Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

GENERAL BRAMWELL BOOTH

Because General Booth wears a uniform he commands the public curiosity; but because of that curiosity the public perhaps misses his considerable abilities and his singular attraction. His worst enemy is his frogged coat. Attention is diverted from his head to his epaulettes. He deserves, I am convinced, a more intelligent inquisitiveness.

To begin with, he is to be regarded as the original founder of that remarkable and truly catholic body of Christians known as the Salvation Army. His picturesque father and his wonderful mother were the humanity of that movement, but their son was its first impulse of spiritual fanaticism. The father was the dramatic "showman" of this movement, the son its fire. The mother endowed it with the energy of a deep and tender emotion, the son provided it with machinery.

It was Mr. Bramwell Booth, with his young friend Mr. Railton abetting him, who, discontented with the dullness and conservatism of the Christian Mission, drove the Reverend William Booth, an ex-Methodist minister preaching repentance in the slums, to fling restraint of every kind to the winds and to go in for religion as if it were indeed the only thing in the world that counted. William Booth at that time was forty-nine years of age.

Again, it was Mr. Bramwell Booth, working behind the scenes and pulling all the strings, who edged his father away from concluding an alliance with the Church of England in the early eighties. Archbishop Benson was anxious to conclude that alliance, on terms. The terms did not seem altogether onerous to the old General, who was rather fond of meeting dignitaries. But Mr. Bramwell Booth would hear of no concession which weakened the Army's authority in the slums, and which would also eventually weaken its authority in the world. He refused to acknowledge any service or rite of the Church as essential to the salvation of men. If the Lord's Supper were essential the Army would have it; but the Army had proved that no other power was necessary to the working of miracles in the souls of men beyond the direct mercy of God acting on the centre of true penitence. He was the uncompromising protagonist of conversion, and his father came to agree with him.

Neither the old General nor his inspired wife, admirable as revivalists, had the true fire of fanaticism in their blood. They were too warm-hearted. That strange unearthly fire burns only to its whitest heat, perhaps, in veins which are cold and minds which are hard. It does not easily make its home in benevolent and philanthropic natures, certainly never in purely sentimental natures. I think its opening is made not by love but by hatred. A man may love God with all his heart, all his mind, and all his soul, without feeling the spur of fanaticism in his blood. But let him hate sin with only a part of his heart, mind, and soul, and he becomes a fanatic. His hatred will grow till it consumes his whole being.

One need not be long in the company of General Bramwell Booth to discover that he has two distinct and separate manners, and that neither expresses the whole truth of his rational life. At one moment he is full of cheerful good sense, the very incarnation of jocular heartiness, a bluff, laughing, rallying, chafing, and tolerant good fellow, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, oozing with the honey of social sweetness. At the next moment, however, the voice sinks suddenly to the key of what Father Knox, I am afraid, would call unctimoniousness, the eyelids flutter like the wings of a butterfly, the whole plump pendulous face appears to vibrate with emotion, the body becomes stiff with feeling, the lips depressed with tragedy, and the dark eyes shine with the suppressed tears of an unimaginable pathos.

In both of these moments there is no pretence. The two manners represent two genuine aspects of his soul in its commerce with mankind. He believes that the world likes to be clapped on the shoulder, to be rallied on its manifest inconsistencies, and to have its hand wrung with a real heartiness. Also he believes that the heart of the world is sentimental, and that an authentic appeal in that quarter may lead to friendship—a friendship which, in its turn, may lead to business. Business is the true end of all his heartiness.

It is in his business manner that one gets nearer to the innermost secret of his nature. He is before everything else a superb man of business, far-seeing, practical, hard-headed, an organiser of victory, a statesman of the human soul. You cannot speak to him in this practical sphere without feeling that he is a man of the most unusual ability.

He can outline a complicated scheme with a precision and an economy of words which, he makes you feel, is a tribute to your perspicacity rather than a demonstration of his own powers of exposition. He comes quicker to the point than nine men of business out of ten. And he sticks to the main point with a tenacity which might be envied by every industrial magnate in the country.

Moreover, when it comes to your turn to speak he listens with the whole of his attention strung up to its highest pitch, his eyes wide open staring at you, his mouth pursed up into a little O of suction, his fingers pressing to his ear the receiver of a machine which overcomes his deafness, his whole body leaning half across the table in his eagerness to hear every word you say.

No sentiment shows in his face, no emotion sounds in his voice. He is pure mind, a practical mind taut with attention. If he have occasion in these moments to ring the bell for an adjutant or a colonel, that official is addressed with the brevity and directness of a manager giving an order to his typist. Instead of a text over his mantelpiece one might expect to find the commercial legend, "Business Is Business."

Here, as I have said, one is nearer to the truth of his nature, for General Booth is an organiser who loves organisation, a diplomatist who delights in measuring his intelligence against the recalcitrance of mankind, a general who finds a deep satisfaction of soul in moving masses of men to achieve the purpose of his own design.

But even here one is not at the innermost secret of this extraordinary man's nature.

At the back of everything, I am convinced, is the cold and commanding intensity of a really great fanatic. He believes as no little child believes in God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, and the eternal conflict of God and Evil. He believes, too, as few priests of orthodox churches believe, that a man must in very truth be born again before he can inherit the Kingdom of Heaven; that is to say, before he can escape the unimaginable agonies of an eternal dismissal from the Presence of God. But more than anything else he believes that sin is hateful; a monstrous perversion to be attacked with all the fury of a good man's soul.

There is violence in his mind and violence in his religion. He believes in fighting the devil, and he delights in fighting him. I will not say that there is more joy at Salvation Army Headquarters over one poor miserable brand plucked from the burning than over ninety and nine cheques from wealthy subscribers; but I am perfectly confident that the pleasure experienced at the sight of all those welcome cheques has its rise in the knowledge that money is power—power to fight the devil.

No man of my knowledge is so strangely blended as this genius of Salvation Army organisation. For although he is first and foremost a calm statesman of religious fervour, cool-headed, clear-eyed, and deliberative, a man profoundly inspired by hatred of evil, yet there are moments in his life of almost superhuman energy when the whole structure of his mind seems to give way, and the spirit appears like a child lost in a dark wood and almost paralysed with fear. Not seldom he was in his father's arms sobbing over the sufferings of humanity and the hardness of the world's heart, mingling his tears with his father's. Often in these late days he is in sore need of Mrs. Bramwell Booth's level-headed good sense to restore his exhausted emotions. And occasionally, like Lord Northcliffe, it is wise for him to get away from the Machine altogether, to travel far across the world or to rest in a cottage by the sea, waiting for a return of the energy which consumes him and yet keeps him alive.

It is possible to think that this formidable apostle of conversion is himself a divided self. His house of clay, one might almost suggest, is occupied by two tenants, one of whom would weep over sinners, while the other can serve God only by cudgelling the Devil back to hell with imprecations of a rich and florid nature. This stronger self, because of its cudgel, is in command of the situation, but the whimpering of the other is not to be stilled by blows which, however hearty and devastating, have not yet brought the devil to his knees.

It is interesting to sit in conversation with this devoted disciple of evangelicalism, and occasionally to lift one's eyes from his face to the portrait of his mother which hangs above his head. The two faces are almost identical, hauntingly identical; so much so that one comes to regard the coachman-like whiskers clapped to the General's cheeks as in the nature of a disguise, thinking of him as his mother's eldest daughter rather than as his father's eldest son. There is certainly nothing about him which suggests the old General, and his mind is much more the mind of his mother—one of the most remarkable women in the world's history—than the mind of his father.

Catherine Booth was a zealot and at the heart of her theology a hard zealot. She believed that the physical agony of disease was a part of God's discipline, and that humanity is called upon to bear that fierce fire for the purification of its wicked spirit. She never flinched in confronting the theology of Methodism. She was in practice the tenderest of women, the most compassionate of missionaries, the most persuasive orator of the emotions in her day; but in theory she was as hard as steel.

Her husband, on the other hand, who threw Jehovah's thunderbolts across the world as if he liked them, and approved of them, and was ready for any further number of these celestial missiles, of an even vaster displacement, was in his heart of hearts a wistful believer in everlasting mercy. Few men have been born with a softer heart. He sometimes wondered whether in framing the Regulations of the Salvation Army he had not pressed too hard on human nature. To the horrified scandal of his son, he even came to question, if only for a passing moment, the ordinance which forbids tobacco to the Salvationist.

He used to say in his old age, ruminating over the past, "Our standard is high. Our demand is hard; aye, very hard. Yes, we don't mince matters in soul-saving. We demand the whole of a man, not a little bit of him, or three-fourths of him, or two-thirds of him; we demand every drop of his blood and every beat of his heart and every thought of his brain. Yes, it's a hard discipline—hard because the standard is so high. I hope it is not too hard."

His son has never once, so far as my knowledge goes, questioned even the extremest of Salvation Army Regulations. The more extreme they are, the more they please him. It is one of his many good sayings that you cannot make a man clean by washing his shirt. His scrubbing brush is apt, I think, to remove some of the skin with the dirt. He believes without question that the only human test of conversion is the uttermost willingness of the soul to be spent in the service of soul-saving. If a man wishes to keep anything back from God, his heart is not given to God. He is no emotionalist in this matter. He uses emotion to break down the resistance of a sinner, but when once the surrender is made reason takes command of the illumined soul. He was asked on one occasion if he did not regard emotion as a dangerous thing. "Not when it is organised," was his reply.

The only concession he seems willing to make to the critics of the Salvation Army is in the matter of its hymns. He confesses that some of those hymns are crude and unlovely; but examine this confession and you find that it is only the language which causes him uneasiness. Approach him on the subject of dogma, the dogma crudely expressed but truthfully expressed in the worst of those hymns, and he is as hard as Bishop Gore or Father Knox.

He has been too busy, I think, to hear even a whisper from the field of modernism, though exaggerated rumours of what is taking place in that field must occasionally reach his ear and confirm him in his obscurantism.

Perhaps it is all to the good that he should be thus wholly uninterested in the speculations of the trained theologian. He has other work to do, and work of great importance, with few rivals and no helpers. By the machine which he controls so admirably, men and women all over the world, and usually in the darkest places of the world, are turned from living disastrous lives, lives which too often involve the suffering of children, and encouraged and braced up to lead lives of great beauty and an extreme of self-sacrifice.

He does well, I think, to stick with the unwavering and uncompromising tenacity of a fanatic to that centre of the Christian religion from which was derived in the first two centuries of its great history almost all impetus which enabled it to escape from Judaism and conquer the world. It is still true, and I suppose it will remain true to the end of time, that man born of a woman must be born again of the spirit if he is to pass from darkness into light. This, after all, is the whole thesis of Salvationism, and if General Booth wavered here the Army would be scattered to the winds. As for his definitions of light and darkness, at this stage of the world's journey we need not be too nice in our acceptance of them.

But there remains the important question of Salvation Army methods.

It seems to me that here a change is desirable, not a radical change, for many of those methods are admirable enough, particularly those of which the public too seldom hears, but a change all the same, and one deep enough to create fresh sympathy for this devoted movement of evangelical Christianity.

I think it is time to stop praying and preaching at street corners, to mitigate the more brazen sounds of the Army band, and to discountenance all colloquialisms in Salvationist propaganda. I do not wish, God forbid, to make the Army respectable; I wish it to remain exactly where it is—but with a greater quietness and a deeper, more personal sympathy in its appeal to the sad and the sorrowful.

General Booth is not the man to make these changes, but his wife is a woman who might. In any case they will be made. Time will bring them about. Then it will be seen, I think, that the Salvation Army is one of the most powerful agencies in the world for spreading the good news of personal religion among the depressed millions of the human race. For even at this present time the lasting work of the Salvationist, the work which makes him so noble and so useful a figure in the modern world, is not accomplished by pageantry and tub-thumping, but by the intimate, often most beautiful, and very little known work of its slum officers, particularly the women.

Finally, concerning the General, he is in himself a telling witness to one of the mysterious powers of the Christian religion. For he is surely by temperament one of the most unstable of minds, and yet by the power of religion he has become a coherent personality of almost rigid singleness of purpose. In conversation with him one cannot help feeling that he is jumpy and excitable; every movement of his extremely mobile face suggests a soul of gutta-percha stretched in all directions by the movements of his brain, and twitching with every thought that crosses his mind; but at the same time one is aware in him of a power which is never deflected by a hair's breadth from the path of a single purpose, and which holds him together with a strength that may be weakened but that can never be broken.

His supreme value for the student of religion is to be found in the explanation of this unifying power. In spite of intellectual shortcomings which might seem almost to exclude him from the serious attention of educated people, he stands out with a marked emphasis from the company of far abler men by reason of this power—this sense of unusual vigour and abnormal concentration of strength. And the explanation of this power, which unifies an otherwise incoherent personality, is to be found, I am quite confident, in his burning hatred of iniquity.

As a boy, like the poet Gray and the late Lord Salisbury, he suffered a good deal of bullying, and thus learned at school something beyond the reach of the Latin Grammar, namely, the brutality of human nature. He has never forgotten that discovery. Indeed, his after-life has widened and intensified that early lesson. Sin is brutality. It is selfishness seeking its low pleasure and its base delight in vilest self-indulgence involving the suffering of others, sometimes their profoundest degradation, even their absolute destruction. Particularly did he experience this burning conviction when he came to understand the well-nigh inconceivable brutality of sexual vice. I believe that it was a poor harlot in the slums of London who first opened for him the door of fanaticism.

He had longed as a schoolboy to hit back at his tyrants, and now in the dawn of manhood that long repression made its weight felt in the blows he showered on the face of evil. For a year or two he was a wild man of evangelicalism, leading attacks on evil, challenging public attention, seeking imprisonment, courting martyrdom. It was from the flaming indignation of his soul that Mr. Stead took fire, and led a crusade against impurity which shocked the conscience of the eighties. But so deep and eternal was this hatred of evil, that General Booth soon came to see that he must express it in some manner which would outlive the heady moments of a "lightning campaign." He settled down to express that profound abhorrence of iniquity in terms of organisation. Tares might be torn suddenly from the human heart, but not the root of evil. If he could not kill the devil, at least he could circumvent him.

Such intense hatred of evil as still consumes his being is not popular in these days, and may perhaps be regarded as irrational. But we should do well to remind ourselves that while those who regard evil merely as a vestigial memory of human evolution do little or nothing to check its ravages, men like General Booth, and the men and women inspired by his abhorrence, save every year from physical and moral destruction thousands of unhappy people who become at once the apostles of an extreme goodness.

Such evidences of mediocrity as exist in the Salvationist are purely intellectual; morally and spiritually he is in the advance guard of the human race.

DR. W.E. ORCHARD

ORCHARD, Rev. WILLIAM EDWIN, Minister of the King's Weigh House Church, Duke Street, W., since 1914; b. 20 Nov., 1887; e.s. of John Orchard, Rugby; m. 1904, Anna Maria (d. 1920), widow of Rev. Ellis Hewitt of Aldershot. Educ.: Board School; private tuition; Westminster College, Cambridge. Ordained, Enfield, 1904, B.D., London, 1905; D.D., London, 1909.

DR. W.E. ORCHARD

Until quite the other day I looked upon Dr. Orchard as a person unique in his generation. But I am now told by an authority in the nonconformist world that there are "two others of him"—one, I think, in Birmingham, the second in Clapham.

I am still permitted to think, however, that to Dr. Orchard belongs the distinction of being the first person of this erratic trinity, and therefore we may still regard him with that measure of curiosity which is the tribute paid by simple people to the eccentric and the abnormal.

But let me warn the reader against expectations of an original genius. Dr. Orchard does not create; he copies. His innovations are all made after visits to the lumber-room. It is by going back such a long distance into the past that he startles, and by coming round full circle that he appears to surprise the future.

But where originality is rare, eccentricity must not be discounted.

Dr. Orchard is a ritualist in the midst of nonconformity; the first Free Churchman, I believe, to entertain exalted ceremonial aspirations, and to kneel for his orders at the feet of an orthodox bishop. One might almost hazard the conjecture that he remains in the Congregationalist Communion, as so many Anglo-Catholics remain in the Establishment, solely to supply the fermentation of an idea which will shatter its present constitution. One thinks of him as a repentant Cromwell restoring "that bauble" to its accustomed place on the table of tradition.

In his heart of hearts he would appear to be a fervent institutionalist, a lover of ceremonial, and a convinced sacerdotalist. To hear him use the word Catholic is to make one understand how the Church of Rome dazzles certain eyes, and to hear him claim that he is in the apostolical succession is to make one realise afresh how broad is the way of credulity.

One may understand his dislike of the hideous and pretentious architecture which disgraces non-conformity, and sympathise with his desire for more beautiful services in nonconformist chapels; but it is not so easy, while he remains a nonconformist, to understand, or to feel any considerable degree of sympathy with, his tendency towards practices which are the very antithesis of the nonconformist tradition.

All the same he is a person of whom we should do well to take at least a passing notice, for he witnesses, however extravagantly, to a movement in the Free Churches which is not likely to lose momentum with the next few years—a movement not only away from sectarian isolation but towards the idea of one catholic and apostolic Church. There is certainly unrest in the Free Churches, and Dr. Orchard is a straw which helps us to understand if not the permanent direction of the wind, at least the fact that there is a breeze blowing in the fields of religious freedom.

Not long ago I asked one of the greatest figures in the Anglican Church what he thought of Dr. Orchard. He replied by raising his eyebrows and exclaiming rather disdainfully: "A ritualistic Dissenter! What is it possible to think of him?" I said that he attracted a good many people to his services in the King's Weigh House Church, and that I had heard Mrs. Asquith was sometimes a member of his congregation. "That," answered the dignitary, "would not make me think any higher of Dr. Orchard."

For many people, it must be confessed, he is a slightly ludicrous figure. He presents the spectacle of a sparrow stretching its wings and opening its beak to imitate the eagle of catholic lecterns. And he has a singularly nettling manner with some people which must add, I should think, to this unpopularity. He seems sweepingly satisfied with himself and his opinions, which are mostly of a challenging nature. He does not discuss but attempts to browbeat. His voice is an argument, and the expression on his face and the fire in his eyes suggest the street corner. He would have greatly distressed a man like Matthew Arnold, for the only method against such didactics is to send for the boxing gloves.

All the same he is a man of no little force, perhaps a scattered and dispersed force, as I am inclined to think; and he is a fighter whose blows, if not a teacher whose opinions, are more worthy of attention than his sacerdotal pretensions might lead one to suppose.

In appearance he may be compared with Dr. Clifford, but Dr. Clifford reduced to youthfulness and multiplied by an infinite cocksureness; a small, eager, sandy-haired, clean-shaven, boyish-looking man, with light-coloured eyes behind shining spectacles, the head craning forward, the body elastic and restless with inexhaustible energy, the whole of him—body, mind, and spirit—tremulous with a jerkiness of being which seems to have no effect whatever on his powers of endurance.

One misses in him all feeling, all tone, of mellowness. His mind, at present, shows no lightest, trace of the hallowing marks of time; it suggests rather the very architecture he takes so savage a pleasure in denouncing—a kind of mock Gothic mind, an Early Doulton personality. He has a thin voice, rather husky, and a recent accent.

In his most vigorous moments, when he is bubbling over with epigrams and paradoxes, ridiculing the dull people who do not agree with him, and laughing to scorn those who think they can maintain the Christian spirit outside the mysterious traditions of the Catholic Church, or when he is describing a recent church as a Blancmange Cathedral, and paraphrasing an account, given I think by Mr. James Douglas, of the building of a certain tabernacle in London—first it started out to be a Jam Factory, then a happy idea occurred to the builder that he should turn it into a Waterworks, then the foreman suggested that it would make an ideal swimming-bath, but finally the architect came on the scene and said, "Here, half a minute; there's an alteration wanted here; we're going to make it into a church"—at such moments, Dr. Orchard might be likened to a duo-decimo Chesterton—but a Chesterton of nonconformity. For he is a little crude, a little recent; a mind without mellowness, a spirit without beauty, a soul which feeds upon aggression.

He makes an amusing figure with a black cloak wrapped round his little body in Byronic folds, and a soft hat of black plush on his head, a Vesta Tilley quickness informing both his movements and his speech, as he nips forward in conversation with a friend, the arms, invisible beneath their cloak, pressed down in front of him, his body leaning forward, his peering eyes dancing behind their spectacles.

Nevertheless, those who most find him only amusing or worse still thoroughly dislikeable, who are antipathetic to the whole man, and who thus cannot come at the secret of his influence, must confess that there is nothing about him either of the smooth and oily or of the adroit and compromising. He is the last man on earth to be called an opportunist. This is in his favour. His aggressiveness must put all but the toughest against him. He is tremendously in earnest. It would be difficult I think to exceed his sincerity.

But not to mind whose toes one may tread on is hardly in the style of St. Francis; and, after all, it is possible to be tremendously earnest about wrong things, and consumingly sincere in matters which are not perhaps definitely certain to advance the higher life of the human race. Humility is always safest; indeed, it is essential to all earnestness and sincerity, if those energies are not to repel as many as they attract.

Dr. Orchard's manner, which can be extraordinarily nettling in conversation, as I have suggested, is evidently of a very soothing character in the confessional—if that is the proper term. He has a remarkable following among women, and it is said that "if he put a brass plate on his door and charged five guineas a time" he might be one of the richest mind-doctors in London. He himself declares that his real work is almost entirely personal. I have heard him speak with some contempt of preaching, quoting the witticism of a friend that "Anglican preaching is much worse than it really need be," or words to that effect. He likes ceremonial and private confidence. He has the instincts of a priest.

His patients appear to be the wreckage of psychoanalysis. It is said that "half the neurotics of London" consult him about their souls. I have no idea of the manner in which he treats these unhappy people, but I am perfectly sure that he gives them counsel of a healthy nature. There is nothing about him which suggests unwholesomeness, and much that suggests sound strength and clean good sense. Also among his penitents are numerous shopgirls who have lost in the commercial struggle whatever piety they possessed in childhood and in their craving for excitement have gone astray from the path of safe simplicity—gambling on horse races and often getting into serious trouble by their losses. Dr. Orchard may be trusted to give these weak, rather than erring daughters of London, advice which would commend itself to the Free Church Council, for with all his sacerdotal aberrations the basis of his moral life is rooted in Puritanism.

It is an entirely good thing that there should be a minister of religion in London who attracts people of this order, particularly a minister whose moral notions are so eminently sane and so steadily uncompromising. London is stronger and less disreputable for Dr. Orchard's presence in its midst—no doubt a very vulgar, degrading, and trivial midst, but all the same a great congestion of little people, one where the solemn note of the old morality sounds all too seldom across the tinkle of bells in the caps of so many fools.

This moral influence, however, may appear questionable in the eyes of strong-minded and unsentimental people. Would he exercise such personal power, it may be asked, if he were not regarded as a "novelty," if the eccentricity of his position in the nonconformist world had not so skilfully advertised him to a light and foolish generation ever ready to run after what is new? Of an Anglican clergyman's popularity I have heard it said, "Who could not fill a church with the help of the band of the Grenadier Guards?"

I should not like to answer this question, and yet I do not like to pass it by. Antipathetic as I find myself to Dr. Orchard, it would not be just to imply that the power of his personal influence is not a great one, and one of an entirely wholesome nature. It seems to me, then, that the nature of that which attracts the unhappy to seek his counsel is of small moment in comparison with the extent and beneficence of his good counsel. The fact that he does help people, does save many people from very unhappy and dangerous situations, is a fact which gives him a title not only to our respect, but to our gratitude.

Perhaps it is his knowledge of all this petty misery and sordid unwholesomeness which makes him disposed at times, in spite of an almost rollicking temperament, to take dismal and despairing views of the religious future.

I have heard him say with some bitterness that people do not know what Christianity is, that it has been so misrepresented to them, and so mixed up with the quarrels of sectarianism, that the heart of it is really non-existent for the multitude. He speaks with impatience of the nonconformist churches and with contempt of the Anglican church. We are all wrong together. Organised religion, he feels, is hanging over the abyss of destruction, while the nation looks on with an indifference which should complete its self-contempt.

His quarrel, however, is not only with the churches, but with the nation as well. He regards the system under which we live as thoroughly unchristian. It is the system of mammon—a system of frank, brutal, and insolent materialism. Why do we put up with it?

His religious sense is so outraged by this system of economic individualism that he bursts out with irritable impatience against those who speak of infusing into it a more Christian spirit. For him the whole body of our industrialism is rotten with selfishness and covetousness, the high note of service entirely absent from it, the one energy which informs it the energy of aggressive self-seeking. Such a system cannot be patched. It is anti-Christian. It should be smashed.

He plunges into economics with a good deal of vigour, but I do not think he has thought out to its logical conclusion his thesis of guild socialism. Perhaps his tone is here more vehement than his knowledge of a notoriously difficult science altogether justifies.

He opposes himself to the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century, and is ready to defend the idea of a Fall of Man. His contribution to theology is a quibble. The old dogmas are to stand: only the language is to be adjusted to the modern intelligence. You may picture him with drawn sword—a sword tempered in inquisitorial fires—standing guard over his quibble and ready to defend it with his spiritual life.

His opinions are apt to place him among minorities. He was against the War, and during that long-drawn agony attracted to himself the mild attention of the authorities. I believe he likened the great struggle to a battle between Sodom and Gomorrah. However, he was careful not to go so far as Mr. Bertrand Russell. As he himself says, "I don't mind dying for Jesus Christ, but not for making a silly ass of myself."

He occasionally writes reviews for The Nation, and has published a number of uneventful books. His writing is not distinguished or illuminating. With a pen in his hand he loses all his natural force. He writes, I think, as one who feels that he is wasting time. Like Mr. Winston Churchill, he diverts his leisure with a paintbrush.

One is disposed to judge that the mind of this very fiery particle is too busy with side-issues to make acquaintance with the deeper mysteries of his religion. When he complains that people do not know what Christianity is, one wonders whether his own definition would satisfy the saints. He is a fighter rather than a teacher, a man of action rather than a seer. I do not think he could be happy in a world which presented him with no opportunities for punching heads.

Matthew Arnold, quoting from The Times a sentence to the effect that the chief Dissenting ministers are becoming quite the intellectual equals of the ablest of the clergy, referred it to the famous Dr. Dale of Birmingham, and remarked: "I have no fears concerning Mr. Dale's intellectual muscles; what I am a little uneasy about is his religious temper. The essence of religion is grace and peace."

But Dr. Orchard, we must not fail to see, is quite genuinely exasperated by the deadness of religious life, and is straining every nerve to quicken the soul of Christ's sleeping Church. This discontent of his is an important symptom, even if his prescription, a very old one, gives no hope of a cure. He is popular, influential, a figure of the day, and still young; yet his soul is full of rebellion and his heart is swelling with the passion of mutiny. Something is evidently not right. Quite certainly he has not discovered the peace that passes understanding.

But perhaps Dr. Orchard will never be satisfied till all men think as he thinks, and until there is only one Church in the world for the expression of spiritual life, with either Bishop Herford or himself for its pope.

In the meantime he is too busy for the profound silence. The event of the day sweeps him before it.

BISHOP TEMPLE

Manchester, Bishop of, since 1921; Temple, Rev. William, M.A.; D. Litt.; President Life and Liberty Movement; Canon Residentiary of Westminister, 1919-21; Editor of The Challenge, 1915-18; Hon. Chaplain to the King, 1915; b. The Palace, Exeter, 15 Oct., 1881; s. of Late Archbishop of Canterbury; in. 1916, Frances Gertrude Acland, y.d. of F.H. Anson, 72 St. George's Square, S.W. Educ.: Rugby (Scholar); Balliol College, Oxford (Exhibitioner) First class Classical Mods., 1902; 1st class Lit. Hum., 1904; President Oxford Union, 1904; Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy, Queen's College, Oxford, 1904-1910; Deacon, 1908; Priest, 1909; Chaplain to Archbishop of Canterbury, 1910; President of the Workers Educational Association; Headmaster, Repton School, 1910-14; Rector of St. James's Piccadilly, 1914-18.