Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON

Because of his great place and his many merits, both of heart and head, and also because his career raises the question I desire to discuss in my Conclusion, I have left the Archbishop of Canterbury to the last of these brief studies in religious personality.

More admirably, I think, because more entirely, than any of the other men I have attempted to study, Dr. Davidson sums up the virtues of Anglicanism. He stands, first and foremost, for order, decency, and good temper. If he has a passion it is for the status quo. If he has a genius it is for compromise. Lord Morley, who knows him and respects him, describes him as "a man of broad mind, sagacious temper, steady and careful judgment, good knowledge of the workable strength of rival sections." Pre-eminently the Archbishop is a practical man.

I know not out of how many crises he has contrived, both as a fisher of men and a good shepherd, to lift the Church of England by hook or by crook.

When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad state of weakness. For long weeks together—once it was for a whole year—his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.

In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire. He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness, may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth, the greatest of all the Christian Churches—greater, more catholic, than Rome.

To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which only those immediately about him can properly appraise.

Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take a day off he spends it in bed.

His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ignoble idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable, have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of the English nation.

He gives most of us the feeling of a very able man of business, an ideal family solicitor; but there is a quite different side to this character. He is by no means a mystic, as that word is usually understood, but he is a man who deeply believes in the chief instrument of the mystic's spiritual life, that is to say, in prayer. He is not a saint, in the general acceptance of that term, but his whole life is devoted with an undeviating singleness of aim to effecting the chief ambition of the saint—a knowledge of God in the hearts and minds of men. Because he believes that the best method of achieving that consummation, having regard to the present level of human intelligence, is by moderate courses, one must not think that he is lukewarm in the cause of religion. With all the force of his clear and able mind, he believes in moderation. Anything that in the least degree savours of extravagance seems to him impolitic. He does not believe in sudden bursts of emotional energy; he believes in constant pressure.

In my intercourse with him I have found him eminently sane and judicial, cold towards excessive fervour, but not cold at all towards ardent faith, inclined perhaps to miss the cause of spiritual impatience, constitutionally averse from any understanding sympathy with religious ecstasy, but never self-satisfied, intolerant, or in the remotest fashion cynical. Always he expresses his views with modesty, and sometimes with healthy good-humour, disposed to take life cheerfully, never moved to mistake a molehill for a mountain, always quietly certain that he is on the right road, whatever critics may care to say about his pace.

It is perhaps unreasonable to expect height and depth where there is excessive breadth. The Archbishop might make a bad captain, but he could have few rivals as an umpire. He is an admirable judge if an indifferent advocate.

His grave earnestness is balanced by a conviction that humour is not without a serious purpose. He looks upon life in the average, avoiding all abnormality, and he sees the average with a genial smile. He thoroughly appreciates the oddities of English character, and would ask with Gladstone, "In what country except ours (as I know to have happened) would a Parish Ball have been got up in order to supply funds for a Parish Hearse?"

His attitude to the excitements and sensations of the passing day may be gathered from a simple incident. During the most heady days of the War, that is to say, days when people made least use of their heads, I encountered him at the country-house of a well-known statesman. One morning, while we were being lined up for a photograph, the boar-hound of our host came and forced himself between the Archbishop and myself. "What would the newspapers say," exclaimed the Archbishop in my ear, "if they knew that his name is—Kaiser!"

In this manner he regards all sensational excitement of every kind. When people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy, nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia. Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the gods, has the serpent for his effigy. "The Devil tempts the busy man," says a Turkish proverb, "but the idle man tempts the Devil."

One of those who has worked with the Archbishop for many years, although his views are of a rather extreme order and his temperament altogether of the excessive kind, said to me the other day, "When Randall Davidson went to Canterbury, I told those who asked me what would be the result of his reign. He will leave the Church as he found it. I was wrong. He has done much more than that." He went on to say that there was now a far greater charity between the different schools than existed at the beginning of the century, and that if unity had not been attained, at least disruption had been avoided.

One of the most eloquent and far-sighted of the Evangelicals puts the matter to me in this fashion: "It is possible that fifty years hence men may ask whether he ought not to have been constructive; but for the present we, his contemporaries, must confess that it is wonderful how he keeps things together."

"Pull yourself together!" was the admonition addressed to a somewhat hilarious undergraduate. "But I haven't got a together," he made answer.

If it be true that a house divided against itself cannot stand, then we must admit that Dr. Randall Davidson is not merely one of the Church's greatest statesmen, but a worker of miracles, a man whom we might expect to take up serpents and drink any deadly thing.

But it will be safe to keep the Archbishop's reputation in the region of statesmanship.

The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the whole modern world, than this word statesmanship. It is a word of which the antonym is drifting. It signifies steersmanship, and implies control, guidance, direction, and, obviously, foresight. Now, let us see how this word is used by those who are supposed to instruct public opinion.

The settlement of the Irish Question was hailed as a triumph of British statesmanship. One of the Sunday newspapers of the higher order acclaimed Mr. Lloyd George as the greatest statesman in the history of England and perhaps the greatest man in the world. But it needs only a little thought, only a moment's reflection, to realise that this welcome settlement was a triumph, not of statesmanship, but of murderous brutality. There would have been no pæns if there had been no volleys, no triumph if there had been no violence.

Statesmanship was defeated in the eighties, and those who defeated it, those who exalted prejudice and racialism and intolerance above rationality and foresight, are now among those whom the world salutes as immortal statesmen. In truth, they have bowed the knee to violence.

By the same power, and not by reason, the Government extended the franchise to women. Statesmanship held firmly on the contrary course till the winds of violence rose and the rain of anarchy threatened to descend in a flood of moral devastation.

Look closely into the great achievements of the Washington Conference and you will find that the nations are not voluntarily seeking the rational ideal of peace, but are being driven by urgent necessity into the course of reason. Statesmanship would have disarmed the world before 1914. It was only after 1918 that the spectre of Universal Bankruptcy drove the poor trembling immortals who pass for statesmen to embrace each other as heroes in search of an ideal. Humanity has achieved nothing noble or glorious in the last thirty years; it has been driven by the winds of God into every haven which has saved it from shipwreck.

With a clear understanding of the meaning of the word statesmanship, one may ask with some hope of arriving at an intelligent answer whether Randall Davidson is a great statesman.

Under his rule a divided and distracted Church has held together; but religion has gone out of favour. During his reign at Lambeth there has been a sensible movement towards reunion; but the nation is uninterested. If the Romanists have been less rebellious, the Evangelicals have lost almost all their zeal. If the Church still witnesses to the truth of Christianity, it is with all her ancient inequalities thick upon her, turning her idealism to ridicule, and in the midst of a nation which has become steadily more and more indifferent to the Church, more and more cynical towards religion.

If there is peace in the Church, there is little of that moral earnestness in the life of the nation which in past times laid the foundations both of English character and of English greatness. We are becoming swiftly, I think, a light and flippant people, the only seriousness in our midst the economic seriousness of our depressed classes. It is not to any other class in the community that the zealot can address himself with an evangel of any kind. Only where a sense of bitterness exists, a sense of anger and rebellion, can the idealist in these dangerous times hope for attention.

The Bishop of Manchester preached some few weeks ago a sermon to the unemployed of that city. He was asked at the end of his sermon if the workers could get justice without the use of force. He replied, "It all depends what you mean by force." And at that the congregation shouted, "Murder." They were to have concluded the service with the hymn, "When wilt Thou save Thy people?" Instead, it concluded with the singing of "The Red Flag."

Now let us ask ourselves what might have been the course of religious history during the last twenty years if Dr. Randall Davidson, instead of contenting himself with composing clerical quarrels, had used his high office to control the Church and to steer it in the direction of greater spiritual realism.

Suppose, for example, that after presiding over a conference of warring Churchmen, he had turned to one of the champions of a party, and had said to him, in the manner of a true spiritual father, "I have something to ask of you. What was the first command of our Risen Lord to the apostle Simon Peter?" He would have been obliged to answer, "Feed My lambs." "And the second command?" And he would have been obliged to say, "Feed My sheep." "And the third command?" And again he would have been obliged to say, "Feed My sheep." Then, what had they all said if the Primate had turned to both sides and admonished them in these words, "My brothers in Christ, I think there would now be no disputation among you if instead of concerning yourselves with the traditions of men you had rather given yourselves entirely to obeying the commandment of our Risen Lord"?

But the question would remain, With what food is the flock to be fed?

Is it possible to give an answer to this question which will not open again the floodgates of controversy? If that is so, then those of us who acknowledge the moral law had better abandon Christianity altogether, and set ourselves to construct a new and unifying gospel of ethics from the works of the moralists. For the world is torn asunder by strife, and contention is the opportunity of the wolves. Humanity has begun to apprehend this truth. It has begun to find out that disarmament is practical wisdom; and now it is beginning to wonder whether counsels of perfection may not serve its domestic interests with a higher efficiency than the compromises effected by unprincipled politicians. It is in the mood to listen to a teacher who speaks with authority; but in no mood to listen to a war of words.

If religion cannot speak with one voice in the world, it had better adjourn, like the plenipotentiaries of Sinn Fein and the representatives of the British Government, to a secret session. It must come to an understanding with itself, an agreement as to what it means, before mankind will recover interest in its existence.

CONCLUSION

It is curious, if Christianity is from heaven, that it exercises so little power in the affairs of the human race.

Far from exercising power of any noticeable degree, it now ceases to be even attractive. The successors of St. Paul are not shaping world policy at Washington; they are organising whist-drives and opening bazaars. The average clergyman, I am afraid, is regarded in these days as something of a bore, a wet-blanket even at tea-parties.

Something is wrong with the Church. It is impious to think that heaven interposed in the affairs of humanity to produce that ridiculous mouse, the modern curate. No teacher in the history of the world ever occupied a lower place in the respect of men. So deep is the pit into which the modern minister has fallen that no one attempts to get him out. He is abandoned by the world. He figures with the starving children of Russia in appeals to the charitable an object of pity. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, but the shepherd also looks up from his pit of poverty and neglect, as hungry as the sheep, hungry for the bare necessities of animal life.

This is surely a tragic position for a preacher of good news, and a teacher sent from God.

If the Christian would know how far his Church has fallen from power, let him reflect that, even after the sorrow and desolation of a world conflict, there is no atmosphere in Europe rendering the savagery of submarine warfare unthinkable—utterly unthinkable to the conscience of mankind.

Mr. Balfour and Lord Lee make a proposal to end this devilish warfare; the French oppose; newspapers open a crusade, here against France, there against Great Britain; the vital interests of humanity are at stake; the door will either be opened to disarmament or closed against peace for another fifty years; and Christ is silent—the Church does not lift even three fingers to bless the cause of peace.

Why is the Church so powerless? Why is it she has so fatally lost the attention of mankind?

Is it not because she has nothing to give, nothing to teach? Morals are older than Christianity, and sacramental religions as well. Men feel that they cannot understand the immense paraphernalia of religion and its unnatural atmosphere of high mystery; it is so tremendous a fuss about so very small a result. If God is in the Church, why doesn't He do more for it, and so more for the world? The revenues of religion are still enormous. What do they accomplish?

Men who think in this way are not enemies of religion, any more than the Jews who came to Jesus were enemies of Judaism. They deserve the respect of the Church. Indeed, it is in finding an answer to their challenge that the Church is most likely to find a solution to her own problem. But that answer will never be found if the Church seeks for it only in her documents. There is another place in which she must look for the truth of Christ, a truth as completely overlooked by the modernist as by the traditionalist: it is in the movements of the soul, in the world of living men.

I believe that there are more evidences for the existence of Christ in the modern world than in the whole lexicon of theology. I believe it is more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the Christian tradition. I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the documents of the Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present hour from the torch of science.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

For twenty years I have followed this clue to the meaning of Christ and the nature of His message. I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view of philosophy. I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets to the soul of man—an immanent teleology, an invisible direction towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent movement towards greater understanding. And I have seen the demonstration by science that this visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and intangible—a phantasm of the senses.

I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to follow this clue.

One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest neighbour than our earth from the nearest star."

I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are not yet understood.

The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the metaphysicians, the world of religious seers—a world which is real and visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.

Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on the other side. Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so photographed as to reveal its skeleton.

But the Church has yet to learn from M. Bergson the alphabet of this new knowledge, namely, that our senses and our reason are what they are because of a long evolution in action—not in pure thought. We have got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by listening for the movement of prey or of enemies. Our reason, too, is fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial discipline in an existence purely animal. So powerful is the influence of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not real, so infallible seem to us the senses by which we fail to live successfully even as animals, that, as Christ said, a man must be born again before he can enter the Kingdom of God—that is to say, before he can behold and inhabit Reality.

At the head of this chapter I have set a quotation from a leading article in The Times on the recent lectures of M. Coué. It is now eighteen years ago, treading in the footsteps of Frederic Myers, that I discussed with some of the chief medical hypnotists in London and Paris the phenomena of mental suggestion. It was known then that auto-suggestion is a force of tremendous power. It was stated then that "an immense hope is dawning on the world," but not then, not even now, is it realised that this awkward term of "auto-suggestion" is merely a synonym for the more beautiful and ancient words, meditation and prayer.