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Bought with the income of the
William C. Egleston Fund
191-^

PASTOR FUTURUS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
PASTOR AGN0RUM: a Schoolmaster's After
thoughts. Crown 8vo, 5s. net.
PASTOR OVIUM: THE DAY BOOK OF A
COUNTRY PARSON. Crown 8vo, 5s. net.
SERMONS TO PASTORS AND MASTERS.
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WHAT IS FAITH ? A Hermit's Epistle to Some
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CREED AND THE CREEDS : their Function in
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LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.,
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA.

PASTOR FUTURUS
A DRAMATIC IDYLL

JOHN HUNTLEY SKRINE, D.D.
AUTHOR OF "PASTOR OVIUM" AND "CREED AND
THE CREEDS" (BAMPTON LECTURES, 1911)

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA
1914

TO THE HOLY MEMORY OF A
GUIDE SPIRITUAL
MOLINOS
"IL GRAN HERIT "

NOTE.
The writer would point out that these pages
were already in print, when a controversy, some
what resembling their theme, arose in the East
African Churches : they are therefore out of
relation to that incident.
To somewhat earlier incidents at home a
reference would not be precluded by the dates :
it is best disclaimed by pointing to the actual
problem of Church discipline, a more ancient
one, to which the story itself acknowledges its.
debt.

CONTENTS. PART I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. St. Wilfrid's  3
II. Venture and Vision  5
III. Concerning John  18
IV. John  22
V. The First Crusader  27
VI. The Band  29
VII. The " Militia "  36
"VIII. Musing on the Making of a Priest ... 42
IX. The Vice-Principal  36
X. The Prayer Book  59
XI. Revision  62
XII. A Lecture on the Tractarians .... 73
XIII. About this Diary  81
PART II
XIV. Five Years Later  87
XV. John's Purpose  92
XVI. Three in Council  98
vii

viii Contents.

CHAP.

PAGE

XVII. The Inspector  «8
XVIII. "Our Circle" Meets  123
XIX. "Star to Star Vibrates Light" .... 136
XX. Third Thoughts  147
XXI. Back at Elfton  138
PART III.
XXII. A Little Book  169
XXIII. Avtour d'un Petit Livrb  184
XXIV. A Shepherd's Problem  188
XXV. Improvidence of some Orthodox .... 198
XXVI. The Creed in One Article  203
XXVII. One Crbed, Many Articles  208
XXVIII. The Communion of Saints  212
XXIX. The Court of Heresy  229
XXX. " Thomas " on the Situation  243
XXXI. A Greek Tragedy  250
XXXII. " Wb took Counsel Together " . 253
XXXIII. Creed and "Our Unhappy Divisions" . . . 256
XXXIV. Faith and the Mystic  26g
XXXV. Peace on Earth, or a Sword? .... 280
XXXVI. The Choice  2go.

PART I.

I.
" Yes, this is well, very well. St. Wilfrid's is st. wil-
the right new home of one's spirit." I was
speaking to myself, as I sat down in Carleford
Abbey. I went in there on my way from the
station to the Chantry House and our new
Hostel to be, having said to myself that, like
David, I ought to seek out the temple of the
Lord before I came within the tabernacle of the
house that is my own new home. My seat was
near the south door, and the great perpendicular
east window, rich in tracery, richer in tint and
figures, seen in the slant perspective, caught my
heart at once. The church is somewhat too
dark perhaps ; I could never feel sure that the
"dim religious" light, which Milton persuades us
to love, is really the more religious for being
dim. For how is it that one's morning orisons
are best rendered, when that can be, out on the
fields under the broad sky, as some of the best
saints used to render theirs? Though, maybe,
3 i*

4 Pastor Futurus.
it is not the daylight that helps one, but the
absence of a roof, since at night an open
window is good, whether there is moonlight or
starlight or a purple dark. But anyway, for a
home of the spirit St. Wilfrid's is well, is very
well.

ANDVISION.

II.
Martha met me just now on my new doorstep, venture
She came here from Elfton Vicarage two days
ago with the other servants to get the Chantry
House ready for "the Principal ".
Her face had a mingled air of anxiety and
elation, which a mood of my own interpreted to
me. My colleague (for that is what she is, though
we describe her on the census sheet as " House
keeper") has that same sense of elevation
chastened by the awe of venture which rules in
the heart of the Vicar of Elfton, as he now mi
grates to Carleford Theological College, which
the first Bishop of that see is founding and
is manning with his Oxford fellow-classman.
" Flitting time " has come to us as to so many of
our parish flock ; without their discomfort of
body, not quite without their tremors of the
spirit. You cannot at life's most significant moments
say always the adequate word. All we found to
say between us was, that I hoped she was not
overworked and the rest not too uncomfortable ;
5

6 Pastor Futurus.
she, that they were very pleased the men that
" moved " us had got through sooner than she
expected. She followed me into the " Library"
(that is what Principals have, she thinks, not a
Study) with the tea, and round her skirts loitered
in another domestic, or at any rate a "familiar,"
who took no notice of me, but brushed the
furniture with a criticising tail and sniffed his vague
disapproval of the arrangements. " Thomas
can't seem to settle down," explained his chief.
" Rather like the Principal," thought I.
Yes, the Principal can't seem to settle down
to his new prospect. The Bishop, dear man,
always an enthusiast and just now seeing a new
heaven and a new earth unfolding before him in
the diocese of Carleford — Robert Caerleon is his
style, and it pleases me well ; there's magnetism
in names to draw one or to drive away, and some
places have names that would make me starve
before I took them — well, Robert Caerleon must
needs hale me away from the country parish just
as I was beginning to begin to know a little about
the work, and plant me rawly down in this Hos
tel, this naked ground-plan of a college, which is
to train the officers who are to work his will in
the new-made realm. The only possible man
for him was the parson of Elfton : if he would
not do it, the thing would, not get done ; that was

Venture and Vision. y
how it was, he said. We were going to do this
work differently from some other places (and I
think that will be well, if only we can), and he
and I were the two that might do it, the only two
possible. How did he persuade me? Well,
when he came down to Elfton after me, I was
easy to unmoor, for one cable that held me had
parted in Catharine's death : the stroke that
emptied the Hall, widowed the Rectory too. So
my heart gave a leap at his loving appeal, and I
said Yes. And now if it was a miscalculation,
and if I cannot do it, nor he and I do it, and his
dream is to break — as most dreams do, though
not all ! — if that, it was an ill day when I flitted
even from an emptied Elfton. No wonder I
"can't seem to settle down ".
But the Principal has consolations in a flit
ting time which are denied to his poor furry
" familiar ". I have sometimes told my flitters
at Elfton, emigrant or immigrant, that to the
homeless the Church is everywhere a home. I
rose in an hour to try if this really is so. The
Abbey was now lighted in one corner, the Lady
Chapel, and an address was going forward. Of
course, this is the Retreat for Church workers of
which they sent me notice a month back, and
I believe I have come by invitation, though at
unaware. So I stayed, outside the pale of the

8 Pastor Futurus.
Lady Chapel, and heard the speaker. I may,
said I, catch up an omen for my new course in
the first words I listen to in my new home of the
spirit. Well, and I did. . . .
Prebendary Eustace is conducting the Retreat
ably. How much better are the new priests
practised in this art than were we. Only  .
No, I will listen to more before I think what I
am beginning to think. . . . Well, the Pre
bendary will know better than this long rusticated
pastor can, what these refined women need for
their soul's health. It is presumptuous in me
to be criticising ; and that was certainly a pene
trating observation that dropped from him just
now. I must hear him through. . . . Ah ! I
see they are not women only. That will be a
churchwarden, the large man in a corner ; and
the pale young man with glasses, on the last
bench is a lay-reader no doubt. Yes, it was for
workers, I remember. ... I heard it through.
When it was over, I stole away to the north
aisle, which was dark, and sat down with my
burden on the soul. Is this what we priests are
for ? Is this what I have to train my school of
the prophets to do when they have been priested ?
Is this the scope of Anglican religion, this the
type of Christian life in which one is to see the
character and note and genius and scope of our

Venture and Vision. g
church? My brother there does this thing so
ably : nothing could be defter than his manage
ment of the function and the people : why do I
feel such discontent ?
Perhaps just because of the ability and deftness.
The nice calculation of pause, inflexion, modula
tion, rhythm : the airy touch on chords of delicate
emotion which respond in such an audience. The
trained management and sway of the gathering
as by a skilled conductor of a chorus. It is the
art of it all — there's what I feel amiss. Here is
an expert in the art of Devotion teaching a class
of art-capable persons. Why not? There are
such persons in the Church ; there is such an art
demanding practisers and professors. These
opportunities ought to be provided, and the Pre
bendary is doing this. What is the fault of the
thing ?
None, none at all. Unless the thing claims
to be something different from this, claims to be
not a thing which the Church does, but, the thing
which she does : unless it is claimed that every
body's religion would be a Retreat if it could,
and that the National Church is an agency for
making all English people become even as these
persons in the Lady Chapel now.
Then a withering whisper breathed on me that
this is how it is. " Your Church means just this,

10 Pastor Futurus.
a school of culture in the religious art for persons
of leisure and education. It is what your Elfton
ploughboy called " the Gentlefolks' service," that
"ain't for the likes o' we".
Desolation swept me with her wing, a vulture
wing. I crept away to the Hostel.
How thankful I am they are not coming here
till next week, the boys. There is time to get
over it before then.
I was listening over my fire to the nine o'clock
curfew. It is rung from the tower of a derelict
little church by a sort of bedesman on the found
ation of a pious revivalist dead some fifty years.
The note in it of antiquity, aesthetically recon
structed antiquity, stirred awake in me what had
gone asleep at supper, the ghostly dread which
had overtaken me in the Abbey. " Primitive," I
thought, that is a word of which we make our
boast, we Anglicans. Our catholicity is not
younger sister but compeer to theirs of Rome.
But to be member of a catholic and primitive
church is like being son of a family that came
over with the Conquest ; the scion must keep up
the quality of the strain, his blue blood must be
also red. Now that is where my disquiet is.
Our old blood, does it run red enough : is our
primitive quality still up to proof? Our cathol-

Venture and Vision. 1 1
icity, is it a wholeness, true to its name ? Our
communion can cite an ancient date of its life, can
it also cite a modern ? My brother in the Lady
Chapel had a message, but as I read it I did not
find it translatable for use to the general. Of
course not ; he was not speaking to the general,
but to educated churchpeople. Ah, but would it
serve even for the educated general in our church,
for people like squires, colonels, schoolmasters,
dons, inspectors, youths at Oxford House, or at the
Temple, iron-masters, engineer prentices, cadets,
and boys bound for Canada or the Cape ? And if
the Church sent brother Eustace with this message
only to the persons it is reaching, has she — there
is the question that knocks and batters at my
peace — has she another message by other
messengers that is catholic enough to run every
where and reach the whole ?

My train of not too cheerful reflection was
broken by a ring. Then through my study
door ajar came a colloquy on the threshold.
" Well, Mrs. Goodacre, so here you are ;
settling in nicely, I hope. Is it too late, do
you think, to see the Principal?" A slightly
fluttered welcome from Martha (she had subtly
discerned in the ring a guest of quality and

12 Pastor Futurus.
answered it herself), and from the entering
voice, "A moment . . . this is the first foot of mine,
you know, across your doorstep. . . . Peace be
to this house and to all that dwell in it." The
Bishop, beloved man ! How Martha's heart will
be swelling.
I met him at the door, and the touch of his
hand shook the chills off me. We faced one
another across the hearth, and he took my house
hold news, how I had parted from Elfton and
how the new home looked to me. " And how
does your new home look to you, Cousin ?
What do you think of this for a diocese ? "
"What do I think of it? Why, Mark, I
don't know how to think highly enough of it.
The best-planned diocese in the country. It
can't be the Church's wisdom this time (you are
always talking of her 'misfits,' Mark): wisdom
couldn't do it, it must be her blessed fortune.
What haven't we got that any bishop would
wish? Here's corn and wine and oil, pasture
and hunting-ground, everything. For corn
and pasture those real yeomen and ploughmen
of the Daneswold, and the untouched old
market towns : for oil, the borough of the
brewers, Aylcester : for wine, that new-made
vineyard of a University College in Hoodington :

Venture and Vision. 13
for hunting ground and forest primeval, the
virgin squirearchy of the Vale: and then, just
in a corner where it can't spoil any of God's fair
earth but itself, the smutty little stithy of the
iron-founders, where we will try our hand on
the Labour Unrest. Mark, it's a model of the
mighty world. To think God has given us a
chance like this ! "
"Us!" I echoed. "You, I grant. Do you
know what I was saying to myself when your
ring came ? "
"Yes," solemnly this, "I know, do I not?
You were telling yourself that you had crossed
the river and burnt your boats, and were not
going to win the campaign. Don't I remember
the thing? how I woke up from a dog-sleep in
the Dutchman at 3.30 a.m., coming back from
taking on the Eggleston venture, and thought :
' Here have I gone and done for myself ; stranded
the vessel of my .lifetime on that mud-bank
yonder, and nothing more heard of Robert Bar-
rington '. As if it mattered," here his voice
changed and sank, " whether more was heard of
him or no. But that was long ago, in vain
youth. Well, Mark, my fit did not outlast
breakfast at the terminus, and I'll wager you
will sleep off yours."
I said nothing till I had judicially poked the

14 Pastor Futurus.
fire. Then, "You come very near the mark,
cousin. But there's more in it than just that.
Your ' 3. 30 in the morning courage ' was sum
moned to sustain your faith in your personal
venture. My 6.30 in the evening terror — for I
will own up to it, and that was the date — was
more like an eclipse of faith in another man's
venture, yours in fact. Robert Caerleon will
' find the faith ' (as we say) to carry his enterprise
through : he'll be heard of. But I am doubting
if he'll find faith enough in his old comrade, that
he's dragging away by the arm from the rustic
plot where he was planting his cabbages, and
not so many of them, to make a henchman in
his battle. Frankly, cousin Robert, what am /
doing in your war-galley ? Where's the use
of me either at the wheel or before the
mast ? "
He looked at me, this dear man, and did not
answer for a bit. His eyes worked, so did his
lips. Then came the smile, a real merry one.
" No, Mark. I didn't think of you for before
the mast, but for in the tops. You know what
it is ' that sits up aloft ' and takes care of the
soul of poor Jack, and also of Jack's skipper.
That's where I want you to sit in this voyage,
up aloft. It's where the steering is really done
from. Or, if that's not quite right in sea-craft,

Venture and Vision. 15
it's where the wind comes from — the wind, Mark,
of the Spirit."
A silence fell between us : then  " I know
what I meant when I asked you, comrade mine.
I must set the course and fight the ship : that's
for me. But you know, though you have led
a quieter life than I, how it is with a captain.
When his eyes are not glued to the compass,
they are watching the men at the ropes. When
the Bishop is off the routine and business of the
see, it's Visitations and Confirmation tours.
When is he to do his thinking ? Oh, don't stop
me yet : I know you will tell me I can be think
ing while I am doing : so I hope, so I hope.
A Bishop may get some chance of thinking, for
acting is thought in a measure : but he can't read
a book (so Porchester told me, though I didn't
believe him) and even if he can read, mark,
learn, I doubt if he can inwardly digest. No
time to ponder, muse, meditate, to wait for the
Vision though it tarry. Yet if the Vision is not
there his people will perish, and the best of
himself. Mark, of us two yoke-fellows it is you
who were always the visionary. That is what I
came and fetched you for ; to sit here near me in
my good ship, but up aloft, on the main-tops, even
up in the clouds if you choose, but where you
can see the visions and signal down to us on the

1 6 Pastor Futurus.
decks what you have seen. That's what you
are doing in my galley."
I was dumb,' for my heart swelled and also my
heart sank. What could I say? There is, I
don't know how, something one is ashamed of
in deprecating honours, unless one can be accurate
in it, and not merely sincere. When I spoke, it
was, " I can't answer you. You have made me so
ashamed and so afraid .... I am going to
speak of something quite different, that came to
me this afternoon in the Abbey, I will not say
how. You and I have few reserves, or I should
be shy of telling you what it is. The vision, if it
was one, that came to me to-day was a dis
comfiting one. It was as if a veil dropped away,
and I saw our Church as she really is, not as I
supposed she was. Cousin, cousin Robert, have
we a Gospel for the Poor ? I don't mean the ' legal
poor ' ; I mean have we a Gospel for the People,
for the real People ; the whole People, the
ordinary sons and daughters of men ? "
He waited for me to go on.
" Well, perhaps I must tell you how it came to
me. I was listening to Eustace this afternoon
at the Retreat. It was no fault of his, though.
Only, as I looked at that trim-fleeced flock being
shepherded so cosily by our brother, there rose
to my eyes a vision of that shaggy flock of mine

Venture and Vision. \j
among the hedgerows, who sheered away in a
shoal from my clumsy nets (how I am mixing
metaphors !) and of that grimy swarm in Smelten-
ham, over whom you, who are thrice the fisher
I am, will have to cast your meshes, if you can.
I said to myself : ' Our Church methods are good
enough for this Lady Chapel, but are they any
good for the shop and office and yard, for my
hedgerows and your stithy ? ' And then — well,
I must confess it — I almost hated that Retreat,
not for the thing it was, but for the things it was
not. The long silence after this made me regret my
outburst. But at last he reached out his hand
across the fire and took mine, very solemnly.
" You have answered yourself, Mark. This
is what you are doing here. We two will go
find a new way for the old Church, you and I,
together."

III.
concern- Frances Desmond came to lunch to-day, for a
talk on a family matter. I had not seen her
since Catharine left us both, and it was a deep
pleasure to be in her company again ; yes, she
seemed to bring with her a Third. " When
two . . . are gathered together," even then 
But she would not open on her matter till she
had been shown the Chapel and its furnishings,
on which I was myself anxious to get the con-
sulta prudentis. She much approved my choice
of an altar-piece, " Let us go hence," the group
of the Eleven risen from the Supper and hanging
on the lips of Christ from which the High
Priest's Prayer begins to mount. " Yes, I love
it," she said. "It is the moment between Vision
and Action and has both in it ; they are going
out from the mystery to the deed. Is it not just
right for these young disciples here at their
communion ? " Then she turned over judicially
the samples of altar linen and other furnishings
sent for our choice through the benefaction of a
18

Concerning John. 19
neighbour, and I found her criticisms wise and
helpful. But most I blessed her for the inspiring
reverence with which her talk and her fingers
handled the objects. There is a kind of tempera
ture that brings out the scent of flowers ; and a
certain aura in Frances brought out an exhala
tion, a mystic aroma, from vessel and vestment
of the sanctuary. It was to myself almost an
initiation into that movement of our religious
nature which we inadequately name the love of
Ritual, and stupidly confound with Externalism
in worship.
Yet I a little wrong my own perceptive powers ;
I was initiate long ago. I recall how on one
of my early travels something that was strange
to me in the physical touch, as it were, of the
ritual at a communion stirred the sense of spiritual
romance and tinged the worship with a new
poetry. And again on another journey, in
company with one of dear and blessed memory,
when a midday meal had, it chanced, to be
made only from loaf and flagon, I was curiously
stirred by his remark, " Bread and wine ; I
could live on bread and wine ". Years later
I recalled it to mind when I read that incid
ent of the French gallant who met Joan of
France at a halting place in her campaign,
where

20 Pastor Futurus. She called for wine,
And pledged the day when we should drink with her
In Paris of the French. 'Twas solemn-sweet,
And like a sacring of the blessed Cup.
Indeed I think I am ritualist, though that past-
master in ceremony, Sensier, would disown me ;
a mere amateur, with the love of it only not the
art. But I do not yield to him in my faith that
the Spirit can and will touch our spirits through
their flesh: and what else is the philosophy of
his ritual?
Then we went out into our garden, and she
began. " I expect, cousin, you have guessed
what I came about. It is my John. You know
about him, but not all. It has been, even to me
who am his mother, a wonder how the cruel
thing has changed him. He was bent on living
the life of don as Fellow of Wentworth. Then
came the love ; and then that awful overthrow
of it when she was found under the cliff, poor
child, with the flowers clenched in her hand.
They said he seemed as if he were stunned by
it. But I do not call it that : it was not stupor,
it was trance. That was what I called it to
myself, when I found him kneeling at the bed-
foot where they laid her, looking, looking at
her, hardly seeming to see me. I could not get
him to talk about it, which I thought would be

Concerning John. 2 1
good for him, for the first two or three days.
Then quite suddenly he woke up. ' Mother, I
think I shall change all my plans now. I don't
want to go on with that University work.
Somehow I seem not to care for study any
more, that kind of study anyhow.' Then it
came out of him with a burst. ' She has made
me see that what we can know of the world, by
study, I mean, is nothing. Her world, where
she is now, that's the world we are in, already ;
but you can't know it by learning. There's
some other way.' I waited, and then he said,
' If only I could have taken Orders ; but then 
The old Creed is quite right ; I'm finding that
out . . . through her. But I couldn't take it
their way, and I thought they wouldn't have me
unless I could.' I said, ' But are you quite sure
they would not have you ? You know, John, I
always told you I thought you were making too
much of your difference from them '. Now he
made no answer to this, Mark, but I am sure it
was not unwelcome. I left it there, and thought
I would try to bring you and him together about
his career. He would not be put off by you, as
he has been by ' them '. Do have him to see
you and try."
And so we have settled it. The dear, dear
lad, how I wish ! 

IV.
My walk over the downs with John this after
noon, will it prove a fateful day for him — and
me? He was still and cold when he came to me,
but the down air brought him some glow, and he
began to talk of modern questions without listless-
ness. I got him to tell me of the movements in
the University. How changed since my time
things are there, when, for instance, the scientific
people were so zealous to overcrow us theo-
logicals. There really was some excuse : science
wanted to get understood, and had to talk (for
let me not say " crow ") rather loud, because
theology was then such a deaf muse or so absent-
minded. John tells me this is altered. Those
doctors of the Natural Law have by now got what
they were wanting ; they have induced ours to
attend and in some measure even to understand
them. Besides, on the other hand they are
coming to understand our doctors of the divine
law, for they are less dumb than at that time,
when theology could only answer the " crow " of
(22)

John. 23
science with a "croak" (John's word that). It
seems we have gained a little of that " boldness
of speech " of which St. Paul, who had so much
already, coveted an increase; and our friends
some corresponding humility. This was good
hearing to me, who remember the academic
atmosphere of my own time, the atmosphere of
an exhausted receiver — if that is not a bull.
We got, by a not difficult transition, where I
wanted to get, to the Institutional in religion,
the region where lie John's rocks of offence.
" Don't think me a heretic : I am not ; but I
really cannot see how a Letter, like the Creeds,
can be sufficient for the Spirit of all times, nor
how one good Order can fail to corrupt the world
if it must be always one. Why cannot some of
our beliefs be provisional, and some features of
our order temporary."
I hope I have been wise in what I answered,
and not let him drift for want of a check towards
a false position : but I could not find in me
directly to counter his plea for an attitude of sus
pense as to some elements in the Creed, and I
frankly allowed of systems of practice that " in
them nature's copy's not eterne," and, like all
else that lives, they must live by a ceaseless self-
accommodation to spiritual fact. I put up a
strong case for the necessity of machine action in

24 Pastor Futurus.
religion in connexion with the vital. " Institu
tional and Spiritual, are they not just Structure
and Growth in the life of Church? You must
accept the two, John, not one but both." When
at this he interjected, " Que messieurs les theo-
logues commencent," the thrust was shrewder
than I was ready to counter, and I let it pass
unparried. However we said some more, and
though I seemed to be speaking neither very
lucidly nor freely, I felt, in the way one does, that
I was now and again reaching his mind. At
one point he said with a note of surprise. " Oh,
would you grant that ? " and then fell a-musing,
not listening to me.
I turned off to the Bishop and his plans, especi
ally his idea of a " raid " on the iron-works and a
" drive " in the country districts. That warmed
him. "Good, that's good. I wish he'd been
Bishop thirty years sooner." And when I added
something about my finding a blessedness to
myself in joining such a leader for a new begin
ning, "rusty as I feel and out of it when it is
diocesan not parochial work," then he fairly took
fire. " Ah, there must be that, there must. " And
this no doubt brought on his first reference to his
own future. He is weighing the question of going
to the Public School, "so much more human, it
seems to me, than the University." And then

John. 25
came on one tense moment. " Since that hap
pened, you know, everything changed : the old
things I cared about went dead. I understood
why people who lost what I did used to ' take
the Red Cross,' or at least go out to battle some
where." I had a swelling in my throat at this,
and we went in silence for a furlong, rather glad
that we had reached the wood and had to walk
single file. On the other side we got on the
Labour Question. He cannot go any way with
his Socialist friends, and not all the way even
with the Christian Socialists. " There must be
a Christian secret of it ; it certainly isn't Com
petition, but then is it Brotherhood ? There
seems something wanting in mere brotherliness.
What is it?"
I answered — what I was likely to answer to
this, and he neither rejected it nor yet took it up.
Some talk about the financial aspect of the prob
lem ended the walk. Neither of us was very
wise about this : perhaps I was a shade the wiser
as being more sure of my unwisdom.
The walk, what a thing it is for these purposes
— the purpose of sweet counsel together. Is it
the open air that lends its own expansiveness to
our tempers ; or the safe seclusion, on which no
one can break because there is no door to knock
at ; or the rhythm of walking feet that best chimes

26 Pastor Futurus.
with the measure of the heart 's-beat or the tick of
the brain ? But the New Age does not go a-foot,
it goes on wheels. Now, can two friends take
sweet counsel together upon bicycles ? I do not
forget the spiritual affinities of the wheel which
a prophet's vision signalizes, nor how the first
Missionary to Those Without took counsel with a
convert in a chariot. Still give me the walk over
a hill-side of two together in counsel.

V.
That has done me a world of good, that little the first
r T . . . . , . CRUSADER.
note from John this morning, asking to come
here "on probation". He thought he would
write, not speak while he was here : I am so kind
that I might find it harder to say this could not
be done than to write it. What he asks is to
come to me for the beginning of term and see
what it is like, on the chance of finding he is fit
to go on with it. I am not to think him pre
sumptuous in asking for such a special arrange
ment : it is only himself he is afraid of, not the
College. He does want to have the chance of
being with me, and of having his little part in
" the Beginning," if he should be fit for that. He
cannot say that his difficulties are gone yet, but
— the dear lad ! — " your Bishop's crusade got hold
of my heart the other day ; perhaps I could be
on it, and if I could, then I ought ; and if I ought,
then, please God, I will ".
Please God you shall, dear son mine, if I may
dare call you that. May God bless our hour
together on the down, and His Holy Spirit keep
the fruit of it sound for ever.
(«7)

28 Pastor Futurus.
How it cheers me, this : how it fires me ! A
Crusade, and this young knight at our side. I
seem to catch a glimpse of what was meant by
" he shall receive a hundredfold, houses and lands,
brethren and children " : yes, this hostel for that
lone rectory, this diocese and all the broad
Church for that narrow Elfton, this brave shepherd
soul at our head for a bosom-friend, and these
lusty youths of my household for gallant band of
brothers. Ah ! my heart, proud heart, foolish heart : you
know men always have hoped like this, and
always have missed their hope. Your dream of
a great beginning of a new time will break like
all dreams ; your hope of a Good die as the rest
have died.
No, by Him that liveth for ever, it shall not
die, shall not.
So John comes too on the Thursday with the
rest. Did they foresee when they baptized him
that he would come to look like his namesake of
the reddening wavy locks over the loyal eyes and
tender, valiant brow — the loving and loved
disciple, as I have seen him in their pictures, and
shall see him here among us in the life.
"Thy heart shall fear and be enlarged." My
heart has feared, my heart is enlarged.

VI.
They are all under our roof to-night, asleep, I the band.
trust, by now, for we have begun as we mean to
go on, early to bed, early to rise, as is primitive,
catholic, and also sensible. I had proposed,
foolishly, to the Bishop that he should come
in to-night for Compline, and give an address.
No, he said, let them have time to see you and
one another and the house and furniture : till
then they will not attend to me. So this is to be
to-morrow night.
They are a likely lot, these recruits for the
Church's Young Guard. Few but fit is our
ship's company : that was sure to be when it was
our Bishop that ran up his flag and called for
men. Two or three are fit even with what Jem
Verley, our Rugby Blue, calls "fitness". That
pleases me. I know prophets must not look on
the height of the stature : in real life what counts
is less the strong man than the handy man ; and
I daresay Philips, whose appearance some ob
servers would disapprove as scrubby, will be at
the head of a see, while Verley is only head of a
29

30 Pastor Futurus.
parish. Still it is no handicap to the latter that
heaven has made him "a proper man," while it
is more than possible that want of looks may
obstruct Philips' usefulness by letting sleepy
Authority overlook the promise in him. Anyhow,
it takes all sorts to make even a tiny world like
the Chantry ; so give me tall and short, athletic
and social, scholar and, yes also, scrub, together.
Verley is a " sort " that comes less often than
formerly to prepare for Orders, a younger son of
a squire. But then his father's sort too grows
infrequent. " There don't be no squires here
about nowadays, not for to call squires," said
one of my own villagers, a pensioned-off keeper •
" th' old uns be gone most on 'em, and these here
new chaps out of Lunnon, they keeps up the
shooting, and they gives a keeper more than the
old uns did, and the beaters too. But lor bless
'ee, Sir, they be a kind of furriners, and they
don't bide : runs down Fridays, shoots Saturdays,
off again Mondays. Might be their own keepers
too for the little they goes to church on Sunday
in between. But there, Mister Samuel Leon,
as has taken Ashenthorp, has a darkie down to
shoot wi' un, a black heathen, I reckon."
Ah ! me, and I used to say to myself thirty years
back that we must not grieve over the migration
that was beginning and the coming of the new

The Band. 31
men : these iron-masters- and heads of firms
would bring new blood and the vigour of business
to our sleepy shires and rusting agriculture. So
they would, I still think, if only, as Keeper has
it, they would "bide".
Well, I have got here a man from business
alongside of Verley from the land. He has
come out of business, however, not to turn squire
but parson. Joseph Matthews should have been
in Orders, I expect, years ago : followed his
father into the city, and has come back not be
cause he did badly there (he didn't) but because
the wrong call had taught him the right one.
An enthusiastic rather young Archdeacon was
saying the other day he would like to see our
clergy prepared for orders by a year or two in
a house of business, after the University and
the College — rather an expensive academy
surely from the side of economy in time and
money. But Matthews' case will help us to
judge how much we can afford to spend on
that education. I hope he will be able to mix in
with the rest, spite of his five or six years'
seniority. A man we shall need to handle carefully is
Twynes, the Bishop's godson. I hope the god
father's magnetism has not had too much share
in his coming. His mother warns me that his

32 Pastor Futurus.
tutors have made him, she thought, too much of
a rationalist. She means he took a degree in
science. We should have all shared her anxiety
once, not now. We begin to welcome positive
science into theology, to their credit, both of them.
And here we shall be glad if Twynes will be as
positive as any scientist, unless he is as conceited
as some are — or were, I would say.
Which of this first set is going to lead ? But I
shall make a guess boldly : Pierce, for the first
two terms : then, or at any rate after College,
some one else ; but Pierce will lead here, for he
is the kind that used to lead, I remember, at
school, though not longer ; the boy with the
active rather than thoughtful mind and the social
confidence which gives initiative at that age.
Then too he is the son of a bustling Archdeacon
and probably inherits an instinct for the
ecclesiastic way. Yes, he will ring the leader's
bell in our small flock.
Then our experimental candidate, Philips,
Canon Christian's discovery, and very likely a
sound one. The Bishops are shy of these candi
dates coming from the primary schools : afraid
that a schoolmaster's inducement is the prospect
of a social rise. That is not his case, however.
For the lad has had his mastership for only two
years, and the prompting to a change was all

The Band. 33
the Canon's, who detected (he writes me), a
pastoral impulse, and believes he was already
heading towards the Chapel or else the Salva
tionist's market-corner, and the Church ought to
intercept and commission him. He has still a
little accent for the men to get over, but I feel in
him at the first touch a grace and gentleness,
which we commonly suppose comes not by
education but by race. Well, race is education,
as we are beginning to discover ; education
which has begun very early. Yet not always so
early. Those who measure our skulls tell me
that when the "long heads" and the "short
heads" come from the East to America they
quickly learn in that school of a new environ
ment to grow shorter or longer to match the
standard length of cranium in the West. That
makes one ask whether colour can be taught as
well as structure ; or, if the dark man may not
change his skin when he changes his heaven,
whether he can so change at least his mind in
the climate of Christianity as to become wholly
the "even Christian" of the white man. For it
seems he is not this as yet. He cannot be our
"even Christian" till a man of his race can be
shepherd, over-shepherd with none over him,
real bishop as well as only under-shepherd of his
brethren's souls. And this our rulers do not find
3

34 Pastor Futurus.
that he can be as yet. Will he learn to be this in
the climate of the school of Christ ? The answer is
charged with a weight of destiny for the native
churches — and for the principle of Episcopacy.
What do I think lastly of Johnson and Newton ?
I shall write them down Sixth Form boys, the
kind that takes an Exhibition and a Second
Class at College, and then makes a clergyman
such as his father was before him? Johnson's
father holds a family living, and convention
would tempt me to write that I hope the son
will not do the same. But I refrain. For do
we wish to lose from the Church this manner of
man who is priest after the order of the patriarchs?
Such a priest is to his rustic flock " one of our
selves ". His prosperous rectory, stocked with
hearty children, holds before village eyes an
image of the life natural lived Christianly and
without the disfigurements which riches and
penury can work upon the life in the grander or
the meaner homes. It safeguards the continuity
of clerical and lay existence, and staves off the
encroachments of the spirit of ecclesiastic caste,
which even on English soil needs to 'be watched.
Still I hope the elder Johnson will live long.
Newton has nothing to tempt him to follow
the family tradition of service in the ministry
beyond the average expectations of the career.

The Band. 35
May Heaven and the English laity make these
better than they are at present ! And may this
be done in time, before the laity, through their
unintended fraud which keeps back the hire
from the labourers in this field, get the clergy
they deserve.

VII.
the In outsets there are omens. Then the Chantry
"MILITIA". , , „ ,
has made a well-omened start.
For we have started to-night at Compline with
the Bishop's address which followed it. The
Inauguration will be a little later, a public
ceremony, when all the dignity that a new-made
diocese can muster will be there to auspicate our
foundation coram populo. But the real Inaugural
Moment was to-night.
Those eight young heads have gone to their
pillows with this for the last waking thought,
that they have got the call from a great leader.
I know it, for I have once felt as they, though
that was long ago, and it was but a childish
schoolboy's head that fell asleep upon it. But
that schoolboy felt it again to-night through
these boys of a larger growth, as with them he
listened to the Bishop's address, and caught the
returning current of electric sympathy in the
spark struck on the eye of more than one, and
in that energy of stillness in all the listeners ; a
36

The "Militia". 37
thing no one can define, but of which the speaker
knows the beat coming back upon his heart.
We were a little cold there, and the light was
scanty from our candles at the seat ends ; but
both things were right ! the austerity in the air,
the frosty taper-flames, the haunting shadows
half chased away, were to my sense most ac
cordant undertones in the music of this act of
worship, a dedication rite of our shrine, an initia
tion of our enterprise, and hallowing of arms for
our new Milites Christi.
For this was the ground-note of the Bishop's
speech to us, this Militia Christi. The appeal
to soldiership is no doubt invariable since a much
earlier date than the Crusades, and our Lads
" Brigades " and " Troops " hear it perhaps even
too habitually. But to-night the speaker struck
that note with a difference. And he did not
begin with it. None of our pacifists, religious
or civil, would have felt for their steel, listening
to his opening. He began where we, and all
things that are, begin, with the Passion. Then
he let Sacrifice lead us on to Service, and
Service "which pays with the person and serves
with the life" lead us back again to Sacrifice,
and to see that soldiership is Passion too. Here
came up from below the " note with a difference "
and dominated the strain. He had reached the

38 Pastor Futurus.
distinctiveness of the hour, our situation as a
group of Christians banded for an enterprise
which was new. " You few here to-night are
the first muster of a company of the Church
Militant. You form the nucleus of a force which
is to be organized for the service of Christ in this
province of His Kingdom, a newly constituted
diocese ; you are the beginners of a history which
may be a great history, God being the helper of
us and those who will follow. We will allow
ourselves thus much of pride and imaginativeness
as to compare our new beginning with things of
a dignity that might seem above the level of
common human interest. For why shall we not
let the genius loci give us an inspiration ? Our
home here is on a soil to which clings a memory,
still distinguishable in the names of places here
and near us, of Britain's oldest romance, the
legend or myth of a King who in the power of
the holiest Name, made a realm and ruled, broke
the heathen and upheld the Christ, by the loyal
might of the soldiery who swore his oath. My
sons, are not we to be a Knighthood of older
and younger sworn to the Rex regum, the men
of another Table Round, 'the fair beginners of
a time '. This will not be fantastic in us, not a
'boasting of ourselves above our measure,' of
which when we have left this hour in our sanctu-

The "Militia". 39
ary behind us we shall be ashamed in the dry
morning light. For we are straining our spirits
not a whit higher in calling ourselves Knights
of Arthur, than when we stand by the font and —
as will presently be the duty of all of you— cross
the brow of a little one from the lowliest of homes
in sign of a knighthood which he must fulfil
under Christ's banner until his life's end. It is
all one, this soldiership under Christ, for all ranks
of men, whether our imagination embroiders
that banner with the language of romance or of
everyday fact, the chivalrous or the homely
metaphor. But you here are not to be soldiers
of the rank and file ; you are asking for a com
mission to command. The language of a warfare
which is chivalrous, words that echo a summons
of an elect soldiery to rarer peril and rarer honour,
these are very fit on my lips when I am to pro
voke to love and good works in the holiest of
causes you who aspire to array the ranks of your
fellow-Christians and to head them in battle. If
I call you then not soldiers but knights, I think
that I touch the inner soul of the spiritual ambi
tion in you : I make more present to your minds
the question with which Jesus Christ confronted
once two valiant youths who asked a boon of
honour, and now is confronting what is valiant
in your own spirits to-night. Young brothers,

40 Pastor Futurus.
who are asking knighthood, Jesus saith to you
by me, ' Are ye able, are ye able ? ' May your
good hearts dare the answer, 'We are able,'
and may the Christ that is within us, enable you
indeed." How it ended — can that be set down ? I think
not. It is only my memory that I would care
to entrust with that appeal, so pure and of so
delicate a reserve, to the bond of a sacred fellow
ship in which he and I and they might be
members incorporate in a blessed company ;
leaders and followers, comrades, pledged to a
holy enterprise, "yours and mine" (he said),
" and all our own ".
No, it is not to be written. Keep it, Memory ;
keep it you, that time and scene, those faces an
hour ago so different, grown suddenly all alike
because all alive ; and one face among them, one
clear face, interpreting to me the rest. It was a
sacrament in which my friend was priest : yes,
indeed, a sacramentum, a giving of the soldier
oath. I closed this diary too soon, and it must come
out of the drawer again.
It had scarcely been put back when a knock
at the door a little startled me. " May I come
in so late?" said John, and stood with the door

The " Militia \ 41
in his hand. I saw he was much moved, but
very shy too. " I ought not to disturb you. I
came downstairs to say something . . . before I
went to bed ... I want to tell you that I think
I know my own mind now. If it's to be what
the Bishop says, I would like to be one of you.
May I ? "

VIII.

MUSINGSON THE
MAKINGOF THE
PRIEST.

This is bad news ; Cyril Sensier that is to be
my Vice- Principal is ill, not able to take up his
work till a week or more perhaps after the open
ing. I was doubtful enough about my venture
when I agreed, but then I counted on this
vigorous young colleague, to relieve me of the
work I cannot myself undertake. He knows
the curriculum well from experience at Brad-
hampton, can plan the men's studies, and teach
the special subjects which are not in my line.
What can I do with them for a week or ten days
alone ?
But plainly what I must do with them will
have to be what I should have to do, even when
the colleague has joined me. On this voyage
of ours it is he who must provide the details of
the seamanship, for he " knows the ropes " and
I do not ; but it was to be I who set the course.
Well, that shall be it. I will do it, will set the
course. We will spend our time, or that part of
it which would have been given to technical
42

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 43
studies under the Vice-Principal, on thinking
what they come here for. What is a priest :
what does he do : how can he learn to do it ?
This is what they and I will work at together.
Perhaps I shall know more of this than young
Cyril Sensier.
Do I know what a priest is and what he is
for? We were not of one mind in our rural
deanery : this Cyril's uncle Sensier, our authority
on ritual, and our dear apocalyptic Julian, would
have defined his duties very inharmoniously,
when they came to particulars. Still I think I
could have got both to say the priest is here to
save men's souls. But that is enough : out of
this everything will come.
For to save souls — what is that ?
At the outset it is a thing no man, priest or
other, can do. Souls are not saved by any man :
they save themselves so far as anything that is
man can save them. But how do they do it?
Let me think it out for myself once more, for
I must be sure of it now when I shall have to
muster all the courage of my convictions, and to
use them, perhaps fatefully, for these young men.
I must, for my own behoof at least, phrase it
in speech that is mine, be it ever so different from
that of the schools. For me then to be saved
is to be alive. I do not speak to myself of

44 Pastor Futurus.
"justification" and " sanctification " ; I speak of a
life born in us and a life perfected in us. Those
narrowed words, though of great authority, an
apostle's, are swallowed up in these wider words,
of authority greater and the greatest, being not
an apostle's but his Lord's — the Birth of soul and
the Life of soul.
How then is soul born and how does soul
live? Surely even as all else is born and lives. The
herb is born by interchange of seed and soil, the
thing that has breath by union of like and like ;
the soul is born by communion of creature and
Creator, by a spirit's uprendering of self to the
All Spirit, by the unbosoming of the mortal to an
Eternal Love which pours itself into the bosom
of the human, working between them one indi
visible mystery-act which is the springing of a
Life. If my creed is a right one, what does it teach
me as to the nature and the office of the priest ?
Well this at once, that my brothers in the
Church who speak of a priest as a mediator have
not chosen the most apt word. To mediate is to
come between. But in this creative event which
is the salvation of a soul there is no coming be
tween the Two, The Creator and His creature
who is to be born into the shores of light.

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 45
They only touch one the other, and directly,
not by touch of each upon and through the
priest. No, we must go beyond this metaphor
of a mediatorial priesthood : it is not sufficient
for the fact.
What then ? Well, is not the Church greater
than her priest ? Let us ask first what her part
is in the making souls to live. She is the mother
of us, she " gendereth " us, not unto bondage but
the liberty of the Spirit. She genders us by her
ministry of Word, Sacrament, Discipline. The
birth of a new soul to the Church our mother is
on this wise : — the Church does not mediate the
union of the Divine and the Human, she does
not come between and link them, she but impels
the soul towards a union which is its own im
mediate act. She cannot, in a word, cause a
birth of the soul ; she can but make for the soul
occasion to be born.
This is how the Church saves souls ; and the
priest — how plain it is all coming out ! — the priest
is the human instrument by which she does it.
There must be an instrument which is human.
The Word cannot be heard without a preacher,
the Sacrament enacted without ministrant, the
Discipline exerted without officer. This then
is what my young men are for : they are to be
come, each one for his own flock, their Church's

46 Pastor Futurus.
voice and hand with which she stirs the spirits of
men, first in the pre-natal dark of the soul which
has not yet awaked, afterwards and always under
that drowsy spell which lies ever in ambush to
bring the growing life to standstill or to hale it
back again into the outer dark of spirit's death.
It is coming out plainer certainly, but what a
mystery am I leaving unexplained ! What is
this that I am saying about the action of Church
or of her instrument ? When I say the Church
or the priest can occasion, though they cannot
cause, the birth of a soul, that they cannot unite
the Divine and the Human but can stir and
impel the Human to unite itself with the Divine,
how do I say that this occasion is made, this
impulsion given? How does it happen, when
the Word is preached or a Sacrament passes,
that thereupon a soul moves itself towards its
Maker and life begins? What happened to
yourself, Mark, when life began in you ; or when
(for who can be sure that his memory carries the
first moment when the soul " converts " ?), when
there fell on your dawning spirit the stroke of
that older spirit, at which your own erected itself
with a deepened breathing and a heart-beat
grown of a sudden strong? What happened
then to you ?
I cannot tell. It is final fact, perhaps, behind

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 47
which we cannot go ; an assumption which a
mortal mind must ask the eternal mind to yield
him, that he may make a start on thought's
journey. But some images from things more
visible do offer themselves as my guides for a
little distance. Not without a parable speaks to
me that Eternal Mind. For I know that a note,
sounded when we touch one viol's string, can be
cause of the same chord sounding on another with
out touch : and I know, or believe I know, that the
music of a thought, made in one human brain or
breast, at times will make rise a music to echo it
in breast or brain of some other, across a width
of land and sea, nay, or a gulf more wide than
these. To these things then I liken the king
dom of heaven, that part of it where it reaches
from the one end to the other of the world of
human souls, and sweetly, strongly, undiscover-
ably orders the motions of them all.
Is this theory of mine an unsubstantial dream ?
I know this, that I mean to build on it whatever
I try to build here. And surely I am basing
upon fact and substance, if it is fact that faith
grows from man to man, person to person. Yes,
by the man and person in him must the priest
work his work. Christ's soldier will, like another
soldier, pay with his person ; Christ's physician
of souls heal, like other healers, with himself; the

48 Pastor Futurus.
shepherd, like the Master Shepherd, save the
sheep by giving for them his life ; the fisher of
men catch souls alive with nets that are woven
of cords of a man and meshes that are bands of
entraining love. Those who first called a priest
the "persoun of a toune," framed that title with
more subtlety than they knew : he is or he should
be the personality of his fold, not to minister to
their contact with the laws of men, but to their
communion with the life from God. Ah, did
they, in requiring him to impersonate his flock,
dare to think it could be required of him to im
personate, by his own communion with that life,
the All-Shepherd to this shepherd's little flock ?
I must dare to think it, and dare to endeavour
so to teach these shepherds that are to be.
How then ? What direction can we give
these shepherds to use the man and person in
them to work the saving of souls ?
The Ordinal must lead us. It commissions
the priest to preach the Word, to minister the
Sacraments, and (for so we are most of us con
tent to understand the work of "forgiving" or
"retaining" sins) to exercise the Church's Disci
pline. This is the Vital Lampas, in its three branches,
which the Church commits to the priest's hand
to bear onward along the age. The triple lights

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 49
are to be reflected severally in the mind, heart,
will of the priest's flock.
The Word — how shall the priest convey this ?
My brethren mostly think this so plain : he must
read and expound the Bible and impart the
Creeds, by sermon to the grown-up, by catechis
ing to the young. I do not find it so plain as
my brethren.
For what the priest has to impart when he
ministers the Word is not a knowledge but a
faith, though a faith which comes not without a
knowing too. But faith, being the aliveness of
a soul to God, can only be occasioned by another
man, not caused. And this other occasions the
aliveness of a brother's soul by his own person
ality ; that is, in the case of a preacher, by action
of a faith in himself which mysteriously sets free
as by a shock a like activity towards God in the
soul he has touched. The preaching then of
the Word must be an act of faith in the priest's
mind such that the faith irradiates from that mind
and casts the rays upon another mind, stirring it
into life. This is why some brilliant sermons
shed no light, and some spluttering smoky rush
light is the bright shining of a candle to a simple
hearer. This is why some class-teachers of most
definite and lucid doctrine work less clearness in
4

50 Pastor Futurus.
their class than some inferior adept in doctrine,
whose mind is confusedly aflame with a truth
and burns to get it out abroad. Yes, that is
what I must tell my scholars — preaching is faith
thinking aloud. " Aloud " : for the vibrations of
your thought are to go out and wake the echo
of other men's thought. But "thinking": for
unless thought is happening in you while you
preach there will be no vibrations to go out.
But again the Word is preached not from
pulpit only but from prayer-desk and lectern.
Can my Vice- Principal, I wonder, teach our men
to read ? I have noticed with regret that some
instructors fail in this ; and with indignation that
some of their scholars, self-instructed only as
I trust, seem when at the lectern to murder the
sacred speech of malice prepense; whose con
demnation is just.
I trust this is not too harsh. I believe this
degradation of the Word read has been come to
by stages, and that these readers believe they
are obeying a principle. Some of them, it is
commonly said, are conforming to what they
suppose to be Catholic methods ; for if the con
gregation cannot understand the lessons, they
are no worse off than those of another Church,
or than our own lay people were while the Word

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 5 1
was still read in Latin. But for my own part
I like to find for them the excuse that they are
blundering imitators of leaders most worthy of
imitation, though most undeserving of this
outrageous caricature. For was it not noted of
one of the greatest in the goodly Tractarian
fellowship, that he used in Littlemore Church to
read the lessons in a level, formal, unemphasized,
unemotional voice, as if he desired to utter the
Divine oracles unmingled with the tones of
a mortal personality ? Yet, O reverent saint of
the past, was not the Word made flesh, the Very
Word ? Then this lesser Word, the written
Word of God, it too should be made flesh that
it may save us : it too must clothe itself in
the personality of a man that it may dwell among
other men and be their saviour. Young brothers,
what gracious opportunities are you trampling
under foot, when you hurry and slur and slubber
the recitations which your Church meant to be
the articulate and penetrating appeal of spiritual
poem, history, oratory, drama, to your soul who
read and theirs who listen — sheep thwt now look
up and are not fed. When all the while here
at the lectern the opened holy page is waiting
for your voice and the mind in that voice, to
become a lively oracle to your people's ear.
They the simpler sort, are as the children are,
4*

52 Pastor Futurus.
where the ring is made round mother by the fire,
and the poet's verse, which had small meaning
for these little ones when they learnt it in school,
and which none would have read at all for him
self, can still and hold the group. By what
spell now ? By a witchery, which is the poet's
music, but a music toned and tinted for them as
it is strained through the person of that dear
interpreter. Such should our Church's lector be,
an interpreter of the Divine music. Even the
sacred writer, the prophet old or new, was inter
preter, and could but speak
God's music by the framework and the chord
of his mortal idiosyncrasy. But the music the
prophet has spoken needs, if it is to reach his
fellows, to be again spoken by the framework
and the chord of a human instrument. To many
of our unlearned it is not yet a music but only
like the dumb scroll of notes which a musician
has scored, until the voice of a minister of the
word descants to them the harmony. Here then
is a ministry of the Word in which we must in
struct our youth — how to minister at the
lectern. Instruction indeed can go but a little
way towards the achievement : can only impart
the technique of voice management. (But
then how badly that accomplishment needs

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 53
teaching among us !) The other thing one can
only teach a scholar to teach himself, for this too
is not a knowledge but a faith. The Word will
on the reader's lips prosper in that whereto God
sent it only if the faith which the Scripture is
to propagate in the hearer lives in the speaker's
own heart while he confesses it with the mouth.
One cannot teach that art : yet one may, God
being our helper, do something to inspire it.
Well, here is a study for us which I perhaps
can lead without waiting for the Vice- Principal.
But I suppose we must wait for him before we
approach the teaching of the second ministry, the
Sacraments. All is so new in this study since I
was priested myself. In twenty years one has
become as a barbarian to the civilized, when one
stands at the altar beside a celebrant who has
moved with his times. "How does old A. get
on at your High Mass ? " I heard one stripling
savant ask another. " Oh, well, we have to push
him about a bit, you know," was the answer ;
at which my brow knitted, for A. in my knowl
edge of him was a leader in such things awhile
back. However Cyril Sensier, as I am assured, is
equipped with all that can be taught in this kind.
All that can be taught. Yes, but how much is
that ? What is teachable here can hardly hold a

54 Pastor Futurus.
larger proportion in the ministry of Sacraments
than the knowledge of how to manage the breath
and the mouth muscles holds in the ministry of
the Word. There is little to teach, but what is
there not to learn !
Why did it strike so on my mind, that word of
my late Bishop, when he was explaining to some
of us his choice of a vicar for St. Edmund's. " I
have seen his parish, watched him at work there,
heard him preach, and seen him celebrate. " What
of that last? I asked myself. What is there to
see in one man's celebrating to distinguish him
from another? It indicates, of course, the school
of churchmanship, a matter of first importance in
filling up the vacancy at St. Edmund's ; but I
am sure from his tone the Bishop meant more
than that. What then ?
Perhaps he was well interpreted by Catharine's
maid when she reported " I did love having
Canon Addingham there this morning ; he's better
than anyone . . . except " she added loyally
"the rector. And young Jack" (the bootboy)
" he said so too ".
Did the Bishop then mean that by which I,
even in my old-fashioned ignorance of the altar
detail, am so powerfully touched, the spell of the
Ceremonial ; the intimate suggestiveness that is
breathed from the silver sheen on paten and

Musings on the Making of the Priest. 55
chalice and flagon, the rosy taper-flame, the
snows of the " fay re linen," the dyes and sparkles
of embroideries ; the state and the reverence of
the ministrant's motion, posture, act? Yes, all
this, I am sure. (And how grateful do I feel
to the men who through much ill report at one
time have kept all this beauty of holiness for us,
reaching back so far across an unmystical age to
recover it for use ! ) All this the Bishop meant.
But how much more ! I have no words for it,
unless they are the words I should find to record
what passed at the altar when that saintly Over-
Shepherd stood there himself to celebrate.
But the words can't be found. It was ineffable,
that communication which passed from him to
us who kneeled on the chancel floor. One can
but whisper that a faith in him that offered and
presented there the sacrifice, ours and his
own sacrifice — this faith that was in him had
gone out in virtue from his vesture's hem and
by "unimaginable touch " had lit upon our souls.
We had "seen him celebrate," and to have seen
him was to us — this.
So here is what no master can teach, yet these
scholars of ours have to learn. Here is a
mystery, and how unripe are my ponderings on
it as yet. How often and for how long must I
come back to them !

IX.
the vice- Cyril Sensier came this afternoon, and the
princi- Ship's Company of the Navicella is now complete.
One would say of him that he " took the stage
well," when he entered : he is self-possessed, made
himself at home at once. That might be merely
manner, but he also makes on me by his air of
preciseness and of energy the impression of an
effective man. He seems to be moulding him
self on a type which is not yet familiar to myself
by personal contact, but which is no doubt a
standard with his uncle's school (Sensier of
Pattenley was our authority on ritual in the
rural deanery). What I noticed in his talk with
the men after supper was a freedom from the
pomp and even the stiffness which one usually
associates with the ecclesiastic temperament.
There was indeed, when reference to professional
matters had to be made, something of the tone
and choice of expression which James Verley
would I think call " sporting ". I am not sure
I quite liked this : but perhaps it helps to the

The Vice-Principal. 57
becoming all things to all men — a thing we clergy
too often are without.
He has an excellent presence, tall, clean
limbed ; fine head of black hair ; with only the
slight rigidity of figure, some lack of colour, and
the clean-shaven face, to suggest the born ec
clesiastic. Yes, the look of him gives me much
confidence. Though I tell myself to distrust the
indications of bodily presence, not merely on the
puritan ground that one should not look on the
countenance and stature, but because one's ex
perience of appearance and reality in the human
person is so paradoxical ; such insignificant
physique proves so often the vessel of the great
spirit, and the other way.
That he will justify his late Bishop's commen
dations to us as a sound historian and liturgist,
and a tutor of good method, I felt some assurance
at the first touch ; and this is a vast relief to me,
who have scant experience of professional parti
culars, and am not quick at acquiring mechanism
and methods in any system of fact. I will hope
that he has also a mind elastic enough to take a
ply from the Bishop's ground ideas of our work,
and will not want to twist the work into a mould
he brings from elsewhere. When that happens,
as I have known it, wine-skins must stretch or
break, either the incomer's or theirs whom he

58 Pastor Futurus.
joins. Please God, in our case both will stretch
and neither break.
I was set musing by one little thing, a straw
perhaps in the wind, in the talk at supper, where
he and John sat together. Sensier was talking to
him of one of the chaplain-tutors at the University,
known to both, and dropped a remark with a
tinge of disdain in it about the chaplain's method
of handling the vessels after celebration. John
raised his head and eyed him gravely, but did
not take the point up. I hope our own new
chaplain and tutor does not share that lack of
proportion which I hear of, and have myself
sometimes marked in certain priests of a very
zealous school. These may be right in their zeal
for particulars : but here in a training-place it is
more important to impart the universal. We are
not a technical school, we are to be a university of
knowledge. But very likely Sensier only meant
to blame the chaplain for being a sloven. John
did not understand him so, however.

X.
Sensier and I have had a strenuous evening the
• PRAYPR
over our curriculum. My head admonishes me book.
that it has been no less. His capacity for draw
ing a scheme of work is admirable : I cannot be
too grateful for his help on this side of our task,
a side as uncongenial to myself as I am inapt to
deal with it.
He naturally refers constantly to the system
of Becket Hall, which I suppose we are practically
taking on here. To a young man like Sensier
that system comes with authority : it is a datum
which he does not go behind. I am less satisfied.
We cannot plan an education of our priests by
the sole help of a completed system, Becket
Hall's or other. We must ask ourselves for
what activity it is that we are educating our
students. Sensier supposes that we all know
what it is : the Church has laid it down. By the
Church, however, I think he really means Becket
Hall. Now let us see. We have arranged the course
of study of the Prayer Book. But what is to
be the aim of this study ? For that must differ
59

60 Pastor Futurus.
according to the use the priest is to make of his
knowledge of the Book. The Principal of Becket
Hall, who is the most resolute opponent of Re
vision, and demanded at a late conference "the
Prayer Book, the whole Prayer Book, and nothing
but the Prayer book," will demur. To him the
Book is, though he may not know it, a datum,
like the Bible or the Creed. It is a block, as it
were, of substance charged with a measure of
spiritual force, which it can give out from itself
to the worshippers upon contact. The priest
must understand what the words and ritual of it
mean, and that is enough : he can then by his
utterance conduct the force given out from it to
the souls of the worshippers. At least the refusal
to touch the book seems to require such a theory.
But I would rather say of the Prayer Book that it
is a live thing, that its language is like those
words of which the Greek said they had hands
and feet : yes, feet to travel abreast of the pilgrim
Church on her road through the age, and hands
to point the road in doubtfulness, or to support
any of her company who faint by the way. It
cannot do this without mobility and adaptability,
things which are elements of life, and things for
which Revision is a name.
But if my conception is the nearer to the truth,
the aim of our study will be to learn the secret

The Prayer Book. 61
of what gives the Book its hands and feet. The
study of its letter and its history is indispensable,
but must be secondary to this and subsidiary.
It is not easy, however, to lecture on this subject.
Yet, when I think again, I see that this is exactly
what we shall be teaching when we teach the
Prayer Book as the instrument of Common Prayer.
In what ways can the minister so apply the ser
vices prescribed as to cause the people to worship,
and to worship as a people, one with another ?
Find out this and teach this. That is how to
teach the Prayer Book to our priests that are to
be. If our lecturer will bend all his studies this
way, and manoeuvre to this effect all his histori
cal and literary resources, then he will be doing
his task and helping his scholars to accomplish
ment. Not that I doubt the Becket Hall people do
the task as well as we can hope to do it here.
I only wish we may get as far as they do in it,
even with the start we may have of them through
our clearer consciousness, if ours is such, of the
goal to make for.
Yet I would like to fetch them another word
from my Greek. If it was true that " life with
out self-examination is no life," it is also true
that a Prayer Book without self-revision is no
Book having hands and feet.

XI.
revision. Revision of the Prayer Book' — was that my talk
yesterday with Sensier ? Well no, not my talk
with my young expert, not yet : but my thought
afterwards with myself. But how far away from
facts I was, if I got no farther. The Church's
Book revised! Is it her Book or herself that
needs revision, if she is to preach the Gospel to
the Poor, that is to say to our English nation ?
It is herself she has to revise to-day.
My fellows in her communion will agree with
me in this. We know we are unprofitable
servants ; it is soon said : we have done that
which it was a duty to do. Nay, we have not
done that. We must repent and do the former
works or lose our candlestick. Yes, I shall
provoke no one by saying we must revise the
Church. But how will it be when I come to say we
must revise not the Church, but her way, her
method, her system. Will they give me audience
then ? Much I fear that to whisper of this will
be to whistle a hurricane, and raise it.
6a

Revision. 63
Justin Belmont came here a week ago hot
from Convocation, red-hot. He had been sup
porting there a motion for the relief of candidates
for the diaconate from the impracticable letter of
their vow.
" We argued," said he, " that they are made to
declare a belief about the Scripture which no one
who reads a book can hold, which no one requires
of them to hold, which no one thinks they could
possibly hold, if only they have wits enough to
be ministers of the faith in our Church. We
pleaded that of bishops and priests we only de
mand what is reason, and why lay on the callow
deacon a load that neither priest nor bishop can
bear? All in vain. Hinc movet Euphrates
illinc Germania bellum (his epigram seemed to
soothe him a little) ; deep called to deep — to
height, I should say, — the two wings of our
English Clerus bore down on our stout but out
numbered centre, like two battalions surround
ing a mutinous third, and swept us off the field."
He paused, a little breathless. Then mustering
himself, " It is amazing — Yes, Clerus Anglicanus
stupor mundi." He flapped his powerful arms,
and I still hear the gasp with which he sat down
violently into that chair. Thomas was in it.
With a yell he vacated it and fled, not to mix
with our theologic wrangle.

64 Pastor Futurus.
I was a little set on edge myself by this
vehemence, but I tried to mitigate Belmont : " It
was disappointing certainly, but don't let us be
too hard on them. It wasn't just dogmatism :
fear, almost godly fear,- — that was it. They
thought, ' here's a leak in the dyke ; we must stop
it up with our hand like the little Dutch boy,
else there will be a great letting out of water,'
and they did not see they were clapping a palm
on the safety valve. They had got the wrong
metaphor, like all theologians when they make
mistakes, called the danger flood, when they
should have called it explosion."
" Oh, yes, fear right enough," said he. " But
I don't know about godly fear. 'Why should
all monks be cowards ? ' asks Becket in the
play ; and I'm going to ask why should all
church dignitaries — or more than half of them —
be cowards? "
" Well, now," I persisted, " we have a dignitary
here, a very minor one, no doubt, Canon Bors at
the Rectory. He was with me the day after
Convocation, as warm — well no, not quite as
warm — as you are about the vote, but on the
other side. ' Ah ! what we have to be thankful
for ! ' he said ; ' I really think it might have gone
the wrong way if it had not been for that grand
speech of the Dean of Aulden. Men seem so

Revision. 65
miserably afraid ' (now don't laugh, Belmont) ' so
miserably afraid of professing the old truths if
they are severe and not popular, and don't chime
with the new philosophies and new intellectual
" charities," as I think they call them. Sometimes
I have feared, Principal, that the Church is gone
soft. Not the Dean, though : he has the courage
of his faith, and he made the rest of them have
some. Yes, we have much to be thankful for.'
There now, Belmont, look at that ' miserably
afraid ' and see yourself, that self of you ' gone soft,'
as Canon Bors sees it. And, you know, Bors is
a splendid worker here and a saint too, and I
love him, as much, almost, as the men in work
shops do."
Belmont laughed at the guns turned on him
thus, and left in quite a good temper.
But I went on ruminating when he was gone,
and there was no longer any need for me to man
the dear Canon's battery. How about my boys ?
For that is where I come in here. They will be
asking me, when I have a walk with any of
them, what I think about the vote, and I cannot
parry them as I did Belmont. What shall I
answer my John, who will see right through the
Dean's grand speech, and read behind his good
primitive personality the religious actualities
which it obscures in their passage ? Well it is
5

66 Pastor Futurus.
odd, but it is not the deep-witted John who will
embarrass me most. He has the historic sense,
he knows that faith must grow with the ages,
and that words which cannot keep pace with it
will often cease to be quite true, and yet must be
kept as the symbol for the new truth, while the
Church is thinking out the new words. He will
understand the necessity of equity and even legal
fiction in the corporate life of the Church as of
the State. The man I shall have trouble with is
Matthews from the city office with his " honest
trader " ethics. He will read Sir Andrew Strate-
man in the church weeklies, and will want to know
why clergymen must not keep their contracts
like business men, and, if they must, how can he
sign on to believe things which he will not believe.
It isn't good business, he will say, and he can't see
that it is even good honesty. And I shall have
to admit that good business it is not. Good
business means, I suppose, practicality, ac
cordance with facts ; and how it can be practical
to do in religion what no one does in trade (unless
be wants to be bankrupt) — refuse to accommodate
method to circumstance and change one when
the other changes, is what I cannot see. And
circumstance has changed in religion : we do not
believe, or desire that a deacon should believe,
that everything in the Bible is true. Then to

Revision. 67
make the young man say he does believe it, is
not good business, not even if we promise
him, as of course we do, that we are not expect
ing him to keep his word ; that the terms of his
promise are to mean something quite different
and quite true and believable, "as the Principal
will explain to him beforehand and so keep his
honesty intact for him ". Well, perhaps, if it is
Matthews, and he has got a Principal to explain.
But suppose it is the conscience of Matthews
before he has a Principal, when he is only think
ing " shall I be ordained ? " while he still sits at
his office desk. Suppose, as his nib pauses be
tween one bill of exchange and the next, con
science nudges him with, " Are you going to swear
to a bishop that you believe the earth took six days
to make? " and he has got no ductor dubitantium
to help him except worthy Sir Andrew's monthly
letter on the ethics of subscription and the
deplorable dishonesty of the new parsons. Why,
Matthews will never come near the Principal,
and so the Bishop will never hear his name.
And how many and better names will the Bishops
never hear ? No, Bors, I love you right well,
and I love even the cast-iron dogmatics of you,
because / know what they really are ; they are
yourself, your blessed self, the holy and humble
man of heart you are, your loyalty to truth as
5*

68 Pastor Futurus.
the Rector of Carleford troweth it, your love of
Christ as Peter Bors has learned to confess the
Christ, yes, your Christian's faith, your true, brave,
living faith in the living God under these ill-fitting
names for it, which once, half a century back,
were its " beautiful garments," and now are, not
to yourself indeed but to us, a misfit and even a
disguise ; I love you, dear Traditionist, right well,
but I can't give thanks where you do for the
"grand speech" of the Dean and the votes of
the brethren, which keep bound on the necks
of our deacons a yoke which neither their fathers
the bishops nor their elder brothers the priests
are able or are forced to bear.
And yet there is something to be thankful for
in this intransigence of the traditionists. That
political saying of last century that the State
needs " Her Majesty's Opposition " as well as Her
Majesty's Government, is as true of the Church.
The resisters of reform are only less necessary
agents of right change than the reformers' selves.
It is a question, to speak with the biologists, of
a right proportionment, in the developing organ
ism, of the two forces of Growth and Structure.
The Church has her Belmonts with their vital
push to expand her limbs and organs towards
the fulness of the stature divine ; and also her
stalwarts, like the Dean, with their bone and

Revision. 69
grit to restrain and solidify the spreading frame
work, and to secure that to the fulness of the
Church's stature the measure of the divine stature
be not lacking. I esteem both of them highly
in love for their work's sake, but not so highly
either of them, unless both are there. Neither
shall have all his way, else the Dean's " too much
stiffness in refusing" will induce ossification, or
Belmont's "too much easiness in admitting
variation " will end us in collapse.
H ow soothing is a generalization ! For I am in
quite genuine anxiety about the Church in this
encounter, that sometimes threatens to embitter
into tragedy, between our conservative and our
modernizing Churchmen ; but when I tell myself
that Tradition and Innovation are only our
older acquaintances, Structure and Growth,
which have been with us ever since life woke on
this planet, and are now playing their world-old
r31e on the stage ecclesiastic, I take much com
fort. I must share this comfort with my two
friends, and persuade Bors to welcome in
Belmont the eternal youthfulness and spring
time of the Church, and Belmont to revere
in Bors her virile maturity and august experience.
And this pacification will do excellently well,
until there is something that wants pacifying,
which will be the moment there is something in

70 Pastor Futurus.
particular to strive about. The balm of a general
ization has no healing in it, when the rub to be
balmed is a particular rub. Vain to remind my
two friends how heaven has ordained that the
Church shall be delivered of a truth only through
the shrewd dialectic between Authority and
Reason, and bid each rejoice in having so
shrewd an opposite to stir the mettle of his soul :
vain as to pour the same oil upon the waters
when Old and New are in battle on the floor of
Parliament. They would answer : " If truth is to
be got, as you say, by war, and if principles are
rained in blood, then let the blows fall and the
blood flow by each laying on his hardest, and
foul fall him who blenches first".
Well, and I would not myself counsel them to
stint the hardness of the knocks they exchange
in the dialectic : rather I cheer them on to do
their hardest. But I begin to see in the en
counter something deeper than the clash of hostile
principles. Under the dualism of Authority and
Reason lies, one is sure, a unity. Authority is
Reason and Reason is Authority, one same force
working in a different medium. What is the
name of that force ? Whatever it be, that force,
when it is called authority, is some potency
in the social organism as a whole : when it is
called reason, is the same potency, operat-

Revision. y i
ing in some organ or organs of the whole.
Tradition is the Church's reasoning grown
mature, her modernism is her reasoning growing
again. The many-seasoned family tree of the
faith has made much hard wood in stock and
bough ; this we call her dogma. But also she
makes every spring new fibre in shoot and bud ;
the name of this is criticism. One same vital push
built the stout trunk and the elastic slip. Can
the stem disown the sliver, or the vine-tendril say
to the vine-stock, I have no need of thee ? Till
the fig-tree can bear olives and the vine figs, we
must think Authority and Reason, Dogma and
Modernism, Institution and Innovation, are the
children in two generations of some nature that
begets them all. What is that nature, what?
Can one learn its name? If one could, then
might one go to our disputants, the Old and the
New, with a charm to turn the heart of the fathers
to the children and the heart of the children to
their fathers, and so thrust aside the curse that
smites earth, where "ignorant armies clash by
night " because each has misheard the war-signals
of the other.
That would be worth doing — to find this force
of which truth is begotten, to discover under
Authority and Reason the true deep-down ground
of belief, the basis of the creeds, the test of reality,

72 Pastor Futurus.
the bed-rock of the Church, the foundation laid
by the tradition of Apostles and also by the
vision of Prophets — to find this, and then lead
my scholars here to see it where I have seen it.
Mark, pastor of Elfton, Principal of the Chantry,
to think, only to think, that perhaps and perhaps
it was this you are sent to Carleford to do !
Dreamer, presumptuous dreamer, that you
should discover this when the kings of thought
and prophets of the faith have been on the quest
since ever the Church began ! No, Mark, this
vision is not for thee ; but thou shall follow this
great quest, and find, in God's mercy, some lesser
vision, but a fair.

XII.
I do not know when I have heard a lecture which a lec-
better achieved its proper aim than that which th|E °N
Little ward gave us last night on the History of xarians
the Tractarian Movement. It was admirable in
form : for vivacity of character sketching it might
have been "moving pictures " of the new Magic
Lantern, as Tractarian and College Head and
Bishop and Recluse and Protestant on the war
path, poured along in a procession of figures each
with convincing portraiture of live feature, gait,
or gesture. This was charming, but no great
matter for our purpose. What delighted me was
what disappointed, as I found, a colleague : there
was a great deal about the Tractarians and their
opponents, .there was not a great deal about
Tractarianism and the doctrines which it en
countered and replaced or which it generated
from itself and provoked in other schools. Sensier
thinks this was an inversion of the right pro-
portionment of principles and personalities. I
do not agree. These personalities with their
73

74 Pastor Futurus.
action or suffering are the deeper and more
permanent significance of the story. It must be
so if we have been right in thinking that in the
whole story of man what has eternal value is not
the material effects he works upon the world but
the spiritual life — or in simple men's language
the character — which is the fire struck out in his
soul by his collision and communion with the
world. One can elevate the value of person
alities without depressing that of principles. For
there is here no need to disjoin the two. The
worth of a personality, studied as engaged in a
struggle of religion, is that the person is a principle
become concrete and alive and thereby com
municable to the student ; the worth of a principle
lies in the power it shows to become thus in
carnate in the flesh that is a man or a woman,
who can dare and bear, love, suffer, and enjoy.
Sensier wanted, so he said this morning, to
hear much more about the Notes of the true
Church as held by Newman, about boisterous
Ward's " Ideal," about the Sacrifice of the Mass,
or again poor blundering Hampden's half-baked
theory of creed and dogma. Well, the theologies
of the movement have certainly to be studied
and with an earnest curiosity ; but if even theo
logy is secondary to spiritual life, it is not the
doctrines thrown up by the movement which

A Lecture on the Tractarians. 75
should have the first and last attention of our
priests to be ; it is the pentecostal impulse which
rose and ran and runs to-day its course along our
Church's history ; the track of the Spirit, who has
left indeed among His footprints the reasonings
and pronouncements of the schools, but has left
deeper marks than these, more significant though
less clear to scrutiny, in massive attitudes of
Churchmen's mind and will towards final religious
fact. These are the first and last lesson of the
Tractarian history ; and when our lecturer made
his discourse a drama, a Mystery Play shall I call
it, nay, a tragedy, with its conflict of Old and
New, and principles "rained in blood," with a
Prometheus in John Henry Newman and an
angry Olympus in that very wooden synod of
Heads of Colleges, he was taking the best way
of imparting the lesson. Ah, one thought, this
is what has happened and can happen again.
This is a campaign in the secular war of Soul
against Sense and the World. It will be re
peated, then, in the sweep of " Time's whirligig " :
erunt etiam altera bella. And how will the
opposites be named and armed, and what will be
their watchwords ? Will perhaps the successors
of the Tractarian host find themselves, or without
finding it out become, the locked phalanx of the
Orthodox, with levelled pikes to " bear back both

yd Pastor Futurus.
friend and foe," driving off from their spear-
points as foes or traitors or impossible allies some
prophets in whose mouth the Spirit has put a
word which is new and yet is true. Orthodoxy did
this a man's lifetime ago : why should it not make
the same blunder again? Because, one would
like to say, that was a dead age, and ours is not.
Nay, but there is a death which any age can die
at any season and even amid an efflorescence of
bright activities. It is the death of taking things
for granted. To assume that any practice or
even any precept of a church is a matter adjudged
that may never be rejudged, a fixed point from
which thought may travel forward but behind
which it may not look, a postulate for reasonings
which a disputant may not ask us to justify —
this is, if not a death, at least an arrest of life.
It is an arrest of life because it is a withholding
of the sacrifice of self which makes a church, as
it makes all things else, to live. There is a
morning and an evening sacrifice which the
Church offers to the Most High : it is the un
ceasing oblation of her whole self, her knowings
and her doings, all that yesterday she thought
or wrought, presented to the Divine scrutiny and
decision, whether to be confirmed or repealed, to
be continued or bettered or transfigured. No
doubt this daily sacrifice was being withheld or

A Lecture on the Tractarians. yy
most slovenly offered in the Church of which the
Bishops and Heads of Newman's days were the
officers in highest place. No doubt the hands
that rekindled the flame on the cold altar stone
were the hands of Newman and his men.
May it be that they have lit a flame which shall
not be put out in the days of us their sons in the
spirit ! But " ease dulls grace " and indisposes to
the effort of judging a new prophet on the merits
of his message. It was so that time ; the ways
of Tractarians were called "dishonest," when
the word should have been "disquieting".
Well, and to-day one may hear "dishonesty"
come back as an angry echo to a fresh voice
which has disquieted some "haunt of ancient
peace," a Churchman's breast, though the Church
has still to pronounce her welcome or her rejection
of its word. To his own mistress, the Church,
the new prophet stands or falls : it would be
common respect to her that we should give her
time to judge if her servant is faithful or no.
Our fireside Conference after the lecture (that
is what I called the discussions of a "foreign"
lecture which we hold in the hour before Com
pline ; but the men name it "Conclave") was
certainly facilitated by our lecturer's biographical
method. Personalities are not, spite of Plato,

78 Pastor Futurus.
unbecoming to philosophers, when the philo
sophers are young. Every one was ready to
"heckle" Littleward about this or that actor or
action of the drama he had so vividly put on the
stage. With something perhaps of the national
love of sport they seemed to single out the
champion who touched their several sympathies.
Hurrell Froude, with his Rupert-like love of
onset, calling on his comrades " to make a row "
if they wanted to effect anything, had, of course,
Jem Verley for a backer ; but he was also a
general favourite. Ward was the object of mixed
regard. That he so conscientiously supported
Froude's policy of " making a row," stood to his
credit ; but his maladroit pestering of Newman
with embarrassing questions on religious logic,
when what Newman most needed for theprocess
of his faith was quiet and non-committal, was more
resented than the audacity was admired. Pierce
had something to say in demur to the condem
nation of the authorities for their persecuting
attitude. Were we right in giving the name
of "persecution" to it, was it any more than
repression which they were bound to employ, as
ideas then were, to doctrine which they thought
noxious? (Pierce has perhaps learned in an
Archdeacon's family to appreciate the difficulties
of officials.) Littleward was inclined to concede

A Lecture on the Tractarians. 79
something on this head ; given the blindness of
the dons their measures were not so inconsistent ;
let us a little condone their harshness by the plea of
" invincible ignorance ". Philips warmed up over
" Nobis Procuratoribus non placet " ,• his chosen
hero is R. W. Church, holding the pass against a
host with the good blade of the Proctor's veto.
That too one might trace to environment ; in his
case not official but democratic : the tribune in
the exercise of his veto has a first claim on the
people's loyalty. John, I thought, was rather
backward this evening, till the talk flagged as if
we had exhausted our subject. But then he
looked across at Littleward and asked, " What
was it like for Newman after he joined the
Romans ? Do you think he was happy — really ;
did he find he had made a mistake ? " I noticed
a change in our lecturer at this, as if he was meet
ing something different from the rest of the party.
To them he had been replying with a smiling
ease and an older man's tolerance for youngsters,
but he drew himself together and made a pause
before answering John. "You ask to know a
hard thing, which I think no one can tell you, for
those who could will not wish, if the right answer
is the sadder answer. The knowledge, could one
have it, would be momentous in the science of
religions. But then — to be happy, do we know

80 Pastor Futurus.
what that is ? " We were silent. Then Newton
had a word to contribute. " My father tells me
of a college friend of his, who was a brilliant man,
he says, but not with much hold on religious be
liefs, who rang the bell of the Birmingham Oratory
and asked if the Father would see him. He
wanted to get his counsel about his course in life,
and thought Newman would give him it though
he wasn't Roman. Well, I did not hear what was
said to this man, or I have forgotten : but the
man said to my father, ' It was the saddest face
I ever saw : I cannot tell you how sad he
looked'." After a pause, "Of course," he added
naively, "that was before he was made a Car
dinal ". We smiled at this a little, and the bell
began for Compline.

XIII.
What kind of a thing, I ask myself, is this Log about
of the Chantry going to be ? What it ought to diary.
be, or at least what an unintended reader (if reader
should ever find the key and get to it) would
expect it to be, is an "intimate chronicle" of a
venture in education, education for ministry in
the Church of England. It ought to preserve
our experiences of what can be done with
Candidates for Orders, what curriculum and
discipline can render their intellectual attainment
more satisfactory to examining chaplains, their
practical efficiency more according to their
rectors' needs, their spiritual ethos more after the
heart of the ordaining Bishop. It should supply
some answer from us to the questions whether a
two years' course is the minimum of a worthy
training, whether only men with a university
degree are adequate to our Church's ministry,
whether a " don " can dispense with our technical
studies on account of his classics or philosophy,
and whether the very definite and seclusive
system of some colleges, which outsiders criticize
81 6

82 Pastor Futurus.
as too " seminarist " or an education of more range
which others would reproach as " modernist," is
the better initiation of the evangelist who must be
harmless but also wise. Then the diary ought to
be telling how much time should be spent by the
student in the daily Meditation, and how we
should direct him in that exercise : even such
homely matters as. the right time-table for study
and recreation, the degree of liberty to visit
friends during term, the rules of abstinence at
the due seasons, and so forth. Will this diary
supply this requirement ? That unintended
reader would say he did not find much promise
of it so far. There are reflections, he would
remark, about many other matters, and perhaps
I thought them good ; but if they were as good
as gold they did not make my treatise a Tractate
on the Education of a Priest, whatever other
kind of thing it might be.
Ha ! good as gold : yes, like the delightful
fellow who was let into a king's treasury to
carry away all the gold he could on his person,
who came out stuffed and pasted and plastered
and powdered with gold-dust, — mouth, nostrils,
hair, and beard, — "looking like anything rather
than a man ". That's how my diary will come
out, " looking like anything rather than a book
on the Theological College".

About this Diary. 83
Never mind. In that case the book will only
look like what it is, not an essay on the Institution
of a Priest, but something of quite another scope.
We mortals often do not know what we really
are after in our works beneath the sun ; and
this humble worker's task in life may prove to
be something far away from what it thought it
was, the story of the first Principalship of
Carleford Theological College.

PART II.

XIV.
Yes, it is true. The keeping of a diary is a well- five
doing in which "patient continuance" is rare, later.
and "final perseverance" a grace which is ob
tained by next to none. For it is now years —
yes, nearly five, I see — since I last made an
entry in my chronique intime of the Chantry.
Well, is there much to deplore in that?
History should be written when history is being
made, and at our start we were making history,
our own at any rate, if less than we conceited
ourselves of the Church's. So we wrote it down.
Then they all left us for their ministry, those
"fair beginners of a time," and with them, one
must confess, some breath of romance exhaled
from the Chantry, and upon enthusiasm super
vened plod. How else? It is the law of exist
ence to which every daylight bears witness.
For do not the horses of the Dawn, that come
prancing across the threshold of night, settle
down before noonday to a solid, practical, but
87

88 Pastor Futurus.
way-consuming trot which drags the chariot to
wards the down-hill race of sunset? It is the
same with the day of a man or of an enterprise
of men, even an enterprise that is "born of the
Spirit". That Spirit bloweth where it listeth,
and also when : there is Pentecost and the hour
of insight and impulse, and then a half-year of
Sundays after Pentecost (as our brethren of
Rome more significantly name them), when
only the milestones change in an unchanging
landscape of the plain.
Yet the Pentecosts come back, as surely
though not so predictably as the dawns, and to
mere register-making succeeds history-making.
That is when again something happens. And
something, as I surmise, has happened this
morning. It is a letter from John. I will transcribe part
of it to the page where I have begun to write in
this long neglected folio, the chronicle of the
Chantry. "... Do you not think, dear Principal, that
there is in these circumstances something that
looks like a leading? I have been feeling all
this about Driborough not being my right work
for many months, but, while I only felt that much,
I was rather ashamed of it ; thought it was my
conceit or fastidiousness, or else that I had caught

Five Years Later. 89
that ailment your contemporary at Oxford was
said to have ' invented as a new sin ' for men in
orders, Accidie. It is different now. It isn't
that I think Driborough the wrong place for me.
It is that I begin to see the right place. Yes, I
don't forget Pythagoras, Infussu Imperatoris, id
est Dei, de prcesidio et statione vitce decedere.
But how if one is not being driven away from
one's post, but called away, jussu Imperatoris .
It looks like that to me, but you will let me come
over and take — not the direction of my Father
Confessor but the sweet counsel of my Soul's-
friend, as I know you would much rather be
called by your sons in the faith, and this very
loving one John Desmond.
Yes, something does happen to-day for John
and therefore for me. But what? For "these
circumstances " in which he finds "a leading " do
not quite tell me that something. The teacups
of Driborough drawing-rooms and parlours — how
they quench the Spirit in a young curate is a
well-known tale. And the mincing religious
habits of leisured people in suburbs, I understand
that too : John is feeling as I did that first
afternoon here at the retreat in the Lady Chapel.
Then every priest who catechizes young folk

90 Pastor Futurus.
has one day or other the moment's fainting-fit
of conviction, when he tries to make sense to the
child's mind of some metaphysical formula of the
catechism, and the sense will not come, till the
teacher feels himself to be a chimara of the
Schoolmen bombinans in vacuo, and loathes his
own bombination. These are among the " cir
cumstances " but I do not touch the fact in these.
How of this other incident, less familiar to myself,
his talk with the young banker, James Heavitree,
who says to him "You mustn't ask me to come to
church : I simply can't see the point of it : but if
I can be of any use looking after your boys'
club or coming on your finance committee and
dunning some of your people, I'll do that for you
and welcome ". Heavitree will work a boys' club,
will not come to church, for he does not see the
point of it. My guess is that here is the incident
on which John's mind has pivoted in its half-
wheel from the Driborough work towards some
other. We shall see when he comes next week,
as I hope he will : but I begin to see already.
He is finding that the Church has not quite the
Gospel to the poor, when the poor are fine
young bankers, with the thews and lustiness of
the athlete and the business man's standard of
" value," but with small capital of devotionalness
or introspection. Yes, yes, I will be bound

Five Years Later. 91
that's what John is out for. He will ride abroad
in quest of the Gospel to the poor. Amen.
The Lord hath called thee, my son. It shall be
that if He call thee still thou shalt answer, Speak,
Lord, for thy servant heareth.

XV.
John's My guess as to what was moving John was
purpose. nejtner wi£e Qf the mark nor very near. It was
not Heavitree that was the matter with him, the
real matter, though it contributed to the move
ment, and in our talk to-day was what we began
with. Contact with a fine young Englishman,
who wants to serve Christ and to help His
Church, but treats some of her most trusted
methods as irrelevances to the work, did help to
wake in John his present discontent with the
Church's outlook on reality ; but it is the Roth-
bury affair that penned that letter of his. Roth-
bury, who seems to have given up an intention
of taking Orders for a journalist's career, but to
have kept his interest in religion, had become an
intimate of John's on the basis of those sym
pathies, and had been persuaded to resume com
munion, intermitted out of scruples which John
dissipated. But then came that startling brochure
of Rothbury's, " A Faith Reconstructed," which
92

Johns Purpose. 93
beat such a dust out of the placid cushions of
orthodox church-goers, that the whole parish
was a-sneeze with repudiation. The Vicar
thought the situation required some action on
his part, for it was being conveyed to him that
the appearance of this heretic at the altar-rail
was a scandal to some of his flock. Very loth
and late he wrote to Rothbury, confidentially,
and asked him to take the " charitable " course
of abstaining, for a time at any rate, from com
municating in a church " where it was a stumbling-
block to some of his fellow-worshippers ". The
other replied that of course he would abstain,
but that to do so " charitably " was more than he
felt able to promise : it seemed to himself that
a man's fitness for communion could only be
judged of by himself, but at any rate was a
question between him and the priest alone : the
Driborough communicants held no writ to be
Inquisitors. John is extremely angry with Colonel B  ,
the true mover of all this trouble, and not a little
disappointed with the Vicar. " But do not think,"
he said to me, " I wish to leave my work through
want of sympathy with him or resentment on
behalf of my friend. It is because this shock
has made me feel that the Church, if this business
represents her mind, is in a false attitude towards

94 Pastor Futurus.
believers like Rothbury. A believer he is, that
I know perfectly, little as I agree with the posi
tions of his tract ; and he is being excommunicated
— for that is what it is of course, though the Vicar
does it very tactfully — because he expresses his
most genuine and deeply-held faith in language
which a colonel with half-pay and no work
pronounces heretical, on the ground that he, the
Colonel, doesn't use it himself, and doesn't under
stand what it means. That is the fact simply
stated. For the Church has not judged Roth
bury, it is the Colonel. If the Church did judge
of the heresy, I think there is a good chance she
would acquit him, or at worst find his statement
of her creed to be blundering and liable to mis
apprehension by the simple, yet not a difference
from her teaching which called for a breach of
communion. Anyhow the Church has not
judged ; this military busybody is not the Church.
But then who is the Church for this purpose.
That is what has got into me, Principal, that at
present no one is the Church for this. We have
no court for the trial of new doctrine. And if I
am told the diocesan Bishop is the judge, then I
ask what Diocesan (supposing any bishop could
give the time and toil it asks) would feel he was
free to judge according to his own mind and
conscience? He would say he could only

Johns Purpose. 95
interpret the Church's statutes. But then how
if the statutes no longer represent the true mind
at this present time of the Church? Suppose
your ' heretic ' is not a heretic but a new prophet
who is also a true, and that he brings a new
interpretation of belief which the Church will
accept as soon as she comes to consider and
understand it, what then ? Well it seems to me
that the prophet will have to be condemned by
however reluctant an episcopal judge at the dicta
tion of some snorting old warhorse, only because
the accused is in verbal disagreement with the
Church's statute, while in mental and spiritual
agreement with the Church's mind, if she had
time and means to learn what her mind about
the matter at this moment is." There he paused,
and then added more quietly, "I'm not saying
Rothbury is a true prophet, though I much doubt
if he is a heretic. But some one else may
presently be in his case who is a prophet, and I
don't see how he is to fare any better." There
he stopped for good.
" Well," I said, " I don't think I see yet why
you should move from Driborough. Perhaps
we do lack what you miss in the Church, a valid
authority to interpret her mind ; but your leaving
your post will not provide this."
Then he looked up at me, his face lighting.

96 Pastor Futurus.
" There's no one else I can tell why. But I
want to confess something to you — the only time
I shall have ever come to confession : but you are
not Confessor, you are Soul's-friend to me. I'm
going to confess to you ... a sin — the sin that
it is ' to covet honour ' : an ambition, I mean "
... (I had to wait, and I was glad he dropped
his eyes again.) " Dear Father, I somehow feel
I shall be able to do something to help. I can't
tell what, but something, if only I can get where
I can think out what is in my mind already, but
very dim. You remember Tennyson's line, how
one can see the
Far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother
Conjectures of the features of her child
Ere it is born.
That is the way I am coming to know my pur
pose. . . . Yes, I have the hope of learning
about communion, what makes it, what breaks it,
really, not in word, not in law, but in truth.
That is my quest, mine, I soberly believe. And
I cannot go on it where I am, full of practical
work that I never overtake, and with no wiser
friend to take counsel with. No, let me come
back here for a year or two, with some excuse
for coming, something to do but not too much,
and with you to talk with when I want. That's

Johns Purpose. 97
my confession, Father, and the absolution I ask
you for is — to be absolved from Driborough."
I do not know what I said to this. Nothing
apt ; I never can. But I know what I thought.
The Lord hath spoken and His servant has
heard.

XVI.
three in Who taught us children in the schoolroom to
council * , , „,
chant Iwos company, threes trumpery r
Absurd. The best company time I ever spent
was with two more (one's with us still) round a
dinner table in a college room, when all the very
best that was in each of us came hurrying to the
door to welcome in the very best in the others,
and one learnt that it is not good for man to be
alone, because he is never quite the whole man
of him till the other men are there too. And so
it was, or almost so, last night, with John and
James and me round my study fire. Almost.
For that other three had " the ineffable sense of
youth in common," and this time there were but
two to share that "ineffable". . . . Nay, nay,
there were three. At the touch of that youth-
fulness of theirs " the lightsome spirit of his youth
returned " on this man, whose work once made
him as a father to their minds, as his years are
enough to make him a father in the flesh.
It must all go down here, though I have had
98

Three in Council. 99
to sleep over it, by help of my jottings before I
went late to bed. I shall have to record our
speeches, theirs at least, with some of the freedom
which we gratefully accord to Thucydides : like
him I must preface them with a cautionary ekegav
TotaSe. James Verley had come in from Southwark to
confer with us before going to the family living
of Norhampton. Some of the wiseheads there
have been shaken portentously at that boy (a
bare twenty-eight year old !) taking this prefer
ment, with its social and class problems (they
said) needing such experience and tact. The
Bishop was appealed to in hopes he would pri
vately cause a withdrawal ; but Barrington said
"Tut! My great uncle, Sir Walter, when he
was not four years more than half Verley 's age,
had to rule a province in India for a bit. Of
course he'll make some blunders : let them thank
Heaven they've got a vicar young enough to
make blunders, and make something else — as,
say, a more wideawake Christian community out
of that frumpy old St. Giles'. And if they can't
be waked, that new quarter of the railway men
is just made for this gallant youngster and he for
them." So James is going all right, and comes
to see us about it. "I'm really come," he says,
to "settle Jonathan in at his new job," meaning
7*

ioo Pastor Futurus.
the Cathedral chaplaincy just arranged. But the
official reason is the order of his uncle the patron
to "go and get primed by our wisdom here " be
fore he starts his own job. Wisdom ! He gives,
I expect, more than he gets. The sort of wis
dom our English churchmanship wants nowadays
is the wiseness that is in a push of warm blood
through a young Englishman's veins, in a tongue
well hung and not afraid to wag through fear of
the frumps of society or of theology either, and,
best of all, a little electric fluid in the brain, with
a heart that dares let the lightnings play about
outside the son of thunder. O golden Parrhesia,
Mouth-boldness that Paul prayed his friends to
pray for him, holy spirit of frank Utterance, how
good art thou for the priest of a highly respect
able and well-connected congregation of an
English borough, and also for a missioner to the
labour suburb at their doors. Well I am giving
a true inventory of Verley' s gifts for this pastorate,
but it's not a full one till I set down that broad,
ruddy countenance like a sunrise on a hill-top.
All kind angels inspire and prosper my goodly
scholar, this gallant James Boanerges ; keep him
in your hands that he dash not his foot against a
stone and lame his march to victory.
But come ; to our night of talk. It began
with John drawing him on the night-work "across

Three in Council. ioi
the bridges," certain torch -light processions,
" round-ups " James calls them, sacred raids in
which they raked out taprooms and swept up
street-corners and filled a church floor with very
new acquaintances of the place, some of whom
repeated this call. I told him I hoped these ad
mirable tactics could be remodelled for the Nor-
hampton campaign where the features of the
country were so different, except perhaps in the
railway quarter. St. Giles' the Demure wants
raiding, I said, as much almost as your old slum,
but it's very difficult ground, that residents'
quarter ; highly enclosed I should say ; wire-
entanglements everywhere of prejudice and eti
quette, deep earthworks of ancient stolidity which
they have been piling up for generations ; you'll
never pound them down at long range, and I
trust you may find it possible to rush them.
However, I have a notion that for the first year
or so your strategy will be to mask the frump-
fortress while you capture the lines of the work
men's tenements. That may compel the sur
render of the City Comfortable, when they see
the plate-layers and the navvies going into the
Kingdom before them. I don't know, but it
might be tried.
John chimed in, " Yes, yes, go for the tene
ments first, Jem. It's what I'd like best myself,

102 Pastor Futurus.
but I couldn't do it, you can. Can't I see you
rounding-up ; taking the honest fellow by the
hand to lead him out of the pub ; or helping him
out, I expect, by the scruff of the neck, and he
rather gratified by the kind attentions, and saying
he ' likes a parson what takes a man as he finds
him '. You're just right for navvies, and the
Church will look up in Norhampton. But then
there are so many, many Hamptons and such a
few Jem Verleys. I want Principal to tell me
how the rest of us, who are not built for Chris
tophers, are to carry Christianity across to this
great new world of working men. If the Church
cannot do this — well, how is one to find the heart
to do the things we are doing, such as providing
religious comforts for the Norhampton parlour
people ?
" Yes, I know," he went on, thinking he read
dissent on my face, which he did not, " I know,
Principal, there are souls to be saved in the
parlours too, and certainly in the sculleries. But
still I feel that our shepherd duties nowadays
want to be turned round the other way from the
parable ; we ought to leave the one sheep safe
in the fold and go after the ninety and nine in
the wilderness. Don't you think it is so ? "
I said I was with him, except in the leaving
the one sheep, but that for a paradox his way of

Three in Council. 103
putting it might stand. But as we only had
James at present to send after the ninety-nine,
" shall not we ask him how he thinks of taking
in hand these strayed sheep — no, that's not right,
these other sheep that never were of this fold.
What are you planning, James ? How are you
going to round-up — if that's the technicality —
how will you round-up the ninety-nine sheep ? "
No, that would not do. He hadn't come for
this, but to be "primed" by us. Besides we
had made him brag too much about what he had
done, and he was not going to brag again of
what he was going to do. Anyhow we were to
teach him his job : that was what we were all
here for.
"Why, that's right enough," said John.
"That's what we are for. You have only to
set forth your young ideas, and then, if we can
not give you any better of our own, we'll faith
fully show you how bad yours are."
This seemed good sense, and it started him.
Once off we soon got him on the run. But there
was no need to excuse himself for brag ; nothing
was further from his tone. He began, "If you
put it that way, John, there was a bit of a bad
idea in my head, which I did want Principal and
you to hear and say whether there is anything in
it, or only my bumptiousness. Southwark makes

104 Pastor Futurus.
a man ask himself some shrewd questions about
the Gospel to the Poor. Our Church methods
are not up to much. The men don't come to
church most of them ; there wouldn't be room if
they did come. Very well, that set me asking
myself how the Gospel was to go to people who
will not come to it. Perhaps it might be the
same way as the Gospel came to Jem Verley.
What way was that then? How did I 'get
religion'? Well it wasn't in a way to satisfy
old Elijah, our shepherd at home, the village
prophet, for he got his along with an awful stitch
in the side and a shout of Glory Hallelujah.
Perhaps I didn't get it. However if I did, it
came to me in a fine mix-up with other things,
when I got into the Fifth at Lillington : it came
along with winning my second Fifteen colours,
and the notion of playing up generally for the
old foundation, as the Head always called it,
which he was getting on its legs again. When
I really thought about being religious, it was just
those things over again for me, only set in a
higher key ; it was the life and ' go ' in a
youngster with a new name for them. It was a
sort of baptism, one might say, of the public school
spirit. You know we had more than a bit of
romance in us in those years of Lillington, and
some of us who took things seriously after con-

Three in Council. 105
firmation, that is how we took them : it was
the schoolboy romance screwed up several pegs.
Really I think that was how the Gospel came to
James Verley.
" Well, then, I say to myself, that's the way it
comes to other people : it will be their romance,
screwed up. I suppose your mason and carpenter
and even your spinner and pin-maker has got a
romance somewhere about him ; must have, if
he has a soul about him, as we all tell him he
has. So I take it what we need to do is to show
him that our Gospel is his own romance over
again, only ours is the real true version of it.
I should like to say to him, ' Don't you get think
ing that I'm come to stop your beer and make
you do things that seem to look silly on you, and
only fit for your wife and kiddies, like hymns
about the New Jerusalem. I'm wanting to show
you how to make the most of yourself and get
the best out of your life, while you are doing
your fifty years' hard at making pins-heads or
boot-heels. You don't really think a man's life
is all grind or else all beer and skittles, nor half
the one and half the other. There's a something
else, you know there is. You found it out one
day when you first walked out with your young
woman, and when the baby was born, and when
you saw your pal chuck his drinking to get his

106 Pastor Futurus.
wife a new gown, or that nursemaid fetched the
child out from the house on fire, or when news
came of Broadshire lads standing fast under shell
fire on the koppe. There, that's what our Gospel
is about. I want to try and tell you what we
know about that Something Else, how you can
get hold of it for yourself, what a grand thing it
is just to be a man, just to be a good working-
man, good mate, good husband, good father.
We'll talk about the New Jerusalem another
day ; but I'm all with the man who said he was
"out " for building Jerusalem in England's green
and pleasant land, or England's grim and grimy
land either. Our Gospel is to show a man how
he can have a good time, and see life well in a
week of forty-four hours' work with Sunday off
and half of Saturday. Is that an unlikely story,
friend ? Was not Jesus Christ a carpenter ?
Just let me tell you a little more about it, and
then you can go off to the street-corner and see
if the preacher there can do you better than we
can. Here we all made a pause to take breath.
When I felt " time " had to be called, I said, " I
see one thing that promises well for your cam
paign. Your method is soundly catholic ; it has
the note of primitiveness, it was the way of our
Church of England as early as when Edwin's

Three in Council. 1 07
thane asked Paulinus to tell him whence the
soul comes, like the sparrow into the King's hall,
and whither away again into the night. Paulinus
had come to tell them of that Something Else,
which was not the fire on the King's hearth or
the feast on the tables nor the working and fight
ing that won them ; Something Else that was on
the farther side of the door in and the door out ;
if the missionary knew of that, the pagan man
would care to be a Christian. It seems to me
your new way is the oldest way and likely to be
the right one."
John took it up. " But I think Verley 's plan
of campaign has something new of its own too.
Our Paulinus means to tell his pagans of a Some
thing Else on the inside of the doors in and out,
alongside of the fire-light and the victuals. He
means to show them that, if the Kingdom of
heaven is not meat and drink, still the meat and
drink can be the Kingdom, part of it. Isn't that
so, Jem ? "
" That's a little like it — except the drink. It
will be pretty hard to persuade my folk that
drink is part of the Kingdom : it's the other way
for them. You see their idea of a Christian is
the man who doesn't drink, doesn't swear, doesn't
bet, doesn't do — a few other things. They are
under the Law, like old Jews : it is ' Thou shalt

108 Pastor Futurus.
not ' all the way. How not to do it, behold the
art of being a Christian in Southwark."
"That is the misery of it," said John, "not
for your working folk only : but," he persisted,
"just there is the Gospel for us to preach, that
Christianity is a man's life, his work, food, and
play over again, but done better this time. I
liked above all things what you said about its
being a grand thing to be a man for the chance
it gives of becoming a good one. What else is
one's religion but having a man's life and living
it the best way and living it out to the full ? I
should not know how to preach that Gospel to
your workers myself, but I seem to know a little
what the Gospel is, and you, Jem, will be able
to preach it too."
Here we got upon the problem of the soulless
trades. How can we teach a man who makes
pin-heads or pin-points all day and every day, to
make pins like a Christian ? How is he to live
this part of his existence Christianwise or indeed
to live it any wise at all ? Verley, however, re
minded us that even pins, Christian-made or
heathen, do not take up all a man's time. He
cast a sum, and reckoned that with Sunday off
and half Saturday and the evenings of the other
five, one might say that the man has two-sevenths
of the week outside his working hours. " I look

Three in Council. 109
at it this way. Five-sevenths of his waking
hours the man, your pin-maker that is, can't be
counted to be living ; it is as if this time was
spent in sleep : put it at the worst he is just non
existent for those hours : his living is done in
those two-sevenths of the week. Now that gives
him a total life as working man which certainly
is not a long one, little more than a third of ours ;
but if he can learn to be alive, really alive, while
he lasts, his case is not worse than the case of a
better-advantaged man who is cut off at forty.
I don't say the case is not sad, but that is the
measure of it."
"Not quite," I criticized. "Those five days
when he is non-existing he is wearing out his
body ; then Sunday comes and his poor body lies
a-bed (small blame to it), and how is his soul to get
up and do any living ? Then, when both of them
are up, how are we to help him to use the Sabbath
opportunity ? Worship, no doubt. Well, James,
we want to hear you on the working man at
church. Tell us whether your people are like
those of my anti-revisionist friends, who want,
they assure me, ' The Prayer Book, the whole
Prayer Book, and nothing but the Prayer Book '.
What do you want in a Revision ? "
James said he wanted a heap of things : " a new
Lectionary, for Sundays at least, to save the

no Pastor Futurus.
workman going home and telling his wife she
wouldn't get him to church any more, where they
read about three men in a furnace. ' He been
a puddler, he know'd about blast-furnaces, and he
know'd that story weren't right.' But there's
something I want much more, and that is plenty
of new prayers. My puddler, if he did come to
church again, would say we gave him no chance :
there's nothing said about smelting-furnaces and
steam hammers, and nothing about trade unions
and wages and a free breakfast table, nor yet
about football and rabbit coursing. His affairs
are not considered, he thinks, in our religion :
he'd have to go to chapel or the parks for that.
Now of course the Church cannot keep her Prayer
Book up to date, like a Whitaker's Almanac ;
but I should like to see a Liberty of Prophesying
in prayer as well as in preaching. Why not
authorize the minister by rubric to make some
prayers of his own, and name the needs of the
forge or warehouse or farm or coalpit : and the
same with the thanksgivings ? I don't see why
your 'nothing but the Prayer Book' people
should stand out against this. We already do
the thing in the sermon when we tell the con
gregation what to ask for or give thanks for ; my
plan would be just a distribution of the sermon
over the service, and good for both of them. The

Three in Council. in
sort of priests who try to let the sermon down in
order to get the service up, ought to back me in
turning preaching into praying. They criticize
our extemporizing friends in the chapel because
they ' preach the prayer,' so they surely will
not object to our praying the preachment.
" But if I am to say, Principal, what I think
about revising the Prayer Book, it is that we must
revise a deal more than the Book if we are to
tackle the slum. Here's the notion I'm getting
in Southwark of what the ' Real Church,' has
to do. We have to get our people to believe the
Church is what we want to call it — real : that
religion is good business. Now Mattins and
Evensong and Eucharist are real to us; they are
not to the common artisan and still less to the
class under him. They are a good way of edify
ing your Christian when you have made one, but
you can't convert your pagan that way. No,
there's another way for that."
We waited, and then John asked what this
way was.
" It's the way that old Elijah made converts.
Conversion by contagion, I call it. As ignorant
an old saint as you like, but full of Christianity,
and it ran out of him at every pore. If you came
too near him, you got religion, as from another
sort you may get the measles. When one thinks

112 Pastor Futurus.
of it, that is how we get most things, like good
manners or a panic ; we catch them from some
one. Now I believe this is how we clergy are
to convert people : we must have Christianity in
ourselves, then come near people and give it them.
Conversion by contagion is the best name I can
find for it."
John was highly pleased. "Yes, Jem, you are
as right as can be ; except perhaps about the
Eucharist, on which I would like to say some
thing presently. You want the evangelist to
live among his heathen, do all the old things as
before, the Prayer Book, and Hours, Services
and Communions, that feed the fire in himself;
but to trust not to these things for drawing in
converts, but to personal contact with them in
daily life of a man who tries to live the daily life
Christian-wise. Only the labourers are few.
We shall not get on very fast with the evangel
izing of the millions, if we have to do it only by
sprinkling our Elijahs among them."
"Oh, of course, it has to be worked on the
snowball principle. The parson must set it
rolling among the C.E.M.S., and they must
speak every man to his neighbour, and
every man to his brother saying, ' Know the
Lord'. There is where I see the real supply
of the ' work ' which the Men's Society all

Three in Council. 113
profess and say it is often so hard to invent for
themselves : their work is to roll up the snowball
by speaking every one to his neighbour. Yet I
don't quite mean like the St. Andrew's Brother
hood, every man finding his own brother to bring
in ; for does one actually expect to bring in the
millions, if ' bring in ' means make communicants
of them or even churchgoers ? No doubt every
Christian is bound to be communicant, just as
the Church is bound to be Holy and Catholic.
Yes, just as much ; and the man will be the one
just as soon as the Church is the other. Now
here is where our ' realness ' has to come in.
It is not real to lay our plans of evangelizing on
the lines of ' no churchgoer, no Christian '.
Besides the Christianity of coming to church,
there's the Christianity of being a decent member
of the human race, one who does not steal, or
swear falsely, or kill the life in his neighbour by
hate or by lust. I say this decent behaviour in
a multitude is a fruit of the Spirit, like devoutness
or self-sacrifice in the few ; and if we priests and
religious lay-folk can convert the many to only
this much of the Faith by ourselves living among
them the life of a worshipper, then we are not
to break our hearts, like some good fellows,
because we can bring so few to the altar rail
and not too many even inside the church door.
8

114 Pastor Futurus.
Are the people lost who keep outside? Are
there no degrees of being saved ? Well, I believe
a man, like Chisleton at Linbourn, who does
only the ordinary things in the way of services
and parish work, but lets the villagers know him
and his family and the life they lead, I believe
he is a real redeemer of that grace-forsaken
place. People say ' Linbourn is grown quite
respectable now ' ; but I say ' Linbourn is
being saved'. Not many more communicants
are on the roll than in the bad time, but do I
suppose there is not more salvation of souls
going on in that forlorn parish, because Chisleton
has not tuned things up to salvation-pitch, only
up to that of decency? I don't. When Bill,
though he hasn't taken to church, has given up
beating Jenny, I think some salvation has come
to that house and Bill is on the way to be a son
of the Church. This is a way, I think, in which
we labourers shall reap where we sow :
only one must have the eyes to see the harvest.
It is the part of a ' Real Churchman ' to see it,
and thank God and take courage. Am I wrong,
Principal ? "
Naturally he had me with him here, but I set
John on to make the objection he had promised.
"Yes — about the Eucharist. You coupled
it with the other offices as not being real to

Three in Council. 115
workpeople. But I can't think they are on the
same level as to ' realness '. It is the Eucharist
that is the most real to such a man : I believe
the sacramentalists are right there, it is the service
for him. I felt that, when I watched the market
folk in Italy at mass. I said to myself, ' That
young workman in the soiled blue cloth with his
eyes on the priest — what is it that happens to
him ? Most likely he knows no doctrine about it ;
he is only aware of the Something Else that
Jem spoke of, something else than himself and
his tools in the basket, and which matters to him
more than they. He does not go to the chancel
step and receive the wafer, but there where he is
he feels a touch of the eternal world and knows
that he is a part of it. I say that is communicat
ing ; he has intercourse with the Unseen ;
Christ that enters, he is told, the bread on the
paten, enters this poor mortal's flesh ; the Incar
nation that passes on the altar passes also in the
vague peasant soul, that stands afar off and asks
God to be merciful to him a sinner for last night's
brawl or theft.'
" Now if that is what happens, the Mass is the
right instrument of the Incarnation for the
people who think with their eyes more than their
ears, even if they do not communicate. It is not
the Transubstantiation nor the magic which

116 Pastor Futurus.
works on the man, it is the drama, the Spiritual
truth not told but done, the 'Passions-Spiel' of
the Eucharist. This is why I think we are not
wrong in making a spectacle of the celebration,
especially in a church of the working class."
Verley backed him up. " I'm no good at
rites and ceremonies," he said, " but I half turned
ritualist when I was helping at St. Gabriel's, a
high celebration, and noticed what a hold it took
on the clerks and a good few artisans, even, I
thought, on those who only ' assisted '. What
do you, Principal, think about non-communicating
attendance ? "
" I think more of it than I did, after listening
to John. But if you think there is only a differ
ence of degree and not of kind between that and
communicating, then I disagree. No doubt we
could get men to look on who cannot be got to
receive : they are saved the self-committal there
is in the corporeal action. But perhaps that
spoils all ; they miss the fact which clinches faith,
the act of the man's bodily nature by which he
touches the Divine Reality, touches It with the
whole self of him. The Passion of Christ in His
body was the clinch (if I may call it so) of the
Incarnation : the communion with the bodily
symbols of that Passion is the clinch of our union
with the Incarnate One. The truest fear of non-

Three in Council. 117
communicating worship is less the fear of idolatry
than that our communicants should content
themselves with the easier course, and full com
munion be forsaken.
" But, dear friends, look at the clock. Can we
take on this great matter at the time of night it
is? I move the closure."
" Oh, but not," cried John, " till we give Jem a
send-off. He's away to-morrow early.
" So, God speed you, you big, brawny Chris
topher, carrying the Christ across the gulf to the
shore of the poor man. Go on, go on. You are
off on the Real Church's service, and the realest,
to seek and save the anima naturaliter Christiana
under the greasy blue jacket, and have the rough
fellow bless you back, when Orson finds Valentine
is his own brother, and one is their father even
' our fair father Christ '. We would all go with
you there, but we haven't Christopher's thews, so
we must stay at home and do what we are fit
for. But here's our prayer to go with you, and
there's use in that, I've come to think." . . . He
paused, " Prayer is the man. Where it goes
the man goes. Yes, we shall be there too, Jem,
alongside." The other, much moved, " Thank you for that.
It's a right good blessing, my brother Jonathan :
thou hast strengthened my hands in God."

XVII.
Our diocesan inspector met J. D. at lunch to
day, and declaimed against the Undenomina-
tionalists. When Stubbs had set forth the folly of the
Dean of Nochester who had been talking of a
Common Christianity which can be taught in
schools, and ended with his " astonishment that
anyone could imagine, even one of our new
deans, that teaching can do good without being
definite, clear-cut, so as to make an impression
on the child's mind," John looked across and
said, " I never feel quite sure what definiteness
means, when one teaches children. Now the
catechism is definite enough, if you look at the
language, say, in the section on the sacraments.
But it never gave me, when I was a school child,
any definite ideas : I fancy it was a fog of words
to me. I did not quite feel as a boy-friend of
mine did who told me that at his first school
they had in the parson once a week to give
a religious lesson, and he 'just hated it'. I
118

The Inspector. 119
didn't agree, but then I was taught at home,
and I think perhaps that parson was a little too
definite, and that that was what made the boy
hate it."
Stubbs was a trifle nettled, and gave us
severely his experience of Canon Smithson's
school as an example of what definiteness can
do. The results when he inspected there were
first-rate ; prompt, bright answers made you
see they had been carefully taught on the lines
of our syllabus : the top standards gave you
back the Vicar's teaching in a way that showed
great retentiveness. It was a very different
story at — well, he would not name the place, but
things are very broad there at the rectory, and
the master is from that three-parts agnostic
training college at Chilhampton. The Rector
teaches four days a week, and it is fair to say
the children like to be taken by him ; but I
cannot say the children give me back whatever
it is they get from him. No, ex nihilo nihil jit :
and ex nebula — not much more.
We honoured the expert's judgment by a
moment's silence, and then John remarked : —
" Perhaps I ought not to say it before a school
inspector, but I sometimes wonder if it is possible
to inspect religious teaching, if inspecting means
looking into things. One can report on the

120 Pastor Futurus.
writing and the arithmetic of a school, for one
can see them write and do sums, but how is one
to report on their religious knowledge, for how
can one see them do it ? "
Stubbs, I thought, became — may I in this
privacy say " stubbly," for bristly would over
state it? but with a difficult meekness he re
joined that he did his humble best as a servant
of the Church to carry out instructions, and these
were to discover whether the children were
learning the Bible and the Prayer Book. He
did not think it impossible to ascertain whether
they had some knowledge of those works.
John admitted this, but would Stubbs call it
religious knowledge ?
" That is what the diocese is contented to call
it." There were now unmistakable bristles, and
I thought I must interpose and save John from
the temptation of irony, so I put in that " Des
mond, I expect, is feeling what I used to feel
about examining a class in literature. You can
find out if the class has been taught the plot of a
Shakespeare play and some commonplaces about
the characters and the derivation of out of the
way words, but no question paper will ascertain
whether the teacher has inspired his class with a
sense of the music in Shakespeare's ' lofty line ' or
laid the spell of tragedy on them. I can remember

The Inspector. 121
being one of a class where the master was like
Matt Arnold's Byron-
He taught us little, but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder roll,
and he could have done nothing better for us ;
but an outside examiner could never have gauged
the vibrations of that ' thunder-roll ' on the soul
of the class. All the same we had to be taught
the Shakespeare, else the thunder would have
rolled in vain, and we needed to be examined to
ensure its being taught. Isn't that rather like
what you are meaning, Desmond ? "
John said I had put his meaning better than he
had known how, and he added (in the same
tones he had been using, so that he had not
really been mocking) that he hoped Stubbs would
not think he was minimizing the inspector's office,
and certainly not the discharge of it in the pre
sent hands, for he knew how that was valued in
our deanery from more than one of the clergy.
But he did think we were rather apt in this
education controversy to speak as if religion and
religious knowledge were the same thing, and it
might misdirect the Church policy. That was
what had been in his mind when he spoke about
inspection. Stubbs lowered his quills under this peaceable

122 Pastor Futurus.
treatment and the conversation ambled off to the
allied but guileless topic of the New Schoolmaster
and the Montessori System, which Stubbs ex
pounded with some mastery, and earned our
grateful appreciation. I doubt if I took it up as
well as John, but that was in part because my
mind was straying somewhat in pursuit of John's
meaning in his late dialectic passage. I think I
overtake it. Institutional Religion — there's the
religion which is not John's. He has not the
Latin mind. Rome was schoolmistress from the
beginning, has been so under every government,
and I suppose we ourselves are often romanizing
unaware when we put more trust in the institu
tions, the catechism and syllabus and inspection
and education act, than the things can safely
carry. That is not John's danger, no. Yet I
see a danger-signal here for his development.
For if the Latin way can conduct to sterility,
yet I would not have his native bent carry him
into that other wilderness, the mystic's. He is
our flower. O ye showers and dews of the Lord,
keep our scholar from either barrenness : bring
flower to fruit.

XVIII.
" Our Circle " met in very full circle this time. " our
CIRCLE '
The subject for discussion promised us that : one meets.
foresaw that Oldham's recent book " The Spiritual
Trusteeship," which Archdeacon James was to
appreciate in his paper, would prove a rallying
signal for our Conservative Churchmen and our
Liberal alike.
James was a sympathetic critic of his college
contemporary's book. . Just a little patronizing
perhaps, as if he could not forget the days when
the author and he were members of their college
Essay Society. At that point they were more
equal in their literary reputations than they have
been since James' mainly practical career denied
him prominence among strict thinkers in theology.
Patronizing, but not a bit minimizing. Indeed
he was somewhat enthusiastic in his presentation
of Oldham's courageous attitude towards certain
domineering critics over the water, whose specula
tions on Christian Beginnings have laid some
123

124 Pastor Futurus.
spell on our younger scholars. " I confess," he
said at one point, ' ' great admiration for the mental
hardiness of the book, its healthy, hearty, English
insularity, the writer's refusal to be bluffed, as some
of us are, by the self-confidence of a critic if the
vowels of his name happen to have a different
value from our own, or if his syntax is more
ponderously entangled and his exact drift open
only to conjecture by our poor English wits."
Then, on his own account he dropped a little
acid upon the theory of Stolz. " Are we really
going to be imposed on by this egregious
phantasy of the elaboration of the doctrine of
the Trinity out of a Zoroastrian sect which he
has unearthed somewhere on the Persian gulf?
This bumptious nonsense will go the way of a
few other discoveries of the foreign critics whose
mare's-nests now are left unto them desolate ; " a
remark which left me asking myself if the bump
tiousness were all on one side of the sea and
theologic humility an appanage only of our
Anglican Church.
Newfoakes, the ex-headmaster (Smythies,
Bors' curate, thinks him and a colleague who
has followed him here from Lillington to be " the
two most dangerous men in the diocese "), was
looked at by some of us to take up the challenges
which the paper had thrown down. He did it,

" Our Circle" Meets. 125
but without alacrity, and like a tired man. " I
have been feeling about the book somewhat as a
reviewer of Seaforth's ' Virgil Illustrated,' who
said the work had been done so well that it was
a sad pity it had not been done better. I don't
quite know what the man meant, but he finds me
words for the sort of half-disappointed admiration
which Oldham leaves with me. What the Arch
deacon has said about his refreshing hardiness
of thought strikes me as most just. And it is
not the hardiness of two generations back, when
our intellectual courage was too much the gift to
us of our ignorance and conceit. It is a well-
informed hardihood, he knows the arguments
which he is replying to. But that is where the
disappointment comes. He seems to be con
scious of principles of criticism which are adequate
to the discussion of religious problems under the
light of our new scholarship, and he more than
half accepts them, though he avows them only
in guarded phraseology of his own. But then
he does not go on where his principles must
carry him. It is as if he had loaded his gun
with the due 14-inch cartridge, and then when
he fires it off the shot drops a long way short of
the target : somewhere the explosive stuff in the
charge must have leaked out, I suppose." Then
he went into some particulars about the history

126 Pastor Futurus.
of the dogmatic tradition, gaining very little
of that adherence which an audience can de
monstrate so palpably without a sound or a
look. Since two of a trade are proverbially unable
to agree it was inevitable that Jefferson, the
Chaplain from Bridgenorth College who can get
over to us for the September meeting, should be
on the other side to Newfoakes. He spoke
with a measure, a measure rather running over
one felt, of pastoral responsibility for the faith of
our young Church people. He disclaimed
(again with a modesty in excess of the require
ments, for he took a good Second in theology),
the right to criticize the dogmatic positions of
the book before us, and said that the only contri
bution he could fitly make must come from his
experience as teacher in a boys' school. Did
not Newfoakes agree with him that we must
keep Biblical criticism at arm's-length from the
public schools? There at any rate one must
be dogmatic, and not be afraid of being behind
the times. Of course we must have progress in
theology, he knew, but the schoolmasters were
not the right pace-makers in that race. Some
of our young masters were a trouble in this way.
When a sixth-form master of six-and-twenty (he
must not name, but Newfoakes would probably

" Our Circle" Meets. 127
guess) is in the habit of airing his acquisition of
the last new book of German scholarship by
telling the boys in a sort of aside that he, their
master, has no use for — well, for our best-estab
lished divines, it seemed high time for a little
discipline in the Church's teaching faculty. But
anyhow, and without questioning the value of a
man's theology in his twenties, he thought what
we wanted for a class of boys was not so much
the teacher's theology as his religion, which is a
different thing. (A sigh of assent escaped John
at this. )
I suppose we were feeling we had heard
enough from the men of the School, and wanted
to listen to men of the home and parish. At
any rate there was some signalling now for
Langton, our best Tractarian, " in whom that
ancient honour more appears than any that draw
breath in" Carleford. The Chairman called on
him, and this " old disciple " drew in his long
legs, and swayed forward that benevolent coun
tenance, venerated high and low and wide,
poising its weight with large hands upon bony
knees. One could quite see the long, friendly
nose meditating for a few seconds, before he
said, " No — well, really — I don't feel as if I have
anything to say worth anyone's hearing. I keep
up so badly with the times : I can't read German

128 Pastor Futurus.
like some of you, and I know very little of what
has been doing since criticism came in. I
suppose I'm not much farther on than where the
Lux Mundi people brought me, and left me by
the wayside, you will say. So if I am to join
this discussion it can only be to say how we
backward scholars are struck by the new ideas
that are about in the Church . . . Well, we are
puzzled : that's what we are, puzzled. We always
have understood ' the faith once delivered unto
the saints ' meant the Bible, and after the Bible
the Creeds. Of course we see that the Bible
needs to be interpreted to Christians ; that is the
office of the Church, and we do not think any
Scripture can be ' of private interpretation '.
Well, but these critics — now please don't think
I am judging them ; I couldn't, not having read
them ; I only take what those who know more
tell me — these critics are very private inter
preters. Isn't it so ? Do they not give us just
their own private ideas about our blessed Lord,
just on their own single authority ? Old-fashioned
people like me want to hear what the Church
says about those ideas. I daresay we are rather
stupid, and indolent too, but it is not all our
stupidity and dislike of change that makes us
unready to accept new thoughts : we recognize
that scientific discoveries have made us change

"Our Circle" Meets. 129
the way of understanding parts of the Bible, I
mean, of the Old Testament. For instance, we
have all long ago given up the Six Days'
creation " (" Not everybody yet," was overheard
from Jenkins) " and Joshua's sun in Ajalon.
But then we know that the Church has given
them up, and we can do it obediently. Then
too these things are not in the Creeds. But
when a critic asks us to believe that the New
Testament writers are wrong about the Empty
Grave, and that the Body of our Lord did not
rise but only an Appearance of Him was seen by
the disciples, then we feel we are asked to give
up part of the deposit of faith with which the
Church was entrusted. It is the Church that re
ceived these truths at the beginning and hands
them on as a trust to aftertimes, and if we are to
give them up it can only be if first the Church
gives them up. But has the Church done so ?
. . . Well, yes, I know some of the brethren
here will tell us that we are not asked to give up
anything that matters to our faith ; that they are
as sure as they ever were that Christ really rose
and really showed Himself alive, only the way
of it was different from what the Church once
believed. That is where I feel puzzled, as I said
just now. For what they say does not seem
quite unreasonable, in a spiritual way of looking
9

130 Pastor Futurus.
at the Resurrection : please don't think I suppose
that people who think that way must have less
real faith than we have : perhaps they have much
more. But there it is : the Church has always
taught that the Body did rise, and has the
Church changed her mind ? . . . The only other
thing I should like to say is that as a parish
priest I have another difficulty. The Gospel is
for the Poor. But the Poor — what kind of a
Gospel for them is this Resurrection of Christ
without the Body ? Can these simple folk take in
the belief that Jesus really came to the disciples,
if He did so only in a spiritual way, not a
bodily ? But if they cannot believe it, then to the
Poor a Gospel is not preached, if it is only
preached that way. That makes me very unable
to think it can be the true Gospel for anyone,
poor or not. One must be humble in judging
about these mysteries, especially when one has
no brains for philosophies : but one can only say
what one feels, and I feel these philosophic
people must be wrong somehow. But I hope
they won't think me uncharitable. I try not to
be." This was where I hoped John would be drawn
in to speak, for he had been watching Langton
with a cordial expression, but things turned out
very differently indeed, for Bulling (whom

"Our Circle" Meets. 131
Julian introduced to the Circle as a younger man
" whose Christianity was sound and also vigor
ous") broke in. I am afraid that " broke in " is the
right word for Bulling's interpolations : he cer
tainly is vigorous. And sound ? Well, there is
always plenty of sound when he breaks in.
(Dear Memory of Julian, forgive me that sorry
and ill-natured gibe at your protege : yet if the
saints in peace can blush for mortals, your gentle
shade must feel creep over you the " something
of a rosy shame " which Browning fancied for
them, when you overhear the curate of St.
Matthew's on his rostrum. ) Bulling dragged the
debate away as it were with a cart-rope from the
New Testament to the Old, which no one was
thinking of (" Bulling it, as usual," murmured
Jenkins into my deaf right ear), and on that chosen
field he valorously bludgeoned the reputes,
scholarly and theologic together, of the critics of
Daniel. (" Quite a lion in a den of Daniels, eh ? "
muttered the importunate one on my right to
my still obdurate countenance.) When, at an
obstreperous challenge addressed to the distinc
tive critics, at large, a "let them all come," to
disprove if they could the historicity of the Fiery
Furnace, Newfoakes shook his head sadly,
Bulling turned his battery on him, with a " Have
you read Sir Ephraim Thwaites on Daniel?"
9*

132 Pastor Futurus.
and receiving a still more mournful head-shaking,
told him not without ferocity that he "had better
do so : it would answer his doubt ".
Upon this shameless explosion (I never found
our brother quite so detonating as to-day) there
supervened a moment of awed silence. But
Bors in the chair with excellent address suggested
that we should like to hear our new member on
the subject, from which he thought we were a
little getting away. I wanted our scholar of the
Chantry to please the Circle, who know little of
him beyond his University record. Was I a
Scots dominie bringing his " lad o' pairts" to the
manse, for the old scholar there to examine with
a view to a college career? It felt like that,
and I was grateful to Bulling : his oration would
be most ingratiating for whoever followed him.
John took up the title of the book " The Spiritual
Trusteeship," and said it had suggested something
to him as to the problem of re-interpretation of
Church doctrine. Trust and Deposit were meta
phors from the bank and law court, and he sup
posed we must be on the watch as always against
our metaphors misleading an argument ; but it
had struck him that in this case the legal figure
lent itself very aptly to help our thinkings in this
new problem of the Creeds.
" I am thinking how some entailed property,

" Our Circle" Meets. 133
transmitted to the heir as an estate with a house
on it, through trustees empowered to convert it
into other values, might become a property of
railway or colonial stock. It would then be
known as, say, ' the Hasledon money,' after the
family name. Now the land after the re-invest
ment by the trustees has lost half its worth for
the new owner because the neighbouring town
has decayed and building land become valueless :
but the new investments, less corporeal, are per
manent — till new changes come.
" Might one say then that we trustees of the
Deposit of Faith are discharging our trust rightly
if we reinvest its value in new spiritual concep
tions. If we kept the old body of the property
(which might prove a 'body of death') we
should not be fraudulent trustees, but we should
be unfortunate in our trusteeship. We ought
surely to watch the spiritual market and, if need
be, change our securities so as to safeguard the
old values in a new and prosperous embodi
ment." Some knitting of brows and pursing of lips at
this. My own turn coming I made the remark
that Mr. Desmond's thought of the reinvestment
of entrusted values might help us to understand
in a new way the Christ-saying, " It is expedient
for you that I go away, for if I go not away the

134 Pastor Futurus.
Comforter will not come unto you ". Might we
render it as if Jesus were saying, " My truth is
embodied now in this corporeal presence of me,
and it will be not limited only but lost if it re
mains there in this body ? It must be re-embodied
in a non-corporeal, non-finite, spiritual body,
which shall not be a body of death ; and this
shall be, for I do not die as this body will die, I
do but change my life, and by changing it make
it yours again and more really yours."
At this word John threw me a grateful look ;
it pleased me to win it.
Bors winding up said we could persuade him,
if there could ever be again the same new
moment in the Church history as when Christ
"changed His life". But that was, we must
think, a unique moment, never recurring. As
a fact the Church for nineteen centuries had found
no need to alter her understanding of the re
vealed facts on which we rest — Incarnation,
Atonement, Resurrection. These were facts,
they had happened once, they were beyond
change now, he did not see how our minds could
ever outgrow a revealed fact. No doubt the
phraseology in which we explain the fact to our
flocks would have to be altered a little as the
language of the people alters in the course of
time ; but we could modify the language of our

' ' Our Circle ' ' Meets . 135
instruction in classes without touching the terms
of the Creed. There he thought a line must be
drawn. I wonder if Smythies will now report John
and me to his friends as " the next most danger
ous men in the diocese".

XIX.
" star to John has said little, though perhaps he has done
Irates" much, since he joined us. His idea that he
light" Would use our counsels here in his theological
project has so far been disappointed. I do not
wonder. Did I find at his age that one could
bring an elder's mind, even the nearest, into
conference on the thought which lay deepest in
one's own soul ? There was the fear lest a
divergence should appear and turn away the
father's heart from the children's, and that too on
a false issue because the divergence was only
seeming and in the ripened thought the gap
would be refilled. And then there was the
instinctive modesty and reverence which makes
all nature keep the birth-processes veiled, at the
birth of mind as well as of body. I must not
grudge this incommunicableness in him, now the
elder is myself.
And a glimpse of his mind we did, I think,
get in his Easter sermon. Public confession is
for the strong spirits more convenient than
136

"Star to Star Vibrates Light." 137
auricular ; what is lost in secrecy is gained in
freedom by the impersonality of the disclosure
from a pulpit. A suppressio veri while the verum
is not yet ripe for verification to the preacher's
audience and perhaps not even verified for him
self, is not merely guiltless ; the suppression
may be part of the preacher's responsibility. He
is the ordained and licensed of the Church, but
what she licenses is not his mere idiosyncrasy,
still less his experimental idiosyncrasy. There
was meaning for me in the passage where he
dealt with the gift of the Spirit in the Upper
Room. ("He breathed on them " . . . " Receive
ye the Holy Ghost") He has it that the speech
and the gift were directed to the "whole congre
gation of Christ's Church," not the Apostolic
college ; and a hardening which came into his
tone when he referred to the Church theory of
the Institutionalists, compared with an enthusiasm
which I at least could detect in his argument
for the more democratic conception of the first
Christian polity, seemed to tell me something of
him. But the glimpse was got in sentences
which I retain. "How can we interpret the
sacrament of that moment, ' He breathed on
them,' except as conveying a gift of Life, the
Life which Christ brought, which He was ? One
is surely meant to think how ' God formed man

138 Pastor Futurus.
out of the dust of the ground and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a
living soul.' One must venture it, that here too
there was a making of man ; a recreation by the
Christ, a breathing in of the life which was His.
The symbol is far less intelligible as a sacrament
conveying the grace of ecclesiastic rule or of
priestly absolving power. Yet this it could be if
rule and absolution can be thought of as specific
energies of that Life. That indeed is how we
ought to think of it. But do we? In our re
searches and reasonings about the founding of
the Kingdom do we use the methods of students
who inquire into the vital facts of that living
organism the Body of Christ, or are we still using
the methods of legal and political scholarship?
If we are, it cannot be that we are being led by
the Spirit into all truth. One wonders whether
there will not need arise some Copernicus of
religion, inspired to lead his fellows into vaster
horizons and make revolution in all our vision of
the world of Spirit."
Now what have we here ? Much more than
met the ear. Not a word perhaps more than I
should be ready to say myself. But behind the
word was the accent, and it stirred in me curiosity,
and an anticipation not quite unedged with appre
hension.

"Star to Star Vibrates Light." 139
I wonder if Bors saw anything in it. I stole a
look at him once or twice, but did not surprise any
disturbance on his placid features. But then
what John was speaking of was only in the region
of ideas.
John a little surprised me this afternoon, when
on a walk we discussed Grantham's modernizing
article in the "New Interpreter" ; surprised me
by the want of sympathy he evinced with the
writer. John cannot be so " modernist " as I was
thinking him. He was not hostile to the conten
tions in the article, but merely cold and aloof, as if
the thing did not matter very much, or mattered,
say, as does a controversy of our Hebraists on
Israelite origins. The fault I was for finding
was the under-current of acrimony in Grantham's
manner ; and he assented, but still indifferently.
No, it is something more radical that shuts off his
sympathy with the modernizing brotherhood, or
with this branch of them. It is their intellectual-
ism. That I saw the moment we turned off to
the neighbour article in the number, Syke's,
" The latest word on Telepathy ". He warmed
up curiously. " Don't you feel rather excited,"
he said ; " I'm promising myself a wonderful new
time in theology to come out of this research ".
And then later, " Of course, if they do prove that

140 Pastor Futurus.
their messages certainly come from the ' discar-
nate,' it will be no news. It will to some of
them — not to us". There he checked himself
rather suddenly, and it checked me, knowing
what had come into his mind, and who. So, to
relieve a silence that fell, I began to prose about
my own expectation that what we were dealing
with in this research are laws as natural as the rest,
and within John's time or perhaps my own will
have made the descent from the rank of the magi
cal to the status of domestic service. But I was
talking this, not thinking it : what. I was thinking
was about John's " new time in theology ". I did
not question him, because of that consciousness
between us of which he had touched the spring.
Another time.
Yet why should I wait till I know what John
meant ? I ought to be able to know for myself
whether this " new time " is imminent. What,
however, does one mean by a new time? In
theology, I have always told myself, nothing is
new, except in a way of speaking ; there are
only new words for the old facts which have
been our facts from the beginning. Whatever
the Divine Reality is which environs humanity,
and whatever the relations are in which the
human soul stands to It, that Reality has always
been there, and the relations to it which make

"Star to Star Vibrates Light" 141
the nature and the fate of the soul have also
existed as long as souls have been. That is
why one has no panics about the faith, but when
one hears of wars and rumours of wars to be
waged against our Creed from the side of Eastern
theosophy or Western scholarship, one is not
terrified ; rather I look up and expect that a
redemption is drawing nigh. For the war of
criticism, or, if that can be, of mysticism, against
faith is a misleading metaphor, which has much
imposed upon the orthodox. War there is, but
the war is only the fight for existence by which
all organic things, and among them the soul,
live their every hour of living. Criticism is the
response of mind to the stimulus pressed nearer
home of the environing fact : it is consciousness
drawing a deeper breath, rousing a stronger
pulse, sharpening the edge of vision, knitting a
subtler complication of the nerve, a tenser sinew
of the living soul which is a man. Theology
is the register kept of this progressive accommo
dation ; it is the history, the autobiography of
the soul, or as I should say the Church's soul.
The work of the theologian, if he knows his
business at least, is to keep the record up to
date. When our apologists insist that the dog
matizing of the Church was not a gratuitous
binding of new burdens upon the minds of

142 Pastor Futurus.
Christians, but only a necessary building up of
new defences (that luckless image !) against new
attacks of the heretics, they are describing this
vital action of the Church, but by a metaphor
which I must deprecate as invidious towards
some of the heretics and to my mind derogatory
to the Church. Defences ! The Faith does
not defend, she takes the field and conquers.
Vexilla Regis prodeunt. Yes, prodeunt : they
do not wave behind battlement and fosse for a
foe to take if he can ; they go out after him, and
take him. But I will not get warm with my
brethren over an ill-chosen metaphor : unless
indeed they let their strategy match their word.
And I am getting a little away from my pur
pose. I am asking if old theology is likely to
gain a new word for itself from this modern
psychic science ?
I begin to think so, whatever be the truth
about these later developments of it, these ' writ
ings ' of that dear and revered woman, our Sibyl
of Carleford. Whichever way we may come to
interpret these sibylline leaves on which her
enchanted pencillings leave the " scripts " which
she has at times let me see ; whether they prove
as she believes to be messages from the ghostly
world, where are her husband and her son, or,
as a scientist friend warns her, only thoughts

"Star to Star Vibrates Light." 143
from her own mind which have crept darkling
out of some postern of consciousness and now
knock at the front gate for admission disguised
as strange visitors ; in either case there is in the
fact something which will enrich our theology,
perhaps much transform it. For suppose my
platitude in the talk with John should prove the
whole truth of it, and these psychic phenomena
become presently as commonplace as the X-rays
or Marconigrams, even so they will compel us
to some retranslation of the language in which
our Doctors expound certain prime articles of
the faith. I foresee that will be so in the case of
the Resurrection doctrine : both the attack and
defence in the controversy over the story will be
put out of date. The confident historical scien
tists who are sure there was nothing substantial
before men's eyes when " Jesus showed himself
alive," and the earnest good apologists, defensores
isti, who are quite as sure that what was offered
to sight and touch in the Upper Room was that
same mortal substance which Joseph laid in grave,
these will alike have to go to school again, and
learn before they teach. For if telepathic vibra
tions are pulses (as some will still have it) of a
physical ether, that traverse continents and oceans
to reach one brain of mortal from another, then
this flesh of man is more fearfully and wonder-

144 Pastor Futurus.
fully made than any physicist has imagined it,
and " creation widens on man's view " till all
things are possible not for belief only but for
science. And if — (yet I will not trust myself to the
hope till I have proved it as a Thomas would) —
but if we shall ever trace the message back from
the mortal brain that receives it to an origin
beyond the sphere of sense, why then — well,
there is in our creed a clause, The Communion
of Saints, that for all but all worshippers has
been till now a sound without a sense ; this
clause the new-found law of nature and super-
nature will — I know not if translate, but assuredly
will transliterate — ah ! in letters of fire.
At Evensong it fell to John to read the first
lesson. I hoped he was not aware of anyone
present, except myself, who knew how the
Hebrew romance of the Canticle would wake
the notes of another love-poem in the reader's
mind — a poem that broke off in tragedy. To
me the incident was poignant ("Arise my love,
my fair one, and come away ") coming after that
reminder of her which checked his tongue on our
walk. As he came back from the lectern to the
stalls I had to look away.

" Star to Star Vibrates Light?' 145
This is strange. I had hardly locked the clasp
of my diary and put it away when John came
in. He often does it at night when the men
have gone off, to chat for ten minutes before he
goes home to bed. But this time he was absent-
minded and yet in a suppressed excitement, and
like one who wants to talk but can't begin it.
" You are wanting a holiday after Easter," I
suggested. He shook his head ; then, " You
were at Evensong : did anything strike you about
the lesson . . . the one I read . . . out of the
Canticle ? " " Why, John, it made me think
what your thought might be as you read it ; how
could it not ? "
We looked in the fire for some moments, then
he, " We were talking to-day about the —
the Intercourse. I never have read that lesson
in Church, since  . It all broke upon me
rather suddenly, and I could hardly get through."
A pause. Presently, tightening his hands on
the chair arms, " But it's quite true what we were
saying to-day. I know it now. They can
speak to us ; they do." I leaned towards him
looking into his eyes with an inquiry. He shook
his head. " I can't talk about it, not now. I am
going to bed ; but I thought I should sleep
better if I came and told you this — that now I
know it. Good night." 10

146 Pastor Futurus.
Then with a hand on the door, " She was there.
... I don't know if she spoke. But I know
what she said to me." And he went.
Why not, why not ?
I never have seen my Catharine, no. And I
too never heard her speak. But I do know
what she has said to me.
Then he is young, I am not ; and " Your
young men shall see visions, your old men shall
dream dreams ". But dream or vision, does it
matter which ? Not if by either the word can
pass between us, the word.
Vision or dream, this dear son of mine is not
far from the Kingdom of Heaven at any time.
And between it and the Kingdom of Nature
there is no wall, not even one that " becomes as
crystal, and we see them through it ". Except
the wall of this house of flesh we live in. And
even that can " become as crystal " for the pure
in heart. Aye, whether in the body or out of
the body, God knoweth, John has seen what he
has seen.

XX.
It is Maytime ; that is why I had this outburst third
from John this afternoon. " In the spring the TH0UGHTS-
young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of
love," sacred love or profane. It is the sacred
love, Love the harbinger of Truth as in the wise
Greek's dream, that quickens in John's youthful-
ness — now. We walked at the covert's side up
Carleford's Happy Valley, and first to-day the
year's breath has had the tenderness as well as
the brightness of spring-time, swelling Nature's
veins and with them man's. So in my comrade
buds opened and blossoms crept abroad and
"sweet counsels" burgeoned in our communica
tions as we walked. I think there was expan
sion in my own middle-aged veins, and thought
ran in a warmer, fuller current. Why, of course ;
love does make to love again ; that " holds in
youth," but it holds in every age. Do ut des, the
statesman's coarse maxim, is also law of the
Spirit ; we can give our best of the mind's riches
to him who opens his treasure-house to us.
147 i° *

148 Pastor Futurus.
I said to myself as we walked that I would
store up here our talk from start on the bridge
head to the street corner where we swung apart
towards the Chantry and the Library. But I
cannot do the feat now as ten years back I still
was able.
In early life as in later, impressions flow in and
flow past, but they flow off much faster now, and
memory cannot as she used make the eddies and
backwaters that detain them. Ah! well, the
words come and go, the winged words ; but the
act of soul with soul which the speech did but
set free, this, I am mystic enough to think, this
abides. Whatever the soul has made itself in
that act, whatever power the Self has clothed
itself with by the utterance given or received, is
a possession henceforward ; soul's speech and
soul's life, they are the blossom and the fruit.
And when my scholar has gone off to a professor
ship or a preachership, and some excellent among
our students keeps the Principal company on the
Northington round, why, the May breath of the
greening covert and the babble of Summerlea
Water— they will be the talk of John and me,
whatever weighty matters the other boy is im
parting at the moment to my attentive ears.
But I must put something down in the record,
if only for a symbol, a charm-word to give my

Third Thoughts. 149
memory some mastery of the rest. It shall be
what he had to say about Second Thoughts in
the taking of practical decisions. This was
started by a reference I made to  's abandon
ment of his project of work, because " on second
thoughts the prospect seemed unhopeful ". John
remarked that while he must not judge  's
wisdom, he was always inclined to distrust a con
clusion if it was made at that stage. Tennyson
was right —
Is it so true that second thoughts are best ?
Not first, and third, which are a riper first ?
Thereupon he set off talking with a rapidity
which is not the least like him on this theme of
first and third thoughts. " That line of Tenny
son's has been an inspiration to me since days
when I began to read the history of philosophy.
Sometimes I have fancied it is the very formula
of human evolution ; those three stages are the
law of progress in history, art, philosophy, man
ners, everything. Just look at some instances? "
And he poured them out. There was the evolu
tion of human society : Nature's first thought is
to make a whole, the family, with the single
member in complete dependence and servitude ;
her second to stir up the member to self-assertion
and rebellion ; her third to teach the individual

150 Pastor Futurus.
to find his Self by identifying it with the whole
and submitting to a service which is freedom.
There was the growth of the individual organ
ism : his mind's growth in the play first of in
stinct, then of reasonings which disintegrate
instincts, last of reason become through exercise
a second and richer, reconsolidated instinct : his
body's growth, from the shapely child through
the pulled out, gawky stripling, into the well-
proportioned man : his manner's growth, out of
childish grace of simplicity, past the blushing and
stumblings of the hobbledehoy, into the frank
ness of the master of intercourse. There was
the circular march of civilization, reared in the
garden of Eden (or more actually in the wild-
garden of barbarism), spoiled by the City of stone
and smoke, recovering itself (as one hopes) in
the City of garden and the breeze. Correspond
ingly human virtue comes through the stages of
an Innocence and a Fall to the Third Thought
of an intelligent and self-determined integrity.
Had not our British politics followed a like track,
from the old-time insular patriotism of Britain,
through the "cut the painter" policy of our
precious Manchester school, round to the Greater
Britain patriotism of to-day ? Does not Art tell
the same tale of herself : begins in play, progresses
through rule and drill, and ends as art which

Third Thoughts. 151
conceals art. The child at her gambols dances
like a leaf because of a music in her limbs ; then
she learns her steps in the schoolroom with pain
and haltings ; and again she dances as light as
the leaf, but in figures instead of at random.
The art of war had the like history : it began
with a "go as you please " of battle by single
combats of Homeric spears or Highland clay
mores ; then came the mechanism of battle,
the legion, phalanx, square, with the individual
fighter become a cog in the machine ; and
now the machine counts more than ever for
victory, but only if the cogs of it — those specks
of khaki sprinkled at seven yards' intervals over
the plain — have been again individualized into
minds that can think and dare and take cover or
make rush each for himself. As to philosophy
he thought it quite needless to pick illustrations :
it was just one illustration throughout : it had
gone marching in a circle, like a lost traveller on
a down at night, though it came round a little
wiser perhaps each time. But he really must
instance one stray example that had struck him
among several others that you can find in the
physical speculations of the early Greeks. It
was a theory of the Origin of Life. When he
had read how " Anaxagoras dogmatized that
animals were made through seeds fallen from

152 Pastor Futurus.
the sky," he had noted with delight that Sir
William Thompson had swung us round from
the search after a genesis of life on our planet to
the rude old opinion of the Greek ; life must have
begun from seeds conveyed to earth on meteor
ites, " moss-grown fragments of an older world,"
but anyway dropped on us out of heaven.
This seemed to warm John's fantasy, for he
sailed off here into a most air-walking fable. He
declared he saw his Three Thoughts law ex
hibited in the newest of arts, aeronautics. For
who was the first airman if not Icarus ? He
flew with wings. Then came the Second
Thought, the lubberly balloon. At last we had
got again the sky-sailor with real wings, the
aviator, a riper and on the whole a luckier
Icarus. We had our laugh at this last sally, and then
he said, " Seriously, this notion of course is only
a way of figuring for one's own use the oldest
of old facts of thinking ; but I find it more use
ful to myself than ' the return of the subject into
itself,' which would have been my philosophy
tutor's demolishment of my callow theory if I
had ever broached it to him. After pupillage I
dropped it, but now I have taken it up again in
hope that my theory's own career will prove an
instance to confirm its own truth. It will do

Third Thoughts. 153
that, if it will hold water now when I try to make
it a vessel to carry for me my understandings
nowadays of life and of the faith. I think it
will, I begin to think it will."
I wished him good speed in his theorizing, and
said that if his hypothesis proved valid as inter
preter of life one might count on its being illumin
ative of faith too.
"Yes, that is my hope," he said, rather under
his breath. After a pause, "Ought one to be
afraid to expect that what I am feeling after is
the truth of religion, that my sequence of Second
and Third is a guess at the way of salvation.
Here is what I should not care to say in any
company but yours, Principal ; if my notion is
anything at all, I must think it may be as much
as a new analysis, of course for my own use only,
of the central truths, the Incarnation and even
the Trinity."
He looked at me here, and I presently answered
that he need not say "even the Trinity": we
were already accustomed to the idea that this
truth had its correspondent in some scheme of
logical or metaphysical abstractions. To quote
his author back to him, " Know ye not then the
riddling of the Bards ? " that is, of the poets gone
mad and become metaphysicians, who riddle to
us about their tri-unity of "The Subject, the

154 Pastor Futurus.
Object, and the Relation between them ". " But,
you know," I continued, " the patronizing way of
the philosophers who tell us in their genial vein
that our Trinity of Persons is a bit of naive
anthropomorphism which will do nicely for us,
not for men who can think in abstractions, is
to me a priggish shallowness. Their fleshless
atomies of logical schematisms are miles farther
off Reality than our anthropomorphisms of Per
son, which are things of human flesh and blood,
and are ideas that can have some effect on
actions. I'm not meaning that your idea has
not this : I think it has. All the same, John,"
I ended with some emphasis, " not every one will
hear you gladly on this matter ; you are right in
picking your company for such talk."
Yes, I suppose this is one of the abstinences and
mortifications which must be practised by the
believer who does his believing with his mind,
with all his mind rather. If he has found an ex
pression of his own religious experience in language
adequate to the rest of his conception of Reality,
but language of which his brother Christian is
incompetent, he must have it unto himself, not
utter it to his fellow. That " weak brother " will
be offended at what to him will feel like the
touch of an unholy rationalism — that weak brother

Third Thoughts. 155
" for whom Christ died ". So he and we cannot
have communion in this kind : let us break no
bread of logic with him while the world standeth,
lest we make this brother to offend.
And yet — and yet — is this the whole word
about it ? If the deeper language our own mind
has won is the mouth's confession of the heart's
deeper belief, how can we keep it back? Our
light must shine, our faith must out, we must not
hide ourselves from our own flesh, hide the best
self of us, the life unto Christ that is in us. The
love of Christ constraineth us and also the love
of man. These two have been the constraint that
worked on some who have published their new
thoughts abroad to the sorrow and anger of their
own communion. Their thoughts were raw, no
doubt ; their behaviour hasty, yes ; their temper —
why, being young and also human, you may say
there was conceit in it, at any rate a self-estimate
which was generous. But still there was also
this love constraining them : this was it that was
hot in their heart and burned an opening in it,
like money in a child's pocket, burning to be
come current. The pity of it! The pity that
the Church so little knows how to turn the heart
of fathers to children, of children to fathers, youth's
power to eld's knowledge, lest her dullness smite
her with a curse of barrenness. How long, how

156 Pastor Futurus.
long shall we go on stoning the fresh prophets,
before they have been tried to learn whether
"thus saith the Lord " or no, and then teaching
our flock their prophecy the day after they are
silenced ? Is it so that there cannot be found
among us wise men enough to form a court of
jurisprudents before whom to bring a new doctrine
and take the Church's mind upon it from those who
know that mind, having one of their own to know
it with ? Must the judgment on the truth or false
hood of a new thought about God and man be
delivered only by the reformer's own diocesan,
whether he has time for it or no, and whether his
Divine grace of leadership is for our thinkings
also or only for our doings? Or if that unjust
burden must be laid on those overtasked shoulders,
then, in the name of Faith and Reason too, let us
lay it there and keep it there. Let a Doctor of
sacred lore, if he be mere Doctor of Divinity, be the
judge of truth or error in doctrine, not some
monastic pedant or frontless dogmatist of cor
respondence columns or a churchwarden with
an M.A. and a purse, or the startled cackling
of pious hen-roosts, thinking itself the voice of
Holy Church. Yes, of course, all these good
people have a right to be heard ; they have
their vote in the assensus populi which confirms
the promulgatio concilii; none more zealous for

Third Thoughts. 157
that right of theirs than I. But let them keep
to their " assenting," let the learned and not they
"promulge". I love not the uncouth mob of
schoolless monks turned bullies, thronging the
Council Chamber and squeezing a Father of the
Church to the extinction not of life, as poor
Eusebius at Ephesus, but of breath to utter his
sentence concerning the faith.
There, I have been a little hot over this.
But this is just the use of a locked diary ; a heat-
explosion there relieves the system, and shatters
nothing but the heat.
Perhaps I should have felt less warmly if it
were not for thinking how the prophet next for
the stones might be  . What I should feel
then I will not write, not even in a locked diary.

XXI.
back in It has been most sweet this week-end spent at
FT FTON Appleton for Newton's parish festival, though
the best of it for me was not there but a league
away beside the Elverill ; that hour I stole from
my host's company for a commune with the
wave and woodland dear to me beyond all else
that is spun out of nature's fabrics. An hour
alone by the Elverill, in the little river's company
and — Hers. Yes, hers, not her memory's. Do
they tell me that "Haunting" is but our flesh-
bound fancy ; that human hearts may be haunted
ground, but not this crescent of meadow-lawn
where she and I paced and talked one Whitsun
tide — where now from a furlong off the white
cross on the Church knoll beckons to the one
of us ? Aye, God is Spirit : neither on yonder
hillock nor yet in our Abbey is the Father of
spirits met by His worshippers ; and the spirits
He has made, these too, they will say, are free
of space and to be met in no place because in
158

Back in Elfton. 159
every place. Tell me not. God who gave her
that tenement of mortal clay, of the dust of the
ground, He gave her too this wider lodging, the
field and flood and grove of her dwelling-place,
to be her soul's encompassment, her embodi
ment's outer skirt. Into this web of earth's
tissues He interwove the living consciousness
that was Catharine for that while. Her relations
to these inanimate things were a part of the
reality which bore her name ; her thoughts of
them, her tender regards towards these mute
and blind familiars, these silently responsive
friends, were among the fibres of her being,
threads in that gracious personality, sympathies
which enwoven once are unravelled by no mortal
fate. Why then, if it be so that "our loves
endure," that the passage across the viewless
line severs not the life-bonds, nor dumbs and
blinds the communion of saints, nor sunders the
intercourse of mutual wills : if it be so that the
Presences absolved of earth can walk with those
still engaged in earth, mingling and ministering
in their concerns, and rendering ghostly counsel
and advice ; how shall not also this be so, that
the loved ghost haunts more often and more
glad the places it haunted in the days of the
flesh, and we that tarry there meet with our
own most surely, before shrines where we bowed

160 Pastor Futurus.
together or by falling waters that repeat our
talk. They will tell me these senseless objects have
no realness in themselves, that only persons are
real things and endure, and so the departing can
have fellowship only with the person of their
lovers. Yes, but then these things without life,
the field and floor we tread and once trod with
them, have become part also of the personalities
of us their lovers ; and so those Others can touch
us through that which is part of them and part
of us. By this they lay a finger upon us un
aware of their approach : they " shake this
garment of our flesh " ; we feel, we turn to
look ; we see not, yet behold it is they them
selves. No, tell me not that houses have no haunters,
and sod and stream no visitants. I have not so
learned life. John has the very truth of it, " First
thoughts, or third, which are a riper first". Our
forefathers who when they carried forth the dead
charmed the threshold against their return, were
half-right in their raw, sad first thought. Our
fathers who exorcised the ghosts with their new
science, were in their second thought wholly
wrong. We are the nearest to the right, who
hold that they that are with Christ still imitate
the Master, taking sweet counsel together with

Back in Elfton. 161
their own beneath the roof where they supped
and beside the waters where they wrought.
How the Dear Shade has beguiled me from
my purpose, which was far other and how little
sweet. What I meant to write down was
Newton's talk this morning before I left. He
was confiding to me, what it needed no confid
ence to possess me of, ex-country parson as I am,
his despair of making rustic labourers into
good communicants. He cannot, he said, draw
these sheep to the altar by hook or by crook of
our Anglican shepherd-craft. The two or three
who would come at the great seasons were oldsters
belonging to the generation before the " Seces
sion," meaning the epoch at which the field-hand
made good his independence of the farmer and
shook off his neck the yoke of his servitude quoad
sacra, that march to church in the train of his pay
master. " You told me all this," he admitted,
"and I suppose I didn't believe you. But it
makes me perfectly wretched to find you were
quite right. What is the good of my being a
priest, if I cannot teach my flock, the half of it, to
do the one duty which Christ certainly prescribed
by word of mouth for the practice of Church
men ; what sort of a pastorate is it when the in
strument said to be ' generally necessary to salva-
n

1 62 Pastor Futurus.
tion' is the instrument which cannot be used,
because the flock won't let us come near them
with it? Tell me, what more can I do?"
I put by the question, asking him another :
how did he find his non-communicant rustics in
matters of conduct? As to the beer, he said,
labourers seemed to him much improved since
what he could remember in his boyhood. This
had rather surprised him. But the other thing —
there he had had a painful revelation. He told
me a woful history or two, and then I came in
with, " Do you know, I think you are finding me
an answer to your question, What to do for the
labourers who will not come to the Lord's Table ?
While we are learning how to help his worship,
there is enough for us priests to do in helping
himself. The priest is there in the village to
bring the man to the church and the altar, but he
is there also to bring him to a clean life, whether
by worship or by other means. Sometimes I
have feared, when we wring our hands over his
obstinate refusal of communion, that we are mis
taking a way of salvation for salvation's self.
Magee shocked some of us parsons long ago by
saying he would rather see England free than
sober : the paradox did us good however ; we
rubbed our eyes and saw facts straighter. And
how it would do us good if some one would

Back in Elfton. 163
shock us again, and tell us this time that he would
rather see England pure than devout. If he
meant that it was better to make English
labourers into good men than into good church
goers, supposing the choice lay between them,
which of course it does not, his rude aphorism
might be a beneficent stimulus. For if we are
despairing of turning out regular communicants,
we cannot for very shame despair of turning out
decent-living working men. The new scope
would strengthen the weak hands and confirm
the feeble knees of the downcast plodder in the
hedge-row cure of souls. His ministries have
failed at the altar side, but they have not failed
yet beside the hearth. His flock have been deaf
to all he has had to say about the holiest mystery,
which for the priest's self has been the very touch
of Reality : will they be so ' dunt ' when his
speech shall be about a mystery, also holy, though
homely of the home — the love of man and maid,
its sanctity and might ; the faith of man and wife,
its beauty, blessedness, and peace ; when he
shall set before them life and good, death and
evil, in language of most human fact, level to
every hearer if he be but human, and shall bid
them choose therefore life, that they and their
seed may live ? "
Something like this was my deliverance on his

164 Pastor Futurus.
problems, and he took very patiently, I felt, what
our priests of some schools would meet with some
instinctive repugnance, the implication that the
service of the altar is not the whole duty of the
priest. " The Priest to the Altar." Yes, a
thousand times yes. Yet he serves that altar not
lastly for itself, but that the flame upon it which
his care makes burn may kindle a flame on the
altar of his own heart and of the hearts of those
whom he represents as their priest. For their
sakes he sanctifies himself for the sacrifice he
offers there on behalf of men who do not even
stand to watch it burn. For their sakes ; and
will it not avail for them ? O brothers, ministers
of the Mystery, every devoted priest of you, that
flame you light upon the mystic hearth, what is it
but the life unto God in Christ ? life for which
sacrifice is other name ; a life that lives in the
man, the sacrificer. In you, in yourself the life
is lit ; then in you, in your living self can you
bear the<live coal from off the all-sacred hearth to
your brother afar off, and touch him with it into
life. Bring him, if you may, to the altar side ;
but, ere that may be, carry hence in the vessel
of your human self that virtue of the altar fire to
him. Something of this I said to Newton, so far as

Back in Elfton. 165
I could father it upon better authority than his
old Principal's, and such as so devout a consti
tutionalist in religion would find most enforcing,
a bishop's to wit and an archbishop's. From one
I cited a warning against the disproportioning
zeal which sees the Eucharist fact with so strict
and narrow an intuition that it sees nothing else
at all ; from the other I culled a precept to his
clergy that " what the Church stands for, fights
for, prays for, toils for, is an elementarily straight,
strong, pure moral life to be lived by us all in
the things of every day . . . the bettering of the
ordinary moral standard of life in the homes and
shops and factories and fields ".
That " elementarily straight, strong " word of
this wise Father in God, how I blessed it when
I read !
Dear brothers mine of the peasantry, what else
is salvation for your soul if it be not this, to live
Christianwise the life of man who eats bread by
the sweat of his brow ? We will not rest, we
priests of the altar, we will not suffer our will to
sleep nor our conscience to slumber, neither the
thoughts of our head to take any rest, till we can
lead you to the Table of the Bread that perishes
not, that you too may fare with us as we. Will
you not come, will you not ? . . . Then no less
will we come to you, from that Table's side, we

1 66 Pastor Futurus.
celebrants, bringing with us reserved in the veiled
vessel of a human heart the crumbs from the
children's table, morsels of the Bread Conse
crate ; and with us shall go a Real Presence to
be among you, behind the plough and beside the
wain and at even by the hearth of the little
ones.

PART III.

XXII.
I devoutly hope I am no prophet ; but " by the a little
pricking of my thumbs " which turn the leaves of
John's new booklet, something of mischief this
way comes.
My mind misgave me when he told me that
Rothbury had pressed him to contribute this
brochure to a series their firm is publishing, " The
New-Old Library ". I demurred, advised him to
let his thoughts ripen longer, to wait in fact till
his " third thoughts " should arrive. But the
dear fellow, how could he resist the appeal of
this man who had come so near to him in a
trouble of faith, and then had been doubly en
deared by the stupid hostilities of the good ortho
dox, or the fairly good orthodox, of Driborough ?
Such an appeal too ! It came as the cry of
young lay manhood asking for a voice to speak
to them out of the Church's inner circle, and tell
them how a thinking man can hold the ancient
Church doctrine with a clear intellectual con
science. John's was the one voice, Rothbury
169

1 70 Pastor Futurus.
told him : he knew of no other that would, like
his, wake echoes in the mind of our modern
questioners of the Christian tradition, within the
Church or outside it. If there were another, it
would not have the courage, or, even if that, the
freedom from official reticence. That was too
much for chivalrous John Desmond. It overbore
my cautions, and so here we get to-day in the
" New-Old Library " (Rothbury) this tractate on
" the Church ".
What will Bors be thinking just now, if he is
reading where I am ?
"If we have been at all right so far in our
train of thought, the step we have next to take
is a long one, or will seem so to many of us.
We have seen this : Faith, when we mean the
faith which saves, is the spiritual fact which some
of us have been wont to call ' the religious ex
perience,' and have been content to leave under
that name with no further analysis of its nature.
It has been attempted in this brief study to
analyse more deeply this ' experience,' and there
has come to us this, that experience is not an
incommunicable intuition of eternal fact, but a
measurable and in some degree even describable
condition of the believer's whole being. When
a contact is effected between a man's personal
being and those facts of an eternal order to which

A Little Book. 171
the articles of the Creed have given a name,
either the man's mind, heart, and will, we say, are
vitalized or are left unvitalized. This vitality,
which the man receives or misses upon that con
tact with reality which is the act of believing a
truth, is a thing which can be verified. It is an
imponderable thing, no doubt, and cannot be
reduced to a mathematical formula. But even in
the bodily frame of man vitality is not ponder
able, cannot be reduced to figures and reasoned
about with the Four Rules ; and yet a doctor can
tell quite certainly whether vitality is full or is
lacking, while the patient can still better know
how the case is with himself. It will be said that
the doctor at least can count a pulse and give
figures of temperature. Yes, but we too, if we
cannot give actual figures of a believer's warmth
of feeling or the rhythm of his will's movement,
yet have means of registering the inward forces
of soul. For they are translated into palpable
shapes of the man's own conduct and its stimulus
upon that of other men."
Well here I am with you, John. Perhaps I
might rather say you are with me : at least I
have some property in this much of your
work. But it is a page farther on that the trouble

172 Pastor Futurus.
begins. It is here, where he "takes the step,"
that he will take Bors' breath away.
" If then the faith which saves is the vitality
in the soul, how can we be content to estimate
a man's spiritual condition by his acceptance of
articles of a Creed, since that acceptance can be
no guarantee of a soundness in his total health ?
We cannot : it is generally admitted. But then
if, not this subscription to written formulas, but
a certain attitude of the entire man towards
spiritual reality is what constitutes the faith that
makes him member of the Body of Christ, can
the case be different for him as a member of an
ecclesiastical body, of a Church ? The degree in
which he is in true communion with his Church
is not ascertained by the degree in which he con
forms to those articles of the Creed by which
that Church has formulated her own experience
of life in Christ : however genuine be his mental
conformity to those articles, it is no measure of
his communion. He has in common the Creed
of his Church, has he also the Church's experi
ence in common ? that is the question to be asked
of him. But now who can give the answer to
this? Not the Church with any confidence,
except in extreme cases. The 'notorious evil
liver ' she may excommunicate without misgiving,
and she can welcome the man whose holiness

A Little Book. 173
goes before him unto judgment ; the one is
plainly dead to spiritual things, the other plainly
alive. But the average Christian, who halts be
tween sin and saintship — who but himself can
know if he is alive with the life his Church has ?
We must needs take him at his own valuation,
till it is proved or disproved on trial : till then to
his own Master he stands or falls."
At this our Bors will shake his grey saintly
head and mutter, " My dear young friend, has
the Church of Christ had the life kept in her for
sixteen centuries by the Creed which seemed
good to the council of the united Church and the
Holy Ghost in the midst of it, to learn that John
Desmond's generation has no use for a Creed ?
I cannot understand how at the College they
have failed to keep him straighten "
But wait a bit. Here he is "stepping" it in
deed. " Is there sound reason then for excluding
from communion with us a member of another
Church who asks to receive with us ? Granting
our previous reasoning valid, the right to com
munion is the fact of communion ; de facto is de
jure here. The applicant, let us suppose, will not
rehearse our Creed, and does not recognize the
authority of our Church rule ; but is he or is he
not in communion with us who minister and

174 Pastor Futurus.
partake ? Does he at the altar rail render the
act of will by which he offers a sacrifice of him
self, body, soul and spirit, to the Christ who
there is Present for ourselves ; and is that sacri
fice of his met and fulfilled by a self-giving to
him of the Christ ? If this does happen, then
the Christ has judged him worthy to communi
cate, and who are we to supersede that judg
ment ? But it is the man himself, and only he,
who can know whether his communicating is
real ; the ministering priest cannot, nor can his
fellows at the rail. Surely the responsibility
must be the man's ; on him not on us, who
cannot judge, must rest the guilt and conse
quence of an unworthy partaking.
" I do not see at present how we can answer
in any other sense the Nonconformist of good
life who comes with understanding and clear
conscience to eat and drink with us. But can
we stop at that definition of the variance in
religion, at mere Nonconformity ? It is neces
sary to see the whole of the consequences to
which we are committing ourself, and this writer
must raise the question for those in the Church
who are wiser than he to answer — why, if the
basis of communion be what we seem compelled
to think it, we should repel a good-living and
religious-hearted man even if he refuses to recite

A Little Book. 175
the specifically Christian clauses of the Creed,
those which affirm the Incarnation and the
Trinity. Such a one may hold the doctrine of
the Three in One to be an uncertain or at least
not a final interpretation of the soul's experience
of Reality, and may think that we conceive of
the relation of Jesus to the Almighty under an
anthropomorphic figure, which satisfied earlier
men but is not adequate to the maturer Christian
intelligence ; yet at the same time his soul may
be in closer and in truer converse than ours with
true Being, which he and we name God ; he
may be surrendering his personal will to the
eternal will with a wholeness perfecter than ours.
That Unitarian differs surely from the Christian
only within the range of the metaphysical appre
hension of Reality. The difference within that
limit is wide ; but if a man's metaphysic does
not determine his faith, while the general vitality
of his spiritual being does determine it, how, one
must ask, shall we be able to justify to a saintly
Unitarian, who thinks of faith as we have been
thinking, and declares his belief that his com
municating is a genuine and heartfelt endeavour
at communion with God — how shall we justify to
the reason and heart of this man a repulse of him
from our feast of love? How? Surely the Church
owes her children an answer to the question."

176 Pastor Futurus.
How glad I am now that Bors in his generosity
gave up St. Wilfrid's to the Bishop, and so is not
John's vicar.
But O ! John, John. It will not be Bors this
time shaking his good grey head. It will be Sir
Ebenezer Slagg, our millionaire who has for
saken armour plate for orthodoxy, shaking the
mahogany in the library of Blastonbury Castle
with a ponderous but well-cushioned fist, and
rehearsing already the thunders that shall roll
next week along the columns of the " Vigilance ".
Is this passage which follows likely to avert
the " slings and arrows of outrageous " Blaston
bury? "The writer cannot be unaware that if his
question should be answered in the affirmative,
there is involved a severe shifting of the centre
of gravity in religious thought and practice. We
have been making Creed the basis of communion
between believers : that basis now would be
found in Sacraments ; Lex Orandi would take
the place of Lex Credendi ; Worship of Belief.
But has not this transference been long indicated
as a necessity ? We are being told no doubt by
the large-minded of our leaders speaking from
positions of responsibility that a Churchman's
mind may and must range as wide as does the

A Little Book. iyy
secular reason, and count all science and philo
sophy a province to be occupied by the Faith :
but that still this range is to be round a fixed
nucleus of given truth, the Creeds of the early
centuries. All else of religious thought is sub
ject to innovation as knowledge ripens : this
credal matter is not so subject. Can we count
on this permanence ? If so, on what grounds ?
Why should the apprehension of Divine reality
attained after the first three or four hundred years
be the limit beyond which apprehension may not
travel? But as a fact we do not count on that
permanence. We have changed the meaning,
without changing the words, of the clauses which
assert the Descent and the Ascension of Christ :
we teach our children that the words are a
figurative expression of facts which we ourselves
express to them under other figures which we
feel to be liker to the reality, and which we
would gratefully have received from the past.
The Creed then is not as a whole a perfect and
final thing : there are these seeds of decay in it :
even in this body of truth there are signs, faint
but recognizable, of a ' body of death '. These
human words are words of eternal life, but not
the words are eternal. In what then shall we
trust ? In that which is behind Creed and out of
which come all the Creeds — the experience of a
12

178 Pastor Futurus.
communion of the soul with God, of a Life that
kindles in the soul when it essays converse with
the Christ. It is he who is the Word of Life,
He and not any mere credal word. That con
verse with Him is had, as nowhere else, in the,
act of communion which has for its sensible
embodiment a ritual ordained by Christ Himself.
The word, the elementally human word, which
the Bread and Wine, repeating that word as it
were from Christ's own lips, speak to us, has a
permanence which is not indeed eternal but is
like to endure through time, at least while the
earth with her fruits remaineth, and seed time
and harvest do not fail."
No, that will not disarm Slagg of his artillery.
Quite 'the contrary ; it offers a wider target. The
enemy has now written a book, not only to exalt
the Sacraments, but actually to degrade the Creed.
Have at him for a pestilent heretic who takes the
Church's pay to corrupt her children's faith !
But our Foremost Layman, Fitz-Eustace, so
well read in conciliar history, how will he take it ?
The praise of Sacrament linked with derogation
of Creed will somewhat divide him. I see his
paper-knife pause at this page and poise itself
with something of the airs of a sceptre, as he

A Little Book. 179
frames the lay Churchman's well-balanced opinion,
which he will contribute to the Bishop's counsels
over his unfortunate young chaplain's book ?
And my late colleague, Sensier. Though he
is not in sympathy with John, he has never been
rude. But I fear he will feel that it would be
right to be so, now, if he quite knew how to do
it. These people matter, but not as John's Bishop
does. He will have a bad time, if Slagg should
rouse the hunt. I wish I had not to blame John
for bringing on this trouble, and forcing his Chief
to separate the parts of the friend and the dio
cesan : really a cruel situation for the Bishop and
the clerk alike.
Yet where does a charge of heresy lie ? On
the face of what he has written about the Euchar
ist there is no false doctrine, for there is no doc
trine as yet ; nothing taught, but only a question
about the Church teaching addressed to the
Doctors. Does the Church not owe her children
an answer to the question he here asks ? Surely
yes, if the question is asked in good faith, which
who doubts in John's case ? His attitude is
what diplomatists call " correct " ; he raises a
point of law and asks authority to pronounce
on it.
Alas, but there is the passage on the Creeds.

180 Pastor Futurus.
To make good his thought on Sacrament he has
denied the finality of Creed. He does not con
sult the Doctors here even in form.
To have used the form of question in his treat
ment of the Communion will not help him.
They will say (and with too much truth) that he
ought to have asked his question in private, not
printed his doubts for the man in the street to
read and then use to bait the bishops with. Dear
John, was it not rather headlong to put this out
without first consulting some of us as to the effect
on the unlearned, or rather on the half-learned,
which is where the danger is ? Besides your
question-mark will not help you. Sensier will
take it to be only a literary device, a rhetorical
not a real question. Slagg, more simple soul,
will say it is a dishonest artifice of our modern
assailants of faith, afraid to say a thing to your
face. Slagg, as Verley once remarked, is quite
' gone on ' honesty in religion : thinks you can test
doctrine as you do steel plates ; with a hammer,
I suppose. O malleus dubitantium / H ammer
of unorthodoxy, bludgeoner of the weak in faith,
breaker of bruised reeds and stamper on smoking
flax, blunder-head in the session of wise heads,
bull among the porcelain wares of the philo
sophers, behemoth wallowing in the wells of truth
— why cannot I find the word I need for the un-

A Little Book. 181
gainly gambollings of this vasty and inapposite
creature, muddying the shallows of theology ?
Mark, are you forgetting charity? Perhaps,
if this were not my diary, my private diary ; for
the law of charity is like the law against libel, the
greater the truth the greater the uncharity — if
you publish it ; and the truth of what I have here
set down is very, very great.
But our First Layman, I hope his paper knife
will persevere and show him this, two paragraphs
on. " One cannot offer this guess at a basis of
intercommunion between the severed members
of the one Body, without foreseeing the severe
reception it will meet with from just those within
each circle of fellowship whose fellowship in faith
should most be coveted by others in another bond.
Their loyal jealousy for the Creed delivered to
their own church will edge a censure that a ' com
mon Christianity is no Christianity,' that a faith
which can be held by all communities is a faith
that can save none, is a mutilated, disbranched,
naked trunk incapable of blossom or fruit. With
such we will plead that, since our metaphors are
often the snare of thought, they should for safety
reshape their reasoning by a change of figure."
Yes, / might have written that. This, too, that
follows — the sense of it at least, not the words.

1 82 Pastor Futurus.
" Have they conceived of the Christian faith as a
trunk and branches of a tree ? Let them ask if it
is not better conceived as the current of life which
climbs the trunk and thrids the network of branch
and bough, building them as it goes and weaving
their tissue into sap and bark and tendril and leaf,
into blossom, kernel, rind, and fruit. The life
that pushes in a river of sap up the central trunk
is one thing with the rivulet which steals along a
branch, and the drops which trickle into foliage
and bud. So is this which you call ' common
Christianity ' and fear that it is no Christianity.
Let me call it, as with humble confidence I do,
the stream of life which flows in the veins of the
Blessed Vine of God, and through all transform
ing growth, in stem and branch and cluster and
grape, is one same changeless Blood Divine
which is the life of Man."
Yes, I hope Fitz- Eustace will read that too.
For he will be equal to it, will see what John is
meaning, he. The rest of them ? Why and O
why has this happened ? Why did he not wait
for his Third Thought ? Why should my young
prophet spoil his own hand at the outset of a
career by his premature challenge of the Old by
the New ? In a week we shall have the tocsin
rung, and they that are at ease in Zion will
stumble to their feet, clutch the club, and run out

A Little Book. 183
to batter down my young gallant before they
know what he has come about. I would have
called it conceit and wantonness in another. It
is chivalry in him, but chivalry of a rather young
knight much more gallant than he is wise.
Welcome the Unitarian to the communion of
the Churchman ! Admit that he may deny the
Incarnation and be equal Christian to the be
liever ! Propose this ! and what will Slagg and
Company care for amiable phrases about " the
life which flows in the veins of the Vine of God " ?
" Creeds don't matter " — that is what you will be
quoted as saying ; and what right, they will ask,
has a man who says that to call himself a priest
of the Church of England ?

XXIII.
autour Ah ! Scrippon and Smithers, the first sheaf from
petit them of newspaper cuttings under name of Des-
livre. m0nd. I 0pen the packet with a tremor. There
is a good deal of the primitive sheep in press
critics, and a book's future may turn on how
leaders jump.
But I must begin, and I take the topmost.
. . . The omen is fair enough. " This is re
freshing, a breath of free air. The new writer
has known how to interpret his loyalty to his
own church's truths in a sense which leaves him
loyal to the truths of the Church Universal."
Very handsome, I am sure. But then this is
from " Reconstruction," and where that bell
wether jumps not many follow.
Try Number Two. " There is much that is
engaging in the manner of the little treatise, and
still more that is subtle in the thought. The
grace and modesty of the former will perhaps
conceal from uncritical readers a real provocative-
ness in the latter. We shall see."
184

Autour d'un Petit Livre. 185
Yes, we shall, very soon, from the look of
Number Three. An aroma exhales from the green
docket. It is vinegar. . . . "It really seems
time that authorities in the Church should re
member they are there to authorize — or refuse
authorization. This writer is, we ascertain from
Crockford, a clergyman of only six years' stand
ing, but that time has been long enough to
confer on him insight into the essence of Christ
ianity, by which he discovers that Creeds are a
surplusage in the equipment of a church, and
that the barriers of differing communions should
be constructed of cobweb. Whether it is his
simplicity or his art that these outrageous sug
gestions are conveyed in a style so unoffensive
verbally, we do not know, and it does not matter.
For it does not affect the question which arises
(perhaps we must say ought to arise) for his
superiors in the Church. Loyal Churchpeople
have for a long time past waited with some
patience for a pronouncement from quarters of
authority on the escapades of the school of
writers to which our author belongs. To un
official observers these kind young instructors of
their decrepit Mother Church appear to be tear
ing to tatters the already much plucked — at credal
vesture of reformed Christianity. Churchpeople
will now wait, with a diminishing patience, to

1 86 Pastor Futurus.
learn whether there is or is not a limit to the
patience of the Overseers of the flock with the
performances of their underlings."
" Tearing to tatters ... the credal vesture
of reformed Christianity. " Slagg, the flamboyant
Slagg, his manner, of and belonging to him.
" The patience of the Overseers." Slagg again,
the Hammer of Unorthodoxy. No, the Malleus
hareticorum ; Malleus. Not the hammer. The
mallet rather, weighty and of wood.
But now here is something more really for
midable than Slagg's drum-stick on the Vigilance
drum. " This volume gives one sadly to think about
the meaning and value of the priestly vow. Our
new theologies may minimize the part in Faith
of dogmatics : but a part they have and one that
cannot be dispensed with. The priest devotes
his heart, but also his mind : he does profess to
believe the truth held by his Church. And one
must ask whether the ingenious speculativeness
which shimmers along these elusive pages is the
sincere expression of an idiosyncrasy genuinely
believing, though bemused by a literary mode,
or is the well-studied strategy of a mind which
consciously abandons the positions of the Faith,
but masks that manoeuvre from foes in front and
allies at his side. In the name of a priest's

Autour d'un Petit Livre. 187
integrity, but also in the name of mere intellectual
honesty, we must ask in which way we are to
take these self-revelations of a junior functionary
in Carleford Abbey."
Hem ! " Priest's integrity . . . intellectual
honesty." Who writes this? I ask. Agnosco
stilum ecclesice Romance, said cheery Paolo Sarpi,
as they dressed his dagger wound. One cannot
english the Friar's latin m8t, but one can re
cognize the style, and stiletto, of a certain Church
Despotic which is encamped in our own, as it is
somewhere in every church in every age. [Ha !
was this agent ever in our own camp here ?] This
dagger pricks shrewdly, goes to the quick, the
chivalrous quick, of the victim. It will rankle
there, that venomed innuendo, "a priest's in
tegrity," and perhaps fever his blood into some
generous extreme of self-avowal, untruthful
through sheer anxiety for truthfulness. What is
my balm for this ? Mine — and the Bishop's ?
For it is his that will be needed most, and he
that will find it hardest to administer. O my
John, what a tangle have you twisted for your
friends !

XXIV.
a shep- The Bishop came across with a troubled face
problem, this morning, and put into my hand a letter from
Sir Ebenezer. Yes, I thought we should not
have long to wait for this. The letter is a
humble plea for the relief of " the serious dis
comfort caused to many Churchpeople of this
diocese," some of them (the writer vouches)
being "persons competent to form a sound
judgment" ("sound" means, I fancy, "practi
cally effective ") by a recent publication bearing
the name of a clergyman on the cathedral staff.
The correspondent would shrink from interven
ing, if it were not his loyal duty to acquaint his
Lordship with a fact unlikely otherwise to come
to his knowledge, in time to enable him to deal
as he would wish with a too probable scandal in
the diocese. ... He did not presume to judge
of the book's theology himself : that would be
his Lordship's province. But he could not be
blind to the unhappy effect the book was having
in certain quarters. He had been made anxious
188

A Shepherd's Problem. 189
by the doubt some of his friends in the county
expressed as to whether they could with a good
conscience continue their support of Church
objects, if the Church allows herself to be re
presented by underlings so little true to their
obligations. When I had read it, " You see," he said, "the
threat there ; ' Church objects,' ' my friends
in the county ' ; that is, the ironmasters, just
when we have got them to see their duty of
building churches for the new swarm of their
workpeople, will ' down tools,' and if they strike
' our Gospel's ' works will be shut down. That
fellow at Blastonbury — " he stifled an explosion,
" Well, Slagg is Slagg. That length I really
must go, and " with a gleam " it is a terrible
thing to say of a fellow- Christian, but it has to
be said : truth will not spare me this ".
We had a moment's laugh.
" Well, yes ; but I'm really much afraid of
what the man may do. That ponderous fatuity
is fugleman to all the wealthy charitable who
count for much in diocesan finance. However,
that is a practical problem, and I feel more equal
to it than to this other, which is a problem of faith
not practice. Slagg owns the ' Vigilance ' and
part too of the ' Mirror '. You see what power
he has to make a row, and to hale Desmond's

1 90 Pastor Futurus.
book before the bar of diocesan opinion, if
I try to quash his private plea. So I shall
have to be a Court of Heresy. It is a thing I
never ought to be, but it is what I have to be.
My new brother of Chesterwick (a rising name,
cousin, to be respected and observed) has just
been saying, in introducing himself to the dio
cese, that the Bishop is responsible to the Church
for " the formulation and interpretation of doctrine
in his diocese, as the incumbent is in his parish '¦
A saving clause, that last : the Bishop ' inter
prets ' ('formulates' surely can hardly stand:
that should be the Church's prerogative), inter
prets for the see, as the parson interprets for the
parish ; the scale is different, not the kind. Well,
we represent the Church, I in the large province,
he in the petty ; and of course the Church must
act through an agent in teaching faith as well as
ruling practice. But if the Bishop is judge in the
Church's name, where is the court of appeal from
him ? Can we possibly do without one ? Especi
ally when the judge may be no jurisprudent for
the trial of disputed doctrine. Mark, what is the
court of appeal against decisions of a fallible
judge ? "
"Then you don't count your Chancellor, and
the Dean of Arches, and the Privy Council to be
courts of appeal ? "

A Shepherd's Problem. 191
" Why no, not for this case. If I were induced
to inhibit, nothing would induce Desmond to
appeal ; and if you got him to do it, what would
those courts make of any question of heresy
which could be framed out of that book ? There
is only constructive heresy there, and of a subtle
construction. The judge would feel as puzzled
as Festus was over Paul. A trial before them
would yield no result except a demonstration,
rather superfluous, of the ineptitude of our
Church's legal machinery to decide cases of doc
trine. We want a court which Churchmen could
respect as competent to interpret the Church's
mind." I supposed that in theory at any rate judgment
could be referred to the provincial synod of bishops.
That was so, he agreed in theory, and he
knew quarters where it was wished to translate
the theory into practice. The translation, how
ever, was not going to be completed in time for
his relief. If it were, could one be sure a board
of bishops would be an improvement on the
single bishop ? It would protect us from plain
ignorance, stupidity, caprice, temper, or partiality
in a diocesan ; but — well, councils of war do not
fight, and Sanhedrins might have no stomach for
the adventure there is in acknowledging a new
prophet, if one comes.

192 Pastor Futurus.
Yes, I concurred, let me fall into the hands of
a bishop, as bishops are in England, rather than
into those of such boards as certain reformed
churches enjoy. Look at the late treatment of
Liberal theologians on the Continent. Our
Wesleyans the other day did better, but it was a
council of hundreds, not a board. He ruminated
a little. Then' —
" I suppose we have to go pretty deep to find
the cause of this trouble of mal-adaptation. A
bishop is left with this burden on him because
we believe heaven makes his shoulders broad
enough and strong enough to carry it. We think
a bishop is an apostle by virtue of the consecra
tion ; he is like Peter or Paul. Well, but now
Timothy and Titus, earliest of bishops and nearest
to Apostles, must have had, by our own argument,
all that their successors the bishops of to-day can
claim of special inspiration and other grace. Now
I ask you, Mark, between ourselves, for one must
not raise such tremendous questions coram populo,
but in the ear of the nearest of the faithful — I
ask you do we really suppose that Timothy, or
Titus whom we know less well, were infallible
interpreters of the Church's mind ; and, if Apollos
had gone back to Ephesus and taught Christ in
a mode which Timothy considered wrong, that
Timothy was sure to be right and Apollos wrong ?

A Shepherd's Problem. 193
Or Priscilla, teacher of Apollos, and perhaps of
the Church, if she did write Hebrews, might not
Timothy have inhibited her, mindful of St. Paul's
view of woman, and have repressed sounder
doctrine than his own ? When we try to see the
fact of the episcopate not through the books and
with the eyes of the learned and theological and
ecclesiological, but through human experience and
with the eyes of a man who has made some
observation of his fellow-men, the Timothies and
the Priscillas of his own day, and knows some
what of how it is with them as to the endowment
of the Spirit, well, we believe as firmly as ever
in the charisma of the bishop — until the ecclesio-
logist begins to tell us what our belief about the
episcopate is. That often gives one's faith a
qualm. It is like the tinkle of a cymbal, not an
echo from a man's heart."
He looked at me with some distress. I said
nothing, only signalled my sympathy.
" It's a comfort to have a man like you near by
— at times, to do a little irresponsible thinking
with. For I expect, Mark, our adventure here
in Christianity has a very anxious concern in this
question about Desmond. We stand for reality
in Churchmanship, we and our young men, do we
not ? H ow about the realness then of our doctrine
of the bishop ? Do we rest it upon the laborious

194 Pastor Futurus.
inferential proofs pieced together by an his
torian ? Well, I do not myself complain of their
scantiness and tenuity : there is some of the same
precariousness in the Christian tradition as a
whole, and I trust this part of it as I trust the
rest, not because we have evidence that would
convince a jury (as say the more blatant of us)
but because there is evidence that convinces the
judge, oneself. People may pare away the his
tory of the Virgin Birth ; what they leave us is
enough, because they do not even touch the evi
dence of the Christ we know incarnate not in hu
manity but in this man. That is how I hold the
historic episcopate. It is rather a bridge of gos
samer that our Church historians have constructed
between James of Jerusalem and poor Robert of
Carleford ; but the threads are fibres of steel
because Robert, by the mercy of God the pastor
and Bishop of this flock, may know the signs of an
apostle (woe is unworthy him!) in head, heart,
and hand that go about His Father's business."
I concurred very warmly here, and hoped his
doctrine might reach some of our valorous
champions of episcopacy ; it would better their
discretion. He smiled, and continued. "Yes, but then
that business, what is it? For the gift will be
a gift wanted for the work. And no one will say

A Shepherds Problem. 195
the work I was chosen for was the ' formulation
and interpretation of doctrine'. The Prime
Minister did not think so ; what he thought was
that Robert Barrington had some turn for setting
his men their work and perhaps keeping them at
it. You'll say the Minister only wrote the letter,
and a Higher Will inspired that scripture. So I
think. But that is what the scripture meant ;
that my task in the Church was Order, not
Illumination. Then that would be the gift, to
set in order the Church's work, not her thought.
However little this Bishop is Apostle, Prophet
he is not at all."
" Nay, but," I broke in, "there is prophecy in
work too ; you shan't call yourself  "
He waved it away. " Anyhow I am not the
man who should sit as assayer of this silver of
the sanctuary. But that is what men make
believe I can be. And now comes this monstrous
situation, that, if that Blastonbury person makes
fuss enough, I may have to recognize that our
chaplain is not teaching according to the doctrine
of the Church of England. Of course I shall not
have to inhibit him or deprive ; he will save me
that. It will be like that choirboy of yours at
Elfton, Mark, " what was turned out of the choir ;
he turned hisself out ". (We smiled.) But see
what it means. Your best scholar from the
13 *

196 Pastor Futurus.
Chantry, the rarest mind you have trained to
help in the Adventure, the man whom you looked
to (confess it) to become the chief " beginner of
a time " in churchmanship, the Pastor Futurus
of our Movement upon whom your prophecies
went before, tua gloria, yes, and decus nostrum —
out goes his lamp before it can shine before men.
That's what it will be. The thing is not what
it may look to people, just a young thinker in a
hurry brought to order by the authorities and
very properly set back in his promotion till he
grows wiser. No, here has he introduced him
self to the church public by butting his head
against the stolid pieties and cowardly religious
decencies of Carlshire. He will be labelled
heretic, and every future word of his will be read
as an enemy's word. The best agent we have
trained for the Movement has done for himself
by a tumble at the start. The world does not
give a man another chance, not often ; the
Church, I expect, even less often. It's a career
broken before it was well begun. Isn't this a
bit of a tragedy, Mark, for Desmond and us ? "
" Yes, for him and for us," I said, " if it comes
to his turning himself out of the chaplaincy. For
suppose it doesn't stop there ; suppose he should
turn himself out of the Church . . . to go where ?
But it is not John's tragedy or ours we ought to

A Shepherds Problem. 197
think of; it is the Church's. Here's a young
priest, who is a prophet too, with a message for
the age, pronounced a little crudely perhaps, but
true or on the way to become true, and this voice
is to be silenced and driven out into the wilder
ness by the bleat and the bray of orthodox ignor
amuses, allowed to pronounce judgment on a
new prophet because Mother Church has no
court of her own for it. "
We looked at one another ruefully. Then he
said, " Dear cousin, I see something that is
coming out of this. That court of Prophecy has
to be found It is you who have got to find it.
Good-bye for now." And he went.
I wonder — yes, I wonder.

XXV.
improvi- Yes, I was looking for this, the Chancellor of
dence of 0, . .. , T 11
some or- Shnvelham s sentence. In every thougnt-pro-
hodox. cesg Q£ Qur Qnurcn tnere ;s a point in the proces
sion which his figure is expected to occupy ; and
I am bound to say his appearances, if they have
the regularity of ceremonial, have also some of
the impressiveness. He has the figure for a
procession, wears his heavy brocaded robes with
an antique distinction of which the rest of us have
lost the secret, and almost conceals from us how
much their stiffness impedes his going.
But the present pronouncement. Ought a
man of his eminence to be so unobservant of
current religious fact, as to think this paragraph
from his pen on the causes of heresy has perti
nence in our case? This sketch of the "vanity,
self - assertiveness, self - opinionativeness, wilful
ness" of the schismatic — well, it could never be
quite out of date ; the type is too human to be
alien to any age ; but offered as an account of
modernism and suggestion of a short way with
198

Improvidence of Some Orthodox. 199
modernists, it is inept ; and as a portrait of John,
if this writer knew him, would be all but silly.
To condemn a theologian's theory on the ground
that he is self-opinionated is like reproaching an
eminent poet for being vain. Suppose the poet
was vain ; where does that spoil his rhythm,
diction, and fancy? Suppose John's opinions
come from himself, the question is not where
they came from, but where they get to ; do they
reach the true mark or miss it ?
However, passing by this irrelevance, let us
see if the Chancellor has any new rendering of
the old theme this time ? . . . No, he has got no
farther than the four centuries. He does not
find " Desmond on the Church " in any document
of that period ; Desmond then is not primitive
and therefore cannot be catholic. Causa judicata
est. None of the Councils or even of the Fathers
have " collected out of the Scriptures " that a be
liever's communion with Christ is of more value
than his Creed. Let then no younger harvester
of truth dare to bring this sheaf in his bosom, on
pain of learning that he must be silent in our midst,
or take his doctrines to some other audience
than ours.
The temerity of our Church doctors makes me
tremble for the faith. Four little centuries, and
the weight and width of the thousand-centuried

200 Pastor Futurus.
church-to-be is to be built on this ! Yes, when
the pyramid can stand on its point ! Ah ! they
will tell me from Shrivelham that their base is
wide and deep enough, for it stands on the
cornerstone which is the Christ. Beware of your
metaphors. Change them for better ; think of
your church as a thing not of stone but of living
substance, the body of Christ, and how stands
your reasoning now ? The child is father to the
man, but not all there is of the man is in that
" six years' darling of a pygmy size ". The tree,
one says, is in the seed, but of course it is not.
It is divided, in proportions how unequal, be
tween the tiny seed and that much of the natural
world which allows itself to be assimilated by the
seed. Does one need interpret the parable ? If
the Chancellor can with help of the best intro
spective instrument detect the branch and blos
som and fruit of the tree in the gram- weight of
the seed ; nay, if he can see enough in that micro
cosm to forecast the spread of bough and fashion
of the leafage, without waiting for the tree to
demonstrate its growth by actually growing into
it ; why, then, let him put the theologic micro
scope to the kernel of the fourth century Creed
and tell us if he can there discern the pattern of
that vision of God and man, which will be the
faith of the Christian believer a century hence,

Improvidence of Some Orthodox. 20 1
or a decade. Ah ! but it is there. It is there,
but not for his eyes. The Spirit that searcheth
all things, even the deep things of God, He can
see the tree in the seed, and the fullness of the
stature divine in the infant frame of Church which
is the body of Christ in early making. For He,
the Giver of Life, can see the life He planted,
and knows whereto it shall grow. He sees and
He can tell us the things to come ; only He.
Why, O why, do we not go right back to Him,
past that early word of His, the creed of the
church's early youth, back to Him, the Breath
of Life, to learn what for us to-day is the truth
by which man can live ? What fatal blindness
is this that possesses so many of our orthodox !
Their exclusive trust in the Four Centuries, their
worship of the Primitive — why call it reverence,
caution, steadfastness, fidelity to the good thing
entrusted ? Is it not rather a foolhardiness, if our
obstinacy is at fault ; or if our supineness, then a
culpable improvidence in the business of faith ?
What a wasteful trusteeship is this, which leaves
a heritage still invested in a failing security, when
it should be transferred betimes into safety. Yet
no doubt I am wronging my brethren. They
are not obstinate nor yet supine in their faith,
that is, not more so than we ourselves are in a
counter cause. But blind, rather blind, they are,

202 Pastor Futurus.
not discerning the signs of the time. Such good
servants and gallant soldiers of the Christ, so
earnestly contending ; but just look at them,
clinging to positions they were set to hold at the
action's beginning and deaf to the recall from an
untenable post — nay, not that, but blind to the sig
nal being waved to them to leave their shelter
trench and come out into the open and storm the
lines in front of them.
It is bad enough that they should fight at the
wrong time and place. It isn't the worst, though.
If they draw their sights on their friends and
pour volleys into our own advanced companies!
But that is what will happen, we shall see.
Really, John, you might have seen it would.

XXVI.
I see it, I see it now," said John, when I im- the

creedIN ONE

parted to him the gist of Slagg's missive. " O
how I see it ! " article.
He gave a woeful look and shook his long
arms in a misery. " It was simply wretched of
me to drag St. Wilfrid's into this and bring scan
dal on the ' Militia '. But don't think it was
wanton in me. It was just absent-mindedness ;
I never thought of it. Absence of mind, that
was it. But I know you can't believe it."
I well knew that I could. Seeing is believing,
and " I've seen me" (as Gardener says) blunder
about the presentation of B  to Haverdown
through forgetting how it affected A — — . So to
John I replied, " They tell us we British won the
empire in a fit of absent-mindedness. Let's hope
yours is going to conquer some territory for
Christendom, and not cost too much. We must
think how to cheapen it."
" That can't be by taking any of it back. I
mean all I said, though I said it the wrong way
203

204 Pastor Futurus.
at the wrong time. Why didn't I talk to you
about it beforehand? I'm not sure I know why.
There are things about which one can't talk, not
to anyone, can't confer with flesh and blood at
all. Then, spite of absent-mindedness, it did
occur to me not to commit you, if trouble rose,
through your knowing of my line beforehand.
At least this is what I said to myself, though I
think the other was the real reason, and this was
the excuse."
There was a pause, which I tried to fill, but
did not. Then he> drew himself together.
" Principal, I did forget the Bishop and you,
how it would touch you, but I didn't forget our
Militia. No, I thought this was my stroke in it.
We always said that what we were ' out for '
was realness. Verley and I agreed that he should
take on the working-man and I was to see
whether I could do anything among head-
workers. So I looked round for the unrealness
where my own little attack might have some
chance of getting in. I found it, that I'm sure of,
whether I am getting in or not. Principal, how
we have been unreal about the Creeds ! How
we have mistaken words for things ! What a
wretched convention it is that we to-day recite
' Whosoever will be saved must hold the Catholic
faith,' as if we meant by it what the Quicunque

The Creed in One Article. 205
people meant. We don't mean it. We could
not mean it, if we stopped to mean anything, if
we had the courage to stop and mean something,
if we dared to be real in our faith instead of
correct." His colour rose and there was a growing
excitement in the voice. My sympathy followed
him, though it followed him trembling, for I
feared he would say something which even be
tween our two selves were better not spoken.
But he sank his voice when he went on ag-ain.
"It was at Philip Graves' death-bed that this
came home to me. That was a fortnight after
the much obituarized Chamberlain, who for the
purposes of parish magazines was no doubt a
worthy. Graves was an unworthy, in the same
meaning : he was never seen in church, and the
head verger told me he was an atheist : also
there was one ill passage in his life, as I came to
learn from himself. But I got to know him in
his last months. Principal, this man went down
to the house of death justified rather than the
other." Here he stopped as if he wanted me to say
something. It came, but was only " That may
be, that may well be, John."
He went on, " Before, he lost consciousness he
signed to me. I put my ear to him. He gasped,

206 Pastor Futurus.
' I don't know where I'm going. You don't :
we've been friends, and I hope — I hope — .'
There the voice died out. So presently did he.
" Why do I tell you this ? Because what
came of it to me has mastered me ever since.
When you stand at the brink together hand in
hand, another soul and yours, and something
comes and parts you both asunder and he goes
over — after that, you find there is only one
article in your Creed, and it swallows up all the
rest. . . ."
" What is it ? " I asked at length.
" I believe," he recited slowly, " in the world
to come, and my portion therein. . . . When
a man is going across the line, what is anything
else to him except his own fate, what is happen
ing to him ? What is the Father to me then,
but that love will meet me there ; what is Jesus
Christ who redeemed me, but that love casts out
fear ; what is the Holy Ghost, but that I know
I shall live in that world, for that it lives in me
now ; what is the Three in One, except that
all this is true and not a part only ; what is
' born of the Virgin Mary ' — though He was,"
with a curious sudden note of pondering, "He
was — but that all this is truly true ; what is ' the
resurrection of the body ' but that it is I myself
that will be there ; I myself and — and mine ? "

The Creed in One Article. 207
There a great throb seemed to silence him.
Did I reason with this heretic ? Was I a man
with a heart, or a theologian with a catechism ?
I took his hand in my two and pressed it.
There was no more said.

XXVII.
one Looking back on our talk yesterday, which ended
CRFFDmany ' so disconcertedly, really without my saying any
articles. of tne tningS which I thought I should have to
get out, do I blame myself for a failure ?
Of course it was an accident that frustrated
me, that burst of emotion in John, which made
further talk indecent or indeed impossible. But
if that had not occurred, how should I have
managed my part? It is the truth that I was
simply disconcerted by the new point of view,
and my bearings were lost. John was so wrong
and so right. For what is truer, what more
real, than that theology must speak in terms of
human fate or is a science of the unimportant.
The problem of the Trinity in Unity, what
more or better is it to the Christian as Christian
man than the Calculus is to my Martha as
housekeeper of the Chantry? What good to
know the attributes of Father, Son, and Spirit as
the Dwellers in Heaven, unless our lot is fallen
to us in that Heaven, and our fortunes hang on
208

One Creed, Many Articles. 209
Them? There may be dwellers in Mars, and,
if so, there are truths about their estate and
quality, and there could be heresies if one studied
them for oneself : but the heretic's friends would
not tremble for his weal nor his foes persecute,
unless indeed Martian or earth-man should invent
an etheroplane and navigate the void which
divides us. Then certainly Martha or her master
for her will have to learn what we must do to be
saved. Yes, John is right: "Creeds are oi no
consequence" (as some infamously affirm that
he says, when it is only they who say it for him)
unless the Creeds tell us what we were and are
and shall be and what meantime we ought to be,
if the "shall be" is to come to pass. So far I
go with you, John. But then those clauses of
the Creed which you are willing to melt down
into one uniform substance of belief, they do tell
us these matters. They are the features of the
face of God, as God shows it to man. You are
content to know of an infinite world and your
portion therein : but the Creed is the landscape
of that world, its clauses are the landmarks ; and
without them that infinite would be a dead-
flat, homeless steppe, with a desolation, not a
welcome, for the soul. John, you quite certainly
are wrong here. If I could show you how !
And yet how right you are, how utterly, un-
14

210 Pastor Futurus.
answerably right in the thing you are really
trying to say. Faith that saves is not a confes
sion, it is a communion. Are we not all of us
seeing now, though many are not aware of what
they see, that all life from insect up to man is
only communion with that which makes it live,
and the life of saint is communion of that which
most is alive with That which most is life-giving ?
You and I, John, have thought out this together,
whichever of us did the more to think it. Walk
we by the rule of this, and if in one thing yet
we be otherwise minded God shall reveal even
this to us. We know what Faith is : we shall
know presently what Creed is also.
Ha! Communion. It has slipped my memory
that next Tuesday is the meeting of the Deanery
for which weeks ago John promised a paper
under that title. What will happen about that
now? Will he feel the situation intolerable
under the present circumstances, and make some
excuse to be off the encounter ? I hope not, for
if I know John and how he would speak of the
" holy mysteries," it will do only good that they
should hear him deal with them in the intimacy
he could use among friends. That is, if the
paper was written before the trouble. To see
the real Desmond may rid some minds among

One Creed, Many Articles. 211
us of the phantasmal figure of him which the
book has thrown on their orthodox retina. I
was never a believer in homoeopathy till now :
but if John's thinking is " dangerous," it is one
of those cases where the cure of the evil is some
more of the evil. Yes, John must read the paper.
What is more, the Bishop must come. He never
does so, but now there's a reason for it.

14*

XXVIII.
the com- The paper has been read. I went anxious to
munion tne meeting of the Deanery, and anxious I came
saints, away, but the anxieties were not the same. The
first was anxiety with a heart of pain in it, the
other with a heart of peace.
He opened well by a spoken apology for read
ing such a paper at all ; he hoped we should not
think him presumptuous in trying to treat a
matter, the Holy Communion, where theory was
only a little more than nothing, and experience
little less than everything : and what was the
experience of a five years' priesthood worth?
However, as we could not help theorizing too,
the safest way was to bring one's own raw
notions under the correction of riper judgments.
Would we take his paper this way ?
This was received favourably, I thought.
The tone was so sincere that our weak brothers
could not suspect irony, which certainly is intoler
able, at least outside of a book.
The paper started with a recollection of his

The Communion of Saints. 2 1 3
early attempts to teach Eucharistic doctrine to
confirmation candidates. He found he had to
begin where perhaps others would end, with the
sacramental teaching of John VI. He used to
tell the class that the discourse in Galilee came
before the Supper, and the Institution could
only be understood when seen in the light of
that doctrine. " For my own understanding I
go back behind the sixth chapter to the first, to
John's ' In the beginning was the Word and
the Word was with God '. But what I mean
will be made plainer if I go no farther back in
the world's history than the beginning of Man
in Genesis. If the Eucharist is the Bread of
Life we shall understand the Institution better if
we can see it against its right background, the
creation of Man the living soul."
How, he continued, do we conceive the creation
of man ? He remembered his childish comment
when some one showed him Michelangelo's
picture in the Sistine of the making of Adam.
There lay the figure of Adam, fully shaped, but
a dim languid form stretched on the sward, just
able to lift a hand towards the approaching finger
of the Almighty, which will touch and make him
a living soul. " How," asked the child, " could
Adam be there already before he was made?"
The elder's answer he forgot, but now he had

214 Pastor Futurus.
come to see that Angelo was right. Adam had
to be there before he could be made : it is so
with all living things, they must exist before they
can be made alive. For when one looked into
it, what was life but a certain relation in which
the thing that lives stands to the Power that
creates it. He thought we might name this
relation an interchange of self between the two,
or an interpenetration of each by the other.
That was at any rate part of the fact. But this
relation could not come into being unless both
the terms were there, the Creator and also the
Creature. So in the making of man Adam must
first be there in order that he may be made to
live. John, I expect, saw some of our faces growing
blank, and looking off his manuscript said : " I am
afraid you will not think there is much sense in
this, or not much else than fancifulness. And of
course I know we cannot imagine the alternative
any better, a creatio ex nihilo. All I need ask
you to agree to is that this is the farthest point
in the process of creation to which our minds
can go back : we can see those Two, fronting
one the Other, man and his Creator, for the man
must be there before he can be in a relation to
God and so have a life unto God. How the

The Communion of Saints. 2 1 5
man comes out of the dark is what one cannot
see: that is where the veil falls. I hope you
will let me have it so at present, and then judge
whether it does not help one to think out some
other things. "
They looked a little re-encouraged at this, but
I thought John lost a little of what he had gained
by adding, " I think I am really saying what the
Prologue of the Fourth Gospel shadows out.
' In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God,' vpbs rbv ®ebu, unto God, in
relation to Him. Have we not here the Two,
God and His First Begotten, by whom also He
made the worlds, fronting One the Other, at the
very, very Beginning ? All the world, and there
fore Man himself, is there in the Word, out of
whom he springs."
I have an idea that at this some one present
was repeating to himself a reviewer's comment
on a passage in John's brochure, " Can anything
be more exasperating in religious writing than
speculation of this kind ? " H owe ver, we went on.
After the Creation comes the Incarnation, to
redeem the Creature. How did we conceive of
this event, the Word made flesh in Jesus ? Again
we were looking at the Two between whom by
their touch the Life must spring, the true Life of

216 Pastor Futurus.
men this time. Here was the man Christ Jesus,
the Incarnate one, set over against the Eternal,
that, being irpb<; rbv ®ebv, He might become
®eos. Jesus made the interchange of self by His
absolute devotion to the Father (a devotion in
which Christians have discerned one culminating
moment in the Baptism with its signs). By that
interchange of self, Jesus, and in Jesus mankind,
became alive unto God, and the Incarnation had
been wrought.
This was how the Incarnation began : how
was it communicated to men, to disciples ? Christ
and the Disciple — these were now the Two
whose communion must engender the life.
What then was the story of the first transmission
of the saving faith from the Incarnate to His
human brethren, from the Man to men ? It was
a tale of Peter breaking an awed hush that
followed the Prophet's challenge "Who think ye
that lam?" by his " Thou art the Christ ". In
that speech the disciple made whole surrender of
himself and his fortunes earthly and spiritual, and
to him and the assenting brethren the Life passed :
the Tradition started on its course. After this
nothing could happen that was not the same in
kind : the birth of every new Christian must be
on this wise : at the touch of the faith of one in
Christ before him, his faith will spring alive in

The Communion of Saints. 217
the like self-surrender, whereby he abides in
Christ and Christ in him. This is the Incarna
tion at its work, Life from the Christ running in
the veins of mankind.
Here the reader looked up to acknowledge the
mystery his words had grazed on, the mystery of
the communication of faith, how it is that it can
pass from one soul to another. " The fact is so,
I cannot doubt. Faith does make faith, life unto
God in one man does cause another man to live
unto God ; but the link of causation between
converter and converted, that is what escapes the
eye. It seems to me that properly speaking
there is no causing, there is only occasioning: I
mean that in every conversion to Christ there is
a new beginning, like the first creation of man ;
the soul of the convert, like that Adam of the
Sistine, starts of itself alive unto God. The faith
of his elder in Christ does only this — it gives the
shock at which the Christian-to-be makes the
effort to live and so is born alive ; he finds in
him a will to live which meets the Creator's Will to
make live, and so there is life. That is all I can
see of it myself : my own mind cannot get farther
back than Adam about to be made and the
Creator about to make him. Perhaps the mystery
is a final one."

218 Pastor Futurus.
Two or three had been regarding him with
close attention, but rather more seemed to note
that philosophy was being talked and took the
opportunity to rest their minds. But we were
really getting near the point now, and all re
covered some animation when the familiar phrase
" The Sacrament as an extension of the Incarna
tion " came to their ears. John said he had
found that formula most illuminating. Those
ever-disputed words of Institution, " This is my
Body," seemed to settle out of turbid contention
into clarity and precision. For was it not true,
most literally true ? The Sacrament is the Body
of Christ. It does for men even that which the
mortal body did for the companions of Jesus, that
body which walked with them in Galilee and sat
at supper in Jerusalem and was broken on the
cross. For what was that body, and its work ?
It was the instrument by which the Incarnate
could impart His life to His followers, for it was
the means of His manifestation. To be there
in the body meant that He and men had bodily
organs of knowledge which could act one on
other, by which the Divine Spirit in the Lord and
their human spirits could meet and interpenetrate,
could exchange the self of man in them and the
Selfhood of God in the Redeemer. When Peter
and they that were with him saw, heard, and

The Communion of Saints. 219
touched Jesus the prophet of Nazareth, His self-
surrender to the Father stirred them by the
shock to make the same self-surrender, to offer
the same sacrifice of their being, and, because He
their Master lived, to live also unto God as He.
It was all a mystery still, but could we state more
closely than thus how the Bodily Presence of
Jesus worked the salvation of men with whom
He lived?
But the temporal Body of Jesus, once slain by
the cross, ceased to be the manifestation of God
and the instrument of life to men. What now
became the instrument ? For a moment in
history the instrument was the Risen Body, the
Presence of Jesus in the Appearances. After
the Ascension and close of the Appearances the
instrument by which God was manifested and the
life imparted was the witness borne by those who
had seen to those who had not seen, but could
believe through their word. It was the Christian
Tradition, the conveyance of the faith by Word,
Sacrament, and Discipline. By the story of the
Incarnation and by the Christian manner of life
based upon that story's truth, the new Christians
had the intercourse with the Incarnate through
the senses, though not their own senses but those
of the witnesses : by that story's help they too
were in contact with Jesus, He was present even

220 Pastor Futurus.
bodily to them ; they saw and heard the Christ
living unto God as man, as Jesus of Nazareth ;
the thrill of His Personality struck on them, and
their souls awoke to live unto God. " This
Tradition then, will you let me say it, worked the
work of the manifestation in the flesh. May I
not say that in the Tradition the Body of Jesus,
His earthly body even, was present still? "
Some were disconcerted at this ; to my eyes
they were saying " We wanted theology ; this is
only philosophy, and we have no use for it ".
Well, perhaps they have not ; but whose fault is
that? But now a heightening of his tone told me we
were reaching his climax. " Now if in the Tra
dition there is present the Body, above all there
is that Presence in the Sacrament. I will not
now think of what no one could miss, that this
one record of the Christ is drama and not history
only (' things seen are mightier than things
heard ') and that the drama is of unsurpassable
aptness as figuring the most elemental life-function
for man who lives by bread. And I will not think
here even of this, that it is Christ and Christ
crucified whom the bread broken and the wine
poured make present to us. We realize that
every morn of communion. What comes before
myself as constituting the unique power of this

The Communion of Saints. 221
sacrament to make Christ present to us is this ;
beyond all those other elements which are instru
ments of the tradition of Life, beyond scripture,
doctrine, creed, prayer, meditation, example, rule,
this instrument carries the Redeemer's — Will.
This we know He willed to be the conveyer to
us of life as He willed no other. Of what action
else was it commanded ' Do in remembrance of
Me — this ' ? Over what other matter said the
Lord ' My Body, it is this ' ? Here then as no
where else the Incarnate set His will : here as
nowhere else the Word chose to be made flesh,
that in the flesh He might abide with man. If
always it is the Spirit that creates the flesh, and
apart from Spirit's act and deed the flesh is noth
ing in the world ; if it was the Spirit of the
Christ that built Christ's tabernacle of the flesh ;
then of all the Presence of God enduring now in
our Lord on earth that part is most surely an
organ, and an organ most having life, which is
with the most certainty a creation of the spirit of
Jesus, is an utterance of the mind of Christ, and
has come into being by a determination of His
will the most visible and the most emphatic.
" But if in this rite the will of the Incarnate is
more present than in aught else, then our human
wills can more present themselves to Him in this
than in exercises of soul which are not stamped

222 Pastor Futurus.
with the same assurance. Our wills can go
thither because thither His will we know is com
ing. He has given us this holy tryst ; our faith
can keep the tryst because His grace will not
fail it. And so at the altar meet again the Two,
Creator and created, that at their touch the fire
may spring and man be a living soul with a life
not unto nature but unto the Very God."
Then came a passage which I supposed was
the end ; I am sure it was so in the paper as he
showed it me beforehand.
" When one has tried to write out one's poor
thinkings about such a matter, one puts down the
pen to cry ' words, words, words ! ' And the
Holy Communion is not words, but experience,
not a doctrine but a thing that happens to one ;
and there are really no words for it, though I
suppose it is right to seek the best words one can
find. But shall I be presumptuous if I say that
much or most of the ceaseless sacramental con
troversy is an irrelevant labour, and the blows of
disputants beat an invulnerable air. If our
brethren of the Roman Church could prove their
doctrine of Christ present in the wafer, and enable
us to credit the convert who says that at his first
communion he found it so (as if he knew it by
the wafer's taste), should we be more able to
receive the Body of Christ, would that taste be

The Communion of Saints. 223
any more a savour of life unto us ? Or if the
Unitarian could convince us that the elements
are emblems only, would that frustrate our com
munion, if as a fact life did come to us in the
eating and drinking ? Or if our fellow- churchmen
could make more distinct to us, than hitherto
they find possible, the sense in which there is a
Real Presence, would they be bringing us nearer
into the mystery than they have already gone
themselves by the aid of their own reverently-
vague definition ? That is what I would gladly
hear. Meanwhile am I wrong in thinking that
what we can truly know about the Sacrament is
not any knowledge which can take a metaphysi
cal expression, but a knowledge which can be
verified in the way in which other truth that con
cerns man's fate is verified ? For surely this can
be known — whether to use the Sacrament makes
the soul of the worshipper to have life in itself,
even as one can know whether such a food or
such an exercise makes the natural body fuller
of life. But to know this is to know that in the
Sacrament Christ is present, according to the
word of that seeker long ago after the Divine
communion, ' In Thy presence is the fulness of
joy ' — joy, life's other name — ' and at Thy right
hand there is pleasure for evermore'."

224 Pastor Futurus.
But this was not the end, and I see from his
manuscript here before me that he had written
down what followed, though I thought he was
not reading it but speaking.
" I have been trying to reason that the Pres
ence of Christ in the Sacrament is the same fact
as the Life which it imparts to the recipient.
But I would like to close with two words about
the Communion as Life. Have we not often
remembered, and perhaps not without some
demur, that the ancients called the Eucharist the
medicina immortalitatis, the remedy of death.
I feel the word jars on us, because it has a
savour of selfishness, of a godliness which is gain.
And yet — well, I found in some one's inquiry
into the Grail legend that in some forms of it,
when the human myth was not yet Christianized
but still a ' noble savage, wild in woods, ' the
mystic object of the quest is not a food giving
life, but a weapon giving victory. I told myself
these two are after all one. Life is war ; to
survive against the gates of death is victory.
Does one not covet this victory, to stand on one's
feet still against the wrestler Time who wears
down body and soul ? to be able to say ' I shall
not go under, I shall not be shamed with the
shame of mortality : I shall not really suffer the
degradation which flouts my eyes in this fellow

The Communion of Saints. 225
mortal, for whom I bring from the altar the viati
cum to his loathly sick-bed, nor of that other
whose aged faculties of wit and will are stumbling
towards a final impotence. The Grail is weapon
of a victory : I shall win it by this antidote to
death, this glory which medicines death's shame,
thanks be to God who giveth us the victory
through the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus
Christ. " The other word I wanted to say was this. In
heathendom the Grail was called a weapon, and
not wrongly, but in Christendom it has been named
a food, more rightly. Will you let me think of
another fancy of heathen men, the tale of her,
the ravished maiden, who, having tasted of food
in the underworld, must still remain bride to
Death ? Why, even so do we eat this bread in
the Kingdom of heaven, and thereby are made
sons who abide in the house for ever. This
truth is how truer than the other ! If life, which
the sacrament has for its gift, be war, also life
is war's opposite, it is Love. It is that, because
every act of living in all orders of living things
is the act of giving up self to the whole, is indeed
sacrifice, a losing life for the Other's sake to find
it. But Sacrifice and Love, these two are not
two but one ; they are names each one of the
other. 15

226 Pastor Futurus.
" So Life is this, to conquer in a war against
Death and Ending, and to live on. But would
we care to live on, unless to live be also to love ;
unless the Holy Communion were Communion
with the Holy, were the fellowship of the saints, of
all the saints, all. Them also that are fallen
asleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him, the
Christ, at that Coming when the Presence fills the
sanctuary and the Glory rests on the altar. Them
also does He bring. For here is the gate of
heaven, where meet all the roads from the one
world and the other, here is the threshold that
marks off yet does not sunder our Time and their
Eternity. Here the Spirits meet, and every day
of the Communion is Dies omnium animarum.
Here, whether in the body or out of the body,
God knoweth, here they tryst together, we and
they all, we that kneel to receive the Christ, they
who are come to the tryst with Christ who gave
it and who keeps."
The voice ceased. That brief silence felt to
me less like a hush than a storm, my heart was
beating so. I did not know how we were to go
on after this, nor yet how we were to end it.
Bors (blessed man, I loved him for it ! ) he knew.
He broke the pause by saying it was the chair
man's duty at these times to prompt a discussion

The Communion of Saints. 227
of the paper. But he thought ' it would be more
to the brethren's mind to-day if he only thanked
our brother in their name for having led our minds
through thoughts so deep and expressed with so
much reverence and beauty, and then we left the
reading undiscussed, as is done in the devotional
meeting of a congress '. We murmured a firm
approval. Then our guest, as Bishop, was asked
to give the blessing, and so we came away.
But the Bishop let me overtake him. " I
must allow myself," he said, " a hackneyed
quotation There lives more faith in this man's doubt
Believe me, than in half the creed
or all the Creed — of Blastonbury."

15

228 Pastor Futurus.

[Ah ! now I know where they came from,
those lines unsigned which Clements " borrowed
from a friend " to illustrate a chapter in his
volume on "the Holy Fellowship".
The Company of Heaven.
When rosy falls my taper sheen
On frosty paten, silver grail,
I close my eyes and mark unseen
A Wonder pass that does not fail.
On soundless feet a company
Of heaven is come to kneel with me.
From lips of earth our Credo springs,
But ghostly lips the burden bear.
Our Holy, Holy, Holy rings,
Thy voice, beloved, and thine are there.
And faint on wistful forehead prest
Your Kiss of Peace hath left me blest.

XXIX.
Is it possible? Can it be that I, Mark of the the
Chantry, and for long only a priest among the heresy.
hedgerows, that I can have any idea worth
naming to another man about the statesmanship
of Church ? Of course it cannot be ; though it
is true " Captain's orders " are to find out how
someone besides the diocesan can be set to be
judge in heresy trials. Robert did not say that
in jest : he really hoped I might get some thought
to help him.
And you, Mark the Obscure, it is you that
have got it.
No, Mark the Vainglorious, not It. But yet
the name for it, the name.
Shall I write it down ? Not so soon. It
would be something of an effrontery even to
my own eyes, written down before my apologies
for it.
Instead I will write down how I came to it.
I had asked myself, Why should judgment on
229

230 Pastor Futurus.
doctrine be the office of the Bishop ? and when
I gave myself the answer, none of my own
indeed yet an answer of some authority, that it
always had been the Bishop's office to determine
questions of faith, I told myself we would go
behind that answer and make sure that it was
true. There was the Creed of Nicsea : the
bishops assembled in council made that, we say.
Do we ? But first they were bishops assembled,
300, not one ; they could even have been what
they claimed to be, the whole episcopate of the
Catholic Church. And next, when assembled,
how would they have done if it had not been for
Athanasius, no bishop but a deacon ? Then when
the Creed had been penned and signed, had a
judgment gone forth ? New Rome had spoken,
but was the case judged ? Yes, after fifty years
more of challenge and affirmation, challenge and
affirmation, till Constantinople silenced the strife.
Those fifty years were the true session of the
council which made the Creed, the court that
tried the cause was the whole people of Christ,
Athanasius and Arius were the pleaders be
fore them, sentence went forth, securus judicavit
orbis terrarum.
That judgment of the whole round world, why
was it secure ?
I will take the reason which satisfies not

The Court of Heresy. 231
myself, who am conscious of a deeper one, but
the most zealous champions of the episcopacy.
It was because it was a judgment of the whole
round world, of the universal undivided Church ;
therefore was it sure. The Nicsean Fathers
formulated Christian belief aright, not because
they were bishops, nor because they were 318
bishops, but because the whole Church, after
fifty years' study of it, found their formulation
to be right.
How did the whole Church find it to be
right ?
By experiment, the experiment of human life.
They tried to live by the faith of Arius, they
tried to live by the faith of Athanasius : by
either faith the good among them found some
communion with the Father of their spirits, but
more communion and more abiding, and for more
of them, came by the following of him who taught
that Jesus Christ is very God of very God. So
Arius died and Athanasius reigned. Yet not he,
but the People of Christ, whose voice he was.
Nor yet the People of Christ, but the Spirit who
indwells them, and prefers " beyond all temples
the upright heart and pure".
In the name of Primitiveness, my Church's
watchward, I ask that we in England to-day

232 Pastor Futurus.
should do as they did yesterday at Nicaea and
Constantinople. Let the People of Christ make
for themselves their Creed of Christ. Call an
Athanasius to council, and an Arius too (how
indeed, if you wished to choose and to reject, could
you be sure which of your councillors is which
prophet, the erring or the true, until their cause
has been heard and judged) : then call the whole
assembly of the men and women of Christ, and
let them give their witness whether the Creed
their elders offer them has led them into deeper
communion with the eternal world, whether the
truth of Christ has so come to them that they
have life and have it abundantly. It will not be
they that speak, but the Spirit that bears witness
with their Spirit.
"Trust the great heart of the people." So a
statesman exhorted us half a century ago. It
was wiser than his opponents thought, wiser
perhaps than himself knew. The People's
heart, not their head. They are not great-headed
but only many-headed. And I would not myself
trust their great-heartedness : they can be trusted
not because their heart is great, but because it is
a heart. The blood is the life, and the heart is
the seat of life. The heart of a people is a
people's life, and the heart of a Church is the
life of a Church. Trust the great heart of the

The Court of Heresy. 233
people of a Church. For the Church's truth is
her life ; that which makes her to live is true.
Let the People frame the laws of faith. Let the
People Catholic, prince with commoner, com
moner with prince, let bishop, priest, deacon,
layman, man, woman, boy, maid, sit together in
the council-hall of Human Experience and
formulate the Catholic Creed.
" Let them sit," do I say? Our permission is
not waited for. It is what they have always
done. No one ever believed a Creed which he had
not himself made. He may have recited one
that had been made for him by others : he never
believed such a one. How could he, since
belief is not in word but all in power, is the man's
life as he lives it unto Him whom he has be
lieved ? Each man's confession of faith, if it does
confess a faith, is the knowledge not of what by
his teacher's telling God is, but of what God has
been to him, the confessor. And the Church
believes the Creed herself has made, the know
ledge of what the Eternal One was and is to her,
to this body of Christ through all its countless
members in particular. She did thus at Nicaea
and after, she did thus in Europe at the Refor
mation and the Counter- Reformation, she did
thus in England when she reformulated her

234 Pastor Futurus.
beliefs in the Inspiration of Scripture and the
Descent of Man, or when of recent days she
decided against her Puritans to permit a sacra
mental worship in the beauty of holiness as well
as only in the bareness. There she trusted the
heart of the People. It was they who formulated
these articles; they, not bishops in council.
They did not do it without their bishops, any
more than soldiers win Waterloos without a
Wellington. But as all battles are "soldiers'
battles," so all victories of the true faith are
victories of the rank and file. We do not ask
our generals in the field to be foot, horse, and
guns as well as commanders. Why do we ask
our Shepherds of the People in the holy warfare
to do the work of all arms, to be shepherd and
flock at once ? They cannot do that, and not
many of them would wish to try.
And yet there is room, I fear, for that "let
them sit in Council " which I was rejecting. For
we try not to let them. We think the faith is
made and interpreted not by all but by a few.
The Fathers of the commonwealth of Christ are
to give the creeds to the commonalty. " This
people that knoweth not and cannot know the
law, how should it have a part in making it ? "
Sacerdos ad altare is a right motto. Yes, but
the layman must come to the priest at the altar

The Court of Heresy. 235
foot or there is no sacrifice offered by the people,
no communion is celebrated. Episcopus ad con
cilium. Yes, but he must come back from hall
to marketplace and persuade the multitude of
them that believe that he has counselled well and
to their heart's content and approval.
Now perhaps I can venture to write the name
of my thought. It is the Referendum. The
Catholic Referendum, the reference of a de
cree to the assent of the whole people of
Christ. Erastianism, some will cry, deadly Erastianism,
to borrow an institution of earthly politics and
fasten it on the spiritual polity. But how so?
This is no borrowing from the State, at least in
England ; for the Referendum is what we want
to have there and have not got, because some
champions of the people's right think they know
them too well (as indeed perhaps they do know)
to trust them with the right of saying what they
want. On the contrary the Church, if she adopt
the principle, will again, as at the first, ' be there '
before the State is there ; again by her example
she will be teaching the State how to live.
But what shall I answer Bors who will tell me
this is stark revolution ; that I am putting the vox
populi in the place of the vox Dei?

236 Pastor Futurus.
I shall answer that so far from being revolu
tionary I am not even innovator. I am pleading
for a return to antiquity, a revival of primitive
practice. In the Nicene age the forecast of Joel
was fulfilled, the sons and the daughters of Israel
prophesied, the old men and the young had
dream and vision, on all flesh and even on
servant and handmaid was the Spirit of truth
poured out. Quod ab omnibus creditum est, that
is the truth Catholic which the Church must hold
and teach ; quod ab omnibus.
Ah ! but Bors, and men wiser than he though
not more good, have an inner line of resistance.
The Church of the Councils was the undivided
Church, and in her the Spirit could speak ; her
decree was the voice of the whole, and now in
our divisions we cannot gather as one whole, and
frame a judgment which is of Catholic authority.
Again I must answer out of Vincent. Quod
semper. Does " Always " mean a certain four
centuries, only four ? What of the fifteen other
centuries? Has the Spirit spoken in none of
these, or is there any in which He has not
spoken ? Great is the authority of 300
bishops, but the bishops of " all time " must be
reckoned by hundreds of thousands. These
men, of whom some, if few, are thinkers fit to

The Court of Heresy. 237
change arguments with even an Athanasius, and
the more part perhaps are ripe enough in
Christian mind to sit as fellows with the 300
chief pastors from Greece and the East, are they
to be as if they had never been ? Is it nought,
their experience of the Christ won during 2,000
years by the soul of mankind? Is this multi
tudinous testimony of credible witnesses to be
put out of court when the cause of truth is on
trial, on this account — that one portion and
another of the Christian whole adopted for itself
an organization of institutional religious life dis
tinct from the others ? Are these portions dis
qualified to witness how they have known Christ,
because they have laid a differing emphasis on a
credal article of third-rate moment, and on the
racial predilections of which it was the flag, or
held conflicting theories about the relation of
spiritual to temporal authority, or about Church
government within the spiritual sphere? Bors
will say he is very sorry for this necessity, it is
what he always thinks of when the prayer bids
him rue "our unhappy divisions," but we must
consent to the unhappiness while we are still
endeavouring to recover the bond of peace ; we
must be content with so much of Catholicity as the
age of the Councils has saved for us from the
wreck.

238 Pastor Futurus.
No, no, and twenty times No. With this for
lorn^ allerwe will not be content. The Spirit
bloweth where He listeth, and still we hear the
sound of Him and see the sway under that breath
of the Church's mind and heart. Whence He
cometh ; whether only out of those council-halls of
assembled Fathers, or also out of unnumbered
oratories of single saints or the gathered two or
three : and whither He goeth, whether to whisper
beside Peter's Chair in Rome or the Bishop's stool
in Canterbury and York or the Chair of the
Moderator in a synod of the North, this we cannot
tell, except as we tell the course of the wind by
its sway upon the grass and its murmur among the
leaves. Where a true fire kindles in a heart and
flames upon a tongue, there has been the Spirit,
and of Him is born whoever or whatever comes
there to a birth into life indeed.
Still I have not persuaded the vicar. He
will tell me it is all no good, this Referendum,
because it cannot be worked. How could we
get the question put to the multitude, if it
were ever so right that their answer should be
taken ?
Well yes, that makes one pause before the reply
will come.
But it comes. We can do this thing, because

The Court of Heresy. 239
it is the thing that always has been done. The
Homoousion was referred to the people and be
came Church law by their vote. The taking of
the vote was, one admits, a prolonged operation ;
it required half a century. Its course was full of
tumult, violence, and wrong. Again at the Re
formation the conscience of Europe delivered its
judgment, or judgments, on the true faith by a
deliberation not less turbulent and with moments
even of more horrid truculence. But lately over
the law of Public Worship in English churches
and the theory of Inspiration a decision was
reached in much less than fifty years, with no
martyrdoms of the " red " order and few even of
the " white ". Too many even so, as I must account.
It is not well that a priest should go to prison,
because his fellow-churchmen take so long to re
discover the lawfulness of sensuous beauty and
symbolism in the worship of a Reformed com
munion : or that a chief pastor should be half ex
communicate, because his scholarship outstrips
their own and they are tardy in re-adjusting their
old religious affections to a new knowledge of the
Hebrew Scripture.
Ah ! that tardiness, what shall cure us of this ?
This tardiness to accept new revealings, which
has on it the blood of all the prophets whom
churches have ever stoned,

240 Pastor Futurus.
There are two things which must be remedied,
and one of them will be very obdurate against
treatment. It is man's selfishness. To give
harbourage to a thought, even of God, which is
a new thought, harbourage while the guest can
be searched and tried to prove it friend or foe,
this asks some sacrifice of self, asks at least for
the generosity of the Berceans : and Berceans
are always rare. Yet without despair we will
appeal to our Thessalonica, when she raises the
hue and cry against the heretic because of his
self-assertion and conceit, to remember the
"nobleness" of Bercea. Heresy, she cries, thy
name is Selfishness. So it is ; and Dogmatism,
so is thine.
More remediable should be the other cause.
It is the imagination that "the faith once de
livered unto the saints " was a fixed intellectual
quantity conveyable in a Scripture and a Creed.
Some of our wisest speak as if, while the mind of
the faithful was free to range the universe of the
knowable and to learn for itself all that mind
can learn, yet there is a pale of the intelligible
world which is secluded from inquiry, where no
man may walk as investigator of truth but only
as passive recipient. That pale is the field of
doctrine measured out and mapped by the
formulators of the early Creeds. This is the

The Court of Heresy. 241
Deposit, the sum of heavenly gold with which
the Church has been entrusted.
And we must reason urgently, though with the
urgency of brotherly love, that the "faith de
livered " is nowise like gold that can be lodged
in the coffers of a bank. It is not a quantity at
all. It is a power. I call it Life, and my dear
pupil calls it Communion. We mean the same,
that which goes to and fro between the Soul and
its Creator, by which man has his being unto
Him whose name is "I am ". This is the
Deposit placed in the hands of the saints, this
power to have a life unto God in Christ. This
we must safe-guard, for this we must earnestly
contend ; not for the Letter of Creeds, which
cannot, cannot be the Life. This way lies one
cure of that fear of change which stoneth the
prophets before they are tried ; we must persuade
our brethren to think with us that faith is not a
Letter, and that it is a Life.
And yet Creed, though it is not life, somehow
is of life, and without it man cannot live. We
are right about the Creed and John is wrong ; it
is of life. But how then is it of life, how ?
But my tired head must think out that to
morrow. One thing more. Have I seen what the
machinery of election will be when the Referen-
16

242 Pastor Futurus.
dum is offered to our Christian commonalty ; how
the vote can be taken in the present day Church
of England ?
Well, that too must wait for to-morrow — or
perhaps the day after.

XXX.
James Verley burst in on me at tea-time. "Thomas "
" Burst," I say, for that's just what he does. g& J£ E
That large ruddy visage came like a sunbreak TI0N-
through cloud on a droopy November afternoon.
But I detected something else than plain good
cheer in his face to-day ; there was a joyful
mischief in his eyes. I guessed what he had come
over about, for I knew he had been with John,
but I dissembled my curiosity and asked him how
things were going at Norhampton and if the
scandalized respectables were beginning to put up
with his outrageous Gospel methods. And I
really did want a little to hear about this. But
he put me off with an " Oh, that's going all right,"
and said that it was our " row " he had come to
hear about.
" Well, have you heard what you wanted ? I
suppose you have had a talk with Desmond?"
" I have," he said, " yes, I have. And I am
glad of it, too. He wants a fellow like myself to
243 16 *

244 Pastor Futurus.
take advice of. John's too good ; far too good to
be trusted with advising himself."
"You feel that, then:"
" Yes. He's horribly down at having been a
' hasty fool,' he says, and done a thing to spoil
the ' Militia,' his own part in it anyway. Also
at putting the Bishop and you in a fix. He's
thinking of clearing out, some quiet way, to save
his friends trouble."
"What's your advice to him then, if you don't
mind telling me ? "
" I don't mind telling you, if you don't mind
my irreverent way of putting things between
me and him. I said, ' You do nothing of the kind.
Stick it out, old Jonathan. Keep your end up,
and don't you go until umpire gives you out.'
That was my unworthy language. But I mean
it." " And the umpire, who is he."
" Why, naturally, the Bishop. Ain't the other
side appealing — all over the field ? But umpire
hasn't given it yet — thank heavens."
I did thank heavens, silently. I gave Verley
his second cup with a heart that as I looked at
him began to stiffen for a fight. Are they appeal
ing to umpire for an award under the laws of
the game ? We can appeal too ; and umpire
has not given it yet, thank heavens.

" Thomas " on the Situation. 245
I got him to tell me what he heard at Nor
hampton and in the neighbourhood about our
situation. It happened to be a good deal, not
because that Deanery is a strong centre of
developments in theology or churchmanship, but
because John is known there through the sermon
he preached at their Festival some months back.
A friend of Verley's (well, a " friend " at present,
as I surmise) tells him the womankind there are
mostly partisans of that preacher. The lady,
however, took back some of her testimony by
adding that she must in candour admit that not
all of this adherence was yielded on the doctrinal
merits of the case. One amiable matron, discus
sing with her circle, had given her friends away
by remarking, in a sort of postscript to the forcible
statement of her own theological position, "That
young man's admirable expression of counten
ance" — (But I cannot write down here that silli
ness.) I said, " You did not repeat that yonder,
I hope," pointing. " My life on it, no," laughed
James ; and then gave a choirboy's report to the
servants' hall where he was houseboy. " O it
was a lovely clergyman : he just stood up
there and didn't look at no book, but you could
just see the very light shining out of his eyes ! "
There are but two of the New Women in his
parish, and their vicar rather wished they would

246 Pastor Futurus.
talk a little less ; their advocacy didn't help
Desmond, rather the reverse. Two of his Non
conformist brothers were warm in their sym
pathies. Something must be discounted, he
feared, in Robson's case, where one might suspect
a chaste jubilance over the embarrassment of our
Church authorities. But good old " Barnabas"
(Verley's gracious nickname for him) was in a
real holy fervour. " That young man, Vicar, is
the hope of Christianity. I was always for the
Apostles' Creed myself, not like some of my
brethren. But Communion — your Mr. Desmond
has got at the root of things ; that's where you
and we are going to come together again. God's
Holy Spirit be with him." And there were tears
in the old eyes. On the other hand Pierce had
written (" Pierce, you know, has gone Modern
ist, stark staring Modernist : pretty odd when
one thinks of him here a few years back ") ; well,
Pierce was not as pleased as one might have ex
pected : said they felt rather like Cecil Rhodes
when the Jameson's Raid " upset his applecart" :
Desmond had gone too far, or too fast rather,
and so had given away points to the other side.
Pierce, though, had a neat little apologue about
Slagg, " the limping Vulcan that wants to play
Mercury, herald of heaven". As to clerical
opinion Verley's opportunities of knowing were

" Thomas " on the Situation. 247
better than ours, because his neighbours could
not feel it so awkward to speak out as ours on
the spot, but not so very much better. They
were mixing Desmond up with the Undenomina-
tionalists, "whom their soul hateth," not quite
intelligently (in Verley's view), and one could not
be much down on them for a rather natural con
fusion. " As to people in general (if there is such
a thing, which I don't think there is), I should say
Miss Jones at the post office might be considered
an exponent of their attitude. When I come
for a postal order she asks after the Reverend
Desmond, and ends with, ' Well, what I think
is, If a clergyman is doing what he ought, why
can't they let him say what he pleases, when it's
only in a book ? ' This tolerance is in Miss
Jones' family. Her father, the farmer, signed a
petition brought him by the curate for the release
of Cyril Adams who was in prison for his incense
at All Saints, Riverstoke ; and on his staunch
evangelical wife reproaching him for doing it,
' when you never heard of this Mr. Adams, and
don't know what he's done more than that baby
there,' was only able to reply, ' Well I thought
the poor varmint might so well come out '."
I had another guest when Verley left. Sensier
came from a committee which brought him into

248 Pastor Futurus.
the Vicarage, where he had conferred, I saw,
with Bors about Desmond's affair. The visit's
object to me was to tell me about his curate, late
from the Chantry, who is shaping well ; but he
made it occasion to express his sympathy with
us in the troublous time we must be having, and
the possible severance of Desmond from his
congenial sphere of work. He had gathered at
the Vicarage that this was too likely. The
Bishop's position must be a most distressing one,
between his high esteem for Desmond's abilities
and the claim of " Catholic order " on him as
diocesan. The Church of course must be con
sistent ; she could not repress Ritualists and
leave the Rationalist alone. " Rationalist ! ' I
echoed with a snap. I was at once sorry for
the ferocity, and would have tried to help Sensier
to know what Mystic is. But I looked at him :
no, it couldn't be done.
My last visitor was Martha, for her appearance
to set right some faultless particulars in the room
was really a call on the Principal. She reported
that Mr. Verley had been so kind as to come to
see her. Mr. Desmond came with him too, was
added, as if significant. After a pause, " I do
wish, sir, he didn't have so much worry."
" You found that then ? "
"Oh, yes. Even Thomas noticed it."

" Thomas " on the Situation. 249
" Thomas ? " I said, not in a moment identify
ing this sympathizer.
" Yes. He got up on Mr. Desmond's knee,
and looked up at him, and reached up his great
flat paw and patted him, just like this, on the
cheek." " Did he, now ? What did you make of that ? "
" Why, he saw the gentleman was sad and he
did it to encourage him like. He's done it to
myself once or twice when I had a worry. Does
seem as if the dumb things could be kinder than
some of their betters."
"Thomas is a credit to the Chantry," I com
mented. "He was doing the duty of the house
to an old friend in trouble."

XXXI.
a greek We were saying, Barrington and I, that we were
TRAGEDY. . i c t i i
in a tragedy. So we are. In a real classic
tragedy, of the best Greek order of drama. For
the plot is a conflict of two high, principles, true
both of them and sacred, but unreconciled. How
shall I name them ? Authority and Reason,
Tradition and Progress, Society and Individual,
Churchmanship and Conscience, any pair of these
is right. These are the real protagonists, these
supernal entities, not the men who present them
on the stage. For our Tragedy is also a Moral
ity. Our Bishop and our chaplain are two dear
human friends whose fate is to put on the re
spective masks of their personifications, most
reluctantly ; and with still more reluctance, the
modest John especially, to be stilted up on the
high-heeled buskin of publicity, and to have their
speech megaphoned by the mouth-trumpet of
the Church Press. And the tragic Chorus ?
What can that be but I, Mark of the Chantry ?
By my distractedness between them, by my
250

A Greek Tragedy. 251
friendliness to both, and the helplessness of my
friendship, I am admirably fitted to sustain that
part according to the most classic tradition of it.
Here, then, seems the point, in this pause of
the action, for a choric ode to moralize the situa
tion. An ode, not a dance ; for never could I
be chorus leader and set the tune to which any
one else would dance. Besides, here I am leader
and the rest of the chorus too. So reciting
neither with music nor measure, I declare that
what is doing on our stage is the ancient "dis
astrous feud" of Old and New, the New that
should be Old and will not, the Old that should
be New and dares not. Here is a stripling saint
asserting the validity of a communion which is
that of the inward man of the heart ; and here is
a Church asserting the necessity of confession of
her Creed by all whom she will admit to com
munion with her. They think themselves truce-
less opposites : I know them to be not so ; my
soul knows it, though not yet my mind. They
think that one of the two must own defeat or
fall : I know that neither need fall ; my fear is
that both will get a deadly wound and neither
of them win. And thou, O Chorus, pitiful in
effectual chorus, helpless friend, quavering inept
spectator, wise moralizing futility, why don't you
come in between the heroes and strike up swords

252 Pastor Futurus.
and show them it is all a wretched blunder over
a word, and neither of them has so* true a friend
as is he at whose heart he aims his sword ? Yes,
why does not Chorus do it? Perhaps he is
afraid he may for reward find the points of both
antagonists meet in his own impertinent intrud
ing body. Why, of course : that chance is al
ways included in the blessing on the peacemaker.
But if you had the adroitness to strike up both
blades innocuously and persuade them to a parley,
can you then persuade them to a peace ? Can
you show their fight is a blunder, and they are
both of one mind if only they knew how they
are minded ? Yes, Mark, sage chorus of well-
meaning Anglican Elders, the only use of you in
this tragical piece is to find the word which will
make their contentions at one by proving to be
the word of both. You said just now you could
bring no music to this drama : look to it that
you bring at least some harmony.

XXXII.
Robert looked more strained than ever when he " we
saw me at the Palace this morning after the mail, counsel
Certainly what he told me thickens the plot, gether."
"lam getting pushed," he said, " from quarters
where I am bound to pay more attention than I
do to iron-masters and their kind. I would like
to tell you who it is that writes to me and what
he says ; I could so much better take your counsel
on it. But I mustn't. One has to be loyal to
one's order, and keep their secrets even from the
safest of one's personal friends. Perhaps I had
better say I do not mean the highest authority ;
else you might think it was that. Authority,
however, enough to weigh heavy with me. . . .
We won't talk of it just now. But turn over in
your mind this much for a talk later. It is this.
My correspondent, who has a very wide know
ledge of public opinion and is himself by no means
among the ' backwoodsmen ' in Church politics,
represents that it will be an unhappy thing to let
353

254 Pastor Futurus.
this issue be forced to the front just now and
just in this way. Opinion in the Church has to
ripen much more before Desmond's notion (in
which no doubt there is a modicum of value
among his youthful confusions) can be soundly
considered. And then the question should be
raised by some more serious personage than an
irresponsible young scholar, who has no position
in the Church and can as yet have but little
spiritual experience. The right course, it is
urged on me, is to let Desmond retire from his
present post. Then people cannot identify our
Chapter with his subversive views. The ob
jectors will raise no more dust, and what there
is will soon settle. The quiet evolution of re
ligious thought, which is daily bringing the public
mind of the Church into accord with the new
knowledge, so far as it is also true, will proceed
peacefully and wholesomely.
" This letter impresses me the more because
nothing is said about certain practical aspects,
which you and I know of, and I have to keep in
sight, though one is ashamed to have to think
of them, the things or the people. It's not
easy to say ' Get thee behind me ' to this
counsellor. "Now, Mark, I shall not say what I think

" We Took Counsel Together" 255
myself about this advice. Perhaps I do not yet
know what I think. Anyhow, give me your own
thought on it, your very own. And the Spirit
of Counsel help us both."
I said Amen to that.

XXXIII.
creed " I wish, Tohn, I could understand better," I
AND OUR . , „ i r 1 • r A
«UN- said, why you felt it necessary to put forth
visions!'1' y°ur idea of admitting the Unitarian to our
communions. It was so certain to bring down
the storm. Why could you not have stopped
at the Nonconformist?" (I had hardened my
heart to open the distressing subject again. I
felt I must, before meeting Robert about that
letter of pressure, make sure of what the moral
situation is between our Innovator and Authority
in the Church.) " I suppose it was absence of
mind, this too ? "
"No, not this time. I did it wide awake.
You see the Unitarian made a crucial case.
People will put up with your inviting the Non
conformist ; it is a thing that has been done,
and some authority can be quoted for the prin
ciple. They would have passed it by as a bit
of weak charitable sentiment, pitied my youth,
and kindly looked the other way. Then the
256

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 257
question would not have been raised. But if I
said ' Unitarian,' they were bound to look my
way, and face the question. The Unitarian is
not a Christian," they say (I don't : I say that
depends) " and to treat him as our even Christian
is a thing that cannot be stood. So they had to
go for my little book, and, except for the trouble
I have brought on you and the Bishop, I can't
say I am sorry. You remember that ' Conclave '
about the Tractarians, how pleased the men were
over Hurrell Froude's ' We must make a row '.
Well" (with a rather watery twinkle), " I seem
to have made my little row. And I could not
do it short of the Unitarian."
I agreed he had made a row ; I conceded too
that sometimes a row might be a weapon of
Christian warfare not illegitimate, though it has
such a carnal look. But the quarrel should be
for a sound cause and also have a chance of
winning. Was it sound to invite a man who
does not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ
to share with us that act of reverence which
most exacts a belief in that Divinity ?
" How does one know," he replied rather
impetuously, "that the Unitarian does not be
lieve in Christ as really as we do ? We say, ' I
believe that Jesus Christ is Son of God '. What
do we mean by it ? Do we know what it is to
17

258 Pastor Futurus.
be Son of God ? We do not pretend to know
it, those of us who have been trained to think
about such things. The Divine Sonship — no
mortal has even a guess at what that fact is,
what it is to the Son, what it is to the Father.
All we really know is what the fact is to the
mortal himself, what difference it makes to his
fate here on earth and afterwards. At every
Eucharist when I declare Jesus to be Son of the
Father who was made Man, what is it I declare ?
This, that He has made it possible for me by His
death and passion to have my own being united
with the Reality which is God. All Christianity
is in that — Incarnation, Atonement, Sanctifica-
tion, Eternal Hope, all : these are but the mo
ments of the process of salvation by faith in
Christ ; they are all summed up in the mystic
fact — the soul's entry into a oneness with God.
Now if the Unitarian would come to our
Eucharist in the belief that by doing so he might
attain this oneness, I see not why he is unworthy
communicant, because he cannot think in the
same way as we do about the personality of
Jesus and how it is related to the Divine Person
ality. That is a question in pure metaphysics,
and we ourselves confess that we have no
guarantee for the correctness of a Christian's
metaphysic as such : what the effect is on our

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 259
spirit, that is what matters. Now this is how it
seems to stand between him and us. He believes
Jesus to have worked for us this union of soul
and God. So do we. But he thinks Jesus worked
it by his teaching and example only : we say
that He worked it, as in earth so in heaven, not
naturally but mystically, by an operation that
had effect in the sphere of the infinite as well as
the finite. Of the fact then of our salvation
through Jesus he thinks very much as we do : of
the means he thinks otherwise than we. But it
is the fact surely and not the means to it which
concerns us as religious beings ; to hold the fact
is what makes the Christian's faith, for it is what
makes his salvation. That is why I think a
Unitarian of holy life may be a Christian without
knowing it, like ourselves, except in the reason
he renders for his faith, and may be able in
heart and conscience to approach the mystic
Reality by the way of our liturgy and with us.
He has the fact of Communion, and I have
asked the Church to tell me why we should
deny him the right. What is the Church's
answer ?"
How promptly Sensier could have answered !
Why could not I ? If I had given the Church's
answer as he would, or even as the gentle Bors,
I should have felt a little ashamed, because there
17 *

260 Pastor Futurus.
was an insight and still more a passion in his
question with which none in my answer could at
the moment cope. I knew an answer was in
me, but it would not out, not yet. I said to him
that I doubted my power to do justice to our
brother Churchmen's position till I had weighed
his challenge longer. He looked so disappointed
and chilled that I tried to say a little more, which
was that our communicants, the ordinary sort,
would be incapable of feeling that this man's
intention was the same as theirs, while it was no
great hardship to leave him to worship with
those who were in full sympathy with him. He
rejoined that of course the desire for such com
munion with us would be most rare, but that he
wanted to raise the question of principle by a
crucial instance : if the Unitarian's right were
established, it would be won for the Noncon
formist. That would be so, I agreed. But supposing
he found himself ready to go with the Unitarian
to the Christian mysteries, did he need to go
with him also to what our friends were calling
"an attack on the Creeds". He might have
insisted on the primacy in religion of Communion,
and left people to learn for themselves the
secondariness of Creed. I reminded him of the

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 261
wisdom of Paul at Ephesus, preaching Christ
but not blaspheming Diana. Why did he
quixotically court this shock with the feelings of
Churchmen ? Could he not have ridden round
this windmill ?
" But it is exactly the Credal Principle," he
said, " which has become the enemy here. Paul
let alone Diana : yes, but he did not let alone
the Law, when it was making Christ profit men
nothing. To-day it is Creed which is the Law.
And it is not only that this Law of our days
takes our time and strength away from the
deeper intercourse with Christ. That hurts us
as single souls, but it is Creed that hurts the
churches also. It is the Creeds that divide
us, that make the communion of church with
church impossible while we think of Creed as
we do."
" I cannot allow you this," I came in. " Creed
may divide, but only to unite us better. For
me Creed is part of the process of Incarnation,
it is the Word becoming incarnate in that of
man's flesh which is human thought and
language. It begins no doubt by dividing, all
definition does that. But also it makes com
munication possible. Remember Tennyson say
ing of the lost comrade,

262 Pastor Futurus.
Eternal form will still divide
Eternal soul from all beside,
And I shall know him when we meet.
The features of the friend's personality, which
separated him as an individual from all else and
from his friend, would be that by which each
would know each and be again in commune.
But I take higher example, the highest. The
Incarnation of the Christ was at first a dividing,
it was the separating of the Son from the Father,
and the separating of Jesus as an individual man
from all other men. But why? In order that
as Jesus the man He might be in communion
with men His brethren, by an experience like
theirs, and that as the Son He might, by ful
filling the Incarnation in a perfect self-sacrifice,
return to the bosom of the Father. The Incar
nation which is Creed must be fulfilled, not
arrested, not turned back on its course, as it
would be if we listened to the anti-dogmatists,
who want us to go back from our divergent
definitions to a residual common Christianity.
No, no, we must not go back, but on and on
and through ; not drop our definitions but define
the faith more and ever more ; let Incarnation
have its perfect work, bringing into subjection
every thought of men and the words in which
they think the thought, till the Christ be wholly

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 263
formed in this flesh of our intelligence, and Creed
be nothing else than faith thinking aloud. This
is the road we must travel towards a union of
Christendom : this road will lead us into all truth,
and lead the parted Churches to one same
truth." He could hardly let me finish for eagerness.
"Yes, yes," he cried, "on, on, and through.
That is the way, it is. If— if— if— only they
would let us do it. But no, we are to be pulled
up dead somewhere not less than thirteen cen
turies ago or even fifteen. Hitherto hast thou
come, O soul of Christian Man, but no farther.
How far then? 'As far as to the Creed the
Fathers at Nicaea made. So far went the
Spirit with the Church's soul. What the soul
knew then, that is knowledge of God' ....
Principal, are we going to rest our hopes of
salvation on this which is a word ; however sacred,
still a word ? It is the Spirit's word, they say.
So is Scripture, of which Creed is only the echo ;
and how that word of Scripture, the mere word
of it, the letter, how it crumbles with time — the
Six Days, Joshua's sun, Jonah's whale, and some
greater things. The Bible is the word of the
Spirit. But so too is every mortal body of a
man, and what is that body when it gives up the
ghost ? It is no better than the live sea- wave

264 Pastor Futurus.
that is flat dead brine when the wind-thrill that
lifted it has passed. So I say with our most
loyal, the articles of the Creed are words of
eternal life, we do live by them as by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God : but
only while it does proceed. They tell me that
our best and wisest find these old phrases still
the right voice of their belief. No, not these
phrases, not the mere speech that Athanasius
wrote, but these when our age and every age is
filling them with its own new life. When we
recite the Creed to-day we chant the primitive
syllables, but how much else ! We are singing
into the same old measure the wisdom of all
prophets since who have interpreted our hope,
and all the joy of poets who enchant our
experience. It is not the letter that saves, but
the fire that comes and comes upon the letter,
proceeding out of the mouth of God. The Creed
is a lamp that shines to light us, but it is a lamp
like — why, like this of mine, which is but a
branch of dead black metal filaments, till the
light current, see, is shot along it."
He took breath, his colour mounting. I put
in nothing, and he went on quietly,
" It is pious and faithful of the Church to trust
to the Creeds as we do : but it is not being real.
It is a make-believe, though we don't mean it so,

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 265
to treat a written formula as if it could tell us, by
itself at least, the facts about God and man. It
cannot, a Creed cannot. And all the while there
is something else that can  Yes " (in an
undertone), "the word is very nigh thee."
It was easy for me to divine whither he was
going now. He and I have been there before
this together.
" There is something which tells us what the
truth is about God and about the soul. . . .
It is our Self. ... If the Divine Reality is
really there, and this soul of mine is something
to It and It to my soul ; if there is a real eternal
world, and the powers of it made me begin to
live and keep me living ; then I know God as
the blind man knows the sun. What does the
blind want with an astronomy to tell him
there is a sun in heaven ? Can that astronomy
warm his limbs and make his heart lightsome ?
And this astronomy of fourth century doctors —
in some minor points now become a Ptolemaic
theory of the heavens — can it quicken my soul's
pulse and make me know there is a Holy Ghost,
the Giver of Life? It is not so. I believe in
God the Father because moment by moment He
fathers this being which is I. Though the Creeds
tell me this, and tell it from the lips of Jesus,
not even so should I know it to be true, unless

266 Pastor Futurus.
also my very Self told it to myself. Every being
must somehow know its own estate in the world.
Whatever is my real condition, the relation in
which my soul is placed to the soul of all things,
I must needs be aware of it, if not in my mind,
yet in my self : that relation is part of the self.
We men know the thing we are, for to be it is to
know it. And so I learn that Christ is my
Saviour by the salvation that happens in me ;
and I am sure I shall live for ever, because here
and now in this body, this heart and limbs, I
have the life-for-ever. "
I would not speak, though he made a long
pause. I felt he had not done yet. He paused
and went on.
" Don't call me individualist for talking like
this, and think me selfish, only caring about my
own poor soul. It isn't like that. What I am
trusting in is all men's trust as well as mine.
And it is the hope of all the Churches too. Say
what you will about the Creeds that divided us
uniting us some day, the day is a long day.
Meanwhile it is in the Creeds that we are separate,
but in this knowledge that is communion with
the real world we are all at one. There are
Creeds many, but one Communion. This is the
' common Christianity,' which some of us deride
as a dead thing. It is not dead ; it is the livest

Creed and " Our Unhappy Divisions ". 267
thing of all, the root of our life, the elemental
manhood of us which makes us to be men, unlike
the creatures that God made but did not make to
know Him. This is where the Churches are to
meet again ; this is where there shall be neither
Trinitarian nor Unitarian, Anglican, Lutheran,
Rome or Free, but Christ be again all and in all.
There's the mark on which I have bent the aim of
my little venture in theology — the re-union of the
Churches. Creeds divide them, Communion will
make them one."
He ended somewhat rapt, and I was slow to
speak, and break in too soon upon the muse in
which he hung. At last I said,
" Thank you, John, thank you for this. You
have the truth ; not the whole truth, but much
more than the half. Thou art not far from  .
God bring the rest of us as near."
The dear lad, he had taken up his prophecy in
deed. He looked spent with it when it was
done. How hard is the dilemma for him. He is a
knight of our Round Table who vowed the vow
when our King began to make a realm, and he
is the Percivale of them. Now here has he
started on a Quest of the Grail — for is it not
that, the Cup of the Passion, the Mystery of

268 Pastor Futurus.
Communion ? — and it seems as if the Quest must
separate him from the fellowship of the Round
Table and the work in Arthur's wars. I think
that hardly will " the sweet vision of the Holy
Grail " comfort his heart for the loss of the
fellowship with us.
Will we let it be lost ?

XXXIV.
Qui e il corpo del D.D. Molinos il gran Herit. faith
So ran an inscription upon a stone in S. Pietro mystic^
in Montorio. Was the body of the Great
Heretic really under the stone ? Perhaps :
though one could not know where the body went
of anyone who passed into the care of the In
quisition in Spain of the seventeenth century.
Disappearance, so difficult nowadays for a
criminal, was in those times easy for a saint. Of
more concern is the question, Where is the soul
of Molinos and where is the soul of the Inquisitor,
and do they meet (as he said at the cell-prison
door they should), and how ?
Our writer in the New-Old Library series,
whom Sensier absurdly called Rationalist, and
less well-informed persons are labelling Modernist,
is, of course, a Mystic. It is possible to be both
at once, but John is not a modernizing mystic ;
he is after the order of Molinos, the Quaker
saint of Spain, whom the Jesuits buried alive for
269

270 Pastor Futurus.
teaching men to practise wordless prayer, the
prayer of silence.
A gentleman found on his knees in a cathedral
not in service hours was rebuked for it by the
verger, who refused to accept the excuse that he
was saying a prayer. " Look 'ere, sir, you'll 'ave
to go out ; we can't 'ave no praying in 'ere." The
culprit might have echoed the historic formula
often on the lip of Colonel B  , Protestant,
" Then I knew that verger was a Jesuit ". When
I read Molinos' story I can echo the Colonel,
with an inversion. "Now I know that Jesuit
was a verger ? " He ruled that they could not
have praying, if it was " the prayer of silence,"
in there, in the Catholic Church as recognized
by the Society of Jesus.
Was not the issue between Molinos and the
Society of the same character as that between
John and Church authority? Molinos taught
his religious countrymen to prefer "contempla
tion " to " meditation," mental prayer to the
exercise of the Rosary, preparation of the heart
for Communion to pre-Communion confession to
a priest, and the continuous act of faith and love
to the rules in Jesuit manuals of " How often and
when we are obliged to love God." For teach
ing this, a saint of sixty years must be led with
hands bound and the burning torch of the peni-

Faith and the Mystic. 271
tent clasped between them, through the nave of
Santa Maria sopra Minerva, up to the tribunal
of the Holy Office, there to hear read the hours-
long abstract of his trial and the judgment, inter
calated again and again by the " al fuoco ! " of the
Roman crowd, and to receive his sentence — ,
"imprisonment in a cell for life, to recite once
daily the Apostles' Creed, twice the Rosary, with
three fasts a week, four confessions a year, and
the blessed Sacrament at his Confessor's dis
cretion ".
Horrible, most horrible !
But suppose we that these men of Spain and
Rome were sinners above all Church rulers and
all crowds of Christian folk who have ever been
judges or lookers-on at a trial of heresy ? Jesus
perhaps would have warned us, " Nay, but except
ye have ears to hear the prophets, ye shall all
likewise persecute ".
I am not writing absurdly. I know that a
young cleric liable to a mild and tacit censure by
his superiors for departing from the credal
standards of his Church, is not in the plight of
that murdered preacher of inward and spiritual
religion. John Desmond is not Molinos ; and
also "This is the English not the Spanish Church".
But the issue here between innovator and
authority is the very same as there, if we put out

272 Pastor Futurus.
of sight the lust of power and the selfish fears
which blinded Spanish officialdom to its sin.
For it is the supposed antagonism between inward
and outward in faith, spiritual and institutional,
the litera scripta of external law and the law
graven on fleshy tables of the heart, the Creed
that is in word and the Creed that is in power,
though it be the commune of silence, between in
fine the Church's "devotions" and a soul's
devotion. There is a point in which I pray the parallel
may fail wholly. Benedict Odescalchi, near
friend of Molinos, and now become Innocent
XI, would fain have delivered the arraigned
prophet, had a Bishop of Rome been master in
his own house. It is very hard, as we know, for
a bishop of the flock of Christ to protect a re
former from the blindness of priests and people,
when that bishop is only a Pope. But here
again "This is the English not the Spanish
Church ".
Now could our Referendum have saved the
author of the Guida Spirituale? Beyond a
doubt it could, if the people's verdict could have
had validity ; if the Church had dared the ex
periment of Human Experience, and had let see
whether it was the Guida or the Rosary that
more made for life in her children. But the

Faith and the Mystic. 273
judgment given by Molinist Spain was an
"unarmed Justice" and could only deliver the
prophet to the priest.
England to-day is not Spain of that long
yesterday, but I have still to show Robert how
the Referendum could in practice be taken. Yet
that is very easy. The Referendum takes itself.
The machinery is there already, and even in
working order, if only it were set free to work.
In effect it always does work, whether the
authority recognizes it or not. It worked at
Wesley's touch, it worked at Newman's, not
waiting to be authorized. England entertained
a truth which Wesley taught, tested it by ex
perience of men and women whose hearts God
had opened, found that this way came life to her,
and returned the verdict which we call the faith
of an Evangelical. Tractarianism was referred
to the multitude of them that believe, and the
people willed to have it so. There and there the
Referendum worked, but with what extravagance
of cost — the secession of many Tractarians, of all
Wesleyans. What will be the cause of a like
extravagance of cost to-day ?
One cause will be this, that many who hold
the keys of knowledge fear to open the door, not
(perish the suspicion !) because of greed of power,
18

274 Pastor Futurus.
but because they are honestly afraid, with a
human and even a godly fear, to let the people
go in where they fear to go in themselves. The
knowledge they dread to look into is the know
ledge which is in the soul of man when that soul
lays itself open to the communing of God. " There
is the door to which they find no key," who think
that all that can be known of God was "de
posited " in writings of saints and Councils. They
believe these writings grow not old, and they do
well. Let them also believe that they for ever
grow young, renewing their youth when that
which touches and is touched by them is the live
heart of man.
I pray to see our Church trust the live heart of
man. I pray to see her now refer to the judg
ment of life, the corporate life of a people of
Christ, this venturous, or it may be this venture
some thought of my scholar, to learn what it has
in it of right and what of error. To that judg
ment it will be referred, whether she will or no,
unless she silences the question before it can be
widely heard. The question must not be silenced.
We here must not let that be. This cause which
has for advocate an intelligence so wide and an
imagination so pure and brave, must not be turned
away unheard. The Church must listen and pro
nounce, not as her mind was yesterday or on

Faith and the Mystic. 275
other yesterdays, but as, when her people are
truly met together and Christ's Spirit in the
midst of them, she shall pronounce her mind
to-day. I seem to see what is coming. It is an act
of faith, the common corporate faith of the Church.
There will be stirred by this quarrel over John an
" earnest contention for the faith," a contention
which has slept too long, between truth from this
side and truth from that, champion and champion
accusing and excusing. There will be the first
arrow-flights from the advanced archery of
partisan critics and apologists ; then the heaving
of the massed phalanx behind them of public
opinion, slow but weighty in movement ; the man
of affairs who knows little of theology but some
thing of man's facts and fortunes through his
cares of family and business, and the experience
of what trust it was which established his heart
in a day of trial ; the mother coveting earnestly
the best gifts for a child and waiting to see fulfil
ment in " the son of such prayers " ; the boy, like
my godson at Lillington to whom the meaning
of religion came somewhat from his tutor or
perhaps myself, but more from "the Head's"
brief word to him about a man's task in life ; the
girl, as Robert's niece, fresh from St. Aldwyth
Hall, who cannot be got to interest herself in
18*

276 Pastor Futurus.
"good works" as done in Micklethorpe, yet is
full of the fire of service, and will bind her duti-
fulness to a cause that will harness also her in
telligence and her pluck.
These are the persons who in the event decide
how the faith they hold shall be spelt, or at least
what the spelling of it shall mean for them. We
pastors and masters can offer them, according to
the proportion of our faith, a spelling or a meaning
within the spelling, but it is they who will choose
it for themselves and not we for them. But it is
we and not they who can provoke a people to
the choice. And we will do it. We will make
a beginning at Carleford.

What was it made me go to John again to
night? A great uneasiness came on me near
bed-time. Was it only that ghastly Molinos
story come back to scare me ? It drove me out
to his lodging. Entering, as we always do, with
out knocking, I found him at his writing-table and
caught sight without meaning it of the address
on an envelope lying there. He rose with the
embarrassed air which betrays to a new-comer
that he was just then on our lips or in our mind.

Faith and the Mystic. zyy
Besides he had intercepted my glance at the
address on his writing-pad.
"I've had to do this," he said, touching the
envelope. " I was just going out to post it to
the Bishop. I simply can't let him and you be
dragged into this trouble over me, whatever it
costs to go. It isn't just the worry and the scan
dal and all that : it is that this wretched fuss over
my doings will spoil the Bishop's hand for the
work here — the work I fancied I might have
some hand in myself. Now it has turned out
quite the other way ; so I shall go. This is to
tell him."
I did not speak for a moment ; then I said in
a voice rather afraid of itself, " John, you were
right, more than I thought till to-night — about
certain things. I see what made me come across
now, just now, just in time, before you sent that
letter. ... It was one of Them — of ' the Com
pany ' — that are not here, and are. They want
you not to send it."
He sat down and stared in front of him. I
went on. " It isn't for your sake and it isn't for
ours either. It's for the sake of the Church.
You are the test case, to decide whether the
Church has a right to have her own mind about
her own beliefs, or whether the living Church
must have her mind made up for her beforehand

278 Pastor Futurus.
by a dead past or by her least lively members in
the live present. It is the Church, John, not
Slagg, that should say whether you are heretic
or not. That's the fight. It would be the easier
thing to keep out of it, for us and still more for
you. The harder, braver, faithfuller thing is to
go into it ; for it is you we have to fight about,
it's your poor body that will be contended over,
pulled this way and that, head and heel, between
the two sides, us and them. Verley's counsel was
the right one, to ' stick it out '. Perhaps you
distrust him, because he's too fond of a fight.
Well, I'm not : you know I never was a fighter,
never. But I am to-day. You must not baulk
us of it."
Still he stared before him and did not speak.
But then — the word came to me.
" Comrade," I paused, " Comrade, this matter
is our Militia, our soldiership, that you have a
hand in. And there are more comrades in it
than we here. Do you remember that morning
in St. Mary's, the Latin liturgy : Igitur cum
angelis et archangelis et cum omni militia coe-
lestis exercitus ? See, this is what ' all the
company of heaven' is— a soldiery, a company
of war."
John rose. He took the letter up and laid
it on the coals. The flame leapt, lighting his

Faith and the Mystic. 279
face bent over it, and the eyes in a still
trance. O ye Spirits and Souls of the Righteous, bless
ye the Lord !

XXXV.
peace on "Am I going to have the moment of my life?"
a sword ? I whispered to myself, as I stood for five seconds
in the Hall, to pull myself together before I
knocked at the Library door. It is only a con
fidential talk with my oldest friend, and more
than a brother to me, who have no brothers of
my blood, and yet here is my heart beating as if
it were an audience with a King where I must
plead for the life of a son. Perhaps it is a little
like that.
He looked up and nodded. " Ah, now I am
to have your counsel, old friend. You don't
know how I am waiting for it. And there's no
need for me to tell you anything further : I have
had no communication from any quarter since
that letter, and no new light has come to me to
change anything. So you are just to tell me
how the situation seems to you."
" I want to try. Only you may have to tell
me something first. For I must be sure I
280

Peace on Earth, or a Sword? 281
understand the situation as you understand it.
So correct me where I miss anything.
" You, as I suppose, see these things ; that the
book has made a real trouble in the diocese, and
scandalized some good simple people and old-
fashioned pious people, as well as our layman at
Blastonbury, who is in a way simple without
being specially good, and not a few persons who
are good without being simple or yet very wise.
To them it looks like an aspersion of the
Christian faith.
"Then there is the hard fact that the drift of
Desmond's , teaching actually is different to the
teaching of the Church, at any rate in the ex
pression of it, and his censors can say with much
force that, as he is commissioned and paid to
deliver the Church's teaching, there is a sort of
breach of contract in uttering doctrines which she
does not want her people to hear."
He nodded to this.
"And here is his Bishop charged with the
direction and control of Church teaching in the
diocese, and pledged to ' drive away all erroneous
and strange doctrines '. So how are you to help
intervening when you are appealed to against a
heresy ? Besides they are moderate, they do not
ask for more than that you should withdraw your
countenance from a heretic, and not make your-

282 Pastor Futurus.
self partaker of his evil deed, as you will if you
retain him in an office so closely associated with
your authority. Also it seems such a little
matter to let a young man retire from a post of
very small value and go somewhere else : while
it may not be such a little matter to alienate a
large body of Church people, and perhaps to
cripple the best and most essential work going on
in the diocese by forfeiting their practical support.
Of course I am thinking of the money for
Smeltenham, and I know that a bishop has to be
statesman as well as Churchman, and part of his
duty is to steward wisely the unrighteous mammon
of the flock.
" The only other feature in the situation which
I see is a thing that will be much on your mind,
but is better on my tongue than on yours- If a
priest must be true to his cloth, a bishop must to
his lawn : I suppose even I can feel how your
obligation to your Order straitens you in handling
the matter : you can't neglect their concern in it.
Have I got it right ? "
" You've got it all, Mark, only too right, this
much of it. But there's the other side of it, you
know." "I was coming to that. I got it from you
when you came with Slagg's letter, and said you

Peace on Earth, or a Sword? 283
were here to do the work of a Bishop not an In
quisitor of prophecy (though for myself if it's to
be one man it should be you). But you set me,
I don't forget you set unlikely me, to find the
proper court of inquiry into the prophets, and I
have done my best. Then Desmond is the ablest
of your own men, chief hope of the Movement :
it will be miserable to spoil his hand, our very
right hand. One thing more, and this more is
the most."
I paused. " Yes, go on to that, Mark."
And I did : " If Desmond is to be silenced for
raising a question as to what is the faith of his
Church, and suggesting an answer which does not
agree with the accepted standards, the standards
accepted at the time ; if that is what is to
happen  ."
I did not go on. The gap was well enough
filled in by the long look we exchanged. He
moved in his chair.
"Yes, you have it well. So now your mind
on it, before I say anything. And, cousin, don't
think I treat you badly if I should say nothing,
even when I have heard you out. Can you
understand me ? "
" I can. And I am glad, for I can speak all
the more frankly. For though we are friends,

284 Pastor Futurus.
I am not bishop and you are. And that makes
a difference when the matter is a big one, as this
one is : yes, very big.
" But let me tell you first about that Court of
Scrutiny I was to find for you. Your Commis
sion shall make its report."
I gave him in some detail my idea of the
Catholic Referendum. When I finished he re
marked, " I ought to be rather taken aback,
Mark, by this from you. This is out and out
revolution you propose, and the last thing I ever
saw in you was a violent revolutionary."
" You don't see one in me now, " I explained,
" this is not revolution, it is hardly even evolution ;
it is the return to antiquity." He smiled with a
grim amusement, and hoped I might convince
our Traditionalists that I was one of them and
this was always their Catholic practice.
Then I went on.
" You knew, I expect, how when you and I
began here, ' the boys,' as we called them, used
to talk about the Movement, the ' Militia,' the
campaign for a ' Real ' Church. It was vain
glory, but glory too. ' The Real Church,' that
was the symbolum that passed among them in the
Chantry at the beginning. They have not for
gotten it. Desmond thinks his book is a stroke
he had to strike in the campaign of Reality.

Peace on Earth, or a Sword? 285
And, Robert, he is right. It is that. Or at least
we can make it that. He may be wrong in much
of the matter ; he is wrong. But his cause is
right enough to give us our opportunity.
" I mean that this stir about him brings us up
against an unreality, which we are bound to
grapple with, if we are men of our word. To say
that the Church's Creeds cannot be changed, that
a Council's formula of the Fourth Century is the
exact, full, perfect, and final truth of things for all
time and its syllables can never be revised, added
to, or taken from — it is an honest belief and a loyal
and a devout belief, and many are saints who
hold it, and even sages ; but it is not a real. For
the thing is not so. The faith once delivered,
the ' deposit ' as they call it (drear counting-house
phrase), is not those words of the Fathers nor any
words at all ; it is a thing ; the thing which
Desmond's book calls ' Communion ' and you
and I would call ' Life in Christ '. That is what
was handed down to us and we must hand on to
others. That, not words which the Council's
clerk wrote out on a parchment and three hundred
bishops signed.
" Then to cry ' heretic ' after a man who brings
a new shade of doctrine, because it does not quite
match the shade they are used to, without waiting
for the Church their Mother to judge whether she

286 Pastor Futurus.
accepts or rejects it, that is unreal. But a terribly
real mischief it is, for on such terms the Church
buys no new truth, or buys it late and at a miser
able cost."
I took breath, for my talk was coming freely
and fast, however that could happen with me,
and I had a look at him, while I could. We
were still on common ground, but perhaps at
what was coming I should want to look away
from him. Then a something seized me. I
was not like myself, my own voice sounded
strange to me.
" Robert, this is our time. This is what we
came here for — to save the Church from herself
by saving John from her. Make him stay where
he is, and dare the heresy-hunters to turn him
out. Raise the great question over his case ;
force them to show if they can that what Church
men thought in one age must be all that
Churchmen may think in any age ; that the
Church's mind can never grow wiser than it was
at first, that her children can never any more be
taught of the Lord and Giver of Life, that
Christ promised what He could not perform,
and the Spirit who was to come to show us
things to come does not show them, as Christ
said He should. I say, let the storm break, if
there is one. It will wake our Church-folk out

Peace on Earth, or a Sword? 287
of their trance, to see things as things are, to
handle facts instead of words, to learn that their
faith is not and never was in the mortal
syllables of a formula, in metaphors, in images
graven by art and man's device, that at best are
but figures of the true, and if we worship them
are dumb idols that cannot save. They will
learn, what they always have known without
knowing that they knew it, or without daring to
say they knew, that our faith is not in man or in
anything of man that can die, not even in his
wisest thinkings and his clearest language for
his thought. Our faith is in the living Spirit of
God and the life in our human soul that beats
between Him and us, and is the voice to-day for
what the Spirit saith unto the Churches.
"It is what we are here for. Who knoweth
if thou art come to the kingdom for such a time
as this ? "
I had not been looking at him, but some
how I knew that he was looking at me, surprised.
Now I faced him.
" Robert, Cousin Robert, there's my counsel.
It is, to send a round answer back to the men of
little mind and of not good will who are suing
John for heresy. Let us ask — Who made them
judges in such causes, and by what right they
claim to know the mind of the Church about a

288 Pastor Futurus.
new prophet better than She knows it herself?
Let us claim that in the English Church as in
the English State there shall be the right of
personal freedom : that if a Habeas Corpus pro
tects the citizen, a Habeas Animam shall protect
the Churchman. Then let the case go to be
tried by the great soul of the People of Christ,
the Catholic Church, all its ranks and orders,
the multitude of them that believe, with the
bishops and pastors of the flock, every man in
his own order, but all of them, the learned with
the simple, the few that know the Will of God
and the many that can only do it. Send the
case for trial by this whole Church of Christ, not
a part of it ; and when they shall answer that
thus is the truth or thus, for to believe this is
life to us, let that be the Catholic Faith which
whosoever would be saved must hold.
" O how ashamed I am to be saying this to
you, the Bishop. It's I that talk, you that take
the resolve. What a poor coward I feel myself,
calling for a fight when it is you, not I, that
have to do the fighting, and bear the risks and
the spites, while I'm a nobody and can stay
behind out of shot. Though perhaps I take
some risks too of getting hurt, and anyhow all
that I care for much outside my own poor person
(and that is the Cause you made me follow),

Peace on Earth, or a Sword? 289
stands to win or fall with you, if you take up
arms in this quarrel — as I think you will. It is
the rightful quarrel of the Church ; not the
High Church, nor the Low, nor the Broad, but
the Real Church, that name we have used among
ourselves, and not told the others ; the Church
whose soldiers we meant to be. Robert, let us
go to war in nomine Domini."
The strong face worked and settled into stern
lines. I am sure there came a light into his eyes :
was it, or do I only hope it was, the light of
battle? He rose and crossed hands with me,
but all he said was, " Mark, you are my best
counsellor, the bravest and the best too. But I
cannot answer you till I have heard One other.
Meanwhile, pray you, brother, for the flock and
this unworthy shepherd, that this counsellor may
show us — the things to come."
And the prayer went up from me and him ;
but the prayer of the mystic, no word spoken.
What is it that will be shown him? How
will the decision go ?

19

XXXVI.
the The eloquence of the pulpit stairs — is that what
happens to me now that I have ventured to give
my message, and am waiting behind my library
lattice till I learn whether it prevails? For a
clearness seems to be falling round me, where
all was so dim until I acted ; if action it can be
called, to counsel another man to a thing which
must be his doing, not my own.
Did I not call myself Chorus in our drama?
If I have been Actor as well, my part is played
out, for me the drama is over. I can now be
Chorus only and chant the epilogue. This
clearness that comes, belatedly, will give me the
yvu>fj.j] with which a chorus ushers out a play.
"Life is change," said Heracleitos, and "you
cannot dip into the same water twice ". He was
not wrong, yet he was short of being right by
something much over the half. Life is change,
but how much else ! Life is Interchange. That
is far more than the double of Change. Far
290

The Choice. 291
more? Nay, beyond all measure more. It is
the difference that lies between Christian Faith
and " the time of that ignorance ".
Life is Interchange. There is the word
which will heal the "disastrous feud," and bring
Old and New, the Church and her heretic, into
union again, if they will accept the word.
For see, John says, " The fact of religion is
Communion, the soul's experience of God : and
Creed is not the fact of religion."
The Church says, " Creed is the fact, not Com
munion without Creed : for we can know whether
a man has Creed, and we cannot know whether
he has Communion ".
But I say Communion is the fact, and Creed
is the fact too, because Creed is Communion, and
because without Creed Communion cannot be.
And this is so because Life is Interchange.
What is it happens when a Church makes a
Creed ? This, that the life unto God which is in
her is exercised in the mode of Thought ; as, when
she makes a law of practice, it is exercised in the
mode of Action. This exercise is an Interchange
of Self between the soul of the Church and the
divine Reality. But then this Interchange (here
is the fact we too little remember) is a twofold
act ; an act between the Church and Christ, but
also between the Church and the souls of her
19 *

292 Pastor Futurus.
Christians. Twofold, but not two acts. It is by
the vital process of the debate between Church
and members, by that commune of thoughts in
which the one gives of itself to the other, and so
the corporate thought is born — it is by this one
and the same process that the Church has the
commune with Christ Himself. Nicaea was the
debate of Arius and Athanasius ; but that com
muning was the commune of a life unto Christ in
God which uttered itself, took outward existence,
in the clause declaring " Very God of Very God ".
Interchanging self with her members the Church
made interchange with God, and the Creed came
to birth.
Could the Church have had the Communion
with God without the communing of thoughts
which issued in the Creed ? Not unless a crea
ture of God which has the conscious existence can
have the life of Doing without the life of Know
ing. Creed is soul thinking and speaking its
thought. Creed is Faith knowing the thing it
does, as Conduct is Faith doing the thing it
knows. Creed then is Communion's half. Creed
is the fact of religion. The Church is right in
that, and John is wrong. He must think on ;
his Third Thought has not reached him yet.
Ah ! but even in his present wrongness let the
Church wait awhile before she censures him. If

.>

The Choice. 29
Creed is born of Interchange, by Interchange it
must live on. Interchange is more than Change,
but Change it is. You cannot dip into the same
water twice ; and your soul cannot draw the same
water twice from the life-river that flows and ever
flows. If the Church would keep her Creed alive
and a cause of life to her children, she must keep
her Creed an Interchange of self with Christ who
made her, and, to that end, an Interchange with
her children's selves. Between her and them,
generation by generation, must be the intercourse
in which they make together, mother and sons,
by a mutual devotion of self in the activity of
thought, the Creed of the faith once delivered
unto the saints. That Creed endures for ever,
more the same the more it changes, because, like
the city of fable, it is never built but always is
building or to build.
But, O Church of my Fathers, is there at this
time that intercourse in Creed-making between
mother and sons, if my scholar may not put forth
his prophecy and have it tried before it is con
demned ? Creed, he has written, is not the test of
Communion. Well, and is it ? It is the test, if
the Creed, as it stands, be a true Communion of
the Church with the Christ. It was so doubtless
when the Church made it first ; it was the utter
ance then of her faith, and she lived by that

294 Pastor Futurus.
utterance. Is it still to-day an utterance of life,
a communion ? If it is, then must the doubter
resign his doubt or else his portion in her.
But the Church must search and see, on just
challenge made, whether her Creed still is as
once a Communion, or whether it must be revital
ized by a new act of faith, that it may again,
whether in altered language or in unchanged, be
a communing with God.
Our answer then to those who would examine
John is this. We here will challenge his accusers
to come before the Church's bar with us, and
accept her sentence and not theirs ; and the
sentence of the faith, not as she judged it long
ago but as she judges it to-day.
We here will challenge them ? It is not we,
it is he across the Close, our Chief, not this humble
presbyter of his, that must take the decision.
How is it going now with Robert? What a
thing it is, a man taking a decision ! And a de
cision in a cause which is not his but the Church's —
how hard ! Waiting for it is next hardest. . . .
We prayed for counsel, and he will have it.
Our mystic John would tell me the Church may
come to counsel in such a cause, the Church here
and beyond, all the company of heaven ; that a
man choosing a great choice is made a spectacle
to just men and angels. He would persuade me ;

The Choice. 295
and in that company, if it gather here, John could
name one Comer, I can name one more. But
'tis ill waiting, even in "the blessed company ".
... At last. St. Wilfrid's bell for Evensong.
I will go. Waiting is less ill there.

We were all at Evensong, we three. John
went away before us. The Bishop signalled me
to wait and go home with him. He loitered in
the sacristy over this and that, and all worshippers
were gone when he and I passed the entrance to
the Choir. He stayed me with a touch, and we
faced the altar together. Then he laid his hands
on mine and looked me in the eyes. " Comrade,"
he said, and paused : "In nomine' Domini let us
go in peace — to the war."
Explicit Pastor Futurus.

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