Chapter XXII: Last Words About Our Celebrities 233 (5)

Still more remarkable was his impromptu acknowledgment when he lay dying, and his wife, referring to some of his published views, said: 'William, such love as mine for you cannot be the result of mere mechanism or vital forces, can it?' 'Oh, no,' he responded; 'it has a far higher source.' 'Once,' adds his wife, 'I saw the hands clasped as in a speechless communion with the Unseen, and twice I caught the solemn word "God" uttered, not in a tone of appeal or entreaty, but as if the supreme contemplation which had been his very life meant more, revealed more, than ever!' In a former article I pointed out how seldom professed, and even perfectly sincere, doubters ever entirely shake off the impressions of Divine reality and the Divine Presence. My own conviction is that the God whom they seek (I am not thinking of the unbelief that springs from moral unfaithfulness or obliquity) does, after all, touch their hands in the darkness, and the Christ whom they fail to understand has included them in His great and universal atonement. It may be that the Holy Spirit, who shows the things of Christ to men, gives them a saving view of Calvary as they pass through the Valley of the Shadow. I cannot believe that any _bonâ fide_ seeker after God ever became a 'lost soul' in any sense of those awful words, even though his seeking endured for a lifetime without conscious finding.

Lucy Smith survived her husband's death at Brighton several years, often making her way back to their beloved Borrowdale, where some of their intensest happiness had been experienced, and to Patterdale, where their first love was awakened. In the latter place there are 'exquisite shade of birch-trees on high ground' where she and her lover read together and recited poetry--his or hers or another's; peeps of Ullswater through the woods; mossy knolls and sequestered grassy walks; and all had memory-voices for her in the midst of their outward quietude. She had, as might have been foretold, imbibed much of her husband's philosophy, and in some directions her cherished 'orthodoxy' of opinion had reached its vanishing point, but her orthodoxy of heart was not touched adversely. It actually grew as life passed onward, and her sunset-lights glowed with the radiancy of heaven. William's real creed, 'God, Immortality, Progress'--a noble residuum, after all--was hers with great assurance, and she writes that she shared 'his craving for fellowship in Christ's deep love, and for a willing acceptance of His sufferings.' They both looked to being united--to quote her own words from her verses--'In, life more high in seeing, serving God, in nearer, nobler ways.' She ripened in character, in lovable ways, in self-forgetting devotion to her friends, till her poet-heart ceased to beat, and her yearnings after a fuller and more perfect soul-life were at length realized through the mercies and merits of the One she knew but in part, though He knew her, and her aspirations and difficulties, through and through.

THE BIBLE AND ITS REVELATIONS

Wherever its Revelations of the essentials of Deity and Humanity
occur they may and must be considered as the most solemn and
precious of all the contents of the Bible. But even of these it
should be specially noted that they are for the most part
progressive. The Bible contains, in fact, a series as well as a
collection of Revelations--a series, of which the earliest terms are
the least, and which very gradually, and not quite uniformly, rises
to its height, and only after long centuries reaches its final terms
in Him who was Himself the highest Revelation which man can be
conceived capable of receiving in the flesh. That there is such a
progression in the Revelation of truth and duty in the Bible must be
obvious at once to anyone who considers the gradual manner in which
those two greatest of all ideas--God and Immortality--are disclosed
in it, and how the great duty of loving all men as ourselves, and
considering every man as our brother, was never at all insisted on
under the older dispensations.--REV. FREDERIC MYERS: _Catholic
Thoughts on the Bible and Theology_.

XV

TWO BROAD THINKERS

FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MYERS

(FATHER AND SON)

'Must then all quests be nought, all voyage vain,
All hopes the illusion of the whirling brain?
Or are there eyes beyond earth's veil that see,
Dreamers made strong to dream what is to be?'
F. W. H. MYERS: _The Renewal of Youth_.

Frederic Myers, of Keswick, is still known by his once-celebrated 'Lectures on Great Men,' and by his two volumes of 'Catholic Thoughts' on the Church and on the Bible and theology. The lectures were delivered to his parishioners. The series commenced about 1840, in accordance with his strong conviction that a clergyman should be the educator as well as the spiritual guide of his flock, and as a consequence of his horror at the 'dreadful separation and want of sympathy of the various orders and classes of modern society.' Remember the period to which these words were applied. It was several years after this that Maurice, Kingsley, Ludlow, and their friends commenced their remarkable movement for bringing the influence, learning, and wealth of the better social strata to the aid of the poorer. Since those early days of awakening to the claims of human brotherhood many things have happened to draw 'the various classes and orders of men' nearer together. Cruel taxes upon the food of the masses, for the further enrichment of the rich, have been swept away. The awakening of the democracy has brought it political power, and with this power the felt necessity for national education. The abolition of child-labour, the regulation and inspection of factories, mines, and workshops, the removal of many sectarian restrictions upon religious equality, an interest in sanitation and the preservation of public health, and many other such things for which the great 'middle classes' have steadfastly laboured side by side with the wage-earners, are results of the transfer of power from the few to the many. Such matters as these, now looked upon as among the common-places of civic life, were then hardly deemed by their most sanguine advocates as within the reach of 'practical politics.' Kindly-hearted Christian pastors, of the type of Frederic Myers, were few and far between, though wherever they existed they provoked among the people that element of 'Divine discontent' which found many voices ere it was appeased, from the decent respectability of Christian Socialism to the plebeian, and often extravagant, cries of Chartism.

Myers, and such as he, fitly began the movement, though scarcely consciously, by seeking 'to call forth the powers within man, by the culture of his whole nature; energy of all kinds--with the simultaneous cultivation of his sympathies, the nurture of truthfulness, justice, love, and faith.' He strove to awaken a spiritual ambition among his hearers by setting before their mental vision the struggles and the conquests of men who had resolved to achieve something worth the winning, and who had in their day become epoch-makers--who had possessed in eminent degree the qualities we all ought ever to cherish, according to our capacities, and our opportunities for self-development. His dozen specimen characters are well chosen from the regions of religion, adventure, and statesmanship. His two other books are devoted to the solution of questions then being much debated after the commencement of the Romeward Oxford movement known as 'Tractarianism.' The earlier one--that on the Church--was originally printed for private circulation. It is well for us that it was fully published at a later date, for though that era was prophetic of the coming of political advancement, it also set in motion a retrograde religious stream of thought and practice which is still flowing through the Anglican Church, and affecting the spiritual well-being of the nation. The principles enunciated in this masterly reply to Newman's doctrine of the Church, and his thorough examination of the sacerdotal claims of the Puseyite Oxonians can never become antiquated. With him the primary idea of the Christian Church is of a brotherhood of 'men worshipping Christ as the revelation of the Highest.' Equality of Christian privilege is, in his view, so characteristic of its constitution that the existence of a priestly caste within its borders is destructive of it. Christian faith is in Christ Himself, and not in doctrines or formulas of even the holiest and wisest men. In the true and universal--_i.e._, the Catholic--Church there can be no majestry, only a ministry. It is a Spiritual Republic in which no worldly distinctions can be recognised. 'Apostolic Sucsession,' in the High Anglican and Romish sense of the phrase, has no place therein, and no room exists for any human assumption over the minds and souls of believers in Christ within the purely spiritual Church, which is His body. Many readers will naturally see some lack of logical sequence in the argument which follows as to the relation of the Established Anglican Church to this Catholic and Spiritual one. That the conclusions reached on this point do not seem necessarily to flow from the premises must surely be conceded by all. Either legitimate conclusions must be drawn from the assumed fundamental position, or fresh premises must be granted. Nevertheless, as the Scriptural ground of his position was generally accepted, his timely work certainly helped to save the Church of England from the medievalist enemies within its own borders. Instead of their carrying the Establishment over to Rome, several of the ablest leaders of the new ritualistic movement severed themselves from its communion, and, as is well known, entered the Papal fold, some rising to great honour and dignity within it.

The 'Thoughts on the Bible and Theology' involve the theory that sacred literature 'contains, rather than consists of, special revelations.' In it, though not wholly Divine, 'the Divine Spirit may mingle with the human, and mingling, overmaster it.' It has infirmities and imperfections, but, he hastens to add, 'less in proportion to its holy truths than the chaff is to the wheat in any harvest--yea, is even only as the small dust of the balance compared with the greatest weight that the balance will weigh.' His theological teaching cannot be presented satisfactorily in a few lines, and it must be, therefore, dismissed with the sole remark that, though far from being rationalistic, it appears highly rational, as it is based on the written words of God, and is not derived from the dogmas and traditions of Churchmen.

Frederic Myers was born in London in 1811, educated at home and at Cambridge, and became perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, in 1839, holding that living till his death in 1851, thus giving twelve years of his prime to the thoughtful activities of his ministry, and to the liberalizing of the Church of England.

Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Frederic by his second wife. He was born at Keswick, and this town was, of course, the headquarters of his boyhood and youth. Therefore we claim him for the Lake District, though the necessities of his official life made it expedient to reside afterwards in the Metropolis. The year of his birth was 1843, Blackheath and Cheltenham were the places of his school education, and Cambridge was his Alma Mater. His classical knowledge and his memory were especially good. He could recite the whole of 'Virgil,' and had a love, spoken of as 'enthusiastic,' for Pindar, Æschylus, and Homer. His culture was widened by a trip to the East, and another to America. Somewhat of an athlete and a good swimmer, he once swam across the Niagara River below the Falls. Returning to England, he became one of her late Majesty's School Inspectors. He died in 1901. This brief summary of his life must suffice.

His literary output is of more value to us than are the details of his personal career. This output all thinking men will be grateful for, whatever their opinions about his teaching on telepathy, hypnotism, and so forth. Had he only given the world his well-known poem on 'St. Paul,' he would have contributed more than most hymn-writers have done to its moral profiting. If the old Hebrew Seer was one who saw visions of the future through Time's manifold veils, and visions of Jehovah behind the marching cohorts of human generations, and who also had the Divine gift of 'discernment of spirits,' surely F. W. H. Myers may be called a nineteenth century seer. He solved in his prose works for many an earnest seeker after the truth many a scientific doubt respecting God and Immortality, while in his principal poem he seems to identify himself with the great Apostle in the yearning and the self-abandonment essential to such a herald of the Cross. As he wrote, he must have entered into close sympathy with the flaming desires with which Paul's breast was burning, and the love with which he ached for souls whom he set himself to win for the Kingdom of Heaven. To present the inner life of him whom Christ Himself chose to fill the vacant office of the fallen Judas was a daring venture, but successful. He makes Paul say:

'Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound Him nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.'

Myers made the great choice, ranking himself among those 'who,' as he puts it, 'suppose themselves to discern spiritual verities,' amid a tumult of Agnosticism and positive philosophy which arose about that time, partly, perhaps, as a result of the reaction from that exaggerated High Church teaching opposed by his father. Accepting the actual discoveries of experimental science without question, he yet maintained there is both direct and indirect evidence that the cosmic laws of uniformity, conservation of energy, and evolution, do not exhaust the controlling laws of the universe, nor explain all classes of phenomena. There is, at least, a fourth cosmic law as ascertainable as any of the others by observation and experiment. To this fourth law the greatest poets, such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, to say nothing of the still greater Semitic Poets, have helped to introduce mankind, and psychical research has demonstrated their scientific truth. 'Life, consciousness, and thought' are facts not fully explained by physiology. The communion of mind with mind without speech or bodily contact or proximity is as certain as that of X rays or wireless telegraphy. The communion of the human soul with the Oversoul of the Universe is not a dream, but a fact as indubitable as the fact of gravitation. The study of these facts, their modes of motion, and the laws which govern them, bring careful philosophers to the conclusion that behind the natural law is an active will, and behind natural force and evolution one universal and intelligent motive power. Mental and spiritual phenomena are ignored--or, for some obscure reason, at any rate neglected--by the ordinary man of science. No real all-round student of cosmic appearances, and the laws and influences that control and guide them to cosmic ends, can afford to shut his eyes to the existence of clues which, whenever they have been loyally followed, have led along the chain of cause and effect to the ultimate discovery of God and Immortality. He who follows the Gleam, everywhere shining before him, arrives sooner or later, whatever he thinks of the creeds of the sects, at the abode of the Eternal Presence, leaving the Land of Negations far behind him. This is the substance, or at least the fair interpretation, of the ideas woven throughout the series of Essays written by our author on 'Science and a Future Life,' 'Charles Darwin and Agnosticism,' 'Tennyson as Prophet,' and 'Modern Poets and Cosmic Law.' At a later period he put forth in support of his views, in collaboration with two others, a large collection of instances, gathered from definite experiences of witnesses, of 'Phantasms of the Living.' These evidences occupy two bulky volumes. He may have been sometimes too credulous. Some of his alleged facts may have needed closer examination. His deductions from observations may not always have been accurate, yet his argument is strong in itself, strongly fortified, and apparently, as a whole, still unshaken. He was, as he says of Tennyson, 'the proclaimer of man's spirit as part and parcel of the Universe, and indestructible at the very root of things,' and as such he has restored to many a doubter, unsettled by scientific materialism, his latent self-hood, his 'subliminal soul,' his realization of the invisible world, and a belief in that intellectual 'Cosmic Will' which common men persist in calling 'God.'

Myers wrote a few sketches of men and women of the hour, under the title of 'Classical Essays,' terse, readable, and displaying literary insight. The most recent 'Life of Wordsworth,' with whose semi-pantheism he had much sympathy, is his also. Nor was St. Paul his only excursion into the realms of poesy. 'The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems' is his. Little of its contents, however, rise to the level of his religious poem, and some are distinctly trivial. Since penning this sentence I have happened upon an 'Appreciation' of the volume mentioned, by the late John Addington Symonds. He likens the muse of Myers to a 'flute of silver, or a fife of gold,' through which he breathed strains, now stronger, now weaker, according to the degree of his inspiration. 'To some ears this instrument may seem too artificial, too metallic,' for his wont was to select words for their colour-values and their sonority--for the mode of saying things rather than for the expression of new and original thoughts. Symonds finds in the poetry not only a special message of God and Immortality, but a declaration of the happy influence of womanhood in human affairs. Whether or not this judgment is right on the last point, it is certain that the all-absorbing intuition of the poet's soul was that of an eternal life for mankind, not an immortality of the species at the expense of the individual, by sacrifice and extinction, but of every separate being:

'Oh, dreadful thought, that all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be--
Stones which are thrust in earth, to build thereon
Some white delight, some Parian Parthenon!'

THE VIEW FROM HELVELLYN

'There to the north the silver Solway shone,
And Criffel, by the hazy atmosphere
Lifted from off the earth, did then appear
A nodding island or a cloud-built throne.
And there, a spot half fancied and half seen,
Was sunny Carlisle; and by hillside green
Lay Penrith with its beacon of red stone.

'Southward through pale blue steam the eye might glance
Along the Yorkshire fells, and o'er the rest,
My native hill, dear Ingleboro's crest,
Rose shapely, like a cap of maintenance.
The classic Duddon, Leven, and clear Kent
A trident of fair estuaries sent,
Which did among the mountain roots advance.

'Westward, a region of tumultuous hills,
With here and there a tongue of azure lake
And ridge of fir, upon the eye did break.
But chiefest wonder are the tarns and rills
And giant coves, where great Helvellyn broods
Upon his own majestic solitudes,
Which even now the sunlight barely fills.'
FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: _Poems_.

VIEW OF WINDERMERE.

Summer Lake and Copse-wood Green.'--FABER.]

XVI

A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER

I.--THE MAN

'Especially did he endeavour to study the spirit of the Church at
its foundation head, in the City of Rome, under the shadow of St.
Peter's Chair. Fully recognising the claims of his own country to
his labours, he made it his business to introduce into it in every
possible way the devotions and practices which are consecrated by
the usage of Rome.'--FATHER BOWDEN'S _Life of Faber_.

Of Huguenot descent, his ancestors having fled from France to England to avoid the persecutions arising out of the 'Edict of Nantes,' and of Evangelical Church of England training, he early developed an unexpected 'spurt' towards Romanism, and that rather of the medieval Italian than of the modern English type.

Starting from such a parentage and such environments as this, it becomes an interesting study of character and temperament, and of the forces that mould and direct them, to trace the gradual development of ideas, and habits, through boyhood to youth, and youth to manhood. The key to his having ultimately become a priestly devotee of a mystical form of Mariolatry, is only secured by a careful perusal of his letters, books, and poetry; of his memoir by Father Bowden; and such fragmentary notices of him as contemporaries have given us. His life itself, as we read it, must furnish us with clues by which to follow the labyrinths of his mind to the end it reached.

He was born in 1814 at Calverley, near Leeds, of which parish his father was the vicar. The family removed the following year to Bishop Auckland on Mr. Faber becoming secretary to the Bishop of Durham. As he grew to boyhood the circumstances of his home-life wrought a development of character beyond his years, his precociousness was stimulated by his parents, and his ardent devotion to work or play gave promise of future eminence. The beautiful scenery around him encouraged his romantic tendencies. Sent to a private clerical school at Kirkby Stephen, he was never really free from ecclesiastical influences at any point of his outlook on the world. His imaginative disposition was still further quickened, and his poetical tastes and instincts acquired a direction for life in the midst of the wild Westmorland hills, for 'solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm.' He took long rambles over mountain and fell, rebuilding in fancy the ruined castles of the eastern borderland, and the abbeys of the western, repeopling them with steel-clad knights, and ladies fair and gay, or with monks chanting their vespers as the great sun went down in glory beyond the clear-cut ramparts guarding the blue inland meres. If one reads no farther than the index to his verses one sees at a glance how firm a grasp the enchanted region had upon his affections, beginning to secure them even then, intensifying the grasp while he lived in young manhood at Ambleside, and recurring to his memory when far away by 'Adria's sapphire waters,' or beneath the shadow of St. Mary's in his 'dear City' of Oxford. Helvellyn and Loughrigg, when sunshine and storm combine to throw rainbow-bridges from peak to peak; the little babbling rivers Rothay and Brathay, when their glittering foam-bells danced beneath the autumn-tinted trees; the green vale of Rydal, where the thrushes pipe the whole day through--were each as much, or perhaps more, to him, and appealed as clamourously for the weaving of a lay, as great Parnassus himself, or even as 'the sweet Styrian Lake.' Amidst the wind-sounds in the 'brotherhood of trees' and the bird-voices of the daytime--nay, in the very night-silences of the towers and fastnesses of the 'awful sanctuary God hath built' in the Lake District--he heard 'the echoes of Church bells,' and dreamed dreams of fonts and altars at which he might serve his 'mother' as her priest.

Educational progress compelled him, after a short tariance at Shrewsbury, to go forward to Harrow. Here he would ride and swim, but he would not play. Instead of giving himself up to the healthy commingling of learning and the usual school athletics, he thought and thought, till he began to think himself an unbeliever in Divine mysteries. From Harrow to Balliol College, Oxford, was a natural transition. He left his infidel doubts and temptations behind, only, however, to come under the influence of the Tractarian flood then streaming through the University, and sweeping some of its best sons towards Rome. He was specially attracted by the preaching of Newman, who was then engaged in constructing a theology from the writings of Anglican Fathers, showing that the Church of England was Roman in its teaching though not Papal in government.

While at Oxford he remained, as all through his career, pure, truthful, sincere, and studious, though ever romantic and impulsive. One of his best impulses was to read his Bible twice from beginning to end, prayerfully and meditatively, without note or comment. This brought him back for a season to the Evangelicalism he had been reared in. Attending Newman's sermons and lectures turned him once more to Church tradition and authority. He soon left his Bible for sacramentalism and all its concommitants. His friends accused him of vacillation. 'No, not vacillation,' he answered; 'but oscillation.' Perhaps we may say his course was like the Borrowdale road, which an old guide-book says 'serpentizes.' Under Newman's more intimate friendship and guidance he was set to the translation of Patristic writings, while still reading for ordination, and began to hope Tractarianism would 'soon saturate' the Church of England. Pursuing his theological studies, winning the Newdigate Prize, and receiving a Fellowship from his college, he, of course, took in due time deacon's and priest's orders, and left Oxford to undertake a tutorship in the household of Mr. Harrison, of Ambleside.

Into the parochial work of Ambleside he threw himself _con amore_, the incumbent being old and feeble. From thence he went on a brief tour through Belgium, returning with another set-back from Rome owing to what he had seen of the low intellectual state and morals of the Belgium priesthood. It was during the period of his Ambleside tutorship that he became acquainted with Wordsworth, whom he accompanied on long walks, the elder poet 'muttering verses to himself' in the intervals of conversation.

Somewhat later came the memorable tour of Europe, and visit to Rome, with his pupils, which practically sealed his conversion. The perusal of the records of this journey in his 'Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Countries' affords a curious revelation of biased history (and therefore often very inaccurate), an interesting account of his mental perplexities, and of the wonderful organization of the Papal hierarchy, enabling it to shadow his steps and 'create an atmosphere' around him wherever he went. This time he carried letters of introduction from the astute Dr. Wiseman, which assured his seeing the æsthetic best of all the great cathedrals and institutions of the Church, in each country he traversed, and helped him to shut the eyes of his memory to Inquisitions, and persecutions, and the pride and licentiousness of Popes and Cardinals, and to the grosser side of popular superstition, comprising the annals of the places he visited, and to the story of Italy especially. He had a keen sense of the misdeeds of poor people provoked to reprisals by the tyranny of kings and priests, but never breathed a word--for he failed to notice anything wrong--against the Church that was courting him, and was coquetting with others like him in the Anglican Communion of that day. At Rome the cultured and winsome Dr. Grant was selected as his chaperon, and once more the attractive figment of a world-dominion of an united Church was dangled before his imaginative mind amidst the music and incense of elaborate ceremonials appealing to his senses. The kindness and sympathy of those who were watching over him effectually removed the last veil between him and Roman doctrine. The Pope accorded him an interview in private, and he prostrated himself to kiss his feet and receive his benediction. The Pope was already the 'Holy Father' to him, and he is able in his letters of this date, though still nominally an Anglican, to pledge himself to a life-crusade against the detestable and diabolic heresy of Protestantism 'as being' what he calls 'the devil's masterpiece.'

After all this, one wonders how he could have persuaded himself it was right to accept, on his return to England, the living of Elton, in Huntingdonshire. He did so, however, and for the space of two years he did his utmost to Romanize the district. His charming manners, and natural persuasiveness, the vein of superstition in him (evidenced by his kissing relics and touching them for healing), which fitted well with the ignorance of his rural parishioners, gave him such influence in this direction that when, in 1845, he somewhat suddenly relinquished his pastorate, and was officially united with the Roman Church, he carried off with him several of his young men, who were the nucleus of his Brotherhood of the Will of God in Birmingham.

From this time forward, the Church having gained a priest but, as Wordsworth said, 'England having lost a poet,' there was developed in him a neurotic mysticism impelling him to ascetic neglect of his body, and suppression of human affections and responsibilities, which preyed on his physical frame, producing incessant headaches, and complete prostrations, and unquestionably shortened his days on earth. His love fixed on such intangible objects as Mary and the saints, rather than the living Christ, indulges itself in luscious outbreathings towards her who was not only to him Queen of Heaven and of Purgatory, and Mother of God, but his 'dear Mama,' his 'dearest Mama,' in whose 'fondling care,' and under whose 'sweet caress' he dwelt, finding, he tells her, 'Our home, deep in Thee, eternally, eternally.' His favourite saints are 'Joseph our Father,' and St. Wilfrid, whom he adopted as his patron, and from whom his monks were called 'Wilfridians.' He lived henceforth a life of self-renunciation, the will of God being accepted by him as made known through his superiors in the Roman priesthood. He devoted his time, substance, and skill to church building, and creation of monastic brotherhoods, in Birmingham, in Shropshire, in the City of London, and finally at Brompton, ere long merging his order in that of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri--an Italian confraternity introduced into England by Newman, a missionary body formed for proselytizing the poor and the young. Besides the beautiful church of St. Wilfrid's erected under the auspices of the Earl of Shrewsbury, there is the well-known Brompton Oratory, wherein his preaching, magnetizing rather by its fervour and picturesqueness than convincing by its reason and logic, held congregations of thousands spell-bound, who were partly, no doubt, attracted by his fame, though quite as much by the exquisite singing of the hymns of his composition and the lavish ceremonies of the Mass. It proved an immense strain upon his nervous system, the daily necessity of feeding the monks, building his churches slowly but magnificently, supplying the vestments, the lights, the incense, and all the other thousand and one requirements of so gorgeous a ritual. He failed under it in 1863, and died while only forty-nine years of age, prematurely worn out and aged.

Protestant as I am, at the extreme antipodes of conviction, religious experience, education, and sympathies from Father Faber, I doubt not his soul went straight to the Great All Father, the only 'Holy Father,' without the help of Masses to liberate it from any intermediate imprisonment, or process of purification, and without need of intercession from our Lord's virgin Mother, or from any portion of the pantheon of Roman saints. Some of his objectionable opinions and teachings--some that are very terrible to us--as well as many that are common to all true Christians, will be noticed in the next article, and there may only be added now a caution to many Protestants, as well as to many of the Church of Rome, not to confound wrong views with moral wrong-doing, nor to make a man's intellectual mistakes the measure of his presumed status before the throne of his God. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right,' when He sits in judgment upon the soul? As Faber's own celebrated hymn declares:

'The love of God is broader,
Than the measures of man's mind;
And the Heart of the Eternal,
Is most wonderfully kind.'

COME TO JESUS

'Souls of men! why will ye scatter
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?

'Was there ever kindest shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Saviour who would have us
Come and gather round His feet?

'It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems:
'Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

'There's a wideness in God's mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There's a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.

'There is no place where earth's sorrows
Are more felt than up in heaven;
There is no place where earth's failings
Have such kindly judgment given.'
FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: _Hymns_.

A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER

II.--HIS BOOKS

'At the evening service, after a few preliminary words, he told his
people that the doctrines he had taught them, though true, were not
those of the Church of England; that, as far as the Church of
England had a voice, she had denounced them.'--FATHER BOWDEN'S _Life
of Faber_.

Faber's mental output is a reflex of his character. I assumed this by using his letters and poems as the matrix of the life I sought to present my readers with. Neither I nor they found them rocks of barren quartz. They contained much gold--'yea, much fine gold'--of conscientiousness, devotion, and self-abnegation; of poetic, oratorical fervour; of rare zeal for the Church of his adoption. But with the fine gold there is also much dross. There are, for instance, not a few passages in 'Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches' of a startling kind to Englishmen--a book, be it remembered, written while the author was an Anglican clergyman. To him Charles I. was more than 'Charles the Martyr.' He was a King, 'conformed to the image of his Master through suffering.' Most of us will ask whether, supposing Jesus of Nazareth had been King in Charles's stead, there would have been any ship-money, any Star-Chamber, or any Civil War? Surely no man bears the image of Christ any farther than he comports himself Christly in politics and general public as in private life. Christ is a poor Master to serve if Charles was an image of Him. The admitted tyranny and licentiousness of the French Bourbons seemed to him to be condoned because they were great at building churches and convents. National struggles for liberty, and their champions, are usually presented in their worst lights, and the freer the nation the bitterer his words about her. The American Republic is thus a 'proud invalid' for whom there is no cure except by 'a multiplication of bishops, and then a monarchy.' In this book occurs his famous passage in favour of burning heretics. His attempted palliation, or modification, of the passage when challenged by Crabbe Robinson, the Diarist, on their ramble together to Eskdale Tarn, is disingenuous. The objectionable sentiment is explicitly made by 'the stranger,' who is as distinctly alleged to be Faber himself by his biographer, and virtually admitted to Robinson to be so. Here is the excerpt: 'Persecution belongs not, strictly speaking, to the Church. Her weapon, and a most dire one, is excommunication, whereby she cuts off the offender from the fountains of life in this world, and makes him over from her own judgment to that of Heaven in the world to come. But surely it is the duty of a Christian State to deprive such an excommunicate person of every social right and privilege; to lay on him such pains and penalties as may seem good to the wisdom of the law, or even, if they so judge, to sweep him from the earth; in other words, to put him to death. The least that can be done is make a civil death to follow an ecclesiastical death, and this must be done where the Church and State stand in right relation to each other.' To the ultramontane views promulgated in this book might be added others from his letters and published sermons, as, for instance, the phrase, 'the pernicious influence of Protestant ragged schools'; that in which he opposes the reading of the English Bible because its 'uncommon beauty and marvellous English' made it 'the stronghold of heresy'; those in which he elaborately argues for the 'adoration' of Mary ('surely it must be called so,' he says); the many in which he disparages the Reformation and applauds the blessings which the Church, and the Papacy in particular, had bestowed upon the nations; and those, once more, in which he declares a man has no rights as man conferred on him by the Bible, unless he be a Christian (by which he means a Churchman, for he says so), and dilating on the misery and unrest of that Protectionist period, proposes no remedies other than obedience to the Church, the keeping of saints' days and holy days, and the sweeping away of the 'indecent system of pews'! Incredible as it may seem, every one of these proposals is seriously propounded in 'A Churchman's Politics in Disturbed Times.'

One might make large quotations from the Oratory sermons full of descriptions, graphic even to gruesomeness, of the bodily agony of Jesus on the Cross, powerful enough to stir emotional women into hysterical weeping, and to bring them into a profound, if temporary and unreal, sentiment of fellowship with His sufferings, leaving Him still afar off as a risen and personal Friend, and leaving them unmoved by the bleeding figure on the crucifix in the silent recess till the next cerebral excitement. The whole of my articles might be taken up with extracts from his hymns that are simply astounding to the unprejudiced mind in their luscious sentimentality towards Mary and the saints. Of these it may be said the expressions do not necessarily mean all to a Catholic that they seem to a Protestant to imply. But is that so? Who that has watched and heard Italian or Irish worship, or studied the biographies and writings of the Romanist mystics of Italy or Spain, can possibly doubt their perfect sincerity? Is it not an entirely natural transfer of ardent love from the Redeemer to His mother happening concurrently with the priestly transfer of worship, of 'adoration,' from Him to her? Her images are bedecked with flowers and gorgeous attire, and her shrines are brilliantly lighted and are perfumed with incense. His image stands in a dark, neglected, railed-off side-chapel, in all the great cathedrals and rural churches of Romanist Europe.

Some of Faber's best prose is curiously reserved for lamentations over the decay of Paganism!--the 'beautiful births of Greek faith, most radiant legends, springing from every hard and barren spot, like unnumbered springs out of the Parnassian caverns, or the leafy sides of Citheron, or the bee-haunted slope of pale Hymettus.' 'The decline of Paganism was mournful and undignified. Faith after faith went out, like the extinguishing of lamps in a temple, or the paling of the marsh-fires before the rising sun.' Yet were the old creeds full of symbols, and the 'whole of external nature an assemblage of forms and vases capable of, and actually filled with, the Spirit,' and so Greek Paganism was the expression of a wish to 'write God's name on all things beautiful and true.' We can re-echo his dirge and acknowledge the saner, more cheerful side of the 'Paganism' that feels after God, 'if haply it may find Him'; but what a contrast between his attitude towards the non-Christian world and the fellow-Christians--not lacking in as holy teaching or living as his own--whom he had left, for an approachment towards image-worship!

Let us see, now, however, what he can do in description of places and scenery, in both prose and poetry. Here is his first impression of Venice: 'How is it to be described? What words can I use to express that vision, that thing of magic that lay before us?... Never was so wan a sunlight, never was there so pale a blue, as stood round about Venice that day. And there it was, a most visionary city, rising as if by enchantment out of the gentle-mannered Adriatic, the waveless Adriatic. One by one rose steeple, tower, and dome, street, and marble palace; they rose to our eyes slowly, as from the weedy deeps; and then they and their images wavered and floated, like a dream, upon the pale, sunny sea. As we glided onward from Fusina in our gondola, the beautiful buildings, with their strange Eastern architecture, seemed like fairy ships, to totter, to steady themselves, to come to anchor one by one, and where the shadow was, and where the palace was, you scarce could tell. And there was San Marco, and there the Ducal Palace, and there the Bridge of Sighs, and the very shades of the Balbi, Foscari, Pisani, Bembi, seemed to hover about the winged Lion of St. Mark. And all this, all, to the right and left, all was Venice; and it needed the sharp grating of the gondola against the stairs to bid us be sure it was not all a dream.'

He says of Milan Cathedral that 'In the moonlight it disarms criticism. When the moon's full splendour streams on Milan roofs, and overflows upon its lofty buttresses; when the liquid radiance trickles down the glory-cinctured heads of the marble saints, like the oil from Aaron's beard, and every fretted pinnacle, and every sculptured spout ran with light as they might have run with rain in a thunder-shower, who would dare to say there was a fault in that affecting miracle of Christian Art?' Of Corfu, the most perfect earthly Elysium I myself have seen, though I first saw it when returning from the Far East, he writes: 'What traveller does not know the delight of getting among foliage whose shape and hues are not like those of his native land? The interior of the island of Corfu was to us a sweet foretaste of Oriental foliage. We rode among strange hedges of huge cactus, fields of a blue-flowering grain, occasional palms, clouds of blue and white gum cistus, myrtle-shoots smelling in the sun, little forests of the many-branched arbutus, marshy nooks of blossoming oleander, venerable dull olives and lemon groves jewelled with pale yellow fruit. It was a dream of childhood realized, and brought with it some dreary remembrances barbed with poignant sorrows. Dreams, alas! are never realized till the freshness of the heart is gone, and their beauty has lost all that wildness which made it in imagination so desirable.'

'Sir Lancelot,' his longest and most ambitious poem, though finished at Ambleside in 1847, was issued from his Elton Vicarage two years later, and is under the guise of 'an attempt to embody and illustrate the social and ecclesiastical spirit of the thirteenth century,' avowedly an allegory of the soul seeking for that which it is represented as finding only when brought 'back to the foot of Peter's sovran chair.' To us its chief interest lies in his portraiture of our Westmorland surroundings. The hermitage to which the returned Crusader wends his way lies

'Within the Vale of Troutbeck, where towards the head
There is a single woody hill, enclosed
Within the mountains, yet apart and low.
Amid the underwood around, it seems
Like a huge animal recumbent there,
Not without grace; and sweetly apt it is
To catch all wandering sunbeams as they pass,
Or volatile lights in transit o'er the vale.'

Who among us does not recognise it? Who does not know 'the bell-shaped mountain which the wild winds ring full mournfully'? And the beck, too, where the ouzel flits even in winter on the 'ice-rimmed stones,' and the banks, whereon Sir Lancelot might lie and watch 'the flowery troops in pageant movable'--the snowdrops 'like a flock of children purely white,' the 'deep Lent-lilies, like constellations girt with lesser orbs.' When he crosses to the western sea 'angry and purple, far and wide outspread in stormy grandeur,' we go with him, and as we wander thitherward see Scawfell 'palpitating in the haze,' feel 'the tingling of the woodlands' at night-time down the valley of the Duddon, and learn how Esk is 'suckled in sylvan places' by 'clusters of wild tarns.'

Among his minor local poems 'English Hedges'--the Saxon hedgerows--are apostrophized:

'The hedges still survive, shelters for flowers,
An habitation for the singing birds,
Cool banks of shadow, grateful to the herds,
A charm scarce known in any land but ours.'

And in 'Mountain Tarns' he sings:

'There is a power to bless
In hillside loneliness--
In tarns and dreary places--
A virtue in the brook,
A freshness in the look
Of mountains' joyless faces--
And so when life is dull,
Or when my heart is full
Because my dreams have frowned,
I wander up the rills
To stones and tarns, and hills--
I go there to be crowned.'

If we turn to Faber's purely devotional writings, such as 'All for Jesus,' and can forget, or slide over, the subtle insinuations of Romish doctrines, and the curious blending of saints and sacraments, popes and priests, confessions and penances, with earnest appeals on behalf of Jesus, at one time as though the soul's salvation depended solely on ceremonials and priestly absolutions, and at another time as if on 'Jesus only,' one may find much help and light in many beautiful passages--as, for example: 'Who can look into the world and not see how God's glory is lost upon the earth? It is the interests of Jesus that we should seek and find it. Apart from clear acts of great and grievous sin, how is God forgotten, clean forgotten, by the greatest part of mankind! They live as if there were no God. It is not as if they openly rebelled against Him. They pass over and ignore Him. He is an inconvenience in His own world, an impertinence in His own creation. So He has been quietly set on one side, as if He were an idol out of fashion, and in the way. Men of science, and politicians, have agreed on this, and men of business and wealth think it altogether the most decent thing to be silent about God, for it is difficult to speak of Him, or have a view of Him, without allowing too much to Him.... Half a dozen men, going about God's world, seeking nothing but God's glory--they would remove mountains. This was promised to faith--why should not we be the men to do it?'

Similarly burning words, apart from his descriptions of Calvary, might be quoted from his sermons, but, alas! these would lack the passionate personality behind them, with the flashing eye, the expressive emphasizing hands, and, above all, the voice rising like the swelling of bells in the steeple, or tender as a silver chord trembling into silence. Without the spirit to make them live, let us not try to reproduce them.

THE BLACK ANT

This fly is an inhabitant of woods and coppices, and is very
abundant in the neighbourhood of the English Lakes. The nest is
often of enormous size, sometimes containing more than a cart-load
of sticks and small twigs. The Vale of Duddon swarms with wood ants,
and is the only place where I have seen the wryneck, which is said
to feed principally on these insects. Like other ants, they have the
enjoyment of wings for a few weeks in each year, and often, as the
proverb says, "to their sorrow," as by them they are conveyed to
places where they suffer greatly from birds, as well as from fishes.
They generally make their appearance in August and September. Body,
a strand of peacock's herl, and one of black ostrich's herl laid on
together; silk, dark brown; wing, the lightest part of a starling's
quill; hackle from a black cock.'--JOHN BEEVER: _Practical
Fly-Fishing_.

YEWDALE.

The Favourite Valley of John Ruskin (see p. 64), and
of the Sisters of the Thwaite.]

XVII

JOHN RUSKIN'S FRIENDS

THE SISTERS OF THE THWAITE, AND THEIR
BROTHER

'Nature takes the hue of a man's own feeling, and he finds in it
what he brings to it. In proportion as he becomes more intelligent
and holy, so does it become more beautiful and significant to
him.'--HUGH MACMILLAN.