I hope through all this description of social work at Landport, Winchester, Oxford, and elsewhere, you have been able to read a deeper truth than mere Socialism even at its best. The lesson which is the foundation of all work like ours is that, however earnestly you may strive to change circumstances, you must realise that change of character is the thing to be aimed at, and practically if you do not achieve this, you have hardly achieved anything at all. And I know but one method by which this change of character can be effected, the method of Jesus Christ, not merely to show to people the perfection and beauty of His character—that oftentimes might lead only to despair—but to enable them, by the means which He Himself has ordained, to be partakers of His very nature. To say to a poor sin-ruled creature, whom you know all his old companions, every public-house door as it swings open, will allure into the ways of sin again, “Be like Jesus, be good,” is only making a demand that you yourself know can never be fulfilled. But to be able to say to him, “Here is this Jesus, Who for your sake became a real man, as you are a man, Who worked in the carpenter’s shop, earning, with the sweat of His brow, daily bread for Himself, His dear mother, and her husband, Who was disappointed and injured by His friends as well as by His enemies, Who was really tempted by the devil, Whose life in many respects was just like your own, Who never turned away His face from any poor wretched outcast, but spoke to them tenderly and gently words of love and hope, Who when He could do no more for you by way of example, willed to die for you: having nothing else to give, He gave His own life-blood, and in the giving of that, won for you a power of union with Himself, that though you must do your part, and be sorry for your sins, and try to be better, He will as surely do His part by letting His precious blood wash away your sin, and strengthen you to live an amended life. Here is this Jesus standing as it were between the living and the dead, so few, few living, so many, many dead, dead with a death more terrible by far than the worm and corruption can effect, for they but touch the outward covering of a man, with a death which has destroyed the real life, the knowledge that God was their Father, that they had souls capable of everything that was beautiful and true. Here is Jesus, Who can give even to the clumsy vulgar body the power of doing gracious acts, of speaking true words, Who can give to the intellect the power of realising true noble ideals, and so assimilating them, that they may become a very fibre of their thoughts.” In almost all our people there was this death, this living, hopeless, faithless death. Who could deliver them from the body of this death? One Who could restore to them faith in the supernatural, hope in themselves, love towards their fellow-men. No preaching can do this. I believe nothing can but the Blessed Sacrament. The compassion, which Jesus learned in the trials of His life, taught Him to realise that man, if he is to be touched, must be touched in his entirety, that an attempt to deal with him spiritually alone is bound to fail. How Christ-destroying is all that theology that tries to be wiser and more spiritual than the Christ! The Blessed Sacrament is not only the prolongation of the Incarnation in the world, but it is a means by which Jesus wills that He shall be apprehended by the multitude. And so ten and a half years ago I set before myself this as the method of my ministry. Some I know make the Blessed Sacrament the crown of their religion. I desired to make it the foundation as well. As the Incarnation is the revelation to us of God the Father, so the Divine Son wills to be known in the breaking of bread.

How far we succeeded in this, the following letter from Father Maturin will show:

Dr. Linklater built a very fitting Mission Church; it seated about five hundred people, and I found Celebrations on Sunday at seven and eight, morning and evening prayer, and a children’s service; and on week-days, Celebrations twice a week, and evensong every night. I felt that it would be wiser to leave the Sunday services unchanged for two years, supplementing them if I saw it was needed. But the week-day services I took in hand very soon after I came. For my brother priests and for my workers, it was very soon necessary to have a daily Celebration, not only for the nourishment of our own souls, but to give us the opportunity of pleading that Sacrifice for the whole body of Christ’s Church, and especially for the wants of our own district. I say it with the fullest confidence, that this daily Celebration has been the chief strength of the parochial life.

But here, at the very outset, we were met by the difficulty of that rubric about three communicants, which seems to have become the shibboleth which proves loyalty or otherwise to the Church of England. Our numbers made it almost impossible for us to arrange for three communicants each morning, even if I could conscientiously have done this. I am told that there are churches which qualify for saying a daily Mass by arranging that three people will be responsible for each morning in the week. I can understand few customs that are so likely to injure souls. Very soon one and another beside the clergy and helpers began to drop in. Remember, the poor have no room where they can pray alone. The church becomes for them the customary place where prayer is to be made, except the very brief morning and evening prayer. The Celebrations, too, were offered on the different mornings with different intentions. Soldiers, sailors, and emigrants one morning, Penitentiary work another, and so on. Often the silent tears trickling down a woman’s face would show you she was praying for her own boy or her own girl. To these poor feeble folk, with no power of prayer or concentration of mind, with but few words which they can use, even in their daily intercourse, the knowledge that their just saying “Jack” or “Mary” as they knelt in silence, was the truest intercession, gathering all the sighs and tears of their heart in union with that all-sufficient Sacrifice, which alone could bring joy and peace to Jack or Mary. I had a better right to know this, for often as I went up into the vestry a name would be whispered in my ear, or a little piece of paper pressed into my hand. I think when I first told this to Bishop Thorold, he feared it was a kind of superstition, but when I could assure him that this grace of prayer gained before the Blessed Sacrament became the custom of the whole life, he no longer thought that we were making a superstitious use of it, or were training people to trust so in this great gift of God that they could not realise His presence elsewhere.

Soon, too, we found it necessary to arrange a special place for communicants. We had been able from the first to exercise a great deal of discipline in the parish. Remember the Church of England is the only religious body which exercises no discipline about Holy Communion. Of course, a great deal can be said on the side of the liberty of the communicant, and his being the best judge of his worthiness to receive. But surely something may be said on the other side, the duty of the priest to consider the Blessed Sacrament as a great trust. Practically I am sure it is a great hindrance to the authority of the Church among large numbers of people. Over and over again, in talking to earnest Nonconformists, they have expressed to me their wonder and amazement that we, who profess to honour the Blessed Sacrament so much, should actually take no pains to see it is not profaned. Their admirable system of letters of commendation at once puts the new-comer in communication with their church authorities, and it enables those authorities to judge about the man’s fitness for Communion. I received a curious letter bearing upon this from an earnest Christian the other day. “When I was young and strong I devoted myself to organising in certain fields of philanthropy. I was a Churchman, and I taught both in the Sunday Schools of Conformity and Nonconformity. It will seem to you, perhaps, terribly lax, but I saw no valid reason why I should not communicate in the chapel as well as regularly in my parish church. Before I was allowed to attend Communion at the chapel, I had to undergo a solemn probation. At the church no question of any kind was put to me, my fitness was entirely treated as either my own affair or a matter of indifference.” At any rate, I am perfectly sure of this, that it would be fatal in a Mission district to offer the Sacraments freely without fencing them round with all possible discipline.

There is another great inconvenience in not knowing the number of communicants; sometimes too many Hosts are consecrated, sometimes too few. I suppose that three week-day mornings out of the six we had no communicants. It seemed to me, therefore, a perfectly profane thing to invite people to receive the Communion, to turn round and say “to them that come to receive the Holy Communion,” when I knew no one was coming, most solemn, nay, awful words, then to allow my minister to make confession, perhaps the most grave and weighty possible in language, “in the name of all those who are minded to receive the Holy Communion,” when he and I knew that no one was so minded, and, still more profane, to pronounce an absolution over those who have made no confession, or if they have, had no right to make that confession. Thus one set of rubrics and prayers in the Prayer Book landed me on the horns of a dilemma; either I was compelled to say what I knew was a mockery, or to give up my daily celebration. Ninety-nine clergymen out of a hundred, finding another rubric as to giving notice of Communion and another exhortation a difficulty, get rid of the difficulty by disregarding the rubric and by leaving the exhortation unsaid. Why should I not do the same?

The same kind of difficulty had to be faced with regard to the week-day evening service. It was wretchedly attended, and I do not wonder. We are told that in pre-Reformation times people came readily to the week-day offices. But what proof have we of this? Was the daily office, of which our Matins and Evensong is a survival, ever frequented by the laity? Perhaps people will answer that there is no obligation for the laity to go to church on a week-day, though the obligation has from the earliest days, I believe, been binding on the clergy to say their offices. Therefore these offices were constructed for the use of the clergy. But in a Mission district, where the people are practically heathen, and where you have little chance of instructing them except in church, the service of necessity must be such that they can join in it with edification. I believe you want two kinds of worship—one very dignified and ornate, which enables them to realise that they are making an offering to the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the other very simple and familiar, that they are talking to a loving Father Who knows all their needs and wants to help them. If you had the ornate worship alone, there would be a danger of mere ritualism. If you had the familiar worship alone, there might be a danger of what some people seem to be so unnaturally afraid of—too much familiarity. At any rate, saying Evensong every night, you would certainly have neither of the dangers, but, on the other hand, you would have none of the educational or heart-touching power.

I am not venturing to make any suggestion about churches except such as those in my own district. But when we had said evening prayer to empty benches for a year, we thought the thing was hopeless. People would come to a prayer meeting in the Mission room, or in one of our own rooms, but they would not come to church, which was the very place where we wanted to get them. But directly we began a prayer meeting in church many people came, and God granted to us such visible proofs—His answer seen by all the people—that many times during the year, because we have continued the prayer meetings on Monday ever since, people would come with some special need, quite sure that, in some way or another, God would answer it. The Bishop of Guildford made it a strong point in his endeavour to arrange matters with the Bishop of Winchester that we should give up this extempore prayer, but I would rather have left the Mission than done so.

Then on Thursdays we began the Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament. This Bishop Harold Browne also objected to till he had read it, and then he said it was one of the most beautiful and scriptural services he had ever seen. I expect a good deal of ecclesiastical troubles might be stopped if Bishops would see things before they condemned them. The same psalms being always sung in the Vespers, the antiphon drawing out, as it were, the sacramental meaning of the psalm, was a wonderful education; the cope, the acolytes, and the incense, added a great dignity, a dignity which, at S. Agatha’s, has never been stilted or unnatural; and the impress of this act of solemn worship upon many an ignorant heart left a true sense of the dignity of worship and a glimpse of the supernatural. Those who can read little, learn through ear and eye. These psalms, too, have been a great heritage to many of our people. I have known many a pain-stricken one recite them over and over again, a grace which certainly would never have been gained by saying different psalms every evening. And no one who has ever seen them at S. Agatha’s can doubt the power of the Stations. As I sit thinking now, I have not the courage to speak of them; but Friday after Friday they were like a great sob going up from the heart of this sinful place, to tell Jesus how sorry we were that we had been His very murderers, driving the thorns into His head, and the nails into His hands and feet. The objection to Compline, that the congregation absolved the priest, was so strangely ignorant, that the Bishop withdrew it at once. Thus our week-day services took their present form, which have continued the last eight years, with generally a little sermon added. The common people always hear gladly.

Very soon the difficulty about the children pressed upon us. They certainly had no conception of reverence or of worship. After much prayer and consideration, I determined that the only solution was to have a Children’s Mass. I wonder if any parish priest has ever been blessed with such Sunday School teachers as I have; many had taught for Dr. Linklater; and though I don’t think they liked me at all at first—they thought I was very rough and severe—they loyally stuck to me. At first, when we spoke of the Children’s Mass, many of them seemed to object to it; but a year’s hard work had well prepared the children for it. I was permitted to use the book in use at St. Alban’s, Holborn, and so got rid of that awful difficulty of inattentive children, for in this book they are employed from the time they come into church till they go out, either listening to the priest in those parts of the service which he says aloud, or, while he is saying his private devotions, being led by some responsible person in their own. What wonderful services these have been. How they have trained boys and girls naturally to come on to Communion. How they have impressed every child with the dignity and solemnity of worship. How they have taught them to realise God and the supernatural. And almost all this is due to the devotion of the teachers. It is invidious, perhaps, to mention names, but all the teachers will understand why dear Barratt’s name and Miss Damerum’s come to my mind; they stand as a kind of representatives of the rest. And, if I might add one special parochial benefit, the Children’s Mass gave us the first idea of the congregation singing their own Mass, for the children had no choir, and yet they sang Creed, Gloria, Benedictus, Agnus, everything.

This giving the children a service of their own mercifully got rid of them from Matins at 11 o’clock. Soon the older people, coming in at the end of the children’s service, began to ask why they could not have the same kind of service. There were, however, two difficulties in the way. I felt bound to make no alteration in the morning and evening services on Sundays until I had been in the parish for two years. What a blessed probation this was, for it gave us time to train choir, acolytes, and congregation. When I told the original choir that they would have to go out of the chancel, which was very small and confined, and virtually sit in a corner, and that there would be a Celebration instead of Matins, they nearly all objected to the alteration. I am afraid I had tried them very much before; I always have been very hard on choirs. I had made them give up singing Gregorians—I never yet heard congregational Gregorians. Then when Major Foote kindly joined the choir, when he was stationed at Portsmouth, and tried to teach them proper time, etc., with one accord they suggested that they could not learn to sing right, and he must accommodate his singing to theirs. I am afraid, as I have said, I was very hard on them, and not nearly patient enough. So we had to get a new choir ready when they would leave, train a set of acolytes, and teach the congregation. Nothing is more fatal than to introduce any change which people do not thoroughly understand. On Sunday nights, after Evensong, most of the congregation used to remain behind. I showed them all the vestments one by one, I made them follow in the Prayer Book every word of the service, I made them learn, to two easy settings of the Holy Communion, all the parts they had to sing, and this without any choir. I also explained to them all about the incense. I made them, either in rows, or individually, stand up and answer questions to show that they understood. At first, of course, they were shy, but Blind Willie, who, one might almost say, was divinely taught in these things, began by answering, and the others soon followed. We have never given up this habit of catechising, and so every change in worship has been well understood by the whole congregation. Some of our first acolytes have gone away from Portsmouth, some have married and given their place to others, some, like dear George Norton, are still upon the altar. Surely no place has ever been served like S. Agatha’s. Their wonderful simplicity, their utter want of mannerism, not a ritualist amongst them all. From the first we had given out notice that no one could receive Communion at the children’s service unless they had previously given in their names. This we had done in anticipation of the Sunday when Matins should be said at 9 o’clock, and the Holy Eucharist become the central act of our worship. No one had given in their names on that first Sunday morning, so we did not expect any communicants. But, while the children’s service was going on, three smartly-dressed ladies came in, and, not content to kneel like other people at the bottom of the church until that service was over, pushed their way up amongst the children, whispering and looking about, to the utter amazement of the children, who judged from their teachers that it was utterly impossible that a grown-up person could behave badly in church. Seeing them in the front pew before the service began at 11, I ventured to ask them why they had come, and they said they had heard that this was such a curious church that they would like to see it, and that they were going to receive the Holy Communion. I found that they had come from close to S. Jude’s Church. I saw by their manners that our church would disconcert them very much, and certainly not help them in preparing for a good Communion, so I whispered to the verger to get a cab, and, as soon as it came, I said, “It will be much better for you to make your Communions at S. Jude’s, as you have not given me notice.” So I walked down the church with them, put them into the cab, and paid the driver. Luckily this story got repeated, and that, together with the discomfort of the church, has largely kept sightseers away. Perhaps you will think I was very severe upon these ladies, but I am sure it was one of the most useful lessons I have ever given, both to them and to my people as well. Nothing can be so bad as going to a church because we hear that the preaching or the service is curious. One such person mars the whole atmosphere of religion, and, above all, I was anxious to keep Southsea people away, except those who worshipped with us from conviction.

Soon we added a dignity to the Evensong by vesting the officiant in a cope, and offering incense at the Magnificat. But I think I can say that there have been no changes in the services or ritual of S. Agatha’s during the last eight years, except that we have added services for men and women alone, a second Celebration daily, and an extra one on the first Sunday in the month, and evening prayer daily at 6.30; so that when we went into our new church we had five services daily, eight services every Sunday, and ten on the first Sunday in the month.

During the winter, too, late at night, so as to catch the impossibles, my dear friend Hobbs, chief school-master on the Vernon, enabled us to give a magic-lantern service, which was extremely valuable.

Very largely, too, we have been helped in all this by our blind organist, dear Richard Whittick. There is a wonderful tenderness in the sympathetic touch of a blind player, and he has given a note of refinement to the whole of our services, playing on the worst organ that ever was built, and yet bringing music out of it. The services made a great demand upon him, because we required him almost every night, and so it was very lucky for him that Mr. Attree, the organist of the Dockyard Church, relieved him on Thursday evenings, and at two of the Sunday services. We owe to Mr. Attree many of the beautiful photographs with which this book is illustrated. By the way, among the other things I have to pay, though I only had the use of it for six weeks, is £225 to Messrs. Hill for our new organ. Perhaps it is to our present choir that my greatest apologies are due, for they have quite willingly altogether effaced themselves, content merely to lead the congregation, and to have whatever music and hymns I thought best. And yet we all felt that in moving into a new church the choir needed strengthening, and so, when dear Mr. Roe left us because his health had broken down, God sent the Reverend Stanley Gresham, the exact man we needed. With the boys and the choirmen he really did wonders, and he is only just another instance, if we needed one, how from September, 1885, till January, 1896, we have never lacked either the persons or the things which we needed. There were ninety-nine communicants on our first Easter Sunday, and over five hundred on our last Easter Sunday. “Increase Celebrations, encourage non-communicating attendance, and you will lessen the number of communicants.” How often this is said. Let S. Agatha’s answer it. “Teach too much about the Blessed Sacrament, give people an exaggerated belief about it, and you will train them to neglect other church services; their objective worship will destroy their subjective faith in God.” Let S. Agatha’s answer. “Have all these ornate services, increase this ritualism, press confession, and you will alienate the lay people, and drive worshippers away from their own church.” Let S. Agatha’s answer. For ten years we have taught and encouraged non-communicating attendance. Our communicants had outgrown our Mission Church. We had taught practically nothing else but that the Blessed Sacrament is the revelation of Christ, Who is the revelation of the Father. Not only our Eucharists but our other services were filled to overflowing, and faith in Christ as a personal Saviour, and the Father as a personal Providence, had permeated the whole of our parish. For ten years we have taught confession, heard confessions openly in church, for eight years we have had all these ritualistic services, and though five times the Bishop of the Diocese has seen fit to summon us to his presence, and to remonstrate with us upon some practice or doctrine, yet no single complaint has ever been made by one person in our parish.