The world at large thought Mr. Maurice obscure and misty, and was, as was natural, impatient of such faults. The charge was, no doubt, more than partially true; and nothing but such genuine strength and comprehensive power as his could have prevented it from being a fatal one to his weight and authority. But it is not uninstructive to remember what was very much at the root of it. It had its origin, not altogether, but certainly in a great degree, in two of his moral characteristics. One was his stubborn, conscientious determination, at any cost of awkwardness, or apparent inconsistency, or imperfection of statement, to say out what he had to say, neither more nor less, just as he thought it, and just as he felt it, with the most fastidious care for truthful accuracy of meaning. He never would suffer what he considered either the connection or the balance and adjustment of varied and complementary truths to be sacrificed to force or point of expression; and he had to choose sometimes, as all people have, between a blurred, clumsy, and ineffective picture and a consciously incomplete and untrue one. His choice never wavered; and as the artist"s aim was high, and his skill not always equally at his command, he preferred the imperfection which left him the consciousness of honesty. The other cause which threw a degree of haze round his writings was the personal shape into which he was so fond of throwing his views. He shrunk from their enunciation as arguments and conclusions which claimed on their own account and by their own t.i.tle the deference of all who read them; and he submitted them as what he himself had found and had been granted to see--the lessons and convictions of his own experience. Sympathy is, no doubt, a great bond among all men; but, after all, men"s experience and their points of view are not all alike, and when we are asked to see with another"s eyes, it is not always easy. Mr. Maurice"s desire to give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.
But he has taught us great lessons, of the sacredness, the largeness, and, it may be added, the difficulty of truth; lessons of sympathy with one another, of true humility and self-conquest in the busy and unceasing activity of the intellectual faculties. He has left no school and no system, but he has left a spirit and an example. We speak of him here only as those who knew him as all the world knew him; but those who were his friends are never tired of speaking of his grand simplicity of character, of his tenderness and delicacy, of the irresistible spell of lovableness which won all within its reach. They remember how he spoke, and how he read; the tones of a voice of singularly piercing clearness, which was itself a power of interpretation, which revealed his own soul and went straight to the hearts of hearers. He has taken his full share in the controversies of our days, and there must be many opinions both about the line which he took, and even sometimes about the temper in which he carried on debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his great gifts, and, still more, for his n.o.ble and pure use of them, the modern English Church may well be proud.
XX
SIR RICHARD CHURCH[23]
[23]
_Guardian_, 26th March 1873.
General Sir Richard Church died last week at Athens. Many English travellers in the East find their way to Athens; most of them must have heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely a.s.sociated with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly, the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim on his attentions or friendly offices. Five and forty years ago his name was much in men"s mouths. He was prominent in a band of distinguished men, who represented a new enthusiasm in Europe. Less by what they were able to do than by their character and their unreserved self-devotion and sacrifice, they profoundly affected public opinion, and disarmed the jealousy of absolutist courts and governments in favour of a national movement, which, whether disappointment may have followed its success, was one of the most just and salutary of revolutions--the deliverance of a Christian nation from the hopeless tyranny of the Turks.
He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations, and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy, his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high spirit of n.o.bleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks, not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose characteristic faults they were impatient.
His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young staff-officer, and by a staff-officer"s qualities of sagacity, activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania, from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare, half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made Colonel Church"s name familiar to the Greek population, who were hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the decisive struggle was carried on against Napoleon; and he was the English Military Commissioner attached to the Austrian armies in Italy in 1814 and 1815.
At the Peace, his eagerness for daring and adventurous enterprise was tempted by great offers from the Neapolitan Government. The war had left brigandage, allied to a fierce spirit of revolutionary freemasonry, all-powerful in the south of Italy; and a stern and resolute, yet perfectly honest and just hand, was needed to put it down. He accepted the commission; he was reckless of conspiracy and threats of a.s.sa.s.sination; he was known to be no sanguinary and merciless lover of severity, but he was known also to be fearless and inexorable against crime; and, not without some terrible examples, yet with complete success, he delivered the south of Italy from the scourge. But his thoughts had always been turned towards Greece; at last the call came, and he threw himself with all his hopes and all his fortunes into a struggle which more than any other that history can show engaged at the time the interest of Europe. His first efforts resulted in a disastrous defeat against overwhelming odds, for which, as is natural, he has been severely criticised; his critics have shown less quickness in perceiving the qualities which he displayed after it--his unshaken, silent fort.i.tude, the power with which he kept together and saved the wrecks of his shattered and disheartened volunteer army, the confidence in himself with which he inspired them, the skill with which he extricated them from their dangers in the face of a strong and formidable enemy, the humanity which he strove so earnestly by word and example to infuse into the barbarous warfare customary between Greeks and Turks, the tenacity with which he clung to the fastnesses of Western Greece, obtaining by his perseverance from the diplomacy of Europe a more favourable line of boundary for the new nation which it at length recognised. To this cause he gave up everything; personal risks cannot be counted; but he threw away all prospects in England; he made no bargains; he sacrificed freely to the necessities of the struggle any pecuniary resource that he could command, neither requiring nor receiving any repayment. He threw in his lot with the people for whom he had surrendered everything, in order to take part in their deliverance. Since his arrival in Greece in 1827 he has never turned his face westwards. He took the part which is perhaps the only becoming and justifiable one for the citizen of one State who permits himself to take arms, even in the cause of independence, for another; having fought for the Greeks, he lived with them, and shared, for good and for evil, their fortunes.
For more than forty years he has resided at Athens under the shadow of the great rock of the Acropolis. Distinguished by all the honours the Greek nation could bestow, military or political, he has lived in modest retirement, only on great emergencies taking any prominent part in the political questions of Greece, but always throwing his influence on the side of right and honesty. The course of things in Greece was not always what an educated Englishman could wish it to be. But whatever his judgment, or, on occasion, his action might be, there never could be a question, with his friends any more than with his opponents--enemies he could scarcely be said to have--as to the straightforwardness, the pure motives, the unsullied honour of anything that he did or anything that he advised. The Greeks saw among them one deeply sympathising with all that they cared for, commanding, if he had pleased to work for it, considerable influence out of Greece, the intimate friend of a Minister like Sir Edmund Lyons, yet keeping free from the temptation to make that use of influence which seems so natural to politicians in a place like Athens; thinking much of Greece and of the interests of his friends there, but thinking as much of truth and justice and conscience; hating intrigue and trick, and shaming by his indignant rebuke any proposal of underhand courses that might be risked in his presence.
The course of things, the change of ideas and of men, threw him more and more out of any forward and prominent place in the affairs of Greece. But his presence in Athens was felt everywhere. There was a man who had given up everything for Greece and sought nothing in return.
His blameless unselfishness, his n.o.ble elevation of character, were a warning and a rebuke to the faults which have done so much mischief to the progress of the nation; and yet every Greek in Athens knew that no one among them was more jealous of the honour of the nation or more anxious for its good. To a new political society, freshly exposed to the temptations of party struggles for power, no greater service can be rendered than a public life absolutely clear from any suspicion of self-seeking, governed uninterruptedly and long by public spirit, public ends, and a strong sense of duty. Such a service General Church has rendered to his adopted country. During his residence among them for nearly half a century they have become familiar, not in word, but in living reality, with some of the best things which the West has to impart to the East. They have had among them an example of English principle, English truth, English high-souled disinterestedness, and that n.o.ble English faith which, in a great cause, would rather hope in vain than not hope at all. They have learned to venerate all this, and, some of them, to love it.
XXI
DEATH OF BISHOP WILBERFORCE[24]
[24]
_Guardian_, 23rd July 1873.
The beautiful summer weather which came on us at the beginning of this week gives by contrast a strange and terrible point to the calamity, the announcement of which sent such a shock through the whole country on Monday last. Summer days in all their brilliance seemed come at last, after a long waiting which made them the more delightful. But as people came down to breakfast on that morning, or as they gathered at railway stations on their way to business, the almost incredible tidings met them that the Bishop of Winchester was dead; that he had been killed by a fall from his horse. In a moment, by the most trivial of accidents, one of the foremost and most stirring men of our generation had pa.s.sed away from the scene in which his part was so large a one. With everything calm and peaceful round him, in the midst of the keen but tranquil enjoyment of a summer evening ride with a friend through some of the most charming scenery in England, looking forward to meeting another friend, and to the pleasure which a quiet Sunday brings to hard-worked men in fine weather, and a pleasant country house, the blow fell. The moment before, as Lord Granville remarks, he had given expression to the fulness of his enjoyment. He was rejoicing in the fine weather, he was keenly noticing the beauty of the scenery at every point of the way; with his characteristic love of trees he was noticing the different kinds and the soils which suited them; especially he was greatly pleased with his horse. There comes a slight dip in the smooth turf; the horse stumbles and recovers himself unhurt; but in that short interval of time all has vanished, all things earthly, from that quick eye and that sensitive and sympathetic mind.
It is indeed tragic. He is said to have thought with distress of a lingering end. He was spared it. He died as a soldier dies.
A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any circ.u.mstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us, probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of each day"s observation and criticism, under each day"s varying circ.u.mstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man"s course moves on, we are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand, falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them, and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be both in the Church and the country.
For it is obvious, at the first glance now that he is gone, that there is no one who can fill the place which he filled. It seems to us beyond dispute that he has been the greatest Bishop the English Church has seen for a century and a half. We do not say the greatest man, but the greatest Bishop; the one among the leaders of the English Church who most adequately understood the relations of his office, not only to the Church, but to his times and his country, and who most adequately fulfilled his own conception of them. We are very far from saying this because of his exuberant outfit of powers and gifts; because of his versatility, his sympathetic nature, his eager interest in all that interested his fellows, his inexhaustible and ready resources of thought and speech, of strong and practical good sense, of brilliant or persuasive or pathetic eloquence. In all this he had equals and rivals, though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his powers. Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect, but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society, to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic congregations. All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the whole. Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges, disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness--or what was often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought. We are far from thinking that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.
But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two things. He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop might do and ought to do. And these two ideas he steadily kept in view and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging energy in action. He grasped in all its n.o.bleness and fulness and height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above all things, a religious society. To serve that society, to call forth in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its benefits would satisfy--this was the aim from which, however perplexed or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really swerved. In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom and variety of its practical applications, in the distinctness of his purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of very exacting claims for the undivided work and efforts of a lifetime.
When he became Bishop he very soon revolutionised the old notion of a Bishop"s duties. He threw himself without any regard to increasing trouble and labour on the great power of personal influence. In every corner of his diocese he made himself known and felt; in all that interested its clergy or its people he took his part more and more. He went forth to meet men; he made himself their guest and companion as well as their guide and chief; he was more often to be found moving about his diocese than he was to be found at his own home at Cuddesdon.
The whole tone of communication between Bishop and people rose at once in freedom and in spiritual elevation and earnestness; it was at once less formal and more solemnly practical. He never spared his personal presence; always ready to show himself, always ready to bring the rarer and more impressive rites of the Church, such as Ordination, within the view of people at a distance from his Palace or Cathedral, he was never more at his ease than in a crowd of new faces, and never exhausted and worn out in what he had to say to fresh listeners. Gathering men about him at one time; turning them to account, a.s.signing them tasks, pressing the willing, shaming the indolent or the reluctant, at another; travelling about with the rapidity and system of an officer inspecting his positions, he infused into the diocese a spirit and zeal which nothing but such labour and sympathy could give, and bound it together by the bands of a strong and wise organisation.
What he did was but a very obvious carrying out of the idea of the Episcopal office; but it had not seemed necessary once, and his merit was that he saw both that it was necessary and practicable. It is he who set the standard of what is now expected, and is more or less familiar, in all Bishops. And as he began so he went on to the last. He never flagged, he never grew tired of the continual and varied intercourse which he kept up with his clergy and people. To the last he worked his diocese as much as possible not from a distance, but from local points which brought him into closer communication with his flock. London, with its great interests and its great attractions, social and political, never kept away one who was so keenly alive to them, and so prominent in all that was eventful in his time, from attending to the necessities and claims of his rural parishes. What his work was to the very last, how much there was in him of unabated force, of far-seeing judgment, of n.o.ble boldness and earnestness, of power over the souls and minds of men in many ways divided, a letter from Dr.
Monsell[25] in our columns shows.
He had a great and all-important place in a very critical moment, to which he brought a seriousness of purpose, a power and ripeness of counsel, and a fearlessness distinctly growing up to the last. It is difficult to see who will bend the bow which he has dropped.
[25]
... The shock that the sudden announcement of an event so solemn must ever give, was tenfold great to one who, like myself, had been, during the past week, closely a.s.sociated with him in anxious deliberations as to the best means of meeting the various difficulties and dangers with which the Church is at present surrounded.
He had gathered round him, as was his annual wont, his Archdeacons and Rural Deans, to deliberate for the Church"s interests; and in his opening address, and conduct of a most important meeting, never had he shone out more clearly in intellectual vigour, in theological soundness, in moral boldness, in Christian gentleness and love.
... He spoke upon the gravest questions of the day--questions which require more than they generally receive, delicate handling. He divided from the evil of things, which some in the spirit of party condemn wholesale, the hidden good which lies wrapt up in them, and which it would be sin as well as folly to sweep away. He made every man who heard him feel the blessing of having in the Church such a veteran leader, and drew forth from more than one there the openly expressed hope that as he had in bygone days been the bold and cautious controller of an earlier movement in the right direction, so now he would save to the Church some of her precious things which rude men would sweep away, and help her to regain what is essential to her spiritual existence without risking the sacredness of private life, the purity of private thoughts, the sense of direct responsibility between G.o.d and the soul, which are some of the most distinctive characteristics of our dear Church of England.
From his council chamber in Winchester House I went direct with him to the greater council chamber of St. Stephen"s to hear him there vindicate the rights and privileges of his order, and beat back the a.s.saults of those who, in high places, think that by a speech in, or a vote of, either house they can fashion the Church as they please.
Never did he speak with more point and power; and never did he seem to have won more surely the entire sympathy of the house.
To gather in overwhelming numbers round him in the evening his London clergy and their families, to meet them all with the kind cordiality of a real father and friend, to run on far into the middle of the night in this laborious endeavour to please--was "the last effort of his toilsome day."
XXII
RETIREMENT OF THE PROVOST OF ORIEL[26]
[26]
_Guardian_, 4th November 1874.
Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, has resigned the Provostship. He has held it from 1828, within four years of half a century. The time during which he has presided over his college has been one of the most eventful periods in the history of the University; it has been a time of revolt against custom, of reform, of keen conflict, of deep changes; and in all connected with these he has borne a part, second to none in prominence, in importance, and we must add, in dignity. No name of equal distinction has disappeared from the list of Heads of Houses since the venerable President of Magdalen pa.s.sed away. But Dr. Routh, though he watched with the keenest intelligence, and not without sympathy, all that went on in the days into which his life had been prolonged, watched it with the habits and thoughts of days long departed; he had survived from the days of Bishop Horne and Dr. Parr far into our new and strange century, to which he did not belong, and he excited its interest as a still living example of what men were before the French Revolution. The eminence of the Provost of Oriel is of another kind. He calls forth interest because among all recent generations of Oxford men, and in all their restless and exciting movements, he has been a foremost figure. He belongs to modern Oxford, its daring attempts, its fierce struggles, its successes, and its failures. He was a man of whom not only every one heard, but whom every one saw; for he was much in public, and his unsparing sense of public duty made him regularly present in his place at Council, at Convocation, at the University Church, at College chapel. The outward look of Oxford will be altered by the disappearance in its ceremonies and gatherings of his familiar form and countenance.
He would anywhere have been a remarkable man. His active and independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold, Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different as they were from one another, all represented the awakening but still imperfect consciousness that a University life ought to be something higher than one of literary idleness, given up to the frivolities of mere elegant scholarship, and to be crowned at last by comfortable preferment; that there was much difficult work to be seriously thought about and done, and that men were placed at Oxford under heavy responsibilities to use their thoughts and their leisure for the direct service of their generation. Clever fops and dull pedants joined in sneering at this new activity and inquisitiveness of mind, and this grave interest and employment of intellect on questions and in methods outside the customary line of University studies and prejudices; but the men were too powerful, and their work too genuine and effective, and too much in harmony with the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped by impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins was one of those who made the Oriel Common-room a place of keen discussion and brilliant conversation, and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the College itself reflected something of the vigour and accomplishments of the Common-room. Dr. Newman, in the _Apologia_, has told us, in touching terms of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty years ago, the two minds first came into close contact, and what intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins had rendered him. He tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins had profoundly impressed him by a work in which, with characteristic independence and guarded caution equally characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and confusions of thought, and shows himself original in discerning and stating an obvious truth which had escaped other people--his work on _Unauthoritative Tradition_. His logical acuteness, his habits of disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of all looseness of thinking and expression, his conscientious efforts after substantial reality in his sharpest distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble, his serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the possession of intellectual power--all this would have made him eminent, whatever the times in which he lived.
But the times in which we live and what they bring with them mould most of us; and the times shaped the course of the Provost of Oriel, and turned his activity into a channel of obstinate and prolonged antagonism, of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most uncompromising, against two great successive movements, both of which he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled from as revolutionary--the Tractarian first, and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was in Oxford, at least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent. From his counsels, from his guarded and measured attacks, from the power given him by a partial agreement against popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his severe and unflinching determination, it received its heaviest blows and suffered its greatest losses. He detested what he held to be its anti-Liberal temper, and its dogmatic a.s.sertions; he resented its taking out of his hands a province of theology which he and Whately had made their own, that relating to the Church; he thought its tone of feeling and its imaginative and poetical side exaggerated or childish; and he could not conceive of its position except as involving palpable dishonesty. No one probably guided with such clear and self-possessed purpose that policy of extreme measures, which contributed to bring about, if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845. Then succeeded the great Liberal tide with its demands for extensive and immediate change, its anti-ecclesiastical spirit, its scarcely disguised scepticism, its daring philosophical and critical enterprises. By degrees it became clear that the impatience and intolerance which had purged the University of so many Churchmen had, after all, left the Church movement itself untouched, to a.s.sume by degrees proportions scarcely dreamed of when it began; but that what the defeat of the Tractarians really had done was, to leave the University at the mercy of Liberals to whom what had been called Liberalism in the days of Whately was mere blind and stagnant Conservatism.
One war was no sooner over than the Provost of Oriel found another even more formidable on his hands. The most dauntless and most unshaken of combatants, he faced his new antagonists with the same determination, the same unshrinking sense of duty with which he had fought his old ones. He used the high authority and influence which his position and his character justly gave him, to resist or to control, as far as he could, the sweeping changes which, while bringing new life into Oxford, have done so much to break up her connection of centuries with the Church. He boldly confronted the new spirit of denial and unbelief. He wrote, he preached, he published, as he had done against other adversaries, always with measured and dignified argument, but not shrinking from plain-spoken severity of condemnation. Never sparing himself labour when he thought duty called, he did not avail himself of the privilege of advancing years to leave the war to be carried on by younger champions.
It is impossible for those who may at times have found themselves most strongly, and perhaps most painfully, opposed to him, not to admire and revere one who, through so long a career has, in what he held to be his duty to the Church and to religion, fought so hard, encountered such troubles, given up so many friendships and so much ease, and who, while a combatant to the last, undiscouraged by odds and sometimes by ill-success, has brought to the weariness and disappointment of old age an increasing gentleness and kindliness of spirit, which is one of the rarest tokens and rewards of patient and genuine self-discipline. A man who has set himself steadily and undismayed to stem and bring to reason the two most powerful currents of conviction and feeling which have agitated his times, leaves an impressive example of zeal and fearlessness, even to those against whom he has contended. What is the upshot which has come of these efforts, and whether the controversies of the moment have not in his case, as in others, diverted and absorbed faculties which might have been turned to calmer and more permanent tasks, we do not inquire.
Perhaps a life of combat never does all that the combatant thinks it ought to accomplish, or compensates for the sacrifices it entails. In the case of the Provost of Oriel, he had, with all his great and n.o.ble qualities, one remarkable want, which visibly impaired his influence and his persuasiveness. He was out of sympathy with the rising aspirations and tendencies of the time on the two opposite sides; he was suspicious and impatient of them. He was so sensible of their weak points, the logical difficulties which they brought with them, their precipitate and untested a.s.sumptions, the extravagance and unsoundness of character which often seemed inseparable from them, that he seldom did justice to them viewed in their complete aspect, or was even alive to what was powerful and formidable in the depth, the complexity, and the seriousness of the convictions and enthusiasm which carried them onwards. In truth, for a man of his singular activity and reach of mind, he was curiously indifferent to much that most interested his contemporaries in thought and literature; he did not understand it, and he undervalued it as if it belonged merely to the pa.s.sing fashions of the hour.
This long career is now over. Warfare is always a rude trade, and men on all sides who have had to engage in it must feel at the end how much there is to be forgiven and needing forgiveness; how much now appears harsh, unfair, violent, which once appeared only necessary and just. A hard hitter like the Provost of Oriel must often have left behind the remembrance of his blows. But we venture to say that, even in those who suffered from them, he has left remembrances of another and better sort. He has left the recollection of a pure, consistent, laborious life, elevated in its aim and standard, and marked by high public spirit and a rigid and exacting sense of duty. In times when it was wanted, he set in his position in the University an example of modest and sober simplicity of living; and no one who ever knew him can doubt the constant presence, in all his thoughts, of the greatness of things unseen, or his equally constant reference of all that he did to the account which he was one day to give at his Lord"s judgment-seat. We trust that he may be spared to enjoy the rest which a weaker or less conscientious man would have claimed long ago.
XXIII