l_icr\ni UNIVCRSITY OF CALIFORNIA 1 SAN DIEGO \ LEADERS OF THE CHURCH 1800 1900 EDITED BY GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL UNIFORU WITH THIS VOLUME. 3\6 net. DEAN CHURCH. By D. C, Lathbury. BISHOP WlLBERFORCE. By R. G. Wilbtrforct. OTHERS IN PREPARATION. ajo-yzj LEADERS OF THE CHURCH 18001900 EDITED BY GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL DR. LIDDON BY G. W. E. RUSSELL A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LIMITED LONDON : 34, Great Castle Street, Oxford Circus, W OXFORD : 106, S. Aldate's Street 1905 TO MY FRIEND LOUIS KERCHEVAL HILTON, RECTOR OF SEMLEY, IN REMEMBRANCE OF HAPPY DAYS AT OXFORD. GENERAL PREFACE. TT seems expedient that the origin and scope of this new Series of Biographies should be briefly explained. Messrs. A. R. Mowbray and Co. had formed the opinion that Ecclesiastical Biography is apt to lose in attractiveness and interest, by reason of the technical and professional spirit in which it is generally handled. Acting on this opinion, they resolved to publish some short Lives of "Leaders of the Modern Church," written exclusively by laymen. They conceived that a certain freshness might thus be imparted to subjects already more or less familiar, and that a class of readers, who are repelled by the details of ecclesiasticism, might be attracted by a more human, and in some sense a more secular, treatment of religious lives. This conception of Ecclesiastical Biography agreed entirely with my own prepossessions ; and I gladly acceded to the publishers' request that I would undertake the general superin- tendence of the series. I am not without the hope that these handy and readable books may be of some service to the English clergy. They set forth the impressions produced on vi Vlll the minds of devout and interested lay-people by the characters and careers of some great ecclesiastics. It seems possible that a know- ledge of those impressions may stimulate and encourage that "interest in public affairs, in the politics and welfare of the country," and in "the civil life of the people," which Cardinal Manning noted as the peculiar virtue of the English Priesthood ; and the lack of which he deplored as one of the chief defects of the Priesthood over which he himself presided. 1 G. W. E. RUSSELL. S, Mary Magdalene 't Day, 1905. 1 See "Hindrances to the Spread of the Catholic Church in England," at the end of Purcell's Life of Cardinal {Manning. NOTE. TT will be seen at a glance that this book does not attempt to compete with the Life ana Letters of Henry Parry Liddon^ D.D., com- piled by the Rev. J. O. Johnston, Principal of Cuddesdon. It is intended merely to supplement the larger book in some small matters of detail ; and I desire to testify my deep obligations to the accuracy and thorough- ness of Mr. Johnston's work. In describing Dr. Liddon's opinions, I have of course made free use of his pub- lished writings. In attempting to estimate his character and gifts, I have relied mainly on the friendship with which he honoured me : it began in my first term at Oxford, and lasted till his death. I am greatly indebted to members of his family for their encourage- ment and help ; and to several of his friends, outside the domestic circle, who have given me similar assistance. G.W. E. R. Ml Sauli 1905 CONTENTS. CHAPTER PACK I. BEGINNINGS ORDINATION CUDDBSDON - i II. S. EDMUND HALL SERMONS BAMPTON LECTURES - - - - - -13 III. THE IRISH CHURCH THE LENT LECTURES - 28 IV. S. PAUL'S THE ATHANASIAN CREED - - 42 V. THE P. W. R. ACT THE EASTERN QUESTION CHANGES AT OXFORD - - - 55 VI. WORK IN LONDON BISHOPRICS THE EAST - 71 VII. MR. BELL Cox "JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC" S. PAUL'S REREDOS LINCOLN TRIAL - 89 VIII. Lux MUNDI - - - - -101 IX. THE LAST CHARGE THE END - -' - 122 X. THEOLOGY RITUAL ESTABLISHMENT- - 139 XI. POLITICS - - - - - - 161 XII. CHARACTERISTICS SUMMARY - - - 172 Leaders of the Church 18001900 DR. LIDDON. CHAPTER I. BEGINNINGS ORDINATION CUDDESDON. " LIDDON is half a Frenchman." Vary the phrase by occasionally substituting "an Italian" for " a Frenchman," and you have the short and easy formula in which, in 1870, the world summarized its impressions of a new and astonishing force in the religious life of London. 1 Some show of plausibility was lent to the statement by the great preacher's olive skin, jet-black hair, and piercing eyes ; some by the vehemence of his rhetorical manner ; some by the structure and method of the arresting orations in which he had sought to deliver his hearers from "per- plexities which beset an age of feverish scepticism." But it was all delusion. In spite of his complexion and his rhetoric, 1 See page 33. B 2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 Liddon was as thoroughbred an Englishman as could be found between the Solent and the Bristol Channel. His ancestors had long been settled in the south-western part of England. His father, Matthew Liddon, was an officer in the Royal Navy, and had served with distinc- tion under Captain, afterwards Sir Edward, Parry in the attempt to discover the North- West Passage. 1 On his retirement from active service, Captain Liddon married Ann Bilke, and established himself at North Stoneham, near Basingstoke. Here their eldest son, HENRY PARRY LIDDON, was born on August 2oth, 1829, and was baptized on the 26th of September. Captain Parry was one of the Godfathers, and bestowed his name upon the child. It is worthy of note, and should be stated at the very outset, that the religious influences which governed Henry Liddon's infancy and youth were profoundly Evangelical. At his mother's knee he learned the vital lesson that " other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is JESUS CHRIST ; " and on that impregnable rock the whole superstructure of his lire and work was built. In 1832 the Liddons moved to Colyton, and in 1839 Henry Liddon was sent to a boarding-school at Lyme Regis. His tastes and habits at school were remarkably unlike those of the normal schoolboy. He played x A bay in the west of Melville Island was named by Parry " Liddon Gulf." Dr. Liddon 3 no games, and eschewed all athletic exercises except swimming. He collected coins, read military history, wrote dramas and acted them, wrote sermons and sent them to his maiden aunt. The tone of his theology was still strictly Evangelical, and markedly Anti- Roman. In 1 844 he went to London, to enter King's College School, and boarded with one of the Assistant Masters. What was he like in those early days ? Let his school-fellow, Mr. Frederic Harrison, reply : " He was much my senior, and very old of his years, so there was no kind of school-intimacy between us. He always seemed to me an elder brother, who wished the young ones were more serious. But, different though our interests and habits were, I always found him friendly, gentle, and considerate. So far as I can remember, he was at seventeen just what he was at twenty-seven, or thirty-seven, or forty-seven sweet, grave, thoughtful, complete. Others perhaps may recall growth, change, completeness, gradually coming on him in look, form, mind, and character. I cannot. To me, when I heard him preaching in S. Paul's, or heard him speak at Oxford of more recent years, he was just the same earnest, zealous, affectionate, and entirely other-worldly nature that I remember at seventeen. The lines in his face may have deepened : the look may have become more anxious of late years. But, as a schoolboy, I always thought he looked just what he did 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 as a Priest. There was the same expression of sweet, somewhat fatherly, somewhat melan- choly interest. He would reprove, exhort, advise boys just as a young Priest does in his own congregation. We expected it of him : and it never seemed to us to be in any way stepping out of his own business when he gave one of us a lecture or a sharp rebuke. We seemed to feel that this was what he was there for. He was entirely a Priest amongst boys." This testimony is the more remarkable, because in after years Liddon, though he was wont to speak gratefully of the intellectual training which he received at King's College School, used to deplore the stiffness and dryness of the religious teaching. Preach- ing in the Chapel of King's College in 1873, he said : " If, after leaving King's College School, I had not come into contact with other influences, I might have shrunk to the end of my life from the religious truths which now have a first place in my heart. And why was this ? . . . There were school-prayers ; there were religious lessons ; there were examinations in religion, as in other things. But there was nothing to touch a boy's soul ; there was nothing to reflect GOD ; nothing to make the Christian life in its lofty and pure ideal a popular power among 500 boys." But the " other influences " were now near at hand. Henry Liddon left school at Mid- summer, 1846, having been confirmed on the Dr. Liddon 5 29th of the previous May. He had already realized his vocation to Holy Orders, and had set his heart on Oxford. Captain Liddon had shown some of the youthful Henry's manuscript sermons to Dr. Barnes, who was both Vicar of Colyton and Canon of Christ Church, and the Doctor was so much impressed by them that he offered their author a Studentship at Christ Church. Liddon went into residence in October, 1846; in the following December he was admitted to his Studentship ; and he was a Student of Christ Church when he died. In 1879 he wrote of himself as "having belonged to the list of Students of the Old Foundation for thirty-three years this Christmas, and loving every stone of a place with which I associate the happiest moments and memories of my life." Just after his death, a fellow-Student wrote : "He had come to Christ Church when he was only seventeen years of age ; in con- nexion with Christ Church, in many instances within its walls, he had formed his most enduring friendships ; almost without any break from the date of his matriculation he had continued to hold his rooms ; and all through his life it had been his habit to spend a considerable portion of each year in residence with us. Christ Church was emphatically his home, and he lavished on it all the wealth of affection of which so deep and genuine a nature was capable." But, above all, Christ Church was the scene, and in some sense the instru- 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 ment, of the momentous change which now overtook his religious beliefs. He fell at once under Dr. Pusey's influence, and his eyes were opened to see the treasures of Sacramental truth and corporate Churchmanship. The life which Liddon led at Oxford was as remote from the ordinary life of Under- graduates, as his life at school had been from that of ordinary schoolboys. He took no part in athletic exercises. He read and walked and bathed with like-minded friends, 1 and cultivated music, and went to church, and frequented Dr. Pusey's society, and wrote elaborate sermons, and practised, in an unob- trusive way, some little "ritual frivolities." In the Long Vacation of 1849 ne went with a " Reading Party " to Wales, under the guidance of William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford ; H. N. Oxenham being of the party. In later life he was wont to narrate with pardonable pride the fact that during this tour he had rescued the historian from a watery grave. It was his one athletic triumph. 1 Among his friends were Lord Carnarvon, Lord Robert Cecil (afterwards Lord Salisbury), Frederick Lygon (after- wards Lord Beauchamp), G. W. Kitchin (afterwards Dean of Durham), and R. M. Benson, founder and first Superior of the Society of S. John the Evangelist, Cowley. Another was F. T. Buckland, "the accomplished and kindly naturalist, whose observations have opened out to this generation un- suspected fields of knowledge, and who, in his most intimate study of nature, never failed to recognize nature's GOD." Church Troubles, p. 53. Dr. Liddon 7 As regards the prescribed work of the University, Liddon was at a double disad- vantage. His absorbing interest in theological study had to some extent distracted his thoughts from scholarship and philosophy ; and he was at least a year younger than most of his com- petitors, two years younger than some. In spite of these disqualifications, and of a delicacy of health which led his tutor to caution him against over-work, he secured a Second Class in the Final Classical School in the summer of 1850, being not quite twenty-one years old. More than two years had to elapse before he could be ordained. He occupied the interval by reading for the Johnson Theological Scholar- ship (which he won in 1851) ; by mastering the history of the Church of England ; and by making journeys in Scotland and on the Con- tinent, sometimes in company with a private pupil. In September, 1852, he paid his first visit to Rome. Vehement attempts were made to convert him, and he was honoured by a polemical conversation with Pius IX. He was attracted by much that he saw at Rome, but neither his intellect nor his conscience was convinced. 1 Unseduced and unterrified, he returned to England, and on December I9th, 1852, he was ordained Deacon in " the Cathe- dral Church of CHRIST in Oxford," by the 1 In 1864 he wrote "I never pass the Festival of the Assumption without being thankful that I am not a Roman Catholic." 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 hands of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. The first of that ever-memorable succession of sermons by which, during a ministry of nearly forty years, he so gloriously served the cause of GOD in England, was preached in S. Thomas's Church, Oxford, on S. Thomas's Day, 1852. In January, 1853, he settled at Wantage, as Curate to the Rev. W. J. Butler, afterwards Dean of Lincoln. Here he instantly made his mark as a preacher of very long, very eloquent, and very impassioned sermons. By Dr. Pusey's wise advice he abandoned his manuscripts, and began to cultivate his splendid gift of extemporaneous oratory. His Vicar wrote in after years : " Nothing could exceed the beauty of his language, or the majesty of his thought. Strange, however, to say, his preaching was not popular among the Wantage folks. He had formed his style at that time much on the French or foreign model, and he used action and manner which our old- fashioned Berkshire parishioners could not appreciate." But, in spite of their truly English tendency to mistrust outlandish ways, the poor people loved Liddon as they knew him in the fields, in their cottages, and at their sick-beds. He acted as Chaplain to the Workhouse, where he tried to introduce some congregational singing in the Sunday Services, and even ventured to decorate the white-washed walls with some sacred prints, which the Guardians abruptly returned. This *Dr. Liddon 9 incident was never forgotten. " I remember," writes Dr. Holland, " how he flamed up at the mention of the Poor Law ; and this fiery indignation grew out of some event in his old curacy at Wantage, where he had given some pictures to relieve the hideous Work- house walls, only to find them removed by unbending Guardians." l However, Liddon's career as a curate was not destined to be of long duration. His health was not robust ; Wantage is bleak ; Butler's rule was strenuous ; and it soon became ap- parent that Liddon was, in the phrase of his friend Richard Benson, "not up to Wantage requirements." He resigned the curacy, and, after a short interval of rest, was ordained Priest by the Bishop of Oxford on December 1 8th, 1853 "My GOD, strengthen me for that to which Thou hast called me." The remarkable prelate 2 whose privilege it was to admit Liddon to the Diaconate and the Priesthood was now in the eighth year of his Episcopate. He had not been a Bishop three months when he noted in his private list of "Agenda" for his diocese "A Diocesan Training-College for Clergy to be established at Cuddesdon." Eight years elapsed before the design was actually realized ; but by the end of 1853 the building was nearly complete, and 1 The CofftmonvffaM, January, 1905. * Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) Bishop of Oxford, 1845 ; of Winchester, 1869. C I o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 the Rev. Alfred Pott, afterwards Archdeacon of Berkshire, had undertaken to be Principal of the College when it should be opened in the following summer. Liddon was now free from pastoral duties ; he had his station and income as Student of Christ Church ; he was a thoroughly well-instructed theologian, and his fervent piety was a living epistle known and read of all men. He was an ideal officer for a Theological College, and, just before the Ordination at Christmas, 1853, the Bishop asked him to become Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon. After some mutual explanations of views and intentions, he accepted the post. The College was formally opened on June I3th, 1854, and the new Vice-Principal entered on his new duties in the following October. He entered on them not without misgiving. He foresaw difficulties only too likely to arise from the Bishop's ingrained Protestantism, just veneered with a layer of Moderate High Churchism. His own theological teaching was definite, unmistakable, insistent. The Bishop's might, without uncharity, be described as nebu- lous and uncertain. The difference between the two theologies soon made itself felt in practice. The Bishop, submitting to the representations of Episcopal brethren, thought it necessary to curb some elementary ritualism in the College Chapel. He required the abandonment of the Eastward Position at the Altar. "This change," wrote Liddon, " I feel to be the Dr. Liddon 1 1 most important ; it is doctrinal." The Bishop, on his part, wrote : " Our (that is, Liddon's and mine,) theological standing- point is not identical. On the great doctrine of the Eucharist we should use somewhat different language, and our ritualistic ten- dencies would be all coloured by this. On Confession, and its expedient limits, we should also, I think, differ." At the beginning of 1858, a sudden storm burst over Cuddesdon College. It began with an article in the Quarterly Review, commenting severely on the theological tone of the College, and it was industriously fomented by a " gossip- ing friend " of the Bishop's, whose name need not now be recalled. Protestant feeling, both in the diocese and beyond it, was violently aroused, and the usefulness, perhaps even the existence, of the College was imperilled. At first the Bishop wrote that the Vice-Principal was " eminently endued with the power of leading men to earnest devoted piety," and that with such a man he ought not to interfere except as to " anything substantially important." But gradually his attitude changed. He found that there was in Liddon "a strength of will an ardour a restlessness a dominant imagination which makes him unable to give to the young men any tone save exactly his own tone." That tone was not the Bishop's, nor was it acceptable either to the old-fashioned High Churchmen who, in their 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 staid way, wished the College well ; or to the Protestant fanatics who were howling for its destruction. Difficulties from within, as well as from without, increased term by term, and eventually the Bishop resolved to lighten the ship by throwing his lieutenant overboard. He "came with a torn heart to the conclusion " that Liddon must go. Of this conclusion Liddon said twenty years later, " It was the only great dis- appointment of my life." He was a Priest to the innermost fibre. He was obviously unfitted, both mentally and physically, for the ordinary duties of a parish, but his ardour for the Priesthood was intense, and he was supremely happy in a sphere of work where he could train men for the priestly life, stamping on young consciences and wills his own high ideal of the Sacerdotal Vocation. His work at Cuddesdon had been, in spite of Puritan calumnies and Episcopal qualms, eminently successful. Then, as always, he powerfully attracted the love and loyalty of young men. Principal Johnston generously says, that " to the present day the special features of Cuddesdon College are due, under GOD, to the work of its first Vice-Principal." That work was closed by the combined action of friends and foes ; and at Easter, 1859, the most brilliant ecclesiastic in the Church of England found himself without office, employ- ment, or responsibility. Dr. Liddon 13 CHAPTER II. S. EDMUND HALL SERMONS BAMPTON LECTURES. WE have seen that Liddon had a precocious talent for composing sermons, and he had improved it with sedulous care. For the villagers of Cuddesdon and Wantage he probably had (as was said of Edward Irving at Kirkcaldy) "ower muckle gran'ner," and in the chapel of a Theological College he may have been, if not " ower grand," yet over -long and over -rhetorical. His return to Oxford, in the summer of 1859, suddenly supplied him with a larger and a fitter audience. He was made Vice-Principal of S. Edmund Hall, 1 but his activities extended far beyond the walls of that secluded quad- rangle. His Theological Lectures on Sunday evenings, delivered in the Hall of Queen's College and open to all Undergraduates, made a deep impression ; and his skill and 1 A pair of candlesticks in the Chapel of the Hall bear this inscription : 4* " Deo et Sacello Aulae S. Edmundi Cantuar : d.d. H. P. Liddon : A.M. : aed. Christi Aluran : ejusdem aulae vice-principalis in fest : Pasch.: 1861." 1 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 judgment in guiding individual souls served to drive home the lessons more publicly delivered. One who was then an Under- graduate of Christ Church writes : " I used to go for walks with him to Headington Hill and Marston. Almost at once I began to attend his Sunday evening lectures. At the end of one of my walks with him, I asked him if he would receive my Confession. He said, * I hope, dear friend, that you do not wish to go to Confession because it is the High Church thing.' I said, { Certainly not, but I feel that it is a necessity,' or words to that effect. It was near the turning from the High to S. Edmund Hall that this matter was arranged, and the thing was done in S. Edmund Hall." But, apart from all this academical or semi- academical work, Liddon was beginning to realize the true scope of his genius. He was a born preacher, and internal and external testimony combined to convince him of the fact. In Oxford he had no rival. The first sermon which he ever printed had been preached in S. Giles's Church, Oxford, in Lent, 1858, and was published by the Bishop's request. On Good Friday, 1859, just before the beginning of the Campaign of Solferino, he preached in Christ Church that magnificent sermon on "The Divine Victim," which now stands as No. IX. in the First Series of his University Sermons. Very soon Dr. Liddon 15 his fame went abroad, and he was invited to preach all over England. In the year 1860 he preached at forty-two different places ; and so acceptable were his sermons to great con- gregations in London and elsewhere that, before 1866, twelve of them had been pub- lished separately. The style and manner of his preaching will be noted later on ; at present I am merely cataloguing events. In 1859 and 1861 he delivered, before the Oxford " Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity," to which he had belonged from undergraduate days, and of which he was now Master, two striking addresses the one on the Christian obligation of study, the other on the needs and prospects of the Brotherhood. In the second of these addresses he drew a vivid contrast between Oxford as it then was, and Oxford as it had been in the great days of the Movement, and the passage is so charac- teristic of his habitual thought and style that some part of it must be reproduced : " We read of rivers whose waters at the mouth bear towards the distant ocean the products of those widely different climates and latitudes in which they take their rise : and it is not, I think, too much to say that the Brotherhood of the Holy Trinity never would or could have taken shape and form in the Oxford of 1861. It was thrown off from the Movement in its days of fresh and warm creative vigour : and it embodied con- 1 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 victions which were then shared by numbers outside it who did not even know of the existence of a Society which expressed them. It has lived through internal convulsion and external isolation and neglect : it flows down to us laden with the associations, and breathing the spirit, of a period which is already historical. It brings to us the impress of minds which have long been lost to it, and the strength of prayers which ascend for it, as we trust, beyond the Veil. It is already, after its far-off measure, a little image of the Church, travers- ing as she does in her Divine and Majestic strength remote and recent ages, and divergent civilizations ; and interpenetrating societies which have scarcely any one other point of resemblance and union, save in that com- mon impress of moral and social grace and beauty which they owe to her beneficent presence." In the summer of 1862 Liddon, who had never been strong, had a sharp attack of illness. This, combined with some other considerations, determined him to leave S. Edmund Hall. He had already declined to be the first Incumbent of S. Alban's, Holborn ; he now refused the Wardenship of Radley. Those were the days when the sciolism of Essays and Reviews, and Bishop Colenso's aberrations, had overthrown the faith of some ; and, acting on Dr. Pusey's advice, Liddon decided to Dr. Liddon 17 remain in Oxford, devoting all his powers to the intellectual defence of the Christian Creed against the assaults of Unbelief and Mis- belief. By the end of 1862 he had established himself at Christ Church, in those rooms in " Tom Quad " which he retained till his death. In 1863 he was appointed Examining Chaplain to his friend Dr. Hamilton, Bishop of Salisbury, whose entire confidence he enjoyed, whose theological opinions he shared, and to whom he always referred as " his revered Master." This appointment made heavy demands on his time, already pretty well occupied with preaching in all directions, with the preparatory study which this involved, and with the guidance of souls both orally and by correspondence. Dr. Pusey disliked all this varied activity, because it interfered with systematic authorship. " You preach sermons an hour long at S. Paul's, 1 and nobody hears you, and you are knocked up for a fortnight afterwards. You have done nothing." In 1864 Liddon was appointed by Bishop Hamilton to a Prebendal stall at Salisbury : and in the following year he published his first volume of sermons. It was rather awkwardly named Some Words for Qod ; but this tide was subsequently dropped, and it is now the First Series of University Sermons. Several of the sermons which it contains had 1 On the invitation of Dean Milman. D 1 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 already been published in separate form, but the volume is united by a certain " apologetic character " which belongs to it as a whole. It is worth noting that " The Law of Progress " and "The Freedom of the Spirit," both preached in 1864, were intended by their author as attempts to " trace to a Christian source some prominent ideas, which, in their appli- cation to secular and material interests, form the strength and staple of the system of thought vaguely described as * Liberalism."' Perhaps the finest sermon in the book is " The Conflict of Faith with Undue Exaltation of Intellect." It was preached at S. Mary's on Friday evening, March 17, 1865 not strictly " before the University," but to a congrega- tion of Undergraduates for whose special benefit Bishop Wilberforce used to organize courses of Lenten Sermons. Of those ser- mons Dr. Holland gives an inimitable descrip- tion : " Can we ever forget them ? Could we tear the memory out of our hearts ? Can Liddon's life be written, without a picture of that moving sight ? The swarms of Under- graduates, herded in galleries, in deep rows, or crowded into every nook and corner of the floor ; the lights ; the unwonted fact that we were all there in church ; the odd weird length of Burgon 1 giving out the hymn in a shrill, piping tone ; the young voices released, in 1 J. W. Burgon, (1813-1888) Vicar of S. Mary's, and afterwards Dean of Chichester. . Liddon 19 their joy, to sing some old friend like c Saviour, when in dust to Thee,' the mighty hush of expectation ; and then the thrill of that vibrant voice, alive with all the passion of the hour, vehement, searching, appealing, pleading, ringing ever higher as the great argument lifted him ; the swift turns of the beautiful face, as he flung out over us some burning ironic phrase or quivering challenge ; the beads on the brow that told of the force expended ; the grace, the movement, the fire, the sincerity of it all. It was wonderful to us. We lived on the memory of it till next Lent came round, and then there we all were again : the same scene enacted itself, the same voice pleaded with us for our souls. So, from year to year, in our weak, boyish hearts the flickering flame of faith was saved from perishing under the gusty tumult of the perilous times." But now a greater effort was at hand. Act- ing on the advice of friends, Liddon had offered himself as a candidate for the office of Bamp- ton Lecturer for 1866, and had been defeated by the casting vote of the Vice-Chancellor ; but in November, 1865, the selected candidate fell ill and resigned the lectureship, and the Heads of Houses unanimously appointed Liddon to take his place. The first Lecture had to be delivered on the 4th of March, 1866, and Liddon had chosen as his subject the most profound and far-reaching mystery of the Christian Faith " the Divinity 2 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo of our LORD and Saviour JESUS CHRIST." The intervening four months were a season of intense study, incessant labour, and painful misgiving ; but the result was a transcendent triumph. The Lectures, now in their four- teenth edition, 1 and twentieth " impression," remain among the masterpieces of English theology ; while the consuming earnestness and rhetorical fire with which they were delivered attracted unprecedented congrega- tions, and determined the spiritual future of many an Undergraduate who heard them. Let the peroration of the last Lecture be recalled : " But here we must close this attempt to reassert, against some misapprehensions of modern thought, the great truth! which guards the honour of CHRIST, and which is the most precious feature in the intellectual heritage of Christians. And for you, dear brethren, who by your generous interest or by your warm sympathies have so accompanied and sustained him, what can the preacher more fittingly or more sincerely desire, than that any clearer sight of the Divine Person of our glorious and living LORD which may have been granted you, may be, by Him, blessed to your present sanc- tification and to your endless peace ? If you are intellectually persuaded that in confessing the true Godhead of JESUS you have not fol- 1 The preface to the fourteenth edition was written within three months of Liddon's death. *Dr. Liddon 11 lowed a cunningly-devised fable, or the crude imagination of a semi-barbarous and distant age, then do not allow yourselves to rest con- tent with this intellectual persuasion. A truth so sublime, so imperious, has other work to do in you besides shaping into theoretic compact- ness a certain district of your thought about the goodness of GOD and the wants of man. The Divine CHRIST of the Gospel and the Church is no mere actor, though He were the greatest, in the great tragedy of human history ; He belongs not exclusively or especially to the past ; He is f the Same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.' He is at this moment all that He was eighteen centuries ago, all that He has been to our fathers, all that He will be to our children. He is the Divine and Infallible Teacher, the Healer and Pardoner of sin, the Source of all graces, the Conqueror of Satan and of death now, as of old, and as in the years to come. Now as heretofore, He is 'able to save unto the uttermost them that come unto GOD by Him ; ' now, as on the day of His triumph over death, * He opens the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers ' ; now, as in the first age of the Church, He it is * that hath the key of David, that openeth, and no man shutteth ; and shutteth, and no man openeth.' He is ever the Same ; but, as the children of time, whether for good or evil, we move onwards in perpetual change. The hours of life pass, they do not return ; they pass, yet they are not 2 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 forgotten ; pereunt et imputantur. But the present is our own ; we may resolve, if we will, to live as men who live for the glory of an Incarnate GOD. Brethren, you shall not repent it, if when life's burdens press heavily, and especially at that solemn hour when human help must fail, you are able to lean with strong confidence on the arm of an Almighty Saviour. May He in deed and truth be with you, alike in your pilgrimage through this world, and when that brief journey is drawing to its close ! May you, sustained by His Presence and aid, so pass through the valley of the shadow of death as to fear no evil, and to find, at the gate of the eternal world, that all the yearnings of faith and hope are to be more than satisfied by the vision of the Divine * King in His Beauty 1 ' " A great part of the year 1866, and some months of 1867, were spent by Liddon in revising his Bamptons for the press. At the same time he 'was rendering constant aid to Bishop Hamilton in the preparation of his famous Charge of 1867 ; J and he was in close consulta- tion with Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison about the Declaration on Eucharistic Doctrine to be submitted to the Upper House of Con- vocation. 2 Amid these varied labours he refreshed himself by a two months' tour in 1 Reasserting the doctrines of the Real Presence, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and the Power of the Keys. See Appendix A. 'Dr. Liddon 23 Russia, where the spiritual atmosphere de- vout, orthodox, and conservative, yet eminently anti-papal was exactly congenial to his own temper. On his return to England he was forced to consider the question of accepting the Headship of Keble College, which was to be opened in two years' time. The sug- gestion was pressed by many friends, who did not accept his refusal without a struggle. In the autumn of this year, on the invita- tion of Dr. Butler, afterwards Master of Trinity and then Head Master of Harrow, Liddon preached to the boys of Harrow School. It was then that I first saw and heard him, and I am one of those who will always regard him as incomparably the greatest preacher they ever heard, and will estimate all other preaching by comparison with his masterpieces. Perhaps the im- pression created by more than twenty years' close study of his methods may here be not out of place. October 10, 1868, is Founder's Day at Harrow. It has been announced that Mr. Liddon the "great Oxford swell," as the better-instructed boys called him, the author of the most eloquent Bampton Lectures which have ever been delivered is coming to preach in the School Chapel at the Commemoration Service. Prayers and hymns and thanks- givings for Founder and Benefactors are duly performed, and the preacher enters the pulpit. 24 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 His appearance instantly attracts attention. " He looks like a monk," one boy whispers to his neighbour ; and, indeed, it is a better description than the speaker knows. The Oxford M.A. gown, worn over a cassock, is the Benedictine habit modified by time and place ; the spare, trim figure suggests asceti- cism : the beautifully chiselled, sharply-pointed, features, the close-shaved face, the tawny skin, the jet-black hair, remind us vaguely of something by Velasquez or Murillo, or of Ary Scheffer's picture of S. Augustine. And the interest awoke by sight is intensified by sound. The preacher recites the prefatory collect. The vibrant voice strikes like an electric shock. The exquisite, almost over- refined, articulation seems the very note of culture. The restrained passion, which thrills through the disciplined utterance, warns even the most heedless that something quite unlike the ordinary stuff of school-sermons is coming. The text is announced " Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." Thirty-seven years have sped their course, and the echoes of that sermon still quiver in the ear of memory. It speaks of the blessedness and glory of boyhood ; the splendid inheritance of a Public School built on Christian lines ; the unequalled opportunities of learning while the faculties are still fresh and the mind is still Dr. Liddon 25 receptive ; the worthlessness of all merely secular attainment, however desirable, how- ever necessary, when weighed in the balance against the "one thing needful." The con- gregation still are boys, but soon they will be men. Dark days will come, as Ecclesiastes warned dark in various ways and senses, darkest when, at the Universities or else- where, we first are bidden to cast faith aside and to believe nothing but what is demonstrable by "an appeal, in the last resort, to the organs of sense." Now is the time, and this is the place, so to " remember our Creator " that, come what may, we shall never be able to forget Him, or doubt His love, or question His revelation. We are listening, for the first time in our lives, to a man inspired. The scene has transported the preacher. The sea of up- turned faces, the graceful architecture, the memorial windows flashing like jewels in the autumn sunshine, the handwriting of the names of saints and heroes speaking from every wall and pillar all combine to show him, as in a trance, the splendid destiny of a Christian School. His eyes glow and flash, every line of his face quivers with emotion, his gestures are so free, so expressive, so illustrative, " that you might almost say his body thought." He leans far out from the pulpit, spreading E 2 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 himself, as it were, over the congregation, in an act of benediction. " From this place may CHRIST ever be preached in the fulness of His creative, redemptive, and sacramental work. Here may you learn to remember Him in the days of your youth ; and in the last and most awful day of all may He remember you.'* Five minutes afterwards we are in the open air. Boys stare and gasp ; masters hurry past, excited and loquacious. Notes are compared, and watches consulted. Liddon has preached for an hour. That sermon at Harrow in 1868 may be taken as a turning-point in Liddon's rhetorical method. His peculiar gifts and graces were fully developed ; his supremacy among Eng- lish preachers was assured. But from this time on he began to subject his genius to a more rigorous discipline. The exuberance of early manhood was laid aside ; he no longer indulged his natural tendency to extempo- raneous declamation. After he became Canon of S. Paul's he very seldom preached except in that Cathedral or at Oxford, and in both places he made it an absolute rule to preach written sermons. In some respects the change was an improvement. A comparison of his First Series of University Sermons, and even his great Bamptons, with the Second Series of University Sermons and his Christmas and Easter Sermons at S. Paul's will show the Dr. Liddon 27 nature of the change. His arrangement, always clear, became more absolutely lucid ; his train of reasoning still closer and more cogent. His rhetoric, which had been undeniably florid, became a very pure and lofty style of eloquence ; and the vivid flashes of sarcasm against unbeliefs and misbeliefs, which had so often gratified his Undergraduate hearers, no longer illumined his solemn passion. If preaching be a distinct art from public speaking if it implies the effective reading of a carefully-written manuscript then Lid- don's last days were his best days as a preacher, for no one ever managed a manu- script so well. 1 But Memory has her own delights, not always amenable to canons of taste or principles of art ; and among those delights are the echo and the vision of Liddon's early oratory. 1 His manuscripts were small sheets of notepaper, strung together at the top corner. 2 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 CHAPTER III. THE IRISH CHURCH THE LENT LECTURES. IN November, 1868, the Parliament which had been elected in 1865 was dissolved, and the first General Election under Household Suffrage -took place. The issue, raised by Mr. Gladstone in the previous summer, and now submitted to the electors, was whether the Irish Church should or should not be disestablished. The result was a majority of a hundred pledged to Gladstone and Dises- tablishment, and Mr. Disraeli resigned without meeting the new Parliament. Among his last acts as Prime Minister were the appoint- ments of Dr. Tait, Bishop of London, to the Primacy, and of Dr. Jackson, Bishop of Lincoln, to the See of London. On the i8th of November, 1868, Liddon wrote to a friend " The recent appointments are very miserable work. I try to shut my eyes to what they mean, but without much success. The new Primate will, I fear, set Colenso on his legs again, by saying that he is in communion with him, and that will be a much more compromis- Dr. Uddon 29 ing thing for the Church of England than a like statement from a Bishop of London. The whole thing shows how little Dizzy was to be relied on in these matters how perfectly subordinate the Church's most vital interests are, with him, to the exigencies of -political party." In December, 1868, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council pronounced judgment in the suit of Martin >. Mackonochie, condemn- ing Mr. Mackonochie for certain practices, esteemed " ritualistic," in the celebration of the Holy Communion at S. Alban's, Holborn. On the 28th December, Liddon wrote : " My own inclination is for resistance, if there is a chance of resistance with such unanimity and success as to make the Judg- ment a dead letter. For it seems to me that a much more serious thing than any particular judgment which may emanate from that Court is the fact that such a Court should give judg- ment in such matters at all, and that the Church of CHRIST, by tacit or practical consent, should acknowledge its jurisdiction. The Court is at once a standing defiance of our LORD'S arrange- ments for the government of His Church, and a very dishonourable violation, on the part of the State, of the Reformation Settlement (cf. 24 Henry VIII. preamble). As a natural consequence, the instinct of the Court is, under the pretence of administering law, to support 3 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 infidelity and to insult Church-truth on every possible opportunity. ... I wish for the sake of the poor Church of England that that miserable Court could be abolished. Mr. Keble said more than ohce to me that c No one who cared for our Saviour's honour and the future of our Church should rest while it remained as it is.' " Mr. Gladstone was now for the first time Prime Minister, and it was obvious that the first work of the new Parliament must be Irish Disestablishment. This was a topic which sharply divided even High Churchmen, the older-fashioned sort clinging desperately to a discredited Establishment : the younger and more adventurous spirits sympathizing with the cause of Justice and Freedom. Liddon wrote to Lord Carnarvon : r " My own line would be to accept Disestablishment for Ireland, and to endeavour by doing so to secure two advantages, or so much of them as possible." These two advantages were the preservation of endow- ments, "or as much of them as could be saved ; " and the attainment of spiritual free- dom, " in particular, freedom from the doctrinal jurisdiction of the Judicial Com- mittee of the Privy Council." In England, he added, what we have most to dread is, not Disestablishment, but " a careful protection both of our social position and of our property, 1 Henry, fourth Earl of Carnarvon (1831-1890). 'Dr. Liddon 31 combined with a systematic endeavour to destroy all firm hold upon doctrine, under the plea of making the Church national. . . . The fate of the Irish Church, disestablished and im- poverished, would be a very welcome alternative to this destiny, which, if some active minds among us could have their way, is in store for ourselves." This is exactly the view of Disestablish- ment and Disendowment which he enunciated, in a more picturesque form, as late as 1881 : " Few, if any, Churchmen desire to see the Church of England disestablished and disen- dowed ; but, if it be a question whether it is better to be turned out of house and home, without any clothes, and even on a winter's night, or to be strangled by a silken cord in a richly-furnished drawing-room, what man, or Church, will have any difficulty in arriving at a decision ? " * A great part of the year 1869 was spent by Liddon in close attendance on the last illness of his " revered Master," and " dearest Father in CHRIST," Bishop Hamilton. Early in the year, the Bishop, already fatally ill, suggested that Liddon should preach the sermon on " CHRIST and Human Law," which stands as No. XVI. in the Second Series of University Sermons. "The opinions which are embodied in this sermon are substantially those of this revered and lamented prelate," and the sermon is 1 Preface to Thought! on Present fyurcb Troubles, 1881. 32 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 noteworthy as combining an emphatic protest against the State's law of Divorce and Re- marriage with an equally emphatic repudiation of the authority of the Judicial Committee in ecclesiastical disputes. It was preached before the Judges of Assize at Oxford on the 28th of February, 1869. On the i6th of March Liddon wrote, " The cold has been very great during the last two or three days, and the green things which have begun to grow look terribly pinched like Christians after a "judgment" of the Privy Council. By-the-by I have got into a certain sort of hot water for a sermon about the P.C. at Oxford the other day, which accordingly I must publish." The Bill for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church had been introduced on the ist of March ; and it ran a very easy course through the House of Commons. In the House of Lords, however, it was seriously imperilled ; and the following account of the division on the Second Reading, given by an eye-witness, was well worth preserving. On the 2 6th of June, Liddon wrote " Mrs. Gladstone's account of the division in the House of Lords was very amusing. She sat there for 1 1 hours : came home to Carlton House Terrace at 3.30 : rushed up-stairs, woke her maid (who probably cared nothing about the Irish Church), woke Agnes and Helen Gladstone ; then * went in to William.' Dr. Liddon 33 He had gone to bed early, and was sound asleep : he had been unwell in the early part of the week. * Could not help it : gave William a discreet poke.' ' A majority of 33, my dear.' * Thank you, my dear,' he said, and turned round, and went to sleep on the other side." The Bill became law on the 26th of July, 1869. The Church of S. James, Piccadilly, has long been famed for its courses of Lent Lectures on Sunday afternoons. In 1869, Dr. Jackson, Bishop of London, requested Liddon to lecture during Lent, 1870. It was an epoch-making point in the lecturer's career. He had often preached in London, at S. Paul's Cathedral, at All Saints', Margaret Street, and elsewhere ; but now for the first time the denizens of the West End, Ministers of State, members of the Houses of Parliament, great squires, leading lawyers, and all their contingents of wives and daughters, heard the greatest of English preachers, and heard him in the fulness of his physical and mental vigour. Dr. Holland writes about the impression created by these lectures with his usual vivid accuracy : " Was anything ever seen like the sensation which they produced ? Those smart crowds packed tight, Sunday after Sunday, to listen for an hour and forty minutes to a sermon that spoke straight home to their elemental souls. It was amazing ! London never again shook F 34 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 with so vehement an emotion. * Society,' in its vague, aggravating ignorance, believed itself to have discovered Liddon. How indignant we used to get with the rapturous Duchesses who asked whether we had ever heard of this wonderful new preacher ! Why, for years before we had stood ranked thick on each others' toes in huddled S. Mary's, to catch every word of the ringing voice. Those belated Duchesses, indeed ! Yet it was something that, however late in the day, they should all feel it necessary for their reputations to be there at S. James's." To Dr. Holland's reminiscences I must add a contemporary account of these famous Lectures, which I have treasured all these five-and-thirty years. It was extracted from a daily paper, and a certain resonance in the style seems to recall what Matthew Arnold called " the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph" " * As dull as a sermon :' no proverb is more trite. * The age of the pulpit has gone by : ' no idea is more readily taken for granted by cultivated men. On these commonplaces of society, however, a strange commentary has been furnished by the afternoon Lenten Ser- vices at S. James's, Piccadilly. For several Sundays the space in front of the church has, more than half-an-hour before the beginning of the service, been thronged by a fashionable concourse, which has eagerly watched for the opening of the door, and has pushed into the Dr. Liddon 35 lobby with the unceremonious vigour of a plebeian mob at the pit-entrance of a theatre on " a first night." Elegantly-dressed ladies have endangered shawls, bonnets, and tempers in the crush ; fashionably-dressed men have not scrupled to use their physical strength to get a good place ; and, five minutes after the opening of the doors, every free seat has been filled. By three o'clock not a single seat has been unoccupied, and throughout the service the passages have been crammed. " Cabinet Ministers, ex-Ministers, members of the nobility, a throng of fashionable women, and a crowd of men who seem to have strayed out of their element in going to afternoon prayers, have filled the church to overflowing. Still more striking has been the sight during the sermon. Sometimes for an hour and forty minutes, and never for less than an hour and a quarter, has the preacher drawn out the thread of his discourse. The sermons have dealt with the profoundest questions that can engage the human mind. In what form the religious instinct has revealed itself in succes- sive ages, and among different peoples ; what has been done to satisfy that instinct by Pan- theism on the one hand, or by Positivism on the other ; what lines of connexion exist between the speculation of modern Germany and that of ancient Greece ; how evil has intertwined itself with the works of a sinless Creator ; and with what hope of answer the 3 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 prayers of a finite being can be addressed to an infinite Creator : such are the subjects on which Mr. Liddon has been discoursing to the great West-end crowd. And, if the themes have seemed unlikely to be popular, still less popular might appear the method of treatment. No appeals have been made to excited feelings, and the vigorous flow of rhetoric has been disturbed by no bursts of vague eloquence. Every sermon has manifestly been written with elaborate care, and the successive links of the reasoning have been so closely knit that to keep them all in view has needed the closest attention even of trained minds. No insult is offered to the intellect of the audience by the doubt whether many of the hearers fully comprehend the Theistic argument which Mr. Liddon drew from the reasoning of Kant with respect to the supremacy of the moral law. Nor is the metaphysical learning of the West-end ladies disparaged by the suspicion, that few possessed such knowledge as he took for granted when he reviewed the efforts of Hume and Mill to resolve cause and effect into a mere antecedent and consequent, bound together by no tie of force, but merely by the link of position in time or space. Yet, while the preacher was minutely detailing and elabor- ately criticising the arguments of Fuerbach or Comte, the large audience has preserved such silence, and displayed such fixity of attention, as to recall the triumphs of the opera rather Dr. Liddon 37 than of the pulpit. Whereas an ordinary preacher finds it difficult to gain a hearing even for a quarter of an hour, Mr. Liddon has riveted the attention of his audience for more than an hour and a half. That the eager- ness to hear great preaching is still a passion, and that the pulpit might still be a great power, are facts amply attested by the series of Lenten Sermons which are to be finished next Sunday. "And what is the secret of the preacher's success ? In the first place, he has something to say. Instead of clap-trap sentiment, or vague declamation, he gives the results of long study and careful thought. Even when most widely disagreeing with Mr. Liddon's conclusions, the student of philosophy, theo- logy, or Church history sees that each sermon sums up the reading and the thought of years. Such general erudition could be matched by that of few divines in a Church which, even in the era of Georgian mediocrity, never lost the reputation for learning achieved by the Cudworths and the Hookers. So wide and so accurate an acquaintance with the specula- tion of Germany and France could be out- matched only by the few English divines, who, like Dean Mansel, have made ontology and psychology their special province. Just as Mr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures on 'The Divinity of our LORD ' were at least as remarkable for their display of minute famili- arity with the destructive criticism of Strauss 38 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 and Baur as for the acuteness of the reasoning or the force of the rhetoric, so the Lenten Sermons are not least distinguished by a wide and varied erudition. But erudition, when it stands alone, is a poor endowment for a preacher, and Mr. Liddon is a reasoner as well as a scholar. In these days of loosely- reasoned discourses, when preachers do not even dream that a defiance of accurate think- ing is a great sin, it is a positive wonder to see Mr. Liddon's attempt to link the deliver- ances of dogmatic theology with the primary instincts of our nature by a hard chain of logical inference. We do not say that the cogency of the argument would win a tribute of admiration from his philosophical opponents. His attempt to overthrow the Pyrrhonism of Hume will not, we fear, strike terror into the small but enthusiastic band of Comtists ; his assault on the Utilitarian theory of ethics will not give Mr. Mill reason for a change of front ; nor, we suspect, will his treatment of that mystery of mysteries, the origin of evil, give more universal satisfaction than the vehement rhetoric which rang through the tents of the Arabs untold centuries ago. But if the accuracy of Mr. Liddon's reasoning be impugned, he will find himself in good company. If Dean Mansel is strong in anything, it is in accuracy of logic ; and yet, by a hundred able critics, his Bampton Lectures on * The Limits of Religious Thought ' were Dr. Liddon 39 assailed on the very ground that the air of superficial exactness which distinguished the expanse of inference concealed a mass of as- sumptions. Besides having something to say, Mr. Liddon knows how to say it. ... In the power of clear, vivid and strong statement, he has no rival among English preachers. And the sermon of yesterday afternoon, 1 on the efficacy of such prayer as a finite being might address to an Infinite Being, displayed a fervour of rhetoric which could scarcely be reined in even by the curb of a fastidious culture, or stayed by the load of learning and thought. As for an hour and forty minutes Mr. Liddon dis- cussed the question whether the idea that prayer could be heard was compatible with the doctrine that the world is governed in accordance with inflexible laws, he set forth the result of such reading and thought as would equip an ordinary preacher for a year of pulpit eloquence. Indeed, the defect of the sermons is that they are better fitted for the eye than the ear. Only when they are published in a collected form, and read as a review of the relations borne by the current forms of philosophical thought to religious faith, will their real weight and power be fully seen. " And what is the moral of the brilliant success which is attending these remarkable lectures ? It is a moral which, as old as 1 April 3, 1870. 40 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 human thought itself, has been denied by age after age only to be re-asserted with renewed vehemence and vigour. It is the moral that, of all subjects, those which con- cern the everlasting destinies of man excite the profoundest interest, and that when dis- cussed with earnestness and sterling intellectual power such themes exercise a resistless fascin- ation. Again and again does scepticism seem the omnipotent creed, and the very idea of religious belief to have vanished from educated society ; but the chill of unbelief passes away, and the fever of faith comes back again. Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists fancied that from the belief of cultivated Europe they had at last banished every tenet except naked Deism, and had reduced Christianity to a bugbear of the Priests. Hume imagined that he had finally demonstrated the futility of reasoning with respect to the invisible world. And, stealing weapons from the armoury of the great Scottish sceptic, Comte waged war against all forms of the supernatural, on the ground that we can reason accurately only from the data furnished by sense, and that, when we cannot reason correctly, it is a breach of morality to reason at all. Voltaire, Hume, and Comte have taught that it is a culpable waste of time to perplex ourselves with such insoluble questions as whether we can deter- mine our own fate in the infinite hereafter, and whether the Omnipotent Ruler of the Dr. Llddon 41 universe listens to the prayers of His creatures. And yet these questions are as eagerly discussed now as they were five thousand years ago. To any fresh or earnest word on those most solemn and mysterious of themes, men listen with some measure of the eagerness which a fond imagin- ation ascribes to the ages of faith. Generation after generation feels those questions start up with the greenness of a recurring spring. Dynasties come and go, Empires rise and fall, literatures vanish from the memory of man, forms of polity wax old and perish, and the ancient homes of great peoples survive as the sepulchres of the dead ; but the breedings of the soul on the dim hereafter never fade or die. With immortal vigour they renew them- selves in each generation, and baffle the efforts of logic or sarcasm to numb them into death. It is these undying problems that Mr. Liddon has been passing under review, with the help of a rare erudition and a vigorous dialectic ; it is these yearnings of the soul that have found expression in the solemn passion of his rhetoric ; and hence, despite his constant recourse to the profundity of German analysis, a brilliant and overflowing audience has flocked to hear his lofty discourse." 1 1 The Lent Lectures were published in 1872, under the title, Some Elements ofRe/igion. 42 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 CHAPTER IV. S. PAUL'S THE ATHANASIAN CREED. 1870 was a marked year in Liddon's life. Before the famous Lent Lectures were delivered, he had received from Mr. Gladstone the offer of a Canonry at S. Paul's, and the appointment was announced on February i6th. He was installed on April 27th, and preached for the first time as Canon on May ist. : On June 1 1 th he was elected to the Ireland Professor- ship of Exegesis at Oxford, though he had steadily refused to put himself forward for the office. At the Encaenia on June 22nd, the first over which the new Chancellor, Lord Salisbury, presided, he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. 2 An American visitor to Oxford, describing the proceedings of the day, wrote as follows : "The men who received the warmest applause were Liddon, the famous preacher, and Arnold, the poet. ... Mr. 1 Liddon never gave way to the new-fangled fashion of using " Canon " as a title. To a friend who addressed him as " Canon Liddon," he would say, " Please do not Canonize me." 2 He was made D.D. in the following November. 'Dr. Liddon 43 Arnold's recent attacks 1 upon the Dissenters had endeared him to the clergymen's sons in the galleries." Liddon spent his summer holiday on the Continent, travelling from Luxembourg to Metz just as the Franco-German War broke out, and went on to Ober Ammergau and to Munich. By September he was back in Lon- don, and on the 1 1 th he preached, as Canon in Residence, under the Dome, thereby estab- lishing the precedent which has been followed ever since. On December 1 6th he took posses- sion of his official house, No. 3, Amen Court. For twenty years that house was to his friends, old and young, and to his spiritual children a shrine, a sanctuary, and a home. When Liddon became Canon of S. Paul's, the condition of the Cathedral was not very markedly different from what it had been twenty years before, when Charles Kingsley described it : " The afternoon service was pro- ceeding. The organ droned sadly in its iron cage to a few musical amateurs. Some nursery- maids and foreign sailors stared about within the spiked felons'-dock which shut off the body of the Cathedral, and tried in vain to hear what was going on inside the choir. The scanty Service rattled in the vast building, like a dried kernel too small for its shell. The place breathed imbecility, and unreality, and sleepy 1 In S. Paul and Protestantism. 44 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 life-in-death, while the whole nineteenth cen- tury went roaring on its way outside. And as Lancelot thought of old S. Paul's, the morning star and focal beacon of England through centuries and dynasties, from Augustine and Mellitus, up to those Paul's Cross sermons whose thunders shook thrones, and to Wren's noble masterpiece of art, he asked, * Whither all this ? ' Coleridge's dictum, that a cathedral is a petrified religion, may be taken in more meanings than one. When will life return to this Cathedral system ? " Some attempt to give a practical answer to that wistful question had been made by Dean Mansel and Canon Gregory before Liddon joined the Chapter, and his appointment gave fresh impetus and strength to the reforming party. In the following year Dean Mansel died, and was suc- ceeded by Dean Church, who threw all the splendid resources of his character, intellect, and knowledge into the work of making S. Paul's the great centre and exemplar of Divine Worship and spiritual activity for the whole Diocese of London. Of that work a detailed account has been given in another volume of this series. 1 Here it is enough to say that the restoration of the Holy Eucharist to its rightful position in the devotional life of the Church was the guid- ing principle of this new reformation. Hence- forward, the " Daily Sacrifice of Sacramental Thanksgiving " 2 was to be offered ; the Bread 1 T>ean Church by D. C. Lathbury. 2 Jeremy Taylor. Dr. Liddon 45 of Life was to be broken daily, and the Breaking was to be the central act of Sunday's worship, gathering round it the best that the Cathedral had to give in the way of music and architec- ture and ordered rite. Every change from the dismal disorder of the past, whether in the way of structure, or ceremony, or organization, was directed to the more conspicuous honour of " the LORD'S Service on the LORD'S Day." One detail in the improved order or Divine Worship was the Eastward Position at the Altar, which Liddon and Gregory always assumed. It chanced that by a decision of the Judicial Committee in the " Purchas Case " of 1871, this position was pronounced illegal. The Bishop of London l sought to enforce this decision in his Cathedral Church, and the " Two Senior Canons," Gregory and Liddon, announced in a published letter to the Bishop that they could not recognize the spiritual authority of the Judicial Committee, and were not prepared to alter their liturgical practice in obedience to its decrees. They invited prosecu- tion, but eventually the Bishop acquiesced in what he could not prevent ; and the incident is only mentioned here because it illustrates that intensity of conviction which made Liddon fight even desperately for what the Man in the Street would call a trifle, when he believed that it embodied or expressed a principle. To a Parish Priest whose Bishop was harrying him 1 Dr. Jackson. 46 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 about Ritual, and had ordered the Episcopal rebuke to be recorded in the Archives of the Diocese, Liddon wrote in 1872, "The * Arch- ives of the Diocese ' do not matter much : they contain a great many odd things, you may be sure. 'The Lamb's Book of Life,' if through His Infinite Mercy our names can only be found there at the last, is the only 'archive ' worth fidgeting about." It was this intensity of conviction about the spiritual forces underlying external forms that made Liddon's preaching at S. Paul's so incal- culably effective. " No one could suppose that the changes in the Services and Ritual at St. Paul's were superficial, or formal, or of small account, so long as that voice rang on, like a trumpet, telling of righteousness and tem- perance and judgment, preaching ever and always, with personal passion of belief, JESUS CHRIST and Him crucified." l It was Liddon's special strength that, in an age which deifies Nebulosity and mistakes vague- ness for depth, he based all that he taught and all that he practised on the dogmatic foundation of the Atoning Sacrifice, offered once for all by Incarnate GOD. And now we approach one of those great controversies which so profoundly stirred Liddon's heart and conscience, and in which he was appointed to play so heroic a part. 1 Dr. Holland. Dr. Liddon 47 About this time the forces of unbelief began one of those periodic attacks on the Athanasian Creed, by which, in each succeeding generation, they endeavour to remove the Landmarks of the Faith. The attack was sedulously fomented by Archbishop Tait. The Bishops, as usual, were frightened by the outcry ; l and even Bishop Wilberforce was in favour of compromises and arrangements. Liddon told him plainly that under existing circumstances the Bishops could not advise the omission of the Creed from Morning Prayer "without being guilty of an act of conspicuous unfaithfulness to Ityealed Truth." 2 For his own part his mind was soon made up, and his course was clear. On the 23rd December, 1871, he wrote to Archbishop Tait, " If this most precious Creed is either mutilated by the excision of the (so-termed) Damnatory Clauses, or degraded, by an altera- tion of the rubric which precedes it, from its present position in the Book of Common Prayer, I shall feel bound in conscience to resign my preferments, and to retire from the ministry of the Church of England." 3 1 In 1872 Liddon wrote "It is painful and odd that we should associate Bishops so generally with qualities which the ideal of their office does not make room for. Dr. Newman tells us that most of them were much the same in the Arian times. No doubt they were, if, as I suppose, something in the position makes its holders timid and imperious at once, quite oddly." * The italics are Liddon's. 3 Dr. Pusey announced the same decision. 48 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 Archbishop Tait was always intolerant of opposition, and he continued his Anti- Athanasian labours with unabated zeal, being powerfully reinforced by Dr. Thomson, Archbishop of York, and Dr. Stanley, Dean of Westminster. On the 5th of March, 1872, Liddon wrote to a friend " Men who would be frantic with indignation if the Establishment or its endowments were threatened, look on with tranquil equanimity while the Church is menaced with the loss of her truest treasures. I confess I care little about S. Paul's. 1 . . . What is the good of decorating a temple to the honour of a GOD Who may, or may not, in the judgment of so many of His ministers, be the Holy Trinity or anything else you like?" On the loth of August he wrote again "The Archbishops seem bent upon consummating the dTroo-Toerta, in one way or the other. The only thing that can possibly prevent them will be alarm about the Estab- lishment, and I don't know whether we can inspire them with that. They think, no doubt, that, if they muffle or mutilate the Creed, they will gain more support at one end than they will lose at the other. A formidable lay demonstration or remonstrance is the only thing that they will mind." Two days later he wrote " There is a fatal 1 The great scheme for decorating S. Paul's had just been set on foot, as a Memorial of the Prince of Wales' recovery from his serious illness of 1871. Dr. Liddon 49 something about the existing positions of our Bishops, which utterly demoralizes them, as defenders of the Faith. They make a certain figure if, like the s and the s, they are avowedly on the unbelieving side. But they don't dare to go against the tide. Now and then you have a Bishop Hamilton, and I do not forget the noble Bishop of Lincoln J in the present controversy. Of the rest, the less said the better : specially of the two Primates, who are really always thinking of the Establishment and their seats in the House of Lords." Two months later it fell to Liddon's turn, as Select Preacher at Oxford, to occupy the pulpit at S. Mary's. The impressions of the scene have not yet faded from the minds of some who witnessed it. It is the 2Oth of October, 1872 a bright autumn morning, the yellow sunlight streaming in upon the densely-crowded church, the long array of scarlet-robed Doctors, the beautiful face looking down from the high pulpit, with its anxious brow and wistful gaze. And then the rolling Latin hymn, and then the Bidding Prayer, and then the pregnant text He that belie^peth on the Son bath everlasting life ; and he that believetb not the Son shall not see life ; but the 'wrath of Qod abideth on him. "Are we listening to S. John the Baptist, or S. John the Evangelist ? " The preacher holds that we are listening to the Evangelist, 1 Dr. Wordsworth. H 50 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 and says that the purpose of S. John's Gospel is condensed into this sentence. " But why should not the text have stopped at the first clause ? Why is it not enough to proclaim the blessedness of those who possess life in possessing CHRIST ? Why should anything be added as to the loss of those who do not possess Him ? " The answer is that, if CHRIST be indeed the SON of GOD, through and in Whom the Perfect Moral Being has spoken to His creatures, to reject Him is to reject GOD. " If to believe Him is life, to have known and yet to reject Him is death. There is no middle term or state between the two. . . . The absolute religion can claim no less than this : it cannot dare to represent its acceptance as other than a strict moral necessity for those to whom it is offered. In fact, this stern, yet truthful and merciful, claim makes all the difference between a Faith and a theory." And now there is a moment's pause. Preacher and hearers alike take breath. Some instinct assures us that we are just coming to the point which is really at issue in the great controversy of the hour. The preacher resumes "A statement of this truth in other terms is at present occasioning a painful controversy, which it would be better in this place to pass over in silence, if too much was not at stake to warrant a course from which I shall only depart with sincere reluctance. Need I say that I allude to the vexed question of the Athanasian Creed ? " Dr. Liddon 51 It is proposed in some quarters to excise large portions of that Creed, in others to banish it altogether from the service of the Church. The former of the two alternatives is dismissed with suitable contempt. 1 "The good taste of scholars, and a fitting sense of the immodesty and grotesqueness of any pretension on the part of a merely National Church to alter the terms of a document of world-wide authority, will probably save the Athanasian Creed from the various cur- rent schemes for mutilating it." But the expulsion of the Creed from public worship is a more probable event, and the argu- ments against such expulsion must be stated with clearness and emphasis. " The broad com- mon-sense of the people would argue that the Creed was discarded because it was imagined to be wholly or partly untrue ; untrue enough, it would be observed, to be discredited as a formulary for general use, although not sufficiently untrue to be unfitted for solemn Clerical Subscription. The fact would remain patent to all men that, after using the Creed for the last three centuries on all the greatest festivals of the Christian year, the English Church had deliberately abandoned it, and the friends and foes of faith would alike draw their own conclusions as to the meaning of such a step. It would be inferred that the Church of 1 It has, in these latter days, been carried into effect at Westminster Abbey. 52 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900 England no longer held belief in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and of our LORD'S Incarnation, as taught by the Church Universal, to be neces- sary to salvation ; and that she admitted herself to have erred in affirming this necessity since the Reformation, not less than before it. But the Creed would be really rejected because it is too faithful an echo of that Gospel which men do not venture openly to reject." The conclusion of the great discourse is now drawing nigh, and the preacher gathers up all his energies for the last word of personal application. "The controversies of our day may do us lasting harm, if they lead us to adhere to our own opinions only because they are our own ; if they send us fuming with our earthly passions into the very sanctuary ; if they estrange from each other hearts which should, in the holiest of causes, be one, and weaken by dividing moral forces which, when united, are none too strong to cope successfully with the energies of evil around us. But, if we should have received in any degree the high and rare grace of an intrepid loyalty to known truth allied to a really unselfish spirit, we too may * take up serpents, and if we drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt ' us. Nay, more to be forced back upon the central realities of the faith which we profess ; to learn to know and feel, better than ever before, what are the convic- tions which we dare not surrender at any cost ; Dr. Liddon 53 to renew the freshness of an early faith, which affirms within us, clearly and irresistibly, that the one thing worth thinking of, worth living for, if need were, worth dying for, is the unmutilated faith of JESUS CHRIST our LORD ; these may be the results of inevitable differ- ences, and, if they are, they are blessings indeed." To at least one Undergraduate who heard that saying, it became the motto and watch- word of a lifetime. On the afternoon of the same day Liddon wrote " I have just delivered myself in S. Mary's on the subject of the Athanasian Creed. The Liberals were there in great force ; and I could feel that I shocked them, though I phrased my positions as warily and as tenderly as I could. However, I feel relieved at having spoken out." On the 3ist of January, 1873, a great meeting in defence of the Creed was held in S. James' Hall. Liddon consented to speak, but very reluctantly, as he felt the difficulty of handling sacred themes on a public platform. When he rose to speak, he was greeted by thunders of applause from a densely-packed audience of loyal and grateful churchmen. It must suffice to give the per- oration of his speech. " I believe that we have before us, amid all our anxieties, a great future for the Church of England. The hearts of young clergymen, and of young laymen, are being stirred by the HOLY SPIRIT of GOD 54 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 as they have not been stirred for many a generation. The great Middle Classes of our towns, too long alienated from our Church, not through their fault but through ours, are being again drawn within the embrace of their true mother. And I cannot believe that He Who has done and is doing of His mercy so much for us will leave us now. I cannot doubt that He will lead us, through the dark valley of controversy and struggle, into a bright future of confirmed faith and unimpaired chanty beyond it." The controversy dragged its slow length along for another six months, but the heart was knocked out of the attack. The Arch- bishop was beaten and the Creed was saved. The shar; which must be claimed for Liddon in this victory for the Faith was ruefully admitted by the Archbishop in his Primary Charge. Dr. Liddon 55 CHAPTER V. THE P. W. R. ACT THE EASTERN QUESTION CHANGES AT OXFORD. THE smoke and din of the Athanasian battle had scarcely cleared away when Liddon found himself summoned to another campaign. Arch- bishop Tait had shown, from the days when he was one of the " Four Tutors " at Oxford who protested against Tract XC., a natural love of persecuting Tractarians, Puseyites, and Ritualists. Just now he was smarting from defeat, and he was not unwilling to take re- prisals on those who had successfully resisted his highhanded policy. Bishop Wilberforce, himself no ritualist but the ritualists' best friend on the Episcopal Bench, was killed by a fall from his horse on the I9th of July, 1873. On the 24th of July, Liddon wrote to his sister " How wonderful are the ways of GOD ! He takes from us the sanctity and the genius, the Hamiltons and the Wilberforces ; and He leaves us the prosaic and commonplace selfishness which has got on in the world, the s and the s." Mr. Gladstone, notoriously not unfriendly to 56 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 Ritualism and a sworn foe of religious tyranny, was dethroned by the General Election of February, 1874, and was succeeded by Mr. Disraeli. Archbishop Tait saw his opportunity, and jumped at it. He introduced a Public Worship Regulation Bill, which, considerably altered at the instance of Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Cairns, passed the House of Lords and went down to the House of Commons. There Disraeli, who believed that Ritualism was unpopular, welcomed it with effusion ; and blurted out the brutal truth which prelatical wiliness had attempted to conceal. " This," he said, " is a Bill to put down Ritualism " and so it was, at least in the pious intention of its authors. Of course, Liddon regarded with anxiety the prospect of legislation against the Ritualists. Such a Bill, endorsed by the concurrence of the Episcopate, " would of itself be a scandal to our Church of the gravest kind." He dreaded " the cruelty of the Bishops, or at least some of them." He felt what the Church had lost by Mr. Gladstone's retirement. " The Archbishop would not have ventured on such an enter- prise during the late Government's time." When the Bill was passing through Parliament, he preached against it 'at S. Paul's, denouncing the " unreasoning panic " which dictated it, and the " disregard of the historical structure and spiritual independence of the Church " which Dr. Liddon 57 it involved. On the 28th of June he wrote to a friend : " The Archbishop's Bill has engaged the attention of the country to the exclusion of any other subject. It left the House of Lords on Thursday night. Lord Salisbury gave it a parting kick, and the Archbishop a parting benediction ; while other persons assumed the various postures which the occasion appeared to them to require. Of all the disappointments which the matter has caused, the greatest is Lord Selborne. ... I was unprepared for the placid sophisms of his published letters, and for the violence (it was considerably greater than as reported) of his last speech in the House of Lords. If so good a man can fall so low, what must we not, all of us, fear ? As for the Episcopal Bench, they have been throwing themselves, with ultramontane de- votion, at the feet of the two Primates with the noble exception of the Bishop of Lincoln. . . . The (guardian has behaved badly, as it always does on these great occasions." On the 1 6th of June, Liddon addressed a great meeting in S. James' Hall, called to protest against the Bill. In his speech, which was en- thusiastically received, he affirmed with all possible emphasis, the binding character of the Ornaments Rubric, and repudiated the spiritual authority of the Judicial Committee. He poked bitter fun at " the Giant Intolerance," who seemed to have taken up his abode near Lollard's Tower ; and he declared his unabated 5 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 confidence in the success of his cause. "After all," he said in conclusion, " Church Principles are true : they are the substance of the Gospel translated into an energetic and tangible form. They are true, and therefore they are indestruc- tible." So when, in spite of Mr. Gladstone's single-handed opposition, the Bill had become law, Liddon took an unexpectedly cheerful view. " Of course," he said, " there is no reason for despondency. We shall live to see the drowned Egyptians on the sea-shore even yet." But, at the same time, having regard to the Archbishop's unmistakable designs, he held it was necessary " to reiterate from time to time our thorough dislike of the Bill, and our distrust of the animus which will preside at its enforcement ; hinting, too, as pru- dence may suggest, that there are such things as withdrawal of subscriptions from Church objects, and Disestablishment." That animus soon became only too conspicuously apparent. Priest after Priest was thrown into prison, for no more heinous fault than conscientious in- ability to recognize the spiritual jurisdiction of the new Court established by the Public Worship Regulation Act, and presided over by the Ex-Divorce Judge. Liddon's sym- pathies were keenly with the sufferers. 1 In 1 A writer who knew him well, reviewing Principal John- ston's book, said " When fourteen long years had been allowed to elapse there was ground for expectation that nothing of interest would be suppressed, but that Dr. Dr. Llddon 59 1877, he wrote "Mr. Tooth's sick face in that cage in the court of the gaol quite haunts me." * And, on a later occasion, " I feel half-ashamed of myself for going off for a time while Mr. Green is shut up in Lancaster Gaol." 2 It was with reference to this outbreak of persecution that he wrote to a younger friend on the eve of his ordination in 1877 "The days are troublous for taking Orders : but f No Cross, no Crown.' They are far better than the old days of sluggish- ness and death : and, if they bring many anxieties, they are not without some very bright hopes indeed." Liddon's share in all the great struggles of the Church would be told at length. The imprisonment of the clergy prosecuted under the Public Worship Regulation Act filled his heart and mind to a far greater extent than this volume shews. He grieved for their distress ; he grieved yet more that no personal challenge availed to bring him into the same predicament ; he admired, almost to envy, those who were suffering for conscience sake. Immediately upon the imprisonment of the Rev. A. Tooth, Liddon went to visit him in Holloway Gaol. During the long imprisonment of the Rev. S. F. Green, when persons to whom the spectacle of such an unflinching loyalty to principle was disagreeable, began to say ' the door was locked on the inside,' Dr. Liddon's characteristic comment was : * They would have said, had they lived soon enough, to the Apostle Paul, If you would only give up your foolish superstition, you might come out and go all about Rome, and do great service to the gutter-children.' " Church Quarterly Review, July, 1905. 1 The Rev. A. Tooth, Vicar of S. James', Hatcham. 8 The Rev. S. F. Green, Vicar of Miles Platting. 60 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 In the meantime Liddon had turned for a season from the work of war to that of peace. In September, 1874, he went to Bonn, on the invitation of Dr. Bellinger, to take part in the first of two well-meant but infructuous Con- ferences on Reunion. 1 "What the Conference had at heart was to deny that the Pope is endowed with an infallibility enabling him to make substantial additions to the received Faith of the Church. . . . For the rest, peace- making is proverbially thankless work, and those who have a hand in it know, or ought to know, their inevitable portion. But, whatever the probabilities of immediate failure, they work for a distant future, and they remember humbly but thankfully Who has promised a blessing on the peace-makers." In March, 1875, tne Archbishops and Bishops, issued a Pastoral Letter deprecating Ritualistic excesses. While regretting that certain of the better-instructed Bishops should have signed the Pastoral, Liddon wrote : "Probably there is a difficulty about holding aloof on these occasions, which persons who are not Bishops cannot enter into ; but the fetal incapacity of seeing that, if fault is to be found at all, it must be in all directions, and not in the one which chances to be unpopular, takes the moral force out of all these compo- sitions which come nowadays from Lambeth. " I hope, with you, that things are looking 1 He attended the second in 1875. Dr. Liddon 61 better than they did some while ago. If we can only have the grace to hold on inflexibly to the whole body of Revealed Sacramental Truth, and yet to avoid exaggerations which are in conflict with our formularies, and which only do the work of Puritanism and Scepticism, we must, Dei Gratid, win our way. The Sacra- mental principle, considered as a religious force, is much stronger than anything opposed to it ; and there is no sort of reason why it should not make way with the English people in its English shape, instead of being associated with the repellent and unhistorical theories of Rome." We turn now to a very different field of controversy. In the autumn of 1875, an insurrection against Turkish misrule broke out in Bulgaria, and the Turkish Govern- ment despatched a large force to repress it. This was done, and repression was followed by a hideous orgy of massacre and outrage. A rumour of these horrors reached England, and public indignation spontaneously awoke. Disraeli, with a strange frankness of cynical brutality, sneered at the rumour as " coffee- house babble," and made odious jokes about the oriental way of executing malefactors. But Christian England was not to be pacified by these Asiatic pleasantries, and in the autumn of 1876 the country rose in passionate indignation against what were known as " the Bulgarian Atrocities." On the ijth of August, Liddon 62 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 made his first contribution to the great controversy in a sermon at S. Paul's. " Day by day we English are learning that this year of grace 1876 has been signalized by a public tragedy which, I firmly believe, is without a parallel in modern times. . . . Not merely armed men, but young women and girls and babes, counted by hundreds, counted by thousands, subjected to the most refined cruelties, subjected to the last indignities, have been the victims of the Turk." And then comes a fine burst of patriotic indignation : " That which makes the voice falter as we say it is that, through whatever misunderstanding, the Government which is immediately respon- sible for acts like these has turned for sympathy, for encouragement, not to any of the historical homes of despotism or oppression, not to any other European Power, but alas ! to England to free, humane, Christian England. The Turk has, not altogether without reason, believed himself, amid these scenes of cruelty, to be leaning on our country's arm, to be sure of her smile, or, at least, her acquiescence ! " It was not in Liddon's nature to sympathize merely by word of mouth with an oppressed and righteous cause ; so, as soon as his term of residence at S. Paul's was over, he started for Eastern Europe, combining a mission of friend- ship and succour to our persecuted fellow- Christians with some negotiations tending towards reunion with the Eastern Churches. Dr. Liddon 63 On September i8th he wrote in his diary: " We passed two chief scenes of the insurrec- tion, and by the bank were a series of Turkish military stations. In front of each of them sat a group of Turks, grave and imperturbable : and close to each [qu. one ?] of those stations, surrounded by a palisade, was an impaled man, and other poles on which insurgents had been impaled. Mr. Odzic said that some of them lived for four days, some only for twelve hours. * And the men who do these things,' he said, * are our neighbours England wills it.' " The publication of this grisly fact drew down on Liddon's head a vehement storm of incredulous abuse ; but all the thunders of the pro-Turkish press were utterly powerless to shake his testimony. "That was a moment never to be forgotten, when Liddon challenged the united hostility of England's Officialdom. And how vivid was his insistence in after years, in making you look through the splendid glasses which had shown him the gruesome sight close at hand : and, then, in contrasting their immediate evidence with that of the British Consul, who, at a distance of eight hundred miles, off and on, from the spot, suggested that it might, possibly, have been a bag of beans on a post, and has got himself believed by all intelligent Englishmen ! " l Early in October Liddon was back again in England, " even more of an Anti-Turk than he 1 Dr. Holland. 64 Leaders of the Church 180x3-1900 went out." On December 8th he spoke at a great Conference in S. James's Hall, convoked to consider the state of affairs in Eastern Europe. He declined to treat the issue before the country as a question between Christianity and Mahom- medanism, between Truth and Error. He regarded it simply as a question of right or wrong -justice or injustice. " I do not ask for a law which shall secure exceptional privileges to the Christians. I only ask for a law which shall be just a law which shall secure to every subject, Mussulman and Christian, equal rights secure to the Turks the right to live in peace, the right to enjoy their property, secure to them even their harems, so long as their consciences are not sufficiently instructed to wish for something better but to take from them that which damages them even more than it harms the Christian the right to injure the latter by continual persecution." And, later, he renewed his protest in the pulpit of S. Paul's, when, as he said in after years, " it seemed possible that this country might be committed to a war in defence of the Mahom- medan Power, which for centuries has been the persecutor of the worshippers of CHRIST." l In January, 1877, he wrote to a friend: "If we were a Christian people, we should join Russia at once in any measures which may be necessary to force Turkey to do justice to her Christian subjects. But, as it is, we shall, 1 See Preface to (Church Troubles. Dr. Liddon 65 I presume, acquiesce in the deeds of lust and vengeance by which the Turk will now pro- ceed to signalize his victory over the half- hearted friends of his victims." In May, 1877, he wrote: "How really magnificent is the moral position of Mr. Gladstone ! He has shown within the last week what I have always believed about him that he is thoroughly superior to the petty ties of party which form the moral horizon of ordinary men. Never at any time have I felt so much respect for him as now, when he faces every sort of unpopularity from a simple sense of duty." 1 In 1878 he made a noteworthy confession : " Really the Dissenters have put us to shame in this matter. They were much more likely to have embar- rassed a plain moral issue with the utter non- sense which the Roc^ and the Puritanical party generally talks about the superstitions of the Greek Church. To their honour, they have brushed all this away, and gone to the heart of the matter ; I must say I have felt drawn to them not theologically but morally as never before ; ' as the School-authors say, they deserve grace of congruity' for their recent proceedings." 2 At one time it was a journalistic fashion to describe Liddon as a Liberal. I propose, later 1 Mr. Gladstone was then heading the opposition to Turkey, and some of his party declined to follow him. * See also p. 165. K 6 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo on, to enquire whether, and in what sense, this term could ever have been properly applied to him : but there was at least one important department of public affairs in which he was the most consistent and tenacious of Conser- vatives : this was the Reform of the University of Oxford. The moderate changes which were effected by the Act of 1856 were, in the eyes of most people, beneficial ; but Liddon had nothing but blame for " the baneful action of that Secularist tendency which was introduced and disseminated by the University Commis- sion." He disapproved so strongly of the abolition of Tests that he felt in advance that " one will be able to do better work for GOD somewhere else than in a place which will have done its best to get rid of Him." But, when in 1877 a Conservative Government passed another Act, and issued another Commission to enquire into the condition of the Universities ; and when that Commission recommended changes tantamount to an official seculariza- tion of the University and the Colleges, his cup of bitterness overflowed. The first Com- mission had done a great deal of harm, but the second Commission, engineered by Lord Selborne, had utterly surpassed it. " Alas ! dear friend," he said, "what the locust had left, the Talnier-worm * hath eaten." " Of all her ancient inheritance in Oxford, the Church 1 Lord Selborne had been better known in Oxford as Roundell Palmer. Dr. Liddon 67 now retains the use of the College Chapels and the Faculty of Divinity ; and what is called * the logic of justice,' with its bold and fallacious assumptions, renders her hold of these remaining fragments most precarious." Liddon's own plan for dealing with these new and perilous conditions was characteristi- cally thorough. The ancient connexion between Christ Church and the See of Oxford should be dissolved. Christ Church should hence- forward be merely one of the ordinary Colleges, and the Bishop's throne and capitular estab- lishment should be removed to S. Mary's Church. The spiritual needs of the Under- graduates should be served by a College of Priests, living in community, in a house having no connexion with the University. He had already frustrated a design to have the Chapel of Keble College consecrated, inasmuch as, if it were consecrated, it must follow the legal fortunes of the Church in Oxford. His own personal ties with the University were growing weaker. He had lost in 1873 his seat on the Hebdomadal Council. In 1882, on Dr. Pusey's death, he determined that it was his duty to write "the Doctor's" Life, and, in order to secure the necessary leisure, he re- signed the Professorship of Exegesis, 1 and 1 One who used to attend his professorial lectures " in a shabby little room in the Clarendon Building " reports that, towards the end of his professorship, Liddon said, "I used to get sixty men, and now I get six." 6 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo ceased to preach before the University. His only official connexion with Oxford was his Studentship at Christ Church, and Christ Church he henceforth used chiefly as a place of quiet study, where he could work at Dr. Pusey's Life more uninterruptedly than at Amen Court. It was, perhaps, with the view of marking a change in his relations with the Univer- sity that, in 1879, he published his second and last Series of University Sermons. They range from 1869 to 1878 ; and the latest in date might, if comparisons in such matters were possible, be considered the greatest sermon that he ever delivered. It is called "Worth of Faith in a Life to Come." It was preached on November loth, 1878: it dealt with the majestic theme of life continuous through and after death; and it had special reference to the recent de- parture of a peculiarly bright and saintly spirit. 1 The sermon ended thus : " Suffer me to add in conclusion a few words which may be remem- bered in years to come. The expectation of a life after death enables us to see things in their true proportions. The future life furnishes us with a point of view from which to survey the questions, the occupations, the events of this. Until we keep it well before us, we are like those persons who have never travelled, and have no standard by which to estimate what they see at home. Next to positive error, a 1 Sarah Acland (1815-1878) wife of Sir Henry Acland, M.D., Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. Dr. Liddon 69 mistake as to the relative proportions of truths is the greatest misfortune. But who does not feel, every day of his existence, how easily this mistake is made ? Some occurrence which touches us personally appears to be of world- wide importance. Some book which we have fallen in with, and have read with sympathy, or perhaps have helped to write, seems to mark an epoch in literature or in speculation. Some controversy, with its petty but absorbing ferocities, . . . appears, through its present relation to ourselves, to touch all interests in earth and heaven. Self magnifies and dis- torts everything ; the true corrective is to be found in the magnificent and tranquillizing thought of another life. As men draw near to the threshold of Eternity, they see things more nearly as they are; they catch perspec- tives which are not perceived in the days of business and of health. When Bossuet lay a-dying, in great suffering and exhaustion, one who was present thanked him for all his kind- ness, and, using the courtly language of the day, begged him when in another world to think of the friends whom he was leaving, and who were so devoted to his person and his reputation. At this last word, Bossuet, who had almost lost the power of speech, raised himself from the bed, and gathered strength to say, not without an accent of indignation, * Don't talk like that. Ask GOD to forgive a sinner his sins.' yo Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900 " And surely those occupations should claim our first attention, which prepare us for that which, after all, is the really important stage of our existence. All kinds of earthly duty may, indeed, be consecrated to this work by a worthy motive ; but direct preparation for the future is made in worship. In the most solemn moments which we can spend on earth, we hear the words, "The Body of our LORD JESUS CHRIST, Which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.' Nay, all Christian worship is, in pro- portion to its sincerity, an anticipation of the Life of the World to come. Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recog- nize our personal immortality ; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insig- nificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator's hands, and the purchase of the Redeemer's Blood, before the Eternal and All-merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for com- panionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the Face of GOD. Wor- ship is the common-sense of faith in a life to come ; and the hours we devote to it will assuredly be among those upon which we shall reflect with most thankful joy, when all things here shall have fallen into a very distant back- ground, and when, through the Atoning Mercy, our true home has been reached at last." Dr. Liddon ?i CHAPTER VI. WORK. IN LONDON BISHOPRICS THE EAST. DR. HOLLAND says in his delightful book of 'Personal Studies ; : "I was Proctor when Liddon preached the sermon which bade all Churchmen wipe the dust off their feet, and abandon Oxford for Zanzibar, where they might give themselves to the service of the Catholic Creed." Happily for the cause of the Catholic Creed in this country, Liddon bethought himself in time that the inhabitants of London, as well as those of Zanzibar, have souls to be saved ; and, when the official ties which had bound him to Oxford were severed, S. Paul's became the centre of his life and ministry ; as it was already, in Bishop Lightfoot's striking phrase, " the centre of the world's concourse." His home was gladdened by the companionship of his younger sister, Mrs. Ambrose, and he spent a good deal of his leisure with another sister, Mrs. Poole King. He loved travelling, both in England and abroad ; liking to find himself "out of the way of gossip and the English language," but liking also, in its turn, the easy 1 Personal Studies, by Henry Scott Holland. (Wells Gardner & Co.) 72 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 and joyous life of English country houses. At Hatfield he was an annual visitor, and he was warmly attached to both Lord and Lady Salisbury. Lord Beauchamp and Sir Robert Phillimore were friends whom he highly valued, and his letters are full of happy allusions to Madresfield and "The Coppice." Perhaps his most intimate friends, in the generation immediately below his own, were Lord and Lady Halifax, and his visits to them at Hickleton or Powderham were always seasons of peculiar pleasure. For Lord Halifax's sister, Mrs. Meynell-Ingram, he felt a respect and an admiration which all the world must have shared if only it had enjoyed the opportunity : and his words about the Church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross, which she built, are so characteristic as to deserve reproduction : " It must be a matter for great thankfulness to GOD that you have been enabled to offer Him so beautiful a gift, which will be a mute prophet of faith and reverence long after we have passed away." But all these enjoyments belonged only to his brief and rare intervals of holiday-making : his daily life was spent in strenuous and even exhausting labour. There was the mental effort of preparing, and the physical effort of delivering, his great sermons at S. Paul's ; there was the unseen but incessant business which devolved on him as a member of the Chapter ; there was a correspondence which Dr. Liddon 73 ranged over the whole world, and touched every topic in theology and morals ; there was the ministry to individual souls in Sacramental Confession ; and, superadded to all these labours, the stupendous toil of writing Dr. Pusey's "Life." Into this self-imposed task he threw himself with a too-conscientious diligence. The physical and mental task of coping with the huge mass of undigested material which Pusey had left behind him overtaxed his strength, and this was only subsidiary to the constructive effort which was required in order to present the Doctor's personality and teaching in a vivid light to a generation which had ^already begun to forget him. The assumption of this gigantic labour was Liddon's great mistake, and, in the judg- ment of Principal Johnston, who had the best means of knowing, " beyond any other one cause, it led to his early death." But, if the energy bestowed on Dr. Pusey's " Life " was to some extent Love's Labour Lost, the energy bestowed on the sermons at S. Paul's was most gloriously and fruitfully expended. Liddon was, as Lord Acton said, " assuredly the greatest power in the conflict with sin, and in turning the soulsof men to GOD," that England then possessed, or had possessed for genera- tions. When he spoke to the people of London under the dome of S. Paul's, he seemed to speak in the spirit and power of S. Paul himself. 74 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 " He was one of those few, those very few, from whose lips we could bear to hear without an apology such strong and awful words as these which came from the innermost soul of the great Apostle. So few of us have the right to use this great language. From so few can it come without a sense of unfitness, of disqualifi- cation, of presumption. We are so blinded by this world's dust and turmoil ; we are so clouded by compromise and hesitation ; we are so insincere, so unconverted, so earthly ; we are so far, far, from these high visions and piercing calls. The burning flames that leap through the speech of S. Paul are not for us to touch without offence, without peril. " But he ! he was different ; to him they seemed akin : he understood ; he had the right to take them on his tongue. We asked for no apology from him ; we murmured under no questioning qualification. As they rang out from his lips (and whoever could make Scripture ring as he did ?) their original force seemed to reach and touch us across all the dividing years. No insincerity withheld it. No half-hearted allegiance made them falter in their coming. * The world,' with its worries, its disputes, its vanities, its beguilements, its pettiness, its greeds the world threw no veiling mist between us and those Divine appeals. He who spoke to us had got past all that. He had pushed his way up through all the tangle. He was not afraid of what was Dr. Liddon 75 involved in facing the truth. He at least was ready for the sacrifice. He had counted the cost. And so, by virtue of that sincerity, of that purged eye, he, we felt, saw something of that vision which the Apostle opens to us. That inner world was real and substantial to him. That fiery zeal had its echo in him. That ever-climbing life of grace upon grace had come within his ken. His life was a cleansed channel down which the news of it might pass to us." i The period which we are now considering covers, roughly, the last ten years of Liddon's life. The first great event of that decade was the dethronement of Lord Beaconsfield by the General Election of 1880. How- ever little of a Liberal Liddon was in reference to several matters of public contro- versy, he was able to rejoice whole-heartedly in Mr. Gladstone's victory over the Turk, the Tory and the Times. When the question of a successor to Lord Beaconsfield became acute, and there were ominous rumours that the Liberal Prime Minister was to be Lord Granville or Lord Hartington, Liddon declared himself against either selection with equal emphasis. " They did not say a word for the Christian Cause in 1876, and they would rob the Liberal triumph of all moral interest whatever. . . . The anguish of the Pall Mall is most edifying, and is a measure of the wound 1 Dr. Holland. 76 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 which cultivated ungodliness feels that it has received." Meanwhile, events of grave importance were occurring or impending in the Church. The Public Worship Regulation Act had come into operation in 1875. The Puritan party, sanguine that their opportunity had arrived, went gaily to work, spying and reporting and delating and prosecuting, with curious results. They did not indeed destroy Ritual, and they fomented " Ritualism ; " but, as we have already seen, they succeeded in putting some excellent clergymen into prison, and keeping them there for considerable periods. " The imprisoned clergy would not recognize the authority of Lord Penzance as an ecclesiastical judge, and they went to prison rather than commit them- selves to any action which would imply such recognition." The spectacle of these imprisonments for conscience' sake did not favourably impress the English people ; and it weighed heavily on the hearts of all who, like Liddon, believed that the clergy were right and the Courts wrong. " What a hideously unchristian thing Puritanism is ! " he wrote to an intimate friend; and just at the same time he was uttering his thoughts on the topic of Persecu- tion, in a more restrained but a more public form. On the Sunday afternoons in December 1880, he preached at S. Paul's the four sermons which he published under the title of Dr. Liddon 77 Thoughts on Present Church Troubles. A rumour had got abroad that the sermons would deal with the ecclesiastical prosecutions, and it was remarked at the time that the preacher had never before addressed such vast and such distinguished congregations. As a matter of fact, the allusions to current events were studiously guarded ; but they were unmis- takable. The idleness of trying to repress conviction by force ; the attractive power of suffering for conscience* sake ; the folly of trying to cramp by minute regulation the free life of a growing Church these were allusions which no one could fail to apprehend. In publishing the sermons, Liddon admitted that the title might seem to promise something more distinctly polemical than what it actually introduced. But, he said, the sermons con- tained " two or three explicit statements of opinion which had attracted a certain amount of public notice ; and moreover, when treat- ing of topics immediately suggested by the Church Services of the day, their language was at times shaped or coloured by occurrences and reflections which no man, to whom the interests of CHRIST'S Kingdom in this country are dear, could, at least in his more serious moments, hope just now to forget. . . . When challenged to do so, a clergyman is especially bound to accept the full responsibility which may attach to his public utterances ; and this reason may sufficiently count alike for the 7 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 publication and for the title of the present work." But the rancour of the " Church Association " was proof even against Liddon's eloquence and wisdom ; against the spectacle, again renewed, of an imprisoned Priest ; against the tem- porizing language of prelates who began to feel frightened at the results of their handi- work. The Association had other weapons besides imprisonment in their armoury. The long series of prosecutions by which S. Alban's, Holborn, had been harrassed, reached in 1882 a point at which it seemed certain that the devoted Mr. Mackonochie would be deprived of his benefice. Some ingenious friends of the persecuted priest suggested a way of escape by means of exchange. Mackonochie should resign S. Alban's ; the Rev. R. A. J. Suckling should resign S. Peter's, London Docks ; the patrons of S. Alban's should appoint Mr. Suckling, and the patrons of S. Peter's should appoint Mr. Mackonochie. It might well have been that the Bishop of London would refuse his consent to this curious arrangement ; and, on the other hand, it was by no means certain that Mackonochie would acquiesce in it. But, at the critical juncture, Archbishop Tait, who was already on his death-bed, intervened. He wrote to the Bishop, and to Mackonochie, strongly urging compliance with the suggested course. His counsel prevailed, and the exchange was effected. Dr. Liddon 79 This intervention was Archbishop Tait's last official act. He died on Advent Sunday, 1882. Beyond question, he was what Mr. Gladstone once called him " A considerable person," and I am not disposed in this place to pronounce judgment on his character and administration. On December 4th, 1882, Liddon wrote : " All that can be said is that the late Archbishop had a conscientious desire to do something on a scale worthy of his great position only, unfortunately, his unhappy education was fatal to any true sense of what to do." At the beginning of 1883 a movement was started to raise a " National Memorial " to the Archbishop ; and to a friend who thought of subscribing Liddon wrote as follows : " We, High Churchmen, must feel grateful to him for what he did on his death-bed to promote the peace of the Church, in the matter of Mackonochie and Suckling. But is this a reason for a 'Memorial?' Was not the act on his death-bed an attempt to undo one part of the wrong which he had done to the Church I do not say intentionally in his life ? Can we rightly forget the history of the Poole l persecution, of the Gssays and Reviews, of the Colenso case, of the Divorce Bill, of the attack on the Creed of S. Athanasius, of the Public Worship Regulation Bill ? Was not the whole drift and purpose of the late Arch- 1 A curate whom Tait, when Bishop of London, per- secuted for hearing Confessions. 8o Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 bishop's life hostile to principles which we hold dear ? And, if so, what is the moral value of our share in a memorial to him ? . . . and will not a memorial of this sort destroy the moral value of other memorials, which are intended to express deep and heartfelt gratitude to GOD for the works and example of the saintly dead ? " Again "A memorial is a tribute to services rendered to the Church. What has he done except in the way of undoing his own mis- takes that really deserves it ? Alas ! he certainly has helped the Church of England on the downward road that leads to repudiation of all faith and principle whatever, more effec- tually than any one who has been in high places in our day. It is one thing to draw a veil over the mistakes of those who have gone before the Eternal Judge. It is another to rank them with the courageous and the self-denying ser- vants of CHRIST." The death of Archbishop Tait and the eleva- tion of Bishop Benson to Canterbury made a vacancy on the Episcopal Bench, and set people speculating on names and qualifications. The late Lord Salisbury, whose experience of ecclesiastical patronage was unequalled, used to say that the English clergy could be exhaus- tively divided into two classes those who wished to be Bishops and were unfit ; and those who were fit but unwilling. All through 1883 and 1884, Liddon's admirers were, quite unknown to himself, pressing him on Mr. Dr. Liddon 8 1 Gladstone as a man who, alike on personal and on public grounds, ought to be made a Bishop. By the end of 1884 there were several vacancies actual or imminent. Dr. Moberly, Bishop of Salisbury, was old and infirm ; Dr. Wordsworth had announced his intention of resigning Lincoln. On January 6th, 1885, Dr. Jackson, Bishop of London, died suddenly. If his successor were brought from some other diocese, there would be yet another See to fill. At this juncture, Mr. Gladstone was most strongly urged to appoint Liddon to London ; but he took another and a much less satisfactory course. He sent a message to Liddon, through Dean Church, enquiring whether he would "take a Bishopric," but making no specific proposal. To put the question in this form to a man of Liddon's principles and temperament was to ensure refusal. It seems, on the whole, likely that if the See of London had been definitely offered, Liddon would have felt it impossible to decline. The opportunity which it afforded of witnessing for truth in one of the most conspicuous places in the Church was too great to have been declined ; and the charge of London, vast as it is, would not have been fatally incompatible with his state of health and habits of life. But in the Diocese of Exeter or Lincoln he would have felt himself wholly out of place ; and to say " Yes " to Mr. Gladstone's question would have implied a M 8 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 readiness to accept any See which might be offered. This seemed to Liddon impossible. It would have been " false to the whole Tract- arian (i.e., the Patristic and Catholic) tradition on the subject. What would S. Ambrose have said to a willingness to accept a Bishopric in the abstract ? What would Dr. Pusey or Mr. Keble have said ? My reply was that I earnestly hoped to be spared the great anxiety of answering such a question. This put an end to the matter for good and all." Thus, not for the first or last time, Mr. Gladstone failed to perceive true greatness of character and intellect, and exalted mediocrity to the highest place. 1 In the summer of this year 1885 Liddon's health, never very robust, began to give way. He suffered greatly from rheumatism and allied affections, among them a disabling pain in the head. On the I5th of June he wrote : " Sir H. Acland said that I ought to go off at once ; and Dr. Gray, that, if I tried to preach, he would not answer for the con- sequences. And even now I have difficulty in writing this such is the state of my head." June 1 8. " I am laid up to-day with a pain in the head which makes me almost quite deaf, and unable to say much more." 1 It is only fair to add that in The Impregnable Roc{ of Holy Scripture Mr. Gladstone spoke of Liddon's death as having " extinguished a light of the English Church, singularly bright and pure." Dr. Liddon 83 June 28. "My head is still very trouble- some." August 1 1 . " My illness has reduced my correspondence to about three or four letters a day ! " Acting on the advice of his life-long friend, Dr. Ogle, 1 he determined to spend the winter and spring in Egypt and the Holy Land. A history of the journey has been published by his sister, Mrs. King, who, with one of her daughters, accompanied him. 2 Just before he sailed he wrote to Lady Halifax a letter to which a pathetic interest attaches. Six years before he had become Godfather to her youngest son. The child was christened Henry Paul, in honour of his Godfather and of the Apostle on whose feast he was born. " It would," wrote Liddon, " be impossible to improve upon the names, considering all the circumstances. I am so glad that he was born on S. Paul's Day, and may thus, in an especial way, claim the great Apostle as his own, all through his life, and after it." Now, on the 1 The Lent Lectures of 1870 are dedicated To JOHN WILLIAM OGLE, ESQ., M.D., OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, WHOSE WORK AND CHARACTER SUGGEST MANY PRECIOUS LESSONS WHICH HE NEVER THINKS OF TEACHING. 3 2)r. Ltidotfs Tour in Sgyft and Tales tine In 1886, (Longmans.) 8 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 eve of his departure for the East, he wrote thus to the boy's mother : " Before leaving England on a health-voyage to the East, I am anxious to send my godson a Prayer Book, and am making bold to ask you to keep it for him until his next birth- day. Will you give it to him on that day, and tell him that I pray that he may one day be a very good and useful man ? " Before the godfather returned to England, the godson was dead, and Liddon wrote to the sorrowing mother with characteristic insight and tender- ness. " I had indeed built much on the possible future in this world of my dear godson ; but his future is now, in the best sense, secure. . . . Certain it is that, fifty years hence, when we are all together in another world, he will express his delight at not having lived long enough to offend our LORD by committing deadly sin ; and the Divine Love and Wisdom which took him away will be fully revealed to us." And again " Not a day passes, but does not suggest how happy are they whom GOD takes to Himself before they have seriously offended Him." And, at the follow- ing Easter, Liddon wrote to Lord Halifax " Dear Henry Paul has been much in my mind, especially at my Easter Celebration. 1 am sure that he is spending an even happier Easter this year than he did last. How much to be envied are those who are taken young ! " Dr. Liddon 85 Mr. Gladstone's second Administration came to an end in June, 1885. He was succeeded by Lord Salisbury, who, for whatever reason, did not appoint Liddon to the See of Salisbury, which became vacant in July, 1885. He did, however, offer him the Deanery of Worcester. This was declined on the following grounds : " I do not think that an offer of mere preferment to higher dignity and larger income constitutes any claim upon the conscience ; and on this point, as on so many others, the old Tractarian feeling ... is profoundly opposed to that commercial view of the higher offices in the Church which was very sincerely held by the old Latitudinarians. In the army, it is natural enough that a Captain should be uneasy until he is a Major, and a Major until he is a Colonel, and a Colonel until he is a General. ' But ye shall not be so,' is surely our Master's rule, and the craving for preferment, which prevails so largely among the English clergy, is one of the secrets of our moral weakness as an Order." The offer of the Deanery reached Liddon at Cairo. Six months later, at Con- stantinople, he heard that he had been elected Bishop of Edinburgh. This offer he also declined, partly on the ground that the Bishops of the Church of Scotland should be Scotchmen. " So long as they are Englishmen, that Church will always wear the appearance of an English importation in the eyes of the Presbyterian majority, whose conversion will thus be 8 6 Leaders of the Chut ch 1 8 oo - 1 900 rendered more difficult by a sense of slighted national feeling. ... I should not forgive myself if I were in my own person to aid an evil tradition of seeking Bishops for Scotland south of the Tweed, which I have deplored ever since I have been able to think about these things seriously at all." Liddon's journey in the East was an immense and unqualified success. He enjoyed the riding, though quite unused to it ; he enjoyed the warmth and brightness, he enjoyed the ever-changing variety of scene, he enjoyed the opportunity of seeing the religion of the Holy Orthodox Churches at close quarters, observing their daily life and work, and discuss- ing the problems which divide Christendom with the occupants of the Patriarchal Thrones. Above all he revelled, with all the rapt devotion which was his innermost nature, in the sacred associations of the places which he visited. "The Patriarch of Jerusalem allowed me to celebrate in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the Chapel of Abraham, which is on the Hill of Calvary, and parted only by a thin screen from the Chapels of Calvary, Greek and Latin." " One of the greatest pleasures of being in the East is the extraordinary relish, if I may use the word, which all that one does and hears gives to the Old Testament. The habits of the people, their whole bearing and aspect, suggest the Bible." When living in a tent on Dr. Liddon 87 the Mount of Olives, he wrote that, though the distance from Jerusalem was a drawback, " the associations of the Sacred Hill and the constant view of the Holy City counterbalance all else. Only one feels that breakfast and dinner are a sort of desecration : it is ;like eating in the Choir of a Church." Again " Our LORD seems to have sanctioned the aesthetic principle by deigning to choose so beautiful a neighbour- hood for some of the great scenes of His life on earth. The pleasure of witnessing the real framework of His Earthly Sojourn which one had hitherto only imagined is indescribable. I wonder how I can have let so many years pass by without making a great effort to see spots, compared with which the interest of all else on earth is tame indeed." But even among scenes so august, and memories so moving, Liddon's sense of humour (of which more will be said later on) could not lie dormant. At Jerusalem, during Divine Service on Easter Eve, " I fear I had my pocket picked on the stairs of Mount Calvary." At Cairo, " a camel suddenly gobbled and spat at me a curious variation of the look of tranquil disdain with which these beasts generally regard everything, as if they were Heads of Houses of the old type." As to the disputed site of Calvary, he wrote " General Gordon seems to have taken up the 1 new site ' with great fervour, and this settles the question with all those many persons who 88 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 think that a good man, a good engineer, and a brave soldier must necessarily be an antiquarian and a Biblical scholar to boot." As Dr. Holland says, Liddon never firmly denied the famous story of his backsheesh, which was so large that it enabled his dragoman to add a new wife to his establishment. He entered into the domestic perplexities of the captain of his dahabeah, whose wife at Assouan com- plained bitterly that the other wife at Cairo had all the fun, and pleaded that each should have a spell of the gay city, turn and turn about. " Liddon entirely sympathized with this claim for equal justice, and gave his judgment in favour of the lady at Assouan." Dr. Liddon CHAPTER VII. MR. BELL Cox "JERUSALEM BISHOPRIC" S. PAUL'S REREDOS LINCOLN TRIAL. LIDDON returned from his Eastern pilgrimage in greatly improved health and spirits ; but unluckily found himself almost immediately involved in a series of controversies which told heavily on his mental and physical strength. The first of these concerned the Rev. J. Bell Cox, Vicar of S. Margaret's, Liverpool, who, having been prosecuted for alleged excesses in ritual and having declined to defend himself before Lord Penzance's Court, was imprisoned for Contempt. This case was more scandalous than any which had gone before ; for, as Dean Church remarked, " they were in the thick of battle, and in hot blood. This comes after all has cooled down." The gross unfairness, as between one section of Churchmen and another, which was exhibited by all this one- sided discipline, disgusted everyone in whom the sense of justice was not dead. Dignitaries were allowed to " make open questions of the Personality of GOD, and the fact of the Resurrection, and the promise of immortality," while Mr. Cox was sent to prison " for having N 90 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 lighted candles and mixing water with the wine." l It happened that, just at the time when this case was attracting attention, Mr. Balfour, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was congenially occupied in imprisoning Irish Nationalists. This coincidence seems to have powerfully impressed the mind of a certain dignitary for whom Liddon felt a very imperfect sympathy. "I agree," he wrote to a friend, "in your distrust of the Dean of , He has two faces to the two worlds in which he moves, or would wish to move." And again, " The Dean of has been staying in Oxford. Gore preached the Gospel to him, but without effecting any marked results. This Dean has all the airs of a Nuncio only not from the See of Peter." It would seem that " this Dean " drew an ingenious parallel between the imprisonment of Mr. Cox and the imprisonment of the Irish Nationalists. Both were legal, and therefore both must be right. On this contention Liddon, writing on the I9th of March, 1887, commented as follows : " I return you the Dean of 's grotesque letter grotesque, because he writes as if he were quite cer- tainly talking straight out of the Oracle. . . . If the letter has any argument in it, it assumes as a major premiss that no human law is, in any circumstances, to be resisted an assump- tion which would make short work with the 1 See 'Dean Church, p. 151. Dr. Liddon 91 Apostles and Martyrs. If this assumption is not made, then the case of the Irish, and the case of Mr. Cox, must each be argued on its own merits ; and it is at least conceivable that, in resisting the law, the Irish may be wrong, and Mr. Cox may be right. And, if this should be so, a further question would arise, viz., whether those whose consciences oblige them, much against their will, to resist what is wrongly called " law," ought to disobey their consciences, lest they should encourage other persons, who disobey unquestioned law, from motives into which conscience does not enter at least prominently ? If this is so, then the Apostles ought not to have disobeyed the Sanhedrim in Jerusalem, lest they should give encouragement to the Sicarii who are denounced by Horace and Cicero. Ought not more attention to be given to logic, before people are made Deans ? " The next controversy concerned the restora- tion of the English Bishopric in Jerusalem, to which Archbishop Benson had in a moment of aberration committed himself. The estab- lishment of that bishopric in 1841 was one of the events which " broke " Newman, and helped to drive him out of the Church of England : its other results were inconsiderable. The plan was that the Queen of England and the King of Prussia were each in turn to nomi- nate a Bishop, who should be consecrated by 92 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 English prelates, and should exercise ecclesias- tical jurisdiction over Anglican clergy and Lutheran ministers in Syria. This arrange- ment seemed to ignore the fundamental difference between an Apostolic priesthood and a man-made ministry ; the intrusion of a nondescript Bishop into the Patriarchate of Jerusalem was an outrage on all historical conceptions of the Church ; and, as a matter of fact, the energies of the anomalous Mission were often directed to the end of weaning Oriental Christians from their spiritual allegiance, and turning them from Orthodox to Protestant. In 1 88 1 the third of these Anglican Bishops in Jerusalem died, and this time the appoint- ment lay with the German Emperor, as King of Prussia. However, he did not move in the matter, and it looked as if the ill-omened enter- prise had died of natural causes. But towards the end of 1886 a rumour went abroad that the Bishopric was likely to be restored. Liddon, fresh from intercourse with the Eastern Patriarchs, who had said, with perfect justice, that the Anglican professions of good-will towards the Orthodox Church did not closely accord with a good deal of Anglican practice in the East, was horrified by a proposal so reactionary. He wrote an intensely anxious letter to the Archbishop, praying that he might be authorized to contradict the rumour. The Archbishop replied that the Foreign Dr. Liddon 93 Office did not yet know whether Prussia would be ready to renounce her share in the arrangement of 1841, and pointed out some difficulties with regard to the endow- ments of the Bishopric. 1 By the Archbishop's wish, the state of the case was made public in the Quardian.- A violent storm of controversy arose, Protestants clamouring for the restoration of the Bishopric, and Catholics protesting. In February, 1887, the Archbishop wrote to Liddon that Prussia had finally withdrawn, and that he was going to consecrate an English Bishop who should be " Bishop of the Church of England in Jerusalem and in the East," and who should discountenance all proselytiza- tion among the Eastern Christians. So far, the plan was obviously a great improvement on that of 1841 ; but Liddon was profoundly dissatisfied. The new Bishop was to draw his 1 On this point Liddon wrote to the Archbishop " If hereafter it should be discovered that any funds now devoted to the maintenance of a Bishop at Jerusalem are placed at your Grace's disposal, that they may be devoted in some other way to the furtherance of Christianity in Palestine, might I suggest that they might furnish an annual grant to the Patriarch, with the object of enabling him to print LXX. Copies of the Old Testament, the New Testament in Greek and Arabic, and, perhaps, some of the Early Fathers, at the Press of the Holy Sepulchre ? " The Archbishop notes the suggestion in his diary, and quaintly adds, " Is such a man serious, or does he think I am ? " 2 Archbishop Benson's comment, Life, Vol. II., p. 165, is scarcely reconcilable with the case thus stated by Principal Johnston. 94 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 income from irresponsible Societies, one, at any rate, of which had been deeply implicated in the proselytizing policy of former years. On May 4th, 1887, he wrote: "Yesterday the S.P.C.K. voted 300 to the Archbishop of Canterbury for Bishop Blyth to spend on schools which are not engaged in promoting schism. This is meant as a set-off against the patronage which he will be obliged to extend to those that are. Was there ever anything so humiliating as the whole of this fiasco ? And the odd thing is that all the time the Archbishop supposes himself to be acting as a High Churchman should." The next controversy arose over the new Reredos erected by the Dean and Chapter in S. Paul's Cathedral. Of this Reredos the central feature was a representation of our LORD on the Cross, and it was crowned by the figure of our Lady carrying the Divine Child. Some Puritan malcontents instituted a suit under the Public Worship Regulation Act against the Dean and Chapter, and the suit was vetoed by the Bishop of London. 1 The promoters of the suit applied to the Court of Queen's Bench, where Lord Chief Justice Coleridge and Mr. Justice Manisty (Mr. Baron Pollock dissenting) decided against the Dean and Chapter. Lord Coleridge's Judgment, vulnerable indeed in point of law, 1 Dr. Temple. Dr. Liddon 95 was delightful for humour and sarcasm. On June 4th, 1889, Liddon wrote to a friend: " The Judgment on our Reredos will be given this morning. But as, I apprehend, there will be an Appeal in any case, the interest is limited to the effect which this move will have upon the future chances of the game." After the delivery of the Judgment, he wrote : " Of course, Lord C. only retains the shell of his old principles : but, as you read his judgment, you see that he knows, and has once felt, a great deal which is an unknown world to a mere ordinary lawyer like Mr. Justice Manisty. ... I hear that Lord Grimthorpe says that Lord C.'s Judgment will not stand. Lord G. no doubt thinks that Lord C. has missed a great opportunity. Had Lord G. presided in the Queen's Bench the blander features of Lord C.'s oratory would have been eliminated, and the Dean and Chapter would have been told the plain truth about their misdoings in that vigorous English to which we are all accustomed. But that, after doing his best, Lord C. should be thrown overboard by Lord G., is too hard." The Judgment of the Queen's Bench was duly carried to the Court of Appeal, and was there upset ; the Bishop's veto was sustained, and the Reredos was saved. Thus the Dean and Chapter were finally upheld in a work which cost them an infinity of thought, care, and expense ; but the worry entailed by the suit 96 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 was just one more burden on Liddon's already over-burdened back. The next controversy was, to adopt Liddon's phrase, a far more serious "move in the game." The Church Association, tired of its infruc- tuous victories over Ritualistic Priests, valiantly resolved to prosecute a Bishop. The prelate selected as the subject of the experiment was Liddon's life-long friend, Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln. The Association raised a special subscription, and "went to work in a most business-like way, sending delegates to attend services at which the Bishop officiated, as ordinary worshippers ; and, however incon- sistent it may appear, to attend (not, how- ever, as communicants) at the Celebration of the Sacrament of Christian Unity." 1 The points on which the Bishop was attacked were the Eastward Position at the Altar, lighted candles on it, the mixture of water with the wine in the Chalice, the cAgnus Dei after the Consecration, the Sign of the Cross at the Absolution and the Bless- ing, and the ablution of the sacred vessels. The Bishop's offences were committed in Lincoln Minster on December 4th, and in the Parish Church of S. Peter-le-Gowts, Lincoln, on December i8th, 1887. In June, 1888, the Church Association addressed the Archbishop, stating that the Bishop had been guilty of 1 Life of Archbishop Benson, Vol. II., p. 320. Dr. Liddon 97 illegal acts, and begging him, in virtue of his office, to cite and try his Suffragan. A vast commotion immediately arose. Some great authorities doubted whether the Archbishop possessed the requisite jurisdiction ; some thought that he would be unwise to exercise it ; some held that he possessed it and should exercise it by dismissing the suit ; some said that, if he attempted to try the Bishop, he would be condemned by the Secular Courts ; others that, if he declined to try him, the Secular Courts would compel him to do so. Beset by these many and conflicting difficul- ties, the Archbishop conferred freely with legal flesh and blood. " Dean Davidson l was in this matter, as in so many, his intimate friend and counsellor." Dean Church called the authority of the Archbishop's Court " alto- gether nebulous." Liddon wrote to his friend and former colleague, Bishop Lightfoot : "The Archbishop is presumably approached, qua" Archbishop, and presumably as having a large discretionary jurisdiction, not necessarily con- trolled by recent legal decisions. It is most earnestly to be hoped that he may exercise this by dismissing the charges as * frivolous.' That such a person as the Bishop of Lincoln should be exposed to the vexation of legal proceedings is a serious misfortune to the Church much more serious than to the Bishop himself, who would probably regard 1 Afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. o 9 8 Leaaers of the Church 1 800 - 1 900 it simply as an opportunity for growth in Christian graces. But, as a consequence of his rare and rich gift of spiritual sympathy, the number of people in all classes of society who look up to him with a strong personal respect and affection is probably quite un- rivalled in the case of any other prominent Churchman of the same type, and the mere apprehension of his being attacked is already creating widespread disquietude. Anything like a condemnation would be followed by conse- quences which I do not venture to anticipate." It is obvious that the Archbishop longed to assert and exercise his jurisdiction, and to sit in judgment on the successor of S. Hugh ; but he was not quite sure whether he could. Reference was therefore made, on his suggestion, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, who were of opinion that he had jurisdiction, and accordingly " humbly advised Her Majesty to remit the case to the Archbishop to be dealt with ac- cording to law." Thus encouraged, the Arch- bishop went forward, and cited the Bishop to appear before him at Lambeth on February 1 2th, 1889. Liddon recommended that the Bishop should demur to the single-handed jurisdiction of the Archbishop, and should demand a hearing before the Bishops of the Province. " The more I think of it," he wrote on February 6th, "the clearer it is to me that, as a broad question of principle, and Dr. Llddon 99 in view of his example upon the future of the Church, the Bishop is right in making this appeal to the Comprovincial Bishops, with the Primate." On the I2th the trial began : the Archbishop having appointed five Epis- copal Assessors to comfort and abet him, but to have no share in the Judgment. The Bishop duly made his protest, which the Archbishop allowed to be argued at a later date. On February I4th Liddon wrote : " The Archbishop somehow seems to bury great issues out of the sight, at any rate, of his own mind, beneath a mass of drapery and phrases ; and the great ecclesiastical ladies who flit about in the surrounding atmosphere add an element of grotesqueness to the whole thing which makes it difficult to keep its great seriousness steadily in view. 1 . . . One thing is certain that Church principles could not possibly have had a morally-worthier repre- sentative and this is a blessing the full value of which it is difficult to take in all at once." Eventually the Archbishop decided to dis- regard his Comprovincials, and to try the case on his own responsibility. The trial, therefore, went forward, and ended on February 23rd. Judgment was delivered on November list, and the Bishop was justified on every point except the Sign of the Cross at the Absolution 1 This phenomenon was curiously reproduced at the hearing of the case for Lights and Incense at Lambeth, May, 1899. ioo Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 and Blessing. This result was an immense relief to Liddon, both as vindicating a decent ceremonial on grounds of historical continuity, and also as delivering a loved and honoured friend from undeserved distress. But, before the Judgment was given, the clouds were dark- ening for a more perilous storm. Dr. Liddon 101 CHAPTER VIII. Lux MUNDI. FROM first to last Liddon's opinions concerning the structure and interpretation of the Bible were sensitively and pugnaciously conservative ; and it is not unreasonable to surmise that they had been permanently affected by his Evangelical up-bringing. In March, 1860, he pounced upon the newly- published Sssays and JKevif&s, and pronounced that " between Jowett's and Wilson's essays, the Gospel history simply evaporates as Jowett considers the three first Gospels to be merely three forms of one tradition, not c three independent witnesses' to our LORD'S sayings and acts ; and Wilson sees in S. John an element of legendary and ideal embellishment, which contrasts disadvantageously with the predominant moral element of the * Synoptic Gospels.' ' Two years later, the offender was Bishop Colenso, whose childish quibbles about the Ark and the Flood had " the direct result of promoting thorough-going disbelief of the truth and contents of Scripture." In 1868 Liddon wrote to a perplexed friend : " Your IO2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 difficulty appears to me to assume that a limitation of knowledge and a liability to error necessarily go together that, because our LORD admits His 'ignorance' of the Day of Judgment, He is ignorant also of the authorship and claims of the Pentateuch, about which He does not profess ignorance, but, on the contrary, makes distinct assertions. Now, I should have thought that the reverse was the more natural inference. If a human teacher tells me that he is ignorant of A., but goes on confidently about B., I am led to trust his profession of knowledge in the case of B. all the more readily from his admission of ignor- ance in the case of A. ... We have only one distinctly recorded instance of limitation of our LORD'S knowledge, and we have, as it seems to me, absolutely no ground for inferring ignor- ance in any other case, certainly not in cases where He spoke as believing Himself to know. . . . " It seems important to observe that it is not merely the * authorship ' of the Pentateuch which our LORD'S quotations assume, and which is disputed by modern Rationalism. It is whether the Pentateuch contains legends instead of history. Our LORD, for instance, refers to the Noachian deluge, to Lot's wife, and to take another case to Jonah's being in the fish. It is admitted that He refers to these things as literal matters of fact. Modern Rationalism says that they are legends. If we Dr. Liddon 103 accept this conclusion, I do not see how we can trust our LORD when He says that He will come to judge the world. Why should He not have been mistaken here, too ; first in attributing to the prophecy of Daniel the force of a description which was to be literally ful- filled ; and, secondly, in claiming Himself to fulfil it ? In short, I do not believe that it is possible to draw a line between CHRIST'S * doctrine concerning His FATHER and Him- self,' and the other parts of His teaching. To suppose that our LORD is really ignorant of any one subject upon which He teaches as One Who believes Himself to know, appears to me to admit a solvent which must speedily break up all belief in His authority and teaching." The last-quoted words anticipate, with almost literal accuracy, a protest which Liddon uttered twenty years later against hasty misbelief. 1 In all the interspace, his mind on these grave topics never varied. It would be easy, but is unnecessary, to multiply quotations. I pro- ceed to the circumstances which involved him in the latest, perhaps the most important, and certainly the most painful, controversy of his life. It will have been gathered from the fore- going pages, that one of the master-passions of Liddon's life was his devotion to Dr. Pusey. They had lived in close and increasing intimacy 1 See Life and Letters, p. 361. IO4 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 from the time when Liddon became a member of Christ Church. Pusey was Liddon's spiritual director, and, to the end of his long life, the elder was to the younger man " The Doctor," " 6/Aeyas," " the most dear and revered of friends, of whose friendship I have all along been so utterly unworthy." To Liddon's ardent nature, full of affection, loyalty, and hero-worship, there was an irresistible attrac- tion in Pusey's austere unworldliness, indomitable courage, and persistent hopeful- ness, even in the darkest hours of treachery and persecution. As years went on, Pusey became to Liddon, not merely a final authority in all disputed points of criticism and theology, but a kind of exterior conscience in the practical problems of life and duty. " The Doctor would not approve of it," was on Liddon's lips a sentence of final condemna- tion. In the smallest question of academical polity, it was pain and grief to Liddon to find himself differing by a hair's breadth from the Doctor ; while in all the vital controversies of a contentious time they were of one heart and one mind. Whether it was entirely whole- some for a man of Liddon's temperament to be thus under the sway of a master who taught us to regard bad butter as a means of grace, and to remember, when we went to bed, that we ought to be lying down in Hell, this is not the occasion to enquire. It is enough to record the fact that Pusey was Dr. Liddon 105 to Liddon, not only dilectissimus amicus, but a Prophet and a King, from whose judgments in the spiritual and moral domain there could be no appeal. Pusey died in 1882, and it was inevitable that Liddon should be profoundly concerned about the best method of perpetuating his memory, and presenting his life and work to the world. We have seen that he undertook, to the great detriment of his own health and efficiency, the burdensome task of writing the Biography, and he was the leading spirit in the movement for creating some visible memorial of the part which Pusey had played in the reconstruction of the Church of England. Liddon's first idea was that the memorial should be a church, exceeding magnifical, in some conspicuous part of London, where the combined beauty of architecture, ornament and ritual should teach through the eye that great Theology of the Incarnation and the Sacraments which the Tractarian leaders had taught through the ear. "A church like that," he said, "would have excited enthusiasm." However, in this prosaic world of ours, memorials depend on money, and rich men are seldom idealists. It therefore came to pass that Liddon's original scheme received no support from those opulent Churchmen to whose pockets he appealed. They, on their part, suggested some very uninspiring projects, io6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 such as an enlargement of S. Stephen's House for training Missionaries, and a "Theological Appendix" to Keble College, where B.A.'s. might be taught Theology. Failing the Memorial Church, Liddon proposed a College of Clergy in Oxford, which should be a centre of religious faith, theological learning, and pas- toral care for souls. This scheme, which would in Liddon's view act as an opposing force to the secular tendencies of the remodelled and dechristianized University, was adopted at a meeting held at Lord Salisbury's London house on the i6th November, 1882. At the same time it was resolved to purchase Dr. Pusey's library and place it in a suitable house, under the care of two or more clerical Librarians who should combine educational with spiritual work. The Pusey House was to be, in Liddon's words, " a home of sacred learning, and a rallying-point for Christian faith ... at what, so far as we can judge, must always be one of the chief centres of the mental life of this country." It was to " exhibit, as the old Colleges of Oxford were meant by their Christian founders to exhibit, solid learning allied to Christian faith and piety." Here was indeed a Venture of Faith. It was obvious that its success must depend in large measure on the character of the man who was placed in command of it. Liddon's choice fell on the Rev. Charles Gore, Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon Theological College ; and the Dr. Liddon 107 selection was generally approved. Pusey House was opened by the Bishop of Oxford l on the 9th of October, 1884, and immediately entered on a course of vigorous and useful work. Much of that vigour and that useful- ness was due to the first Head, afterwards Bishop of Birmingham. Charles Gore was born in 1853, and educated at Harrow and Balliol. At Harrow he was marked by an 'early and consistent piety, and by a habit of close study, pursued outside, though never at the expense of, his regular work. When other clever boys were content to talk about books, he read them ; but he was no mere student. In many ways he was a born teacher. It came naturally to him to think, to theorize, and to expound. He had views on most subjects, and was not shy about enunciating them. His thinking processes were in great measure shaped by Dr. Westcott, then an Assistant-Master at Harrow, who pleaded for the revival of Religious Com- munities in England, and at the same time sought to implant in his pupils "a firm faith in Criticism." Some traces of Westcott's influence were visible in Gore when he first went up to Balliol as a Scholar in 1871, and they were reinforced by the intellectual in- fluences of the time and place. After taking his degree in the First Class of the Final Classical School, he fulfilled a long-cherished 1 Dr. Mackarness. io8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 purpose by seeking Holy Orders. He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College, and soon began to make a distinct mark on the life of the University. He had social advantages which differentiated him in some ways from other Dons. His Balliol Scholarship and First Class sufficiently attested his mental competence ; and no one who knew him could doubt that spiritual and moral interests held the first place in his heart. In 1878 he wrote a paper on the Nature of Faith and the con- ditions of its exercise, which was privately printed, and revealed him at once as a clear, bold, and yet cautious thinker. Being appointed Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon, he developed a power of attracting and interesting young men ; and the same power made both his public in- structions and his private ministrations at the Pusey House acceptable to a wide circle of Undergraduates. In boyish days, Gore had passed through a ritualistic phase ; but residence at Oxford had conformed his religion to a more academic type ; and it was common knowledge to his friends and pupils that he inclined towards some extremely modern methods of criticizing the Old Testament. But, curiously enough, no suspicion of this unconcealed fact seems ever to have crossed the mind of the man who put him at the Pusey House. Liddon " knew and loved his general character ; knew that he was sound about the Incarnation and the Sacra- Dr. Liddon 109 ments ; and did not suspect that he had constructed a private kennel for liberalizing ideas in Theology within the precincts of the Old Testament, and so much of the New Testament as bears upon it." Now it happened that this was a subject on which Liddon's own convictions were fixed and immoveable. He held them even pas- sionately, and the lapse of years brought no change in the manner of stating them. In 1 86 1 he wrote "The religious admiration of our day is very generally given to systems which still bid us study Scripture, while they evacuate its almost every claim to reverence ; and to men whom we are thankful to hear describing the dress of a patriarch or the historic parallels of a crisis, lest they should be insisting upon all the objections which can be urged against some primal Christian doctrine, or suggesting indirectly all the criticisms which tell against the genuineness and authenticity of some Canonical Book." To a mind thus possessed, the arbitrary assumptions and bland self-confidence of the criticism quaintly called " Higher," were necessarily repulsive. Its prevalence in Oxford was a permanent distress to Liddon, but he took comfort in the thought that the Pusey House, which he had done so much to establish, and the Librarians whom he had placed there, were sedulously confirming Undergraduates in the Faith, and were battling, no Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 with all their might, against the forces of the New Scepticism. To some extent this was true. Pusey House did good work in the regions of devotion, conscience, and morals ; and crude theories about the text and inter- pretation of the Old Testament ran off the robust common-sense of sincerely Christian Undergraduates, like water off the back of the proverbial duck. But all at once the skies darkened for a drenching storm ; and that storm, when it burst, destroyed for ever the peace and brightness of the devoted and beautiful life which this book attempts to pourtray. On the 6th of July, 1889, Liddon wrote to a friend " I should be happier about the future of good principles among us, if some of our friends did not coquette with rationalism, as put out by the destructive school of Professors Driver and Cheyne ; and others, with such forms of worldliness as theatre-going which, in a Priest, is surely unintelligible. Each of these symptoms characterized a large section of the French clergy in the generation which preceded the Revolution of 1789. Each is due partly, I suppose, to a mistaken notion that we can conquer worldly morals, or forms of thought that are unbelieving at bottom, by discreetly * playing pretty ' to them. I daresay I have made my full share of mistakes in this way, if I only knew : perhaps one sees the outline of the battlefield more clearly when one T>r. Liddon 1 1 1 is leaving it, though without having con- tributed to the success of the day." In September of this year Liddon spent some time at Brighton, where it was the privilege of the present writer to be daily in his company. From Brighton he went to stay with Mrs. Meynell-Ingram at Hoar Cross, and there, in reply to a question of his hostess, he so strongly urged the merits of the Pusey House and its Head, that she subscribed 500 to its funds. At the beginning of the October Term he returned to Oxford, and soon learned, to his unspeakable dismay, that a book which was just coming out under the editorship of the Principal of the Pusey House contained an essay by the editor which would " make great concessions to the Germans." This book was of course the well-meant but ill-starred volume entitled Lux Mundi. Matthew Arnold, in his famous Lectures on translating Homer, said that Mr. Ichabod Wright's translation had no proper reason for existing. If I could venture so far without appearing to verge on blasphemy, I should say the same of Lux Mundi. The contributors were men of high character and great attain- ments, among whom I count some loved and honoured friends ; but why they published Lux IMundi is a question to which in sixteen years there has been no intelligible answer. The preface states that the volume was 1 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 primarily due to a set of circumstances which at the time of publication existed no longer. The writers had been Tutors at Oxford between 1875 anc ^ 1885, and had then been compelled to "attempt to put the Catholic Faith into its right relation to modern intellectual and moral problems." It might perhaps be sug- gested that to put intellectual and moral problems into their right relation to the Catholic Faith would be a more promising and a more dutiful attempt for a company of clergymen. The phrase was indeed explained away in the preface to the Tenth Edition ; but it still stands in the forefront of the book, a monument of infelicitous expression. Whatever necessities were laid upon these Tutors at Oxford between 1875 an< ^ J ^^5> one would have thought that they had been re- moved by lapse of time and change of duties. By Michaelmas, 1889, the men, "who once enjoyed this happy companionship, were for the most part separated." And yet they felt bound to gather up the residuum of their old teaching, which had filtered harmlessly enough through several generations of Undergraduates, and to precipitate it on the Church at large. The Undergraduates of 1875-1885 may have required instruction about Faith and Pain and Inspiration and Ethics and other venerable themes ; but the Church, which had free access to the works of Pascal and Butler and Paley and Newman and Pusey and Church and Dr. Liddon 113 Liddon, was not conscious of any aching void which Lux Mundi could fill. I have lived most of my life in circles where religious enquiry and discussion abounded ; but I have never yet encountered a human being whose doubts had been removed by Lux Mundi ; and the fact that it ran through eleven editions in twelve months is, I imagine, due to the fact that, as Liddon said, "the world at large thinks it piquant that such a book should have issued from the Pusey House." Myself an unworthy son of Oxford, I know the repulsiveness of the suggestion that we at Oxford have ever learnt anything from Cam- bridge, or that Cambridge has preceded us in any line of fruitful thought or action. Yet, when I read Lux Mundi> I cannot perceive that, with all its exuberance of rhetoric and verbiage and illustrative allusion, it carries us much further than the position taken by that least exciting of teachers, Dr. Vaughan, 1 as far back as 1862. Preaching in that year before the University of Cambridge, Vaughan admitted that "the Bible itself is the battle-ground of our generation." He warned his hearers not to ignore difficulties, but still to keep their heads amid the rattling storm of Criticism. He laid it down that it was no part of GOD'S purpose in Revelation to anticipate the discoveries of science, to teach history in ad- 1 C. J. Vaughan (1816-1897), Master of the Temple, and Dean of Llandaff. 114 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900 vance, or to disclose truths which lay within the competence of man's intellect to discover for himself. Above all and here he was on exactly the same ground as the more reverent writers in Lux Mundi he taught that for the man who owned the true and proper Deity of the LORD JESUS CHRIST, and placed him- self as a learner at the Divine Feet, the problems of criticism and speculation had neither fears nor perils. 1 However, for weal or woe, Lux Mundi was compiled, and rumour in Oxford was busy with its supposed contents. The Editor, hearing that Liddon was terribly perturbed, sent him the unpublished sheets. On October 2oth, 1889, Liddon replied, "I have read through your Essay, but nothing else in the volume. It is needless to say that with the drift of the earlier part of the Essay I am in hearty agree- ment. There are passages which command my warmest admiration. You will, in your kindness, forgive me if I add how much I wish that pages 345-362, or large passages in them, could have been modified or abandoned." Whoever cares to peruse the pages to which Liddon here refers must look at the first edition of Lux Mundi. In later editions, " two of the more painful passages that bore on the Person of our Divine LORD " were, as Liddon said, "altered for the better." But the Essay as it stood, and stands, says, with an 1 See Appendix B. Dr. Ltddon 1 1 5 air of superior information, that our LORD "argues with the Pharisees on the assump- tion of the Davidic authorship of Psalm ex.;" and in a footnote we read, "He never exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in the realm of natural knowledge ; such as would be required to anticipate the results of modern science or criticism." Surely to introduce the tremendous and far-reaching doctrine of the " Self-emptying of GOD " in a casual footnote to a book of miscellaneous Essays suggests a levity which might well appal a mind so reverent and so scrupulous as Liddon's. A long correspondence followed, and re- vealed an almost equal amount of misery in Liddon and his younger friend. To both, the divergence which was now and the truculence of the Church Times. He groaned over "an execrable article in Fraser:" 1 and yet he went on reading all this stuff with scrupulous diligence. No man on earth could 1 It should be borne in mind that, at the dates to which these quotations relate, all these papers were under editor- ship which have long since ceased. Dr. Liddon 191 come unscathed through such a process ; and Liddon's style always showed (though less conspicuously as years went on) the traces of the school in which it had been formed. One of those traces was that most ingrained of all journalistic habits the unwillingness to call anyone or anything by a plain name when a periphrasis is available. Liddon called the Bible " the Sacred Volume," the Times " the Lead- ing Journal," Mr. Keble "the Author of The Christian Tear" and Dr. Pusey "the Regius Professor of Hebrew." When he wrote thus, every journalist must have recognized him as a man and a brother. The style of modern journalism has been so profoundly affected by Macaulay, that whoso writes journalese writes also Macaulayese : and Macaulay's influence on Liddon's style made itself felt in the short sen- tences, the rolling paragraphs, and the sonorous eloquence of the descriptive passages. Reference has already been made to the chapter which the present Bishop of Oxford con- tributed to Principal Johnston's Life and Letters of Henry Tarry Liddon. The chapter is written with much unction and urbanity, but it is pervaded throughout by an apologetic tone which is curiously out of place. We cannot doubt that the apology is offered in perfectly good faith. Indeed, to think otherwise would be to charge the Bishop with insensibility to a high privilege ; for Liddon, though nine- 192 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 teen years his senior, honoured him with a close and almost brotherly kindness, and never lost an opportunity of praising him. " F. Paget is a self-forgetting person." " F. Paget left Oxford to-day. What a blessing he has been to me during the last four years." Even in Lux Mundij " F. Paget's " Essay was marked out from the rest by Liddon's commendation " a real contribution to Christian Theology." Now that this gracious friend and master has been for fifteen years in his honoured grave, the Bishop of Oxford reviews his career, and finds two great defects in it. Divested of verbiage, those defects are found to be (i) that Liddon was too fond of controversy, and (2) that he would have been a greater man if he had been a Bishop. When I first read the former of these implied censures, there came back upon my memory some words from the Sermon on " The Curse on Meroz." l To play the part of Meroz was not congenial to Liddon's temperament. When a sacred cause was imperilled, he flung himself into the thick of the fighting with absolute and calculated self-surrender. He did not stand aloof to see which side was going to win. To 1 " To refuse aid to the Sacred Cause until it was certain of success, was, in a man or a community belonging to the Covenanted Nation, an act of virtual apostasy ; and Meroz was not merely politically disfranchised : it was religiously excommunicated." University Sermons, Second Series. Dr. Liddon 193 imagine 'that he loved controversy is ridicu- lously to misconceive the man. He simply regarded it as a duty which could not be shunned without unfaithfulness, when the Honour and Truth of GOD were at stake. Thus he wrote from Oxford in 1868: "I often envy the scouts I and their boys, who know nothing of the Church troubles of our time, and who, if they like, can do their duty and go to Heaven without a previous hand-to-hand fight with Romans and unbelievers. However, this no doubt is wrong : we are best where and as GOD has placed us." It was Liddon's high though arduous fortune to fight and win some great battles for Truth and Righteousness : and the Bishop of Oxford may rest assured that no apology is needed for such a career. The Bishop, who seems to be exceptionally impressed by the responsibilities of his office, writes solemnly about " great burdens of ad- ministration and government," and " lonely tasks of decision," which he has been called to bear : and says that it would have been better if Liddon had been obliged to share them. That Liddon would have been a chief glory of the English indeed of the Universal Episco- pate is certain enough ; but the effect of Episcopal office on the character of even good men has not always been such as to make one wish to see the experiment tried in the case of those whom we love and honour. Of a certain 1 College Servants. 2 C 194 Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900 Bishop who once " did run well," but, after his elevation, took to persecuting Ritualists, Liddon wrote : " Popularity is his God, and all his higher chances in the way of character have been sacrificed at its shrine." As regards my loved and honoured master, I feel assured that his spiritual temper would have been proof against all such base temptations ; but still I am thankful that he was permitted to live and die in a position where he could testify for Truth without pausing to consider the susceptibilities of worldliness and time-serving and misbelief, whether displayed at courts, or in newspapers, or on episcopal thrones. It is true that Faith- ful was burned to ashes, and that Christian was all but drowned in crossing the river ; but, after all, they are more attractive characters than Mr. Facing-both-ways and Mr. Worldly- Wiseman. It would be well for the Church of England at this moment if a few more of her servants were inspired by Liddon's spirit, and were as ready as he to rebuke spiritual wicked- ness in high places, at whatever sacrifice of worldly ease and professional advancement. Dr. Liddon 195 In the life and character of Henry Parry Liddon the modern Church saw reproduced the attributes which marked the Saints or Apostolic and Sub-Apostolic times. He shared their personal devotion to our Adorable Re- deemer ; their unconquerable valour in the defence of truth ; their capacity for Confessor- ship ; their readiness for Martyrdom : and his words concerning those who had gone before him with the Sign of Faith may serve as the summary of his own life in time and in eternity "Things would not have been better than they are for Martyrs and Confessors, if, in their day, the sea had been calm and the waves unruffled. For them, long since, the winds and waves of life have been stilled, and CHRIST has brought them to the haven where they would be. Sit anima nostra cum Sanctis with them, if He wills, in the fellowship of their sorrows ; with them, through His mercy, as sharers of their everlasting rest ! " l 1 " CHRIST in the Storm," in University Sermons, Second Series. Dr. Liddon 197 APPENDIX A. "Whereas, at this present time, imputations of disloyalty to the Church of England are current, to the discredit of those who have been, some of them for many years, incul- cating and defending the Doctrines of the Real Objective Presence, of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and of the adoration of CHRIST in the Blessed Sacrament ; and whereas, by reason of these imputations, the minds of many are troubled : We therefore, the undersigned, exercising the office of the Priesthood within the Church of England, beg respectfully to state to your Grace, and through your Grace to our Right Reverend Fathers in GOD the Bishops of your Province, and to the Church at large, what we believe to be the mind of our LORD, touching the said Doctrines, as expressed in Holy Scripture, and as received by the Church of England in conformity with the teaching of the Catholic Church in those ages to which the Church of England directs us as ' most pure and uncorrupt,' and of ' the old godly doctors,' to whom she has in many ways referred us, declaring hereby both what we repudiate, and what we believe, touching the said Doctrines. "(i) We repudiate the opinion of a 'Corporal Presence of CHRIST'S natural Flesh and Blood ' ; that is to say, of the Presence of His Body and Blood as They 'are in Heaven ' ; and the conception of the mode of His Presence, which implies the physical change of the natural substances of the bread and wine, commonly called ' Transubstantia- tion.' " We believe that, in the Holy Eucharist, by virtue of the Consecration, through the Power of the HOLY GHOST, The Body and Blood of our Saviour CHRIST, ' the inward part, 198 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 or Thing signified,' are Present, really and truly, but Spiritually and ineffably, under ' the outward visible part or sign,' or ' form of Bread and Wine.' " " (2) We repudiate the notion of any fresh Sacrifice, or any view of the Eucharistic Sacrificial offering as of some- thing apart from the One All-sufficient Sacrifice and Oblation on the Cross, Which alone 'is that perfect Redemption, Propitiation, and Satisfaction for all the Sins of the whole world, both original and actual,' and Which alone is * meritorious.' "We believe that, as in Heaven, CHRIST, our Great High Priest, ever offers Himself before the Eternal FATHER, pleading by His Presence His Sacrifice of Himself once offered on the Cross ; so on Earth, in the Holy Eucharist, that same Body, once for all sacrificed for us, and that same Blood, once for all shed for us, Sacramentally Present, are offered and pleaded before the FATHER by the Priest, as our LORD ordained to be done in Remembrance of Himself, when He instituted the Blessed Sacrament of His Body and Blood. "(3) We repudiate all 'adoration' of 'the Sacramental Bread and Wine,' which would be ' idolatry ; ' regarding them with the reverence due to them because of their Sacramental relation to the Body and Blood of our LORD : we repudiate also all adoration of 'a Corporal Presence of CHRIST'S Natural Flesh and Blood,' that is to say, of the Presence of His Body and Blood as they 'are in Heaven.' "We believe that CHRIST Himself, really and truly, but Spiritually and ineffably, Present in the Sacrament, is therein to be adored." From a declaration signed by Liddon, Pusey, Mack- onochie, and eighteen other leading Churchmen, and pub- lished as Appendix F. in the First Report of the Royal Commission on Ritual, 1867. Dr. Liddon 199 APPENDIX B. " What think ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He ? Till that question is answered in each one of us, there is no rest and no strength for any man. If we set out in the race of life without answering it, we are the sport of every passing wind, in the deepest interests and the highest destinies of our being. Every word breathed against the authority of a divine revelation or the reality of a divine inspiration is enough to topple down the whole fabric of a traditional faith, and to destroy the sand-built habitation of a con- ventional hope. Happy is the man who has so assured himself, by GOD'S grace, of the mission, the truth, and the Divinity of his Saviour, that he can consider every other question, whether of opinion or practice, under His guidance, in His presence. Then, if he has anything to modify, by later experience or deeper reflection, in his first ideas of theology, whether in regard to the relation of Scripture to science, or of the human to the divine element in inspiration, he does so under CHRIST'S direction, and is a believer and a Christian still. Perhaps, if he looks more closely into the matter, he will find that what is supposed adverse to the Bible is in reality in perfect harmony with it, and will eventually turn to it for a testimony. He will not be forward to surrender without reason, but neither will he be perverse in retaining against reason, any supposed outwork of the truth he loves. His faith in CHRIST Himself, the result first of enquiry, and then secondly of intercourse of carefully noting the evidences of the Gospel, and then of daily communing with the Saviour Whom the Gospel reveals is built upon a ' rock that is ' indeed ' higher than he,' at whose feet the storms of controversy may spend themselves, but upon whose head, through all time, the ' Eternal Sunshine settles.' " ' Univtrsity Sermons, New and Old, by C. J. Vaughmn, D. D. , pp. 59, 60. 2 oo Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900 APPENDIX C. " On this serious subject, there is often a singular con- fusion between limitation of knowledge and the utterance through ignorance of that which is in fact untrue. If our LORD as