XVI.
A Plea for Toleration.
My work in Landport is finished. I hand over to the Bishop of Winchester all necessary plant for the future of S. Agatha’s—Church, Schools, Mission House, Parsonage, Gymnasium, Clubs, Almshouses—which the generosity of Wykehamists and my own friends has enabled me to build for the Church of England. I hand him over a parish with a communicants’ roll of 441, so united that for ten years there has never been a difference amongst us, so full of zeal for Holy Religion that they have created admiration and wonder in the heart of that most experienced missioner Father Maturin, and who welcomed, without one single murmur, Father Bull, who took my place, when the Bishop’s demand for alteration in the services caused me to resign. Into the Bishop’s hands, and the hands of my successor appointed by Winchester College, I place this great trust to which God appointed me ten and a half years ago, and I pray God that they may be able to administer it with greater zeal, self-denial, and success than I have been able.
I have taken it for granted that this book will generally be read by those who know S. Agatha’s, and therefore I have frequently spoken about persons and things without any introduction, knowing that these readers would know what I meant; but for the sake of others who do not know me or the work, I should like to make a few explanations. In the first place “I” always stands for “we,” and “my” always stands for “ours”; for I have had round me a body of the most devoted helpers that parish priest ever had, not only my own sisters and the ladies who lived with them, my fellow-clergy, and the laymen who lived with me, but the day-school and Sunday-school teachers, the district visitors, all who served in the church, either on the altar or in the choir, my own personal clerks, the servants in my own and Miss Dolling’s house, our shopwoman, and many more too numerous to mention. Every parochial plan was well discussed by those who had to administer it; objections were stated, differences were heard, but when once we had arrived at what was deemed to be the right course, one mouth spoke the judgment—one brain, one hand, executed it. There was no degradation of service, there was no unstinted labour, there was no demand on heart and enthusiasm that I have ever asked and been refused by one of my workers. I could almost dare to use some of S. Paul’s expressions with regard to the unselfish loyalty with which I have been supported; and I know the parish felt that, whether it was they or I; so we preached, and so they believed. Might I give two instances?
As I have said before, I am an unlearned man, unable to pass even my “little go” at Cambridge. When Charles Osborne came to me, I had no knowledge of exact theology at all, except what I had been able to scrape together during one year at Salisbury Theological College, where the Rev. E. B. Ottley was particularly kind and patient with me. But Osborne devoted an hour a day all the time he was with me to talking theology with me. There is no method of learning so easy as the conversational method, especially such conversation as his, and when the opportunity came to me to occupy London pulpits, he prepared the notes of many of my sermons, and looked up the references; and ever since he left me, though he now has work almost as time-exhausting as my own, he has never failed to send me at Lent, and at other times when I needed them, courses of sermons. I have often felt little better than a humbug, delivering sermons which are the fruit of his brain. And when I left Portsmouth, my then secretary followed me to London, and has remained with me, so as to prevent the compositors who set up this book committing suicide, or the world being scandalised with my bad spelling. These are but two little instances of countless acts of love and devotion which it has been our extraordinary privilege for the last ten years to enjoy; and when you hear of trades’ unions of curates and vicars, and of disloyalty on the one side, and humiliations on the other, I should like you to realise that our work was successful because, though I was the apparent doer of it, I merely represented a community bound together by the tenderest ties of mutual service. People take a very exaggerated view of mission work. It is not only the pleasantest and most rewarding, but it is really the easiest done. Preaching about a great deal, and giving retreats and missions, enables one to judge, I think, pretty fairly of the difficulties of other clergymen’s work, and I am quite sure that I am speaking only the literal truth when I say that I have never been in any parish where the work was as easy as in my own. Of course, we added to ourselves many things that were not strictly parochial; and if these had not been begun, and we had merely stuck to working amongst our own people, this truth would have been even more apparent. Faith in humanity is the foundation of all mission work, very easy to be attained in a slum where, every single day, some soul reveals to you progress; very difficult to attain in a parish where your church is well filled by a respectable congregation. Then a greater elasticity of method is allowed, and it was just the attempt to check this that never could have occurred if Bishop Thorold had lived. And yet I think that if reasonable people, unprejudiced and unbiassed, would consider the Prayer Book, and the methods by which it has been interpreted for the last fifty years, they would be less anxious to desire to curtail this greater liberty of method.
At best surely the Prayer Book is a compromise, for which, indeed, we may be most grateful to Almighty God, when we consider the character of those who constructed it, and the Court pressure under which many of them were continually coerced. But surely a compromise, fond as we are of them in England, is never a lasting arrangement. Fifty years ago people might conscientiously call our Liturgy incomparable, because, as a witty Irishman said, they had no others to compare it with. But now, when the inexhaustible treasures of both East and West have been rediscovered by us, and when those Catholic doctrines, long hidden away in the hearts of a few learned clerics, were, by the Oxford movement, scattered broadcast over England, the method by which those doctrines alone could be understanded of the people, was by interpreting the Prayer Book according to Catholic ceremonial, and the progress which has been made in this interpretation is a fact that we, who see its effects, can hardly appreciate. Is it not true to say that fifty years ago almost every single Bishop on the English bench would have proclaimed the priest a traitor, and endeavoured to deprive him, for doctrines that are taught, and for ceremonies which are performed, in twenty-five per cent. of the churches in their dioceses to-day? Remember, the things which have been condemned in S. Agatha’s are done in a large number of churches in England. Earnest souls everywhere are crying out for Masses to be said for their dear dead. There is no service in the Prayer Book appointed for this purpose. But the Catholic priest who understands and appreciates the piety of this desire, who believes himself that he has this treasure committed to him by God, will not surely be deemed disloyal to the Church of England if he ventures to use either the service in the Prayer Book of Edward VI., which our own Prayer Book declares “doth not contain anything contrary to the Word of God, or to sound doctrine,” or chooses from some ancient source a like office. It seems to me that this is a far more honest practice than to use in a forced sense the Commendatory Prayer from the Visitation of the Sick, the first prayer in the Burial Service, or the first Good Friday collect, the use which my successor has adopted in deference, I suppose, to the Bishop’s wish. I know his great integrity of purpose, and his utter honesty of mind, and, therefore, I am sure that he considers his method a more honest one than mine. But the chief thing which commended S. Agatha’s to Bishop Thorold, to my numerous supporters, and to my poor people, was the plainness of speech and calling things by their names, which oftentimes superficial gazers may deem unwise, but which I have ever found to pay in the long run. But if it might be said that putting in a new prayer is disloyal, no one can say that leaving out a prayer, or disregarding a rubric is disloyal. I do not suppose that there is any church in England where every prayer is said, and every rubric obeyed; nay, the service would be intolerable, impossible, if it were so. People have, however, a convenient way of saying, “This rubric is obsolete; that prayer may be lawfully left out, that exhortation never read.” Who is the best judge of that? The parish priest who has laboured ten years amongst his people, and knows every one of them, and the Bishop who has visited, loved, and blessed that work for four years, or the Bishop who has been in the diocese for three weeks? Two rubrics stand side by side in the Book of Common Prayer. One of them as to having notice given of Communion I obeyed, the other as to the number of communicants I disobeyed. Ninety-nine clergy out of a hundred disobey the one I obeyed, eighty obey the one that I disobeyed. Let me illustrate, by my successor’s action, the enormous difficulty of obeying both. He says, You must give notice if you are coming to the Holy Communion, and he has told the people that, unless notice is given so that he may know that there will be communicants, the Children’s Mass at 10, and the High Mass at 11, must be given up. The notice is to be given in on Saturday night. If two communicants give notice, or one, or none, what would his action be? Would he wait till people came to church and tell them that there would be a different kind of service, and thus prevent many of his faithful from being present at a Celebration, which many of them believe to be a Christian obligation, or would he get certain people to promise, three for 10, and three for 11 each Sunday?—a strain on their loyalty that I, whom they loved and knew, would never have dared to demand, for the working woman with children an utter impossibility, for the District Visitor from Southsea a walk of a mile and a half there and back, entailing most likely an illness and a breakdown, for the working man living with all his children round him, breakfast a common meal shared by all on Sunday—I am not talking of the irreligious man who eats his breakfast, and lies in bed till one or two p.m.—the binding upon him of a burden, which we ourselves, who are often forced to say late Masses, can hardly sustain. This line of thought applies just as well to the daily Masses in a place in which it was utterly impossible, with all my workers round me, to manufacture six communicants every day.
I have ventured to go into this question again at length, because I am anxious that the public should understand it. If the Bishops are going to make an attack all round on beneficed as well as unbeneficed clergy, on High, Low, and Broad equally, then I and my people would have no right to complain. But I doubt very much whether the Church of England could stand the strain of such an attack. If such an attack is to be made it must be uniform, and not according to the individual mind of the Bishop; Bishop Perowne might succeed Bishop King, Bishop Ryle might succeed Bishop Temple. And surely this danger ought to be realised before fresh power is put into the Bishops’ hands, such power as is proposed in the recent Patronage Act, which would have meant in my case that if I had been presented to a living, either in the diocese of Durham or of Worcester, I should not only have been refused by the Bishop, but—as I read the Act—my patron would have lost his nomination, and the prelate would have appointed his own nominee. Far more dangerous would it be, as a recent bill in Convocation proposed, to allow the Bishop to be sole judge of what rubrics are obsolete, and what must of necessity be observed.
We are told that these are days when every Church Society is being starved, when the Bishops can neither get money nor men for their great overgrown dioceses, and therefore that the masses are in a large extent lost to the Church of England. Here is a place where over £50,000 has been spent in ten years, only £760 of it coming from a Diocesan Fund. Here is a place where three clergy, and many earnest laymen and women, have been working at no cost to the official resources of the Church at all. Here is a place where large numbers of the poorest and most ignorant have been instructed in the saving truths of Holy Religion. Here is a place which the late Bishop of the diocese fostered with truest tenderness and care. I do not venture to ask the question which I was going to ask, but I leave it to the judgment of my readers to answer the question themselves. I know that one answer is conceivable. “No work, no labour, no success is any excuse, when disobedience to the Prayer Book is practised alongside of it.” But does anyone pretend to believe that this is the consistent method of the Church of England; or, if it had been so for the last fifty years, would one spark of life have been left in her?
If this little book has interested you at all, I would earnestly ask you to help me to pay off my debt. During the last three months people have been very generous to me, and I have paid off £800. This leaves me still owing £2290. Many Winchester men are very anxious, I know, that the Wykehamist Committee should become responsible for this debt, and I shall be very grateful if they do, because that might enable me to raise from the bank the money that I require to pay the builders. But even if they make themselves responsible, I feel it to be my bounden duty to do all I can to get this money together, for all the time that they are collecting it, they will be able to give my successor very little for his Mission work. I know that in many things he excels me, but I know that I am a better beggar than he is. He will require every penny that he can possibly scrape together, and so I am most anxious to set all Wykehamical resources free, by paying off this sum as quickly as possible.
Many people write and ask me, What are you going to do yourself? The answer to that rests in other hands than mine. When this debt is paid, if the Church of England offers me work, and I believe that it is God’s intention that I should accept it, I will at once. In the meantime I am trying to learn a little lesson that one of my dearest children, a Jesuit priest, wrote down for me, “God allows you to build the fibre of your brain, the blood of your heart, into a temple for His glory, and then with one breath of His nostril o’erturns it, that He may see whether you will bear this also.”