Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

BISHOP TEMPLE

The future of Bishop Temple is of more importance to the Church than to himself. He is one of those solid and outstanding men whose decisions affect a multitude, a man to whom many look with a confidence which he himself, perhaps, may never experience.

He cannot, I think, be wholly unaware of this consideration in forming his judgments, and I attribute, rather to a keen and weighty sense of great responsibility than to any lack of vital courage, his increasing tendency towards the Catholic position. One begins to think that he is likely to disappoint many of those who once regarded him as the future statesman of a Christianity somewhat less embarrassed by institutionalism.

It is probable, one fears, that he may conclude at Lambeth a career in theology comparable with that of Mr. Winston Churchill in politics. Born in the ecclesiastical purple he may return to it, bringing with him only the sheaves of an already mouldering orthodoxy.

On one ground, however, there is hope that he may yet shine in our uneasy gloom with something more effective than the glow of phosphorescence. He is devoted heart and soul to Labour. Events, then, may drive him out of his present course, and urge him towards a future of signal usefulness; for Labour is a force which waits upon contingency, and moves as the wind moves—now softly, then harshly, now gently, then with great violence. Those who go with Labour are not like travellers in the Tory coach or the Liberal tram; they are like passengers in a balloon.

I do not mean that Bishop Temple will ever be so far swept out of his course as to find himself among the revolutionaries; he carries too much weight for that, is, indeed, too solid a man altogether for any lunatic flights to the moon; I mean, rather, that where the more reasonable leaders of Labour are compelled to go by the force of political and industrial events, William Temple is likely to find that he himself is also expected, nay, but obliged to go, and very easily that may be a situation from which the Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace will appear rather romantically if not altogether hopelessly remote.

His career, then, like Mr. Winston Churchill's in politics, is still an open event and therefore a matter for interesting speculation. This fair-haired, fresh-faced, and boylike Bishop of Manchester, smiling at us behind his spectacles, the square head very upright, the broad shoulders well back, the whole short stocky figure like a rock, confronts us with something of the challenge of the Sphinx.

One of the chief modernists said to me the other day: "Temple is the most dangerous man in the Church of England. He is not only a socialist, he is also Gore's captive, bow and spear." But another, by no means an Anglo-Catholic, corrected this judgment. "Temple," said he, "is not yet hopelessly Catholic. He has, indeed, attracted to himself by his Christlike attitude towards Nonconformists the inconvenient attentions of that remarkable person the Bishop of Zanzibar. His sympathies with Labour, which are the core of his being, are sufficient reason for ——'s mistrust of him. I do not at all regard him as dangerous. On the contrary, I think he is one of the most interesting men in the Church, and also, which is far more important, one of its most promising leaders."

So many men, so many opinions. Strangely enough it is from an Anglo-Catholic who is also a Labour enthusiast that I hear the fiercest and most uncompromising criticism of this young Bishop of Manchester.

"All his successes have been failures. He went to Repton with a tremendous reputation; did nothing; went to St. James's, Piccadilly, as a man who would set the Thames on fire, failed, and went to Westminster with a heightened reputation; left it for the Life and Liberty Movement, which has done nothing, and then on to Manchester as the future Archbishop of Canterbury. What has he done? What has he ever done?

"He can't stick at anything; certainly he can't stick at his job—always he must be doing something else. I don't regard him as a reformer. I regard him as a talker. He has no strength. Sometimes I think he has no heart. Intellectual, yes; but intellectual without pluck. I don't know how his brain works. I give that up. I agree, he joined the Labour movement before he was ordained. There I think he is sincere, perhaps devoted. But is there any heart in his devotion? Do the poor love him? Do the Labour leaders hail him as a leader? I don't think so. Perhaps I'm prejudiced. Whenever I go to see him, he gives me the impression that he has got his watch in his hand or his eye on the clock. An inhuman sort of person—no warmth, no sympathy, not one tiniest touch of tenderness in his whole nature. No. Willie Temple is the very man the Church of England doesn't want."

Finally, one of those men in the Anglo-Catholic Party to whom Dr. Temple looks up with reverence and devotion, said to me in the midst of generous laudation: "His trouble is that he doesn't concentrate. He is inclined to leave the main thing. But I hear he is really concentrating on his work at Manchester, and therefore I have hopes that he will justify the confidence of his friends. He is certainly a very able man, very; there can be no question of that."

It will be best, I think, to glance first of all at this question of ability.

Dr. Temple has a notable gift of rapid statement and pellucid exposition. One doubts if many theologians in the whole course of Christian history have covered more ground more trippingly than Dr. Temple covers in two little books called The Faith and Modern Thought, and The Kingdom of God. His wonderful powers of succinct statement may perhaps give the impression of shallowness; but this is an entirely false impression—no impression could indeed be wider of the mark. His learning, though not so wide as Dean Inge's, nor so specialised as the learning of Canon Barnes, is nevertheless true learning, and learning which has been close woven into the fabric of his intellectual life. There are but few men in the Church of England who have a stronger grip on knowledge; and very few, if any at all, who can more clearly and vividly express in simple language the profoundest truths of religion and philosophy.

In order to show his quality I will endeavour to summarise his arguments for the Existence of God, with as many quotations from his writings as my space will permit.

"It is not enough to prove," he says, "that some sort of Being exists. In the end, the only thing that matters is the character of that Being." But how are we to set out on this quest since "Science will not allow us a starting point at all"?

He answers that question by carrying the war into the scientific camp, as he has a perfect right to do. "Science makes one colossal assumption always; science assumes that the world is rational in this sense, that when you have thought out thoroughly the implications of your experience, the result is fact. . . . That is the basis of all science; it is a colossal assumption, but science cannot move one step without it."

This demand for "a coherent and comprehensive statement of the whole field of fact" comes solely from reason. How do we get it? We have no ground in experience for insisting that the world shall be regarded as intelligent, as "all hanging together and making up one system." But reason insists upon it. This gives us "a kinship between the mind of man and the universe he lives in."

Now, when man puts his great question to the universe, and to every phenomenon in that universe, Why?—Why is this what it is, what my reason recognises it to be? is he not in truth asking, What is this thing's purpose? What is it doing in the universe? What is its part in the coherent system of all-things-together?

Dr. Temple holds fast to that great word that infallible clue, Purpose. He is not arguing from design. He keeps his feet firmly on scientific ground, and asks, as a man of science asks, What is this? and Why is this? Then he finds that this question can proceed only from faith in coherence, and discovers that the quest of science is quest of Purpose.

To investigate Purpose is obviously to acknowledge Will.

Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it. But is this hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of Mahomet's coffin? Is it not to be investigated? For if atheism is irrational, agnosticism is not scientific—"it is precisely a refusal to apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop."

People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what they know that they entirely forget "the perfectly astounding fact that they know it." Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of spiritual individuality; "because I am I, I am not anybody else." But let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of himself in relation to the Creator's Will.

If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will. But, as we have seen, "to speak about an immanent will is nonsense":

He pronounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to be soluble. Why is there no problem of good? Note well, that "the problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing? "While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . . But would it?"

His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics:

But if it is self-will, he asks, how is it to be overcome?

All this seems to me admirably said. It does at least show that there are clear, logical, and practical reasons for the religious hypothesis. The mind of man, seeking to penetrate the physical mysteries of the universe, encounters Mind. Mind meets Mind. Reason recognises, if it does not always salute, Reason. And in this rational and evolving universe the will of man has a struggle with itself, a struggle on which man clearly sees the fortunes of his progress, both intellectual and spiritual, depend. Will recognises Will. And surveying the history of his race he comes to a standstill of love and admiration before only one life—

Love recognises Love. "I am the Light of the World."

I will give a few brief quotations from Dr. Temple's pages showing how he regards the revelation of the Creative Will made by Christ, Who "in His teaching and in His Life is the climax of human ethics."

One may form, I think, a true judgment of the man from these few extracts.

He is one who could not move an inch without a thesis, and who moves only by inches even when he has got his thesis. His intellect, I mean, is in charge of him from first to last. He feels deeply, not sharply. He loves truly, not passionately. With his thesis clear in his mind, he draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then, with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being, moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing. Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily, take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is perfectly sure of striking home.

You must not think of him as old beyond his years (he is only a little over forty) but rather as one who was wise from his youth up. He has never flung himself with emotion into any movement of the human mind, not because he lacks devotion, but because he thinks the victories of emotion are often defeats in disguise. He wishes to be certain. He will fight as hard as any man, but intelligently, knowing that it will be a fight to the last day of his life. He is perhaps more careful to last than to win—an ecclesiastical Jellicoe rather than a Beatty. Nor, I think, must one take the view of the critic that he has never stuck to the main point. Every step in his career, as I see it, has been towards opportunity—the riskless opportunity of greater service and freer movement.

I regard him as a man whose full worth will never be known till he is overtaken by a crisis. I can see him moving smoothly and usefully in times of comparative peace to the Primacy, holding that high office with dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade. But I cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of distrust one may feel in his strength—not of character—but of personality. He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat? I am not sure. On the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not been born in the episcopal purple.

By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great, but who has the seeds of greatness in him. Events may prove him greater than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be. A crisis, either in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather blurs the individual outline of his soul. But, even with the dissipation of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition. He does not, at present, convince one of original force.

Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of the Church, and so perhaps of the nation. For from his boyhood up the Kingdom of God has meant to him a condition here upon earth in which the soul of man, free from all oppression, can reach gladly up towards the heights of spiritual development.

He hates in his soul the miserable state to which a conscienceless industrialism has brought the daily life of mankind. He lays it down that "it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of brotherhood and fellowship." To this end he has brought about an important council of masters and men who are investigating with great thoroughness the whole economic problem, so thoroughly that the Bishop will not receive their report, I understand, till 1923—a report which may make history.

As a member of the Society of Spirits, he says, "I have a particular destiny to fulfil." He is a moral being, conscious of his dependence on other men. He traces the historic growth of the moral judgment:

And so we come at last to "the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Christ, and the supreme law of ethics, the demonstrably final law of ethics, is laid down—Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

To a man who believes that Christ came to set up the Kingdom of God, clearly neither the Conservative nor Liberal Party can appeal with any compelling force of divinity. How far the Labour Party may appeal must depend, I should think on the man's knowledge of economic law. As Dean Inge says, Christ's sole contribution to economics is "Beware of covetousness"—an injunction which the Labour Party has not yet quite taken to its heart. But Dr. Temple has a right to challenge his clerical critics for Christ's sanction of the present system, which is certainly founded on covetousness and produces strikingly hideous results.

His theological position may be gathered from the following reply which he made, as a Canon of Westminster, to a representative of the Daily Telegraph nearly two years ago. I do not think he has greatly changed. He was asked how far the Church could go in meeting that large body of opinion which cannot accept some of its chief dogmas. He replied:

Then, writes the interviewer, arose the question of fervour. "Can the City of God be established without some powerful impulse of the human heart? Can it ever be established, for example, by the detached and self satisfied intellectual priggishness of the subsidised sixpenny review, or by the mere violence of the Labour extremist's oratory? Must there not be something akin to the evangelical enthusiasm of the last century, something of a revivalist nature? And yet have we not outgrown anything of the kind?

"To Canon Temple the answer presents itself in this way: Rarer than Christian charity is Christian faith. The supreme realism is yet to come, namely, the realisation of Christ as a living Person, the realisation that He truly meant what He said, the realisation that what He said is of paramount importance in all the affairs of human life. When mankind becomes consciously aware of the Christian faith as a supreme truth, then there will be a realistic effort to establish the City of God. The first step, then, is for the Church to make itself something transcendently different from the materialistic world. It must truly mean what it says when it asserts the morality of Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. The fervour is not to be born of an individual fear of hell or an individual anxiety for celestial safety, but of an utterly unselfish enthusiasm for the welfare of the world."

I should give a false impression of this very interesting man, who is so sincere and so steadfast, if I did not mention the significant fact of his happiness. He has always struck me, in spite of his formidable intellect and a somewhat pedagogic front and the occasional accent of an ancient and scholarly ecclesiasticism, as one of the happiest and most boy-like of men—a man whose centre must be cloudlessly serene, and who finds life definitely good. His laughter indeed, is a noble witness to the truth of a rational and moral existence. His strength is as the strength of ten, not only because his heart is pure, but because he has formulated an intelligent thesis of existence.

He has pointed out that the Pickwick Papers could not have been produced in any but a Christian country. "Satire you may get to perfection in pagan countries. But only in those countries where the morality of Christ has penetrated deeply do you get the spirit that loves the thing it laughs at."

PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE

SELBIE, Rev. WM. BOOTHBY, M.A.; Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, since 1909; b. Chesterfield, 24 Dec., 1862; e.s. of late Rev. R.W. Selbie, B.A. of Salford; m. Mildred Mary, 2d d. of late Joseph Thompson, J.P., LL.D., of Wilmslow, Cheshire; two s. one d. Educ.: Manchester Grammar School; Brasenose and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford; incorporated M.A., at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1904; Hon. D.D. Glasgow, 1911. Lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament at Mansfield College, Oxford, 1889-90; Minister Highgate Congregational Church, London, 1890-1902; Emmanuel Congregational Church, Cambridge, 1902-1909; Editor of the British Congregationalist, 1899-1909; Lecture in Pastoral Theology at Cheshunt College, Cambridge, 1907-1909; Chairman of Congregational Union, 1914-1915; President of National Free Church Council, 1917.

PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE

Mansfield College, Oxford, has been happy in its Principals. Dr. Fairbairn created respect for Nonconformity in the very citadel of High Anglicanism; Dr. Selbie has converted that respect into friendship. There is no man of note or power at Oxford who does not speak with real affection of this devoted scholar, who has been dubbed up there "an inspired mouse."

He is a little man, with quick darting movements, a twinkling bright eye, an altogether unaggressive voice, and a manner that is singularly insinuating and appealing. As it is impossible to think of a blustering or brow-beating mouse, or a mouse that advances with the stride of a Guardsman and the minatory aspect of a bull-terrier, so it is impossible to think of Dr. Selbie as a fellow of any truculence, a scholar of any prejudice, a Christian of any unctimoniousness. Mildness is the very temper of his soul, and modesty the centre of his being.

He is a Hebrew scholar who has advanced into philosophical territory and now is pushing his investigations into the field of psychology. Modest and wholly unpretentious he sets up as no original genius, and is content with his double rôle of close observer and respectful critic. He is rather a guide to men than a light. He has nothing new to say, but nothing foolish. His words are words of purest wisdom, though you may have heard them before. You feel that if he cannot lead you to the Promised Land, at least he will not conduct you to the precipice and the abyss.

Above everything else he is a scholar who would put his learning at the service of his fellow-men. Education with him is a passion, a part of his philanthropy, a part of his religion. It is the darkness of man, not the sinfulness of man, that catches his attention. He feels that the world is foolish because it is ignorant, not because it is wicked. And he feels that the foolishness of the world is a count in the indictment against religion. Religion has not taught; it has used mankind as a dictaphone.

He has spoken to me with great hope and confidence of the change which is coming over the Church in this matter of religious teaching. Dr. Headlam, the Regius Professor of Divinity, has lighted a candle at Oxford which by God's grace will never be put out. There is now a fairly general feeling that men who enter the ministry must be educated not to pass a test or to prove themselves capable of conducting a service or performing as rite, but educated as educators—apostles of truth, evangelists of the higher life.

Religion, according to Dr. Selbie, is something to be taught. It is not a mystery to be presented, but an idea to be inculcated. The world has got to understand religion before it can live religiously.

But all education stands in sore need of the trained teacher. Our teachers are not good enough. They may be very able men and women, but few of them are very able teachers. The first need in a teacher is to inspire in his students a love of knowledge, a hunger and thirst after wisdom. But, look at our schools, look at our great cities, look at the pleasures and recreations which satisfy the vast masses of the population! As a nation, we have no enthusiasm for education. This is because we have so little understanding of the nature and province of education. We have never been taught what education is.

With his enthusiasm for education goes a perfervid spiritual conviction that intellect is not enough. He tells the story of an old Scots woman who listened intently to a highly intellectual sermon by a brilliant scholar, and at the end of it called out from her seat, "Aye, aye; but yon rope o' yours is nae lang enough tae reach the likes o' me." Something much more mysterious and much more powerful than intellect is necessary to change the heart of humanity; but when love and knowledge go hand in hand there you get both the great teacher and the good shepherd. Knowledge without love is almost as useless to a teacher as love without knowledge.

In his study at Mansfield, a large and friendly room book-lined from floor to ceiling, with a pleasant hearth at one end of it, where he smokes an occasional pipe with an interrupting fellow scholar, but where he is most often to be found buried in a great book and oblivious of all else besides, this little man with the darting eyes and soft voice is now invading, with sound good sense to save him from nausea or contamination, the region of morbid psychology.

He would perfectly agree with Dr. Inge's characteristic statement, "The suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is ridiculous to anyone who has prayed"; but he is, I think, much more aware of the power and extent of this suggestion than is the Dean of St. Paul's, and therefore qualifies himself to meet the psychologists on their own ground.

He has confessed to me that in reading Freud he had to wade through much almost unimaginable filth, and he is driven to think that Freud himself is the victim of "a sex complex," a man so obsessed by a single theory, so ridden by one idea, that he perfectly illustrates the witty definition of an expert—"an expert is one who knows nothing else." All the same, Dr. Selbie assures me that his studies have been well worth while, that modern psychology has much to teach us of the highest value, and that religion as well as medicine will more and more have to take account of this daring science which advances so swiftly into their own provinces.

So far as my experience goes no man of the first rank in Anglican circles is preparing himself for this inevitable encounter with anything like the thoroughness of Dr. Selbie, a nonconformist.

He makes it a rule never to interfere with the troubles of another communion; but I do not think I misrepresent him when I say that he regrets the immersion of the Church of England in questions of theological disputation at a time when the true battle of religion is shifting on to quite other ground.

Not many people in Anglo-Catholic circles realise perhaps that to the educated nonconformist all this excitement about modernism seems strangely old-fashioned. Long ago such matters were settled. The scholar nonconformist is no longer concerned with dogmatic difficulties; he has abandoned with the old teleology the old pagan theology, and now, believing in an immanent teleology, in an evolution that is creative and that has direction, believing also that Christ is the incarnation of God's purpose and the revelation of His character, he is pressing forward not to meet the difficulties of to-morrow, but to equip himself for meeting those difficulties when they arise with real intelligence and genuine power.

"If medicine," said Froude, "had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-Nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found."

Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a time when knowledge was at its lowest level.

It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of nonconformity.

Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.

One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the difficulty of punishment for sin. In a little book of his called Belief and Life he has the following passages:

And because of this very sense of right they entertain no soft and sentimental notions concerning the universe:

Religion, he says, can never live or be effective within the narrow circle of time and sense. Nevertheless he has the courage to say: "The future life, like the belief in God, is best treated as an hypothesis that is yet in process of verification."

But this hypothesis explains what else were inexplicable. It works. And, confronting the hypothesis of immortality, he insists that a future life must embrace retribution. "As a man sows, so shall he also reap." Immortality is not to be regarded as a sentimental compensation for our terrestrial experience, but as the essential continuity of our spiritual evolution. "For many, no doubt, it will mean an experience of probation, and for all one of retribution."

He sees clearly and gratefully that "the moral range of the work of Christ in the human soul, His gifts of grace, forgiveness, and power, lift men at once on to the plane of the spiritual and fill their conception of life with a new and richer content." But he does not shut his eyes to the fact of the moral law, and with all the force of his character and all the strength of his intellect he accepts "the great principle that as a man sows, so shall he also reap."

In this way Dr. Selbie prepares his students, not only to meet the intellectual difficulties of the future, but to stand fast in the ancient faith of their forefathers that the moral law is a fact of the universe. He helps them to be fighters as well as teachers. They are to fight the complacency of men, the false optimism of the world, the delusive tolerance of materialism. There is no need for them to preach hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that just and inevitable word, Retribution. In a moral universe, selfishness involves, rightly and inevitably, suffering—suffering self-sown, self-determined, and self-merited.

He is the last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching to emanate. He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise. But approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is as vivid and consuming as that of any social reformer.

There, in Oxford, among his books, and carrying on his duties as Principal of Mansfield College, Dr. Selbie, back from holidays spent in watching the great working world and listening to the teachers of that world, finds himself not alarmed, but anxious. The voice of religion, he feels, is not making itself heard, and the voices of churches are making only a discord. Men are going astray because they have no knowledge of their course, and the blind are falling into the ditch because they are led by the blind. How is this dangerous condition of things to be remedied?

He replies, By the teachers.

What we need at this hour above all other needs is the great teacher, one able to proclaim and explain the truths of religion, and filled with a high enthusiasm for his office. We need, he tells me, men who can restore to preaching its best authority. At the present time preaching has fallen to a low ebb because it is despised, and it is despised because it has lost the element of teaching. But let men recover their faith in the moral law, let them see that retribution is inevitable justice, let them realise that the life of man is a progress in spiritual comprehension, let them understand that existence is a great thing and not a mean thing, and they will feel again the compulsion to preach, and their preaching, founded on the moral law and inspired by faith in the teaching of Christ, will draw the world from the destructive negations of materialism, and wake it out of the fatal torpors of dull indifference.

Happy, I think, is the church which has such a teacher at the head of its disciples. Though its traditions may not reach far back into the historic twilight of ignorance, the rays of the unrisen sun strike upon its banners as they advance towards the future of mankind.

ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON

CANTERBURY, Archbishop of, since 1903; Most Rev. Randall Thomas Davidson, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D.; Prelate of the Order of the Garter, 1895-1903; G.C.V.O., cr. 1904; Royal Victorian Chain, 1911; Grand Cross of the Royal Order of the Saviour (Greece), 1918; Grand Cordon de l'Ordre de la Couronne (Belgium, 1919); First class of the Order of St. Sava (Serbia), 1919; b. 7 April, 1848; s. of Henry Davidson, Muirhouse, Edinburgh, and Henrietta, d. of John Swinton, Kimmerghame; m. Edith, 2d d. of Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1878. Educ.: Harrow; Trinity College, Oxford (D.D.), Curate of Dartford, Kent, 1874-77; Chaplain and Private Secretary to Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1877-82; to Archbishop Benson, 1882-3; Examining Chaplain to Bishop Lightfoot of Durham, 1881-83; Sub-Almoner to Queen Victoria, 1882; one of the six preachers of Canterbury Cathedral, 1880-83; Dean of Windsor and Domestic Chaplain to Queen Victoria, 1883-91; Clerk of the Closet to Queen Victoria, 1891-1901; to H.M. the King, 1905-3; Trustee of the British Museum from 1884, Bishop of Rochester, 1891-95; Bishop of Winchester, 1895-1903.