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking
that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not
likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing
difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to
evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for
ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.

But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the
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.

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