HENRY HOWITT PRIEST AND BOOKLOVER
DIOCESE OF CALIFORNIA 1887-1922
Ijenrg iffltmtt ICt
AS PROVIDED IN HIS WILL
3 GIVE and bequeath to the Diocese of California th
books specified in the catalog appended to
Codicil for the purpose of a Reference and Lending
Jwihrary for the sole and exclusive use of clergy residenij
in the Diocese, holding the Bishop s license, and en*
gaged in pastoral work. My desire is that these book;!
may form the nucleus of a permanent Clerical Librarj
and as a means to that end that they be kept intactj
entirely separate from all other libraries, and that adef
quate provision be made for safe-keeping for issu<|
and return. For these ends I would suggest thai
trustees be appointed in whom the property of thtj
books should be vested and the care of them, and thtf
framing >f customary library regulations.
.
FROM-THE-LIBRARY-OF
TRINITYCOLLEGETORDNTO
RECOLLECTIONS
OF
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
RECOLLECTIONS
OF
AETHUR PENKHYN STANLEY,
LATE DEAN OF WESTMINSTER.
DELIVERED IN EDINBURGH IN NOVEMBER, 1882.
BY
GEORGE GEANVILLE BRADLEY, D.D.,
DEAN OF WESTMINSTER,
HONORARY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.
LONDON :
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1883.
[All lliylits reserved. }
5/99
.56373
LONDON :
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WH1TEFRIARS.
112G25
3 J982
INTRODUCTION.
THE following pages are the result of an
attempt to comply with a request made on behalf
of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh.
The Directors did me the honour of expressing a
Avish that I should open their winter session by
delivering two lectures on my much lamented
friend and predecessor, the late Dean of "West
minster. I could not refuse to avail myself of
such an opportunity for placing on record my
recollections of one to whose intimacy I had been
admitted in early youth, and whose friendship I
had been privileged to enjoy for more than forty
years. I felt it, however, due alike to the
memory of my friend, and to the legitimate
claims of those whom I was to address, to bring-
before them something more than mere personal
reminiscences of one who had filled so large a
space in the literary and theological history of
the whole period during which I had known
INTRODUCTION.
him. I thought it right, therefore, to prepare
myself for the task by a careful re-perusal of his
published works, especially of the numerous lec
tures, pamphlets, articles, essays, and occasional
sermons which, even more markedly than his
longer and more elaborate writings, bear the true
impress of his mind and character. ~Not a few of
these which had escaped my memory or notice
were placed at my disposal by various friends;
and in addition to all that I had preserved of my
own correspondence, I was permitted to avail
myself of letters, and notes of personal recollec
tions, entrusted to me by the kindness of some
who had been bound to him by the closest ties of
enduring friendship. It soon became apparent
that the materials placed in my hands, though
insignificant in comparison with those which were
being gradually collected with a view to more
detailed memoirs, could scarcely be adequately
dealt with in the compass of two evening lee-,
tures, even before so kind and forbearing an
audience as I was prepared to find in the city of
Edinburgh. Arrangements were very kindly
made for the delivery of a third lecture let me
thank my friends there for its cordial reception
at Fettes College ; and thus with some necessary
curtailment the greater portion of the following
INTRODUCTION. vii
pages was spoken as printed. I have not thought
it necessary to indicate the paragraphs which,
out of consideration for the time and patience
of singularly attentive and sympathetic listeners,
were omitted in the actual delivery of the lec
tures. As, however, the greater portion of the
matter devoted to Dean Stanley s earlier life, at
Alderley, Eugby, and Oxford, formed the sub
ject not of the first but of the second lecture,
that which was given at Fettes College, I have
thought it better to arrange what is now printed
in three consecutive chapters. I have thus pre
served the order in which all that I had prepared
was actually written, as well as that which will
be most convenient to the general reader. But I
have retained throughout the form, and, with a
few necessary corrections, the actual words of the
lectures as actually delivered. They were de
livered, it will be remembered, in Scotland, and
before a Scottish audience ; and I therefore felt
myself warranted in dwelling with a not un
reasonable emphasis on the singularly close
ties which united him of whom I spoke to the
sympathies and affections of those whom I was
addressing.
I need hardly add that the subject on which I
spoke was one of exceeding interest to myself.
viii IX TROD UCTIUN.
Those who are at the pains of glancing at the
following pages will see that I disclaimed from
the very first any attempt to speak of Arthur
Stanley otherwise than as a deeply attached and
grateful friend, and as one who largely sympa
thised with his views. Had I not done so 1
should have written differently, or not at all. 1
trust, however, that I have not allowed my warm
affection for one who was, for many years of his
life, engaged in almost ceaseless controversies, to
cause me to give needless pain to those whose
difference of views on some most important sub
jects made them unable to share the feelings
with which he was regarded by those who were
more or less in sympathy with him. I should
regret any want of fairness on my own part as
in itself blamable. I should regret it the more,
as some of those who were necessarily brought
in the course of many controversies into the
most direct collision with my dear friend, have
spoken with generous warmth and. tenderness of
one, the beauty of whose character they could
recognize without undervaluing their disagree
ment with his opinions, sentiments, or language.
I feel, however, that in saying even this, I
am attaching an undue importance to the pub
lication of what can have no claim to more
INTRODUCTION. ix
than a passing and fugitive interest. Nothing
could be further from my purpose than to offer
this most imperfect sketch as in any way a sub
stitute for, or even an instalment of, a biography
of Arthur Stanley. Great as was the kindness
of his literary executors and personal friends,
it was impossible for me to avail myself of more
than a small fraction of the documents and papers
which, owing to his own habits and the prescient
care of so many to whom he Avas dear, are
assuming proportions of almost unexampled
abundance. Yet I venture to hope that the
publication even of the short summary of his
life and work which is comprised in these three
chapters, may be not unwelcome to some at least
among the many beyond the limits of those to
whom they were directly addressed, who had yet
felt the spell of his character, or had been
attracted or instructed by his writings.
I may conclude with a warm expression of
my gratitude to those of his friends who have
kindly allowed me the use in some cases of their
own correspondence, in others of their notes of
personal reminiscences. I ought especially to
name Dr. Greenhill, Professor Max Miiller, Eev.
W. B. Philpot, Eev. H. H. Montgomery, Mr.
Victor Williamson, and Mr. John Hodgkin ;
INTRODUCTION.
above all my thanks are due to his two surviving
literary executors, Mr. Theodore Walrond and
]\Ir. George Grove, not only for their ready
acquiescence in the present publication, but for
the invaluable assistance which in various forms
I received from each of them.
DEANERY, WESTMINSTER,
December 31, 1882.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
(From his birth in 1815 to 1840.)
ALDERLEY-RUGBYOXFORD
PAQK
INTRODUCTION Seven distinct stages in Arthur Stanley s life
Limited aim of these Lectures 1
Special ties to Scotland 4
Date and place of Arthur Stanley s birth (1815) . . . . y
The Stanley family 10
Alderley : Mr. Hare s description 11
His father, Edward Stanley, Rector of Alderley . . .12
Bishop of Norwich 13
His mother . . . . . . . . .10
Brothers and sisters 17
Clerical homes 18
CHILDHOOD OP ARTHUR STANLEY School at Seaforth . . 18
Early poems 20
Tour in the South of France, 1828 his journal . . . . 21
ENTERS RUGBY SCHOOL, 1829 early life at Rugby . . 22
Letters to his former schoolmaster impressions of Dr. Arnold 25
Life as a Rugby School boy 27
The poet Gray and Mr. Gladstone 31
Election as scholar of Balliol (1833) 31
Exhibitioner of Rugby School (1834) 32
Parting with Dr. Arnold .... .... 33
Visit to the English lakes 34
A glance forwards to Arnold s death in 1842 35
Truthfulness of Stanley s picture of Arnold .... 35
What was the effect of Arnold on himself ? . 3ti
xii CONTENTS.
PAGE
LIFE AS AN OXFORD UNDERGRADUATE : prize poem, " The
Gipsies" . . .40
Elected to a Fellowship at University College, ordained (1839) 45
Family history : removal to Norwich (1837) ; return of his
eldest brother from the Arctic expedition . . . .46
A personal reminiscence 47
CHAPTER II.
(From 1840 to 1863.)
OXFORD CANTERBURY OXFORD.
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, 184050.
Tour in Greece, 1840-41 41)
Remarks on the spirit in which he studied nature . . . . 50
Scenery always subordinate to historical or other associations . 51
His intense interest in such associations 52
His remarks on the effect of the first visit to places of interest . 54
His meeting with Hugh Pearson at Naples . . . . . 54
Eeturn to Oxford, 1841, and life as College tutor . . . 55
College life at Oxford 56
Effect of his lectures on History and Divinity . . . .57
His intercourse with undergraduates 58
Literary and other work .60
Influence over the young . . 61
Secretary to the first Oxford Commission 62
Public events : Sir Robert Peel the year 1848 . . . . 63
Position towards Church parties 64
Removal from Oxford to Canterbury (1851) 67
Retrospect of family history : death of his father and two
brothers (1849-50) 67
CANON OF CANTERBURY, 18511858.
Advice given by Thomas Carlyle 69
Value to him of his life at Canterbury ... 69
* Memorials of Canterbury " . . ~ 70
Travels in the East : " Sinai and Palestine " 71
CONTENTS. xiii
I AQE
Tour in Russia 74
Home and social life at Canterbury 75
Family and public events : examining Chaplain to the Bishop
of London (Dr. Tait) 185ft 76
LIFE AT OXFORD AS REGIUS PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL
HISTORY, 1858 1803.
Appointed Professor 77
Inaugural and other lectures 78
Relation towards undergraduates 82
Social life at Oxford 83
Controversies Greek Professorship ; " Essays and Reviews " . 84
Second visit to Egypt and Palestine with the Prince of Wales ;
sermons on the East ; his mother s death (1862) . . 86
Return to England Death of General Bruce . . . . 90
Theological controversies at Oxford and elsewhere . . .91
Letter to Bishop of London on terms of subscription . . . 91
CHAPTER III.
(From 1863 to 1881.)
WESTMINSTER.
Marriage . 94
Farewell Sermon at Oxford 94
Feelings with which his appointment was regarded . . . 96
Manifold aspects of his life as Dean 97
I. Married Life Lady Augusta Stanley .... 99
II. Social Life ... 100
III. Controversial Life : Vestment and other controversies ;
Athanasian Creed ; Convocation ; hostility which he
provoked attempt to exclude him from the University
pulpit 102
Defence of the Bishop of Natal three occasions . . 107
IV. Official Life ax Dean : Memorials of .Westmin ster ; monu
ments ; Chapter-house 110
xiv CONTENTS.
PAGK
V. Sermons 113
VI. Theological position.
Dislike to party ties Liberal theology . . . .115
Quotation from Archbishop of Canterbury ; Kev. W.
R. W. Stephens ; his favourite topics . . . . 116
Stress laid on the spiritual and moral elements of Chris
tianity 118
Hopes and fears for the future . . . . . . ill)
His attitude towards Science 120
towards other Denominations and Churches. 121
John Wesley ; Zwinglius ; Baxter 123
Impression made on different minds by his teaching . . 124
VII. His Sympathy with the Working Classes: their feelings
towards him 125
VIII. His Personal and Domestic Life 130
Lady Augusta Stanley s illness her death in 1875. . 132
His life as a widower ; visit to America (1878) . . . 135
Reminiscences of his closing days 13(5
Literary activity ; sermons ; his sister s death . . . 137
Proposed monument to the Prince Imperial . . . 138
Illness and death . 140
RECOLLECTIONS
OF
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
CHAPTER I.
(From his birth in 1815 to 1840.)
ALDERLEY RUGBY OXFORD.
YOUR directors have called on me to undertake a
very interesting, but by no means an easy task. Some
months have passed since they requested me to speak
to you here of one whose face and voice will long be
remembered among you, my own dear friend may I
not say yours also ? the late Dean of Westminster.
Flattering as I felt their proposal to be, I shrank with
unfeigned reluctance from accepting it. In default of
leisure, and in the absence, the comparative absence, of
necessary materials and documents, I despaired of doing
any adequate justice to his memory, or of satisfying the
claims which a Philosophical Society in I use his own
words " this great and historic centre of Scottish life,"
might justly make in behalf of one of such rare and
surpassing gifts, whose life was so closely bound up with
the religious and literary histoiy of the last forty years.
But I was encouraged to believe that I might look for
2 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
a sympathetic and forbearing audience ; and I was
given to understand that there was a general wish that
he who should attempt to recall him to you should be
none other than his successor in the post to which his
own genius had added so much exceptional significance.
To that wish I deferred, and am here to-day to fulfil
my engagement, or to attempt to do so to the utmost of
my powers.
Let me say at once that I would gladly have
brought before you a sketch of each of what I may
venture to call the seven distinct and marked stages-
of his life. They are, first, his childhood in his
home at Alderley ; next, his boyhood at Rugby,
where he grew up under the influence of his great
teacher, Dr. Arnold. Then follows his brilliant career
as a scholar of Balliol. Then, fourthly, the many
important years that he passed as a resident Member
of the University of Oxford, and as an active and
influential Tutor, no longer of Balliol, but of University
College. After this come the seven quiet years of his
Canonry at Canterbury; then his work as Professor
of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford ; and, finally, the
closing and culminating stage of all, his life and death
as Dean of Westminster.
It would, however, be obviously impossible to bring
before you in any detail all these chapters in his life,
though each has a peculiar character and a special
interest of its own. Nor can anything be more
remote from my present purpose than any attempt
to forestall his future biographer ; and I shall pass
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 3
over without notice many of the most important
passages in his career, only attempting any fulness
of detail, where my own recollections, or the special
circumstances of those whom I address, or other
sufficient reasons, guide me to do so. If I have made
a wrong choice in my selection, you will forgive me. I
must take comfort in the hope that you have come here
not so much to criticise the literary merits or the
judgment of your Lecturer, as to renew your acquaint
ance with his friend.
To that friend I stand too near in affection I am
bound to him too closely by enduring ties of sympathy
and gratitude to play the part of a censor or a
critic. I cannot stand aside, and look at him, or speak
of him, as a stranger would. This you will not expect
or wish. But I can promise that I will not willingly
misrepresent him by a hair s breadth, or paint him for
one moment other than he was; other than I have
known him in constant intercourse since I won his
friendship as I passed from boyhood. In life " he
feared no man s rebuke ; " and we, his friends I, for
one feel no need to speak of him with bated breath,
or in apologetic accents. I will simply try to do in
short compass what his biographer will do, we all
trust, on a larger scale; to set before you Arthur
Stanley as he lived and as he died; himself, and no
other his real character, his real self; and, if I
venture to add something as to his views on the most
important of all subjects, I will leave him, so far as
possible, to speak for himself. Great as was his con-
B 2
4 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
sideration for others, unbounded as was his tolerance,
large and tender as were his sympathies, there never
breathed a more outspoken, a more fearless soul, or a
more transparent expounder of all that lay next his
heart.
And I assure myself that I may do this with an
especial trustfulness before a Scottish audience. You
knew the man, and he you. Nowhere did he more
freely open all the secrets of that seething brain, and
that ardent temperament that perfervidum inge-
nium which is no monopoly of the countrymen of
Buchanan. To Scotsmen here, to Scotsmen at St.
Andrews, he spoke in his later years with a fulness
of confidence not exceeded in his letters to his dearest
friends, or by all that he uttered when his soul was
stirred within him by that long delayed visit to the
new England beyond the seas. Reared and educated in
England, he was unknown among you till some few
years after the publication of his " Life of Arnold " had
lifted his name above the level of a merely academical
reputation. I have mislaid, alas ! but I well remember,
the letter in which, 34 years ago, on his first visit
to the Scottish home of Principal Shairp, the present
Professor of Poetry in my own University, with the
recollection of his winter in Greece still unfaded in his
memory, he spoke of Edinburgh as an Athens as
(forgive me the quotation) a " coarser Athens " and
described the kindness with which he was everywhere
received as the Biographer of Arnold, the interest
evinced in one in whom Scotsmen saw, and the words
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 5
on his lips had a deep significance, Elisha the son of
Shaphat, who poured water on the hands of Elijah.
A year passed, and he came to Scotland on a sadder
errand to close his father s eyes; even as, twice
later, he came to lay in their ancestral grave the two
brothers of her whom he married. But long before
his marriage had bound him by a closer tie to these
northern regions, Scotland had laid upon him the spell
which she maintained to the very end. In repeated
snatches of autumnal leisure as Tutor at Oxford, as
Canon of Canterbury, he had visited, often under the
guidance of the friend whom I have already named,
one after another of the scenes, rich in legendary or
poetic or religious or historic interest, with which
Scotland abounds. As time went on, it is not too
much to say that no native of Scotland could be more
imbued, more saturated, with all the manifold as
sociations of Scottish story or history, " the most
romantic," as he would vehemently assert, " by far of
all European histories," than one who never drew a
breath of Scottish air till he had become famous by
writing the life of one of the most typical of English
men.
Thus on the very first occasion that he opened his
lips to lecture on Ecclesiastical History at Oxford,
years before family ties had made him almost a
countryman of your own, in urging on his future pupils
the importance of including among the original records
of history " monuments, and grave-stones, and epitaphs
on the very spots where they lie ; " " the mountain, and
6 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
the stream, and the shapeless stone, that has survived
even history and tradition," he chose the first of two
examples from "the caves, the moors, and moss-hags of
the Western Lowlands ;" from " the rude grave-stones,"
with their savage rhymes and texts and names that
are to be found from shore to shore of the Scottish
kingdom. And he placed these side by side with
" the faded paintings, the broken sculptures, the rude
epitaphs, that lie underground in the Roman cata
combs."
It is rarely that he attempts to describe Scottish
scenery as scenery; Nature, indeed, as Nature, he
seldom, I might say never, allowed himself to paint.
But he loved to dwell on his enjoyment of the scenery
of St. Andrews ; "the roar and expanse of the sea on
one side, the shattered relics of the Cathedral on the
other" the "two voices," as he would call them, "each
a mighty voice." Of all the great names of literature
none was so dear to him as that of Walter Scott, that
" second Shakespeare of your own," the " spell and
glamour " of whose " wizard notes " he felt at threescore
as strongly as he had felt them in boyhood; of whom
he delighted to speak not in Scotland only, but alike
on the sacred soil of Palestine and in his own Abbe}^
now as the greatest and purest writer of fiction, now
as " one of the greatest religious teachers of Scottish
Christendom." Later in life he could no more visit
Tours without reading and re-reading for the fiftieth
time, as he said, "Quentin Durward," than he could
have made a pilgrimage to the graves of the Cove-
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PEXRHYN STANLEY. 7
nanters without once more renewing his acquaintance
with " Old Mortality." Behind "all the wretchedness of
life, and all the levity of language " which marred
the genius of "the prodigal son of the Scottish
Church," he could find in Kobert Burns not " the poet
only, but the prophet;" in that "wise humour, that
sagacious penetration, that tender pathos," he could
find at times fragments of a teaching that breathes the
spirit, "not of this or that Confession, but of the Ser
mon on the Mount." On his undying interest in
the religious history of Scotland I need hardly dwell,
or remind you how keenly he appreciated not only the
more romantic and attractive features of its earlier
chapters, but "the defiant self-reliance and dogged
resistance to superior power," " the force of unyielfeg
conviction," "the indomitable native vigour," the
marvellous energy," which, with whatever drawbacks
drawbacks on which he spoke to you with entire and
characteristic frankness marked its later develop
ments. How gallantly did he meet the charges brought
against the clergy of Scotland, at one time by Samuel
Johnson, at a more recent period by Mr. Buckle. Even
Milton s sneer at Rutherford he meets by the one
method which he was never tired of commending to
others, of practising himself by bringing out the equally
true, the more touching, the more Christian side of the
stern yet affectionate Pastor of Anwoth. With what
.delight did he dwell " on the divine fire of Scotland s
Burning Bush that lies hid beneath the rough husk"
of logical subtleties and stubborn protests, of testi-
8 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
monies and confessions. You know how his soul
yearned over the combination of deep religious senti
ment, "of a sanctity equal to that of the strictest
Covenanter or the strictest Episcopalian," with "a just
and philosophic moderation," the crowning instance of
which he found in Kobert Leighton, "the most apos
tolical," as he deliberately called him, " of all protestant
Scotsmen;" who held a place in his affection and vene
ration side by side with, if not even above, that held by
Eichard Baxter in the South. You may have smiled as-
he rebuked in his own manner the eccentricities or the
shortcomings or the excesses of this or that form of
Scottish Christianity; for you knew that your Church
and people had no more devoted or more earnest
champion ; that all that was great and noble and
inspiring in its past or present history was as dear to
him as it was to you. Some of you can remember
the delight with which (not here only, but in Oxford)
he called up from the recollections of his earlier
days his one interview, the first and last, "end
ing in front of the academic church at Oxford," with
the " wise and good " Dr. Chalmers. With what fer
vour did he recite, not here only, but at Westminster,
the burning words in which Thomas Carlyle poured out
his angry but noble grief over the open grave of your
Edward Irving. How he rejoiced heart and soul in
the society of Norman M Leod ; how in Erskine of
Linlathen he found one " to hold brief converse with
whom was to have his conversation in heaven." The
very last literary work on which that brain, active to
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 5)
the last, was ever engaged, was a paper on the West
minster Confession, the proofs actually corrected in
that fatal illness which took him away from the great
work that he was doing, beneath the very roof where
that "venerable document," as he loved to call it, first
saw the light.
I say nothing of Scottish friends and companions
and fellow workers who^ gathered round him from
Oxford days to the day on which he breathed his last ;
nothing of that Scottish lady whose name will be in
separably connected with his own, in whose grave he
lies. I have said enough to remind you, were it needed,
that he of whom I am to speak was one towards whom
Scotland may feel as the almost adopted son of her own
soil, almost bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh.
Let me pass at once to the story of his life.
He was born on December 13, in the eventful year
1815. The place of his birth was Alderley, in Cheshire,
of which his father was rector, a place which for many
centuries had formed part of the ancestral estates of
the great house of Stanley. Of a branch of that house,
not ennobled till the next generation, his uncle, Sir
John Stanley, who lived at the Park hard by, was the
representative and head.
On the position which the family of Stanley has
held in English history, whether in the Tudor or Stuart
reigns, or later on, it is not necessary to enlarge. The
thoughts of a resident in Westminster will naturally
turn to the Stanley who on the field of Bosworth placed
10 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
on the head of the first Tudor king, his own stepson,
the crown that is so often reproduced, sometimes with
the bush on which it was found hanging, in the stately
chapel of Henry VII. It is possible that the memory
of those to whom he speaks may travel rather to the
fatal field of Flodden, where the sword of a Stanley of
the next generation drank so deeply of the best blood
of Scotland. Scotsmen and Englishmen will alike be
interested to note the one and only passage in which
one scion of that race cared publicly to recall his
lineage. It is that in which, after describing the
marvellous promise of Alexander Stuart, the shortlived
son of James IV., the pupil of Erasmus, of "gentle
manners, playful humour, keen as a hound in the pur
suit of knowledge " Ah ! you see why I dwell on the
words "the young Marcellus," as he calls him, "of the
Scottish Church," "if," he goes on to say, "he fell in the
memorable charge of my namesake on that fatal day,
may he accept, thus late, the lament which a kins
man of his foe would fain pour over his untimely
bier."
For a charming picture of the home of Arthur Stan
ley s infancy and boyhood, his friends owe a debt
of gratitude to Mr. Augustus Hare. " Few country
places," he says, " in England possess such a singular
charm as Alderley :" and he goes on, in an article in
Macmillan s Magazine for September in last year,
to describe the spot "where the flat pasture lands of
Cheshire rise suddenly into the rocky ridge of Alderley
Edge, with the Holy Well under an overhanging cliff ;
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 11
its gnarled pine trees, its storm-beaten beacon tower,
ready to give notice of an invasion, and looking far
over the green plain to the smoke which indicates in
the horizon the presence of great manufacturing towns."
He tells us how the beautiful beech woods, which clothe
the western side of that upheaving ridge, feather
down over mossy lawns to the lake or "mere" beneath.
I wish that time allowed me to read to you a descrip
tion of the scene written by Arthur Stanley s mother
at the age of eighteen, in the first few months of her
married life. You will find it in the Memorials of his
two parents published by himself on the anniversary
of her death, in 1879. You would agree with me that
for clearness and delicacy of touch, that gifted son could
hardly have surpassed it in the full maturity of his
powers. The Rectory itself cannot be described better
than in Mr. Hare s words. "A low house, with a
verandah forming a wide balcony for the upper storey,
where bird-cages hung among the roses ; its rooms and
passages filled with pictures, books, and old carved oak
furniture." His father, in his " Familiar History of
British Birds," speaks of watching the starlings " on a
well-mown, short-grassed lawn, within a stone s throw
of which stands an ivy-mantled parish church, with its
massy grey tower, from the turreted pinnacle of which
rises a tall flagstaff, crowned by a weather-cock." You
will, I think, forgive me for entering into these details
in speaking of one to whom all such associations were
so peculiarly dear.
Of his father he has himself left us a picture in his
12 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. I.
Memoirs of Bishop Stanley, and in the work which I
have just mentioned. His personal character and his
position in the Church of England were so peculiar and
so striking, and their bearing on his son s career, however
difficult to estimate precisely, were so undeniable, that,
quite apart from their intrinsic interest, I must not
pass them by. His educational advantages in early
life were scanty. He did his best to compensate for
their absence by untiring industry at Cambridge. He
attained considerable proficiency and academic honours
in mathematics, a study in Avhich his son was so
unversed, that at least after the close of his school life,
an arithmetical sum was to him an almost insoluble
problem.* Active on foot, and one of the very first
forerunners of modern Alpine climbers, as much at
home in the saddle as his son was the reverse, he never
hunted or joined in field sports. But the people of
Alderley long remembered the courage with which, while
all his respectable parishioners stood aghast at his
temerity, that true son of a gallant house darted on his
little black horse into the midst of a riotous crowd, and
by his mere appearance stopped a desperate prize fight.
As keen an observer of outward nature as his son s
friend, Charles Kingsley, he was the author of a
"Familiar History of Birds," which, thanks to its
accurate and careful studies of animal life, may outlive
many graver scientific works. But the father of Arthur
* "Were I," he once said late in life, " a citizen of this (American)
State," it was one in which an educational test was enforced, " I
should never enjoy the franchise."
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 13
Stanley was far more than this. He was not only a
liberal clergyman at a time when to hold liberal
views was, at all events so far as the rural clergy were
concerned, almost to court social isolation : he was an
indefatigable and apostolic priest at a time when and
in a district where the standard of clerical work was
still deplorably low. In moral courage he was not
surpassed by his fearless son. He was almost the first
parochial clergyman of the Church of England to do
his utmost to advocate and to promote the spread of
general as well as of religious instruction among the
neglected agricultural population. He was almost if
not quite the first parochial clergyman who ventured
to lecture before a Mechanics Institute on the then
young and suspected science of Geology. In the midst
of the alarm and panic of 1829 he attempted to throw
oil on the troubled waters by publishing "A Few Words
in behalf of our Catholic Brethren." In the crisis of
the Reform Agitation in 1831, when the very word
" Reform " was a sound of terror to the mass of the
clergy, he had won sufficient influence to persuade a
group of clergymen in his diocese to join him in a
petition to Parliament for the removal of some of the
most undeniable of the abuses then existing in the
English Church a petition which the excellent Bishop
of his diocese at once declined to present.
Removed in 1837 to the see of Norwich, he was
grudgingly received in his new sphere, a diocese in
which the clergy were perhaps even more than else
where indisposed to welcome a Whig Bishop, the
14 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
nominee of a Whig Premier, who had vainly urged on
a cautious Primate the name of Thomas Arnold as the
preacher at his consecration. In his very first sermon
he raised a whirlwind of opposition by speaking of the
duty of forbearance towards Dissent, and of the im
portance of imparting secular as well as religious educa
tion in parochial schools. But this was only the first of
a series of shocks which, in the midst of entire and
absolute devotion to the spiritual and moral welfare of
his huge diocese, he inflicted on the public opinion of
his own clergy, and of wider circles. Both as a
Clergyman and as a Bishop he was emphatically
before his time. As we look back at his career we
see him now standing on a platform at Norwich
side by side with an Irish Catholic priest, Father
Mathew, the Apostle in the sister island of the cause
of temperance ; now advocating in the National Society
such modifications of school teaching as would open
the school-doors to the children of Non-conformists ;
now addressing a reluctant House of Lords and two
indignant Archbishops in favour of relaxing the terms
of subscription then enforced on the English clergy;
now, in a sermon which was at once characterised
as the boldest ever preached in St. Paul s Cathedral,
disavowing in the presence of the Metropolitan Clergy
and their Bishop, the doctrine as usually understood of
the Apostolical succession ; now, strange and almost
incredible as it may sound to yon, censured by a cer
tain section of the religious public for welcoming to the
hearth and to the heart of his episcopal home one so
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 15
honoured in all circles as the gifted lady who then bore
the name of Jenny Lind. If he was the first English
Bishop of his day to throw himself heart and soul, in
conjunction with the present Earl of Shaftesbury, into
the movement for the establishment of Kagged Schools,
he was, no doubt, the very first of English Bishops to
preach in his own Cathedral a funeral sermon in honour
of a saintly Quaker. We live in an age of transition.
It is already difficult to understand, still more to make
due allowance for, the storms of obloquy and clamour
which one after another of such proceedings awoke in
large and influential circles. They at times even exceeded
those which his son encountered years after with here
ditary fearlessness. But if they did much to embitter
the life and impair the usefulness of one of the most
devoted of God s servants who ever held the high office
of an English Bishop, it is encouraging to remember
how steadily and increasingly he won his way to the
respect and affection of those who most differed from
him, of some of those who had expressed that difference
most strongly. When, during a rare visit to Scotland at
the close of twelve years of unwearied episcopal work,
he was called away after a short illness under the
hospitable roof of Brahan Castle, there was a general
and frank recognition of what was lost, and a genuine
burst of sorrow throughout all East Anglia. Clergy
and Laity, Churchmen and Dissenters, adults and chil
dren, mourned alike for one who " had found his
diocese a wilderness and left it in comparison a culti
vated field," whose " good grey hairs and elastic step,
16 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
and open countenance, with its striking profile and
quick searching glances," are still affectionately
remembered among Norfolk parsonages and in poor
men s dwellings. His funeral at Norwich drew toge
ther a concourse like in numbers and in the diversity
of its elements to that which gathered last year round
another grave in the Abbey of Westminster. At that
sight "there came across me," said his son, "as it had
never come before, the high ideal and the great oppor
tunities of the life of an English Bishop." And if there
was much in the son which he did not inherit from his
father, and if some of the father s gifts were not trans
mitted to his son, yet I feel that the son would have
forbidden me to speak to you of himself without re
minding you of what he owed to a father whom he
never mentioned without honour and reverence.
Of his mother also he has drawn his own portrait.
But he knew well that no words could describe the
debt he owed to her. She was indeed the ideal mother
for such a son. Quiet, calm, thoughtful, dignified even
in early womanhood (she became a wife at eighteen) :
deeply religious, "with a spiritual insight which belonged
to that larger sphere of religion which is above and
beyond the passing controversies of the day;" observant,
and somewhat reticent, yet full of sympathy to those
whom she loved, she possessed in girlhood and retained
to the end "a rare delicacy of intelligence," which
Sydney Smith happily characterised as "a porcelain
understanding" together with a literary taste and
power of expression of which few but her children
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 17
were aware till the publication of her Memorials.
She watched with trembling and aided with wisdom
the early development of the gifted nature of her
second son, whose rare genius she quickly recognized,
and whose delicate frame and unformed constitution
she did her best, with a mother s devotion, to con
solidate and strengthen. And the son, as he grew
up, repaid that devotion, so far as such debts can
be repaid, sevenfold into her bosom. Every year of her
long life she became increasingly dear to him; every
year her "firm faith, calm wisdom, and tender sym
pathy, speaking the truth in love, counselled, encou
raged, and comforted" him who inscribed these words
upon her tombstone. When death had taken from
her almost at a stroke the husband of her youth, and
two sons whose bones " lie severed far and wide," the
one survivor drew her more and more closely to his
filial and loving heart.
It was in such a home, and with such parents, that
five children passed their childhood and opening life:
Owen, who inherited his father s taste for the sea, and
chose it for his calling ; Mary, whose active life spent
in works of beneficence at Norwich, among the soldiers
on the Bosphorus, and in Westminster, will not lightly
be forgotten; Arthur, of whom I am speaking;
Charles, the future Royal Engineer and Secretary to
the Governor of Van Diemen s Land; and the one
sister who still survives to bear, as the wife of the
Master of the Temple and Dean of Llandaff, a name
honoured greatly in the English Church.
18 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. I.
The future biographer may supplement Mr. Hare s
picture of that home ; he can hardly improve upon it.
It is interesting to dwell on it as one of the very
highest types of that large class of cultivated, modest,
and well-ordered family circles, which have so often
grown up under the quiet roof of English parsonages
and Scottish manses, and which have made the sons of
the clergy so important an element in our own, and,
indeed, in all Protestant countries ; and I cannot help
reminding you how, towards the very close of his life,
in a sermon preached at Glasgow, after enlarging " on
the sacred and beneficent institution of a married
clergy," Arthur Stanley spoke of his own memory of
" a happy and peaceful childhood spent under the shade
of the tower of a parish church, and under the roof of
a parish parsonage, still," he said, " after all the vicissi
tudes of a chequered life, familiar, dear, and sacred
beyond any other spot on the surface of the earth."
I shall follow Mr. Hare s guidance for a short time
longer. The mother s letters bring before us her second
boy as frail and delicate, yet beginning, when infancy
was over, "to expand as one of the spring flowers
in Alderley May time," and, again, as " talking
incessantly, full of pretty speeches, repartees, and in
telligence ;" "like his elder brother," the gallant sailor
that was to be, " but softer and more affectionate ; "
sorely divided between fear and curiosity (that curi
osity which never died) at the entrance of the enchanted
cave of the neighbourhood ; revelling in all the legends
of the countryside ; at five years old devouring Miss
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 19
Edgeworth s " Frank," and translating its lessons into
practical life ; living already in a little world of books
and poetry of his own.
At eight years old a growing shyness and silence
alarmed his parents, who were wise enough greatly to
dread too exclusive an activity of brain and nerve,
and it was resolved to try the effect of a transference
to a small and homelike school near the seaside. There
we are allowed to see " the little sylph," as his aunt
calls him, happy in his own way, proud, like other little
boys, of hearing himself called by his surname of
Stanley, prouder of bringing home a prize-book the
first of many for history, devouring "Madoc" and
" Thalaba," and forming a love which he was always
eager to avow for Southey s now much forgotten poetry ;
laying the foundation of his wonderful faculty for letter
writing by writing home long histories of school life,
describing his drill sergeant " as telling him to put
on a bold, swaggering air, and not to look sheepish ; "
astonishing every one when he came home by his
memory and his quickness in picking up knowledge ;
yet disquieting his mother more than ever, when
his twelfth birthday was passed, by having no other
pursuits, nor anything he cares for, except reading ;
" often," she says, " I am sure, very unhappy, with a
laudable desire to be with other boys, yet when with
them finding his incapacity to enter into their plea
sures." "Ah !" she says, with a cry almost of despair,
" it is so difficult to manage Arthur. Yet after all I
suspect," she adds, with rare sagacity and prophetic
c 2
20 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
instinct, " I suspect that this is Arthur s worst time,
and that he will be a happier man than he is a boy."
Yet even she hardly foresaw the unrevealed wealth of
social gifts, of unbounded cheerfulness and merriment,
of power of adapting himself to the most varied circles,
above all, the inexhaustible capacity for tender friend
ship, that lay latent under that passing cloud of boyish
shyness and reserve.
It is rarely that the general public need be called on
to pore over the faded records of the childhood of
distinguished men. But there is a oneness in the
development of Arthur Stanley s mind that gives a
singular interest to even his boyish, to even his
childish, effusions. No doubt that young brain was
at this time abnormally active. There lay before me,
as I wrote what I now say, a small MS. volume,
written, from beginning to end, in a boyish but,
strange as it may seem to those who knew him later,
a singularly clear hand. On the title-page are inscribed
the words, " The Poetical Works of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, Vol. II.," and underneath is a drawing, his
own handiwork, of Neptune in his Chariot, with
Amphitrite and the sea nymphs sporting around. The
volume contains 13 or 14 poems in various metres, and
on various subjects; not only odes to the Humming
bird, to the Owl, to the Stork, but to such abstract
ideas as Superstition, to Time, to Forgiveness, to
Death, to Sleep, to Justice. It includes a poem on
the Destruction of the Druids, written in a tripping
dactylic metre, and a ballad on a strange legend of
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 21
King Harold. This, remember, is Vol. II., and the
poems, which are carefully dated, were written in the
years 1826 27, when the young poet was of the age
of 10 and 11. They seem to me (I will not trouble you
with specimens) to show more marked originality than
almost any, that I have seen, of his English verses
written much later at Rugby. His little study there
soon gained the nickname of "Poet s Corner," and from
time to time he gained much credit by his school com
positions in English verse, especially for a prize poem,
composed at the age of 18, on Charles Martell s victory
near Tours, " the more than Marathon of France," as he
happily calls it in his final line. Yet I suspect that, quite
apart from the effect of public- school life on a boy of
poetic temperament, his Rugby life developed mainly
other sides of that imaginative and active brain. He
was intent there rather on absorbing ideas and know
ledge than on giving out his own impressions. Certainly
in my own day it was not so much to him as to Arthur
Hugh Clough the gifted author of much besides,
known perhaps to some here through that charming
description of a Long Vacation spent by Oxford under
graduates at the Bothie with the name unpronounceable
to Southern lips that we Rugby schoolboys looked back
as the true poet among our distinguished predecessors.
The year 1828 was an eventful epoch in Arthur
Stanley s life. It was the year marked by the first
foreign tour of one who was afterwards to be a traveller
of travellers. Mr. Hare has told us how when first he
saw the great Pic du Midi rise above a mass of clouds,
22 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
he could find no words to express his ecstasy but " What
shall I do ? what shall I do ? " And his journal written
at the time was worthy of the future author of " Sinai
and Palestine." I have been favoured with words
written in November of the same year by a discerning
lady, an absolute stranger to the Stanley family, in
which she speaks of herself as having been
" Much pleased and still more surprised by the perusal of a journal
during a tour in the Pyrenees made in the last summer by an English
family. The writer is a boy of twelve years old, who, if he attains
manhood, and keeps the promise he has hitherto given, will, I do not
doubt, hereafter be classed amongst the distinguished literary characters
of this country. His mind appears to have been open to all the beauty
and wonders he saw, which he describes in language always good, and
often poetical. The account he gives of their expedition to the
Maladetta is one of the very best I ever read of similar excursions in
any book of travels."
Such prophecies may have been often made. It is
seldom that they meet with such entire fulfilment !
It was in the same year that, after much consulta
tion, his parents resolved to remove their boy to Rugby,
and place him under the care of Dr. Arnold, who was
just entering on a career which, in the prophetic
language of the letter to which he owed his election,
was to " change the face of education all through the
public schools of England."*
It was a momentous decision, and one that must
have required all the encouragement that so keen-
sighted a friend as the elder Augustus Hare, who was
* The words are those used by Dr. Hawkins, late Provost of Oriel,
who has passed away while these pages were passing through the
press.
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 23
about to marry Mrs. Stanley s sister and who was taken
into counsel, could venture to give. English public
schools in those days were but rough homes for sensitive
boys. At all times there is much in their life especi
ally trying to boys of exceptional genius ; to all in fact
who are out of sympathy out of touch, so to speak
with the average tendencies and tastes of boyhood.
Rugby was, if a staunch Rugbeian may be allowed
to say so, of small repute outside the circle of a few
Midland counties till the advent of Arnold. The
innumerable readers of "Tom Brown" will find in it
a faithful picture of the rougher side of school life as
it presented itself in the earlier days of our great
Head Master. Arthur Stanley joined the school from
which he was to receive, and to which he was to give,
so much, in January, 1829. Whatever his sufferings in
that new life, he yet with the courage that lay behind
a timid exterior, put a brave face on the matter. In
letters to his former schoolmaster, towards whom he
cherished a loyal affection, the new boy describes himself
as domiciled for the time at a small boarding-house of
fourteen boys the larger house, of which he was soon
to be a more permanent inmate, being not yet com
pleted each of the fourteen having a small study
to himself, <l which," he says, " is a very great advan
tage." He goes on to give a characteristic sketch of
those now world-famous school buildings : the "towers
and turrets," looking, to his boyish fancy, " like those
of some stately castle ; " " the Close, with its many tall
trees" on his return, years after, from Greece, he
24 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
rejoiced once more over those ancient elms " and its
small chapel," where a monument to himself will soon
be added to that of Arnold, of the surrounding
country, where his eye already marked in those
sluggish brooks "the numerous branches of the
Avon "the Avon of Wycliffe and of Shakespeare
"winding through extensive meadows." He appears
to wish to amuse his former instructor, he certainly
astounds his later friends, by announcing that " he has
been chosen to write out one of the Praepostor s prize-
essays, on account of writing such a good hand"
carefully underlining the now almost incredible state
ment. He tells him " how the school now numbers
167 boys, but is rapidly increasing with Dr. Arnold s
fame;" he drops, poor boy! the remark "that he has
not yet fixed on anyone whom he should like as a
friend." Doubtless, for a time, he suffered acutely
from something worse than isolation and want of
sympathy. But those who have had boys at school
will understand his silence on the subject. Years
later, when all such trials were over, on the eve of
competing for the Balliol scholarship, he wrote to
a friend already at Oxford, " I recollect when
I first came here, and was much bullied at my first
house, that I one day walked disconsolately up to the
school, where I met , who took me round
the Close, and asked me how I liked the place? I,
being too broken-spirited to enter into a detail of my
grievances, said, in the very bitterness of my heart,
that I liked it very much." How many disconsolate
CHAP. L] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 25
schoolboys have made the same answer! But those
days soon ended. He rose rapidly in the school,
thanks, he tells his old friend, to his careful teaching ;
how could it have been otherwise ? He attained, if
not robustness of constitution, yet an entire immunity
from conscious ill-health ; " my health," he tells his
former teacher, " is almost perfect. From one half-year
to another I pass with scarcely a day s sickness." He
was able once more to indulge in comparative freedom
his taste for reading, " keen as a hound " I borrow his
own words, which I have already quoted " keen as a
hound in the pursuit of knowledge." He writes of
himself as " reading to myself, chiefly history. I have
got through all Mitford and all Gibbon, and several
smaller ones, with greater success than I could have
expected." "I don t know," he says, still writing to
his old schoolmaster, " whether } ou have heard much of
Dr. Arnold, or conceived bad opinions of him. It is
possible that you may have heard him abused in every
way. He has been branded with the names of Sabbath-
breaker and Infidel. But seeing so much of him as I
do, I may safely say that he is as thorough a Christian
as you can anywhere find. His sermons are certainly
the most beautiful that I ever heard, and rendered
doubly impressive by his delivery. He has reformed
the school in every possible way, introducing History,
Mathematics, Modern Languages, Examinations, Prizes,
&c." My younger hearers will be startled at hearing
that such now established branches of a school cur
riculum were then looked on as revolutionary inno-
26 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. I.
vatioiis. " I am afraid," he adds, " that you would not
find many in the school to give him as good a character
as this, as perhaps he has got a little more than the
usual odium attached to a Head Master, but I think
there are few who would question his talents or
his sermons. 7 am, as you may perceive, thoroughly
prejudiced in his favour. The common report is that
he will be a Bishop. I hope it will not be before my
departure." It is fair to add that, in a conversation
held years after with an Oxford undergraduate, he
confessed that, though at first charmed with his Head
Master, there was yet a time in his schoolboy life in
which he looked on him as " fierce and alarming" : and
thought that what he used to hear of him at home was
somewhat exaggerated, and that there was some truth
in what the boys used to say about his harshness. "It
was after my getting into the fifth form, and during
my three and a-half years under him in the sixth, that I
began to feel what Arnold really was. During all the
time that he was being publicly abused, and while
nobody befriended him, I was perfectly satisfied in my
own mind that I was in intercourse with one of the
most remarkable men of the age. What anxiety there
was among some of us to hear him preach ! When
Sunday came round when he went from his seat up
to the pulpit, and we saw that he was going to preach
I and Vaughaii used to nudge each other with delight.
When I came back from the examination at Balliol,
we posted home late at night, in order to avoid missing
his sermon."
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 27
Rugby, in fact, soon became to him, as to how many
others since, when the first troubles of his early days
were at an end, I will not say a second home, but a
place invested with a dearness and a sacredness of its
own, not inferior to, though different from, that which
attached to such homes as the Rectory at Alderley,
School distinctions, of course, fell to his lot one after
another. He records in one of his letters how, by
winning the prizes for a Greek poem and a Latin essay,
he had succeeded at last in carrying off the five great
school distinctions then existing a feat in which he was
only rivalled once in the history of Arnoldian Rugby, by
A. H. Clough, whose name, dear to all Rugby men, I
have already mentioned. Indeed, the most definite
school tradition that I, as a schoolboy there myself,
found attached to his name was, that on handing to him
the very last of these five prizes, his master and ours
broke for the first time the profound, the almost grim
silence which, strange as it may sound to modern ears,
he invariably maintained on the annual " Speech-Day,"
to utter the expressive words, " Thank you, Stanley ;
we have nothing more to give you."
Meantime his literary instincts were finding their full
satisfaction, not only in the work done at the feet of his
renowned master, but in his own insatiable reading, as
partly described above. Now, too, it was that he
developed the first germs of that marvellous capacity
for forming warm and lasting friendships which was
to the very end of his life one of his most marked
characteristics. It is touching even now to read how
28 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
the boy, so shy and reserved in his beloved home, so
forlorn and solitary in his first year or two of Rugby
life, whose incapacity for entering into intimacy with
other boys had once so gravely alarmed a mother s
heart, was already realising her hopes that the cloud
that isolated him was only transient. A letter exists,
written at the close of his schooldays to an older friend,*
then an undergraduate, in which, after speaking of his
soon leaving Rugby, " the place where I have spent five
happy years, learned knowledge human and divine, as
probably I shall never learn it again," he speaks also of
Rugby as " the place, too, of my several friendships
(forgive me," he inserts, " for the word several) to last,
I hope, none lessened by the existence of others, to the
latest hour of my life." How many there are still
living, how many who have passed away, whom the
young writer of these words was to inspire with feelings
which even the sacred word friendship seems only
inadequately to express ! What a genius for friendship,
in the very highest and noblest conception of its mean
ing, was he to develope ! How he loved his friends, how
steadfastly did he stand by them ; to how many did he
open his heart and how many hearts did he win win
and raise and ennoble by his friendship, without stirring
the slightest sense of jealousy or rivalry in the men of
all ages and of all classes who delighted in the sense
of each other s affection for him ! How they, how we,
rejoiced to bring our friends into the charmed circle of
* Dr. Greenhill, who has kindly allowed me to read many of these
early letters.
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 29
his companionship and love How prophetic seem now,
to those who saw the circle of his friends recruited year
after year, the youthful words, " my several friendships,
to last, I hope, none lessened by the existence of the
others, to the latest hour of my life ! "
On the other hand, it is not to be supposed that,
happy and cheerful as he was at school, he ever became
a genuine specimen of what is now ordinarily under
stood by a " public-school boy." He ranged freely over
the country, not very interesting in itself, round Rugby ;
but he never acquired any taste for the ordinary games
and amusements which now-a-days fill the foreground
in the popular conception of young Rugby life. In
deed the taste for such games, far less organised than
they are now, was less widely diffused than it has since
become, and the distinction between the many who
played or idled, and the few who worked, greatly effaced
since, was in the earlier and rougher period of Arnold s
time still strongly marked. There is a short paper in
the old " Rugby Magazine," which it was not till the
last time I saw him, within less than four weeks of his
death, that, while talking of this very subject, I learned
to be his. He speaks there of himself and his young
co-editors as turning out with heated brains for a ten
minutes walk in the Close before "locking up," and
meeting the other, the more numerous and athletic,
portion of the school coming in from their summer
afternoon spent in cricket. It is a paper which could
scarcely have been written at the present day : the state
of things which it describes the division of the School
30 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
into two classes is one which, for good or evil, for good
and evil, mainly I trust for good, has passed away. Once
at a Rugby dinner he described, with the humour of
which he was a master, how, "as I sat in that study read
ing Mitford, a stone thrown at me by a schoolfellow came
through the window, struck me on the forehead here,"
striking his forehead as he spoke, "and left an almost
indelible scar." The story is characteristic of the in
voluntary disgust with which the sight of a schoolfellow
sitting at home to read, otherwise than under compul
sion, would have inspired nine out of ten of the school
boys of the day. And the result of this state of things
was that his direct influence on the School was probably
confined to the circle of those who were more or less like-
minded. " The young barbarians all at play " cared little,
though they learned to look on him with a certain awe,
for their gifted schoolfellow, the quiet, kindly, studious
high-bred Praepostor. "Not being marked out from
others in any game," writes one who, as a very young
boy, was with him in the same house, and rose years
after to the headship of the School " not even to the
extent of dough s prowess as goal keeper at football, his
name passed away very quickly at his house, save for the
holidays which he won for us at Oxford." Such was, I
doubt not, the case with these outer barbarians. But I
am bound to say, in defence of my old school, that
coming to it as I did at an unusually late age, and being
admitted at once to the society of my older school
fellows, I found his name, after the lapse of three years
from his leaving Rugby, surrounded by the halo of
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 31
departed genius ; and I may add that I for one could
say by heart most of his Oxford prize poem before I had
ever seen its author.
Do I fatigue you with these boyish reminiscences ?
Let me add one. In a letter written towards the end
of his time at Rugby he speaks of rumours coming
from Oxford of the rising reputation of " William
Gladstone," who had been a pupil for a time of
Stanley s first teacher. In later life he recounted
the story of his first meeting the present Prime
Minister and member for Mid-Lothian then a boy
of fifteen, himself a few years younger at the house
of Mr. Gladstone s father. " Have you ever read
Gray s poems ? " said the future statesman. " No,"
replied his younger acquaintance. "Then do so at
once," said the elder vehemently, and produced the
volume. It was taken home, read at once, and en
joyed ; and to the end of his life it was difficult for him
to speak of the scenery of Greece, or to go round the
tombs of the earlier kings in the Abbey, without the
appropriate quotation from Gray rising to his lips. For
myself, I shall always think of the poet as associated
not least of all with the veteran statesman and the
friend whom he will, I trust, long survive.
The end of his schoolboy days drew near. You will
find a graphic account in Mr. Hare s paper of the
eventful week in which he won, the first of many
Rugby boys who have followed in his steps, the first
of the two vacant scholarships at Balliol. The tumult
of joy which such marked success raised in his own
32 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. I.
heart, in the large circle of Rugby men at Oxford,
at Rugby, and not least at Alderley, is more easy
perhaps for Rugbeians and Oxonians to realise than for
those to whom the details of Oxford competitions are a
matter, if not of absolute yet of comparative indif
ference. " It is a great triumph," he says, in a letter
to that old schoolmaster to whom in that hour of
triumph he was still loyal, " a great triumph to us, for
Rugby has hitherto been kept rather in the background
by other schools, who this year were entirely defeated."
In the same letter he once more, with characteristic
chivalry, returns to the charge in behalf of Dr. Arnold.
But I will not repeat to you the emphatic words in
which he asserts his unaltered adherence to his former
opinion.
In the following June he left Rugby. There is a
humorous and graphic account in one of his letters of
the final school examination, conducted on behalf of
Oxford by the present Bishop of Salisbury, then tutor of
Balliol, and soon to become Head Master of Winchester,
and on behalf of Cambridge by Dr. Wordsworth, now
well known as the venerable Bishop of Lincoln. After
recounting how his own name was proclaimed first in the
anxiously expected list, and immediately explaining that
this was merely because he was senior in the school, and
that Vaughan, his dear friend and future brother-in-law,
was really bracketed as his equal, he expresses the hope
that his friend " will not think it affected in him to say
that he could not possibly have wished it better."
"There is all," he writes, "that was necessary to
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 33
gratify every individual feeling of vanity; all to make
me happy for Vaughan, to whom I should not at all
have grudged the first place ; all to make me happy for
the School/ " For now/ he adds, with a dash of
public spirit which every public-school boy or man will
appreciate, " let no one say of me, whether in my
successes or my failures at Oxford, that I was the first
at Rugby, and therefore must be taken as a specimen
for better or worse of the School. The answer is ready
in black and white that there was and is another
equal, who would, had it not been for his long illness
before the examination, have most probably been
before me."
I may venture to say that there is no true son of Rugby
living who does not rejoice in a "bracket" which linked
together those two friends, a due estimate of whose
widely different gifts must have sorely puzzled the most
discriminating of examiners.
The hour came at which he bad goodbye to his
school life. I have been allowed to read a letter in
which he describes the scene in which one who has
been called the hero-schoolmaster had to part with one
who has been felicitously called the hero-pupil.* " I saw
him," he writes. " but for a few minutes, but those few
minutes were worth much ; " and after describing their
brief conversation, the promises of introduction to his
old pupil, the late Bishop of Salisbury, and to a newer
friend, the present Lord Chancellor of England, and
* In the touching sermon preached in the Abbey by the Dean of
Llandaff on the Sunday after the death of his brother-in-law.
34 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
then the parting words, the very tones of the twice re
peated "God bless you, Stanley ;" he goes on, " and so we
parted, and so that constant and delightful and blessed
intercourse I have had with him for three years closed
for ever. My comfort is that I shall see him now, when
I do see him, with greater ease; but even that may and
must be soon broken off, by his becoming, what every
year makes more inevitable, a Bishop. I see I have
said for ever. God grant noj: for ever literally, though
it may be so on earth."
There is something, you will say, overstrained in all
this. He himself so far agreed with you that he spoke
at the end of his life of a certain exaggeration of tone
in his youthful letters, not on this subject specially, but
on all. Yet which of us would wish to rob youth of its
special gift of a generous enthusiasm ? Who of us
would not rejoice to see our sons fired with a like ardour
for another Arnold ?
Before many weeks were over he had the delight of
visiting his beloved master in his home among the
Westmoreland lakes not where some of his later pupils
of the same age were privileged to see him, at Fox
How, which was then in the builder s hands but at
Allan Bank, overlooking Grasmere, which had been
the temporary home of the poet Wordsworth. Space
and time warn me to leave to his biographer his short
but delightful notices of Arnold in his home; of Words
worth, to seeing whom he bad looked forward with all
the interest of a schoolboy admirer ; of Hartley Cole
ridge ; of Captain Hamilton, author of " Cyril Thornton,"
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 35
and "Men and Manners in America," "still lame,"
says the youthful student of Napier s History, " from a
wound received at Albuera ;" or his humorous account of
the expedition to Keswick, and the vain watching like a
cat outside Greta Bank in hopes of seeing Southey, of
one who to the end of his days upheld against all
comers the poetic merits of "Thalaba" and "Kehama."
The visit was paid in 1834. Less than eight years
later, on the 12th of June, 1842, the master to whom
he still looked with a no less ardent if less boyish
devotion was taken from the work which he was
carrying on with unclouded success at Rugby. Arnold
was still comparatively a young man he wanted three
years of fifty ; to all appearance unusually strong and
vigorous, growing every year in intellectual grasp, and
dying at the very moment when the combination of that
Christian faith, which sustained him in the swift and
painful passage from life to death, with an ardent and
inextinguishable love of truth, might have opened for
him a fresh field of untold influence in the religious life
of England. He had outlived much of the odium with
which his position as a religious teacher, a church
reformer, and an outspoken opponent of the rising
Oxford movement had at one time covered him. His
Oxford pupils still recall the rapid revulsion from
fierce aversion to warm admiration produced at the
University by the delivery of his historical lectures in
the spring of that fatal year. The shock that ran
through England at the news of his death few here
may remember. It remains in the memory of his pupils
D 2
36 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
as something almost or quite unparalleled. "To me,"
said Stanley, who had hurried to Rugby on receiving
the dreadful news in London from the present Dean of
Durham, " to me," he said, in the first letter that one
who was then his pupil and is now his successor ever
received from him, " it seems as though the solid earth
had passed away beneath my feet." He preached the
funeral sermon at that saddest of gatherings in Rugby
Chapel ; stood by the grave side by side with his father
and his friends, and immediately volunteered to write
his Biography ; " a work," he said, " which from first
to last I thoroughly enjoyed." And well he might !
When was such a tribute paid in English literature by
a pupil to his teacher ? Let me add that no 12th of
June ever passed without his writing to Mrs. Arnold,
or, when she had passed away, to her daughter at Fox
How; few on which one or other of his own Rugby
pupils failed to write to himself.
Two questions at once arise. How far is Arnold s
reputation due to his biographer, rather than to his own
merits ? And what was the effect of Arnold s influence
on Stanley ? The first is a question of fact, the other
one of inference and conjecture. Some of us have
heard it said, in answer to the former question, not
merely that Arnold s work and character were brought
home to thousands, to whom otherwise they would
have remained unknown, by that matchless Biography,
but that the man himself was transfigured by the
genius and devotion of the biographer that the por
trait is, in fact, an ideal picture. Nay, it has been
CHAP. L] AETHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 37
more than whispered in these latter days, that the
Arnold of the biographer is a legendary being, a
mythical personage, created by the picturesque, but
unfaithful, fancy of Arthur Stanley.
It is encouraging to feel how baseless sometimes are
the final results of an over-restless scepticism, even in
the hands of those who would have no words too strong
for their condemnation of a "negative criticism" on
the part of others. We, his pupils, are fast passing
away. Let one of those who still remain record his
emphatic protest against these extravagances of in
credulity, this entire misreading of the character of
two such men. It is impossible, alas! that the bio
graphy of Stanley can be written by one so gifted and
furnished for the task as he was for his ; but it will be
much if it be written by one equally unsparing of
pains to verify every touch and every line, as deter
mined to check every impression of his own mind by
careful comparison with that made on others ; above
all, content to let the subject of his work speak for
himself, in his own words, and almost in his own
tones, as Arnold speaks in his letters and journals,
and to keep his own impressions, his own views, as
carefully in the background as Stanley keeps his in
that memorable Biography.
But what was the effect of Arnold on himself? Did
the influence of so commanding and overpowering a
character dwarf his own genius, de-individualise if I
may coin the word the individual Stanley, or unduly
affect and modify his course and character? Should
38 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
we, but for Arnold, have had something other, some
thing perhaps better, something perhaps worse, but
something different to what we had in Stanley ?
Similar questions may occur as to all lives. Like
analogous questions in the history of nations, they are
always hard to answer. The influence, no doubt, of
his teacher was enormous over his mind in youth. He
was quite conscious of it then and afterwards. " Arnold
at Rugby," he said, late in life, "was my idol and
oracle, both in one. Afterwards, well he was not
exactly my oracle, but I reverenced him wholly to
the end I have never felt such reverence for any
one since." In that most moving of sermons, preached
near Stanley s open grave, the Vaughan of whom he
spoke with such chivalrous affection nearly fifty years
before, recalled his friend s rapt countenance as he
listened to his master s sermons his entire absorp
tion, as he went straight from the chapel to his study
to transcribe his impressions of those memorable dis
courses. Speaking at Baltimore in 1878, " the lapse
of years," he said, " has only served to deepen in me the
conviction that no gift can be more valuable than the
recollection and the inspiration of a great character
working on our own. I hope that you may all experi
ence this at some time of your life as I have done."
And he was quite alive to it while it was in full force.
" What a wonderful influence," he says, in a letter
written while still at Rugby, " that man has over me !
I certainly feel that I have hardly a free will of my own
on any subject on which he has written or spoken.
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 39
It is, I suppose/ lie goes on to say, " a weak and
unnatural state to be in ; for," he adds, with instinctive
insight, " I do not at all consider myself to be naturally
of the same frame as he is ;" and, curiously enough, a
great part of a long letter to the same correspondent
is filled with a remarkably bold and searching criticism
of a striking hymn, -written by his great teacher, of
which he had obtained possession. Indeed, no two
men could have been in many points more unlike
each other. In stature, in manners, in appearance,
in voice, in conversational powers, in much of their
general tone of mind, the difference between them
amounted almost to contrast ; and however strong
were the bonds of sympathy and agreement on the
most important subjects, however undying the effects
of that contact with so vigorous and impressive a
teacher in the most impressible stage of the pupil s
life, yet those who knew them both are not very careful
to answer otherwise than with a smile of incredulity
the suggestion that Stanley was in any way the creation
of his teacher. What difference might have been made by
the subtraction, so to speak, of the Arnoldian element
from the Stanley whom they knew, they cannot say. But
they feel quite sure that he had a genius all his own,
and an individuality, and an independence and a power
of marking out his own course, not inferior to that of his
master. And considering his early training and home
influences, and still more the whole temperament and
constitution of his mind, they will greatly question
whether, after whatever periods of temporary oscilla-
40 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
tion, the ultimate bent and direction of the forces
which marked his genius and character, would have
been very different to what they were, even had his
father shrunk from entrusting him to the then untried
world of that Warwickshire Grammar School, and placed
him in the more familiar atmosphere of " Commoners "
at Winchester.
In all this I am purposely anticipating. Let me
now return to the narrative of his life.
In 1834 he was fairly launched on his undergraduate
career. It was an eventful time at Oxford. The
dominant religious influences of the place were be
coming every year more antagonistic to those under
which his boyhood had been passed. The watchwords
of " Church Authority," " Apostolical Succession," "The
Primitive Church," " Sacramental Grace," were to be
heard on all sides. The views which they represented
were being urged in sermons, in tracts, in conversation,
above all from the pulpit, by the most persuasive of
lips and the purest of lives. Their effect on the life of
Oxford has been described, in a manner which I shall
not attempt to emulate, by Principal Shairp,* himself
somewhat later a member of the same College as
Arthur Stanley. Their influence on the religious history
of the nation has yet to be fully estimated. How
i ar the theological atmosphere in which he now
lived temporarily affected him, one who was a school
boy at the time will hardly venture to say ; but
* In a paper on Keble in " Studies on Poetry and Philosophy."
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 41
among his most intimate friends were more than
one of those who afterwards became the leaders of
a movement in which he certainly never joined ;
and there is no doubt that, while still an under
graduate, he felt the keenest interest in the defence of
Dr., afterwards Bishop, Hampden, whose appointment to
the Regius chair of Theology provoked a storm, the first
of a long series that later on convulsed the English
Church. He was actually, there is reason to believe,
privately consulted by Lord Melbourne himself, whose
short but characteristic encomium on his young adviser
need not be repeated. Doubtless even his active mind
and indomitable power of work. were largely absorbed
by his necessary reading. In a letter to his eldest
brother, written while reading at Oxford during his
last summer vacation, he speaks of " looking forward
to November to free me at once and for ever from
the great burden which has been hanging over me for
the last three years." He was by no means what is
called a heaven-born scholar, in the technical sense of
the word. In Greek and Latin composition he had
been always easily distanced at Rugby by his friend
Vaughan, and for the more abstract branches of mental
philosophy, so congenial to the Scottish mind, he had
no special turn. He used to amuse his Oxford pupils
by recounting his laborious efforts to attain sufficient
excellence in Latin verse-writing, in which he never
greatly excelled, to allow him to obtain, as he did
at last by the excellence of other work, the Ireland
Scholarship the highest distinction offered by the
42 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
University for Greek and Latin scholarship ; and he
would enlarge on the debt which he owed to the present
Bishop of St. Albans, who, as his private tutor, assisted
him greatly to overcome this special deficiency.
The most interesting achievement of his under
graduate days was a poem for which in 1337 he won the
Newdigate prize. Its subject was " The Gipsies," and
it seems to me to be separated by a marked and dis
tinct line from all his earlier literary efforts (setting-
aside passages in private letters or journals) which I
have yet seen, and to bear the true stamp of the
mature Stanley, such as his later friends and the
world at large have known him. It is not only that it
is something far more than an unusually meritorious
prize poem, arid contains touches of description drawn
from natural scenery, such as a true poet would gladly
claim to have written at his age. Such lines, for
instance, as
" Tlie changeful smiles, the living face of light,
The steady gaze of the still solemn night ;
Bright lakes, the glistening eyes of solitude,
Girt with grey cliff s and folds of mighty wood,"
though possibly within the reach of one who, without
high poetic gifts, had saturated himself with the works
of first-class poets, are something more than the patch
work phrases of a skilled versifier. Nor is it only
that when, with a reference in a footnote to Lamartine s
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he speaks of
"The meteor light
Of Syrian skies by Zion s towery height, "
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 43
he foreshadows his own more fruitful visits to that
sacred soil. But when those who are familiar with his
later writings read his description of the
" Dark and troublous time
The Heaven all gloom, the wearied Earth all crime,"
that ushered in the fifteenth century ; or the couplets
that follow, beginning with
" A stranger people, mid that murky gloom,
Knocked at the gates of awe-struck Christendom ; "
we feel that " the boy " has already become " father
of the man." So again, after breathing the very spirit
of romance and poetry into the various legends that
hung round the origin of that strange people, as for
instance, in the words
Heard ye the nations heave their long last groans
Amidst the crash of Asia s thousand thrones,"
he lingers over the tradition, destitute as it is of all
historical value, of their representing the old Egyptian
race, and thus living as degraded wanderers by the side
of their ancient Hebrew bondservants, in such lines
as
" Remnant of ages, from thy glory cast,
Dread link between the present and the past
***#*
One only race amid thy dread compeers
Still moves with thee along this vale of tears ;
Long since ye parted by the Red Sea s strand,
Now face to face ye meet in every land.
Alone amid a new-born world ye dwell
Egypt s lorn people, outcast Israel ! "
As we read such passages, we feel that we are at once
44 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
transported into the very centre of the familiar thoughts
and imagery of the Stanley that was to be : that if the
voice is the voice of the young undergraduate, still toiling
for his degree, the words and the ideas are those of the
writer who was one day almost to re-create large fields
of sacred and ecclesiastical history by clothing them with
a fresh glow of life and colour.
It is interesting to add that the poem as it stands
bears traces, as we know from the writer, of corrections
introduced by the author of the " Christian Year," who
then held the Professorship of Poetry ; it contains also
a reference, perhaps the earliest that appeared in print,
to a line from an early poem of the present Poet
Laureate, whose name, however, was not given, and
which the poet Keble supposed to be a quotation from
Shakespeare.
His career as an undergraduate of Balliol was now at
an end ; his First Class obtained, his degree taken. The
burden was lifted from his shoulders, and with character
consolidated, and many warm and lasting friendships
formed, he stood on the threshold of mature manhood.
A Fellowship at his own College would have seemed
the natural sequel in the academical life of one of the
most distinguished of her sons; one whose character
was as spotless as his career had been exceptionally
brilliant. But it will hardly be believed in Edinburgh,
it will scarcely be credited in modern Oxford, that so
strong was the feeling among the older and ruling
members of that society against admitting to their
circle the son of such a Bishop as Bishop Stanley, and the
CHAP. I.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 45
sympathizing pupil of Thomas Arnold, that he was
privately given to understand that his chance of election
at his own College was too small to warrant him in
exposing himself to a repulse. The moment was seized
by the keen-sighted dexterity of one still living, then
an active and influential tutor of University College
let me once more thank him here I and in the year
1839 Arthur Stanley was elected Fellow of that
College ; an event I do not hesitate to say of far greater
importance to the welfare of that ancient society, which
claims King Alfred for its founder, than any that had
befallen it for at least a century. In the same year his
dear and life-long Balliol friend, Benjamin Jowett, now
the Master of Balliol, was elected, while still an under
graduate, to a Fellowship in his own College ; and before
it closed, Arthur Stanley had, after a period of some
perplexity and hesitation, taken a step to which he had
steadily looked forward from his Rugby days, and which
he never for a moment regretted, and had been or
dained deacon by the Bishop of Oxford.
He had now fully resolved to give his life, for the
present at least, to the work of a College Tutor at
Oxford. But before plunging into educational work,
he resided for a time as junior Fellow, occupying himself
in study, in learning the elements of Hebrew, attend
ing with great interest Dr. Pusey s lectures, and in
writing an Essay, which obtained the Chancellor s
Prize, on a congenial historical subject. It is a com
position which almost deserves to be placed beside his
prize poem. Would that time allowed me to quote to
46 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
you the eloquent and most characteristic page with
which it closes. Meantime, important changes had
taken place in his family circle. His father and family
had removed to Norwich, and were established in their
new home in the Bishop s Palace. His sailor-brother
Owen had accompanied Captain Back as scientific officer
on his adventurous voyage in the Terror to the Arctic
seas, and struggling back with a scurvy-stricken crew, in
a battered ship only kept from.going to pieces by under-
girding her with iron chains, had reached at last the wild
but friendly shores of Lough Swilly on the night of the
3rd of September, 1837. There, for the first time, the
young officer heard to his great dismay that the
Alderley home was broken up. The removal had
already taken place. While it was in contemplation
Arthur Stanley, still an undergraduate, had stolen two
days in term time to visit his father in London. " It
was," he writes, " a most trying time. I should hardly
have known my father s face, so worn as he was with
the anxiety of the week before in making up his mind
to the decision." "But," he writes, after a visit paid in
September to Norwich, " I do not repent of it now ; he
seems much freer and happier than he ever did before."
In the same letter, addressed to his brother on board
H.M.S. Terror, he gives a characteristic account of their
new home, contrasting the ugliness of the Palace with
the surpassing beauty of the Cathedral that over
shadows it. "The former is," says the yet untravelled
traveller, " among houses what Moscow is, I should
think, among cities. Rooms which one may really call
CHAP, i.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 47
vBry fine side by side with the meanest of passages
and staircases. By the riverside," he characteristically
writes, "is a ruin where a Bishop once killed a
wolf ; over the river, a road down which another Bishop
marched with 6000 men at arms ; " and he assures his
brother that he is highly flattered by his having carried
the remembrance of the Hampden controversy with
him through the Arctic winter. " That storm," he says,
" is laid ; in fact, its place is taken in the newspapers
by the installation sermon of the Bishop of Norwich."
The letter is dated September 22, 1837, and concludes
with a fear that " these full particulars of Norwich life
may give you the idea, which they say at home is the
case, that I am the only one puffed up by the accession
of dignity."
May I be allowed to insert here what is to myself
something more than a slight personal reminiscence ?
It was after his migration from Balliol, that it became
the duty of the new Fellow of University, early in the
year 1840, to take part in the annual Scholarship
Examination, which ended in the election of a Rugby
schoolboy, the first of many whom his rising fame drew
not from Rugby only, to a College which had so wisely
added to its teaching staff so attractive and magnetic an
influence. More than two-and-forty years have passed
since on that bright March afternoon the loud con
gratulations of old friends and schoolfellows were hushed
for a moment as the young Examiner stepped into the
quadrangle and turned to greet the new scholar. How
well does he recall that kindly greeting the hearty
48 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. i.
grasp of the friendly hand that seemed to carry the
heart in it the bright expressive countenance of the
young tutor, so full of all that might win and charm a
somewhat imaginative schoolboy, which shines still out of
the distance in all its first youthful beauty " as the face
of an angel." He at once invited the newly elected
scholar to take a walk with him on his return from a
formal visit to the Master of the College, and that dull
road that led out by the then unplanted, unreclaimed,
Oxford Parks, is still lit in the memory of him who
trod it by his side, with something fairer than the
bright March sun which shone across it. "We are
walking," he said, " towards Rugby," and at once
placed his companion at his ease by questions about
his friends there, and about the Master who was the
object of as enthusiastic a devotion to the younger as
to the older Rugbeian. How little did it occur to either,
as they parted, how strangely near their lives were to be
drawn to each other ! The younger might have listened
to a soothsayer who had said, " You have won to-day
something that you will soon count far more precious
than the scholarship in which you are exulting : " but
how contemptuously would he have turned from the
prediction that he would years after be called from the
headship of the College of which he was that day
enrolled as the youngest member, to succeed, in his
new friend, not the least illustrious and the most
lamented of the Deans of Westminster. It is in virtue
of the friendship of which that day was the birthday
that I have stood before vou this evening.
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 49
CHAPTER II.
(From 1840 to 1863.)
OXFORD CANTERBURY OXFORD.
IN the autumn of the same year Arthur Stanley left
England for a tour in Greece and Italy. The tour was
so far memorable that it encouraged and confirmed the
taste for foreign travel, implanted first of all by that
early visit to the South of France, which he never lost.
He suffered, as travellers at that time were sure to
suffer, from occasional personal discomforts. " At
Athens," he said in later life, " I felt the cold of winter
more than I ever did ; at St. Petersburg least of all."
But he had already mastered the art of extracting a
fund of amusement from such passing trials, and his
companion, the present Dean of Norwich, was a man of
most kindly heart and unfailing humour. In spite there
fore of all drawbacks, he drank deep of the delights of
moving about from day to day among the scenes of Greek
history and poetry, and he became conscious of in himself,
and revealed more fully to his friends, a power of
bringing before the minds of others such pictures of
scenes which most interested him as, when their
50 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAI>. ir.
number and their variety are taken into account, have
rarely, if ever, been surpassed in English literature.
A long letter which he wrote to Dr. Arnold, in which he
dwells on some of the main characteristics of Greek
scenery, deserves to be placed side by side with the
most striking of the descriptive passages in his later
writings.
It is possible that a few words on that which forms so
marked an element in all his writings, his attitude as
regards natural scenery, may be of interest here as a
contribution to a right estimate alike of his literary
position and of the pervading tone and colour of his
mind.
Scenery in and for itself, the aspects of Nature as viewed
in their own light and for their own sake, he never, I
think I am right in saying, never once attempts to
describe. In one of his letters to an old pupil, written
at Canterbury in 1854, there is a passage which gives the
key alike to the excellences and the deficiencies of this
great painter of Nature. "I cannot think," he says,
" that mere effusions of emotion at the transient blushes
of Nature deserve an everlasting record. I feel about
such effusions, almost as I feel about my present,
oftentimes ineffectual, labours at reproducing scenes
of my travels " (he was then at work at " Sinai and
Palestine "), " that they are not worth publishing, except
as a framework to events or ideas of greater magni
tude." Of Nature, as studied for her own sake, in the
spirit of Wordsworth, or of so many true poets in all
ages, or of Mr. Ruskin among modern prose writers, there
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 51
will be found, I venture to say, no trace in his published
writings or in his letters since he grew to manhood.
Whenever he becomes enthusiastic on the beauties
of nature, we may feel sure that there is always at
work a motive other than that of the artist that
behind nature lies some human or historical interest.
" How mysterious," he says, in a letter to a younger
friend, then at Koine, " the Alban lake ! How beautiful
Nemi ! how romantic Subiaco ! how solemn Ostia ! how
desolate Gabii ! " What could be better ? you will
say. Yes; but behind all these, there lay on his mental
retina the background of the history of Rome " the
one only place," he goes on to say, "in the whole
world, that is absolutely inexhaustible ! " It is quite
true that occasionally, in some three, or four, or five
remarkable passages, occurring especially, and for an
obvious reason, in his American addresses, he intro
duces pictures of some natural phenomena, quite apart
from any direct historical association. Such is the
splendid picture of the Falls of Niagara ; the graceful
and touching image, a true sonnet in prose, drawn
from two trees, the graceful maple and the gnarled
and twisted oak, growing side by side; the descrip
tion of the course of the St. Lawrence as contrasted
with that of the Nile; of sunrise, as seen from the
summit of the Righi. But in each of these apparent
exceptions to his ordinary habit, he seizes on some
aspect of external nature, not for its own sake, but as
the symbol of some idea some truth, that he wishes
to enforce or interpret. As a general rule, he looks
E 2
52 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
on nature not as a poetical interpreter of nature
not, we may fairly say, as a poet in the truest sense
but as one who seems never to feel that he has
thoroughly mastered any event, or chain of events, in
human or sacred history, till he has seen the spot
and breathed the air which give to each occurrence
its peculiar and local colouring. And with what an
eye he sees ! with what a power of insight and
discrimination he reproduces the exact points in which
nature and history meet and blend with, and mutually
influence, each other! " We go," he said in his Sermons
in the East, " to the Jerusalem where Christ died and
rose again. To see that Holy City, even though the
exact spots of His death and resurrection are unknown,
is to give a new force to the sound of the Name,
whenever afterwards we hear it in Church, or read it
in the Bible." The words apply in their first sense to
the most sacred of all lands and of all scenes. But the
feeling that dictated them is the key to something
else, to the unwearied, the insatiable avidity I can call
it nothing less with which he would fatigue the most
indefatigable of fellow travellers or hosts, by visiting
any and every spot, however apparently insignificant,
which was connected, directly or indirectly, with any
historical event or person, or with any scene in the
works of the great masters of poetry or fiction, or even
with any important legend that had ever influenced the
human mind. " At Lindisfarne," says one who visited
it with him, "his mind was, I am sure, quite as
much occupied with the immurement of Constance,
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 53
as with the memory of St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert."
Tours was to him quite as much associated with
Quentin Durward as with St. Martin, or with Hilde-
garde, or Louis XL, or Henry II. His persistence in
dragging a fellow traveller to call on the Archbishop
of Granada was based quite as much on his being the
lineal successor of the master of Gil Bias, as on his
being the occupant of that historic see. And the keen
eye for detecting resemblances and points of agreement
under superficial or real differences, that gave such a
character to his whole treatment of history and of
theology, followed him also in his visits to historic
places. As he saw an analogy to the yet unvisited
Moscow in his new home in Norwich, so he delighted
to point out the seven hills of Rome in the same city.
He was not content with recognising in this your
famous capital the resemblance the modified resem
blance, which I have already quoted to Athens ; he
found in the relation of the new to the old town
something which reminded him of a place so unlike
Edinburgh as Prague.
Let me add that in the same spirit in which
before his tour to the Holy Land he read through
and through all that he could find worth reading
on Palestine, so he would visit no place, not even
in the suburbs of London, or a railway junction
in Scotland, without learning all that he could of
its history or associations. A curious feature of his
travelling mind if I may so speak was that for
many years of his life he did not care, indeed rather
54 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
objected, to see the same scene twice. "When once,"
he said, "I have seen a remarkable sight, I do not
care to see it again, unless it is one with which fond
or happy associations are connected." "The second
sight of Prague quite revolted me," he added, with
comic energy ; " and though I saw Marathon on a
rainy day, yet I refused three or four opportunities of
seeing it again. On the first sight of scenes of this sort
a whole new world opens before me ; floods of thought
come in, which are indelible, and there is nothing new in
a second visit."
And now let me return to his personal history. At the
conclusion of his tour in Greece, he wrote the letter to
Dr. Arnold to which I have already referred, in solitude,
or worse than solitude. His fellow sufferers under the
miseries of a Maltese quarantine, were some young men,
whose loose talk revolted him, and who had not the good
sense to discover that beneath the mask of that averted
countenance and those silent lips, was one, to enjoy
whose society and conversation many wiser than them
selves would have gladly faced the horrors of that
tedious imprisonment. Keleased at last, he arrived
alone at Naples, depressed, home-sick, and yearning
for some congenial society. In the Museum he met an
English acquaintance, who said, " Of course you have
seen Hugh Pearson?" mentioning the name of one of his
closest Balliol friends. " Hugh Pearson ! " he exclaimed ;
" where is he ? " and darted in search of him. He found
him in front of a well-known statue, rushed up to
him, and, overcome with joy and emotion, fell into his
CHAP, ii .] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 55
friend s arms with a burst of uncontrollable tears. I
mention the incident, not merely as illustrative of
his tender and affectionate, nature, which never lost a
spark of its youthful warmth till the hand relaxed its
clasp, and the heart had ceased to beat, but because
the companion whom he then found, and with whom
he completed his homeward journey, became from that
time the very closest and most inseparable of all his
friends.
When sorrowing mourners gathered in April last
round the grave of that friend, from whom death had
severed him for a time, there was one feeling in many
hearts that they had lost one who, beyond any living
person, was in full possession of the whole soul of him
to whom death had re-united him that the most trust
worthy, the most intimate, the most continuous of the
authorities for the history of Arthur Stanley, had passed
into the world beyond the grave, in the person of his
friend Hugh Pearson.
He returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1841, and
soon after became Lecturer, and in due time Tutor and
Dean of his new College, where he resided continuously,
or nearly so, till his removal to Canterbury.
This perhaps is the place to speak of his life as
an Oxford tutor, the capacity in which I, and many
others of his most devoted friends, first knew him. Yet,
in speaking to an audience north of the Tweed, there
may be some difficulty in bringing before you what that
life really was. But you are perhaps aware that, until
quite lately, every Oxford student though the word
56 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
" student " in this technical sense is unknown on the
banks of the Isis passed three years of his academical
life within the walls of one of about a score of Colleges.
Of these Colleges each contained within a separate,
more or less imposing, block of stone-built buildings,
with its own chapel, its own dining-hall, its own
library, its own lecture rooms the University prac
tically consisted. Each College was under the separate
government of its own head Master, Warden, Provost,
Principal, President, as the case might be and its own
fellows and tutors ; and each contained its own group
of undergraduate students. The University, by which
all degrees were conferred, was represented by disci
plinary and other authorities, by examiners, and by pro
fessors. But at the time of which I speak, professorial
lectures had, with few exceptions, fallen into almost
entire abeyance ; and the instruction which under
graduates received was given within the walls of their
own College, supplemented often by private tuition from
teachers whom they selected at their will and remune
rated from their own resources.
The position, therefore, of a College tutor, living
in rooms among his pupils, waited on by the same ser
vants, attending daily the same chapel services, dining
at the same hour in the same hall, was may I not say
still is ? one singularly fitted to open a field for useful
ness to those who have the rare gift of influencing
young men. Into the duties and opportunities of this
position Stanley threw himself with all the ardour of
his nature, and the impression that he made and the
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 57
work which he achieved was, at the time, unexampled.
It can only be understood by those who are familiar
with the influence gained by the almost life-long labours
of his own almost life-long friend, Professor Jowett, now
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, at a College
better known in Edinburgh than that to which the
scholar of Balliol had migrated. As compared with
that friend, Stanley had no doubt some drawbacks as a
tutor. " I am no moral philosopher or metaphysician,"
he said of himself later. His interest in the minuter
shades of philological scholarship was never very keen.
No man knew better his own weak points. But the page
of History, ancient, modern, or sacred, was to him, in the
truest sense of the words, " rich with the spoils of time ; "
and he knew how to make that page glow with the
light of wisdom and of poetry, and to aid his pupils to
regard those spoils as very treasures. How well two or
three of us must remember that well-marked Herodotus
which he freely lent us. It had its special marks in
coloured lines to indicate, first, passages noteworthy
for the Greek ; secondly, passages bearing on Greek
history, or on the time of Herodotus ; thirdly, passages
containing truths for all time. He was already giving
himself to the study of the Old and New Testaments
with an enthusiasm which never left him, and which he
was able to communicate to one after another of those
who came under his influence. Even now there are
those who, in East-end parishes, in country villages,
in far-off Missionary stations, as well as in what are
called the high places of the Church, feel the im-
58 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
pulse which they then received from him. So keen
was the interest inspired by his Divinity lectures,
that not only did we, his pupils, continue to attend
them in the very crisis and agony of our final work
for our degrees, but little by little we obtained per
mission to introduce our friends ; and the first germ
of those inter-Collegiate lectures which have revo
lutionised Oxford teaching, and gave your new professor
of Greek a field to display his masterly gifts as a
teacher, is to be found in those close-packed chairs
that crowded the still damp ground-floor rooms in the
then New Buildings, as they are still called, on the top
most story of which our lecturer had his rooms. He was,
need I say it ? a singularly attractive and inspiring
teacher; but in saying this I feel that I have said
little. It is impossible for me to describe to yon, it is
difficult for me to analyse to myself, the feelings
which he inspired in a circle, small at first, but
with every fresh term widening and extending. The
fascination, the charm, the spell, were simply irre
sistible ; the face, the voice, the manner; the ready
sympathy, the geniality, the freshness, the warmth, the
poetry, the refinement, the humour, the mirthfumess
and merriment, the fund of knowledge, the inexhaustible
store of anecdotes and stories, told so vividly, so
dramatically, I shall not easily enumerate the gifts
which drew us to him with a singular, some of us with
quite a passionate devotion. Arnold, before and after
his death Arnold, to us Rugby men well ! he was
Arnold still. We never dreamed of a rival to him. I
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 59
am sure that in those days we never thought of weigh
ing Stanley against him. They dwelt apart in our
minds ; apart, yet coupled in a sense together. Living
or dead, the Elijah of that day was wrapped to our
young souls in a certain cloud of awe. Stanley him
self never quite lost the feeling. But the Elisha on
whom his mantle fell was near and dear to us. That
sympathetic touch that won him to the end of his
life fresh friends at every breath he drew, had already
come to one who as a child had lived much alone,
uncompanionable and undemonstrative to a fault, writing
his boyish poems, and hidden in the light of ideas and
knowledge which he was hourly absorbing. It is felt
by some of us, as a thing that coloured our whole
lives from that day to this. We walked with him,
sometimes took our meals with him frugal meals, for
he was at the mercy of an unappreciative college
" scout," who was not above taking advantage of his
master s helplessness in arranging for a meal, and his
indifference to any article of diet other than brown
bread and butter ; we talked with him over that bread
and butter with entire freedom, opened our hearts to
him ; while his perfect simplicity, no less than his high
bred refinement, made it impossible to dream that
any one in his sober senses could presume upon his
kindness. He was steeped in work. For two years
he was . devoting himself to the immortal biography
of his master. Afterwards he was continually studying,
devouring books, entering more and more keenly into
the theological and other controversies of the next few
60 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
years, deeply and absorbingly interested, I need hardly
say, in the crisis through which the University and the
Church were passing in the years between 1841 and
1845. He was surrounded more and more by friends
and associates of his own age, or older : he was
becoming more and more conspicuous in literary as well
as in theological circles. He was busied in writing such
sermons as those on the Apostolic Age, in which he
first made his mark as an academical preacher and I
use the word in its widest and truest sense as a
theologian. He was full of schemes, full of hopes, for
the reorganisation and enlargement of the University,
as ultimately effected by the Commission of which, in
the closing part of this chapter of his life, he was the
indefatigable Secretary. I remember how, soon after
I had ceased to be his pupil, and had reached the
dignity of a junior Fellowship, on our return from a
walk, in which he had discussed the question of a royal
or parliamentary Commission a question which could
not have been mentioned in ordinary Oxford society
without causing scandal he paused for a moment oppo
site one of the most wealthy, not perhaps the most educa
tional of Colleges, and whispered, " The only drawback
to such reforms is that this institution must at once
flourish on the ruins of Balliol." Keform has come, and
Balliol still holds its own ! But in spite of all these
interests and all these employments, and in spite of a
correspondence that grew with the growing number of
his friendships, and in spite of the weeks which he
almost yearly gave to travel, the amount of his time
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 61
and of his best self which he gave to his younger
friends was something almost incredible. Some of us
can recall the half-amusing, half-touching, efforts which
he made to become acquainted with, and win the con
fidence of, a class of men least likely to be impressible
to one like himself ; the missionary spirit, if I may use
the phrase, in which he regarded his relation to the
undergraduates of his College ; a College which steadily
continued owing mainly to his own reputation to
attract to it an unusual portion of the elite of the
best schools in England. Many must still remember
his introducing what had long been abandoned in that
ancient College I am not sure that he had not to go
back as far as the times of the Commonwealth for a
precedent the preaching of occasional sermons in the
College chapel. They will recall his veiy voice, and
accent, and look, and manner, and gesture. But it was
not his preaching, nor his teaching, it was himself most
of all which impressed us. We always knew and it
was the secret of his winning to the end of his days
the hearts of the young, and, let me add, of the humble
and working classes of his countrymen we always
knew that he treated us and felt to us as a friend ;
cared for us, sympathised with us, gave us his heart,
and not his heart only, but his best gifts ; that we did
not sit below the salt, but partook with him of all that
he had to give ; and what he gave us was just that which
was most calculated to win and attract, as well as to
inspire and stimulate. There still live in my own
memory the vivid recollections there have been placed
62 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
in my hands the still existing evidences of his active
kindness and beneficence to present or former pupils ;
the letters, long or short, of sympathy in trouble, advice
in doubt or difficulty ; the pecuniary aid given so freely
and so delicately whenever he saw an opening to do
so with good results.
I have said perhaps, out of the abundance of my
own recollections, with the written testimonies of others
by my side, more than you will have cared to hear
on this chapter of his life ; yet it is one which
may have a special interest in the close vicinity of a
great northern University. Let me end by repeating
once more what I have already said, that the impres
sion which he made upon many at least of his Oxford
pupils was one which it is impossible to convey fully to
those outside that circle ; it will be intelligible in some
degree to all who have enjoyed his society. You could
not, I may almost say, think of evil in his presence.
The atmosphere round him was as pure and elevating
as it was rich in interest. It was indeed full of " what
soever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are of good report."
I must pass over the effective part that he bore,
towards the close of his residence in Oxford, in
recommending, as Secretary to the first University Com
mission, many changes of the most important and vital
nature in the constitution of the University. To re
form an -ancient institution, to breathe new life into
venerable forms, was a work exactly suited to one as
averse from a merely obstructive conservatism as he
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYX STANLEY, 63
was impatient of the spirit that seeks only to destroy.
It is enough for one who was a member of a Commis
sion but lately appointed to follow mainly in the lines
then laid down, to say that the reforms established
were chiefly directed to two objects ; first, to widen the
influence of the University by the removal of restric
tions, local, professional, or theological, which kept more
than half closed the admission to its emoluments and
its distinctions; and secondly, to revivify an almost
dormant Professoriate.
I must pass over, also, the intense interest which
then, as always, he took in the contemporary history
of his own country and of the Continent. Two in
stances only let me give. Some here will recall the
now distant fall of Sir R Peel s Ministry in the
summer of 1846, after the full establishment of free
trade by that great Minister. On that occasion the
young tutor of University wrote as follows : " Peel s
speech is, to me, the most affecting public event
which I ever remember: no return of Cicero from
exile, no triumphal procession up to the temple of
Capitoline Jove, no Appius Claudius in the Roman
Senate, no Chatham dying in the House of Lords, could
have been a truly grander sight than that great Minis
ter retiring from office, giving to the whole world free
trade with one hand, and universal peace with the
other, and casting under foot," he adds, " the miserable
factions which had dethroned him
* E en at the base of Pompey s statue,
"Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.
64 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
So I write, the metaphor being suggested by an eye
witness, who told me that it was Mark Antony s speech
over Caesar s body, but spoken by (Caesar) himself."
Again the shock that passed through Europe in 1848
moved him profoundly. I have no doubt that his
journals will be found to contain a perfect magazine of
anecdotes of Guizot, Lamartine, Louis Philippe, and
the Parisian mob. " Here I am," he writes from
London in July of that year, "working hard at
I. Corinthians, and seeing no one of importance
except Guizot, and two or three more eye- or ear-
witnesses of Feb. 24 or June 24, whose accounts I
treasure up for my grand-nephews, when they come in
1894, on the outbreak of the Fourth French Revolu
tion and the formation of the Sclavonic Empire, to hear
the traditions of the great days of 1848 " (July 29th,
49).
Meantime, if the circle of his personal friends, and of
his private and public interests, was extending year by
year, his public position was becoming every year more
prominent and less acceptable to a large portion of the
religious world in England, and, I may perhaps add, in
Scotland also. Great as was the impression made by
the life of Arnold, there was an instinctive feeling that
even Arnold s unquestionable hold on the essential
truths of Christianity represented another form of re
ligious belief to that on which the views and principles
either of the High Church or of the Evangelical party
were moulded ; and both these parties agreed in regard
ing his biographer with somewhat of a growing distrust
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 65
and suspicion. It did not win him the support of the
High Church clergy that he had devoted himself heart
and soul to prevent the condemnation in the Oxford
Convocation of Mr. Ward, who had succeeded Dr. New
man as their acknowledged leader in 1845, or had done
his utmost to defeat the formal censure of the cele
brated tract No. 90 by the same assembly. They
knew well that he had no sympathy with their most
cherished views, and the divergence might have been
read between the lines of all that he had as yet pub
lished, even if he had not met their somewhat exclusive
claims to represent the " Church Party " by the asser
tion that the Church of England was, " by the very
conditions of its being, not High, or Low, but Broad."
On the other hand, the leaders of the Evangelical
section of English Churchmen were not won to him, but
the reverse, by the language in which in 1850 he
hailed the then famous " Gorham judgment," the Magna
Charta of their continued existence in the Church, in
the earliest, but not the least telling or brilliant, of his
theological contributions to the " Edinburgh Keview."
When he spoke of " the inestimable advantage " of that
decision as consisting in the fact that "it retained
within the pale of the Establishment both the rival
schools of Theology," and went on to add that " the
Church of England was meant to include, and always
had included, opposite and contradictory opinions not
only on the point now in dispute, but on other points
as important, or more important than this," he seemed
to many of those whose cause he was pleading to be
66 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. u.
shaking the very basis of the Christian Faith. They
would scarcely have been conciliated had they been
told, as they were told twenty years later, that the main
substance of that very Article had been written, though
not published, several years earlier, "in the hope oi
averting the catastrophe which drove out from the
Church of England such men as Dr. Newman and bis
friends." They felt also that, averse as he might
be to impress upon others ideas of a purely nega
tive and unsettling character, though he had depre
cated the day of inevitable trial, " when the works of
German Biblical criticism would be read indiscrimi
nately by all the men, women, and children in England,"
yet his views on Scriptural Inspiration, and on other
important subjects, differed widely from their own.
I may have an opportunity further on of saying
something of his theological position. But do not let
me for a moment disguise the fact that however strong
his personal piet}% however deep his own religious
convictions, he stood from first to last quite apart from
both the two great parties in the English Church ; that
his theological views squared with neither. I do not
know that he himself ever disguised the fact that he
looked on each, even as he said much later of the sepa
rate Churches of Christendom, " as having something
which the other had not," and recognised " the human,
imperfect, mixed character " of each. The natural
result was that from first to last he was an object of
almost equal suspicion, an object, theologically speaking,
I might even say, of almost equal antipathy to both.
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 67
When however the time came, in 1851, for him to
leave Oxford and accept the Canonry of Canterbury, the
reception which he met with in his new home was
cordial, and the dissatisfaction, doubtless felt in some
quarters, was expressed in undertones. The change
was well timed. His friends had begun to feel that
the position which he had gained as a student and as a
writer had long merited public recognition. They felt
also that it was time that he should be removed from
the many wearisome details of a College Tutor s life ;
and his father s death and his consequent entering into
a moderate amount of landed property had, uri^der
then existing regulations, made the retention of his
Fellowship impossible. Heavy blows indeed had fallen
on that happy family circle. In September of 1849 he
had reached Brahan Castle just in time to see his
father lying unconscious, and passing away from a life
of unwearied labour. In a short time came the news
that in the month previous the youngest son, who had
reached the rank of a captain in the Royal Engineers,
had succumbed to a sudden attack of fever in Van
Diemen s Land. As his young widow entered the
harbour of Sydney in hopes of receiving the support
and consolation of a welcome from her husband s
brother, Captain Owen Stanley, she found that he too
had lived only long enough to hear that both his
brother and his father had gone before. Worn out
with the incessant toil entailed by his survey, in com
mand of the sailing frigate Rattlesnake, of the perilous
Coral Sea, and by the intense anxiety attendant on a
p 2
68 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
lengthened cruise " amongst a mass of shoals and reefs,
where the lead gives no warning, and the look-out
from the masthead is often useless from the colour of
the coral," the gallant sailor, " after twenty-three years
of arduous service in every clirne," died in March, 1850,
at the age of thirty-eight.*
His father s death struck him to the quick. " The
crash, the gloom, the uprooting and the void," he wrote
between his father s death and funeral, "is at times
overwhelming, but of him even more than of Arnold
I believe that I shall soon feel that I would not have
him back again for all that a restored home could give."
And those who knew him well may recognise the
occasional reference in later sermons and addresses to
that circle of brothers and sisters, each so rich in diffe
rent gifts, which time and death had so greatly broken
up ; or knew how vivid was the recollection of the first
accumulation of family sorrows on that affectionate
heart.
You will not expect me to enter into the details of
his life as a Canon of Canterbury. You have heard
perhaps of his famous interview, immediately after
his nomination, with your great countryman, Thomas
Carlyle, and of the answer which he received at last
to the twice-repeated question, "What is the advice
* Few, perhaps, who saw the remarkable gathering of men of science
at the funeral of Arthur Stanley remembered that it was not the least
eminent among them, Professor Huxley, who had been his eldest
brother s companion in that distant voyage, and who, in the pages of
the "Westminster Review," paid a tribute to the memory of his lost
friend and commander after his return to England.
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 69
which you would give to a Canon of Canterbury?"
" Dearly beloved Roger " (the answer began in jest, but
ended in earnest), "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do,
do it ivith all thy might; " and with all his might he
strove, there and elsewhere, to find the right work, and
to do it with his might strove to realize in himself
a thought he often expressed, not without a tacit
reference to his father s experience as well as to his
own; "High offices hi Church and State may fill
even ordinary men with a force beyond themselves ; "
and again, "Every position in life, great or small,
can be made almost as great or as little as we desire
to make it."
It was, I need not say, delightful for him, in spite of
much natural regret at leaving Oxford friends, not only
to " have leisure for a few tranquil years of independent
research or studious leisure " (I quote his own words,
used later), "where he need contend with no pre
judices, entangle himself with no party, travel far and
wide over the earth with nothing to check the constant
increase of knowledge which such experience brings ;"
but to be placed at once in connection (to use once more
his own words) "with the cradle of English Christianity,
the seat of the English Primacy," "his own proud
Cathedral," as he learnt to call it, " the Metropolitan
Church of Canterbury."
There can be no doubt that his seven years at
Canterbury were seven years of exceeding value to him.
Here it was that he brought to full ripeness and
maturity his wonderful gift of throwing a fresh and
70 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
human interest, one which reaches even the most
unlettered of his hearers or readers, into great his
toric scenes or great historic monuments. It was at
Canterbuiy that he at once undertook to impress
upon his new fellow citizens the great advantages
which they enjoyed by living under the shadow of
that stately fabric. It was not at Westminster but at
Canterbury that he found his earliest opportunity for
uttering the characteristic words, " It is not too much
to say that if anyone were to go through the various
spots of interest in or around our great Cathedral, and
ask, What happened here ? Who was the man whose
tomb we see ? Why was he buried here ? What effect
did his life and death have upon the world? a real
knowledge of the history of England is to be gained,
such as the mere reading of books or lectures would
utterly fail to supply." * It was not at Westminster
but at Canterbury that he spoke of " what may seem
to be mere stones or bare walls becoming so many
chapters of English history." None who ever went
through that grand Cathedral with him will forget
the vividness with which each successive incident
in the tragic story of the murder of Becket was
re-enacted, as it were, on the very spot where each
occurred. In his "Memorials of Canterbury," dedi
cated to a venerable brother Canon who still resides
may he long do so ! in his delightful home in
those beautiful precincts, and written, as he says in
* Memorials of Canterbury, p. 99.
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 71
the Introduction, " in intervals of leisure, taken from
subjects of greater importance," he gave to the world a
more than sufficient justification for his removal to that
fair city. But the advantages of his life at Canterbury
were not limited to literary work, whether in immediate
connection with that life or on other subjects, such as his
" Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians,"
written mostly at Oxford but completed there. It
was here that the freedom which he enjoyed for
gratifying his instinctive love for travel was so fully
indulged, and with such great results. Already, as we
have seen, he had taken every opportunity of " enlarg
ing his mental vision," of seeking a fresh and complete
influx of new ideas, by visiting far and wide scenes and
places of historic interest. Spain, Germany, including
Bohemia, France, and Italy, he had already traversed.
Scotland also, as I have already said, had begun to exer
cise over him the fascination which became afterwards so
much deeper and stronger. But now he took a wider
flight. After a visit to Italy and Rome with his mother
and two sisters, and after returning to England with hot
haste in time to be present at the funeral of the Duke of
Wellington, he started, at the close of 1852, for the tour
in Egypt and the Holy Land, which resulted in the
publication of, next to the " Life of Arnold," the most
widely popular of all his works, " Sinai and Palestine.
Of the wonderful light which that work throws on sacred
history I shall not now say one word. I will only say
that the greater part of it is but a reproduction of
letters written to his friends. As Professor Goldwin
72 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
Smith wrote to him on his return, " You have nothing
to do but to piece together your letters, cut off their
heads and tails, and the book is done." But something
I may say of his journey which was not recorded in the
pages of " Sinai and Palestine." Two of the party of
four were Scotsmen. One of these, from his justice,
good temper, and power of command, received from their
Eastern attendants the name of " the Governor " ; but
Stanley was invariably "the Sheik," the holy man.
He gained this title partly from his knowledge of the
localities which they visited, and his familiarity with
and interest in all the strange outgrowth of Arab
legends ; but he gained it also by the pure and beautiful,
and, in their unsophisticated eyes, unversed in the
bitter controversies of the Christian world, by the
saintly character of one whom they watched and lived
with day and night for weeks. Well can we who
knew the man understand the story, how Mohammed,
the faithful dragoman, after the last farewell was over,
crept down into the cabin, knelt and seized his hand,
and then rushed away with an outburst of passionate
grief at parting with one whom he would never see
again, and whom, in spite of the difference of creed,
he reverenced as a saint. The journey was, notwith
standing inevitable occasional discomforts, a source to
him of the deepest delight. " Those glorious days, * he
said of them, " which can now never be taken away."
At Cairo and on the Nile he re-read the "Arabian
Nights ;" and, what seemed to him, destitute as he was
of his father s taste for birds or beetles, " the infinite
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 73
endless, boundless, monotony " of the voyage up the
Nile was beguiled by reading all the parts of the Bible
that referred to Egypt in the original Hebrew. In the
same spirit he prepared himself for a careful survey of
the sacred soil of Palestine, by toiling through every
word of Robinson s elaborate four volumes. " I read
them," he said, "now riding on the back of a camel in
the desert, now travelling on horseback* through the
hills of Palestine, now under the shadow of my tent
when I came in weary from the day s journey. They
are among the very few books of modern literature
of which I may truly say that I have read every
word." Those who had the privilege of visiting him
at Canterbury on his return, and found him over
flowing with the recollections of his journey, as well as
with the intense interest inspired by the Cathedral and
its neighbourhood, will well understand his closing a
letter of invitation to Professor Max Muller with the
words, " I consider I was never so well worth a visit."
It was from Canterbury, also, towards the end of his
tenure of office there, that he made the visit to the
Baltic, St. Petersburg!!, and Moscow, the result of
which he embodied in his volume on the Greek
Church. " I have been deeply interested," he says in
a letter written in a Baltic steamer on Sept. 29th, 1857,
* He was probably one of the worst horsemen in Europe, Asia, or
Africa, from the day when his first visit to Norwich was marred by a
fall from what he called "the episcopal pony," to the day when his
life was all but lost on his second visit to Egypt with the Prince of
Wales, and a donkey was henceforth found for him.
74 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
to one who was becoming every year more closely
united to him by friendship and by sympathy, Mr., or,
as here he should be called, for it is to Scotland that he
owes the title, J)r. George Grove, " I have been deeply
interested in Norway and Sweden, more in St. Peters-
burgh, most of all in Moscow. Russia fully answered my
expectations, in the flood of light which I derived from
my sight of those two great cities. If you wished to bring
out the dramatic effect of Russian history, it could not
be better done than by the contrast between Moscow
and Petersburgh. The great Eastern nation striving to
become Western, or, rather, the nation half Eastern,
half Western, dragged against its will by one gigantic
genius, literally dragged by the heels and kicked by
the boots of the Giant Peter, into contact with the
European world. " I dare not read more, though the
opening passage is barely a fair sample of a letter
every line of which is full of picturesque effects, as he
enumerates the points of Oriental character in the
Russian people "some great," he says, "some small,
but all delightful to me, as making me feel once more
in the ancient East." Of that ancient East he wrote
on his first visit that he now understood the then
Mr. Disraeli s language, who speaks of it in "Tancred"
as being, to a traveller from Europe, " another planet."
If his residence in Canterbury was not only a
delightful pause in his always busy life, and fruitful
as giving him leisure for such journeys as these, and
for such literary work as his "Memorials of Canter
bury," " Sinai and Palestine," and his " Canterbury
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 75
Sermons," it was not less delightful or less useful in
developing another and a different side of his character.
It was now that for the first time he exchanged his
bachelor s rooms at Oxford for a house and home of his
own. It is needless to say how often that home was
cheered by the presence of his mother, dearer now to
him, if possible, than ever, or of his sisters, one of
whom had been for some time the wife of his early
friend, Charles Vaughan, then Head Master of Harrow.
Rarely has that ancient city of Southern England
had such a centre of social life within its fair Cathedral
precincts. Citizens and officers, residents in the neigh
bourhood, visitors from afar, old friends and new
acquaintances, met in that most delightful of homes,
and there it was that the once self-contained and
retiring youth, the child shy to the verge of moodiness,
developed those social gifts which made him to the
end of his days not only the coveted guest of every
circle in England I might almost say in Europe but
the very best and most delightful of hosts. What
those social gifts were, some here have the happiness
of knowing. Their charm lay in their perfect sim
plicity and naturalness, in their use being so obviously
based on the kind heart that was bent on one purpose
to cheer, to amuse, to instruct others, not on self-
display. There come back to the memory of one
here, perhaps of others, times when the most delightful,
the most dramatic and picturesque of his stories were
told with all the charm of his voice and manner the
voice that became, as has so well been said, " resonant
76 RECOLLECTIONS OF . [CHAP. ir.
and full" when he recited a quotation from poetry, or
a saying of interest not to charm a listening circle of
men or women of mark or rank, but to amuse a weary
and silent friend, or to enliven a tedious drive through
country lanes. I will only add that he himself greatly
enjoyed this first entry into the position of a house
holder. At the close of his Canterbury life, in a letter
written on the sudden bereavement, by his young wife s
death, of one of his Oxford pupils, he writes with some
thing of a prophetic instinct, " But yet on the whole I
feel sure that even with such dreadful contingencies in
store it is better to have had a home and wife than
never to have had either. To have had even a home as
I have had at Canterbury has been, I am convinced, an
immense step in life much more would the other have
been."
The great public and national events which marked
this period can only be noticed here so far as they most
closely affected his personal history. It will be enough
to mention his sister s mission to the hospitals of the
Crimea, or rather of Scutari, in the Crimean war ; and
in connection with this mission, his own first visit to the
Court of England and to the Queen and Royal family ;
his delight in the appointment of his dear friend,
Archibald Campbell Tait, his own tutor at Balliol, and
Arnold s successor at Rugby, to the see of London
(1856). "He will give," he said of the present revered
Primate of England,* "he will, in my humble judg-
* The words, as well as those on the next page, are printed a
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 77
ment, give the Church of England a great lift. Scot
land," he adds, " as you may suppose, claps her hands
and sings for joy at his elevation." And well might
Scotland do so! One of the first acts of the new
Bishop of London was to appoint Arthur Stanley as his
examining chaplain, an office which he retained till his
appointment to the Deanery of Westminster, and in
which he was succeeded by the present Bishop of
Durham. Almost greater still was his satisfaction
greater even than that with which he hailed the ap
pointment to Rugby of Dr. Temple at the elevation to
the Bishopric of Calcutta of one of whom he once spoke,
" as on the whole the very best Bishop whom he had
ever known," the then Master of Marlborough College,
Dr. Cotton. It is to this dear friend of his that your
countryman and our Primate bore so lately, from that
sick bed which is the centre of so many prayerful
thoughts in England and in Scotland, his testimony that
" he wielded among the civilians of India a power un
known to any of the great men who have ever occupied
the see."
The year 1858 saw the close of the calm and fruitful
stage in his life s progress, of which Canterbury was the
scene. He was now to enter on a work for the duties
of which his whole life might well have seemed one long
preparation, that of the Professorship of Ecclesiastical
History in the University of Oxford. The appointment is
vested in the Crown, and it may be well to remind you
spoken in November. It was on the 3rd of the following month that
the Archbishop died.
78 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
that each of the three important offices which Arthur
Stanley held in succession came to him from the same
source, and were due to the impression which his genius
and character had made, not on the Church in its
narrowest sense, nor again on the Crown in the per
sonal sense of the term, but on the Church and nation
at large as represented in the " kingly commonwealth
of Great Britain," by the Sovereign and her responsible
Ministers. Which of these three offices he would have
ever held, had the appointment rested in other hands,
was a question which his friends would sometimes ask
with amused perplexity, and answer with much relief and
thankfulness that things were as they were ; that the
selection in these cases lay with the First Minister of
the Crown, who was free to give due weight to claims
which were, in the general opinion, unrivalled. " There
is one and one only possible candidate, and that is
Arthur Stanley," were the words of his distinguished
friend, the historian Milinan, then Dean of St. Paul s,
when consulted on the subject by an influential
Churchman.
I do not suppose that there are many here who have
ever read the three inaugural lectures which he deli
vered before crowded audiences beneath what I venture
to call the august roof of the Sheldonian Theatre at Ox
ford. That Theatre had been the scene, one-and-twenty
years before, of his own early distinction as the reciter
of the Prize Poem which to the discerning critic might at
once have revealed the unmistakeable stamp of true
genius. Five years later, in the spring of 1842, it had
CHAP. II.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 79
been thronged again by crowds, the great majority of
whom came to see, for the first and for the last
time, the striking face and listen to the powerful
voice of one who bore the name, suggestive to many
only of aversion and dread, of Thomas Arnold. And
now, in the place where Arnold, to the joy and exulta
tion of his devoted pupils, in the last spring given him
on earth, had, by his simple and manly eloquence, won
back the heart of an alienated University, the most
distinguished of those pupils poured forth his accumu
lated treasures of study, travel, thought, and imagina
tion. The opening words of his first lecture were
eminently characteristic. Years before he had been
struck by a passage in the "Pilgrim s Progress," in
which the pilgrim Christian was cheered and solaced
on his way by the sight of the treasures and records of
the palace of which the name was "Beautiful." He
had promised himself at the time that, should he ever
address an Oxford audience on ecclesiastical history, he
would begin his lecture with the quotation. And he
kept his promise. The first words which he uttered in
his capacity of Professor of Ecclesiastical History were
taken from the great work of the devout non-conformist
tinker of Midland England, whom sixteen years later,
when Scotland and Scottish associations had filled so
large a part of the background of that vivid imagination,
he startled a Bedfordshire audience by speaking of as
" the Robert Burns of England." He closed the last of
the three lectures with a quotation from the same
author.
80 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. ir.
Read these Lectures even now, in the Kght of his
later works and his later letters, and you will see that
they embody his whole views, his whole life, his whole
self. Listen to his characteristic determination to begin
his treatment of his subject, not with the era of the
Reformation, not with the rise of the Papacy, not with
the age of the earlier Fathers, but to start from "the
first dawn of the history of the Church, when in Ur of
the Chaldees the first figure in the long succession that
has never since been broken, the first Father of the
Universal Church, started on that great spiritual migra
tion which from the day that Abraham turned his face
away from the rising of the sun has been stepping
steadily Westward." Read his earnest protest against
the " narrowing and vulgarising process by which the
original sense of great theological terms becomes de
faced and marred and clipped by the base currency of
the world, till the Christian Church comes to signify,
not the whole congregation of faithful men dispersed
throughout the world, but a priestly caste, a monastic
order, a little sect, or a handful of opinions ; till the
word "ecclesiastical" has come down to signify, not the
moral, not even the social or political interests of the
whole community, but the very opposite of these such
questions as the retention or abolition of a vestment,
its merely outward, accidental, ceremonial machinery."
Read his estimate of the position of great laymen,
such as St. Louis in France, Dante in mediaeval Italy,
" the half heretic half Puritan " Milton in England, as
" the true interpreters, the true guides of the thoughts
CHAP. IT.] ARTHUR -PEXRHYX STANLEY. 81
and feelings of their respective ages/ Read his descrip
tion, drawn from the happy experience of his own past,
and foreshadowing that of his future life, of the effect of
" meeting face to face an opponent whom we have known
only by report. He is different from what we expected ;
we cannot resist the pressure of his hand, the glance of
his eye." Read above all the words in which he pours
out his whole soul on that which lay so near his heart,
"the endless vigour and vitality of the words of Holy
Scripture." Read, if you wish to grasp the key to, I
had almost said, his whole lifelong position as a theo
logian, the energetic expression which he gives to
what to some may seem an idle dream, but which
was to him the mainstay of his life, the conviction
"that in that virgin mine, the insufficiently explored
records, original records, of Christianity, there are still
materials for a new epoch ; that another and a different
estimate of the points on which Scripture lays the most
emphatic stress warrants the hope that the existing
materials, principles, doctrines of the Christian religion
are far greater than have ever yet been employed, and
that the Christian Church, if it ever be permitted or
enabled to use them, has a long lease of new life and
new hope before it." I quote the words, because, uttered
in 1858, they contain the very gist of that which, whether
you or I, this person or that person, agree or disagree,
was his belief, his hope, his aspiration, now bright, now
sadly clouded, till his dying day. Approve or disap
prove, call him a dreamer, blame him, condemn him, if
you will, but recognise the fact that in this faith and
82 RECOLLECTIONS -OF [CHAP. n.
this hope that of a new and greater future for the
Church of Christ Arthur Stanley lived and died.
The interest which was awakened by the opening
lectures of the new Professor was sustained throughout
by the more regular courses which they inaugurated.
Those who are familiar with the two first volumes
of his "Jewish Church" will readily understand the
attraction which they must have had, as spoken lec
tures, for the young students of theology, to the ma
jority of whom they came almost as a new revelation
of the wealth of historical and other teaching that was
to be gathered from the records of Jewish History.
There were those among them whose subsequent theo
logical position and tenets differed widely from those of
their gifted teacher ; but not the least emphatic testi
mony to the value and the permanent effect on their
own minds of the light thrown by him on the pages of
the Old Testament would be borne by those who could
not possibly be claimed as his theological adherents.
And the mere preparation and delivery of those
inspiring and instructive Lectures formed but a
small part of the duties which he set himself to per
form. His old love for the society of the young was
rekindled at the sight of the hundreds of undergradu
ates swarming in the streets of Oxford. "My heart
leaps up," he would say, repeating a parody suggested
by his friend Clough, " when I behold an undergradu
ate ; " and it may well be said that to the very end of
his daj^s his years were "bound each to each by the
natural piety" of affection for friends of every age, from
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 83
early youth to the latest stage of human life. It was
not only to the younger members of XDhrist Church, or
to those who attended his own lectures, that his house
was open. More than one or two of the masters of great
English schools were encouraged to introduce to him
their pupils on their entrance at the University, and,
among those who still mourn his loss most keenly, are
some whose long and close friendship began in this way.
But his social position at Oxford was one as peculiar
and unparalleled as was his own personality. Never
I suppose before, and certainly never since, has there
been a house in which the representatives of the
most opposite views and parties, accustomed to regard
each other as almost belonging to different worlds, could
foe won to meet in such free and social intercourse. It
was his delight to place side by side at his table, and to
oinite in friendly conversation, men who had hitherto
met each other, if at all, only in sharp, and sometimes
acrimonious, debate. And his own unrivalled social
gifts, his humour, his vivacity, his endless store of
anecdotes connected with places and persons visited
in his travels, gave a charm to his society which few,
either then or later on at Westminster, could wholly
resist. " What an element," says Bishop Cotton, in a
letter written from Oxford, " of peace and goodwill is
Stanley ! so heterogeneous a dinner ! yet all most
humorous and cheerful ! Stanley s stories about
Becket s brains, and Louis XVI. s blood, assume a
positively sacred colour when they bind together in
friendly union the latitudinarian - and the stiff-
.
84 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
necked :-." As every year added to the circle of
his friends and acquaintances at a distance, Oxford
society was continually enlivened and diversified by
the visits of distinguished foreigners, or persons eminent
elsewhere in the fields of literature or science. What
ever storms might rage in academical society, the
future guardian of the " great temple of reconciliation
and peace " made it his aim to make his own house a
place at the threshold of which the demon of con
troversial bitterness must be exchanged for a more
Christian spirit.
Yet the air around him was charged with contro
versy. One that raged through a great part of his
Oxford residence was the question of providing a
higher salary than 40 a year for his attached and
early friend, the eminent scholar who held, and still
adorns, the post of Prpfessor of Greek at that wealthy
University. Those whom I am addressing may find
it difficult to realise the animosity with which so
obvious an act of policy as well as of justice was
defeated, time after time, by the votes of theological
opponents, or the almost "judicial blindness" by
which the seeds of a bitter and rankling sense of
injustice, fruitful, alas ! of evil to come, were sown
broadcast, in the name of a religion of righteousness
and peace, among the future leaders of academical life.
But it will not be difficult for you to understand or to
recall the whirlwind which was raised by the publication,
or rather by the attacks and discussion which followed
in due time the publication, in 1860, of the famous
.HAP. ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 85
volume of "Essays and Reviews." It is not my pur
pose to enter into the details of that long and bitter
controversy which for a time convulsed the English
Church, and which was not finally laid to sleep till after
at least three years of clamorous agitation. Stanley s
position was characteristic. He objected most strongly
to the whole scheme and form of the work. "In a com
posite publication" he recognised from the very first
"a decided blunder." But this was not all. While
admitting that almost the whole of the first, and
much in the last, of the seven Essays, was eminently
conservative, he censured strongly the generally nega
tive character of the volume. "No book," he said,
"which treats of religious questions can hope to
make its way to the heart of the English nation,
unless it gives at the same time that it takes away,
builds up at the same time that it destroys." And
in addition to this, he thought that one at least of
the Essays might be fairly charged with " needlessly
throwing before the English public, which had never
heard of them, conclusions arrived at by the lifelong
labours of a great German theologian, without any argu
ment to support or recommend them. We do not," he
said, "defend the madness of the bull, but we must
bestow some of our indignation on the man who shakes
the red flag in his face." But this felt and said, he
fiung himself with all his own generosity and ardour
into the defence of writers who represented, with
whatever drawbacks, the sacred cause, as he held
it, of liberty of thought among the English clergy,
86 RECOLLECTION* OF [CHAP. 11.
the cause which in the judicial suits which followed
he believed " to be pleading for its very life." Nowhere
has he written with greater force, vivacity, and energy
than in the appeals which he made to the educated
public through the pages of the Edinburgh Review, in
articles written on this question one when the storm
was at its height, two others when the danger was past.
For he felt himself to be pleading for a cause which he
believed to involve the whole future of the National
Church, "the learning of the most learned, the freedom
of the freest, the reason of the most rational Church
in the world." And he dreaded above all things a
breach between the higher intelligence of the rising
generation and the tenets of that Church, which would
not only " have dealt a heavy blow to all biblical study,
but have gone far to reduce it to the level of an
illiterate sect or of a mere satellite of the Church of
Home." By this controversy the combative side of his
nature, which was no less real if less strongly marked
than its peaceful and social side, was called into full
activity, never again to be allowed an entire repose I
might almost say for the rest of his life, whether at
Oxford or at Westminster.
It was during his residence as Professor at Oxford that
in pursuance of the wish of the lamented Prince Consort,
and at the express desire of the Queen, he accompanied
the heir to the throne, in the spring of 1862, on a
second visit to Egypt and Palestine. His old and
curious objection to re-visiting scenes of former travel
had become greatly modified, as that ardent traveller
CHAP. IL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 87
found that he would soon have to sigh for new worlds
to conquer ; and he accepted without hesitation, and dis
charged with much real enjoyment, the important trust
committed to him by the Crown. For any sacrifices
which it involved he had a rich reward in the additional
facilities which he enjoyed, in virtue of the respect paid
to his Royal companion, for visiting at last such an
object of interest as the Mosque at Hebron. He was re
paid still more by the warm feelings which he inspired
during those memorable four months in the new circle
in which he travelled, alike in the youthful Prince, and
in one who bore a name dear to every Scotsman, in
General Bruce, the Prince s faithful friend and coun
sellor, the brother of her who was ere long to be the
solace of his life. Sunday, too, after Sunday he was
enabled now on the Nile itself, now in the great hall
of the temple at Karnak, " in the grandest building,"
as he called it, " which the old world ever raised for
worship;" now on shipboard at the .ancient Joppa,
now under canvas above Shechem, or by the springs of
Nazareth, or on an Easter morning by the Sea of
Tiberias, or " on the way to Damascus," or under the
shadow of the temple of Baalbec, or of the cedars of
Lebanon, or off the shore of Patmos, to give utterance
to the thoughts which such scenes awoke within him.
Those short sermons, perhaps more than anything
which he ever wrote, re-produce his very inmost
feelings on life and death, and on the relation of the
human soul to duty and to God.
On one such occasion an event which cast >a deep
88 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
shadow over that otherwise happy journey gave an
additional pathos and impressiveness to his words. The
news of his mother s death, on Ash Wednesday, 1862,
reached him when on the Nile, between Alexandria and
Cairo. He preached on the following Sunday, in the
neighbourhood of Memphis, a sermon on the lesson for
the day, the story of the re-union of Joseph and his
brethren in Egypt; a sermon which, for the pathetic elo
quence in which it dwells on the sacredness of home, and
for the suppressed tenderness and emotion with which
its sentences seem to thrill and tremble, has hardly
been surpassed in the English language. There is not a
word of direct allusion to his own loss, and I have
heard that his voice, though deeper than usual, never
faltered throughout. But it must have been hard to
have listened unmoved to a fellow traveller who had
already endeared himself to all his companions in that
memorable journey, as he spoke in the presence of the
young heir to .the throne, still in mourning for his
father, of the "ties that link those who have passed
into the world beyond the grave, with those to whom
their wishes are now commands, their lightest desires
sacred wishes, the very mention and thought of whose
names draws us upward and homeward," or to the con
cluding words in which he spoke of "that last best
home where Jacob and his sons, Rachel and her chil
dren, shall meet to part no more."*
* Till another, and even sadder Ash Wednesday, came to end twelve
years of married happiness, he always spoke of his mother s death as
the great sorrow of his life, of his mother s character as the best
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 89
Those who have ever glanced at, still more those
to whom it has been a work of sadness dashed with
delight, to read, after his death, those " Sermons in the
East," will understand his words written after his return :
"My sermons were to me an immense relief, and it
was a great satisfaction to feel that by the end of the
time I had said almost everything that I could have
wished to say." Later on, speaking to one of his many
friends and helpers in Westminster, he said that his
fullest and deepest convictions were, he thought, to be
found in the pages of that volume.
His return to a home now vacant of the mother who
for years had been more than a mother to that loving-
son, was necessarily a time of sadness and trial. By
the kind forethought of Her in whose service he had
been absent " o er seas and deserts far apart " when the
blow fell, and who from that time counted, we may well
believe, his loyal friendship as among the best jewels in
her crown, his first meeting with the sister who so
keenly shared his sorrow took place neither in their
London nor their Oxford home, but under the Royal
roof of Windsor. But the wound was very deep. He
human manifestation to him of the Christian life. He joins the two
days together in lines written shortly before his own end. They
begin with the words :
" O day of ashes, twice for me
Thy mournful title thou hast earned ;
For twice my life of life by thee
Has been to dust and ashes turned."
They end with the words :
" Hi.- se.-rct of a better life
Read by my mother and my wife."
90 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
felt in his own words that the " guardian genius "
had "passed away that nursed his very mind and
heart." Twelve months later, in thanking a much-
valued friend for well-deserved words of praise, " You
know," he said, "how what you have said would have
delighted one who is not here to read it. When I think
of this the tears fill my eyes ;" and those to whom his
happiness was dear began to ask each other whether
there was any hope of the vacant place being filled by a
wife worthy of such a husband. Meantime another loss
had saddened him. His new friend and fellow traveller,
General Bruce, the one among the group to whom
he had opened freely all his feelings on his mother s
loss, was taken away after a short illness. Arthur
Stanley was with him when he died, and went to
Scotland to lay him in his grave at Dunfermline. The
friend who saw him on his return will never forget the
conversation. " It was," said Stanley, " the very first
time that I had seen a human soul pass with full con
sciousness from this world to the world beyond." He
spoke of the " identity of character remaining to the
very last ; " thoughtfulness for the absent, consideration
and courtesy for others no mere outward mask, but
shown in his very dying moments, when the last prayer
had been breathed, to the nurse who attended him.
His last farewell seemed waved to me from the invisible
world."
But he had much to call away his mind from private
troubles. The storm raised by " Essays and Reviews
was still at its fiercest. So also was the controversy
CHAP, jr.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 91
as to the Greek Professorship, of which I have already
spoken. The second volume of Bishop Colenso s
startling work appeared in the same year. The position
of one whom he so loved and reverenced as the
saintly Frederick Maurice, was being rendered almost
intolerable by the assaults of those who have, let us
hope, long since repented of the course they took.
Oxford society was divided as it had not been for many
years by bitter controversy. Even his own rare sweet
ness and gentle charm could not allay all feuds. Even
in the circle of his friends there had been some passing
coolness, and before he quitted Oxford the feelings and
language of some of his theological opponents had
become exceedingly embittered ; " so entirely," he
wrote of one of them, "is he, in this respect, bereft
of reason as to render charity comparatively easy."
Yet he disclaimed all wish to leave Oxford. "I
earnestly desire," he said, "a few months of leisure
to consider the events of this last year."
Early, however, in 1863 he took up his pen,
Encouraged by an Episcopal Charge delivered to his
clergy by the Bishop of London, his chaplain ad-r
dressed to him a letter on the terms of Subscription
enforced at the Universities and on the Clergy.
Nothing can be more telling than the arguments in
which he advocates a careful re-consideration of the
whole question. He points out that the stringent
form then required could only be subscribed as in
volving a general, not a particular assent; that so
understood, there was no section of the English Church,
32 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. n.
lay or clerical, which might not innocently accept it.
But he saw also that it was in the power of any
" malignant or narrow-minded partisan " to " rattle
up," as he said, " the sleeping lions, heedless of the
reflection that when aroused, they will devour with
equal indiscrimination on the right hand, and on
the left, and so add to the general evils of con
troversy the great and peculiar aggravations of
constant imputations of dishonesty and bad faith."
He pressed above all on the notice of a Prelate who
lived to be recognised as the wisest and most states
manlike of our English Archbishops, that in this
direction was to be sought not the sole, but one,
remedy for "the greatest of all calamities to the
Church of England, the gradual falling off in the
supply of the intelligent, thoughtful, and highly
educated young men, who twenty and thirty years
ago were to be found at every Ordination." I must not
attempt to carry the attention of a Scottish audience
through a narrative of all that followed; though the
results were great, and the whole question is one
of interest not confined to the Church of England.
It is enough to say that in 1865, after a stout re
sistance on the part of those who declared at one time
that no relaxations were necessary, and at another that
any relaxation would be an act of treason, an Act of
Parliament, following the recommendations of a Royal
Commission, abolished the elaborate subscriptions of
" Assent and Consent to all and everything contained
in the Prayer Book and Articles," and substituted a
CHAP, ii.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 93
simple assent to them, and to the doctrine therein
contained, and a pledge to use these Formularies,
and none other, without lawful authority. The change
was effected with an ease that forms a marked con
trast to the keen opposition which a movement in
the same direction encountered in the House of Lords
exactly twenty-five years earlier. Then a petition
from forty clergymen and laymen in behalf of some
modification of the terms of subscription, presented
almost with apologies by Archbishop Whately, and
gallantly supported by Bishop Stanley, had been
almost spurned from the door of the same House, in
which a healing measure was now passed without
opposition, and almost without comment.
94 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
CHAPTER III.
(From 1863 to 1881.)
WESTMINSTER.
LATE in the autumn of 1863 came the removal of
Arthur Stanley from Oxford and his appointment to
the Deanery of Westminster. At the end of the same
year, postponed somewhat by the uneasiness caused by
Lord Elgin s failing health, came the great event of his
life, his marriage with her who once more brought sun
shine into his heart.
He bad farewell to the University in a sermon
preached in the month of November in the Cathedral
of Christ Church. Nine years were to pass before
that eloquent voice was to be heard again in the
University pulpit. His text was the verse in the
Gospel of St. Luke which describes our Lord as
pausing on the ridge of the Mount of Olives,
" the one absolutely authentic spot in Palestine where
we can say with entire certainty that His presence
passed," to utter, with weeping, the memorable words,
" If thou hadst known, even thou at least in this thy
day, the things which belong unto thy peace" He
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYX STANLEY. 95
threw his whole soul into his parting words. As he
spoke of "the grief, the emotion, which stirs our inmost
souls at the thought of passing from a great institution
of which we have formed a part, with which some of
our happiest days have been interwoven," all felt how
genuine was that grief, how deep that emotion. But
from the beginning to the end there is scarcely a
sentence, scarcely a line which does not "thrill and
tingle" with warnings and encouragements, aspira
tions and regrets, rebukes and appeals. The very
inmost history of past and recent academical progress
and controversies can be read between its lines ;
the whole history also of the hopes and fears that
divided his own breast as he put before his hearers,
many of whom he Avas addressing for the last time,
now the possibility of reading in the future " nothing
but a dreary winter of unbelief, which is to be the
beginning of the end, and to shrivel up every particle
of spiritual life ; " now, " the danger to the Church
of England of losing for ever the noble ambition
that faith and freedom, truth and goodness may yet be
reconciled ; " now, " the glorious prospect to be spoken
of if never hereafter in this place, yet in other
spheres, if God so please, and before other hearers so
long as life and strength shall last the glorious pros
pect to be found in the conviction that in the religion
of Christ, better and better understood, in the mind
and words and work of Christ, more and more fully
perceived, lies the best security. ... for the things
which belong, not to our peace only, but to the peace of
iX> RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. m.
universal Christendom." It would be impossible here
to give any adequate idea of a sermon whose special
interest was, after all, academical. Had any passing
visitor from Scotland found a seat in that crowded
cathedral, he might have recognized an allusion to Lord
Elgin s illness, the news of which had reached his
future brother-in-law on the evening before ; he would
have been struck by the recital of some remarkable
words of Dr. Chalmers, spoken twenty years earlier in
the High Street of Oxford ; he would certainly have
found many to agree with him in thinking that the
most touching passage in that eloquent sermon was
the tribute paid to the "blameless holy life" of a
young Scottish tutor of Christ Church, who had passed
from the Edinburgh Academy through the University
of Glasgow to Balliol, the news of whose untimely
death had reached the preacher " through yet
darker shadows far, far away," almost by the same
post that had brought the tidings of his mother s
death.
In due time he and Lady Augusta were established
in their home at Westminster. In the prominent yet
absolutely independent position which he had now
reached, many of his friends saw the post most calcu
lated to give to such powers and such a character as
his their full development and influence. It would be
ungracious to recall the public protest raised against
his appointment by one of the most respected and most
learned of the Canons of Westminster, now a Bishop
of apostolic zeal and saintly character, were it not for
< HAF. in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 97
the sake of adding that the new Dean at once showed,
as again and again to the end of his days, that he was
filled with that Christian grace that " thinketh no evil,
is not easily provoked," and that he succeeded ere long
in establishing a personal relationship of cordial and
friendly intercourse between himself and his protesting
Canon. But, I may add that there were some few
among his friends who, on quite other grounds, felt
misgivings at his exchange of an academic office for the
wear and tear of the social and political life of London.
Some also, in the spirit of a saying of Cardinal
Newman s " Universities are the natural centres of in
tellectual movements," doubted whether the extended
influence wjtiich he was sure to gain over a larger
circle would compensate for the loss of that growing
hold on the minds of the future clergy which his post
at Oxford was yearly ensuring him. The second
question is one that may even now be raised and
discussed by those interested in the life of the Univer
sity and of the English Church : to the first, his life at
Westminster, so rich in fruitful work and marked
results, is the best reply.
I come now to a difficult question. How can I best
describe that period in his life which extends from the
beginning of 1864 he was installed on the 9th of
January to the sad day in July, 1881, when he was
taken from us? Shall I speak to you of his social
life ? or of his work as Dean ? or of his literary work ?
or speak of him as preacher, or lecturer, or speaker ? or
as plunged in controversy, as the leader in every move-
98 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
ment to promote, in the language of the ancient instru
ment to which he declared his assent on his installation,
" the enlargement of the Christian Church ? " or, not
less, as the champion of all and every one whom he
looked on as the victims of intolerance or persecution ?
Or shall I speak to yon of his personal history, his
domestic life, its sacred joys and sacred sorrows ? or
of his happy autumns spent in your own country,
his frequent visits to this very city? or of his many
sojourns in foreign countries, his extended acquaintance
with the most eminent men in Europe ? or of his ever
growing circle of devoted friends? or of the place he
held in the affection of the working classes ? in the
more than regard of his Sovereign and her Family ?
As we think of all these things, we think once more
of the irreparable gap which his loss has made, and of
the impossibility of doing adequate justice to such a
subject under close limitations of space or time. If a
few scattered observations can be read or listened to
with attention, what will be the surpassing interest of
the biography of one in whose character his friends may
proudly feel that there is nothing to soften, nothing to
keep back, when all that wealth of materials, of which
I have scarcely laid my hand upon a hundredth part,
has been brought before us by a biographer worthy of
the task ?
For his social life, then, using the term in its widest
sense, let me speak first of the new feature in that life
his marriage, and all that it brought to him. If there
was any apprehension among his earlier friends that
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 99
his union with one whom he had met in the circle of
a Court, and who was herself rich in a wealth of friend
ships, would in any way close the door of his house or
his heart to those to whom they had hitherto stood
open, the fear was soon dissipated. In that gracious
and graceful lady they found a new friend, who gave no
mere lip-welcome to his and her new home. They
rejoiced to see her seated with her own papers and
correspondence in the lofty library, looking westward
into Dean s Yard, which will so long be associated in
many minds with their united memory. It cheered
her to receive on her death-bed twelve years later the
assurance of their gratitude ; it rejoiced him as he sat by
her coffin side with one who had shared those first
misgivings, to hear the assurance once more repeated.
Her usual seat was at a table where, after her death,
stood her bust in marble, a few feet from where her
husband stood at his desk, plying his daily task of
Jewish history, or sermon, or lecture, or article, or
letters, yet ever ready to turn aside for a few moments
conversation or rest, and then to resume his work where
he had left it. His old pupils marked with an amused
delight her tender care for the health and comfort of
one curiously incapable of taking care of himself, even
in the most essential points of food and -dress. And
she not only shared his friendships, but went with
him heart and soul in all his work and all his
aspirations, " in every joy and every struggle," * and
* The words used by himself in his dedication to her memory o
Vol. 3 of his Lectures on the Jewish Church.
H 2
100 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
her companionship developed in him to the utmost
that capacity for social life in its highest aspect, on
which I have already touched. The Deanery soon
became a social centre as unique of its kind as was its
master. Church dignitaries not seldom some who half
an hour before, in the presence of Convocation sitting
within ten yards of the room and beneath the same
roof, had denounced their host in terms which have long-
been banished from all language but that of theological
controversy felt the spell of those cordial invitations
and that genial welcome, and returned from that plain
lunch eon- table softened in heart, if not wholly recon
ciled to their entertainer. There the Nonconformist
minister found that full social recognition, the absence
of which has done much to widen the gulf between the
Church and the Nonconformist world. There the
pioneers of Science found a listener always apprecia
tive, always eager for information, "keen as a hound in
the pursuit of knowledge," "possessed by what the French
call la (jrande curiosite" full himself to overflowing of
a knowledge other than their own, never depreciating
studies which were alien to the bent of his own genius,
never afraid of Truth, always ready to welcome all who
sought for her. There the leaders of literature met on
equal terms with a master of their craft. There too,
that highborn chivalry which marked his inmost nature,
threw open the doors of that coveted resort to men
from whom .others in his position might have withheld
a welcome : to the conscientious, if mistaken, sufferer
from theological bitterness, or to the most eloquent of
CHAP, m.] ARTHUR PENRIIYN STANLEY. 101
French priests who, in the supreme moment when others
withdrew their protest, had dared to beard the Vatican,
to question Papal Infallibility, and to assert the right
of a minister of the Catholic Church to Christian matri
mony. Foreign ecclesiastics, Archimandrites, Bishops
of the Greek Church, met there the representatives of
the American Churches or of Indian Missions. There
too, above all, the class who lived by daily and weekly
wages found a welcome, not merely to the Abbey
monuments, round which he delighted to conduct them
on their Saturday half-holidays, but to what must have
seemed to them the spacious rooms of the quaint and
interesting abode of the Abbots and Deans of West
minster that was now his home. His social gifts, his
stores of anecdotes, his quick perception alike of the
serious and of the ridiculous, his ready sympathy, his
power of apt quotation, are as impossible to describe
as the marvellously expressive countenance, " the eye
now beaming with sympathy " I quote a Scotsman s
eloquent words " now twinkling with humour, the
mobile mouth with its patrician curves, and the deli
cately sensitive face." The remembrance is a posses
sion which those who have enjoyed will never lose, but
which they cannot impart to others. I lighted just now
by chance on a page in the memoir of a lady once well
known here, who in extreme old age received from him
n visit in her retirement among the English lakes :
" There is no one like Arthur Stanley," wrote Mrs.
Fletcher ; " there is no one like Arthur Stanley" is the
echo that might have passed from lip to lip through
102 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
Scotland as through England. And it was not merely
that he amused, entertained or instructed. He won
hearts. Some of those who would almost have given
their own lives to prolong his, had never seen him
till he had reached threescore years, and fresh friends
clustered round him to the last, ready to toil for him in
all good works, not least in the service of the Abbey
which he loved.
And yet it must also be stated that he lived in an
atmosphere, if on one side of peace, on another of con
tention and struggle, and that something of the bitter
ness which, as he sadly said on leaving Oxford,
"poisoned the upper springs of academical life," was to
be found even in the freer and larger world of London.
It was scarcely to be wondered at. His aims were
distinct and clear ; and they were not those which
were palatable either to the religious world at large or,
above all, to his clerical brethren. And he never, as
you in Scotland well know, concealed his views, or
hesitated, whether among friends or foes, to plead the
cause which he had most at heart " the enlargement,"
in his own favourite words, "of the Church, and the
triumph of all Truth." Every attempt to repress free
dom of inquiry within the Church, or to vilify scientific
inquiries outside its borders, or to assert the claims of
the clergy to resist or to evade the supremacy of law,
found in him the most uncompromising of opponents.
Every effort to widen the borders of the Church,
whether by relaxing a stringent subscription, or by
admitting those whom he called "the nonconform-
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 103
ing members of the Church," to every privilege that
the widest interpretation of the law permitted, found
in him a never-failing advocate. His own intense
belief in the paramount importance of the spiritual and
the moral side alike of Christianity and of human
nature, made him somewhat impatient of what he called
" the materialism of the Altar and the Sacristy." His
avowed sympathy with the " far-sighted reformer of
Zurich " in his teaching that " the significance of sacred
rites consists not in the perishable accidents of their
outward token, or in the precise forms of their ministra
tion, but in the souls and spirits of their receivers," was
perhaps less shocking to those who looked on Zwinglius
as a heretic than his characterising, before the clergy
assembled in Convocation, the vestment controversy,
then and still convulsing many congregations, as a
mere question of " Clergymen s clothes." If it is quite
true that I quote once more Scottish testimony " he
stood higher in the respect and affection of a larger
and more varied circle of members of many churches
than any ecclesiastic in the world," it is equally true
that, within his own Church, he shocked and pained
some whom he would fain have won, and was more fiercely
vituperated, and regarded with greater aversion than
perhaps any living clergyman, by others whose partisan
ship, or sensitiveness to theological differences, was too
strong for their charity. Of his defence of the writers
of " Essays and Reviews " I have already spoken. The
strife became even hotter after his removal to London.
After judgment had been given by the highest court
104 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
in. favour of the side which he had espoused, lie
dashed with one final charge into the fray to do
battle with the Memorial signed by eleven thousand
of the clergy against the acquittal which had been
won. In Convocation, that is, in the assembly of
the Clergy of the Province of Canterbury held at
Westminster, he developed powers of debate the
existence of which neither friends nor foes, nor
he himself had ever suspected. And those powers
he used freely. The year 1872 introduced a fresh
subject of religious controversy. An attempt was made
to alter a word in the Rubric that heads the Atha-
nasian Creed, the result of which would have been to
make the reading of that Creed and of the so-called
" damnatory clauses " which it includes, optional instead
of obligatory. The course indicated was supported not
merely by its actual leader and inaugurator the Dean
of Westminster, but also by many sober and influential
churchmen. I am not, I hope, wronging our venerable
Primate in expressing a belief that his judgment, to
gether with that of a considerable portion of the bench
of Bishops was riot wholly unfavourable to the pro
posal. But the strife was perhaps hotter and keener
than any one of the many controversies in which our
friend was involved. Already he had been fiercely
impugned for including Dissenters from the Church of
England, and among those dissenters a Unitarian, in an
invitation to a Celebration of the Holy Communion to be
held in Westminster Abbey, which was sent to all the
revisers of the Old and New Testament Version. He
CHAP. IIL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 105
was looked on as sharing in some way the responsibility
incurred by the Primate and the other English Bishops
who declined to use the occasion of the meeting of the
Pan- Anglican synod for the purpose of confirming the
sentence passed by the Bishop of Cape Town on the
Bishop of Natal. It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising
that his speech in Convocation on the Athanasian Creed
was received with some approach to clamorous interrup
tion. Archdeacon after archdeacon rose to protest. One,
himself but lately the defendant in an ecclesiastical
trial, after a vain appeal to the Prolocutor to silence
the audacious speaker, left the meeting in disgust.
The words "Great interruption," cries of " No! no"
occur thickly in the report of the proceedings. Hostile
pamphlets, printed sermons, fell in showers upon him.
His conduct was stigmatised by one church dignitary,
whose kindliness of heart is often belied by his un
measured words, in pages dedicated " by his afflicted
servant and much injured son in Christ " to the Arch
bishop of Canterbury (himself addressed in that dedi
cation with thinly veiled reproaches), as scarcely recon
cilable with the most fundamental principles of morality.
He and his supporters were warned that " had they con
ducted themselves in the service of an earthly sovereign
with like profligacy, they would inevitably have been
tried by court-martial and shot." They were called
upon, and the call included a host of the most faithful
and devoted of the middle party among English Church
men, " to go out instantly from the Church of which
such men proclaim themselves disaffected and disloyal
106 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. nr.
ministers." If one of his opponents ended a printed
letter with a grateful acknowledgment of " that reverent
love for the Bible which you taught me at Oxford ; "
others had recourse to such phrases as " moral de
pravity," " immoral priests," " traitors in the camp."
He was publicly taunted with committing a graver
offence than " the tutor who corrupts his pupil s mind,
or the trustee who robs the widow and the orphan of
their property." And his opponents were not content
to beat the air with harmless clamour. Such clamour
never ruffled him. But a blow was aimed by once
friendly hands which, had it struck its mark, would
have wounded him to the quick. An organized
effort was made to employ a dormant power of the
Convocation of Oxford for the purpose of erasing his
name from the list of University Preachers in which it
had at last, nine years after his last sermon preached
there, been inserted by the Board charged with the
duty of selection. But so studied an insult to one so
widely honoured was resented by many who were little
accustomed to take part in University controversies.
Even the leaders of the dominant religious party, though
they took no overt step to restrain their followers,
declined to aid them with their votes; and the only
result of the threatened stigma was to effect what all
but the blindest leaders of the blind might have easily
foreseen, to win him hearty sympathy and tenfold
attention from all that was generous in youthful
Oxford.
I only revive these unpleasing memories in order to
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 107
make it clear that he was to the very end of his life
engaged not merely in peaceful study, or in such calm
statements of his views as were embodied in his utter
ances here and elsewhere, north of the Tweed or south,
on this side of the Atlantic or the other, but in a
succession of conflicts that he was the object, not
merely of devoted affection and widespread sym
pathy, but of exceedingly bitter and undisguised
hostility.
Let me give an instance, or rather three instances of
the manner in which, with a courage and promptitude
of which his early youth gave little promise, but which
was developed in him more and more as life went on,
he was every year more eager to spring to the rescue of
the solitary or the unfriended more ready to stand
face to face before an excited and hostile majority. All
three shall be taken from his defence of Bishop Colenso,
who had been condemned of heresy by his Metropolitan
the Bishop of Capetown. I choose this controversy not
because it will be a specially welcome or acceptable
topic to those whom I address. It is perhaps the one
in which he stood, I will not say alone, but with less
sympathy and less following than in any other he
never looked behind to see who followed him. But I
choose it because it is most illustrative of his chivalry
and fearlessness, and throws most light on the hostility
which he provoked.
I choose it also because he felt and expressed not
only a want of sympathy with, but an actual aversion
for, the special mode in which the Old Testament was
108 RECOLLECTIONS OF
treated in some at least of Bishop Colenso s writings.
The object of much of those works was, it seemed, to
break down a supposed belief in the literal inspiration
of every word of Holy Scripture by invalidating the
accuracy of the details of the Old Testament narrative.
The aim of Stanley was entirely different always and
invariably to bring out the treasures of the Bible, his
torical, poetical, moral, spiritual. But though he felt no
sympathy with the form which Dr. Colenso s work took,
he felt entire sympathy with him as a real and honest
searcher after truth ; he earnestly desired to protect the
Colonial clergy from being "judged by irresponsible
Metropolitans by other laws than those of England ; "
aiid he strove, in the interests as he believed of truth
and freedom, to avert the severance of the Colonial
Churches from the State of England.
On the first occasion, so early as 186G, he felt called
on at a moment s notice to oppose a resolution brought
forward in Convocation, which virtually treated the
See of Natal as vacant. After going seriatim through
the various points on which Bishop Colenso had been
found guilty of heresy by his Metropolitan, and point
ing out that in each separate case the condemnation
must be shared, sometimes "by sainted Fathers of the
Church," sometimes " by English divines and Bishops of
unquestioned orthodoxy," sometimes by " hundreds, nay
thousands of the English clergy," he ended by chal
lenging, in a very striking passage, those whom he
addressed, to institute proceedings against one who,
" though on some of these awful and mysterious ques-
CHAP, in.] AUTHUR PEXUHYN STANLEY. 109
tions lie has expressed no opinion, yet holds the same
principles as those which have been condemned by
the Bishop of Capetown. That individual is the one
Avho now addresses you. Judge," he said, "righteous
judgment." It is needless to say that the challenge
was not taken up.
Years after, on an occasion when the death of the
Bishop of Capetown was calling forth well merited ex
pressions of sorrow on the part of the Clergy assembled
in Convocation, the Dean of Westminster rose and read
an extract from a sermon of the Bishop of Natal contain
ing a dignified and affectionate tribute to his work and
character. " For myself," Dean Stanley went on to say,
" I do not profess to express full agreement with the
Bishop s words. To some here they may appear too
highly coloured by the recollections of early friendship.
But they are a testimony, alike to the Bishop of Cape
town, who could inspire such sentiments, and to the
Bishop of Natal who could give utterance to them.
When the first Missionary Bishop of Africa who trans
lated the Bible into the language of the natives, shall be
called to his rest, I trust that there will be found some
Prelate presiding over the See of Capetown just and
generous enough to render the like homage to the
Bishop of Natal."
Lastly, in the midst of a stormy and almost tumultuous
scene at a meeting of the venerable Society for the Pro
pagation of the Gospel, in the early part of the year
before that in which he died, he once more stood forth
as the solitary and undaunted champion of one for
110 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
whom he had pleaded years before as " absent, friendless,
unpopular," "as attacked by every epithet which the
English language has been able to furnish against
him." " The Bishop of Natal," he said, "is the one
Colonial Bishop who has translated the Bible into the
language of the natives of his diocese. He is the one
Colonial Bishop who, when he believed a native to be
wronged, left his diocese, journeyed to London, and
never rested till he had procured the reversal of that
wrong. He is the one Colonial Bishop who, as soon as
he had done this, returned immediately to his diocese
and his work. For these acts he has never received
any praise, any encouragement from this the oldest of
our Missionary Societies. For these deeds he will be
remembered when you who censure him are dead,
buried, and forgotten."
It was surely not without reason that one of your
own foremost Divines spoke of him as " the champion
of the vilified name, the lost cause/
Let me pass on now to his official life as Dean of
Westminster. How deep, how intense was his interest
in the venerable fabric committed to his care, I need
not say. Within three years of his appointment he had
completed, incredible as it may appear, his " Memorials
of Westminster Abbey." To that thick volume, crowded
with information of every kind, men of slower powers
of work might have devoted half their lives. It is a
full guide to all the treasures of that vast historical
museum. It is deficient only on the architectural side,
for of architecture he would sometimes plead as entire
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN tTAXI.EY. Ill
ignorance as of music. But with all the accumulated
knowledge ready for him in existing works, and with all
the help gladly given him by friendly hands and heads,
it is a really prodigious work. He himself spoke
lightly of it. Its very diffuseness of aim, and its
encyclopaedic character wearied him, and, as he said to
his friend, Max Miiller, " it carried him too far away
from the vital questions of the age."
But in scarcely one of these " vital questions " was
he more interested than in the Abbey itself. To
commend its treasures to the public, to interest in its
monuments and walls, and services, every class of his
countrymen, soon became to him one of the most vital
of all questions. There is hardly a corner in the Abbey
on which he did not throw some new light : now penetrat
ing underground till he had tracked the coffin of the first
Scottish King of England to its forgotten home in the
vault of Henry VII.; now placing in her husband s
chantry the neglected remains of Catherine of Valois ;
now carefully and reverently replacing the recovered
fragments of the desecrated tomb of the young Protestant
King, Edward VI. His hand and spirit may be traced in
the brightly tinted leaves of an American autumn, that
speak a message of reconciliation over the bones of
Andre ; in the monument, with its characteristic inscrip
tion, erected to the two Wesley s ; in the faint repro
duction of the sun shining on Boston Harbour, which
forms part of the memorial window which he raised to
the memory of his lost wife. It was his delight to take
eminent strangers now a king, now a general, now a
112 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
literary man, now a party of children, now a listening
friend, from tomb to tomb ; to answer their questions
and pour out his knowledge. Rarely did a Saturday
pass in spring or summer without his accompanying a
party of working-men from end to end, through Jeru
salem Chamber, Chapter-House, and Abbey ; often
ending the fatiguing task by giving them a simple
meal, and occasionally showing them the curiosities of
the Deanery. In that ancient house of the Abbots of
Westminster and earlier Deans he took the profoundest
interest. His malediction will fall, I am sure, on the
first of his successors who shall substitute modern
apartments for those antique gables and not wholly
commodious bed-rooms. The restoration of the Chapter
House, the cradle of English Parliamentary life, in
augurated under his predecessor, was vigorously urged
on the Government and completed at last, all but
the windows. Every detail of the design for these
last was arranged by himself, and will be completed,
in great part at least, as a fitting monument to his
memory. Had he never preached a sermon, never
published a line, never made a single speech, never
appeared in public on any general question, he would
have made his mark in those ancient precincts as a
memorable Dean.
For preaching too, and that from the most inspiring,
to him, of all pulpits, he had now the -ample scope
that was grudged him at the University, and he was
able to fulfil the promise which he had made in his
parting sermon at Oxford. If to preach was, strictly
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 113
speaking, his proper and official duty on three Sundays
only in the year, yet the special circumstances of the
Chapter gave him abundant opportunities ; and Sunday
after Sunday, men and women, including many whom
few preachers would have drawn to worship, crowded
to hear him. If there were times, as must needs
have been the case in one who preached so often
and so readily, when the quality of his sermons fell
in some respects below what had been looked for, yet
the voice, the manner, the face, the tones, were some
thing that could be found nowhere else, and at his
best in, for instance, such occasional sermons as he
himself chose for publication, or such as are contained
in a volume published since his death he had for
striking and moving eloquence few rivals in any
English-speaking community of Christians. Read his
funeral sermon on Charles Kingsley, on Sir John
Herschel, on your own countryman Carlyle, or that
preached after the Siege of Paris. Who else in the
United Kingdom could have preached them ? Read,
indeed, any of his published sermons. We may say as
Dr. Johnson said of Baxter s, " Read any ; they are all
good." Read any, we may add, for they are all cha
racteristic, all stamped with his own impress. No one
else in the world could have written them. I have
heard it said that it was worth a considerable journey
to hear him read in the Abbey certain lessons from the
New and even more from the Old Testament. He had
a wonderful genius for finding in the services of the day
a happy and felicitous guide for the subject of his
114 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
sermon. On a Sunday when the Shah of Persia was in
London, he had to preach to a regiment of volunteers.
His text was drawn from the Book of Esther, which
had formed for some days past the daily lessons.
The greatest personage in that book was "the very
last King of Persia who from that time to the present
liad visited Europe," and the text was taken from words
of devoted patriotism a very motto and watchword for
citizen soldiers uttered by Esther herself.
I have already spoken of his preaching on the re-
gathering of the brethren of Joseph which formed the
morning lesson on the Sunday after his hearing of his
mother s death; the text "Abraham went down to
Egypt to sojom^n there" he drew from the same
source for his first sermon in Egypt. The same
dexterous readiness in catching analogies and simi
larities which gave such a charm to his conversa
tion, stood him also in good stead on very different
occasions. In preaching, for instance, to the men em
ployed at the great Agricultural Show at Islington, he
was able to find ennobling memories even for the
drovers of swine, if not in the associations of Holy
Scripture, yet in the faithful Gurth of Walter Scott,
and in the even more faithful Eumseus of the
" Odyssey."
But you in Scotland have heard him preach, and
need no eulogies of mine.
You will now, perhaps, expect his successor to say
something at greater length than he has yet said of his
theological position. Yet what I have already said is
CHAP. IIL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 115
the key to all that I could say. He stood aloof, abso
lutely aloof, from all parties in the Church. " I can
not," he said, in a letter to one of his dearest friends,
" go out to battle in Saul s armour : I must fight with
my own sling and stone or not at all. I have never
been able to reconcile myself to these unreasoning un-
discriminating war-cries : whatever power I have been
able to exert has been mainly derived from this absti
nence."
Towards the close of his life, after quoting a famous
passage on party spirit from Robert Hall, that opens
with " Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry is favourable
to error, whatever promotes it is favourable to truth,"
he added one of his favourite remarks : " This spirit of
combination for party purposes, and this alone, is what
the New Testament calls heresy, and this," he added,
"constitutes the leading danger of synods and of
councils."
Yet he was never ashamed of the title of " liberal
theologian," not even " if he were to be the last who
was to bear the name," and he was the first to give
currency to the much used term " Broad Church."
Liberal theology, he spoke of, in one of the very latest
of his addresses, as being " the backbone of the Church
of England," and he claimed for it an "orthodoxy, a
biblical, evangelical, Catholic character which its
opponents have never reached."
What, you will ask, did he mean by this ? I can
give you no better answer than in words of his own ;
his theological views are repeated over and over again
i 2
116 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
with a monotony which is never monotonous in all that
ever came from his lips or pen.
Let me say first, that he was not, as you all know,
a lover of dogma. His dear friend, your countryman,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, said of him that "no
true believer in Christianity was ever more abhorrent
of dogmatism," and adds that " he was almost bigoted
against bigotry, and almost intolerant of intolerance."
But though this is quite true, I feel inclined to quote
some wise and discriminating words used by a much
respected writer in reference to his dear friend Hugh
Pearson, whose death soon followed his own, and who,
as I have already said, for over forty years had shared
every thought and feeling as none other of his friends :
"There will probably always be two schools of
opinion respecting the true relations between Christian
doctrine or dogma and Christian morals ; the one of
those who think that the true spirit of the Gospel has
been fettered, if not perverted, by being too much tied
to doctrine, the other of those who believe that in the
careful custody of the faith, in every particular, out of
which Christian ethics sprang, is to be found the only
security for their permanent vitality and power. The
Vicar of Sonning " (let me substitute the name of the
Dean of Westminster) " unquestionably belonged to the
former school. He had a devout faith in the power
and love of God, a profound reverence and love for
Jesus Christ, and an absolute conviction that the
truest wisdom and highest happiness of man were to
be found in the study and the imitation of that holy,
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 117
lovely, and beautiful life. This was the sum and sub
stance of his religion, this was really the key-note of
all his sermons. To this he turned from doctrinal
questions with something like contempt, and some
might think with too little consideration or perception
of the bearing of such questions upon the practical life.
The whole condition of his mind on this subject might
be summed up in the verses of Charles Wesley on
Catholic Love :
* Weary of all this wordy strife,
These notions, forms, and modes and names,
To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
Whose love my simple heart inflames
Divinely taught at last I fly,
With Thee and Thine to live and die. "
He was never, as you know, weary of repeating, 1st,
"that the essential superiority of Christianity to all
other religions in the world, lay in its resting on a
Divine life, a life that was the image of God, because he
who lived it was all goodness and truth " ; 2ndly, " that
its essential object was to produce characters which in
truthfulness, in independence, in mercy, in purity, in
charity, may recall something of the mind that was in
Christ " ; 3rdly, " that what makes a man a Christian
is to have the character of Christ, " a Master worth
living for, worth dying for, whose spirit was to be the
regenerating power of the whole world."
It is in the light of this intense feeling for goodness
and for truth as revealed in Christ, and presenting to
mankind a standard which system after system of
118 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
theology had only dimly realised " as having far, far
more in it," as he delighted to say of the Bible, " than
has ever been taken out of it," that we must view his
dissatisfaction with the imperfections of the past, "the
old theological Adam striving in each successive gene
ration to maintain his own against the new Christian
spiritual Adam." Hence his reiterated claim to place
" all that was ceremonial, all that was dogmatic, even
all that was miraculous, on a lower level among the
essential elements of Christianity than what was moral
or spiritual." Hence his bold assertion " that the
greatest of all miracles is the character of Christ."
Hence his urgent advice to his American friends " to
feel truly the littleness of what is little, as well as the
greatness of what is great ; to distinguish what is out
ward from what is inward, what is accidental from what
is essential, what is temporary from what is eternal."
Hence his fondness for the story of the French pastor
asking on his death-bed his friends " to pray for him
that he might have the elementary graces ; " or of the old
Scottish Methodist, laying aside in his dying moments
the narrow sympathies of his earlier years in the words
" if power were given me I would preach purity of life
more and purity of doctrine less." On the realisation
of this idea of a wider Christianity, "if not in this
century," as he said in America, "yet in the next or
in the next but one," "even if he were to be the last
not to despair of his religion and his Church," " even if
a partial eclipse were at hand," on this he rested all his
hopes of the triumph of faith over unbelief. At times,
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 119
no doubt, his heart seemed to fail him. " Those younger
than himself might live/ he said, " to see a brighter
and happier day than that which seems to overcloud the
minds, and oppress the hopes, of those \vho live in the
latter part of this nineteenth century." " The imme
diate future " seemed to him " sometimes darkened by
an eclipse of faith, sometimes by an eclipse of reason."
But he never seriously relinquished the hope call
it, if you will, an idle dream that he expressed, as
elsewhere, so in Scotland, "that, in spite of cynical
indifference or growing superstition, it would yet be
shown that Christianity a Catholic, comprehensive,
all-embracing Christianity was not dead or dying, but
instinct with immortal life " " that Christianity in its
wider aspect may yet overcome the world." It was to this
indestructible faith in the real vitality of what he held to
be " the essentials of Christianity," that we may refer his
impatience under all stringent subscriptions to church
formularies and confessions of faith as tending to
alienate Christian from Christian, Church from Church,
and to retard the progress for which he sighed. " All
confessions and similar documents are," he said, "if
taken as final expressions of absolute truth, mislead
ing," and he speaks of a church " whose glory it is to
be always advancing to perfection."
Truth he was ready to welcome from any quarter.
It was in the firm conviction that " Truth was to be
sought above all things for itself and not for any
ulterior object," that he refused to be appalled at
any discoveries, real or supposed, of physical science,
120 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
but was ready to welcome all as elements of a larger
system. " However far," he said, " we may trace back
the material parts of man, from whatever earlier forms
of existence it may be possible to derive the bodily
frame which we possess in common with other parts of
creation, no one can go further back or deeper down
than St. Paul or the Book of Genesis have already led
us. The first man is of the earth earthy, says St.
Paul ; The Lord God made man of the Just of the
earth, 1 says the Book of Genesis. In neither the
biblical nor the scientific account, can the descrip
tion affect or destroy our knowledge, our certainty
of what he is now. What would be fatal to our
hopes, would be to be told, that because our first
man was of the earth, earthy, therefore all our higher
and nobler desires and hopes and affections are also of
the earth, earthy. This would indeed make us, as
St. Paul says, of all creatures the most miserable "
And he protests against "driving into the devil s
camp" all the leaders in such inquiries, just as he
protests elsewhere against using, by way of disparage
ment, such words as " deist " or " theist," on the ground
that " where this belief remains, the true supernatural,
the true ideal, immaterial ground is not abandoned."
Scotsmen know well how eager he was to find
points of agreement and similarity in dissident
churches, and the reproach of a late venerable Oxford
Professor that " he had an eye for resemblances but not
for differences," he welcomed as the highest praise.
" Make the most," he said, in a sermon preached in Old
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 121
Grey Friars Church, " of what there is of good in in
stitutions, in opinions, in communities, in individuals."
He had, as you know, an avowed, a warm, an almost
passionate preference for the much decried principle
of an " Established Church," for the union, wherever
possible, of Church and State. He would dwell, to the
astonishment no doubt of conscientious dissenters, " on
the enlarging and elevating influence infused into a
religious institution by its contact, however slight, with
so magnificent an ordinance as the British Common
wealth, by its having for its aim the highest welfare of the
whole community." <% That connexion which Chalmers
had vindicated in the interest of Christian philan
thropy, had," he said, " in these latter days more
and more commended itself in the interest of Christian
liberty." And he was never tired of enlarging on
the "soothing, moderating, comprehensive spirit of the
Church of England."
Yet not the less he could thank the Baptists for
having " almost alone in the Western Church pre
served intact one singular and interesting relic of
primitive and apostolic times which we have," he adds,
"at least in our practice, wisely discarded." He
could point to their Bunyan, Robert Hall, and Have-
lock, as men who taught us that " there was a ground
of communion which no difference of external rites could
ever efface." He could thank Quakerism for " having
unfurled before the eyes of Christendom not the
flag of war but of peace ; " for " dwelling even with
exaggerated force on the insignificance of all forms,
122 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
of all authority, as compared with the inward light
of conscience." " The work of dissenting churches
is," he said in Scotland, " to keep alive that pecu
liar force of devotion and warmth which is apt to die
out in the light of reason, and in the breath of free
inquiry." " We cannot safely dispense," he said in
America, after a sermon full of wisdom 011 the
characteristics of the Roman, the Eastern, the Lutheran,
and the Calvinistic systems, " even with the churches
which we most dislike, and which in other respects
have wrought most evil." If he felfc that the absolute
and corporate re-union of Churches was in some
cases undesirable, in others impracticable, he did all
that lay in his power to advocate and to promote a
friendly inter-communion. You. know how gladly he
preached in the pulpits of the Scottish Establishment,
how joyfully he would have opened to] your own
clergy the pulpit of an Abbey which he loved to call
"the consecrated temple of reconciled ecclesiastical
enmities," how in the absence of freedom fully to
effect this, he rejoiced to hear, if not in the pulpit,
yet beneath the roof of that Abbey, the voice of a
layman like Max Mliller, of Scotsmen such as Prin
cipals Caird and Tulloch, of such an English Noncon
formist as Dr. Stoughton. How gladly did he dwell on
the manner in which men like Milton or John Bunyan,
or Thomas A Kempis or Keble, or the writers of great
hymns, rise unconsciously above their own peculiar
views, "above the limits that divide denominations,
into the higher region of a common Christianity." How
CHAR in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 123
lie delighted in the words of your own Dr. Chalmers,
" who cares about any Church except as an instrument
of doing good?" or of Dr. Duncan, the Free Church sage,
who was " first a Christian, then a Catholic, then a
Calvinist, then a Pa?do-baptist, and fifthly a Presby
terian," who avowed "that there was a progress in
all things and therefore in religion ; " who, though a
staunch Protestant and disliker of image worship, could
never banish the touching memory of a rude image of his
Saviour which he had seen cut on a granite cross in
Hungary. How he rejoiced in the conviction of John
Wesley s dearest friend that "the main, fundamental,
overpowering principle of his life was not the promotion
of any particular doctrine, but the elevation of the
whole Christian world in the great principles of Christian
holiness and morality," How often has he quoted the
words of Zwinglius, " of the meeting in the presence of
God of every blessed spirit, every holy character, every
faithful soul that has existed from the beginning of the
world even to the consummation thereof." His own
words, as applied to Richard Baxter, sum up all that
under this head can be said of himself: "In a stormy
and divided age he advocated unity and comprehension.
Many other thoughts abounded in that teeming brain,
but they were more or less secondary. Other messages
of divine or human truth were delivered with more
force and consistency by others of his time, but in the
solemn proclamation of this message he stood pre
eminent."
You can imagine, or you know in part, how fierce a
124 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
spirit of opposition all this and I have read you only
some fair specimens of his habitual teaching must
have provoked in some minds. As those whose duty it
is to do so, read the fierce invectives, the malignant
insinuations which were launched against that noble
spirit, so full of the hunger and thirst after righteous
ness, so glowing with an all-embracing charity towards
every human soul, it is easy to repress what might
seem a natural, a righteous resentment. So clear is it,
if not on which side lies the victory in argument,
or the hope of immediate success, yet on which side
is the spirit of Christ. Let me give you, if you wish
for criticism you will have none from me something
more worthy of himself. A lecture which he once
delivered is thus described by a member of the
Society of Friends, one who did not wholly share
his views, yet deeply sympathised with and greatly
reverenced him. "The subject was, The points in
the Christian creed which are held by all Christians.
It was full of his own wonderful and all-embracing
charity, and he seemed to lift his whole audience into
a higher sphere as he spoke. The soul was soothed
and cheered by listening to him. Perhaps the intellect
was not altogether satisfied. If any man could have
succeeded in finding and describing the common stand
ing ground of Roman Catholic and Unitarian, it would
have been he. But I think that one or two of us felt
that not even he had quite succeeded in finding that
common formula." Ah ! how different this thoughtful lan
guage from the taunts of some of his own communion.
CH\P. IIL] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 125
" He spoke after his lecture," the same observer adds,
" of the manner in which Ecce Homo had been re
ceived by the different sections of the Christian Church.
Each one had found something in the book which har
monised with its own special views. This seemed to
him an illustration of the wonderful manifoldness of our
Lord s character, "that character," he said, " which is the
foundation of the Church." His host adds an interest
ing reminiscence of his speaking of the Founder of
Buddhism. "I remember," said Stanley, "the time
when the name of Gautama was scarcely known, except
to a few scholars, and not always well spoken of by
those who knew it, and now he stands second"
" There was something," we are told, " very impressive
in the way in which he said this with hands and
eyes uplifted, leaving the name of the First unspoken."
Those who knew him will easily fill up the outlines of
the picture.
You would wish me, I think, to say something of
the position which he held towards the working classes
in London, and in the nation generally. This also
was unique of its kind, and difficult at first sight
to define or account for. Other men have devoted
themselves far more exclusively and more assiduously
to promoting their welfare. Other men have spoken,
preached, and written in a style far more directly
adapted to their opinions and tastes. He had little, at
least in early life, of his father s frank, ready, sailor-like
power of at once placing himself on a level with less
educated strangers. He had never toiled and laboured
126 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
like his sister, Mary Stanley, in the details of hospital
life, or of organising industrial and other means of
relieving distress and encouraging self-dependence.
It was not till he was established at Westminster
that he came into any specially close or permanent
contact with what are called the working classes.
While still at Oxford he had been deeply interested
in efforts made by his warm friends, Mr. Thomas
Hughes and the Rev. Septimus Hansard, under the
inspiration of Mr. Frederic Maurice, in conjunction
with the late Mr. Kingsley and others, to raise the
condition of the London operatives ; and it is needless to
say that, with Lady Augusta by his side, he gave the
aid of his presence and his sympathy to various move
ments that tended to promote their welfare. Very soon
he won his way to their hearts, and was a welcome
visitor at their meetings. There remains at the Deanery
an address presented to him by the working-men of
Westminster on his reaching his 60th birthday ; a
cheering memorial of their good wishes as the shadows
of life began to darken round him. He early formed
the habit, which he never laid aside, of conducting
Saturday parties of working-men round the Abbey,
explaining, as no one else could, the principal monu
ments, and endeavouring to interest them in the past
greatness of their common country, by trying, in lan
guage used by himself at his Installation sermon, * to
draw out the marvellous tale that lies imprisoned in
those dead stones, and make each sepulchre give up
again to life its illustrious dead." I have been favoured
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 327
with more than one description of such afternoons,
written by working-men who had been admitted to a
privilege which the most exalted personages delighted to
enjoy. In such tours of the Abbey or in the visits to the
Deanery that occasionally followed them were laid, at
times, the seeds of future intimacy with individuals.
Yet I feel that these details throw but a faint light on
his relation to the men of whom I speak. It is not the
thing done that is in the reach, if not of any one yet
of many it is in the manner in which he did it that
the charm lay. I might easily enumerate other claims
to gratitude: his promotion of coffee-houses and libraries,
his hearty sympathy with the Working-Men s Club and
Institute Union, of which he was elected President,
his care to have every monument in the Abbey carefully
lettered and described ; but I feel that no list of such
services will, in itself, account for the place he held in
the affections of his countrymen. The truth was that
the same sympathetic fibre, the same indescribable
gift for winning hearts, which was constantly binding to
him new friends among his own class, and which made
his death felt, in America as in England, as a personal
loss by multitudes who had never seen him, told with
no less force on a class not often interested in the life
and death of an ecclesiastical dignitary. Its effect was
clearly marked when he was laid in his grave. It was
not only that the Abbey and its approaches were
thronged to the very full by humble worshippers, or that
in the meanest streets in the neighbourhood there was
scarcely a shop or a public- house that was not partially
128 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
closed as for a death in the family, or that as was said
at the time by one familiar with the purlieus of West
minster " the hardest roughs seemed softened by his
name." This might have been in a measure due to
years of ready beneficence and well-tried sympathy on
the part of Lady Augusta, his sister, and himself. But
the feeling extended far beyond the vicinity of the Abbey.
In a great northern seat of industry, one who was coining
up from the Yorkshire Moors to bear his part in that sad
funeral, heard a working man, as he put his- i; son into
the train, bid him, in Yorkshire dialect, " tak care of
himself at the burying," and a few moments conversa
tion startled him by the interest shown in the loss
which was saddening his own heart. The same tra
veller spent the next two months in a Midland town,
where he made the acquaintance of some of the leading
operatives ; and there, to his astonishment, he found
the name of Stanley, introduced in conversation by men
who were not aware that the new comer was his
friend, act at once as a passport to their confidence. How
was it ? I must leave those who have felt the spell of
his presence, of his face, his voice, his greeting, to add
to these his reputation for chivalry and courage and
eloquence, and sympathy with all who needed sym
pathy, and the wide-spread sense that he was the
same man in the atmosphere of a court as at a
meeting of working men ; that to use once more
words quoted by himself but applied to another,
" he feared no man s displeasure, and hoped for
no man s preferment," and so to find a key to the
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 129
undoubted hold which that scion of an ancient family
had won on the affection of the best representatives of
our toiling millions.
I need not remind you how deeply, how univer
sally he was mourned. " He was borne to his
grave," it was truly said, " on the shoulders of the
nation." It may be no less truly said that the
feelings which he inspired were a real force in
breaking down, or at least softening, that aliena
tion of classes which is the most formidable of all
dangers to existing institutions. When the foremost
men in England, the leaders in Parliament, in society,
in science and literature, in church and state, met in the
Chapter House of Westminster to do honour to his
memory, no testimony was more impressive than that
borne by one who represented neither high rank, nor
political office, nor ecclesiastical dignity, but the work
ing-men who mourned the loss not so much of a bene
factor as of a friend. And they were not mistaken.
If years before he had spoken in the distant East, in
the presence of a circle far removed from their own, of
God s love " to the poor, the humble classes, the neg
lected classes, the dangerous classes, the friendless, the
oppressed, the unthought for, the uncared for ; " if he
had pleaded for Christianity " as the only religion
addressed, not to the religious, but to the irreligious, the
non-religious," his friends know well that this was no
rhetorical utterance of idle breath, but a deep con
viction on which his own life and his own religion
were based and moulded.
130 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
The many volumes of his collected works will have
to face the verdict which it is yet too early to pronounce
as to their enduring character. His theological position
may be questioned, challenged, attacked, and defended ;
it may be maintained or abandoned by those who
survive him. But those who have had the privilege the
inestimable privilege of enjoying his society or of
sharing his friendship, will feel that behind the genius
and behind the theology there was something more
precious, more attractive, more inspiring than either ;
the man himself the Arthur Stanley who in youth,
in manhood, in maturer age, drew to him more and
more the hearts of men, and has made the skies seem
less bright, earth less habitable, life itself less interesting
since he ceased to be.
I would gladly end with these words : but something
I ought to say of his domestic, his personal history.
You will not expect me to anticipate his biography by
saying much.
His life was exceedingly busy and laborious. He
speaks frequently in letters written on his first coming
to London of "the terrible whirl," of "my time being
broken to pieces in useless, trivial labour." His successor
can enter into his dismay. Yet the amount of work
work of the most various kinds which he contrived to
do seems almost incredible. And he did it in the main
joyously. No controversialist s abuse ever seemed to
ruffle him for a moment ; the fiercest invectives left no
sting behind. His health, without being strong, was
good, and his autumnal tours in Scotland, or on the
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 131
Continent, he enjoyed to the last with indefatigable
activity. The loss of friends he felt sorely. Kings -
ley s death struck him to the ground. So wide was
his circle that such blows came often as life went on.
" I am thankful now," he said, " if a month passes
without a death !" Yet he had wonderful elasticity
and a hopeful temperament. I remember his telling
us how, near the time of his sixtieth birthday, a little
German boy with whom, with his usual love of children,
he had made acquaintance (I think it was on a Rhine
steamer), asked him his age; on hearing it, he said,
" Why, all your life is over ! " " No," he replied, " the
best time is yet to come." He took a keen interest in
public affairs, and was deeply moved by the war between
France and Germany. His letters express the
strongest indignation against the French Emperor as
the wanton disturber of the peace of Europe. But the
bombardment of Strasburg and the siege of Paris were
to him " dreadful calamities, even if needed to secure
the world against the recurrence of such evils." And
in his sermon on the Distress of Paris you will find the
most moving of laments over the city which he knew
so well. But I must hasten on.
It was after his visit to Russia in 1874 that his wife s
health began to show signs of failure, and that sadness
began to darken that once bright home in the Deanery.
In the next year it was necessary to pass the spring and
summer in seclusion, and to forego their usual visit to
Scotland. He writes of his " suffering wife and her
widowed sister as .cheering each other and cheering
K 2
132 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
mo." "I resign myself," he says, "to six months of
this stranded existence. If at the end of that time
my dear wife is anything like what she was before in
activity and strength, I shall be satisfied. Like what
she was in wisdom and goodness she is and has been
throughout, and will be, I have no doubt, to the end. r
(To M. M., Feb. 8, 1875.) He spent the autumn at
Norwood near London, busying himself, seated by her
couch-side, at his third volume of the Jewish Church,
in alternations of hope and despondency. He returned
to London in October. But the months went by, and
110 change for the better came. " I know not," he
writes to the same friend, " what report to give. So very
weak, so suffering, and yet such unconquerable cheer
fulness and vivacity." And he speaks of the invaluable
presence of her cousin, that most faithful of friends,
who is even now devoting herself to the sacred task
of deciphering and arranging a vast mass of his letters,
papers, and journals. "All the world is changed for
me," he adds ; "yet I find it best, and she also desired,
that I should fill up the time, not filled by my thoughts-
and works for her, with work of my own, and so I
struggle on." And through that sad winter, ever ready
to forget his own trouble if he could aid a friend or
O
further any good cause, he worked day by day at that
concluding volume. By February she could only just
rouse herself to express her joy that her husband
and Oxford were not to lose the presence of so
dear a friend as Professor Max Miiller. Still he
worked on by her side, placing, when speech had failed
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 133
her, some simple hymn, some Christian text, within her
sight. " Last night," he writes at last to his old pupil
and present successor, " she pronounced my name for
the last time ; this morning, for the last time, in
answer to my urgent appeal, she opened those dear
eyes upon me." On the 1st of March she passed away.
The last visitor to look upon her as she lay in the calm
of unconscious slumber was the Sovereign s youngest
son, the young Prince dear to Scotland for other
reasons than the Scottish title that he bears, whose
recovery from dangerous illness twelve months before
he had made the subject of some touching lines,
under the title of " The Untravelled Traveller," which
some here may have read.* It was Ash-Wednes
day the same day of the ecclesiastical year as that on
which he had lost his mother fourteen years before.
Something of his feelings towards both he embodied in
stanzas of characteristic and mournful beauty to which I
have already referred.!
He was, indeed, "in the very ashes and embers."
Yet the sympathy of his friends, the letters that poured
in upon him from every quarter of the world, cheered
him greatly. " The knowledge," he wrote once more,
" that my friends, my dear unfailing friends, knew what
she was and is, must be my enduring solace." " Do
not pity me for Thursday" (the day fixed for the
funeral). " What could be more sustaining and in
spiring than such a tribute rendered to the life of my
* Macmillau s Magazine, March 1875.
1* See note to page 89.
134 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
life, the heart of my heart ? " Some here may possibly
have been present at that vast gathering second only
in impressiveness to another that we have since seen
moving towards the same tomb which walked behind
him to her grave. How anxiously, during the long roll
of a music into whose secrets he could not enter, men
Avatched his face as he stood sustained and calm behind
the coffin. With what courage, what almost majesty, he
himself, before he returned to his darkened home, dis
missed with the final blessing that vast multitude,
awed, thrilled, and touched by the strange power and
resonance of that unfaltering voice a multitude that
included every class, from the Queen who loved her to
the poor workers for their daily bread whose lives she
had helped to cheer.
But the blow had been struck from which he was
never wholly to recover. He often loved to speak of
lives which great affliction had strengthened and ele
vated. He would point with admiration to that sorely-
tried friend the Primate of England, who had gathered
strength and renewed usefulness from crushing sorrows.
There is an exquisite passage in one of his latest ser
mons in which, after speaking of " the blank desolation
of sorrow with which we look on the lonely work that
lies before us when the voice that cheered us is silent,
and the hand that upheld us is cold in the grave,"
he speaks also of " the cloud of blessing that comes
out of that tender memory, and of the feeling that
the very solitude in which we are left calls for new
CHAP, in.] AllTHUU PENRIIYX STANLEY.
Two months after his bereavement he laments that
it is not so with himself. " Sorrow has not yet brought/
he writes, " strength and energy. I still hope that it
will." And his hope was not wholly in vain. Care was
taken that his home should be never wholly desolate.
He lived, as you know, for five years longer. Old
friends rallied round him ; new friendships were still to
be formed. One who for those last few years saw him
almost daily, and who repaid his warm affection by
a devoted and almost filial attachment, had never
known him in his married life. He recovered his full
interest in public events, in the questions which agi
tated the Church. He worked on at the same desk in
the library, with his wife s bust hard by on the table
by which she had sat. Much of his old elasticity and
vivacity returned ; his keen sense of humour never left
him. He was as ready as ever to take the field in
defence of any victim of theological prejudice or ran
cour. His interest in his humbler fellow-countrymen
grew deeper and wider. There lies before me at this
moment a letter from one of the mourners who filled the
Abbey at his funeral. It is written by a London lighter
man, i.e., a navigator of barges on the Thames, whom
he had accidentally encountered in front of the monu
ment to John Wesley on the Easter Monday of the
year before he died. Their chance conversation had led
to two or three friendly visits paid by invitation to the
Deanery. The humbler friend recalls not only his own
remark, in reference to the Dean s visits to Palestine, that
it must "have been beautiful to have been able to walk
1C RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
where the Saviour had walked," but the answer and
" the heavenly look " that came with it, " Yes, beautiful
to walk in the steps of the Saviour." And his visitor
and others like him learned to look on him with the
same love that we his old familiar friends bore to him.
Of work he had no lack, and he never rested from
work except in such rest as travel brought him. He
seemed to find a new lease of life, for a time at least,
in his visit made to America with two dear friends in
1878. There he renewed many friendships, formed
fresh ties, and drank in with delight the throng of new
ideas which pressed upon him in his first visit to that
untrodden region. If the volume of "Addresses and
Sermons in America" were the only relic left of his
literary labours, if all else from the Biography of Arnold
to the "Christian Institutions" were swept away, you
might find in that one volume almost everything
characteristic of the man, and some gems of a kind not
to be found in his earlier writings. To these I have
referred already.
At the meeting which was held to take steps to
commemorate him in the Chapter House of West
minster, the Archbishop of Canterbury told a touch
ing story of a poor old widow at Lambeth whose
face brightened up on hearing his name. " Frail
and trembling," she said, " I was trying to make my
way across Westminster Bridge among the carriages,
and afraid that I should be trodden down, when a
man stepped up to me and gave me his help, and
piloted me safely through the crowd. I asked him
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 137
to whom I was indebted; he merely pointed to the
great Abbey, You know that place, he said ; I am
its Dean. "
Let me add another characteristic anecdote. In his
absence from home for some weeks, a much respected
servant of the Abbey, a man of humble position, but
rich in health and strength, and vigour and stature, had
become permanently and hopelessly blind. My in
formant, his one surviving sister none but herself
could have told the tale so touchingly found him
seated by the side of the blind man, his own eyes
streaming with tears, which he whom he was trying to
comfort could not see, endeavouring by every possible
word and topic to inspire hope and courage into the
heart of one who was visited with what would have
been to himself the most terrible of afflictions. No
wonder that the sufferer found his burden lightened
by the aid of such a friend, and was encouraged
to take the first and hardest steps towards lead
ing, in spite of that great loss, a cheerful and useful
life.
From America he returned to his work refreshed and
strengthened for a time. But there was a sense among
those who knew him best that his hold on life was
slackening. Yet his busy brain never rested, nor did
the warm heart grow cold. It was only shortly before his
death that he published the volume on " Christian Insti
tutions," which embodies his latest views on the whole
field of Theology. The exquisite lines on " Death the
Reuniter," were written not long before death did its
138 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. m.
kindly work. His sermon on Thomas Carlyle was
preached in the February before the preacher died ;
that on Lord Beaconsfield so late as the 1st of May,
Within a few weeks of the end he wrote for TJie Times
a paper which appeared after his death on the revised
version of the New Testament ; an article on the
Westminster Confession he corrected for the Press,
on what proved to be his death -bed. In the year
but one before he died he had greatly enjoyed a
visit to Northern Italy and Venice in company with
his sister, Mary Stanley, and a young London physician,
whom he greatly loved, and who had been one of his
two companions in America. It was followed, in No
vember, by that sister s death, coming, if it must needs
have come, even as they would both have wished it, yet
for all that a sore trial. The last but one gone of
that bright circle ! Father, mother, brothers, sister,
gone before him !
Shall I remind you of the one storm of popular,
as opposed to clerical, opposition that he ever en
countered ? His own words will recall it. " When,"
he said, "I assented to a monument in the Abbey
to the Prince Imperial, I expected, after the sym
pathy shewn at the time of the funeral at Chisle-
hurst, nothing but universal approval. I did it with
out consulting or hearing from any one, and I still
believe that a few years hence it would have been
amongst the most generally interesting and attractive
of the Abbey monuments." Yet he was no Napoleonist,
and had little sympathy for either the First or the
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. 131)
Second Empire. His intended inscription for the pro
posed monument, was the untranslatable line of
Virgil-
" Sunt lacrimai rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt."
He asked a friend to suggest a corresponding English
quotation. He demurred to Wordsworth s lines,
" Men are we, and must grieve when e en the shade
Of that which once was great has passed away,"
as expressing a certain excess of homage to what had
fallen, and seemed more ready to acquiesce in the
vaguer words of the same poet,
" Yet tears to human sufferings are due."
The result of a debate in the House of Commons
seemed to him sufficient grounds for abandoning the
projected memorial ; but he never changed his opinion,
or was for a moment dismayed by the storm that arose.
" He feared no man s displeasure."
Let me hasten onwards. In the year before his
death, his friends had been made uneasy by occasional
failures in strength ; but he seemed in the last few
months to have recovered in no small degree his wonted
tone, and preached, if often with less than the usual
vigour, yet at times with all his old force and fire. But
the lamp of life was burning low. " I shall never go
again," he said, after his return from the triennial
dinner of Old Rugbeians ; " I do not mean that I shall
not live, but I feel that I am losing interest in these
140 RECOLLECTIONS OF [CHAP. in.
special and youthful meetings." Something of the same
kind he had whispered on his last return from Oxford.
This was within a fortnight of the commencement of
his last illness. The next day, however, he shewed the
keenest interest in an account given him by a young
Scottish friend of the feelings and language of a London
mob who were met together in support of Mr. Brad-
laugh. So anxious was he to the very last it was the
last time I saw him to find, if possible, some germ of
good in what most revolted the educated and religious
classes. A few days later he attended for some hours
the annual gathering within the Abbey precincts of
the Westminster Window Garden Exhibition, presided
over by the venerable Lord Shaftesbury, a meeting
in which he had for many years taken the deepest
interest.
But the end was at hand. On the following Saturday
he closed the afternoon service with a short sermon,
one of a course which he was delivering weekly on the
Beatitudes. Before the Psalms of the day were ended he
had left the Abbey, feeling ill ; he returned exhausted
with violent sickness, and preached his last sermon with
an effort which few but himself would have faced. For
the first time in his life at Westminster he was com
pelled to disappoint a party I believe of young
sailors who were expecting his guidance round the
Abbey.
He retired to bed on his return to the Deanery, and
except for a short time on the following Wednesday
never left it till, after two or three days of graver illness,
CHAP, in.] ARTHUR PEXRHYN STANLEY. 141
he passed away towards midnight on Monday, the 18th
of July.
You will not ask me to enter further into these sad
details. Some of those closest and dearest to him
were far away, unaware of his danger till all was over.
But his dear friend, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
came to his bedside, and took from him, before he left,
his dying words ; his one remaining sister and her
husband, his wife s sister, his two fellow-travellers
in America, both exceedingly dear to him, and his
friend and neighbour Canon Farrar, were with him to
the end, and all received, before utterance failed him,
his parting blessing.
Shall I do wrong in passing from that solemn scene
to language used not long before by himself, when
speaking of the wrestling of Jacob with his mysterious
visitor as the likeness and type of all spiritual struggles ?
" It describes also the last struggle of all, it may be in
the extreme of age or of weakness, in the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. There the soul finds itself alone on
the mountain ridge overlooking the unknown future ;
our company before is gone, the kinsfolk and friends
of many years are passed over the dark river, and
we are left alone with God. We know not in the
shadow of the night who it is that touches us we
feel only that the Everlasting arms are closing us
in ; the twilight of the morning breaks, we are bid
to depart in peace, for by a strength not our own
we have prevailed, and the path is made clear before
142 ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. [CHAP. m.
Let me only add the closing lines of the same
paper, " When the struggle is drawing to its end,
when the day breaks and the sun rises, there will
have been some who in that struggle have seen the
Face of God."
To him the night was past, and the daybreak had
dawned.
NOTE. The Volume of Addresses and Sermons delivered in
America from which the concluding paragraphs of Lecture III. are
taken, and to which special reference is made on pp. 51 and 136, was
published in New York in 1879. I was not aware till these pages
were in type that the work was not on sale in the United Kingdom.
An English Edition will shortly be published by Macmillan <fc Co.
THE END.
BRADBURY, AGXEW, & CO., FRI>TERS, WH1TEFR1ARS.
BX
5199
.S8B73
BRADLEY
RECOLLECTIONS OF
ARTHUR PENRHYN
STANLEY, LATE DEAN
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