Bishop Westcott

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FROM-THE- LIBRARY-OP
TRINITYCOLLEGETORDNTO

Presented by
Professor C.H. Powles

LEADERS OF THE CHURCH

1800—1900

EDITED BY GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

BISHOP WESTCOTT

JOSEPH CLAYTON

Author of" Fatter T) oiling : a {Memoir "

A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LIMITED

LONDON : 34 Great Castle Street, Oxford Circus, W

OXFORD : 106 S. Aldate's Street

1906

'tis

9068

JUN 1 4 1QQK

TO

H. A. KENNEDY, M.A.
SOMETIME VICAR OF ALL SAINTS'

LEEDS
IN FRIENDSHIP

GENERAL PREFACE

TT seems expedient that the origin and scope
of this new Series of Biographies should
be briefly explained.

Messrs. A. R. Mowbray and Co. had formed
the opinion that Ecclesiastical Biography is apt
to lose in attractiveness and interest, by reason
of the technical and professional spirit in which
it is generally handled. Acting on this opinion,
they resolved to publish some short Lives of
"Leaders of the Modern Church," written
exclusively by laymen. They conceived that
a certain freshness might thus be imparted
to subjects already more or less familiar, and
that a class of readers, who are repelled by
the details of ecclesiasticism, might be attracted
by a more human, and in some sense a more
secular, treatment of religious lives.

This conception of Ecclesiastical Biography
agreed entirely with my own prepossessions ;
and I gladly acceded to the publishers' request
that I would undertake the general superin
tendence of the series. I am not without
the hope that these handy and readable books
may be of some service to the English clergy.
They set forth the impressions produced on
vii

Vlll

the minds of devout and interested lay-people
by the characters and careers of some great
ecclesiastics. It seems possible that a know
ledge of those impressions may stimulate
and encourage that " interest in public affairs,
in the politics and welfare of the country,"
and in "the civil life of the people," which
Cardinal Manning noted as the peculiar virtue
of the English Priesthood ; and the lack of
which he deplored as one of the chief defects
of the Priesthood over which he himself
presided. I

G. W. E. RUSSELL.

S. Mary Magdalene's Day,
1905.

1 See "Hindrances to the Spread of the Catholic
Church in England," at the end of PurceH's Life of
Cardinal {Manning.

FOREWORD

T HAVE endeavoured in this book to give a
plain account of Bishop Westcott's lire and
teaching, and I have dwelt more on the social
and religious teaching than on the details of
episcopal biography, for two reasons. First, I
understand the object of this series is to present
Leaders of the Church of England from the
layman's point of view, and the average layman
is not greatly interested in the discussion of
ecclesiastical minutiae ; and in the second place,
Westcott's life was remarkably even and un
exciting. Rarely is life so orderly as Westcott's
was. It was not torn by internal passion, nor
vexed by the blows of enemies. No mental or
theological crisis is recorded, no parting of the
ways is arrived at. It was just the life of a man
who lived well and saw good days, who kept
faith with himself, with his neighbour, and with
his GOD, without violence.

The Rev. Arthur Westcott has given us in
full the story of his father's life, and has pub
lished all the chief letters the Bishop wrote.

This little book of mine cannot attempt to
rival that excellent piece of biographical work,
ix «

and it was only after obtaining Canon Westcott's
consent that I ventured to set about writing it.

I am greatly indebted to the Rev. J. Llewelyn
Davies For the help he has given me ; and
my best thanks are also due to the Dean of
Durham, to the Rev. John Carter (Pusey
House, Oxford), to Canon H. S. Holland, to
my brother (Mr. T. Clayton), and to others
whose assistance has been so generously given.

The Editor of this series has not only been
kind enough to help me with the proofs ; he has
also corrected many small errors of fact, and
has adjusted many broken sentences to a better
literary standard. I accept these corrections
and adjustments, and am glad to acknowledge
them.

J.c.

STEEPLE CLAYDON, BUCKS.,
February , 1906.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACK

I. THE SCHOOLBOY - I

II. THE UNDERGRADUATE - 14

III. THE SCHOOLMASTER - 26

IV. CANON OF PETERBOROUGH - 46
V. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY 59

VI. CANON OF WESTMINSTER - "75

VII. BISHOP OF DURHAM - 94

VIII. THE END - - 116

IX. RELIGIOUS TEACHING - 132

X. SOCIAL VIEWS AND ASPIRATIONS - 156

APPENDIX : SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF WESTCOTT

BY THE REVO]. LLEWELYN DAVIES - - 183

Leaders of the Church

1800-1900

BISHOP WESTCOTT

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOOLBOY

"DROOKE FOSS WESTCOTT was born
in Bloomsbury, Birmingham, on January
12, 1825, and, save for a few years spent at
Erdington, a village near by, (where the curate,
the Rev. T. Short, prepared him for school,)
and for the holidays, all his boyhood was passed
in that city. He was the only surviving son
of Frederick Brooke Westcott, a Birmingham
manufacturer — a studious, scientific man,
keenly interested in geology and botany — and
Sarah his wife, daughter of William Armitage,
another well-respected manufacturer. Mr.
Westcott's scientific knowledge must have
been considerable, for he acted for some years
as Hon. Secretary of the Birmingham Horti
cultural Society, delivered lectures on botany
and vegetable physiology at the Sydenham

2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Medical School, Birmingham, and compiled,
with G. B. Knowles, The Floral Cabinet and
Magazine of Sxotic Botany, a book useful in its
day, and now rare and valuable.

Bishop Westcott's grandfather, Brooke Foss
Westcott, was an officer in the Army, and his
great-grandfather, Foss Westcott, served the
Honourable East India Company at Madras,
and lies buried in Cobham Church in Kent.

At twelve years of age Westcott entered
King Edward VTs School in Birmingham, and
he remained there till the time came to leave
for Cambridge in 1844. At the end of two
years he arrived at the highest form in the
school, and passed into the immediate care of
the Head Master, James Prince Lee, after
wards first Bishop of Manchester. Lee was at
once favourably impressed by young Westcott's
school-work, and a strong mutual regard sprang
up in those years between the boy and the
Head Master. On more than one occasion
in later life Westcott declared his passionate
admiration of Lee's character and gifts. In
1870, when his old Schoolmaster was just
dead, Westcott wrote in the Quardian : —

" I almost despair of explaining how our
devotion to him was created in us. It certainly
did not come from the acceptance of definite
opinions, for we were almost forced to be
independent ; nor yet from the recollection of
instruction in detail, for our instruction in this
respect was even desultory and irregular ; but

'Bishop Wettcott 3

it was rather kindled (no other image will con
vey my feeling) by contact with a mind which
revealed to us in every lesson that intellectual
and moral warmth which is the evidence and
the source of the highest life. We recognized
magnificent power, wide interests, large sym
pathy, inexhaustible freshness, stern justice,
and, above all, an invincible faith in the laws
of thought and in the laws of language. . . .
He produced among us an enthusiasm for work
which he himself rejoiced to trust. He made
us feel that there was something which we
could do, and not only something which we
could receive. He familiarized us with the
original sources of criticism and history by
giving us free access to his splendid library.
He encouraged us by his breadth of illustration
to make every individual taste minister some
element to the fulness of our common work.
He enabled us to see that scholarship is nothing
less than one method of dealing with the whole
problem of human existence, in which art and
truth and goodness are inextricably combined.
It may be from the direction which my own
studies have since taken, that I always recall
with the liveliest gratitude his lessons in the
Greek Testament. It seemed to me at the
time, as it still seems, that all our other teaching
was consummated in these, and that in them
there was a centre of unity to which all else
converged. ... It was an incalculable advantage
to be led to examine for ourselves the actual

4 Leaden of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

sources of the sacred text, to investigate its
language with honest and true faith in the
significance of every detail of expression and
arrangement, to find in historical theology the
crown of scholarship."

Twenty-three years later, in 1893, Bishop
Westcott, then an old man of seventy, visited
Birmingham to attend the opening of a new
girls' school on King Edward's Foundation, and
his speech on that occasion included a glowing
tribute to Prince Lee. It is well to recall some
of this testimony, for it reveals how much
Westcott felt he was indebted to the famous
Head Master of King Edward's School : —

" When I desire to express my best and
loftiest wishes for the Foundation to which I
owe the preparation of my life's work, it is
natural I should look back to my own master,
James Prince Lee — superior, as I believe, among
the great masters of his time — for the guidance
of my thoughts. Some things never grow old.
His presence, his voice, his manner, his ex
pression, have lost nothing of their vivid power
in half a century. I can recall, as if it were from
a lesson of yesterday, the richness and force of
the illustrations by which he brought home to
us a battle-piece of Thucydides, with a land
scape of Virgil, or a sketch of Tacitus ; the
eloquence with which he discoursed on prob
lems of life and thought suggested by some
favourite passages in Butler's ^Analogy ; the
depths which he opened to us in the inexhaust-

'Bishop Westcott 5

ible fulness of the Apostolic words ; the appeals
which he made to our highest instincts, reveal
ing us to ourselves, in crises of our school
history or in the history of the nation. We
might be able to follow him or not ; we might,
as we grew older, agree with particular opinions
which he expressed, or not ; but we were stirred
in our work, we felt a little more the claims
of duty, the pricelessness of opportunity, the
meaning of life. . . . He made us feel that in
all learning we must be active and not receptive
only. . . . He encouraged us to collect, to
examine, to arrange facts which lay within the
range of our own reading for his use in dealing
with some larger problem. In this way we
gained, little by little, a direct acquaintance
with the instruments and methods or criticism,
and came to know something of confident
delight in using them. There was, we rejoiced
to discover, a little thing which we could do,
a service which we could render, in offering
which we could make towards the fulness of
the work on which we were engaged. . . . We
had in those days for the most part simple texts
of the classics — the editions of Tauchnitz or
Trubner, without note or comment. Every
difficult phrase was, therefore, a problem ; and
grammars and lexicons were the only helps at
hand for the solution of it. But we were
trained to recognize the elements with which
we had to deal, and to trust great principles of
interpretation. Such discipline could not fail

6 Lcaaers of the Church 1800-1900

to brace and stimulate ; and, lest our zeal
should flag, the few English commentaries
which existed were made to furnish terrible
warnings against the neglect of thoroughness
and accuracy. For * Mr. Lee ' — that was the
simple tide by which we always thought of him
to the last — had an intense belief in the exact
force of language. ... In translating we were
bound to see that every syllable gave its testi
mony . . . and, if I am to select one endow
ment which I have found precious for the
whole work of life beyond all others, it would
be the belief in words which I gained through
the severest discipline of verbal criticism.
Belief in words is the foundation of belief in
thought and of belief in man. Belief in words
is the guide to the apprehension of the pro
phetic element in the works of genius. . . .
But the strictest precision of scholarship was
never allowed by our master to degenerate into
pedantry. Scholarship was our training — and
I have not yet found any better — but he
pressed every interest of art or science, of
history or travel, into its service. The welcome

Greeting after the holidays was, ' Well, what
ave you read ? What have you seen ? ' The
reward of a happy answer was to be commis
sioned to fetch one precious volume or another
from his library — I can see their places still —
in order to fix a thought by a new association.
So we grew familiar with the look of famous
books, and there, is, I believe, an elevating

Bishop Westcott 7

power even in such outward acquaintanceship.
Then came lectures on art and archaeology and
physics, which he enabled the senior boys to
attend. ... I can remember watching in the
darkened theatre of the Philosophical Society
for the first public exhibition of the electric
light in Birmingham. ... I remember, too,
a striking series of lectures on painting by
Haydon, and one sentence in them suggested
a parable which I often ponder. * Look,* he
said, pointing to a beautiful chalk drawing of
Dentatus by his pupil, Leach, 'it has no out
line. There is no outline in nature.' { There
is no outline in nature ' — is not this parable
worth pondering ? I lay stress on this wider,
if more fragmentary, teaching, because I believe
it was essential to our master's view of his work,
and that it is still the most effective way of
awakening dormant powers."

So Bishop Westcott spoke of Prince Lee,
and no more vivid picture of his own school
days at Birmingham could well be given.

From an article in Sdgbastonia, we get some
impressions of Westcott, the schoolboy, from
the pens of contemporaries at King Edward
VI's School :—

He is remembered as " a shy, nervous,
thoughtful boy from the first," " seldom, if ever,
joining in any games." " His sweet, patient,
eager face ; " " his intensity and keenness of
look ; " " his habit of shading his eyes with one
hand while he thought ; " " his quick and eager

8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 90°

walk, with head bent forward ; his smile, won
derfully winning then, as in later life ; his devo
tion to work, and his fainting once in school, in
consequence," are recalled. We are told of the
"authoritative decision" of his answers in class ;
his conversation out of school about things
" which very few schoolboys talk about — points
of theology, problems of morality, and the
ethics of politics." His younger schoolfellows
regarded him with a certain awe as one alto
gether above themselves, and his influence over
them was as good as it was great. Thus one
writes : " One of the chief features of his School
life was his reverence. To see his pained face,
when any wrong or rash word was spoken, was
a lesson." And another writes : " The beauty
of his character shone out from him, and one
felt his moral goodness in his presence." And
a third : " An atmosphere of right and purity
surrounded him, and his smile, and kindness,
and courtesy, which was real and constant to
any small boy who had to do with him, only
made us feel that it would be unbearable to
rouse his anger or even disapproval."

In 1842, with two of his school friends,
C. Evans and J. S. Purton (both distinguished
scholars in after years), Westcott started and
edited J(ing Sdward the Sixth's Magazine, and a
sentence in the first number sets forth that the
aims of the new venture are (among other
things) " to give a somewhat higher tone to a
schoolboy's standard of morality, and to infuse

Bishop Westcott 9

a better spirit into his everyday conduct
towards his companions." If these were not
Westcott's own words they certainly stood for
his faith and practice at King Edward's. A
brief history of the School, which appeared
in this magazine, was the work of Westcott,
and was, in fact, his first printed essay.

Westcott's life-long interest in political
questions began at Birmingham. As a very
small boy he had seen the great demonstrations
in favour of the first Reform Bill, and his years
at school were the years of the Chartist Move
ment. He saw Thomas Attwood, and heard
Feargus O'Connor, and, while young Westcott
would go without his dinner to hear the
agitator speak, his opinion of the latter
was severely unfavourable. There were riots
in Birmingham in 1839, and exciting Chartist
meetings in the famous Bull Ring, and arrests
of speakers, and large numbers of soldiers were
brought into the town to prevent meetings being
held. All these things Westcott observed and
pondered, and though neither in youth nor age
was he a Radical in his politics, he early noted
and deplored the anti-social bitterness, and the
ugly separations of class from class in England,
and longed for the recognition of common
responsibilities, and the setting-up of fellowship
among men. Bishop Westcott often referred
to those stormy days of his boyhood, and to
the introduction to the " Condition-of-England
Question " that Chartism gave him. He

c

i o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

recalled in his speech to the Northumberland
miners at their Gala Day at Blyth in 1894,
that during his School and College life he had
followed the history of Chartism, and had seen
houses burnt down in Birmingham and the
streets occupied by soldiers. And at the very
last visit paid to Birmingham, in 1898, Bishop
Westcott, addressing the Christian Social Union,
spoke of the stirring years of his boyhood : —

"We who passed through them dimly felt
that the old order was changing and that a
revolution was going on about us of which the
form and the issue could not be foreseen. The
first public event of which I have a clear
recollection, was the meeting of the Political
Union on New Hall Hill in 1831 ; and I can
see now the Crown and Royal Standard in front
of the platform, which reassured my child's
heart, troubled by wild words of violence and
rebellion. The Chartist Movement followed
soon after. I listened to Feargus O'Connor
and saw the blackened ruins in the Bull Ring
guarded by soldiers. Then came the Corn
Laws Agitation and the Factory Acts. The
Young England Party strove to mitigate the
antagonism of classes, and Disraeli described in
his memorable triology, Coningsby, Sybil, and
Tattered, the conflicts of opinion and life and
aspiration by which we were surrounded.
Meanwhile, the Oxford Movement was raising
in new forms the fundamental questions of
authority and faith, and Strauss assailed, with

Bishop Westcott 1 1

unmatched power, the foundations of the
Gospel. Those were stirring years. Political,
economic, social, religious changes came in
quick succession, and looking forward already
to the work of a Priest and a teacher, I watched
them with the keenest interest. I saw how
movement acted upon movement, and how all
the movements pointed to something deeper
than any one showed ; so 1 recognized that I was
bound to study the problems of the new age, /
no less than the lessons of the old world, if I
was to take a just view of the office to which I
aspired." "

Invaluable are these pieces of autobiography
for those who desire to see clearly the growth
and development of Westcott's mind.

Studious and reflective, spending his holidays
mostly in country rambles in search of old
churches and famous ruins, and filling sketch
books with careful drawings, caring more for
natural history and poetry, than for any school
boy sport, Westcott passed through the seven
years at King Edward's School, and then left
for Cambridge with a disciplined character that
already bore the impress of high ideals and
strong convictions concerning justice and duty
to GOD and man. Neither in youth nor in {
manhood did games or amusements attract him
(though at school he confessed to a liking for
chess), and even such questions as Mormonism

1 This speech, in full, appeared under the title of " Social
Service," in The Commonwealth for January, 1899.

1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

— made interesting by the arrival of Brigham
Young's first missionaries at Birmingham —
and Positivism proved more interesting than
athletics.

It must not be thought, however, that
Westcott was, in any sense, a weakling.
He lived long and saw good days, and few
men enjoyed such freedom from sickness. But
the school was a town-school, and games did
not loom so large in Prince Lee's scheme of
education as they do in the modern Head
Master's. Scholarship, wisdom, the well-trained
intellect — these were the prizes set before
Edwardians sixty years ago ; cricket and
football had not then become a life's business
for thousands, still less were these excellent
games a matter of grave and absorbing interest
to scholars and men of brains.

In the present rage for athletic exercises, we
are apt to forget that neither physical health
nor physical courage depends on such things.
Westcott was a striking example of the truth
that good health, and the courage, endurance,
and other qualities that depend largely on good
health for their existence, belong to the man or
woman of orderly temperate life and well-
disciplined habits, rather than to the eager
follower of sports and pastimes.1

Young Westcott was never pugnacious, but
he could handle his fists when occasion

1 It may be remarked that Westcott was a fine skater —
his sole athletic accomplishment.

Bishop Westcott 13

demanded. One winter 's day an unexpected
attack on a smaller and weaker school-fellow,
by a rough lad armed with stone-kernelled
snowballs, provoked Westcott to lay down
his books by the roadside and " go for "
the assailant, whom he pummelled and drove
away beaten. The small boy he championed
was T. M. Middlemore-Whithard, and a strong
attachment to his protector followed. The
parents of the two boys were neighbours, and
the friendship ripened. Very soon Westcott,
then seventeen, was in love with his school
fellow's eldest sister, and this lady, Sarah
Louisa Mary Whithard, ten years later became
his wife, to the lasting happiness of both.

Already, then, in the Birmingham schoolboy
we find the characteristics of Bishop Westcott's
life — the religious and intellectual activities,
nourished and fostered by Prince Lee ; the
lively interest in social questions, set up by the
spectacle of the Chartist agitation ; the intense
devotion to home and family life, and to the
sacredness of the marriage tie, rooted in the
long courtship of his future wife.

In October, 1844, loaded with school-prizes,
Westcott entered Trinity College, Cambridge.

Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER II

THE UNDERGRADUATE

A T Cambridge, Westcott, the studious school
boy, grew into the scholar and the man of
learning. He read hard as an Undergraduate
at Trinity, rising at five ; and, allowing a
scanty interval for breakfast, and the usual two
hours in the morning for attendance at College
Lectures, he continued at his books till two,
lunching on a biscuit. Then came a walk, with
a friend for company, and dinner in Hall at the
uncomfortable hour of four. Chapel took place
at six, and, after service, Westcott settled down
to his books again to read till midnight — and
later.

The pleasures of social intercourse were
largely omitted from such a scheme of work as
this, and, indeed, Westcott was as little drawn
to breakfasts or wine-parties as he was to the
river or the cricket-field. It was not that he
was altogether a recluse or a mere bookworm —
his friendships were strong and faithful — but
that he pursued his ideal of scholarship for
future usefulness in the world, and his heart
was in the pursuit.

Bishop Westcott 15

Some amount of relaxation was allowed, too,
and this was found in the weekly meetings of
an Undergraduate circle, called "The Philo
logical Society." At these meetings an essay
was read and discussed, and abstruse topics
concerning ancient Greece or Rome generally
filled the programme. Westcott really enjoyed
these gatherings. His close friends, J. Llewelyn
Davies (afterwards Vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale),
C. B. Scott (Head Master of Westminster),
and D. J. Vaughan (Canon of Peterborough),
were of the club, and common interests and
serious religious convictions drew these four
men together. " We were in the strongest
religious sympathy," wrote Mr. Llewelyn Davies
years later. " We were studying classics, and we
were eager to gain any knowledge that might
be of use to us. There were at the same time
abundant differences between us as to antece
dents and temperaments to make our friend
ships the more interesting." They were not
the only notable men of that year. Professor
J. E. B. Mayor, Bishop Barry, Lord Alwyne
Compton (sometime Bishop of Ely), the late
Dean Howson, the late Lord Derby, E. H.
Bickersteth, late Bishop of Exeter, were all at
Trinity in 1845, an<^ Westcott belonged to
their set.

With all his hard reading for the Examina
tion Schools, Westcott was on his guard against
the temptation to study merely for the sake of
rewards and prizes, and set himself to keep

1 6 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

alive other interests not directly profitable. He
encouraged his old love for botany, geology,
and architecture, and continued to make use
of his sketch-book. He read widely, too, for
recreation — poetry chiefly. Westcott never had
any real liking for novels. Keble's Christian
Tear he appreciated at that time with an enthu
siasm which seems strange to a generation that
still, indeed, buys that famous book, and
bestows it on friends and pupils for a gift or a
school-prize, but rarely reads it. So great,
in fact, was Westcott' s admiration for Keble
that he, with the courage of youth, avowed his
preference for the Christian Tear to Tennyson,
and held the devout Anglican singer a truer
poet than Wordsworth or Goethe ! The
remarkable thing is that Westcott should have
found time for Goethe at all ; but he practised
an economy of time that gave every hour its
full value. He had great powers of concentra
tion, and his memory was excellent.

Honours fell thick upon Westcott at Cam
bridge. In March, 1846, he won the Battie
Scholarship; a month later he was elected to
a Scholarship at Trinity, and in June of the
same year Sir William Browne's Greek Ode
Medal was awarded to him. In 1847, this
Greek Ode Medal again fell to Westcott,
and in addition he won the Members' Latin
Essay Prize. The Ode had to be recited
before Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert
handed him the medal. In January, 1848,

Bishop Westcott 17

came the Mathematical Tripos, and Westcott
was placed 24th Wrangler, a position that more
than satisfied him. He at once took his B.A.
degree, and then in February came the Classical
Tripos, and Westcott was bracketed first in the
First Class with his friend C. B. Scott, to the
unmitigated delight of both. The Chancellor's
Medal for Classics he also obtained in the
course of that year.

Distinguished as his University career was,
the laurels Westcott earned and won never
affected the sweetness of his character nor the
deep humility of his mind. His intimate friend
could write of him l : —

" Profoundly reverent, affectionate, single-
minded, enthusiastic, blameless, he seemed to
those who knew him an example of the purest
Christian goodness. Cambridge can hardly
have had at any time a more ideal young
student."

On Sunday afternoons at Cambridge West
cott taught regularly in a Church of England
Sunday School in Jesus Lane — no easy matter
for one who considered such teaching as of the
very first importance to England. Westcott
was always anxious that Sunday School teachers
should be equipped more efficiently for their
work — he found his fellow-teachers at Jesus
Lane dull and heavy — and it pained him as an
Undergraduate, as it pained him years after-

1 Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies in The Cambridge 2^/Vw,
Oct., 1901.

1 8 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

wards at Durham, to find that the teaching of

Christian verities on Sundays was often a very

poor and unsatisfactory performance compared

with the teaching of arithmetic on week-days.

Westcott looked for help for himself and his

fellow-teachers, and was disappointed ; but he

stuck to his Sunday School class, conscious

that he was not exactly successful, and yet

unwilling to abandon the task. At an earlier

age he had realized the essential oneness of

mankind, and the social responsibilities laid

upon all : and this Sunday School teaching

brought him in contact with a world different

in many ways from the society of Trinity

College, Cambridge, and he felt that in some

slight way he was passing on to others a share

of the gifts he received. A period of religious

doubt and uncertainty did not make him give

up the Sunday School. The Thirty-nine

Articles troubled him at Cambridge, as they

troubled many another loyal Anglican, and for

a time even the very foundations of Christianity

seemed to be shaking. But Westcott had the

will to believe. The doctrine of the Incarnation

of the SON of GOD appealed strongly to him,

and his habits of life were temperate and

well-disciplined. Neither passion nor ambition

called him to break away from tradition, and

his mind instinctively preferred order and

obedience to revolt and revolution. Authority

was always a more sacred thing in Westcott's

eyes than liberty. So the doubts, and the very

Bishop Westcott 19

real pain they caused, passed away before he
took his degree, and once and for all Westcott's
faith in CHRIST and in the Church of England
was established — to remain unshaken till the
end.

Towards Rome Westcott never had any
leaning, though he confessed to an admiration
for the monastic life and for the organization of
the Religious Orders. The details of Roman
Catholic ceremonial seemed tiresome to him,
and the dramatic ritual of the Mass, with all its
solemnity and beauty, made little impression
upon a man who suspected the gratification of
the senses as a step on a dangerous road. The
idea of a visible Church of GOD on earth, and
the awful necessity of finding salvation in its
communion, did not strike Westcott as they
struck his Oxford contemporaries. To West
cott the Kingdom of GOD was rather a fellow
ship in CHRIST than a society rigid in its form ;
and though he held to the Apostolic Succes
sion as an outward, visible sign of necessary
authority for duly-ordained ministers, it was not
on the visible things that his soul dwelt, but
on the invisible. The grounds of the Papal
claim to obedience left Westcott unmoved ; he
held the Reformation to be a matter for thank
fulness, not regret, and the faults in the Church
of England abhorrent to Anglo-Catholics —
departures from and violations of Catholic
custom in public services — seemed to Westcott
trivial and unimportant. Not that Westcott,

20 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the Undergraduate, with his large views, was
indifferent to small things. In matters of
conduct he was unusually scrupulous for a
young man, reproaching himself for wasting
time if he spent an hour or two in conversation
not definitely informing or edifying, denying
himself music lest it should take the place
of more serious pleasures, and resolutely turn
ing his back on many common and lawful
luxuries of the body in the way of food and
furniture. His personal purity was unsullied.
Westcott never sowed to the flesh in loose
talk, base suggestion, and riotous imagina
tion, and so never reaped the harvest of the
profligate. Any hint at impurity or approval
of sexual irregularity so shocked and startled
him that such speech was impossible in his
presence. And with the body and its affec
tions duly submissive, Westcott's mind and
intelligence had the freer play. To quote again
from his friend Mr. Llewelyn Davies : —

" There seemed to be no subject of which
he did not learn something, and his whole soul
was in his studies. His faith possessed him
and governed his whole intellectual and moral
life."

For three years after taking his degree,
Westcott remained at Cambridge. Private
pupils came to him at once, and among the
earliest of these pupils were three Trinity
Scholars, two of them, J. B. Lightfoot and E. W.
Benson, old Edwardians from Birmingham,

Bishop Westcott 21

and the third, F. J. A. Hort. This was the
beginning of Westcott's friendship with these
three distinguished men. Lightfoot preceded
him in the bishopric of Durham, Benson was
made Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hort
received the appointment of Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and be
came Westcott's co-worker in the production
of the Cambridge Greek New Testament. All
three men died in harness, and Westcott, though
their senior, outlived them. As a private coach,
Westcott was extremely successful, and his
time was fully occupied with pupils. In spite
of this, he succeeded in 1849 in winning the
Members' Latin Essay Prize, and two years
later, after being elected to a Fellowship at
Trinity, he gained the Norrisian Prize with an
essay on the Elements of the Qospel Harmony.
This essay — an altogether extraordinary per
formance tor a young man of twenty-five — has
been reprinted many times, and is known to all
New Testament students as *An Introduction to
the Study of the Gospels, for so it was renamed
by its author when he revised and enlarged it
a few years later. It was Westcott's first serious
literary effort, and it has remained one of his
most popular books, and is now accepted as a
standard work. The wide reading of Early
Christian Fathers and late German critics
revealed in the book, the freshness of its thought,
and the depth of its religious feeling, won an
immediate recognition ; and when we turn over

22 Leaaers of the Church 1800-1900

the pages of the Introduction to the Study of the
Qospels to-day, more than fifty years after its
first appearance, we are still struck by the
knowledge and the devout earnestness of the
author. It is not the work of a merely learned
man, and even less of an ordinary unlettered
Bible-lover. It is the work of a scholar
sincerely and devotedly attached to the funda
mental dogmas of Christianity, who has brooded
over these dogmas and known the difficulties of
belief. Its author is plainly alive to the neces
sity for setting the reasonableness of things
before people.

In 1851, his last year at Cambridge, West-
cott was ordained Deacon by his old School
master, Prince Lee, then Bishop of Manchester,
at Prestwich Parish Church, and six months
later, at Bolton Parish Church, he received
Priest's Orders. His Fellowship at Trinity
was sufficient title. The cold formality of
these Ordination Services depressed Westcott
intensely, and it is difficult for Church people
who have only witnessed the dignified ceremonial
now attached by most Anglican Bishops to Con
firmation and Ordination, to realize the dreary,
lifeless character of these occasions fifty years
ago. Even the Bible, a shabby, much-used
volume, presented to the newly-ordained by the
Bishop, was only a " property " Bible, and had
to be returned to the authorities at the conclu
sion of the service. Westcott bitterly resented
not being allowed to retain his Bible, and his

Bishop Westcott 23

disappointment at the perfunctory way the
whole business was conducted was not con
cealed. Years afterwards, when his own sons
were ordained by Bishop Lightfoot in Durham
Cathedral, Westcott noted the change that had
come over the Church of England and its epis
copate in the matter of Ordination and other
services, and expressed his thankfulness at the
increased solemnity and reverence in public
worship.

All through these early years at Cambridge
Westcott lived eminently the life of a student,
and that of a student of the things of GOD ;
but that fact did not prevent his attachment
to Mary Whithard from growing and ripening.
The two met in the vacations and wrote
weekly letters ; and a year after taking his
degree, Westcott was formally accepted as
the engaged lover. Four years later the
marriage took place.

Westcott's interest in public affairs suffered
no more than his love-making from the claims
of scholarship and theological reading. He
could find no sympathy for Louis Philippe
when that bourgeois king was dethroned in
1848, and the social contrasts of riches and
misery in England made him uneasy and dis
tressed. His loyalty to the Crown, and in
particular to Queen Victoria, was then, as it
was in all his after life, very pronounced, and
he actually could make it an excuse for not
corresponding with a friend in Ireland, in

2 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

1849, tnat ne would hold no communication
with a rebel country.

In 1851 Westcott left Cambridge, and
accepted an Assistant-Mastership at Harrow
under Dr. Vaughan. There was some talk of
his being made Principal of the newly-estab
lished Victoria College, Jersey, and he forwarded
testimonials as candidate, but he soon withdrew
from competition for the post and declared his
preference for Harrow.

Cambridge brought lasting friendships into
Westcott's life ; it tested his character and his
mental powers, and he did not fail under the
strain. In spite of his vast reading and his
intimate friendships, few men had been less
directly influenced at the University by the
great writers of his time. He deliberately
declined reading the works of F. D. Maurice
on the ground that his own development might
be more independent ; and though Westcott's
theology is distinctly Maurician, it was not
learnt from Maurice. There is no sudden
change of heart, no startling conversion, no
mental crisis, in the story of Bishop Westcott's
life. It was all of a piece throughout. The
Birmingham schoolboy just grew into a man at
Cambridge : his character became stronger, his
brain more vigorous. Westcott's departure
from Cambridge was a great blow to his friends.
His first friends, Llewelyn Davies, David
Vaughan and C. B. Scott, had already left
Trinity in 1850 ; and it was the men he had

Bishop Westcott 25

" coached," Benson, Lightfoot and Hort,
particularly, who mourned his absence. Dr.
Vaughan invited him to Harrow. He felt it
was time for a change of work. Much as
he loved Cambridge, it was never his part to
put personal preferences before the summons
of duty.

26 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER III

THE SCHOOLMASTER

January, 1852, till Easter, 1870,
Westcott was at Harrow. He was
married to Sarah Louisa Mary Whithard at
S. Philip's Church, Bristol, on December 23,
1852, and a few weeks later they were settled
at Harrow in a small house called "The
Butts." In 1863, on the death of the Rev. W.
Oxenham, Westcott moved to take possession
of his large house, which held some forty
boarders. Westcott's school-work during those
eighteen years was chiefly the correction of
Sixth Form composition ; he was never a
form-master, and his occasional class-teaching
was hardly successful. Both boys and masters
felt that Westcott was not like other men.

One old Harrow pupil, Sir Charles Dal-
rymple, wrote in The Harrovian at the time
of Westcott's death : —

" No doubt there was an element of mystery
about Westcott in those remote days. It was,
I believe, the mystery of a great reputation, of
which we boys knew but little, though we were
conscious of it. He was not widely known at

Bishop Westcott 27

Harrow in those earlier years, for he was shy,
reserved, sensitive, a laborious student. Nor
do I think that he ever largely affected the
public life of the School, though he left marks
deep and ineffaceable on pupils who knew him
well. It is extraordinary to realize that in
1853 he was only thirty, for he seemed to us
full of learning (as indeed he was) and weighted
with care. He took the Sixth Form every
now and then, generally at Fourth School, and
impressed us all with his earnest interest in the
lesson. I fear that the Sixth Form took some
liberties with him, and there was occasional
disturbance, which would have been impossible
in the presence of the Head Master. . . . To
his own pupils, or to Sixth Form fellows who
went to him with composition, the visits to his
beautiful study at < The Butts,' where he lived for
some years, were a great delight, and they acted
on us like a tonic. We felt, I think, that to
bring poor work to him was specially inappro
priate, and that we must give time of our best
whatever it might be. The pains that he took ;
the encouragement that he gave to poor efforts ;
the high ideal that he set before us — these can
readily be recalled. Then he would pass for a
little time to pleasant talk, and if any reference
to foreign travel occurred he would say, ( You
remember such a cathedral and the carving at
the head of the columns,' and he would hastily
draw, sometimes at the corner of one's poor
exercise, a lovely bit of carved foliage — there is

2 8 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

no doubt that his knowledge of architecture
was wide and accurate — and one went away
refreshed and braced from contact alike with
his cultivation and his sympathy."

Another of Westcott's Harrow pupils wrote
in Edgbastonia : —

" I remember very well that he at first
rather shocked in some ways our boyish con
servatism. The hurried pace with which he
passed up and down the street, carried him up
the school steps with a gait which was unlike
the stately stride associated with the idea of a
master. But even the somewhat unimpression
able mind of a lower Fifth Form boy very soon
found out that he was in the presence of no
common man ; and the influence he began to
exercise then he has exercised ever since, upon
older boys, upon Undergraduates, upon younger
Graduates, and upon older Graduates. No one
can have come within the sphere of his personal
influence without having been most deeply
impressed by it."

An article in the Pilot by Mr. G. W. E.
Russell may well be reprinted here : —

" There will be plenty of panegyrists to
describe Dr. Westcott as Critic and Author,
Professor and Bishop. Comparatively few
people remember him as a Schoolmaster. I
look back over three and thirty years, and
recall him as I first knew him at Harrow ; with
his 'puny body,' anxious forehead, and faint
voice, one of the few noticeable and interesting

Bishop Westcott 29

figures in a society dominated by Convention
and Commonplace. The great majority of our
masters, I think, we honestly contemned, or at
best regarded with a good-humoured tolerance.
But there was a kind of mystery about West-
cott which was distinctly impressive. He was
hardly visible in the common life of the School.
He lived remote, aloof, apart, above. It must
be presumed that the boys who boarded in
his house knew something of him, but with
the School in general he never came in contact.
His special work was to supervise the com
position, English and classical, of the Sixth
Form ; and on this task he lavished all his
minute and scrupulous scholarship, all his
genuine enthusiasm for literary beauty. But,
till we reached the Sixth, we saw Westcott only
on public occasions, and one of these occasions
was the calling over of names on half-holidays,
styled < Absence* at Eton and 'Bill' at Harrow.
To see Westcott performing this function
made one, even in those puerile days, feel that
a beautifully delicate instrument was being
wasted on a rough work of mere routine, for
which it was eminently unfitted. We had sense
enough to know that Westcott was a man of
learning and distinction, altogether outside the
beaten track of schoolmasters' accomplish
ments ; and that he had performed achieve
ments in scholarship and divinity which great
men recognized as great. * Calling Bill ' was
an occupation well enough suited to his

30 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

colleagues — for Huggins or Buggins or Brown
or Green — but it was actually pathetic to see
this frail embodiment of culture and piety
contending with the clamour and tumult of five
hundred obstreperous schoolboys.

" It was not only as a great scholar that we
revered Westcott. We knew, by that mysterious
process by which boys get to know something
of the real as distinct from the official characters
of their masters, that he was a saint. There
were strange stories in the School about his
\ ascetic way of living. We were told that he
wrote his sermons on his knees. We heard
that he never went into local society, and that
he read no newspaper except the Guardian.
When Dr. Liddon, at the height of his fame as
the Bampton Lecturer of 1866, came to
Harrow to preach on Founder's Day, Westcott
would not dine with the Head Master to meet
him. He could not spare three hours from
prayer and study ; but he came in for half-an-
hour's conversation after dinner.

"All that we saw and heard in chapel
confirmed what we were told. We saw the
bowed form, the clasped hands, the rapt gaze,
as of a man in worship who was really solus cum
Solo, and not, as the manner of some of his
colleagues was, sleeping the sleep of the just,
or watching for the devotional delinquencies of
the Human Boy. Various incidents, trifling but
significant, went to confirm the same impression.
We heard that when Westcott celebrated

Bishop Westcott 31

the Holy Communion in the parish church,
he took the Ablutions, though they were
not customary there ; and, after celebrating in
the church in the early morning, he remained
for prayer and worship in the school-chapel at
the late Celebration. But it was as a preacher
to the boys that he made the deepest impres
sion. His sermons were rare events ; but we
looked forward to them as to something quite
out of the common groove. There were none
of the accessories which generally attract boyish
imagination — no rhetoric, no purple patches,
no declamation, no pretence of spontaneity.
The voice was so faint as to be almost
inaudible ; the language was totally unadorned ;
the sentences were closely packed with mean
ing ; and the meaning was not always easy.
But the charm lay in distinction, aloofness from
common ways of thinking and speaking, a wide
outlook on events and movements in the
Church, and a fiery enthusiasm, all the more
telling because sedulously restrained. I
remember as well as if I heard it yesterday a
reference in December, 1869, to 'that august
assemblage which gathers to-morrow under the
dome of S. Peter's,' and I remember feeling, at
the moment, pretty sure that there was no
other schoolmaster in England who would
preach to his boys about the Vatican Council.
But by far the most momentous of Westcott's
sermons at Harrow was that which he preached
on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1868.

32 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

The text was Ephesians v. 15,* See then that
ye walk circumspectly.' The sermon was an
earnest plea for the revival of the ascetic life,
and the preacher endeavoured to show 'what
new blessings GOD has in store for absolute
self-sacrifice,' by telling his hearers about the
great victories of asceticism in history. He
took first the instance of S. Anthony, as the type
of personal asceticism ; then that of S. Benedict,
as the author of the Common Life of Equality
and Brotherhood ; and then that of S. Francis,
who, c in the midst of a Church endowed
with all that art and learning and wealth and
power could give, reasserted the love of GOD
to the poorest, the meanest, the most repulsive
of His children, and placed again the simple
Cross over all the treasures of the world.'
Even { the unparalleled achievements, the
matchless energy of the Jesuits,' were duly
recognized as triumphs of faith and discipline ;
and the sermon ended with a passionate appeal
to the Harrow boys to follow the example of
the young Francis or the still younger Bene
dict, and prepare themselves to take their part
in reviving the ascetic life of the English
Church.

"It may readily be conceived that this
discourse did not please either the British
Parent or the common schoolmaster. A
rumour went abroad that Mr. Westcott was
going to turn all the boys into monks, and loud
was the clamour of ignorance and superstition.

Bishop Westcott 33

Westcott made the only dignified reply. He
printed (without publishing) the peccant
sermon under the title Disciplined Life, and
gave a copy to every boy in the School,
expressing the hope that c GOD in His great
love, will even thus, by words most unworthily
spoken, lead some one among us to think on
one peculiar work of the English Church, and,
in due time, to offer himself for the fufilment
of it as His Spirit shall teach.' Those who
remember that Charles Gore was one of the
boys who heard the sermon may be inclined to
think that the prayer was answered.

" Dr. Westcott's career at Harrow ended
with two incidents so characteristic that they
should be reproduced : —

" i. He begged, as his parting request, that
a weekly Celebration might be established in
the school-chapel (a request refused by the
Head Master).

"2. In taking leave of the Sixth Form, he
said that his best wish for them was that, what
ever befell them in life, they might always
retain * a firm faith in criticism and a firm faith
in GOD.' "

Amongst the boarders in Westcott's house
at Harrow were the present Archbishop of
Canterbury, the late Lord Bute (who always in
after years, on Palm Sunday, sent a palm from
his chapel to his old tutor), and Lord Dunedin,
President of the Court of Session. Charles
Gore, now Bishop of Birmingham, was one of

F

3 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

the Sixth Form boys who signed a simple
address of thanks to Westcott on his departure
from Harrow : a more tangible memorial had
been characteristically refused. With his fellow-
masters Westcott was on the best of terms.
He had the greatest belief in Dr. Vaughan
and Dr. Butler, the two Head Masters
under whom he served, and the late Dean
Farrar, then a master at Harrow, became, in
especial, a very close friend of Westcott's.

The routine of School duties left little time
for other labours, but Westcott made great use
of the holidays for theological and literary
work, and his output of writing at Harrow was
very considerable.

In 1855 the General Survey of the History of
the Qanon of the 3^ew Testament was published,
and Westcott inscribed the Essay to his old
Schoolmaster, Prince Lee. Eleven years later
the second edition appeared, and in 1889 came
the sixth edition. It has been urged by some
that, in this book, Westcott yielded unneces
sarily to the hostile critics of the New Testa
ment, but those who recall his vigorous reply
to the author of Supernatural 1{eligion, in the
preface to the fourth edition, will be satisfied
that he yielded nothing that belonged to the
orthodox belief of the Christian Church. If at
any time Westcott seemed to neglect the
defence of the outworks of Christianity it was
because his faith in the invincible character of
the citadel was so calm and sure. He had

Bishop Westcott 35

builded, he was satisfied, on a Rock that no
waves of criticism could destroy, and he could
afford to welcome every new scientific discovery,
every fresh bit of knowledge relating to the
history of the Bible, every fact that revealed
the truth. The purpose of the Qeneral Survey
was " to connect the history of the New Testa
ment Canon with the growth and consolidation
of the Catholic Church, and to point out the
relation existing between the amount of
evidence for the authenticity of its component
parts, and the whole mass of Christian
literature." The author desired "to convey
both the truest notion of the connexion of the
written Word with the living body of CHRIST,
and the surest conviction of its divine
authority." He sought " to fulfil the part of
an historian and not of a controversialist,"
with the result that those who looked for an
onslaught on the German rationalists were
disappointed with a volume that confessedly
was devoted to the setting out of facts. This
account of the Canon of the New Testament
has become a standard work in theological
libraries ; it is exceedingly valuable to students,
and it is particularly interesting, too, because
it gives us the belief in " the living body of
CHRIST," which made Westcott so strong and
so loyal a Churchman, and the devoted affection
for the Bible, which knit him in bonds of real
friendliness with the Protestant Nonconformists
of England. The amount of research and

3 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

learning contained in the Qeneral Survey is
astonishing when it is remembered that the
book was the work of a busy schoolmaster
just thirty years old.

In 1859 Macmillan published Westcott's first
volume of sermons — Characteristics of the Qospel
Miracles, sermons preached before the Univer
sity of Cambridge, and the following year the
Introduction to the Study of the Qospels, the revised
and enlarged edition of his Elements of Qospel
Harmony, appeared. Then in 1864 came *The
Bible in the Church, which professed to be
a " popular " account of the collection and
reception of the Holy Scriptures in the
Christian Churches; in 1866 The Gospel of the
Resurrection, and in 1869 the General View
of the History of the English 'Bible. Besides
writing these books Westcott contributed a
number of articles to Smith's Dictionary of the
Bible, and the essays on Plato, -^Eschylus, and
Euripides, familiar to readers of his Religious
Thought in the West, to the Contemporary Review.

At Harrow, Westcott for the first time was
drawn to the serious study of Comte's writings,
and Positivism, which had interested him as
a boy, made a great impression upon him. An
article on "Aspects of Positivism in Relation
to Christianity," first published in the Contem
porary Review, and now bound up as an appendix
to The Qospel of the Resurrection, gives Westcott's
appreciation of the good he recognized in
Comte's theory of Religion, and shows at the

"Bishop Westcott 37

same time how infinitely more precious he felt
Christianity to be.

To his friend Mr. Llewelyn Davies, Westcott
wrote in March, 1867, from Harrow: —

" I have been spending all my leisure — how
little — for the last nine months on the Comtists.
How marvellous that it should be left for them
to rediscover some of the simplest teachings of
Christianity — scarcely less marvellous than that
Mr. Mill should be so profoundly and sincerely
ignorant of what Christianity is and of the
religious significance of Comtism, as all he
writes of them both proves him to be."

The Gospel of the Insurrection must on the
whole, I think, take the first place in all Bishop
Westcott's books ; it is at once the most striking
and the most original piece of work. Mr.
Llewelyn Davies assents to this, but at the same
time points out that "Westcott's work on
New Testament books, S. John and Hebrews
and other expository work, may prove to be of
most value." To those who love literature
more than theology, 'Religious Thought in the
West will always be the one book of Westcott's
that may be read and re-read many times ; the
essays on " Origen and Browning," in especial,
in that volume are luminous and suggestive,
and for their insight and charm worthy to
rank with the masterpieces of literary criticism.
Browning, indeed, was the one modern writer
for whose work Westcott really cared in those
days.

38 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

In an essay for the Browning Society at
Cambridge he wrote : —

" Browning has dared to look on the darkest
and meanest forms of action and passion, from
which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes,
and he has brought back for us from this
universal survey a conviction of hope.

" He has laid bare what there is in man of
sordid, selfish, impure, corrupt, brutish, and he
proclaims, in spite of every disappointment
and every wound, that he still finds a spiritual
power without him which restores assurance
as to the destiny of creation." l

In later life Westcott read Ruskin a good
deal, and with full appreciation ; but this never
diminished his love for Browning. Over and
over again in sermons and addresses we come
across quotations from the great poet, and the
affectionate dwelling on some favourite thought
or line.

Of The gospel of the 'Resurrection^ the first
thing to note is its insistence on the Resurrection
as a miracle, as a new fact. The miracle is
the foundation of Christianity, and a miracle is
a phenomenon which "suggests the immediate
working of a personal power producing results
not explicable by what we observe in the
ordinary course of nature." GOD reveals
Himself through the ordinary laws of nature

1 This paper on Browning was afterwards reprinted by
the London Browning Society, and later it was published
in l^e/igious Thought in tht West.

Bishop Westcott 39

and through miracles, and the latter are not
" unnatural," because they are not violations of
law, but are manifestations of a new power
working through law — " the law is not sus
pended, but its natural results are controlled."
The mystery as to how GOD acts is left
untouched in both cases. Admit the exist
ence of a Personal GOD, of a Father watching
over mankind, and the miracle is neither
impossible nor unnatural. Only, Westcott
urges, " the moral element in miracles is both
essential and predominant." The miracles,
which in one age or to one people suggest
the personal working of GOD, in another age,
and to another people, may not do anything
of the kind. And as every true miracle must
move the hearts of men to GOD, it follows that
where miracles are not looked for as tokens of
GOD'S presence, that is, where we understand
GOD already working through law, they do not
take place.

" It seems certain that knowledge limits
faith, not indeed as diminishing its power but
as guiding its direction. For instance, when
any particular physical phenomena are appre
hended as subject to a clear law, which is felt
to be a definite expression of the Divine Will,
it is inconceivable that faith could contemplate
an interference with them, not because it would
be impossible, but because the prayer for such
an interference would itself be disloyal. For
example, it would be positively immoral for us

4O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

now to pray that the tides or the sun should
not rise on a particular day. The corresponding
act is represented in the Gospels as suggested
by the tempter. There is even a Divine
c cannot ' recognized in the Gospels as well as
a Divine c must.* But as long as the idea of
the physical law which rules them was unformed
or indistinct, the prayer would have been
reasonable, and (may we not suppose ?) the
fulfilment also. . . . An age records only
what it believes ; but, in a certain sense also,
it does what it believes."

Westcott's deep reverence for law made him
shrink from the idea of violation of law by
miracle. The miracle was just a manifestation
of GOD, not really more inexplicable than the
manifestations of GOD in nature. For the man
who denied the existence of a Personal GOD
working now in man and in nature the miracle,
of course, was impossible ; but such a man
Westcott held to be of imperfect powers.

Passing from the consideration of miracles
in general to the Resurrection in particular,
Westcott dwells on the thought that the body
of the Resurrection was in the case of CHRIST,
and will be in ours, the body of this life, yet a
changed body, and no longer subject to the same
conditions. Westcott could not contemplate the
existence of a soul unaccompanied by a body ;
the body was not to be cast away at death, nor
the discipline and training it afforded to prove
useless. Rather it was to be transfigured.

Bishop Westcott 41

" Our present body is as the seed of our
future body. The one rises as naturally from
the other as the flower from the germ. ' It is
sown in corruption ; it is raised in incorruption :
it is sown in dishonour ; it is raised in glory : it
is sown in weakness ; it is raised in power : it
is sown a natural body ; it is raised a spiritual
body.' We cannot, indeed, form any con
ception of the change which shall take place,
except so far as is shown in the Person of the
LORD. Its fulfilment is in another state, and
our thoughts are bound by this state. But
there is nothing against reason in the analogy.
Every change of life which we can observe now
must be from one material form to another
equally falling under our senses ; but such a
change may help us to understand how a form
at present sensible may pass through a great
crisis into another, which is an expression of
the same law of life, though our present senses
cannot naturally take cognizance of it."

In an essay called The Transfiguration of
Matter •, Mr. George Barlow has brought out
very forcibly the significance of Westcott's
teaching oji this point.

Many people after reading the Qospel of the
Resurrection^ considered Westcott a " mystic,"
and spoke of him as such. But Westcott
himself disliked the term. In a letter to Mr.
Llewelyn Davies in 1899, he wrote : —

" I don't think that I have ever used the
word c mystics ' ; it is so hopelessly vague, and

G

42 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

it suggests an esoteric teaching which is wholly-
foreign to the Christian. But from Cambridge
days, when I delighted in Tauler, I have read
the writings of many who are called mystics
with much profit. Every one who believes
that phenomena are c signs ' of the spiritual
and eternal receives the name, and to believe in
the Incarnation involves this belief: does it
not ? After all, the first chapter of Genesis is
the Protevangelium."

School work and literary work consumed the
best part of those years at Harrow, but he
found time for a holiday in France in 1854,
and a visit to Paris nine years later. Generally,
he spent the school-holidays in England.

The publication of Sssays and HeYietos in
1860 disturbed Westcott. Strongly as he dis
sented from the position of the Essayists, he
felt still more strongly that reaction would be
provoked by the book, which would do far
greater harm than the book itself. He felt that
a serious reply ought to be made, something
vastly different from the rude declamation of
the Bishops. A mere attempt to shout down un
popular and unfamiliar opinions made Westcott
particularly indignant ; and he tried to persuade
Hort and Lightfoot to join him in a reply to
the Essayists ; but Lightfoot after considera
tion declined the proposal, and so the scheme
fell through. What Westcott desired was to
show that a mean existed between the position
of Essays and Reviews and Traditionalism. He

'Bishop Westcott 43

was satisfied that such a mean existed, and
that a large body of loyal Churchmen would
welcome a statement that took for its basis
the Incarnation of CHRIST, with all that the
Incarnation implied. The crisis caused by Essays
and Reviews passed, and one of the foremost
Essayists lived to become Archbishop of
Canterbury, and to see many other Church
crises arise and melt away. Sssays and TZeYieivs
seem dull, moderate reading to-day, and it is
difficult to realize the storm they raised forty-
five years ago. Probably the " Church crisis "
of aur time, chiefly the sport of irresponsible
pressmen, will appear equally mysterious to
future generations.

In the year of Essays and Reviews Westcott
took an ad eundem degree at Oxford ; the
visit gave him considerable pleasure. At
Dr. Jeune's house, where he stayed, Westcott
met Dr. Pusey and Nassau Senior, the political
economist, and enjoyed, as he said, to see
"gentleness and simplicity well matched with
cynicism and wit."

The following year the Hulsean Professorship
of Divinity at Cambridge fell vacant, and
Westcott was anxious to become a candidate
for the post. But learning that Lightfoot, then
a Tutor at Trinity, was also thinking of stand
ing, and both men agreeing that Lightfoot had
the better chance, he at once withdrew and
Lightfoot was elected. Ten years later Light-
foot stood aside from becoming a candidate for

44 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

the Regius Professorship of Divinity, and did
his utmost — and successfully — to secure West
cott' s election to that office.

Westcott rarely preached at Harrow, seldom
more than once a term, and his school sermons
have not been published. At the weekly
" Masters* Meetings," too, he sat a silent
member. But the "School Singing" which
John Farmer and Edward Bowen worked so
hard to popularize at Harrow received his en
thusiastic support, and he wrote several school
songs in Latin — " lo Triumphe ! " " Decor
Integer," " Lenimen duke," " Strenua," and
others.

In the last years at Harrow Westcott' s heart
was set on a plan for a " Ccenobium," for a
Community life, an association of families,
not individuals, bound together in voluntary
co-operation to live frugally, to work, and to
pray. The Rev. Arthur Westcott tells us in
his Life and Letters of T&shop Westcott how he
and his brothers " viewed the establishment of
the c Ccenobium,* with gloomy apprehension,
not quite sure whether it was within the bounds
of practical politics or not. I was myself
inclined to believe that it really was coming, and
that we, with the Bensons (may be), and Horts,
and a few other families, would find ourselves
living a Community life. Whenever we children
showed signs of greediness or other selfishness,
we were assured that such things would be
unheard of in the * Ccenobium.' There the

Bishop Westcott 45

greedy would have no second portions of
desirable puddings."

The " Coenobium " was not established, but
Westcott's horror of luxury and ostentation in
private life, and his acute sense of the responsi
bility of personal expenditure remained to the
end. His son tells us that the Bishop " could
never to the end of his life reconcile himself
to dining late." Later, in his cordial support
of the Co-operative Movement, Westcott found
some outlet for the feeling and energy which
had prompted the idea of the Community life.

46 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER IV
CANON OF PETERBOROUGH

TN 1856 Arthur Stanley suggested to Dr. Tait,
then just appointed to the See of London,
that he should make Westcott an Examining
Chaplain, but nothing came of the proposal,
and it was not until the autumn of 1868 that
the first offer of an ecclesiastical appointment
in the Church of England came to Westcott ;
and then it came from Dr. Magee, just
appointed to the Bishopric of Peterborough,
an Irishman. Bishop Magee invited Westcott
to become one of his Examining Chaplains,
and in December of the same year, when a
Canonry at Peterborough Cathedral became
vacant, he asked Westcott to fill it. To leave
Harrow for Peterborough was to suffer a loss
of income, and Westcott had already several
sons for whom education must needs be pro
vided ; but after a few days' consideration he
accepted the offer, and was duly installed in
his Canonry on the Feast of the Epiphany,
January 6, 1869. The following August
he entered on residence first time, and his
voice, which had seemed hardly equal to the

Bishop Westcott 47

task of preaching in Harrow School Chapel,
was found strong enough for the large con
gregation of Peterborough Cathedral. It was
wonderful how Westcott made himself altogether
fit for whatever post he was called to fill. His
physical powers in the matter of speaking and
preaching increased enormously as circumstances
required that a bigger effort should be made,
and right on in old age he made himself heard
plainly and clearly at the Albert Hall and in
S. Paul's Cathedral.

In 1870 Bishop Magee offered Canon
Westcott the Archdeaconry of Northampton,
but the preferment was declined. Westcott
still hoped for a Professorship at Cambridge,
which could be held with a Canonry : to have
become an Archdeacon would have left no
time for work at Cambridge. The increase of
income would have been welcome, and Westcott
considered that life might be put into the
Archdeacon's office, but on the whole he
thought it better to decline, and wait in the
hope of some recognition from his University.
Dr. Lightfoot approved his decision, and events
justified it ; for that very year came the call
to the Regius Professorship of Divinity at
Cambridge. When the vacancy occurred on
Professor Jeremie's resignation, Canon Westcott
urged Lightfoot to stand, but Lightfoot re
fused, and Westcott was elected. The duty
at Peterborough could be well combined with
the Professor's work, and Canon Westcott was

4 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

always in residence at the cathedral during the
three months of the Long Vacation.

For fourteen years Canon Westcott laboured
hard to infuse a new spirit into the cathedral
and its services. At the very outset he was
distressed by the lifeless character of the place,
and its apparent uselessness. One of his first
steps was to start an eight o'clock morning
service in one of the side chapels, and he
induced the Chapter to institute an early Cele
bration on Saints' Days.

In Macmillatts Magazine in 1870 Canon
Westcott published some articles on " Cathedral
Work," and he expressed in these articles his
belief that " systematic devotion and corporate
action " should be the foundation of cathedral
life, and the needs of " theological study and
religious education " decide the work. In this
belief all his efforts at Peterborough were
made. He was constant at the daily services,
he enjoyed conducting parties round the
cathedral, and his relations with the Dean and
Chapter and with all the members of the cath
edral staff were, on the whole, of the happiest.
Of course, there was some grumbling among
the older men of the cathedral choir, espe
cially at the introduction by Westcott of the
Paragraph Psalter, and at his organization of
a voluntary choir for Sunday evening services ;
but the Taragraph Tsalter soon came to be
appreciated, and from the voluntary choir
sprang the Peterborough Choral Society.

Bishop Westcott 49

The ^Paragraph Tsalter was arranged by
Westcott in order that the chanting might be
more intelligible. This is explained in the
preface : —

" It is evident, upon the least reflection, that
no one uniform method of chanting can be
applicable to the whole Psalter. Sometimes
the verses are separately complete ; sometimes
they are arranged in couplets, sometimes in
triplets ; sometimes they are grouped in unequal
but corresponding masses. In most cases the
verses consist of two members, but not unfre-
quently they consist of three or four. If,
therefore, the Psalms are sung antiphonally on
one method in single verses, or in pairs of
verses, the sense must constantly be sacrificed :
and the music, instead of illuminating the
thought, will fatally obscure it."

To raise the standard of cathedral services,
and to make the cathedral not only a real
house of prayer for all people, but also the
very centre of the religious and intellectual life
of the diocese, was Westcott's aim. It was to
be a place of training for theological students,
too, and every year a number of young men
from the Universities were drawn to Westcott
at Peterborough to prepare for Ordination.
Canon Scott Holland has given us his recollec
tions of those days : —

" My first sight of him (Canon Westcott)
had been in Peterborough Cathedral, all but
thirty years ago. I had gone with a friend to

H

50 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

read with him for Deacon's Orders. He was
giving Lectures on S. John in a side chapel ;
and all through the first lecture we could
hardly believe our eyes. This tiny form, with
the thin small voice, delivering itself, with pas
sionate intensity, of the deepest teaching on the
mystery of the Incarnation to two timid ladies
of the Close, under the haughty contempt of
the solitary verger, who had been forced to
lend the authority of his { poker ' to those
undignified and newfangled efforts — was this
really Dr. Westcott ? We had to reassure our
selves of the fact, as we emerged, by repeated
asseverations that it certainly must be.

"Then, the first interview revealed where
the secret of his power lay. We had never
before seen such an identification of study with
prayer. He read and worked in the very mind
with which he prayed ; and his prayer was
of singular intensity. It might be only the
elements of textual criticism with which he was
dealing ; but, still, it was all steeped in the
atmosphere of awe, and devotion, and mystery,
and consecration. He taught us as one who
ministered at an altar ; and the details of the
Sacred Text were to him as the Ritual of some
Sacramental Action. His touching belief in
our powers of scholarship used sometimes to
shatter our self-control ; and I well remember
the shouts of laughter which we just succeeded
in mastering until we found ourselves outside
in the moonlit Close, when he confessed his

Bishop Westcott 51

disappointment at our not recalling the use of
a certain verb in the Clementine Homilies — we
who, at that moment, had but the dimmest
conception what the Clementine Homilies might
be. Sometimes he would crush us to the dust
by his humility, as when, after we had gaily
turned of?, at a moment's notice, our interpre
tation of some crucial passage in S. John, he
would confess, in an awe-struck whisper, that
he had himself never yet dared to put down on
paper his own conclusion of the matter." J

A story was told at Peterborough that, once
when a candidate for Ordination who had
received an explanation of some difficult point,
said, " Thank you, Canon Westcott ; now I
understand all about it," the Examining Chap
lain answered entreatingly, " Not all about it,
I hope, Mr. , not all about it."

The death of Bishop Prince Lee, early in
1870, moved Westcott to write some account
of his last interview with his old Schoolmaster ;
and so he describes in the Guardian a visit to
Manchester a few years earlier : —

"The health of the Bishop was already
greatly shaken, but his intellectual power was
never greater. In his intervals of leisure he
returned to each old topic of interest. Now it
was the famous variation in Luke ii. 14 ; now
the almost prophetic character of ^Eschylus, on
whom I happened to be working at the time ;
now a volume of sketches from old masters, in
1 Personal Studies, by H. S. Holland, D.D.

52 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

which he showed me the outline of Thorwald-
sen's famous Night (owl and all), already given
in a drawing (unless I am mistaken) by one of
the Caracci ; now it was the work of Arnold,
on which he delighted to dwell with loving
admiration ; now some aspect of diocesan
labour in which he saw a bright promise of
hope. One evening I can never forget. We
had dined alone. There had been the usual
rich variety of subjects in his conversation ;
playful quotations from Thucydides and Aris
tophanes and Virgil, in memory of school days ;
a clear summary of the latest results of the
explorations of Palestine ; an estimate of the
moral influence of Shakespeare (which, to my
surprise, he judged somewhat unfavourably).
As the evening closed in, the topics became
graver. We spoke of some of the difficulties
of belief ; of future punishment — and, in illus
tration of the instinctive promptings of the
heart, he quoted the line, which he always
called one of the noblest ever written, Virtutem
^ideant intabescantque relictd ; of modern critical
theories — and here only he used some stern
words in condemning some untrained and hasty
speculators. Then came a long and solemn
pause, while his thoughts, I fancy, no less than
mine, were pondering on the relation of Biblical
controversies to the fulness of Christian faith.
At last the Bishop turned his eyes on me —
they were overflowing with tears — with a look
which clings to me now, and said only this :

Bishop Westcott 53

* Ah ! Westcott. Fear not, only believe '
(S. Marf^ v. 36). It was enough. The words
have risen again and again before me in times
of anxiety and doubt, charged for ever with a
new force ; and what would I not give if I
could convey to others the impression which
they conveyed to me, crowning with the grace
of complete self-surrender and child-like faith
the character which through long years I had
learned to revere and love for power, for
breadth, for insight, for justice, for sympathy !"

Westcott was fond of preaching courses of
sermons, and three such courses delivered at
Peterborough were subsequently published by
Macmillan — The Christian Life, Manifold and
One (a small volume inscribed to Westcott's
cathedral friends, Dean Saunders, Archdeacon
Davys, and Canons Argles and Pratt), The
Revelation of the Risen Lord^ and The Historic
Faith — a series of addresses on the Apostles'
Creed. The Historic Faith is one of the best
known of Westcott's books. It is written in
simple language, and should dispel the charge
of obscurity brought against Westcott by those
who are not inclined to read his works. Six
editions were published, and the volume has
recently been reissued in sixpenny form. In
his preface the author declares his conviction
that " the Apostles' Creed in its main substance
represents the Baptismal Confession of the
middle of the second century."

The Historic Faith is addressed to those who

54 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

accept the Creed as true, and it must strike the
ordinary Churchman (and those Nonconformists
who accept the Apostles' Creed) reading its
pages how very much more that Creed
implies, how much fuller and more luminous
the Christian life appears to a man like
Westcott, who had pondered deeply the mys
teries of existence, than to the verbalist and
formalist of the Church. Westcott makes us
realize that as an illumination and inspiration
of life, there is so much more to be said for
Christianity than either its disciples or oppo
nents commonly admit. Many passages in
The Historic Faith stand out boldly before me.
One is on atheism : —

" There is — most terrible thought — a practical
atheism, orthodox in language and reverent in
bearing, which can enter a Christian Church
and charm the conscience to rest with shadowy
traditions, an atheism which grows insensibly
within us if we separate what cannot be
separated with impunity, the secular from the
divine, the past and the future from the present,
earth from heaven, the things of Caesar from
the things of GOD."

Another is on Faith : —

" The highest form of Faith is religious
Faith, by which we acknowledge that there is a
divine purpose of wisdom and love being
wrought out in the world, and that we are
called upon and enabled to co-operate towards
its fulfilment."

Bishop Westcott 55

" / believe in God. To say this is to confess
that there is, in spite of every unpunished sin,
every fruitless sorrow (as we judge), one pur
pose of victorious righteousness being fulfilled
about us and in us, one purpose able to
reconcile justice and mercy in the complete
accomplishment of the destiny of creation."

Westcott's religion made him keenly alive to
the events of his time, for his GOD was a living
GOD, moving and working in the world, and
so the outbreak of the Franco-German War in
1870 drew a powerful sermon from him — a
sermon which was published under the title of
Our attitude towards the War.

In a letter to Mr. Llewelyn Davies, written
at this time, Westcott said :

" I cannot, on the evidence before me, find
that France is much more to blame than
Prussia, if at all. This war is but the second
act of the Austrian War, and as far as I could
judge that war was more unjustifiable than
the Italian War. Probably Bismarck is much
more adroit than Louis Napoleon. But I do
not think that he is one bit more honest or
more patriotic. Prussia was obviously no less
unwilling to submit to arbitration than France,
and even if it were otherwise, we must
remember that all Prussia wishes is to keep
what she has unjustly seized. She has her
share of the plunder already. We failed cul
pably to speak in the Danish War, in the war
in South Italy, in the Austrian War. Now, at

5 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

length, I hope that the people will make their
voice clearly heard — the Government seems
helpless — and profess that nations have faith
and truth."

In the same letter are these notable words :
" How unnatural the destruction of small
Powers really is : how pagan in essence ! In
this, too, Comte has seen the Christian theory
of States."

In addition to the cathedral work, with its
sermons and instructions, and the divinity
work at Cambridge, to which we shall refer
later, Canon Westcott found time, at the
request of Gladstone, to sit, from 1881-1883,
on the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, and
to contribute articles on Clement, Demetrius,
and Dionysius, for the first volume of Smith
and Wall's Dictionary of Christian Biography,
and an article on " Origen and the Beginnings
of Christian Philosophy," for the Contemporary
Review. He also lectured on Origen at
Edinburgh in 1877. Archbishop Benson was
a member of the Ecclesiastical Courts Com
mission, and we have it on Westcott's own
authority that the enquiries of the Commission
really defined the ideas expressed in the
Archbishop's Judgment in the Bishop of
Lincoln's case. Another result of the Com
mission was that the defenders of Catholic
doctrine and Catholic practices in the Church
of England found their position considerably
strengthened ; for the Report of the Com-

Bishop Westcott 57

mission declared for the continuity of the
Church of England, as against the view that
the Church was set up at the Reformation.

Westcott's departure from Peterborough
came very suddenly in May, 1883. Bishop
Magee, without giving any warning, alleged
that Canon Westcott had neglected his duty as
Examining Chaplain for his Cambridge work,
and asked him to resign the Chaplaincy and
with it the Canonry. Westcott sent in his
resignation at once, and did not return to
Peterborough, but he pointed out that the two
offices were distinct, and that in fourteen years
he had only been absent from two Trinity
Ordinations. That the cathedral responsi
bilities were compatible with the Cambridge
work was amply proved by the fact that
Westcott accepted an Examining Chaplaincy
to Archbishop Benson immediately on leaving
Peterborough, and that barely two months later
he was appointed Canon of Westminster.

Throughout the diocese, and particularly in
the city Canon Westcott's retirement from
Peterborough was heartily regretted, and he
carried away the respect and affection of all
sorts and conditions of people. For Westcott's
ideal of the Church was a national ideal, and he
loved welcoming to the cathedral all types of
national life — railwaymen, members of friendly
societies, and trade unionists, volunteers,
and school teachers, shopkeepers, choirs,
and choral societies ; for each of these he

58 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

had his word, his message of sympathy and
greeting.

The friendship between Westcott and Magee
was naturally broken by the step the latter
had taken, but it was renewed the following
summer on the Bishop's illness. No grain
of bitterness or sense of personal injury could
ever take root in Westcott's heart.

Bishop Westcott 59

CHAPTER V

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY

twenty years (1870-90) Westcott filled
the office of Regius Professor of Divinity
at Cambridge. The return to old scenes
brought him unqualified happiness, and prob
ably in the whole course of a long life no work
was better enjoyed than the responsibilities of
the Professorship. A deep attachment to the
University and a particular affection for Trinity,
and the fact that his friends Dr. Lightfoot and
Dr. Hort were also at Cambridge, contributed
largely to the pleasure which he felt. Above
all, the work was after his own heart, and he
was in the prime of life, vigorous and of good
health. Almost immediately on his return to
Cambridge, King's College elected him to a
Fellowship, which he accepted with a full
sense of the responsibilities due in consequence
to that College. The new Professor set to
work at once to raise the standard of the
theological examinations in the University, and
to make the D.D. degree something more than
a complimentary gift, or a nominal affair within
the reach of all who cared to pay the necessary

60 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

fee ; and in both directions his efforts were
successful. The Act of Parliament of 1871
abolishing all religious tests for Fellowships,
and thereby making it possible for Colleges
to be no longer governed in the principles
of the Church of England, made Westcott
anxious that the University authorities should
meet the new situation, and his little book of
sermons On the Religious Office of the Universities^
published in 1873, gives us his standpoint.
That same year came the abolition of the Pass
or " Voluntary " Theological Examination for
the B.A. degree, and Westcott felt that for all
those students who did not read for the
Theological Tripos and yet desired Holy
Orders some examination in Divinity was
desirable, and that if possible this examination
should be one that would satisfy the Bishops
generally. With Lightfoot and Hort he set
to work to draw up a scheme for a "New
Theological Examination," and this scheme
received the early support of the Archbishop
of York, and six other Bishops. In a few
years the passing of the "Cambridge Pre
liminary Examination " was accepted by
practically all the Bishops as sufficient evidence
that candidates for Ordination were qualified
for the Diaconate. After this came the
establishing of the Clergy Training School at
Cambridge for Graduates who were preparing
for Ordination, though for years the work
of the School was confined to lectures and

Bishop Westcott 61

addresses on religious subjects, with parochial
work at one of the churches in the neigh
bourhood. In 1887 a permanent building
was erected, which now bears the name of
" Westcott House," to commemorate " the
close connexion between Bishop Westcott and
the Clergy Training School, and to record the
honour and affection felt for him by all
associated with him in his work in it."

The Undergraduates who attended the
lectures of the Regius Professor were not
many in the early seventies, but the number
grew until the average reached some 300.
The most famous of these lectures were those on
the Gospel and Epistles of S. John, published
in book form. One evening in the week
Dr. Westcott devoted to those who cared to
come to him for guidance in theological
reading ; and, though the Regius Professor was
never exactly "popular" with the Under
graduates, there are many clergymen who can
still recall the quiet, lasting help received at
those personal visits to the teacher whose vast
learning and deep devotion seemed to set him
apart from other men at Cambridge.

" How many of us owe him deep gratitude,"
wrote a Cambridge man in &dgbastoniay at
the time of Bishop Westcott's death, "for
his wise counsel — counsel never sought in
vain, but always given with ungrudging
readiness, with clear insight and breadth of
view."

62 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

That Westcott made the Regius Professorship
of Divinity an office of influence and power in
the University, to an extent not contemplated
by his predecessors, is well known. The
testimony of another Cambridge man who
was in residence during Westcott's Professor
ship may perhaps be given here : —

" He has been one of those few men in each
generation to whom it is given permanently to
elevate the ideal of an office. Dr. Arnold has
permanently raised the ideal of a Schoolmaster ;
the late Bishop Wilberforce may be said to have
raised the ideal of episcopal activity ; and I
think we may fairly say, without in the least
degree reflecting upon any predecessor, or any
contemporary, that Dr. Westcott, by the width
of his sympathy, and by the intensity of his
character, has permanently raised the ideal even
of that great office the Regius Professorship
of Divinity."

The impression Westcott made upon some
of his contemporaries may be learnt from the
words uttered at a meeting in Cambridge in
1886, when a proposal was on foot for the
presentation of the portrait of the Regius
Professor of Divinity to the University ; the
proposal was duly carried out, and the portrait,
painted by Sir William Richmond, hangs in the
Fitzwilliam Museum.

Professor Humphrey on that occasion
said : —

" I cannot but think if the artist can portray

Bishop Westcott 63

the remarkable features of that face, the mag
netic influence of which I have spoken may,
through it, be continued on to the University
in after years. It is a face which represents
with singular and forcible truthfulness the
character of the man ; so full, on the one hand,
of earnestness ; of earnestness toned by gentle
ness, and toned by an anxiety amounting almost
to sorrow, an anxiety evidently to be using his
efforts to do good in the utmost possible
manner. And then, on a sudden, that face
flashes up into a genial smile brightened by the
reality of a universal sympathy, by genuine kind
ness, and by love for his fellow-men ; by those
very qualities which give to his character the
great liberality which we all know he possesses.
One could wish for a portrait of each of those
expressions — the intensely earnest and the
unmistakably benevolent ; we could then look
upon this picture and on that, and feel how
complementary they are to one another, how
they contribute to make up the character of
that admirable man. And also one could wish
to see him in another form — as he goes up and
down Trumpington Street, with his books and
manuscripts under his arm, looking neither to
the right nor to the left, endeavouring, as it
were, to overtake time, and bent seriously upon
the one object before him, which one object is
certain to be the prosecution of some good and
useful work. It passes the power of art to
combine in one all those three conditions, for

64 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

no art can give in a single picture the complete
fulness of any man, and certainly no art can
give the complete fulness of one who has such
a large measure of fulness as Dr. Westcott."

This is a very glowing tribute, but it gives
us very vividly the veneration in which Westcott
was held by those of his colleagues who knew
him. It was inevitable that Professor Humphrey
should allude to " a magnetic influence," but
the phrase is tiresome. As Father Stanton, of
S. Alban's, Holborn, once said : " We speak
of a man's magnetic personality, or of his
magnetic influence, when we don't understand
him."

Professor Stuart, M.P., the originator of
the movement for University Extension Lec
tures — a movement which had Westcott's
hearty support — also spoke in praise of
Westcott at that same meeting.

" I have received," he said, " the greatest
kindness from him in everything in respect of
that part of the work of the University which
lies beyond the limits of the University. There
is no one whose sympathy has been more
encouraging and more practically useful in that
work. The high conception which Dr. West
cott has formed of what can be effected by the
University in this and in . other respects, of
what its call to duty is, and of what its ultimate
aim may be, and ought to be, is one of the
grandest ideals I have ever come in contact
with."

Bishop Westcott 65

Deep was the respect for the Regius Pro
fessor among University authorities, but to the
average Undergraduate he remained a personage
of mystery. In more than one course of
lectures Westcott quoted freely from those
mediaeval luminaries Tauler and Rupert of
Deutz ; and the Undergraduate audience know
ing nothing of Rupert of Deutz, took to
applauding when the name was mentioned.
Westcott, unaware that the cheering was the
mere display of boyish humour, was delighted
at the reception given to his hero, and told the
story of the growing popularity of Rupert
among Undergraduates to his friends.

For some years Dr. Westcott was a member
of the Universities' Joint Board (for Extension
Lectures), and he delivered one or two notable
speeches on the idea of University Extension.
There was a Conference at Cambridge in 1887
to consider the Affiliation of Local Centres to
the University, and Westcott in his speech
gives us a glimpse of the vision in his mind.
Few students, he believed, would use the
privileges of affiliation " so as to come among
us as our own students," yet he did believe that
there would be many who would bear the title
of affiliated students, and many who would
bear it with honour.

" So it will be that miners in Northumbrian
coalfields, artisans in Midland factories, toilers
in the country, and toilers in the cities will
repeat with pride what is not our motto only

66 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

but their motto also, Hinc lucem et pocula sacra,
when they find their lives enlightened and
purified, I will venture to say ennobled and
hallowed, by the conception of higher education
which it has been the privilege of this University
to bring home to them."

At a Conference held in London the fol
lowing year, by the London Society for the
Extension of University Teaching, Dr. Westcott
pleaded vigorously in memorable words for the
highest ideals in Extension Lectures.

" These lectures supply, I trust, an agreeable
recreation, but they are essentially something
different. They are designed to have a serious
educational use. Under this aspect, we may
regard them either as a preparation for special
work, or as a general intellectual discipline.
I know how great is the temptation to adopt
the former view ; to measure the value of
learning and knowledge by a material standard.
But special training is not the work of a
University, and, if I may speak my whole
mind, I confess that I am alarmed and ashamed
when I hear the results of science treated as
instruments for successful competition ; when
I find the language, the methods, the aims of
war transferred to the conditions of commerce
and the circumstances of daily life. No
University will lend itself to the pursuit of
such an end. Universities exist to maintain
and propagate a nobler faith. So far as we
have entered into their spirit, we believe, and

Bishop Westcott 67

we strive to spread the belief, that life is as
the man is ; that if the man is sordid, selfish,
narrow, mean, his life, however affluent, will
reflect his character ; and, on the other hand,
that there is about us an inexhaustible store of
unrealized possibilities, a treasure of spiritual
wealth, open to the poorest, which grows with
the using, if only we know how to use it.
And we believe that true education opens the
eyes of the soul ; that it is a strength in the
difficulties which we must face ; a solace in the
sorrows which we must bear ; an inspiration in
interpreting the new truths which claim to
receive from us a harmonious place beside the
old ; that it offers to all a vision of a larger
order, truly human and truly divine ; that
it is not, in the noble words of your
motto, * a means of livelihood, but a means
of life.' "

Unfortunately, the current of common
opinion sets more and more strongly against
this exalted and wholesome view of University
education, and in Great Britain, in America,
and in Germany, the consideration of com
mercial advantage now enters largely into all
educational schemes. Even Oxford is yielding
to the Philistines.

Besides taking an active part in the
University Extension Movement, Westcott
during many of those years of his Professor
ship was a member of the Governing body
of Harrow, and of the Council of the Senate

68 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

at Cambridge. In 1881 Oxford conferred a
D.C.L. upon the Cambridge Professor, and
Westcott received an enthusiastic greeting in
the Sheldonian Theatre.

Two questions of interest affecting the
University — questions still unsettled — were as
hotly discussed twenty years ago at Cambridge
as they are to-day. In the discussion con
cerning the abolition of compulsory Greek,
Westcott opposed the change, declaring that
the study of that language, " regarded only
as a disciplinary process, is of unique value."
To the granting of degrees to women Westcott
was also opposed. His view being that the
education of women must necessarily be
different from the education of men, he held
that if it was confined at Cambridge to the
membership and degrees of the University it
would naturally be hindered from its proper
development on its own lines. He favoured
the suggestion that some independent body
should be empowered to grant the degrees —
if it was decided that the degrees of Oxford
and Cambridge were to be conferred on
women — and that this body should have power
to consider and decide the special problems
of the Education of Women. In later life
he wanted a special University for women
established, but the proposal met with little
support.

Conservative in these matters affecting the
University, Westcott was liberal in the question

Bishop Westcott 69

of Church Reform, and the Memorial sent to
the Bishops from Cambridge in 1885 at the
instigation of the Regius Professor of Divinity
urged " the admission of laymen of all classes,
who are bona fide Churchmen, to a substantial
share in the control of Church affairs."

In spite of all the official work at Cam
bridge, and the duties of the Canonry, first
at Peterborough and then at Westminster,
Dr. Westcott still found time to take part
in the labours of the New Testament Revision
Committee, to complete with his friend
Dr. Hort a new text of the Greek Testament,
and to see several volumes of sermons and
lectures through the press. The first of these
volumes was On the Religious Office of the
Universities ; then, 1882, came the Introduction
and C^otes to the Gospel of S. John, followed
a year later by O^otes and Essays on the
Epistles of S. John. J^ofes and Essays on the
Epistle to the Hebrews appeared in 1889.
These three commentaries have won a famous
reputation in the Church of England, and it
is not too much to say that they will be read
as long as English people are interested in
the New Testament.

The Introduction to the Gospel of S. John
contains a very full and very fair examination
of the question of authorship of the Fourth
Gospel, and the grounds for Westcott's decision
that both the Apocalypse and the Gospel are
the work of the same writer, and that S. John

jo Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

was their author. That the Epistles attributed
to S. John are rightly so attributed Westcott
also maintains.

Two notes in Westcott's S. John must be
quoted, because they contain in a few lines
teaching that Westcott was apt to expand at
great length : —

" The great mystery of religion is not the
punishment, but the forgiveness of sin."

"Judgment is not an arbitrary sentence,
but the working out of an absolute law."

The other volumes belonging to the Cam
bridge period include The Revelation of the
Father (1884), Some Thoughts from the Ordinal
(1884), The Victory of the Cross (1888), Qifts for
Ministry (1889), and The Qospel of Life (1892).
There were also two books of Westminster
sermons published, Social Aspects of Christianity
and Christus fynsummator. The Revelation of
the Father is not equal in force or power to
the Gospel of the Resurrection, but it contains
some of its author's most characteristic teach
ing, especially in the sermon on " The Light
of the World."

The Victory of the Cross contains half-a-dozen
sermons preached during Holy Week of 1888
in Hereford Cathedral, and is of interest
because it gives us Westcott's view of the
doctrine of the Atonement. This view, with
a fuller discussion of Westcott's theological
teaching, will be found in a later chapter.

A few sentences from the Preface to those

Bishop Westcott 71

Cambridge Lectures, published in 1892 as the
Gospel of Life, may be quoted here : —

" The world is not clear or intelligible. If
we are to deliver our message as Christians
we must face the riddles of life and consider
how others have faced them."

" To some I shall necessarily appear to
speak too doubtfully on questions of great
moment, and to others too confidently."

" Not by one way but by many must we
strive to reach the fulness of truth."

" Christianity is in life and through life. It
is not an abstract system but a vital power,
active through an organized body. It can
never be said that the interpretation of the
Gospel is final. Absolute in its essence so
that nothing can be added to the revelation
which it includes, it is relative so far as the
human apprehension of it at any time is
concerned."

The publication of Westcott and Hort's
revised text of the New Testament in Greek
took place in 1881. The work was begun
in Cambridge, and there was something fitting
in its close taking place when Westcott held
the Regius Professorship. To quote The
Times of July 29, 1901 : —

" Probably in the whole history of the New
Testament since the time of Origen there has
been nothing more remarkable than the quiet
persistence with which these two Fellows of
Trinity — Westcott aged twenty-eight and Hort

J2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

some three years younger — started cin the
spring of 1853 ' to systematize New Testament
criticism. ... It says something at once for
their determination and their care that the two
famous volumes were not published till 1881,
twenty-eight years from their inception. True,
the lion's share of the accomplishment was due
to Hort, who wrote the masterly statement
of their principles of criticism in the second
volume ; but the importance of Westcott's
co-operation appears from the declaration of
the two authors that their 'combination of
completely independent operations ' enabled
them 'to place far more confidence in the
results than either could have presumed to
cherish had they rested on his own sole
responsibility/ To Westcott also must be
given the merit of having by his earnest cheer
fulness kept up the courage of his shy and
nervous colleague."

A few days after the publication of the
Westcott and Hort Greek Testament, the
Revised Version of the New Testament was
issued. Westcott and Hort and Lightfoot
were all members of the Revision Company,
which sat for eleven years. Before accepting
a place in the Company Westcott was anxious
that the text of the New Testament itself
should be more carefully revised before a new
translation was made, but as this was not part
of the plan, Westcott yielded, and resolved to
make the best of the business.

Bishop Westcott 73

At the outset the work was nearly wrecked
by the Bishops in Convocation, and it was
really the firm stand made by Westcott and
his Cambridge allies that enabled the Revision
to proceed. The incident that provoked the
Bishops is ancient history now, but it must
be related.

Westcott suggested to Dean Stanley that a
Corporate Communion of the members of the
Revision Company should be celebrated in
Westminster Abbey before the first meeting of
the Revisers, and Dean Stanley at once agreed
on condition that all the members of the
Company were invited. The fact that there
were several Presbyterian members of the
Company did not seem to Westcott any reason
for exclusion from the Communion, and
probably had the Presbyterians been the only
non-Anglicans no more would have been heard
of the matter. But a Unitarian member of
the Company was also invited and duly re
ceived the Communion at the celebration in
Westminster Abbey — to the scandal of orthodox
Church -people. To satisfy the outcry the
Upper House of Convocation passed a resolu
tion declaring that no one who denied " the
Godhead of our LORD JESUS CHRIST " ought
to be allowed to take part in the Revision
of the New Testament.

Westcott was furious at this attempt to
interfere with the constitution of the Company,
and the protests of the Cambridge group saved

74 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the situation. Westcott and Lightfoot would
certainly have resigned had Convocation over
ridden the Revision Company.

Westcott's love for the text of the New
Testament amounted to a passion. He was
jealous for its purity, and the labours he spent
on its revision he counted a matter for thank
fulness. He felt the privilege of working at
such a task to be of the highest. His respect
for those critics who were unfavourable to his
Greek Testament and to the Revised Version
was measured by his estimate of their know
ledge. The fierce attacks of Dean Burgon,
the leader of the hostile critics, did not trouble
Westcott. He doubted Burgon's competence
to discuss the matter.

Bishop Ellicott, who sat on the Revision
Committee, recalled how Westcott — when one
of his renderings was rejected — would retire
with a look of solemn resignation on his face
— as if his life-work had been destroyed at
a stroke. When the Revision Company was
equally divided on some nice point of transla
tion, Westcott always found it difficult to vote
on either side ; generally he preferred to with
draw to a corner of the room until the vote had
been taken.

Bishop Westcott 75

CHAPTER VI
CANON OF WESTMINSTER

^.LADSTONE was always alert to promote
^^ men of character and learning in the
Church, and so, when Westcott retired from
Peterborough in 1883, the Prime Minister
very soon sought him out for preferment. The
Deanery of Exeter was vacant, and Westcott
could have had the post ; but he was anxious
to continue his Cambridge Professorship, and,
when a few months later his old Trinity friend
Dr. Barry resigned his Canonry at Westminster
to become Bishop of Sydney, and Gladstone
suggested that Westcott should take his place,
the Canonry was accepted because it did not
necessitate departure from Cambridge.

Westcott preached the sermon at Bishop
Barry's Consecration on January i, 1884, and
was duly installed as Canon of Westminster in
February. The appointment gave very wide
satisfaction, for Westcott's reputation in the
Church had been growing quietly, but steadily,
from the Harrow days, and at the Abbey he
was warmly welcomed.

The Regius Professorship and its responsi-

j6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

bilities claimed Canon Westcott for Cambridge
in Term time, but the Long Vacation and the
Christmas Vacation always found him in
residence at Westminster, and two volumes
of sermons, Christus Consummator, and Soda!
^Aspects of Christianity, and the U^otes on the
Epistle to the Hebrews, remain a lasting memorial
of the connexion with the Abbey. In these
sermons it may be noticed that social questions
and social aspects of life loom more largely than
in earlier works, and this may be set down
partly to the fact that at Peterborough West
cott had come face to face and hand to hand
with workmen for the first time in his life,
but still more to the fact that London in those
first years of the Westminster Canonry was
stirred by the beginnings of the Modern
Socialist Movement in England, and by the
Radical agitation of Henry George. In the
parks and at street-corners lecturers of the
Socialist League and the Social Democratic
Federation were at work — William Morris
in the forefront. The Fabian Society was
issuing leaflets to the middle classes, and the
Rev. Stewart D. Headlam and Mr. Frederick
Verinder were rousing consciences, through
the Guild of S. Matthew and the Land
Restoration League. Socialism was very much
" in the air " in London twenty years ago, and
the disturbances after an unemployed meeting
in Trafalgar Square, and the trial and acquittal
of Mr. H. M. Hyndman,Mr. H. H. Champion,

Bishop Westcott 77

and Mr. John Burns attracted considerable
attention. Nowadays Socialists are found all
over England, even in Parliament, and Socialist
teaching has permeated political thought and
public activity. All sorts of kind-hearted,
sympathetic, pathetic people call themselves
Socialists, or at least " Christian " Socialists,
and, if the Socialist agitation of to-day is not
so fiery and not so revolutionary as it was in
the early eighties, it is certainly spread more
widely. But William Morris and Mr. H. M.
Hyndman were prophets indeed in 1884, and
in their message startled and provoked thou
sands. Mr. Stewart Headlam, too, with his
burning outspoken words on the Land Ques
tion made timid, but respectable Anglicans
wonder what was going to happen when a
clergyman spoke of such things, and preached
from the platforms of Radical Clubs.

Westcott, though he appeared to the ordinary
man wrapped in contemplation of eternal
verities (" recluse " and " cloudy " some called
him) was always alive to the movements of
contemporary life, and the signs of change
around him were not unheeded, nor the voices
acclaiming the social revolution unheard. More
and more he brooded over social questions, the
deforming misery and wasted wealth in England,
the long industrial agony of the labouring men
and women, and from all his meditation one
thought emerged. By and by, in GOD'S good
time, man would cease from wronging his

7 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

brother, and would become fashioned like unto
the SON of GOD. From every fresh contem
plation of life he returned to his belief with
renewed confidence — " the Word was made
flesh."

GOD had walked this earth as Man, and
henceforth humanity with a capacity for moral
growth must slowly but surely reach out
towards the Divine. Humanity once and for
all had been taken into the Godhead when
CHRIST dwelt among men in visible form, and
it was not possible for humanity to do other
wise than go forward. Westcott's optimism
was built on this belief in the Incarnation, and
every fresh experience, every new fact gleaned
by observation only confirmed the point of
view. Nothing expresses this innate and
incurable optimism of Westcott's more forc
ibly than the Christus fynsummator sermons,
preached in 1885-6. Here the preacher
insists that —

" Sin, suffering, sorrow, are not the ultimate
facts of life. These are the work of an emeny ;
and the work of our GOD and Saviour lies
deeper. The Creation stands behind the Fall,
the counsel of the FATHER'S love behind the
self-assertion of man's wilfulness."

At the same time we are to

"Welcome each rebuff which turns earth's smoothness
rough."

" The true secret of happiness is not to
escape toil and affliction, but to meet them

Bishop Westcott 79

with the faith that through them the destiny
of man is fulfilled, that through them we can
even now reflect the image or our LORD, and
be transformed into His likeness."

" It is through difficulties fearlessly met that
we are led to wider knowledge."

"At every prospect of great trial we have
seen the figure of CHRIST to rise above the
darkness — of CHRIST the Fulfiller — not only to
give comfort, but to enlarge hope, not only
to support the sufferer under the pressure of
transitory affliction, but to show to the believing
soul that, in a world such as this,

* Failure is but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days.' "

To the contention that faith and religion,
after all, leave evil, sorrow, and suffering,
poverty, and luxury, unremoved, the preacher
answers, and gives reason for his optimism.

" True, but it leaves them only as one
element in life, the most obvious, the most
oppressive, but not the most enduring or the
most powerful. It is when the physical order
is held to be all, that life appears and must
appear to be hopeless. As it is we can wait.
We have found GOD in the world."

That is the explanation of the quiet calm of
manner which made more impatient reformers
regard Westcott as merely visionary. He had
found " GOD in the world," and was satisfied
that the world was daily becoming better. It
did not make him indifferent or apathetic where

8 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

evil was concerned ; in the silent hours in his
study he was at times bowed down at the
thought of the sin and suffering around him,
and his earnestness in speaking about questions
of industry and social conditions in the pulpit
and on the platform was strikingly sincere to
all who heard him. But with Browning he
could say : —
"There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall

live as before ;

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce

The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ;
That, after Last, returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched ;
That what began best, can't end worst,

Nor what GOD blessed once, prove accurst."

" Look backward," Westcott bids his readers
in Social Aspects of Christianity, " look backward
for the inspiring encouragement of Christian
experience. Look forward for the glorious
assurance of Christian hope. But look around
you, without closing your ears to one bitter
cry, or closing your eyes against one piteous
sight, or refusing thought to one stern problem,
for your proper work, and thankfully accept it
in the name of GOD."

Many passages in Social Aspects recall the
writings of F. D. Maurice, and in 1884
Westcott wrote to Mr. Llewelyn Davies :—

" For the last week I have spent my leisure
in Maurice's Life. I never knew before how
deep my sympathy is with most of his

Bishop Westcott 81

characteristic thought. It is most refreshing
to read such a book — such a life."

Westcott was strengthened and confirmed in
his social religious faith by F. D. Maurice at
Durham ; he could speak of Maurice's Social
{Morality as "one of my very few favourite
books," but he left Maurice too long unread to
be in any real sense his disciple. At the same
time, Maurice's teaching had been influencing
thoughtful Churchmen for forty years past.
Westcott's early friends, Llewelyn Davies and
David Vaughan were devoted Mauricians, and
Westcott could not altogether escape breathing
in the Maurician atmosphere. So with the
Socialist agitation in London in the eighties.
Westcott was not attracted to Social-Democracy,
but he was influenced by the Socialist thought
around him, and his sympathies were quickened
by a movement that preached a co-operative
commonwealth that was to supersede industrial
anarchy of unrestricted competition.

In Social Aspects of Christianity Westcott
declares boldly —

" We are suffering on all sides, and we
know that we are suffering from a tyrannical
individualism."

But he does not dwell on economic develop
ments at all. It is the moral side, the spiritual
part of man, that is to work the change in
society, and the family is to be the social unit.
" We are not made to live alone. . . . The
existence of the world is a fact, a self-luminous

M

82 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

fact, of which we must take account, no less than
the existence of GOD and the existence of our
own souls. Even our communion with GOD
must be through the fulness of life. There may
be times when hermit isolation becomes a duty, as
it may be a duty to cut off the right hand or
to pluck out the right eye, but it exhibits a
mutilation and not an ideal of life. All the
anarchy and half the social errors by which we
are troubled spring from placing the individual,
the self, at the centre of all things. No view
can be more flagrantly false."

" Man, in a word, is made by and made for
fellowship. The family and not the individual
is the unit of mankind. . . . For the family
exhibits in the simplest and most unquestionable
types the laws of dependence and trust, of
authority and obedience, of obligation and
helpfulness by which every form of true
activity is regulated."

It may be remembered when we read
Westcott's glowing eulogy of the family that
his own happiness in family life was very great.
His married life extended over forty-eight
years, and few men have been so blest in
marriage as Westcott was. He had, too, a
large Family, seven sons and two daughters,
and the sons all became clergymen, and that
without the slightest paternal pressure — a
striking witness to the respect and affection
for the father's office. Missionary zeal carried
several of these sons far from England, but no

Bishop Westcott 83

shadow of real separation, no suggestion of
any failing in mutual love, came into the family
circle. And Bishop Westcott and his wife and
their sons and daughters were united in a
mutual love, which held more closely than
the common ties of home are wont to bind.
Perhaps this was so because at the bottom of
the mutual love lay a deep mutual respect, for
the trouble so commonly is that love is apt
to forget the respect due, to claim its own at
the expense of another personality — to claim
parental authority at the expense of the child's
character and self-respect, or childhood's
pleasure at the expense of a parent's proper
responsibility ; and the love in parent or
child, in husband or wife, or in friend and
friend that yields its own in weakness or in
indolence sins against the light, and brings
distress as surely as the love that is the
aggressor. Hence the passive misery, the
estrangements, the dull bitterness, and from
time to time the open revolt, in countless
homes and families where happiness might be
looked for. Remembering Westcott's unbroken
life of domestic happiness, well deserved, it is
not difficult to understand his belief in the
family as a regenerative force.

From the fellowship of the family, Westcott
bids the readers of Social Aspects turn to the
larger fellowship of the nation, and of the race.
" How essentially pagan is the destruction of
small States," he had written fifteen years before,

84 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

and now in these Westminster sermons we
meet the same championship of nation and
nationality (but not of Nationalism).

" The nation no less than the family springs
out of the acknowledgement of our personal
incompleteness. . . . There could be no true
family without wide differences in power, in
fortune, in duty among those who compose it.
. . . The nation again, no less than the family,
is organized and controlled by an inherent
authority. Through whatever instruments the
authority may be administered it is in itself
not of man but of GOD. Authority is not
created but recognized, even in a successful
revolution. Authority may be graced or
obscured by the character of him who wields
it, but essentially it can receive no glory and
suffer no loss from man."

It is interesting to compare this view of
authority with a passage of Thomas Carlyle's
in Heroes and Hero-Worship : —

" To assert that in whatever man you choose
to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of
clutching at him) ; and clapt a round piece of
metal on the head of, and called him king — there
straightway came to reside a Divine virtue, so
that he became a kind of god, and a Divinity
inspired him with a faculty and right to rule
over you at all lengths ; this — what can we do
with this but leave it to rot silently in the
public libraries ? "

" England, a nation " was one of Westcott's

Bishop Westcotl 85

burning causes in the years before the clamour
for Imperialism. It made him enlarge with
enthusiasm over the importance of the Jubilee
celebrations of 1887 and 1897 ; it impelled
him to take the platform of the Church Defence
Society, and declare that a nation was weaker
if its spiritual organ and mouthpiece (i.e., an
Established Church) was removed ; and it
made him labour for the healing of wounds

O

caused by industrial disputes. On the other
hand this passionate regard for England made
it difficult for Westcott to look at the welfare
of other nations with whom England might be
at strife. He found satisfaction in the thought
that England was better — more chastened and
more united — for the late war in South Africa,
but there is no hint that he considered the
Boer nation in the matter, and whether they
also profited by the war.

It was impossible for Westcott to believe
that England could be wrong in any great
public Question, or that the policy and ambi
tions or its rulers could be base or ignoble.
There was always some reason to be found,
some explanation to be offered for apparent
departures from high ideals. Even the facts
concerning the opium traffic were not conclu
sive for condemning that iniquitous business.
The ostentatious display of military force at the
Jubilee Celebration of 1897, which distressed
many, did not so strike Westcott. It is true
he asked himself the question, after witnessing

8 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

the spectacle, Is the Army the nation, or the
strength of the nation ? But he also gives his
answer in an address to the Christian Social
Union at Leicester : —

" The pageant was, perhaps necessarily,
military in form ; but no one, I think, rests in
the belief that our strength lies in material
forces. . . . The solemn grandeur of the
spectacle has not been marred by any popular
voice of vainglory. . . . The large representa
tion of Colonial troops kept far away the
thought of aggression, while it vividly expressed
the variety of the elements united in the
Empire. . . . Our social ideal and our personal
ideal have both been ennobled ; we have
received a powerful impulse of self-realization,
not as units in aggregate, but as members in a
body. Even when the outward has associated
itself with the most impressive majesty, the
Unseen has been acknowledged as paramount."

Christus Consummator is the fruit of medi
tation on the Epistle to the Hebrews, and it
was followed by the publication (1889) of
Westcott's edition of that Epistle — the Greek
Text with Notes and Essays. " No work in
which I have ever been allowed to spend many
years of continuous labour has had for me the
same intense human interest as the study of
the Epistle to the Hebrews," Westcott wrote
in his preface to this important commentary.
In the Essay "On the Use of the Old
Testament in the Epistle," at the end of the

Bishop Westcott 87

book, Westcott stated some of the difficulties
that beset the study of the Old Testament,
and uttered a note of warning : —

" It is likely that study will be concentrated
on the Old Testament in the coming genera
tion. The subject is one of great obscurity
and difficulty where the sources of information
are scanty. Perhaps the result of the most
careful enquiry will be to bring the conviction
that many problems of the highest interest as
to the origin and relation of the constituent
Books are insoluble. But the student, in any
case, must not approach the enquiry with the
assumption — sanctioned though it may have
been by traditional use — that GOD must have
taught His people, and us through His people,
in one particular way. He must not presump
tuously stake the inspiration and the Divine
authority of the Old Testament on any fore
gone conclusion as to the method and shape
in which the records have come down to us.
We have made many grievous mistakes in the
past as to the character and the teaching of
the Bible. The experience may stand us in
good stead now. The Bible is the record, the
inspired, authoritative record, of the Divine
education of the world. The Old Testament,
as we receive it, is the record of the way in
which GOD trained a people for the CHRIST
in many parts and in many modes, the record
which the CHRIST Himself and His Apostles
received and sanctioned. How the record

8 8 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

was brought together, out of what materials,
at what times, under what conditions, are
questions of secondary importance."

Early in his residence at the Abbey a
pleasant break in the routine of Cambridge
and Westminster work came to Westcott when
Edinburgh University held its Tercentary
Festival in 1884, and conferred Honorary
Degrees upon a number of distinguished
people, of whom the Cambridge Regius Pro
fessor, to whom Edinburgh gave a D.D., was
not the least distinguished. Westcott had a
rare capacity for enjoying himself at all public
functions he felt it his duty to attend, and this
visit to Edinburgh brought very real pleasure.
He was the guest of Professor Flint ; Professor
Seeley walked beside him in the procession
to S. Giles' ; Dr. Hatch, of Oxford, an old
schoolfellow of Westcott's, was a fellow-
guest at Professor Flint's ; Robert Browning
exchanged greetings with him ; Bishop Light-
foot was there ; Sir James Paget and Sir Andrew
Clarke carried him off to a luncheon at the
College of Physicians. At the banquet after
the degrees had been given Westcott responded
to the toast of "Theology," proposed by
Lord Napier and Ettrick. Sir Henry Maine
responded for Law, and Professor Virchow
for Medicine.

The establishing of the Christian Social
Union in 1889 was a matter very dear to
Canon Westcott. He became its president,

Bishop Westcott 89

and to the end of his life the C.S.U. was
one of the Church of England societies he
aided in every possible way.

Canon Scott Holland in The Commonwealth
described the impression Westcott made as a
speaker on social questions : —

" The real and vital impression made came
from the intensity of the spiritual passion
which forced its way out through that strangely
knotted brow, and lit up those wonderful grey
eyes, and shook that thin high voice into some
ringing clang as of a trumpet. There was a
famous address at the founding of the Christian
Social Union, delivered to us in Sion College,
which none who were present can ever forget.
Yet none of us can ever recall in the least what
was said. No one knows. Only we know
that we were lifted, kindled, transformed. We
pledged ourselves ; we committed ourselves ;
we were ready to die for the Cause ; but if you
asked us why, and for what, we could not tell
you. There he was : there he spoke : the
prophetic fire was breaking from him : the
martyr-spirit glowed through him. We, too,
were caught up. But words had only become
symbols. There was nothing verbal to report
or to repeat. We could remember nothing,
except the spirit which was in the words : and
that was enough."

What Canon Holland, with so much hearty
appreciation, calls " spirit," plainer people, who
rather wanted to remember what was said and

90 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

to recall the words of the speaker, were apt to
call " cloudiness."

But if Canon Westcott's spoken words at
the Christian Social Union meeting could be
described as " symbols," his writings and
speeches on the question of International Peace
were plain enough for all.

In 1889 Westcott presided over a Confer-
ence of Christians representing the Church of
England and the Nonconformist bodies, held
at his residence at Westminster, and from this
Conference sprang the Committee of the
Christian Union ror Promoting International
Concord, of which he was made Chairman.
Dr. Clifford, Rev. F. B. Meyer, Mr. Percy W.
Bunting, and Rev. H. W. Webb-Peploe, were
at that Conference ; and Rev. Dr. Paton,
Rev. Mark Guy Pearse, Dean Gott of
Worcester, Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, and
Lord Nelson, though absent, expressed their
full sympathy with the meeting. In a letter
to the Guardian Canon Westcott explained the
objects of the Conference, and the resolutions
it adopted. Unanimously the Conference had
decided " that the present condition of the
armaments of Europe demands the urgent
attention of all Christian Communions with
a view to (i) United prayer to Almighty GOD
upon this subject, (2) Combined action, in any
ways possible, for the bringing about a simul
taneous reduction of the armaments."

In a later chapter I shall deal more fully

Bishop Westcott 91

with Westcott's views on War and other
political questions, but it may be well here to
quote two paragraphs from this letter to the
(guardian, for they are as clear as could be
desired : —

" The proposal to work for the simultaneous
reduction or European armaments is definite,
and deals with an urgent peril. It does not
involve any abstract theories. It is not com
plicated by any considerations of party politics.
It emphatically recognizes that which is the
object of our greatest statesmen. Such a
disarmament would secure the lasting and
honourable peace which the leaders of Europe
have shown lately, once and again, that they
sincerely desire. And we may reasonably hope
that a strong expression of popular feeling will
be welcome to those who have the conduct
of affairs, as strengthening and encouraging
them to adopt measures by which they may be
delivered from the embarrassment of a policy
which more and more tends to turn the pro
vision for home defence into a menace.

"If once we realize that the true interests
of nations are identical, and not antagonistic,
it must be possible to find some settlement
of the existing causes of debate upon the
Continent, which will satisfy the legitimate
aspirations of the great and generous nations
in whose satisfaction Europe will find peace."

Westcott became deeply attached to the
Abbey during the six years of his Canonry.

92 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

" He loved this Abbey Church," said Canon
Duckworth in his sermon on August 4, 1901,
" with a quite peculiar affection, because it
witnessed in a unique manner, as he said, to
the consecration of every form of service which
man is capable of offering to GOD. ... For
the Incarnation had taught him that every
form of human effort was capable of consecra
tion ; and that only as each brings that which
is his own predestined contribution can the
fulness of life be offered to CHRIST, and the
purposes of GOD for man be carried to its
issue."

Gladstone offered him the Deanery of
Lincoln in 1885, and Lord Salisbury the
Deanery of Norwich in 1889, and Westcott
declined both — so unwilling was he to leave
Westminster and Cambridge. Then in Decem
ber, 1889, came the death of Dr. Lightfoot,
and the Bishopric of Durham was vacant, to
be filled the following March by the appoint
ment of Dr. Westcott. The last ceremony he
took part in at Westminster was the funeral
of Robert Browning.

Westcott was Examining Chaplain to Arch
bishop Benson during the six years at West
minster, and a characteristic story is told of
a Roman Catholic Priest who applied at
Lambeth for admission to the Church of
England ministry and was referred by the
Archbishop to his Chaplain. Some months
later Benson enquired of Westcott concerning

Bishop Westcott 93

this Roman Priest, of whom he had heard
nothing more. " Oh ! " exclaimed Westcott,
" he was very ignorant, very ignorant indeed ;
he knew nothing." And then Benson dis
covered that the unhappy man had not satisfied
Westcott in Bible Exegesis, and had been sent
away to study instead of being welcomed as
a convert.

94 Leaders ef 'the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER VII
BISHOP OF DURHAM

, in March, 1890, Canon Westcott
accepted the Bishopric of Durham, the
news of the appointment was greeted with
approval from every side. He was in no
sense a party man ; to Westcott indeed, the
differences of High Church and Low Church
seemed irrelevant, and earnest men of all
opinions in the Church of England welcomed
Bishop Lightfoot's successor to Durham, and
declared the choice wise and well-made.

For Canon Westcott the change from
Cambridge and Westminster to Durham was
very grave. He was in his sixty-sixth year,
and (in his own words) after " long and busy
years as student and teacher " he was " suddenly
called at the close of life to the oversight of a
diocese in which the problems of modern life
are presented in the most urgent and impressive
form." The faith which had been pondered in
quiet had without preparation to " be brought
into the market-place and vindicated as a power
of action."

But, though Westcott was thus impressed

Bishop Westcott 95

by the immensity and the responsibility of
the task before him, there was no hesitation, no
weakness about obeying the call to Durham,
and till the day came — more than eleven
years later — when death relieved him of his
charge, he fulfilled the work before him with
a patient, untiring industry, and with a courage
and sympathy that won affection and respect
throughout the diocese, and commanded ad
miration wherever men were interested. At
his Consecration a Bishop makes solemn
promises that he will

" Maintain and set forward quietness, love,

and peace among all men,"
and that he will

" Shew himself gentle, and be merciful for
CHRIST'S sake to poor and needy people,
and to all strangers destitute of help."
and Westcott kept faith. The Consecration
took place in Westminster Abbey on May i.
Dr. Hort preached, and Archbishop Thomson
consecrated the new Bishop ; assisted .by
the Bishops of Winchester, Carlisle, Exeter,
Oxford, Ripon, Truro, and Wakefield. A
fortnight later Bishop Westcott began his
work at Durham. The days for studious
research concerning the original text of the
New Testament, for long meditation over the
beginnings of Christianity, for editing of the
sacred books were over ; the work of a Bishop
of the Church of England with its mass of
official business, its Conferences, and its Visita-

9 6 Lea ders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

tions had commenced. Men wondered how
this learned Cambridge Professor, this idealist,
this preacher of the glories of the invisible,
would acquit himself in the turmoil of
industrial Durham. Would he become lost
in episcopal routine ? Would he fail among
the big capitalists — the practical men of his
diocese ? Would he make himself under
stood to the miners with their trade unions
and co-operative societies ?

In his sermon — published later in The
Incarnation and Common Life — at his enthrone
ment in Durham Cathedral on Ascension Day,
1890, Bishop Westcott struck the note that
was to distinguish his episcopate. This
Christian religion which he had come to
preach and confirm in that part of the realm
of England was a social religion : —

" We are not, we cannot be alone. There is
a larger life in which we are all bound to an
irrevocable past and an immeasurable future :
a life which we inherit ; a life which we
bequeath, weakened or purified by our own
little labours. And there is also now a present
life of the society in which we are all bound
one to another, a life of the city, of the diocese,
of the nation, a life which in these different
relations is completed in many parts and ful
filled through many offices ; a life in which
each member serves the whole body with his
peculiar gifts ; a life in which the rich harmony
is marred by the silence of the feeblest voice ;

Bishop Westcott 97

a life in which the greatest powers owe a debt
of blessing to the humblest ; a life in which
each lives by all, through all, for all."

After alluding to many social questions of
pressing importance, the Bishop declared : —

" I do wish to call again, as far as any
influence is given to me, the energy and enter
prise of our citizens from personal to civil
duties. I do wish, speaking, as I believe, in
the spirit of the great office in which I desire to
sink myself, to claim the whole of life, every
human interest, every joy and every sorrow,
every noble aspiration and every true thought,
as falling within the domain of our faith. I do
wish that we should agree together from the
first that all the problems of modern life are in
the end religious problems."

The time was very soon to come when this
social faith was to be put to the test, when
England was to see how an idealist would
acquit himself in the strife between Capital
and Labour.

In 1891 the coal-owners of the County of
Durham had resolved on a general reduction
of wages, and after a good deal of fruitless
correspondence between the Miners' Federation
and the Owners' Committee, in March, 1892,
work stopped at all the pits. The owners
demanded seven and a half per cent, reduction
of wages, the miners were willing to work at a
reduction of five per cent. Neither side was
prepared to yield. Bishop Westcott wrote at

9 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

the beginning of the struggle, offering his
services to the Miners' Federation, but the men
were not then inclined to any return to work at
a reduction of wages beyond five per cent. ;
they refused to entrust the officials of their
Federation with full powers for a settlement,
and declined to look with favour on any "out
side interference." And so the weary labour-
war went on — fought with grim tenacity by the
pit-men against the heavy accumulated wealth
of the coal-owners. There could be but one
ending to such a strike — sooner or later the
men were bound to accept whatever terms the
owners would offer : starvation throws its
weight in the scale against labour in all
these disputes, and hunger compels submis
sion. Strikes are the insurrections of industry,
often heroic, often educative, often productive
of great qualities of loyalty, patience, and
fellowship, and (save in petty disputes), as
a very general rule, doomed to be unsuccess
ful. It is a matter of whether Capital or
Labour can hold out the longer, and the
means for endurance, the resources for a pro
longed spell of idleness, are the greater on the
capitalist side. So it was in Durham in 1892.
Within a couple of months the miners and
their families were face to face with famine.
Savings were soon exhausted, and dismantled
homes told of household furniture pawned and
sold to provide food. Others besides the
miners were affected — all local industries and

Bishop Westcott 99

small shopkeepers — the distress became general.
The men, starving quietly in silence and with
due regard to law and order, made the first
overtures for peace. They were willing to
submit to a seven and a half per cent, reduction,
but now the owners demanded a greater fall in
wages. The men offered ten per cent., and
the owners raised their claims to a thirteen and
a half per cent, reduction. So matters stood at
the end of May, and the Bishop, who had
watched and waited, anxious only to do what
he could "to set forward peace among all
men," again made overtures for a settlement.
In an open letter addressed to the
Rev. E. Price, Rural Dean of Bishop
Auckland, and published in The Times, early
in May, Bishop Westcott urged that the
questions in dispute between the miners and
the coal-owners should be referred to a joint
board composed of three representatives of the
owners, three representatives of the miners, and
three business men not connected with mining.
"No argument could fail to receive due
weight in the deliberations of such a body.
The grounds of their verdict would, I imagine,
be laid before the world, and masters and men
would alike be gainers by the loyal acceptance
of a policy of just conciliation." The letter was
ignored, but it brought conciliation into the
field for discussion, and set the minds of men
in that direction for a settlement of the strike.
So it happened that when, on May 25, the

ioo Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Bishop wrote to Sir Lindsay Wood, the
Chairman of the Owners' Association, and to
the Secretary of the Miners' Federation Board
proposing —

" That the pits should be opened with the
least possible delay on two conditions :

" i. That there should be an immediate
reduction of wages of ten per cent.

" 2. That the question of any further
reduction should be referred to a Wages
Board, to be established with full powers
to deal with this and with all future
differences as to the increase or reduction
of wages" —

and inviting representatives of the two
organizations to meet at once at the Castle,
Bishop Auckland, "to discuss details," the
offer was accepted.

Sir Lindsay Wood, in accepting for the
Owners' Committee, and Mr. John
Wilson, M.P., and the other leaders of the
Miners' Federation, in accepting for the men,
paid tribute to Bishop Westcott's " care and
thought " and " the laudable desire manifested
towards bringing the unfortunate dispute to a
termination," but neither side expressed any
confidence that the conference would accomplish
a settlement.

Still, the invitation was accepted ; owners
and miners were agreed in this, that they
could meet under the Bishop's roof, and
under his chairmanship would discuss the

Bishop Westcott 101

possibilites of peace. Westcott hastened
back from the Annual Meeting of the Inter
national Arbitration Association in London in
time to meet the chosen representatives of the
miners and the owners at the Castle on
June i. The Conference began directly after
lunch and all the afternoon the crowd outside,
which had gathered at noon, waited eagerly for
news. First, the Bishop pleaded with both
sides for a settlement that should have lasting
results in the direction of peace and goodwiU
between capital and labour ; and then after
some discussion, under his chairmanship, the
Federation-men and the Owners' Committee
retired to separate rooms, the Bishop passing
freely between the two camps. The men were
willing to return to work at a ten per cent,
reduction of wages : would the owners agree to
those conditions ? The owners were standing
out for a thirteen and a half per cent, reduction,
and for a time it seemed as though the dead
lock could not be forced. Then, as the hot
summer afternoon passes, the Bishop makes an
appeal to the owners to yield. Let the men
return to work at a ten per cent, reduction, and
let a Conciliation Board go into the whole
question of wages for the future. He pleads
with the owners to concede these terms before
starvation forces the men to an unwilling and
hostile submission. The miners, at the same
time, send a message to the owners, offering a
return to work at an immediate reduction of

IO2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

ten per cent., and promising to agree to the
formation of a Joint Conciliation Board for the
further settlement of disputes. At five o'clock,
after a very tough last half-hour, the Owners'
Committee abandoned their claim to a thirteen
and a half per cent, reduction of wages, and
accepted the men's terms.

The strike was over ; the great crowd out
side the Castle shouted itself hoarse with
excitement. The Bishop had really carried the
day. The idealist had prevailed. It is worth
while to recall the details of the Durham Coal
Strike in 1892, not only because it was the
chiefest event in Westcott's episcopate, but
because it demolishes the tiresome con
temptuous notion that men of exalted principle
and simplicity of belief, men of patient study
and of rare enthusiasm, are out of place in the
everyday affairs of public life, and are not
helpful in the hour of public difficulty.
Westcott succeeded at Durham just because he
was a man of ideals and of devotion. He had
no axe to grind, no faction to serve, no ambition
to gratify ; but he had high principles of duty
and social responsibility that needs must be at
work ; his simplicity of heart and honesty of
mind were open for all men to see ; he was a
man in whom (it was felt) all could have
confidence, to whose judgements all could look
for justice. And for ten years men of all
sorts and conditions in that Durham diocese
trusted Bishop Westcott and believed in him.

Bishop Westcott 103

His mediation finished the strike — that was
always to be remembered. Two days after
the Conference at the Castle the pits were
reopened, and later on the Conciliation Board
was constituted.

Of course all bitterness among the miners
was not removed when the strike was over.
The ten per cent, reduction meant a heavy fall
in wages, and some of the men felt that the
Bishop might have helped them to withstand
the demands of the owners, and so prevent
any reduction of wages. They did not under
stand that Westcott could not take sides
in such a dispute, that he believed it his
work to reconcile and harmonize in the
strife of men, and that the responsibility to all
classes in the diocese sat heavily upon him.
Besides, Westcott was as far from being a
democrat as was Ruskin (whom he read a
good deal in those Durham years), and to the
end he openly defended social inequalities of
wealth and position. To a great audience of
Northumberland miners, at the Miners' Gala
Day in 1894, Bishop Westcott maintained that
it was well that some men should have a high
place and large means, though, of course, such
men were in the responsible position of great
trustees, and they were bound to use their
means for GOD and the nation. " Privileged
inheritance should be regarded as a call to
exceptional devotion."

The fact that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners

1 04 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

draw large sums from mining and royalties
could not be overlooked, and it was suggested
by certain men, miserably disappointed at the
collapse of the strike, as an explanation of the
Bishop's anxiety to arrive at a settlement.
Men said harsh things in their hour of defeat
of the Bishop, of the owners, and of their own
leaders, and there is always a certain amount
of relief to some minds in thus giving vent to
explosive feelings of wrath and vexation ; but
in their hearts, neither in Durham nor else
where did any believe that the Bishop's motives
were not of the highest, or that any question
of personal loss or gain in material things
prompted his interference. Jealous for the
rights of his See, no Bishop of Durham cared
less for personal state, or indulged fewer desires
of the flesh. The Rev. Arthur Westcott has
told us in the Life and Letters of Bishop
Westcott) of his father's dislike of all luxury,
of his abstinence from tobacco, and from
wine and spirits, of his objection to using a
carriage — how the Bishop would when the
carriage was necessary sit huddled up with his
back to the horses — and these things were not
unknown in the diocese. Though a few
denounced the Bishop for "siding with the
owners," the great bulk of the miners knew him
for their friend, and several times in after years
he was invited to preach to them in the Cathedral
on the Miners' Gala Day. The very last public
address Bishop Westcott delivered was to the

Bishop Westcott 105

Durham miners only a few days before his
death.

The average Bishop's life in the Church of
England is a very busy one, and Dr. West-
cott escaped none of the tasks that we assign
to our prelates. At Missionary Meetings,
Temperance Meetings, Church Defence Meet
ings, Diocesan Conferences, the Bishop was
expected to be present, and he rarely failed
to attend. Then his proper work of ordain
ing, confirming, and consecrating churches
was done with a devout conscientiousness that
covered the minutest detail. There was a
mass of official correspondence to be attended
to, and the Bishop would never yield to the
modern spirit that relegates letter-writing to
the typewriter and the shorthand clerk, but
must needs write his own letters by hand, and
generally by return of post. In social move
ments no less than in episcopal activities
Dr. Westcott was absorbed at Durham. He
was busy at conferences on Co-operation,
Profit-sharing, and Labour Co-partnership ; on
the Unemployed, and on Temperance Reform.
Sometimes these conferences took place at
Bishop Auckland, and the Bishop was always
at his happiest in the hospitality he bestowed
on his guests.

For the Christian Social Union he preached
and spoke far and wide in the diocese, and at
Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Birmingham,
Leeds, Liverpool, and Leicester ; in a later

106 Leaders of the Church 1800-190x5

chapter I shall give some fuller account of
this Christian Social Union work. London, of
course, too, had to be visited from time to time
for " May Meetings," for important anniver
saries, and for conventions in the cause of
International Peace and Arbitration.

In the debates in the House of Lords,
Westcott took little part ; but he voted in
1894 — much to the regret of his Trade
Unionist and Liberal friends — for the amend
ment to the Employers' Liability Bill, which
sanctioned " contracting - out," and thereby
largely destroyed the usefulness of the measure.

To the Bill introduced in the House of
Commons, in 1893, by Mr. Asquith for the
Disestablishment of the Church in Wales,
Westcott offered most strenuous opposition.
He spoke at the Albert Hall, London, and at
a great meeting at Sunderland in defence of
the Establishment, and his voice, in early life
thin and weak, carried well. The Bishop's
main arguments were: (i) That the Estab
lished Church was the spiritual organ of the
nation, and that to disestablish was to deprive
the nation of a great possession. (2) That
Church and State had grown up together,
and were one — and like the head and body
made one person. How was it possible to
disestablish, when we could not fix the date
when the establishing took place ? It is
remarkable that in his " Church Defence "
speeches it is for the nation Westcott pleads

Bishop Westcott 107

and not for the Church. He was not Erastian
in any desire to make the Church subservient
to the State ; rather Church and State are
united too closely in his mind to be separated
without lasting loss to both, and the national
life without a National Church, a thing only to
be contemplated with dismay. The things of
Caesar and the things of GOD, the secular and
the sacred, were not to be separated, Westcott
more than once declared with passionate
emphasis. This warm affection for the
Established Church of England never made
him look with coldness on Nonconformists,
though he was puzzled that men should prefer
the authority of Rome to the independence he
prized so highly in his own communion.

With Dr. Moulton, a fellow-member on
the Revision Committee, Westcott remained
close friends, and for that eminent Wesleyan's
work on the Revision of the Apocrypha he
had high admiration. His relations with
Dr. Dale, the Congregationalist of Birming
ham, too, were very friendly, and both men
enjoyed each other's New, Testament Com
mentaries. From time to time parties of
Nonconformist ministers and local preachers
visited the palace at Bishop Auckland to be
entertained in the most cordial way by the
Bishop. On the other hand neither Cardinal
Newman, whom Westcott heard in his Under
graduate days, nor Cardinal Vaughan, whom he
met late in life, impressed him pleasantly.

1 08 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

With the clergy of his diocese Westcott's
relations were on the whole very happy. His
real fatherliness, and his plain sincerity for the
welfare of the whole Church could not fail to
win the hearts of men. He believed the best
of his clergy, as he did of other men ; he never
charged them with disloyalty if their ritual
practices and their sacramental teaching were
not what he approved. It might be want of
due thought and consideration of the position
of the Church of England that had caused this
overstepping of the mark, but the Bishop
could not believe that it was any conscious
disloyalty. He recognized fully that the
Church's formularies allowed considerable lati
tude of discipline and expression, and made
no attempt to coerce High Churchmen or
Low to a rigid uniformity. Certain cere
monies and devotions that were disagreeable
to Westcott personally he permitted in the
diocese, understanding that they might be
helpful to others. On the whole he welcomed
varieties in Church life as symptoms of health
and vigour, provided there was at bottom
sincere belief in the Christian verities and in
the claims of the Church of England. At the
same time, with all his wide sympathies and
the earnest desire not to curtail the liberties
of his clergy, Westcott could put his foot
down quite firmly when he considered it
necessary, and his refusal to sanction Father
Boiling's presence in the diocese revealed this

Bishop Westcott 109

firmness. Dolling had arranged to preach a
mission in a Durham parish, and then came his
difference with the Bishop of Winchester, and
the departure from S. Agatha's, Portsmouth,
at the end of 1895. Dr. Westcott was not
troubled by Father Dolling's religious or social
teaching, but that a clergyman should be
lacking in obedience to his diocesan was what
seemed so deplorable. Himself the soul of
obedience to all lawfully-constituted authority,
Westcott was really distressed that Dolling was
" obviously deficient in the elementary graces
of humility, meekness and obedience," and so
he wrote and requested the vicar of the parish
where the mission was to be held to cancel the
arrangements and put the mission off, and the
request was obeyed. It was a blow to Father
Dolling's friends, and to all who hoped that
the Church of England would find room for
the large-hearted parson of the Winchester
College Mission, Landport ; that a Bishop
of such well-known social views as Westcott
had should join in what looked like an
episcopal conspiracy to drive Dolling out
of the Church of England seemed parti
cularly sad. But this must be remembered :
Westcott had really little affection for the
"saving of souls " through evangelical preaching,
sudden conversions did not appeal to him, the
success of a parochial mission was a small thing
beside the continuance of authority in the
Established Church. In his own words spoken

no Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

in Durham Cathedral, " at the close of life . . .
we learn to distrust speedy results. And if we
are tempted to hope for less in the near future,
our confident expectation of * the times of
restoration of all things ' is strengthened by the
vision of a continuous movement in the affairs
of men and a clearer sense of its direction."
In this vision of " continuous movement "
Father Boiling's powers of persuasion, and
whole-hearted love for individual souls had no
place. Dolling was a thorn in the side of
the powers that trust to law and order, and
Westcott naturally sided with authority. It
was unfortunate ; it was a matter of real sorrow
to the Bishop ; but if Dolling would not submit
to episcopal order, Dolling, or any other
clergyman who behaved with the same freedom,
must stay away from Durham. There was
nothing of the Evangelical at any time about
Westcott.

To the simple Evangelical Christian there
are only two great facts — the personal immortal
soul and GOD. Westcott never could exclude
a third fact nor deem it of less importance —
the existence of mankind, the welfare of the
race.

It was said that once a clerical friend com
plained to him that a Salvation Army officer
travelling in the same railway carriage had put
the question to him " Are you saved ? " " I
was rather embarrassed to find an answer :
what should you have said, my Lord?" the

Bishop Westcott 1 1 1

friend enquired. The Bishop paused a moment
and then answered, with a gentle smile, " I
should have said, Do you mean by { saved '
sotbcis (o-o>0e2s), sozomenos (crco^o/ze^oy), or sesosmenos
(a-€<7co(TfjL€voy) ? " — quoting the three related but
not identic words which the A.V. indifferently
renders " saved."

If the inhibition of Father Dolling vexed
a good number of Church -people, Bishop
Westcott's attitude on the South African War
was a far greater blow to all his peace-friends.
Westcott had identified himself so largely with
the cause of International Peace that many
looked to him for a lead when war broke out
between the British Government and the Boers.
Dean Kitchin, of Durham, from the first spoke
out against the policy that led to war, and
protested all the time against the continuance
of the war, but Dr. Westcott could not see
things in the same light. He found the Boers
to blame for sending the ultimatum, he held
that England was bound in duty to prosecute
the war, and he believed that the war did good
in uniting the British Empire, and in rousing a
sense of common responsibility among English
people. It is difficult to see how Bishop
Westcott could have spoken otherwise. His
love of International Peace was not greater
than his love of England, and his belief in
England's mission. To have condemned the
South African War would have been to
turn his back on the convictions of a life-

U2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

time, and at seventy-five men do not easily
give up the convictions by which they have
lived. He could not believe England to be in
the wrong, and, therefore, the Boers were to
blame. It is to be noted, too, that here, as in
the case of Dolling's inhibition, immediate
distress was a small thing in his sight when
compared with the growth of men and nations.
Westcott's dislike of war was deep and
strong, but he saw that in the past men and
nations had grown through, and in spite of
war, pestilence, and famine, and he could
comfort himself with the sure confidence that
this South African War was a discipline which
would leave England purified. Its effect on
the Boers was not, perhaps, duly considered.
Then Westcott had nothing of the Manchester
Liberal hostility to war as a hindrance to
international trade, and as a destroyer of the
goodwill that comes of such trade. Neither
did he believe that literal obedience to the
commands of CHRIST expressed in the New
Testament — commands to refrain from violence
and resistance to evil — were of the essence of
Christianity. Christianity was not in his
eyes the obedience to certain fixed laws of
conduct, it was rather the transforming of
character to the likeness of a Divine Person.
He could not, looking back over past history
and around him in the world, condemn the use
of force, and war was but the extreme use of
force. And so, though the South African War

Bishop Westcott 113

saddened him, Bishop Westcott could bless the
British troops, and pray anxiously for their
success on the field of battle.

Public affairs were not the only things that
brought sadness to the old Bishop in the last
years at Durham. Death carried off his
youngest son Basil, who was working as a
missionary in India. Then in 1892 Dr. Hort
died, and four years later Archbishop Benson.
Sorrowfully in 1897, Westcott inscribed his
book on The Christian Aspects of Life to the
memory of his three friends, Bishop Lightfoot,
Dr. Hort, and Archbishop Benson, and added
the words " whose friendship has been inspira
tion and strength throughout my life."

One touch of passing pleasure he had. In
1898, the University of Dublin conferred
upon him the Honorary Degree of D.D. —
an honour which it rarely bestows ; no one,
in fact, had received it before Westcott for
more than eighty years. The Bishop crossed
to Ireland for the first and only time in his
life to receive the degree, and he preached
before the University.

Mrs. Westcott accompanied him, and the
visit to Dublin, where Dr. Salmon, the Provost,
entertained them, remained to the end a time
of memorable interest and pleasure. To few
men has it been given as it was to Bishop
Westcott to win in a lifetime so full a recogni
tion of the gifts possessed and the character
revealed.

1 1 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Three books of sermons and addresses
delivered during the Durham episcopate were
published by Messrs. Macmillan : The
Incarnation and Common Life, Christian Aspects
of Life, and Lessons from WorJ^. These
contain the full, ripe thought of Westcott's
life. They mark no change of standpoint, no
recantation of former utterances, no striking
development of opinion. It is the earlier
thought matured and confirmed by experience ;
but it is essentially the same thought and
teaching that characterized the first deliverances
of the Cambridge Tutor. Westcott never
delivered a rash message to be afterwards
recalled, nor took a false step to be afterwards
retraced. His life was of a piece throughout.
The vision before him may have become more
luminous, the vista wider and brighter, the
road clearer. But the one vision before him —
the Incarnation of the SON of GOD — was never
obscured, the vista was never closed or seriously
darkened. There was no halting on the road, no
weary floundering in sloughs of despond. In
these Durham sermons, if the note of age is
sometimes struck, it makes no discord with
the note of invincible optimism — that note to
which Browning had attuned him. The belief
"in the life to come," the life to come for
man and for humanity here on this earth,
eternal life in close fellowship with GOD, the
life ever approaching nearer to the likeness of
the Eternal, with sin and its disfigurements

Bishop Westcott 115

no longer oppressing, — this belief rings out
triumphantly in these last discourses, and
remains recorded in his books, that all who
will may read for themselves, and so reading
learn the message of a great Christian teacher.

1 1 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

CHAPTER VIII
THE END

TLLNESS rarely interfered with Westcott's
work, but in the summer of 1897, the
Bishop being then in his seventy-third year,
his good health failed him, and some months
of rest from all diocesan business was necessary.
With reluctance and disappointment he can
celled his engagements to attend the Lambeth
Conference of Anglican Bishops throughout
the world, and to address the Durham miners
at the service in Durham Cathedral on their
annual Gala Day. So serious was the break
down that resignation was thought inevitable,
and there was talk of the Bishop's successor.
But the end was not yet. The life of steady,
even mind, of ordered habits, of wholesome
discipline, the life of the temperate mean,
never wasted by self-indulgence nor torn by
the anxieties of poverty, must run its full
course. The Bishop rallied and recovered,
and in the autumn was pleading for " Church
Reform " from the presidential chair of his
Diocesan Conference.

Parliament, he urged, was not able to deal

Bishop Wcstcott 1 1 7

effectually with questions of Church Reform ;
it had no time for ecclesiastical legislation.
The Church of England needed the same
powers of self-government that the Established
Church of Scotland possessed. And as a step
in this direction the Church of England must
first reform its Houses of Convocation by
securing the due representation of laymen in
those assemblies.

Again the round of Church services, public
meetings, conferences, and official correspon
dence was resumed, and Westcott was as
indefatigable as ever. The activity in the last
year of his life was wonderful. In September,
1 900, he presides at a meeting of the Newcastle
Church Congress on the subject of "War" ;
in October he makes an Episcopal Visitation
and delivers a lengthy Charge in Durham
Cathedral and at Darlington on " The Position
and Call of the English Church " ; in Novem
ber he speaks on Education at the opening
of new Science Buildings at Barnard Castle,
declaring that —

" Education, as I understand it, is not a
preparation for commerce or the professions,
but the moulding of a noble character, a
training for life — for life seen and unseen —
a training of citizens of a heavenly as well as
of an earthly kingdom, for generous service
in Church and State."

And later in the same month, at Leeds, he
gives his last address to the Christian Social

1 1 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Union, and utters some memorable words on
Progress : —

" Before we can determine whether a move
ment is really progress we must determine the
end it is desired to reach. Progress is an
advance towards an ideal. If we wish to
estimate human progress we must fix the
human ideal."

In December came the last visit to Cam
bridge, and for the second time — after an
interval of thirty-two years — Westcott preached
at the Trinity College Commemoration. Very
eloquently he reminded his hearers that as
a young man in the chapel and courts of
Trinity he had seen visions — visions which in
outward circumstances had been more than
fulfilled ; and that now as an old man he
dreamed dreams of great hope that the work
his own generation had left unaccomplished
would be carried forward by men who " would
welcome the ideal which breaks in light upon
them, the only possible ideal for man, the
fullest realization of self, the completest service
of others, the devoutest fellowship with GOD."

So the days went by and winter passed, and
still the meetings, sermons, conferences, and
correspondence went on. Then at the end of
May, while the Bishop was away from home
consecrating a churchyard at Lamesley, came
the death of Mrs. Westcott, and the devoted
wife (" for forty-eight years my unfailing
counsellor and stay," Westcott wrote in the

Bishop Westcott , 119

touching dedication of Lessons from Work] was
no longer to share his hopes and fears. In
a letter to his old friend the Rev. J. Llewelyn
Davies, a few weeks later, Bishop Westcott
wrote : —

"When we came here I was afraid that
the cares of her position would oppress
Mrs. Westcott, whose whole heart was in her
home. But it was not so. She told me again
and again that these eleven years were the
happiest of her life. They brought countless
opportunities for showing little kindnesses, and
it is a joy to me to see how many speak of
her c loving motherliness.' She was, I think,
a perfect Bishop's wife, a mother in GOD to all
whom she touched. And now the memory of
a beautiful life remains in its completeness to
guide me through whatever I may have to do."

From all parts of the diocese, and from
troops of friends, came sympathy, and the
Bishop could write to the same correspondent :
" The thing which has struck me most is the
way in which a great sorrow reveals a larger
life."

At the funeral in the chapel at Bishop
Auckland Castle, on May 3ist, Bishop West
cott, and his eldest son, Canon Westcott, and
another son, the Rev. Henry Westcott, said the
prayers at the grave-side, and the Rev. T. M.
Middlemore-Whithard, the Bishop's school
fellow in the Birmingham days at King
Edward's, stood close at hand.

1 2 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Bishop Westcott was parted from the woman
he had loved in boyhood, from the " unfailing
counsellor and stay " of a lifetime. The silver
cord that had held these two in such close
communion was loosed, the golden bowl of
mortal happiness broken.

But there was to be no leaving off from
work to mourn for the dead, no weakness of
grief to hinder from the race that was yet
to be run. Mrs. Prior, Bishop Westcott's
youngest daughter, remained at the Castle,
and the Bishop, looking beyond the sorrowful
ness and heaviness of a night for the joy that
cometh in the morning, set himself bravely
to accomplish the work that was left for him
to do. He had not neglected his bishopric
in the few anxious weeks of his wife's illness,
and he could face the appointed duties of his
post undismayed by the close hand of death.

Early in June came the publication of
Lessons from Work^ the last volume of Durham
Sermons and Addresses, with the dedication
to the memory of his wife. At the service of
welcome in Durham Cathedral, on June 3, to
the Durham Volunteers, who had returned
from South Africa, the Bishop was present.
No responsibility was forgotten, no task
omitted, in the time that remained.

On Saturday, July 20, came the annual
service for the Durham miners in the Cathe
dral, and the Bishop fulfilled his promise and
preached the sermon. A miners' band played

Bishop Westcott 121

the well-known hymn tune, " Abide with me :
fast falls the eventide," when the Bishop, with
Dean Kitchin and the Archdeacon of Durham
on either side, entered, for the last time, the
Cathedral he loved so well.

Slight, frail, and bowed with years, was
Bishop Westcott — the allotted span of three
score years and ten well past, but his voice was
Ml and clear and his words carried plainly to
the great congregation. Without faltering the
message was delivered, the last public utterance
spoken that all might hear.

Who, of that multitude who heard the
closing words of the Bishop's sermon, will
forget them ? — those words of simple Christian
faith :—

" About eleven years ago, in the prospect
of my work here, at the most solemn hour of
my life, I promised that, by the help of GOD,
c I would maintain and set forward, as far as
should lie in me, quietness, love, and peace
among all men'; and that CI would show myself
gentle and be merciful for CHRIST'S sake to poor
and needy people and to all strangers destitute
of help.' I have endeavoured, with whatever
mistakes and failures, to fulfil the promise, and
I am most grateful to you, and to all over
whom I have been set, for the sympathy with
which my efforts have been met. I have been
enabled to watch with joy a steady improve
ment in the conditions, and also, I believe, in
the spirit of labour among us. Much remains

R

1 2 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

to be done ; but the true paths of progress
are familiar to our workers and our leaders,
and are well trodden. While, then, so far
I look back, not without thankfulness, and
look forward with confident hope, I cannot but
desire more keenly that our moral and spiritual
improvement should advance no less surely
than our material improvement. And, since
it is not likely that I shall ever address you
here again, I have sought to tell you what
I have found in a long and laborious life to
be the most prevailing power to sustain right
endeavour, however imperfectly I have yielded
myself to it — even the love of CHRIST ; to tell
you what I know to be the secret of a noble
life, even glad obedience to His will. I have
given you a watchword which is fitted to be
the inspiration, the test, and the support of
untiring service to GOD and man : the love
of Christ constraineth us.

"Take it, then, my friends — this is my last
counsel — to home, and mine, and club : try by
its Divine standard the thoroughness of your
labour and the purity of your recreation, and
the Durham which we love — the Durham of
which we are proud — will soon answer to the
heavenly pattern. If Tennyson's idea of
heaven was true, that c heaven is the ministry
of soul to soul/ we may reasonably hope, by
patient, resolute, faithful, united endeavour,
to find heaven about us here, the glory of
our earthly life."

Bishop Westcott 123

The sermon was over, the massed bands
of the miners struck up another hymn :
Westcott had taken farewell of his people.
Dean Kitchin accompanied him back to the
Chapter House, and said, " I'm afraid you
are very tired."

"Yes," replied the Bishop, "but just as
I wish to be after so splendid a gathering.
I think I may now say that the Cathedral
Service on Miners' Day is firmly established
and will last."

Westcott returned home to the Castle to
leave it no more. A week of illness followed ;
his life-strength slowly ebbed ; each day left
him weaker. For a little while, tired as he
was, he made some attempt to deal with
correspondence and dictate answers to letters,
but on the Friday the doctors knew the end
was very near.

A resolution of sympathy came from the
Wesleyan Conference sitting at Newcastle, and
this message of goodwill cheered the good old
Bishop in those last hours. The love of the
brotherhood of men was always very dear to him.

On Saturday, July 27, just before midnight,
Westcott passed quietly from his work on earth,
from mankind he had served so faithfully, to
the rest that remaineth for the people of GOD.

It had been a life well lived, the full life
of an exalted mind, no shadow darkening the
end. With his sons and daughters gathered
round, and the clergy attached to the place,

1 2 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

and the doctor and nurse, consciousness left
him. The Psalms for the day were recited
at the dying man's request, a few favourite
hymns sung, till the eyes were dim and the
frontiers of earth passed. As he had walked
all his days with his GOD, so no doubt or fear
disturbed him at that hour. Surely his LORD
was with him in the valley of the shadow of
death. It was the death-bed of a good man
whose creed had not been so much what he
had lived for as his life itself. And as this life
had been sowed to the spirit, when the harvest
came the reaping was to the spirit. There
was no thought or word of making peace with
GOD, for Westcott had never been at enmity
with his GOD. He had followed the Light
which lighteth every man, and in the Light
was Life. " Keep innocency, and take heed
unto the thing that is right : for that shall
bring a man peace at the last," wrote the
Psalmist, and the peace that rested upon
Westcott was, of a certainty, the peace that
comes at the last to the upright man of
innocent and righteous life, whether he die on
the scaffold or in his bed, whether his death
be full of honours or of public shame.

For a few days the coffined body remained in
the great entrance-hall of the Castle at Bishop
Auckland, and then on Friday, August 2, came
the funeral in the Castle chapel. From all
parts men came to do honour to the Bishop
in his burial, to pay the last tributes of love

Bishop Westcott 125

and reverence. Canon Westcott (the Bishop's
eldest son), and his brother, the Rev. Henry
Westcott, Dr. Llewelyn Davies, the only
surviving friend of Undergraduate days, Mrs.
Hort and her eldest son, some of the Bishop's
grandchildren, Church dignitaries and diocesan
clergy, representatives of the Universities, of
the chief Missionary Societies, of the great
Nonconformist bodies, and of Durham Co
operative Societies and Miners' Associations,
stood by the open grave.

Brightly the sun streamed through the
chapel windows that August afternoon ; the
band of the Durham Light Infantry Volunteers
played Chopin's Funeral March ; slowly the
funeral procession came from the Castle to
the chapel. The Archbishop of York and
the Bishops of Winchester, Rochester, Exeter,
Newcastle, and Salisbury, walked in front, and
they were followed by Dr. Strong, of Christ
Church, Oxford, and other Examining Chap
lains. Archdeacon Boutflower l bore the pastoral
staff, and Mr. J. McClemens — an old servant
of the Bishop's — the mace of the diocese. On
the coffin a simple laurel wreath was laid.

" I am the Resurrection and the Life " — the
opening sentence, read by the Bishop of Win
chester — rang out clearly, and struck a note
that sounded again and again throughout the
service, and to this day recalls the memory of
the resting of Bishop Westcott.

1 Now Bishop of Dorking.

1 2 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

The Gospel of the Resurrection, the Gospel
of Life, the GOD of the living, not of the dead,
Westcott had always preached. He had turned
men's minds from brooding over death to
rejoicing in life — life, and life in abundance,
whole, and complete, had been his message to
all who would heed it. And now in the hour
when the dust of the preacher — the dust that
was once a man — returned to the earth, it was
fitting that the thought should still be of life,
and not of death ; and it was well for the
mourners that the triumphant feeling that
mankind had acquitted itself well in Bishop
Westcott, that in him it had kept faith to itself
and to its GOD, that the resting was the reached
goal of the course so finely run, should rise
above the grief that knew only of bereavement,
and echo in many hearts within that Castle
chapel, in that hour of death's inheritance, the
deathless words, " I am the Resurrection and
the Life."

The sunshine, and the flowers on the chapel
altar, and the absence of the undertaker's
trappings, all helped to keep predominant the
thought of life.

The hymn, " O GOD, our help in ages past,"
was sung ; Dr. Butler, the Master of Trinity,
began the Ninetieth Psalm, " LORD, Thou hast
been our refuge : from one generation to
another," and Dean Kitchin read the lesson
from the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

Then Canon Westcott committed the body

Bishop Westcott 127

of his father to the ground, " Earth to earth,
ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; in sure and certain
hope of the Resurrection to Eternal Life."

Another hymn, " Now the labourer's task is
o'er," was sung, the Rev. Henry Westcott said
the last prayers, the Archbishop of York
pronounced the Benediction, and the singers
chanted the C^func Dimittis. The service
was over, Bishop Westcott rested in the
grave where but two months earlier his wife
had been laid, and near by where his friend
Bishop Lightfoot was buried. The congrega
tion filed by the open tomb, for the final
glimpse of the Bishop's coffin, and from the
organ came Mendelssohn's, " Oh, rest in the
LORD," to break the silence. There must have
been some four hundred people in the chapel,
for the seats had been removed to make as
much room as possible, and before they had all
left the organist had gone on from Men
delssohn to Handel, and the strains of the
" Hallelujah Chorus " were the sounds that
lingered when the chapel had been left behind
for the open air — brave, vigorous human
music that made those who heard it recall the
glorious, invincible optimism of the Bishop, and
with such good recollection leave the burial of
Bishop Westcott for the world that was to see
him no more. It was to see him no more, but
it might still ponder his counsels and the secret
of the integrity of his life. It might reflect
upon that saying of Balzac's, " People who

128 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

have hearts are simple in all their ways," and
upon the incorruptible treasures upon which
the Bishop's heart was set. When the
funeral was over, the people of Durham
understood that for ten years and more they
had had among them a Bishop who had served
his day and generation with wonderful single-
hearted devotion, who had devoted great talents
of knowledge and industry to the welfare of
the community, and whose character was of
rare beauty. They knew him for a man not
only without guile, but also without any of the
vanity that disfigures many a hero. And,
since they knew this of Bishop Westcott and
appreciated the character of their friend, his
influence did not end at his death, but it lives
on in Durham — in men of vastly different
habits and positions — in all who are striving
for better social relations among men, for
more wholesome industrial conditions, for
greater honesty and higher principle in public
life, and for greater sincerity and devotion in
the Christian Churches.

So it is that, though death leaves us poorer
by the loss of a friend, a teacher, a leader, and
the loss seems irreparable, it yet happens that
the work of the dead is still carried on by
uncounted numbers, and the banner, dropped
in death, is grasped by a thousand hands. At
Westcott's own request no public memorial
has been erected to his memory, but a lasting
memorial to the good Bishop stands in the

Bishop Westcott 129

men and women whom he helped to a nobler
conception of life — a deeper sense particularly,
of its duties and activities — by the ideals he so
steadily set forth.

In the Resolutions written down in the
books of various public bodies and religious
and industrial societies after the Bishop's death
memorials may be found too. It was, of
course, to be expected that the Houses of
Convocation, the Durham Diocesan Con
ference, the Dean and Chapter, the S.P.C.K.,
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,
the Church Missionary Society, and the British
and Foreign Bible Society should declare the
loss they had sustained and pay eloquent
tribute to the memory of the man who had
been not only a good Bishop but a faithful
friend. It was natural that the Durham Board
of Conciliation for the Coal Trade, the Durham
Miners' Association, and the Northumberland
Miners' Association, and the Local Co-operative
Societies should place on record their apprecia
tion of the services Bishop Westcott had
rendered. But it does not often happen that
so earnest a Churchman as Westcott can win
such praise from Nonconformists as he won.
The Wesleyan Methodist Conference could
declare while the Bishop lay dying —

" Your Lordship's writings have for many
years been an inspiration to our ministers and
people, and your latest volume has come to us
as a message from our common Master."

s

130 Leaders of the Cburcb 1800-1900

The Sunderland Free Church Council
recognized with gratitude the Bishop's " Love
to CHRIST, his genuine piety, his reverent
manner, his catholic spirit, his spiritual
instinct, his social interest, his practical help,
his ripe scholarship, and his humble bearing,"
and declared that "The Church Universal
mourns his absence."

Collectively, through the Durham County
Councils, and through the Borough Councils
throughout the county, the people expressed
their sorrow. The County Coroner, at an
inquest at Hartlepool directly after the
Bishop's death, and with him jurors and
witnesses, placed on public record their desire
" to testify their high appreciation of the
lofty piety, the noble consistency, and the
truly Christian liberality in thought, word, and
deed whereby the late Dr. Westcott exalted all
the infinitely great things respecting which
Christian people are agreed, while exhibiting
the comparatively infinite littleness of those
things which are matters of difference."

The Socialists of the Darlington Independent
Labour Party expressed their "deep sense of
the great loss the cause of social reform has
sustained by the death of Dr. Westcott, Bishop
of Durham," and their "highest appreciation of
the earnestness and zeal with which he sought
to improve the social conditions of the masses."

So from far and wide men gave their stones
for the cairn of the Bishop's memory.

Bishop Westcott 131

Blessed are the dead when, with such tokens
of affection, they pass from earth ; blessed are
they when they rest from their labours at the
close of a full life-day of toil, and there are
none to breathe reproaches for wrong or injury
inflicted. Blessed indeed are the dead when
the old common prayer ascends from the hearts
of all that the soul may rest in peace, and that
light perpetual may shine upon it.

132 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER IX

RELIGIOUS TEACHING

HPHE basis of Westcott's religious teaching
was his belief in the Incarnation of the
SON of GOD. For him the Incarnation was
the central fact of history, not caused by the
fall of man, but fore-ordained from the
beginning. He held that in becoming man,
in dying on the Cross, and in rising from the
dead, GOD had so revealed Himself to man
that henceforth mankind had a religion which
would be found sufficient for all human needs,
for all holy and humble men of heart who were
seeking after GOD, a religion which, as history
told, would fulfil the spiritual desires of all
men.

Over and over again, Westcott, in sermons
and addresses, dwells on this belief in the
Incarnation and presents it to his hearers, as
the key and illumination of life. The experience
of his own heart confirms the belief, and he
can declare in old age : " I say without reserve,
that I have found my absolute trust in the
Gospel of the Word Incarnate confirmed with
living power, when I have seen with growing

Bishop Westcott 133

clearness that no phrases of the schools can
adequately express its substance, or do more
than help men provisionally to realize some
part of its relation to thought and action ;
when I have learnt through the researches of
students in other fields to extend the famous
words of the Roman dramatist, and say,
Christianus sum, nihil in rerum natura a me
altenum puto — I am a Christian ; and therefore
nothing in man and nothing in nature can
fail to command the devotion of my reverent
study — that I have found, even in the
slow and fitful progress of the Church, which
still does move forward, a spring of hope,
when I turn, as I must turn from time to
time, to take count of the unutterable evils
of great cities, and great nations, and whole
continents, which wait for atonement and
redemption in the long-suffering and wisdom
of GOD."

That man was essentially religious, and must
needs be seeking after GOD, Westcott took for
granted. Again, he judged from the experience
of his own heart and from his reading of history.
"If we look back to the earliest, or over the
widest records of human life we cannot, without
setting aside the witness of history, avoid the
conclusion that man is born religious. He is
by his very nature impelled to seek some
interpretation of his being and his conduct by
reference to an unseen power."

In these words Westcott stated his premise.

134 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Granted that man was " by his very nature
impelled to seek some interpretation of his
being and his conduct by reference to an unseen
power," then the Christian religion gave that
interpretation as no other religion could do ;
and the Christian religion was the belief in the
coming of CHRIST the SON of GOD to dwell on
earth as man — in the life, death, and resurrection
of CHRIST. Miracles are essential to this
religion. The virgin-birth of CHRIST is a
miracle, the resurrection from the dead is a
miracle, and Westcott had no inclination to
explain miracles away. CHRIST the SON of GOD,
in His birth, and in rising from the dead, must
transcend all the known facts of life. It is not
that the miracle is a violation of law, as we
have noticed elsewhere. Rather, the miracle is
the expression of a law at present beyond our
experience. Westcott insists upon this belief
in miracle ; he solemnly warns us against
"natural" explanations of the virgin-birth or
the resurrection. It is only fitting, Westcott
teaches, that, when GOD came to take human
nature, He should not come quite as other
men come ; and that, though dying as man,
He should not be subject to death.

It is easier to understand this insistence of
Westcott's upon the miraculous as essential to
Christianity, when we remember that it is not the
character of JESUS as we have it in the Gospels,
it is not the sublime teaching of the Sermon
on the Mount, it is not the " sweet reasonable-

Bishop Westcott 135

ness " of the Son of Man, that Westcott
preaches, but the doctrine that the "Word
became Flesh." Bishop Boutflower has told
us that Bishop Westcott declared " the Sermon
on the Mount is not Christianity ; it is not
a Gospel but a Law — the most perfect moral
Law no doubt — but there is nothing in it to
lift a man outside himself."

Westcott takes his stand upon the Incarna
tion and the Resurrection — "if CHRIST be not
raised from the dead then is our faith vain."
He makes no ordinary appeal for personal
loyalty to the teaching of JESUS CHRIST ; he
rather deprecates the tone and feeling of
popular hymns and devotions addressed ex
clusively to JESUS ; neither does he urge us
over- much to contemplate the character of
the JESUS of the Gospels, nor greatly to ponder
the recorded words of the Master. The idea
of a " Life of our LORD " was hateful to him.
Westcott bids us study the growth of mankind,
and in such study see the hand of GOD at
work, and the fruit of the Incarnation. It was
impossible, Westcott held, for the Christian to
observe and reflect upon the progress of man
kind, and not see in that progress the
illumination shed by the Incarnation. Westcott
preaches, not the crucified JESUS, but a Gospel
of infinite possibilities opened to mankind
through the fact that GOD had become
man. Man is bidden to learn more and more
of GOD, and in this knowledge to find the

136 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

fuller significance of the creeds of the Church,
for Westcott has perfect confidence that the
creeds will endure through all time. In
Cbristus Consummator he bids us —

" Cling with the simplest devotion to every
article or our ancient creed, while we believe,
and act as believing, that this is eternal tifi, that
we may fyiow — know, as the original word
implies with a knowledge which is extended
from generation to generation and from day to
day — the only true God and Jesus Christ."

Every fresh experience should reveal more
of the truth of GOD.

"The sum of human experience grows
visibly from year to year ; and the Truth
ought to find fresh fulfilment in every fact
of life." '

With his belief in the exalted destiny of man,
springing from the belief in the Incarnation, so
constantly proclaimed, what was Westcott's
teaching concerning the Atonement ? Naturally
he deprecates all efforts to define or limit
salvation. CHRIST lived on earth and died
and rose again, and in so doing brought man
back into union with GOD ; that is sufficient
for us to believe.

" It is enough for us to remember with
devout thankfulness that Qhrist is the pro
pitiation not for our sins only, but for the whole
world, without further attempting to define
how His sacrifice was efficacious."

C°nsummator*

Bishop Westcott 137

In the same volume — Christus Consummator
— he speaks, further on, of the remission of
sins : —

" For the most part we are tempted to look
to the Gospel for the remission of the punish
ment of sins, and not for the remission of sins.
But such a Gospel would be illusory. If the
sin remains, punishment is the one hope of the
sinner ; if the sin is forgiven and the light of
the FATHER'S love falls upon the penitent, the
punishment, which is seen as the expression of
His righteous wisdom, is borne with glad

ness."

That men should greatly fret over fears of
personal damnation, or be elated at the pro
spective happiness of heaven, seems to Westcott
unworthy in the face of the wider hopes and
fears of the race, and he shakes his head over
" the blind complacency which is able to forget
the larger sorrows of the world in the confidence
of selfish security." He is reported to have
said that an infinite prolongation of individual
existence seemed to him undesirable and insup
portable.

Bishop Boutflower has recalled another saying
of the Bishop's, " Forgiveness is not the removal
of consequences, but their transfiguration."

Though not inclined to encourage theological
niceties concerning the doctrine of the Atone
ment, Westcott gives us in Christus Consummator
a fairly plain account of his own point of view.
To the question, " How can another's suffering

T

138 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

avail for my offence ? — how can punishment be
at once vicarious and just?" he replies, Because
Humanity is one, because

" The family, the nation, the race, are living
wholes which cannot be broken up by any
effort of individual will." And,

"We are coming to understand why the
human instinct has always rejoiced in the stories
of uncalculating self-devotion which brighten the
annals of every people : why our hearts respond
to the words of a Chinese King, contemporary
with Jacob, who said to his people, ' When guilt
is found anywhere in you who occupy the
myriad regions, let it rest on me the One
man * ; and faithful to his prayer said again,
when a human victim was demanded to avert
a drought, * If a man must be the victim, I will
be he ' ; why we do not think lives wasted
which are offered in heroic prodigality to
witness to a great principle : why the blood of
martyrs is indeed seed, not idly spilt upon the
ground, but made the vital source of a teeming
harvest. We are coming to understand, in a
word, what is the true meaning of that phrase
c vicarious suffering,' which has brought at
other times sad perplexity to anxious minds ;
how it excludes everything that is arbitrary,
fictitious, unnatural, external in human relation
ships : how it expresses the highest energy of
love which takes a friend's sorrows into the
loving heart, and taking them, by GOD'S grace
transfigures them."

Bishop Wcstcott 139

In the Victory of the Cross , a small book
of sermons preached in Hereford Cathedral
in Holy Week, 1888, Westcott enlarges
upon the doctrine of "Social Indebtedness,"
which is the key to his teaching on the
Atonement : —

" We have only to ask ourselves what we
have which we have not received in order to
feel the overwhelming greatness of our debt to
others. The wealth which is entrusted to our
administration represents the accumulation of
others' reflection. . . . Each of us in his
measure is a product of all that has gone before.
. . . We live through others. The sacrifice
and suffering of others minister to us from the
cradle to the grave."

Man is reconciled to GOD, is at one with the
Almighty FATHER by the perfect life *of man
lived by the SON of GOD. Henceforth man
kind in the Person of CHRIST dwells on the
right hand of the FATHER.

To Westcott belief in the Resurrection is
no less important than belief in the Incarnation.
It is part and parcel of his Gospel of Life.
He would not have man brood over sin and
death. Not the death of CHRIST upon the
Cross, but the Divine life overcoming death, is
the religion by which men will become trans
formed into the likeness of GOD. Hence the
crucifix — that common representation of a
suffering GOD, that symbol of Divine
martyrdom — was repugnant to Westcott. The

14° Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Cross he finds unobjectionable, nay, beautiful.
But " The Crucifix " he declares in the Victory
of the C™ss> "with the dead CHRIST obscures
our faith. Our thoughts rest not upon a dead
but upon a living CHRIST."

Disliking the crucifix, Westcott, naturally,
shrank from contemplating sin. It was said
that "original sin" had no place in his
theology. Certainly he is not a preacher who
tells mankind of its sins and bids them repent.
His belief in man is great ; he loves to dwell
on the advance mankind has made, and on the
infinite possibilities before it. It was not that
he was ignorant of the offences man committed,
but his religion, his optimism, made him insist
on the innate goodness of his fellows. Just
as he held man, normal man, to be essentially
religious, ever seeking after GOD, so he could
not find in his heart that man was consciously
sinful. To hear of gross offences shocked him
unspeakably ; to his mind there was some
thing particularly monstrous in the notion of
wilful sin. The transgressor violated Westcott's
teaching ; there was really no room for such in
his scheme of human life. Doubtless, man in
ignorance and in weakness fell far short of
the Divine standard, but to believe that man
wilfully set his face against the light was to
undermine that belief in man which came from
the belief in the Incarnation. With Browning,
whose view of life Westcott so cordially
approved, he could say : —

Bishop Westcott 141

" There shall never be one lost good ! What was shall

live as before ;

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ;
What was good shall be good with, for evil, so much

good more,

On the earth the broken arcs : in the heaven a
perfect round."

With this faith, asceticism finds no place in
Westcott's teaching. There is no belief in
matter being evil ; no dogmatic refinement as to
good and evil ; no scholastic list of sins. Origen,
not Augustine, is Westcott's theological hero.
S. Francis of Assisi he admires indeed, but
for his real nobility of soul, his sweetness of
character ; and at bottom he perceived that
Francis was no ascetic, but a lover of men and
of GOD, whose love left no room for the cares
of temporal things. Yet, without being in the
least a Manichaean, Westcott had something
of the Puritan in him. His seriousness made
amusements seem too trivial things for man.
He never condemns theatres or dancing, but he
finds no place for them in his outlook on life.
Novel-reading and games are equally outside
the view. The life of study and of cheerful
co-operation in all good works for the welfare
of man and the glory of GOD is the ideal life
for man, and the life in which Westcott found
happiness. Without speaking evil of the
common pleasures of man, he continually
exhorts to the fixing of the heart on the more
lasting pleasures of the soul and the mind.

142 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Man's responsibilities are great, his inheritance
is immortal ; then let him seek the things that
will best fit him for his great destiny.

George Eliot's 1{omola seems to have been
the only novel he had a really high opinion
of. The Sistine Madonna he thought the
greatest picture in the world.

Granted Westcott's premise that " man is
born religious," born " to seek a harmonious
relation with the unseen powers — conceived of
personally," as he wrote in his notes on the
Epistle to the Hebrews — then his teaching,
with its vigorous optimism, will be acceptable
to many, and will prove wholesome and helpful.
It has already so proved acceptable and helpful.
But then there are to-day, as there have been
in the past, many people, sincere, honest, and
hard-working, who somehow cannot be included
in the number of " the born religious." There
are serious thinkers, men of integrity and plain
uprightness, who cannot accept the belief in a
personal GOD, in a FATHER to Whom every
human life is precious, — for such Westcott's
theological teaching has no message. He is not
a preacher to the Gentiles, but to those of the
Household of Faith, and this limitation must
be noticed. He appeals to the feeling that some
men have for the knowledge of GOD ; but for
those that are without this feeling, who say
plainly that they cannot believe such knowledge
possible, this appeal is vain. And here the
weakness of Westcott's teaching beside that of

Bishop Westcott 143

the preacher of "CHRIST crucified" becomes
apparent. From the first centuries, through
the ages, and around us to-day, men are
drawn to the character of CHRIST, to the Man
of Nazareth, to the story of His life. The
discourses of JESUS, His Sermon on the Mount
and His parables, His patience and His courage
are still an inspiration to multitudes. The death
on the Cross remains an act of sublime heroism.
Metaphysical conceptions of CHRIST, and
transcendental doctrines of Divinity, do not
touch the plain average man of simple intelli
gence. For the weary and heavy laden, for
the desolate and oppressed, there is comfort
in the vision of the Man of Sorrows, there is
still some measure of peace in the thought of
the life laid down on Calvary. The atheist
and the agnostic, the pantheist and the
materialist alike, are still moved by the teaching
of CHRIST, and can loyally declare that teaching
to be the best rule for men, and can humbly
live by it. Westcott's doctrine, though it may
be acknowledged as the teaching of a high-
minded, single-hearted man, does not appeal
to the agnostic because it is not addressed to
him, and its general waiving of guidance, in
details of conduct in favour of proclaiming
exalted transcendental doctrines, leaves it
powerless to help average people in their
everyday troubles. But it remains whole
some, bracing teaching for the converted and
for the faithful.

144 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

In an old article in The Expositor^ published
as far back as January, 1887, the Rev. W. H.
Simcox, M.A., pointed out an aspect of weak
ness in Canon Westcott's teaching which I
have suggested above, and the following
passage from this article may be quoted because
it comes from a Christian writer whose appre
ciation of Dr. Westcott's work was warm and
discriminating : —

" In matters of scholarship, Biblical or other
wise, Dr. Westcott has always stood ahead of his
readers, and an advance in the general standard
of knowledge has done nothing to discredit
him ; but it is less certain that in psychology
or metaphysics his judgment is more than that
of an average educated man of his time. Now,
such a man twenty years ago was apt to think
the eternity of matter inconceivable, and the
existence of a personal GOD a necessity of
thought ; but people whose minds are active,
and who know what the movement of men's
minds is and has been, now know that
materialism, pantheism, and atheism are things
which, right or wrong, it is at least possible
for serious thinkers to believe. And the
incapacity here shown to do justice to the
materialist point of view is the more surprising,
because it is recognized how arbitrary is the
line popularly drawn between * soul ' and
'body.' He who feels how hard it is to
draw this line should have felt how rash it is
to assume that we feel something intuitively,

Bishop Westcott H5

because we believe it undoubtingly. To say
that we have intuitive knowledge of the
existence of our own souls, or the freedom
of our own will, may be a true or a misleading
description of the facts of consciousness : but
it is at least certain that the facts so described
are given in consciousness, and can be denied
by no one. It is further a tenable though not
an incontestable view, that we are directly
conscious, as of the power to choose either a
right or wrong course of action, so of responsi
bility for choosing the right — i.e., that the
individual subject is intuitively conscious of
its subordination to the universal order — to the
Power, whatever it be, that is supreme in the
universe. But it is not a part of this con
sciousness, even if it be a legitimate inference
from it or from other data, that the universal
or supreme Power is itself a conscious Subject,
in whose image the human consciousness is
made. That it is so is the postulate of
Christian theology — perhaps of anything to
be called a theology as distinct from mere
metaphysics ; and a Christian theologian may
be excused in taking it for granted, when
dealing only with fellow-Christians. But he
weakens instead of strengthening his theological
system, when he rests this postulate of theology
not on what may be true reasonings, but on a
false appeal to consciousness."

To sum up shortly, Westcott's theological
teaching left the agnostic position untouched;

u

1 46 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

its want of practical directness left the
average man unhelped in everyday conduct,
and its treatment of the Atonement left it
without the means to move and cheer the
hearts of those simple people among us who
are still comforted by the evangelical preaching
of a crucified Saviour. On the other hand,
Westcott's teaching put before us a noble ideal
of Church and State ; it encouraged the halting
to hope on and hope ever, and it bade men
walk upright as sons of GOD and not cringe
in fear of an offended Deity ; and it insisted
that we must look with confidence for the life
to come — here on this earth — that to doubt the
future was disloyalty.

In his sacramental teaching, Westcott's
dislike of defining where the things of GOD
were concerned, his distrust of logical reasoning
in the presence of mysteries, and his instinctive
shrinking from all controversy and argument
over matters of faith, mark off his standpoint
from the Catholic position, as sharply as his
teaching on the Atonement keeps him aloof
from Evangelicalism. Certainly, Westcott held
that the Holy Communion was a great means
of grace for Christians, that it had been
instituted by CHRIST for the perpetual refresh
ment of His disciples, and that in the Holy
Communion the believer drew near to CHRIST
and received CHRIST into his heart. But he
drew back distressed from the idea of a
localized Presence in the consecrated elements,

Bishop Westcott 147

and still more from the suggestion that man
should adore such a Presence. It was enough
for him that CHRIST was present in the Holy
Communion ; to say exactly where that Presence
was seemed to him dangerously near idolatry.
For Westcott, " heaven was a state and not a
place." At Harrow Westcott would remain at
the late celebration in the school-chapel with
out communicating, if he had made his own
communion early in the day at the parish
church ; and he was always anxious for a weekly
communion to be instituted. At Durham he
gave no sanction to perpetual Reservation of
the Sacrament in the churches in his diocese.
Such Reservation, indeed, he regarded as a
very grave and regrettable attempt to localize
CHRIST'S Presence. At the same time he
allowed the consecrated elements to be carried
away from church at the time of com
munion by one of the assisting clergy and
administered to the sick, and he defended the
practice as legal and primitive.

On the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist
Westcott said little. He could not accept the
view that " do this " meant " offer this sacrifice,"
and he very much disliked all announcements
of the special offering of the Holy Eucharist
on behalf of the dead or the living. Gently,
but quite firmly, he pointed out at Durham
the objectionable nature of the phrase, and
induced his clergy to withdraw it. To think
of friends, to remember them alive or dead, in

148 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

one's prayers, and at the Holy Communion
more particularly, was seemly and beautiful,
Westcott held ; at the same time it was not
good to try and explain the exact consequences
of such prayers, or to enter into detail of the
blessings desired.

"True prayer — the prayer which must be
answered — is the personal recognition and
acceptance of the Divine will," Westcott wrote
in his notes on the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Westcott, in fact, was no more a " Sacer-
dotalist " than he was an " Evangelical."
Dr. Llewelyn Davies writes to me : —

" He (Westcott) could not be called a
* Sacerdotalist.' The last time I was with him
at Auckland he mentioned that he had been
looking through the New Testament to see
what evidence there was of a ministerial system
having been appointed for the Church in the
early days, and he could find none. And what
impressed him as accounting for this was the
prevailing expectation of the coming of the
LORD. I believe he held — as Maurice did —
that the LORD * came ' according to expectation,
at the end of the age ; and that then the
system of the Church was formed under the
influence of the Spirit given to the Church."

The Priesthood was an institution of man,
Westcott taught in Christus Qomummator^
devised by man in his need : —

" So it has been that men in every age have
made Priests for themselves, to stand between

Bishop Westcott 149

them and their GOD, to offer in some acceptable
form the sacrifices which are the acknowledge
ment of sin, and the gifts which are the symbol
of devotion. The institution of the Priesthood
has been misused, degraded, overlaid with
terrible superstitions, but in its essence it
corresponds with the necessities of our
nature."

A passage in Carlyle's Heroes and Hero
Worship may be recalled : —

"The Priest, too, as I understand it, is a
kind of Prophet ; in him, too, there is required
to be a light of inspiration, as we must name it.
He presides over the worship of the people ;
is the uniter of them with the Unseen Holy.
He is the spiritual captain of the people ; as
the Prophet is their spiritual King with many
captains : he guides them heavenward by
wise guidance through this earth and its work.
The ideal of him is, that he, too, be what we
can call a voice from the unseen heaven ;
interpreting, even as the Prophet did, and in
a more familiar manner unfolding the same
to men. The unseen heaven — the ' open
secret of the Universe ' — which so few have an
eye for ! He is the Prophet shorn of his
more awful splendour, burning with mild
equable radiance, as the enlightener of daily
life."

Nothing of a Sacerdotalist, Westcott was, if
possible, less of a Ritualist ; a certain amount of
formal respect he recognized as due to every

150 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

office, but he had no love of ceremonies in
public worship, and his mind was impatient of
details of ceremonial. At the same time,
recognizing the latitude of the Church of
England, he made no attempt at Durham to
coerce High Churchmen, nor to curtail the
liberties they had enjoyed under his prede
cessors. The very few men who, more or
less frankly, preferred the doctrines and ritual
of Rome to the doctrines and ritual of the
Book of Common Prayer and yet remained
as officiating ministers in the Established
Church distressed Westcott, but he was fully
aware that the great bulk of the High Church
clergy, even when they adopted an elaborate
ritual, and made more of the Holy Com
munion than their Bishop did, and recom
mended Confession for general use, while he
only regarded it as a medicine for the sick,
were at heart thoroughly loyal to the Church
of England, and without positive desires for
reconciliation with Rome.

Bishop Boutflower, who was for some years
Westcott's Domestic Chaplain at Durham, tells
us that the Bishop's conclusion concerning many
of the hymns so popular in public worship
was, that he could not understand what they
meant, and that he didn't believe their writers
could. Hymns Ancient and Modern^ he once
said playfully, had done more harm to popular
English theology than any other book except
Milton's poetry.

Bishop Westcott 151

So much of Westcott's life was devoted to
the study of the Bible, and particularly to the
study of the New Testament, that we must
recall how very deep a place the Bible held
in his affections. His views on inspiration
were published quite early in his Introduction
to the Study of the Qospels and remained
practically unchanged. They struck a mean
between the Calvinistic view, wherein the
writer was nothing and the Spirit everything,
and the modern view, wherein the writer was
everything and the Spirit was nothing.

" Man is not converted into a mere machine
even in the hand of GOD," Westcott declared.
" Inspiration then, according to its manifesta
tion, is dynamical and not mechanical : the
human powers of the divine messenger act
according to their natural laws even when these
powers are supernaturally strengthened."

He found the truth to lie in a combination
of the elements of truth at the bottom of the
two opposing theories : —

" If we combine the outward and the inward
— GOD and man — the moving power and the
living instrument — we have a great and noble
doctrine to which our inmost nature bears its
witness. We have a Bible competent to calm
our doubts, and able to speak to our witness.
... It is authoritative, for it is the voice of
GOD ; it is intelligible, for it is in the language
of men."

That the Bible itself must play a large part

152 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

in the religion of men and of nations Westcott
held firmly. At Harrow, in 1868, in his
History of the English Bible, he could say : " A
people which is without a Bible in its mother
tongue, or is restrained from using it, or
wilfully neglects it, is also imperfect, or
degenerate, or lifeless in its apprehension of
Christian Truth, and proportionately bereft of
the strength which flows from a living creed."
And later life brought no modification of this
point of view. The Church and the Bible,
these two things were an everlasting witness
to the truth of GOD ; and the injury or neglect
of either was the injury of Christianity. In
the text of the Bible, Westcott was intensely
interested. That a passage, proved to be of
later date, should still retain its place in one of
the books of the Bible, brought real distress
to him. That those first responsible for the
compiling of the Canon and for deciding what
passages should be retained, could be as equally
inspired in their work as the writers of the
Bible were, Westcott does not admit. Yet
surely when such a story as that contained in
S. John's Gospel, vii. 53 to viii. n, has been
retained for all these centuries as characteristic
of CHRIST, and mankind has accepted it as
such, and to-day accepts it in that light, and
holds the passage as containing teaching of
rare beauty and value, it is beside the mark
to ask us to give the passage up because it is
not found in many of the earliest manuscripts.

Bishop Westcott 153

It is of no importance whether S. John wrote
the words or not, but the feeling which
prompted the compilers of the Bible to rank
the story as divinely inspired was a sound
one, and the New Testament which omits the
passage is a maimed and mutilated book.

Two anecdotes related by Bishop Boutflower
throw light on Bishop Westcott's attitude to
the Bible. A certain Cambridge Professor
having declared that he wanted the Bible to be
read just like any other book, " I have always
tried to read it just like any other book,"
Westcott replied, "and because I have done
so I have come to the conclusion that it is
utterly unlike any other book in the world."
On another occasion Westcott was appealed to
by an ardent advocate of the circulation of
the Bible in India, and his answer was not
encouraging. " I'm sorry not to think it would
do good ; consider the desecration it would
lead to ! ... They would never think of
doing this with their own sacred books in the
East." Yet, as a matter of fact, in recent years
the sacred books of the East have been very
widely published and circulated in England.

Westcott was a strong believer in Sunday
observance from his youth up, and some words
from a sermon he preached at S. Andrew's,
Auckland, in 1894, on "The National Day
of Rest," (afterwards republished in Christian
c/fspects of Life?) give us in brief his religious
teaching in the matter. Though other sermons

x

1 54 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

and articles were written on the subject, they
do not throw any fresh light or put West-
cott's own principles any clearer : —

"An early Assyrian tablet, discovered not long
since, gives an interpretation of the term which
goes to the very root of its meaning. c The
Sabbath,' it says, c is the day of the rest of the
heart.' This is the thought I ask you hence
forth to associate with your Church. . . . The
Jewish Sabbath was a shadow to which CHRIST
brought the substance. But He made clear
that the old Sabbath existed in virtue of the
eternal principle to which it witnessed. . . .
Meanwhile, He gives to us our Sunday, the
old rest-day in a new shape, to be a spring of
fresh energy under the present conditions of
our being, stripping off from it the heavy load
of ceremonial observances with which it had
been burdened and disguised. . . . He says
to us : * Remember the Sabbath Day to keep
it holy,' in a truer sense than the punctilious
Pharisee, even in the acts by which He was
accused of breaking it. ... The Sabbath is
not simply in a negative sense a time in which
we must refrain from work for our own gain.
It is that, but it is more ... it is emphatically
the LORD'S Day, the Rest-day of the Resur
rection, in which it is given to us to realize the
power of the new life."

Westcott would never be drawn into public
argument on religious and theological topics.
At Harrow he had been anxious for a reply to

Bishop IVesteott 155

be; made to Sssays and !7?£>/Vrw, and that seems
to have been the only time when he was willing
to embark on the sea of controversy. His
confidence in the Christian Religion was
absolute : he believed that it was a revelation
of the Truth, and that the Truth must prevail ;
that sooner or later all mankind, illumined by
the life that was the light of men, would come
to the knowledge of the FATHER.

The world was full of difficulties : the only
people Westcott despaired of were the people
who thought all things were easy. But GOD
was guiding the world, and therefore neither
the crimes nor follies of men could delay for
long the due fulfilment of all things.

156 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER X

SOCIAL VIEWS AND ASPIRATIONS

TXfESTCOTT'S interest in social questions
dates from his school-days, as he
frequently pointed out, but it was not till he
went to Westminster in 1883 that he devoted
any considerable time to such questions ; and
only at Durham, in the last ten years of his
life, did the public think of him more as a
social reformer than as a man of learning.
Westcott assisted at the founding of " the
Christian Social Union," and it was on C.S.U.
platforms that some of the best of his social
teaching was delivered, and some of his finest
social aspirations were uttered.

The Christian Social Union is the offspring
of that league of Radical and Socialist Church-
folk, the Guild of S. Matthew, which was
founded in 1877 by the Rev. Stewart D.
Headlam. The C.S.U. was conceived, not in
the University of Charles Kingsley, Westcott,
Llewelyn Davies and Stewart Headlam, but in
Oxford, and at the Pusey House. In 1889 the
older members of the Oxford Branch of the
Guild of S. Matthew, distressed at the democratic

Bishop Westcott 157

sayings and doings of Mr. Headlam and the
London members of the G.S.M., proposed to
dissolve the University Branch and start a
new and less aggressively political society.
The Oxford G.S.M., however, was not to be
dissolved, and Mr. Percy Dearmer, now Vicar
of S. Mary's, Primrose Hill, London, and
Secretary of the London C.S.U., with a few
Undergraduates kept the Guild alive in Oxford
for some time to come. The present
Bursar of Pusey House (Rev. John
Carter, M.A.), and Canon H. S. Holland, of
S. Paul's, inaugurated the new society with
four lectures on " Economic Morals," by the
Rev. Wilfrid Richmond, at Sion College,
London, in 1889, and at the first of these
lectures Canon Westcott presided. Then, at
a meeting in Pusey House in the November
of 1889, it was decided that the new society
should be called the Christian Social Union,
its constitution and rules were agreed upon,
and the following year Bishop Westcott became
its first President. The Oxford Branch was
the beginning of the C.S.U., which now
numbers some 5,000 members in fifty-two
branches, and has affiliated societies in the
United States and in most of the Colonies.
The Christian Social Union is strictly confined
to communicants of the Church of England,
and its objects are threefold : —

i. To claim for the Christian law the
ultimate authority to rule social practice.

158 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

2. To study in common how to apply the
moral truths and principles of Christianity to
the social and economic difficulties of the
present time.

3. To present CHRIST in practical life as the
living Master and King, the enemy of wrong
and selfishness, the power of righteousness and
love.

It was evident that the C.S.U. supplied a want.
The directness, the fearless championship of
democratic causes, and the want of "respecta
bility," which marked the Guild of S. Matthew
naturally made Church dignitaries frown upon
that society, and the radicalism of the Church
Reformer, Mr. Stewart Headlam's monthly paper,
was not soothing to ecclesiastical authorities.
In the Christian Social Union there was no taint
of party politics. Conservatives, Liberals, and
Socialists could meet together without being
jarred. Under Bishop Westcott's presidency
all Anglican Churchmen who " felt an interest
in social questions " were sure of discovering
congenial spirits in the C.S.U. Bishops and
Deans are found in quite large numbers on the
ample roll of the Union. And a very large
measure of the success and popularity of the
C.S.U. must be set down to Westcott's
influence. From the first he threw himself
heartily into its work ; he insisted all along
that it must never be identified with one
political party in the State, or with one set of
theological opinions in the Church ; and the

Bishop Westcott 159

weight of his influence was always against
any definite pronouncement as to the rights or
wrongs of contemporary industrial disputes,
or any taking of sides in the social and
economic arguments of our time. So it was
that many were attracted to the C.S.U. simply
because Westcott was its advocate ; others, who
knew Westcott's devoted attachment to the
Throne and to the Established Church, felt
that under his presidency it could not become
an instrument of Liberals or Radicals, and that,
though good Conservatives, they were safe in
joining it. Liberal Churchmen, again, who had
grown up under F. D. Maurice, heard an echo
of Maurice's teaching in Westcott's words,
and were glad to be associated in the C.S.U.
Church-people, tired of the " Church Crisis "
and the attacks of Low Churchmen upon
Ritualists, or a little alarmed at some of the
manifestations of Catholic doctrine and feeling
in the Established Church, found it a whole
some and pleasant change to have their
attention turned from these things by
Westcott's exalted words on Social Aspects
of the Faith, and to learn from the Bishop of
Durham that life and all its secular problems
were of supreme importance. Unquestion
ably Westcott's social sermons did make
controversies over " ritualism " seem a very
poor and insignificant business. And then,
besides these, there is always a multitude of
men and women ready to join any new society

160 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

that makes no great demand upon the head or
the heart, and, as the C.S.U., under Westcott's
lead, from the first steadily set its face against
any direct application of its principles to the
social and economic needs of the time, and
discouraged all plain speaking that suggested
the immediate redress of social wrongs, and in
fact was much more a society for enquiry than
for reform ; those who had neither courage,
nor sympathy, nor imagination, but yet were
not indifferent to the conditions of life around
them could be enrolled as members of the
Union, and feel they were somehow helping
the good cause of human brotherhood.

In the address at Birmingham, in 1898,
already referred to, there are some characteristic
sentences as to the work of the C.S.U. Such
a society, Westcott held, could declare an ideal
more effectively than any teacher.

" It can stir an enthusiasm for righteousness
— the common aim of men. It can set in
action laws which are inoperative till the
popular voice demands their enforcement. It
can raise the standard of civic obligation. It
can show that our earthly citizenship is the
expression of our heavenly citizenship under
the conditions of ordinary life. It deals
essentially with principles and not with their
application. It claims that certain problems
should be dealt with, but it does not under
take their solution. This work must be left
to experts. But the acknowledgement of the

Bishop Westcott 161

need will stimulate the energy of those who

can meet it."

To spread abroad certain principles and leave
to time and conscience their application ; to foster
rather a point of view, than a definite social
creed — these were Westcott's objects, and here,
as in his theological teaching, he disappoints
those who look for plain commands in everyday
conduct. The general principles are set forth
with a certain clear conviction in the addresses
Westcott delivered to the Christian Social Union
from 1894-1900. We are "to study social
and national duties in the light of the Christian
Creed." Christians are to take their full part
" in preparing for the amelioration of men no
less than for their conversion," and are to
strive, " without impatience and without inter
mission, to secure the richest variety of service
among citizens for the good of the common
wealth, and to make the conditions of labour
for the humblest worker such that he may find
in it the opportunity of a true human life."

The members of the C.S.U. are to unite " in
the clear and unwavering affirmation of our
principle and of our end, in the diligent
prosecution of many-sided duty, and in the
watchful formation of opinion." The Chris
tian ideal is declared to be "the perfect
development of every man for the occupation
of his appointed place, for the fulfilment of
his peculiar office in the * Body of CHRIST * ;
and as a first step towards this, we are all

Y

1 6 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

bound as Christians to bring to our country
the offering of our individual service in return
for the opportunity of culture and labour
which we receive from its organization."
The Christian law of life is " to realize the
brotherhood and the membership of men,
classes, nations, all alike offering their mature
powers to the fulness of the sovereign life in
which they all share according to their several
capacities.'*

These few sentences gathered from Bishop
Westcott's social addresses give the C.S.U.
standpoint, and the high principles they
declare are not to be gainsaid. At the same
time Westcott is very careful to hedge round
his disciples lest they venture out rashly to
attempt to put their principles in operation.

" For the present," he reminds us, " our
corporate work is not action, but preparation
for action." " Legislation is the last and not
the first thing in social reform." The work
of the Christian reformer is that of the sower,
and not that of the conqueror." In consider
ing economic questions we are to remember
that " methods of action which are most
effective for production may be unfavourable
to equitable distribution, and methods which
provide for more equitable distribution may
so limit production that employer and employed
will alike suffer."

So with careful admonition the good Bishop
prevented any outburst of practical effort that

Bishop Westcott 163

would radically change our economic con
ditions. No word is spoken on the Land
Question, for instance. If his well-balanced
warnings have kept the Anglican reformers of
the C.S.U. from being identified with any
definite plans or proposals for the removal of
our social distresses or the abolition of any
particular social injustice, it must, on the other
hand, be admitted that Westcott's intense
earnestness to create an interest in social
questions, and to arouse a sense of social
responsibility, has quickened the consciences of
great numbers of young men and women of
wealth and education, and its fruit may be seen
in the many " social settlements," the Public
School-missions, and the countless clubs for
boys and girls, in the poorer parts of our big
cities. Westcott's social teaching has not
lessened the material poverty in England ; it
has not visibly decreased the mass or misery ;
it has not added to the wages of those
who live year in and year out on the borders
of starvation ; it has not directly affected the
social movements for old-age pensions and
better houses ; but it has helped to bring all
these things within the outlook of numbers of
clergymen, University students, and Members
of Parliament, and it has encouraged them to
take part with others in the cause of social
reform. Churchmen no longer think that social
movements are outside their province, and this
change of mind is due in no small degree to

164 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the teaching of Bishop Westcott and his
Christian Social Union. F. D. Maurice and
the Guild of S. Matthew had earlier preached
the social gospel, but Westcott and the C.S.U.
made it popular in the Church of England.

Moderate as the Bishop's counsels were,
there were, of course, critics who shook their
heads over his teaching. Those upholders of
the existing order, who look with suspicion on
every suggestion that things are not altogether
as well as they might be, and who scent
revolutionary changes in the mildest proposals
for amelioration, particularly disliked West-
cott's impressive exhortations, and found them
" dangerous."

His address on " Socialism " at the Hull
Church Congress, in 1890, was gravely
rebuked by the leading Conservative papers.
That a Bishop, of all people, should have a
good word for " Socialism " seemed, in those
days, to savour of treachery to his order —
it was positively alarming. This address was
subsequently issued in pamphlet form by the
Guild of S. Matthew, and was included in the
Bishop's volume, The Incarnation and Common
Life. The comparison which Westcott made
at Hull between Socialism and Individualism
was too clear to be misunderstood, and it
presented so good a case for Socialism that
its opponents had reason to protest. The
kernel of the Bishop's speech was in these
words : —

Bishop Westcott 165

" Individualism and Socialism correspond
with opposite views of humanity. Indi
vidualism regards humanity as made up of
disconnected or warring atoms ; Socialism
regards it as an organic whole, a vital unity
formed by the combination of contributory
members mutually interdependent.

"It follows that Socialism differs from
Individualism both in method and in aim.
The method of Socialism is co-operation, the
method of individualism is competition. The
one regards man as working with man for a
common end, the other regards man as
working against man for private gain. The
aim of Socialism is the fulfilment of service,
the aim of Individualism is the attainment of
some personal advantage, riches, or place, or
fame. Socialism seeks such an organization of
life as shall secure for every one the most
complete development of his powers ; Indi
vidualism seeks primarily the satisfaction of
the particular wants of each one in the hope
that the pursuit of private interest will in the
end secure public welfare."

That Bishop Westcott was in sympathy with
Socialism was only too plain, for he went on
to say : —

" We wait for the next stage in the growth
of the State when, in full and generous
co-operation each citizen shall offer the fulness
of his own life that he may rejoice in the
fulness of the life of the body. Such an issue

1 66 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

may appear to be visionary. It is, I believe,
far nearer than we suppose. It is, at least, the
natural outcome of what has gone before."

At the same time Westcott looked for no
violent birth-pains in the coming of Socialism.
He warned his hearers that violence could
destroy, but it could not construct. "Love
destroys the evil when it replaces the evil by
the good."

In the Diocese of Durham Westcott came in
close touch with the Co-operative Movement,
and for the principles and work of the Industrial
Co-operative Society he expressed warm ad
miration. He found that " the humblest form
of true co-operation " opened to the patient
worker " the vision of an ideal towards which
we can all strive, and in which we can all
find that personal satisfaction which becomes
greater when it is shared with others." The
spectacle of large numbers of people united
together in trade under the motto of " Each for
all and all for each," possessing a store and a
share in the great Co-operative Wholesale
Society, seemed to Bishop Westcott to offer
infinite possibilities in the direction of a better
commercial system. On several occasions he
attended co-operative festivals in the North,
and spoke words of encouragement and advice.
Westcott was anxious that men should
co-operate as successfully in the production of
goods as they did in the work of distribution,
and " Labour co-partnership " seemed to him

Bishop Westcott 167

to combine in the most satisfactory form the
advantages of mutual responsibility and profit-
sharing. At Macclesfield, in 1 898, he described
this " Labour co-partnership " as " the ideal
union of inventors, and organizers, of capitalists,
workers and consumers." The difficulties which
confront co-operators ; the fact that they must
compete with the ordinary trader for custom,
and that any serious attempt to change for the
better the conditions of labour in co-operative
stores and factories would so raise prices that
purchasers would promptly buy elsewhere — to
the ruin of the co-operative store ; the constant
temptation to shareholders to increase their
dividend by keeping down wages and by
neglecting to spend money on educational
work — these difficulties were not hidden from
Westcott's eyes, but his social enthusiasm and
his exceeding hopefulness made him dwell
rather on the brighter side of the movement.

It was the same with the trade-unions as
with the co-operative societies. Here were
men banded together in mutual service,
primarily, it seemed to the Bishop, to help one
another. That the trade-union chiefly exists to
defend the workmen against the capitalist, to
obtain shorter hours and higher wages when
possible and to resist reduction of wages and
increase of hours, Westcott would not allow.
What, however, he did see, and what all might
well see, is that, by combining in co-operative
societies and trade - unions, workmen were

1 6 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

educated by the responsibilities that fell upon
them, and that, in these democratic days when
the government of the country is within the
grasp of workmen, such responsibilities were of
very first importance. All that taught men to
live more socially, to rule better, to obey better,
to realize their membership in the great human
family, won Westcott's approval, and he was
discerning enough to understand the educative
work of the co-operative society, and the trade-
union, and the friendly society. The Bishop
met the leaders of the Miners' Associations of
Durham and Northumberland, and talked with
them, and he was acquainted with some of the
chief men in the co-operative societies of those
counties : it was impossible for him not to be
impressed favourably by these men and the
movements they represented.

Education, and public elementary education
in especial, loom largely in Westcott's social
teaching, and at Bristol in 1896, in an address
to the Christian Social Union on "The Aim
and Method of Education" (republished in
Christian Aspects of Life) the ripe thought —
matured by experience — of the Bishop may be
read at its best. The object of education, he
insists, is "To train for life, and not for a
special occupation ; to train the whole man for
all life ... to train men, in a word, and not
craftsmen — to train citizens for the Kingdom
pf GOD." And with this object in view,
" Education must be so ordered as to awaken,

Bishop Westcott 169

to call into play, to develop, to direct, to
strengthen powers of sense and intellect and
spirit, not of one but of all ; to give alertness
and accuracy to observation ; to supply fulness
and precision to language ; to open the eyes of
the heart to the eternal of which the temporal
is the transitory sign."

Westcott dwells on the supreme importance
of the personal element in education.

" Faith and love and religion can only be
taught by those who possess them. The
teacher, indeed, communicates himself, and
then perhaps most effectively when he is off
his guard. Thus his moral teaching will be
for the most part indirect : on the one side an
awakening of the sense of responsibility, and
on the other a welcome of something which is
felt to belong to the true self. His final appeal
will be not to ambition, not to self-interest, but
to love."

The fullest education for all was Westcott's
programme. "The right use of leisure," he
maintains, "is an object of education not
second — this is, you remember, the judgment
of Aristotle — even to the right fulfilment of
work."

" Education is, so far as it is true, of the
whole life by the whole life. The highest is
for all in CHRIST, and not for any privileged
class. . . . When we narrow our aim, we
wrong our faith."

For Bishop Westcott's teaching on the subject

i jo Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

of Temperance we cannot do better than turn
to a sermon preached in Durham Cathedral, at
a festival of the Diocesan Temperance Society
in 1898. The case against intemperance is
found to be stronger than the arguments of the
ordinary teetotaler suggest.

"Objects in themselves good," the Bishop
points out, " impulses in themselves generous,
occupations in themselves healthy may be pur
sued intemperately. There is an intemperance
in work as well as in amusement ; in energy as
well as in slackness ; in lofty speculation as
well as in vacancy of thought."

The preacher believes it necessary to touch
on these wider aspects of the subject, because
" the popular limitation of intemperance to one
special form of excess seems in many cases
to lead to a false complacency. A man may
be moderate in the use of intoxicating drinks,
or a total abstainer, and yet be fatally intem
perate, a helpless slave to the pursuit of money
or of power, or of reputation. Such forms of
intemperance, though they often win the praise
of the multitude, are ruinous to a noble
character."

When the discussion is confined to intem
perance in drink, it is found that the vice
cannot commonly be isolated.

" It is a representative form of a large class.
It exhibits in a coarse and repulsive shape, that
craving for excitement by which we are all
assailed. The same restless passion for fresh

Bishop Wcstcott 171

sensations dominates our amusements and our
literature. Manly games are made opportunities
for gambling. Startling incidents and morbid
studies of extravagant situations and persons
are characteristic of popular books. Intem
perance of this kind is perilous everywhere.
It destroys the power of calm thought. It
dulls the apprehension of the quiet joys of
the passing day. It exhausts the tired worker
when he needs refreshment. It grows by
indulgence, and yet, for the most part, it is
uncondemned and unnoticed."

Without disparaging in the slightest degree
the attempt to promote temperance by legis
lation, Westcott urges that legislation must
depend for its strength upon the public
opinion at the back of it, and that public
opinion had yet to be turned more com
pletely against intemperance. The remedy,
he declares, is recognized in S. Paul's words :
" Be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot,
but be filled in spirit." The remedy must
be religious, the full occupation of the mind
in higher pleasures and interests. Himself
a total abstainer from tobacco, and from all
alcoholic liquors in later life, Westcott never
preached Total Abstinence as a Gospel. He
gave up his moderate glass of wine because
the thing was obviously a cause of offence to
many or his fellows, and because he hated
spending money on anything that amounted
to a personal luxury ; but at the same time

1 7 2 Leaden of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

he was the last man to bind fresh burdens
on the consciences of people, or to add
to the law and so to the possibilities of its
transgression by making a new commandment,
"Thou shalt not drink." At Durham he
pleaded publicly for " pure beer," and for a
reformed public-house, where good beer and
non-intoxicants could be obtained. The
Bishop's good, pure beer was to consist of
" barley, malt and hops only, no chemical or
other injurious substitute for malt being used."
Westcott, as we have seen, took no part in
party politics, and never appeared on a political
platform in his life ; but he would occasionally
throw himself into the agitation for or against
some political measure, that seemed to him of
national importance, with tremendous energy.
And the Welsh Suspensory Bill, introduced
by the Liberal Government in 1893, was just
one of those measures that provoked him to
speak. He hated the idea of Disestablishment
because it seemed to him a disintegrating move
ment — a National Church helped to keep a
nation together — and because it involved a
violent break with England's past. To Westcott,
a nation that had no National Church was as
imperfect as the man who had no conscious
belief in a Personal GOD ; its patriotism would
suffer. And yet the United States and the
Colonies stood before him as examples of
countries that without an Established Church
were lacking neither in religious feeling, nor

Bishop Westcott 173

yet in that self-love we call patriotism. In
a speech at a great Church Defence Meeting,
at the Albert Hall, London, in May, 1893,
Westcott insisted that Disestablishment implied
the non-recognition of religion as an essential
element in man. "I am a Churchman. . . .
But I am a citizen also, a citizen of no un
distinguished Nation ; and I fear lest through
impatience, or wilfulness, or ignorance, we
may, in a brief moment of excitement, allow
a motley combination of adversaries to
secularize our national life as national,
and to discard that which has been the
moulding, inspiring force of England. . . .
For if the National Church ceases to be
national — national as accepting the pastorate of
the whole people and expressing generally their
spiritual convictions — no other Communion
can take its place. No other organ can be
found through which the Nation can declare
its faith. No concurrent endowment can guard
the truth which it embodies. . . . The question
is whether the State shall openly declare that
religion is not an accident of humanity, but an
essential element in every true human body."

Many other speeches were delivered in
various parts of the country in defence of the
Welsh Establishment, until the defeat of the
Liberals in 1895 removed the question from
immediate politics. Although Westcott mainly
opposed Disestablishment on the ground that it
was a blow to the nation, and never suggested

174 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

by his words that Church Defence meant the
defence of Church property, he could at times
be moved to a eulogy of the National Church,
when its position was assailed.

At a Diocesan Conference, in 1895, in
an address on the Duties of the National
Church to Christendom, the Bishop adopts the
remarkable line that the Church of England
is eminently fitted to heal the divisions of
Christendom.

" It is obvious that the English Church,
by its constitution, by its history and by its
character, is fitted to be a mediator between
the divided societies of Christendom. It has
points of contact with all. It has never broken
with the past, and it stands open to the future.
On the one side it has affinities with the ancient
Churches of the East and West by its jealous
maintenance of the historic Episcopate ; on the
other side it has affinity with the non-episcopal
Churches of the Reformation by its appeal to
the Scriptures as containing all things that are
required of necessity to salvation. . . . Outward
reunion of the English Church with the Roman
Church as it is now would, as far as I can judge,
postpone indefinitely the reunion of Christendom.
. . . The teaching of the past shows that the
principle and the beginnings of reunion are to
be sought from within and not from without."

Westcott held strong views on the progressive
character of the English Church, of its historic
position ; and these views naturally made him

Bishop Westcott 175

oppose all proposals for the separation of Church
and State. At Jarrow, in 1896, he dwelt on
the continuity of England, and of its National
Church.

" England stands unique among the nations
for the continuity of its life through a thousand
years, which no vicissitudes of dynasty have
interrupted. We have passed through great
revolutions — the last and greatest in the
present century silent and often unnoticed —
without breaking with the past. ... It is the
same Church as it was three hundred or five
hundred or a thousand years ago in the sense
in which the nation is the same nation. . . .
In a most true sense the Reformation of the
English Church is a continuous and unending
process. . . . We are charged to shew the
vitality of our faith by its power to meet new
circumstances. . . . We shall avoid equally a
rigid maintenance and a hasty abandonment of
traditional forms."

The point to be noted in these various
addresses is that Westcott in his defence of the
Establishment stands very far away from the
ordinary Conservative who resists Disestablish
ment because he regards it as an attack on the
existing social order, an interference with the
rights of property. Westcott holds that the
nation will suffer if Disestablishment is effected,
and, though the Church may suffer through its
connexion with the State, Westcott, loyal
Churchman though he was, could have borne

1 7 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

more easily an injury to the Church than an
injury to the nation.

From the question of Disestablishment let us
turn to Westcott's teaching on War, Imperialism,
and Patriotism. As far back as 1870, the
Franco-German War drew Canon Westcott at
Peterborough to speak words for international
peace, and at Westminster, he took an active
part in the formation of a Christian Union for
Promoting International Concord, presiding
over the deliberations of a committee which
urged a reduction of armaments throughout
Europe. In later life he attended some
meetings of the Parliamentary Peace Congress
in London.

Preaching at Hereford in 1888, Westcott
declared he would not disguise his horror
at the spectacle of an armed continent. At
Darlington, nine years later, at a meeting of
the Peace Society, he said that, as slavery had
been done away, they might also look confidently
for the suppression of war.

At S. Margaret's, Westminster, in May, 1 899,
in a remarkable sermon on " International
Concord," he urged that war must be only
regarded as a " transitory necessity." The fact
that war had always existed was no proof that
it would always continue in the future. A
general tendency to substitute reason for force
in the settlement of all differences between
men, was to be noticed. And the business of

Bishop Westcott 177

Christians was " to check in ourselves and in
others every temper which makes for war,
all ungenerous judgments, all presumptuous
claims, all promptings of self-assertion, the
noxious growths of isolation and arrogance and
passion." Then a few months later came the
war with the Boers, and it was inevitable
that a restatement of opinions had to be made.
The belief in England and in England's mission,
the belief of a lifetime — could not dissolve
before the fact that England was engaged in a
war which many of Westcott's friends held to
be unjust. The Bishop was seventy-five ; all
his life he had loved his country with a whole
heart ; his eyes saw a great future before the
Empire ; he could not in old age declare England
wrong. The Boers must be to blame for the
war, and grounds must be found for supporting
the British Government, for Westcott had
too keen a sense of his public responsibility
to refrain from speech when all England was
affected by the issue. And so at the Church
Congress, at Newcastle, in 1900, Westcott,
who had spoken of war as a thing to be
suppressed as slavery had been suppressed ;
who had declared that violence could destroy
but could not construct ; who had pleaded for
the reduction of armaments in the interest of
International Peace ; now found that a case
must be made out from the Christian point of
view in favour of war. Slowly and carefully
he delivered his defence, and, like all his

2 A

178 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

public speeches, it is argued from a position
taken after much thought and deliberation.
War must still be inconsistent with the ideal
of Christianity ; but was it inconsistent with the
profession of Christianity in a world where
violence, wrongs, and selfish ambition, both
in men and nations, had to be dealt with ?
No, said the Bishop, emphatically ; for " the
supreme end which is proposed to us is not
peace, but righteousness." War, a just war,
was but force, and force was necessary if right
was to be upheld. The Christian was bound
to acknowledge, he held, that war was "an
ultimate means for maintaining a righteous
cause." All government plainly rested on
force. " The machinery of settled government
worked so smoothly that we forgot that the
execution of justice between man and man
rested in the end on force," that " armed forces
stood behind the judge" in courts of law.
Granted that force was necessary for righteous
ness, and that the Boers were the enemies of
righteousness, then the war in South Africa
must be supported.

The Church Congress accepted the Bishop's
teaching, and many who had followed events
in South Africa with misgiving felt relieved.
Westcott's wide influence carried thousands
with him against the Boers, and the bulk of the
Christian Social Union members followed their
President in loyal support of the Government,
and in defending the prosecution of the war.

Bishop Westcott 179

" Imperialism " became the new cry, and
nothing more was said about peace. Hence
forth Imperialism filled the chief place in the
programme of the " social reformers " of the
Christian Social Union, and the colonies became
an object of enthusiastic admiration. It was
inevitable that Bishop Westcott should applaud
Imperialism — that is, British Imperialism.
With Mr. Meredith's "Old Chartist" he
might have said

" Old England is ray dam, whate'er I be ! "

In early days at Westminster he had described
patriotism as " the love of our country, the
intense watchful interest in the growth or the
waning of its influence, the passionate desire
that it may be made a herald of peace and of
righteousness," and he had insisted that this
love of country did " lie deep in the souls of
all of us."

And he had been conscious in those days of
" that spirit of larger, deadlier, self-assertion,
miscalled patriotism, which tempts us to think
that the power of a nation is the power of
dictation and not of service, and that every
failure must be washed out in blood."

The love of England, and an innate and
unconquerable aversion from dwelling on defects
and shortcomings, made Westcott rejoice in
an increase of British influence in the world,
and Imperialism promised such an increase.

Imperialism, to Westcott, meant the spread
of British views and opinions, and a closer

180 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

union of British subjects. A sermon preached
in London, at All Saints', Tufnell Park, in
November, 1900, was devoted to the matter,
and it contained in one memorable passage the
substance of all that he held and taught about
the theory of Empire : —

" Imperialism is the practical advocacy of a
fellowship of peoples with a view to the com
pleteness of their separate development, a wide
federation for the realization in the members
of their special character. An Empire is a
union of self-governing or subject States under
one supreme authority, held together by an
ideal more or less clearly recognized by
all, guarded by an adequate organization for
common defence, of which the ultimate aim is
the welfare and relative completeness of all the
bodies which are included in it. The prospect
of increased power or material advantages,
though it may assist in a secondary degree in
creating or maintaining an Empire, does not
belong to the essence of it."

The statement in the last sentence was
needed, as Westcott knew, but was it heeded ?
Is it heeded to-day ? To help send abroad a
passionate stream of sentiment for Empire was
one thing ; to guide the direction of that stream
in a well-ordered course was another, and a
harder, task.

Bishop Westcott died before the South
African War was over, and his words on Empire
and Imperialism mark the close of his teaching.

Bishop Western 181

Yet we cannot end this book without recalling
some of his gentler and humaner teaching ; for
Westcott, was really in heart and life, the
humanest and kindliest of men. " The flower
torn up and thrown upon the ground, the sea-
bird shot upon the wing in the wantonness of
skill, the dog tortured in vain curiosity " showed
the same temper, he said (in a sermon at
Sedbergh, in 1 896), and that temper he abhorred.
Nature he loved, and little children, and he
was kindly in his bearing to all men. " There
can be no understanding without love,"
and, because Bishop Westcott had a great love
for his fellows, therefore the measure of his
understanding was a full one. All that was
valuable in his social teaching sprang from
love, and so must bear fruit as long as love
shall live among the children of men.

Bishop Westcott 183

APPENDIX

Some Recollections of Westcott by the Rev. J. Llewelyn Varies.

WHILE this book was being written Dr. Llewelyn Davies
sent the writer several letters relating to its subject, and
forwarded many others received from Westcott himself ; the
latter had in the main already appeared in the Life and Letters
of Bishop Westcott. Dr. Davies's recollections are of particular
interest because of the lifelong friendship he enjoyed with
Westcott. I am indebted to them for many things recorded
in this book. From the letters I have made a selection.

The first letter deals chiefly with Westcott's relation to
F. D. Maurice and his introduction to the works of
Robert Browning : —

" You are quite right in regarding Westcott's theology
as substantially Maurician. I send you a few short letters
from which you will see that Westcott and I were not only
friends but intimate friends. In the same year at Trinity
there were four of us — Westcott, Scott, Vaughan, and I,
who were drawn together not only by common interests,
but by serious religious convictions. Scott, who became
Head Master of Westminster School, died a short time
before Westcott. David Vaughan still lives.1 In his later
years the Bishop made several efforts to bring us four
together at Bishop Auckland, with only partial success.

" Westcott never said it to me, but he told a friend who

1 Canon Vaughan has entered into his rest since these words
were written, and Dr. Llewelyn Davies remains the survivor of
the four.— J. C.

1 84 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

told me, that he had deliberately refrained from reading
Maurice, in order that his own development might be the
more independent. We did not know at Cambridge of
this purpose of his, but it explains what was sometimes
rather unintelligible to us. There were several writers of
the day who interested one or more of the other three of
us — Maurice, Browning, Ruskin, Comte — whom Westcott
seemed to put aside.

"Maurice was at that time, from 1845 onwards, made
known at Cambridge by the Macmillans, especially Daniel,
the elder of the two. Daniel Macmillan talked of Arch
deacon Hare and Maurice to any of us who would listen
to him. I became a devoted disciple of Maurice, and
David Vaughan was nearly as much attracted by him.

" Scott happened to become possessed of Browning's
'Betts and Pomegranates, and lent the book to me ; from which
loan I date my lifelong delight in Browning.

" Some volumes of Comte came into Vaughan's hands,
and excited his interest keenly ; and it was through him I
gained such knowledge of Comte as I have had.

" I do not remember how we came to know Ruskin.

"With all these Westcott came into close contact at
later points of his life, and each of them excited a sudden
enthusiasm in him.

" With regard to Maurice the enthusiasm was not so
marked. When Maurice went to live as Professor at
Cambridge, Westcott admired him personally with the
reverence which nearly all who knew him felt for Maurice ;
and after his death he read his Life. You will see that
in the letter dated March 28, 1884, he writes to me : —

" ' For the last week I have spent my leisure on Maurice's
Life. I never knew before how deep my sympathy is with
most of his characteristic thoughts. It is most refreshing
to read such a book — such a life.'

"In the year before Bishop Lightfoot's death I was
spending a day or two with him ; and he asked me one
evening if I remembered occupying the same bedroom with
him in Switzerland and talking about Browning till we

Bishop Westcott 185

fell asleep. That was his introduction to Browning, and
he went on to tell me that Westcott, coming into his rooms
at Cambridge one day, and waiting some time for him,
took up a volume of Browning that lay on the table,
and exclaimed about it with astonished admiration when
Lightfoot returned. Westcott — as you know — became one
of Browning's enthusiastic expositors.

" How Westcott was introduced to Comte, I do not
remember ; but he also wrote about Comte with warm
admiration of much of his doctrine. In the note dated
Harrow, March 12, 1867, he says, *I have been spending
all my leisure — how little ! — for the last nine months on
Comtists. How marvellous that it should be left for them to
rediscover some of the simplest teachings of Christianity ! '

" So, by some process of which I have no knowledge,
Westcott became, long after our Cambridge time, an
ardent admirer of Ruskin.

" It will probably occur to you, especially after reading
some of the letters to me, that it was not possible for
Westcott to isolate himself from the theology of Maurice
by not reading his books. His inner circle of friends was
full of that theology and he could not help becoming
acquainted from his early Cambridge days with the formative
ideas of it. I, for one, was always Maurician ; and
Westcott and I almost always agreed with one another ;
of which you will see some evidence in these few letters."

In a second letter Dr. Llewelyn Davies refers to
Westcott's disinclination for amusements, and his attitude
towards the Roman Catholic Church : —

" I suspect Westcott never went to a theatre, and I feel
sure he did not read many novels. I should not put this
abstinence down to * Puritanism ' so much as to the extreme
seriousness of his disposition and his life.1 I never knew
any one who so filled all his time for so many years with
laborious occupation. His holidays when he was at Harrow

1 But surely this " extreme seriousness " is the very essence of
"Puritanism"?— J. C.

2 B

1 86 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

were given to his Divinity work. I think that at Cam
bridge he played at no games. (But at Auckland he was
credited with having a taste for mechanical toys ; and his
friends would send him any that they thought ingenious
and amusing. And he would relax with young people.
I have played with him at a sort of bowls in a corridor of
Auckland Castle).

" You are right that * the ritual and claims of Rome did
not appeal to him.' He could not be called a * sacerdotalist.'
But, though Rome never had any attraction for Westcott,
he had a great knowledge of architecture, and did archi
tectural drawing very well ; and I have no doubt he was a
good Ritualist in the sense of being well acquainted with
Rituals. His knowledge was astonishingly varied and
comprehensive ; he seemed to know something about
everything, whilst his learning in all branches of Divinity
was quite extraordinary."

In the same letter Dr. Davies refers to Westcott's politics,
and to the influence of his books with Nonconformists : —

" No, Westcott was never a Liberal. Though I knew
this, I was surprised once to find that he admired Disraeli
as a statesman.

" Westcott and Dale of Birmingham mutually admired
each other, and they sympathized warmly in theological
views ; but I do not know whether Dale regarded himself
as a disciple of Westcott — probably not. Westcott is not
very ' readable,' but he is in a less degree a writer for the
few than Maurice ; and I should think that amongst the
English Dissenters and in Scotland Westcott has had a
most beneficial influence."

In another letter Dr. Davies mentions Westcott's period
of " doubt," and gives some late reminiscences : —

" I feel sure that Westcott's faith was never seriously
shaken by doubts. His position, after — and I daresay
during— his earlier days at Cambridge, was that represented
by the old saying omnia exeunt in mytterium. He would say

Bishop Wcstcott 187

that he could not believe anything to be profoundly true
if it did not carry the mind into the incomprehensible.

" After our Undergraduate time and a year or two after,
I never saw him for more than a day or two at a time. A
purer and more saintly soul it has not been given to me to
know. When he paid me short visits here, two or three
things struck me : his love of flowers (he liked to keep
them as memorials, and would dig up flowers and take
them to plant in the Auckland garden) ; his knowledge of
bridges as well as other ancient buildings ; we have a
beautiful bridge (at Kirkby Lonsdale), and Westcott seemed
to be sure of its date, and to be acquainted with all the
bridges in the diocese ; his reverence for George Fox,
whose memory is rather specially associated with the
neighbourhood of Sedbergh ; we went together to see one
of the two oldest Quaker Meeting Houses in England."

INDEX TO NAMES OF PERSONS
MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

Argles, Dean, 53.
Arnold, Dr., 52, 62.
Attwood, Thomas, 9.

Barlow, George, 40.
Barry, Bishop, 15, 7 5.
Benson, Archbishop, 20, 21,

*5> S^, 57> 92» 93,

i'3-
Bickersteth, Bishop, 15, 95,

125.
Boutflower, Bishop, 125,

I35» 137, 'S3-
Bowen, E. E., 44.
Browning, Robert, 37, 38,

80, 88, 92, 114, 140,

183-185.

Browne, Bishop, 95.
Bunting, P. W., 90.
Burgon, Dean, 74.
Burns, John, 77.
Bute, Lord, 33.
Butler, Dr., 34, 126.

Carlyle, Thomas, 84, 149.
Carpenter, Bishop, 95.
Champion, H. H., 76.
Clarke, Sir Andrew, 88.

Clifford, Dr., 90.
Compton, Lord
(Bishop), 15.

Alwyne

Dale, Dr., 107, 186.

Dalrymple, Sir Charles, 26.

Davidson, Archbishop, 33,
125.

Davies, Dr. J. Llewelyn, 1 5,
17, 20, 24, 37, 81, 125,
156; (Letters to) 37, 41,
55, 80, 119 ; (Letters
from) 148, 183-186.

Davys, Archdeacon, 53.

Derby, Lord, 15.

Disraeli, Benjamin, 10, 186.

Dolling, Father, 108-112.

Duckworth, Canon, 92.

Dunedin, Lord, 33.

Ellicott, Bishop, 74.
Evans, Rev. C., 8.

Farmer, John, 44.
Farrar, Dean, 34.
Flint, Professor, 88.

George, Henry, 76.

189

190

Index

Gladstone, W.E., 56,75,92.
Gore, Bishop, 33.
Gott, Bishop, 90.
Goodwin, Bishop, 95.

Hare, Archdeacon, 184.
Hatch, Dr., 88.
Haydon, B. R., 7.
Headlam, Rev. S. D., 76,

77, 156-158.
Holland, Canon H. S., 49,

51, 89, 157.
Hort, Professor F. J. A.,

21, 25, 42, 59, 60, 69,

71, 72, 95, 113.
How, Bishop, 95.
Howson, Dean, 15.
Hughes, Rev. H. P., 90.
Humphrey, Professor, 62,

64.
Hyndman, H. M., 76, 77.

Jacob, Bishop, 125.
Jeremie, Professor, 47.
Jeune, Bishop, 43.

Keble, Rev. John, 16.
Kitchin, Dean, in, 121,
123, 126.

Lee, Bishop, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12,

'3, ", 34> Si-
Liddon, Dr., 30.
Lightfoot, Bishop, 20, 21,

*3, 25, 42, 43, 47, 59,
60, 72, 74, 88, 92, 113,
127, 184, 185.
Louis Philippe, King, 23.

Maclagan, Archbishop, 125,

127.
Magee, Archbishop, 46, 47,

57, 58.

Maine, Sir Henry, 88.
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 24, 80,

81, 159, 164, 183-186.
Mayor, Professor J. E. B., 1 5.
Meyer, Rev. F. B., 90.
Middlemore-Whithard, Rev.

T. M., 13, 119.
Mill, J. S., 37.
Morris, William, 76, 77.
Moulton, Dr., 107.

Napier, Lord, 88.
Nelson, Lord, 90.
Newman, Cardinal, 107.

O'Connor, Feargus, 9, 10.
Oxenham, Rev. W., 26.

Paget, Sir James, 88.
Paton, Dr., 90.
Pearce, Rev. M. G., 90.
Pratt, Rev. Canon, 53.
Price, Rev. E., 99.
Pusey, Dr., 43.

Richmond, Sir W., 62.
Richmond, Rev. Wilfrid,

'57-
Ruskin, John, 38, 103, 184,

185.
Russell, G. W. E., 28.

Salisbury, Lord, 92.
Salmon, Dr., 113.

Index

191

Saunders, Dean, 53.

Scott, Dr., 15, 17, 24, 183,

184.

Seeley, Professor, 88.
Short, Rev. T., i .
Simcox, Rev. W. H., 144.
Stanley, Dean, 46, 73.
Strong, Dean, 125.
Stuart, Professor, 64.
Stubbs, Bishop, 95.

Tait, Archbishop, 46.
Talbot, Bishop, 125.
Tennyson, Lord, 16.
Temple, Archbishop, 43.
Thomson, Archbishop, 95.

Vaughan, Dr. (Canon of
Peterborough), 15, 24,
81, 183, 184.

Vaughan, Dr. (Head Master
of Harrow), 24, 25,

34-

Vaughan, Cardinal, 107.
Victoria, Queen, 16, 23.
Virchow, Professor, 88.

Watkins, Archdeacon, 121.

Webb-Peploe, Rev. H. W.,
90.

Westcott, F. B. (father), i.

Whithard, Sarah L. M.
(Mrs. Westcott), 13, 23,
26, 113, 118, 119.

Wilberforce, Bishop, 62.

Wilkinson, Bishop, 95.

Wilson, John, 100.

Wood, Sir Lindsay, 100.

Wordsworth, Bishop, 125.

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Plain Words on the Incarnation and the Sacraments
of the Gospel. By the Very Rev. VERNON
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The Blessed Virgin and all the Company of Heaven.
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of S. Mary's Collegiate Church, Port Elizabeth,
S. Africa ; Author of The Prayer Book with Historical
Notes and Scripture Proofs, etc. With a Preface by
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Worcester Cathedral, and Vicar of Hoar Cross.
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Salvation beyond Death. Being some thoughts of a
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may hope and pray on behalf of such souls as depart
apparently not good enough for heaven, nor bad
enough for hell. By the Rev. G. WINGFIELD
HUNT, Vicar of Calderbrook, Lancashire. With
a Preface by the Rev. M. Cyril Bickersteth, M.A.,
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The Christian Church: What is it? By the Rev.
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Instructions on the Pentecostal Half-year for Teachers
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vi ADVERTISEMENTS

Bible Worship. By the Rev. FENDER H. CUDLIP,
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Why I am a Churchman* An "Apologia pro vita
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Life in the Catholic Church : Its Blessings and Respon
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Rev. R. W. RANDALL, D.D. Third Edition.
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The Oxford Sermon-Library. Containing collections
of Sermons by notable preachers. Edited by the
Very Rev. Vernon Staley, Provost of Inverness
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Vol. I.— NEWMAN'S SERMONS FOR THE
FESTIVALS. Tfi x 4^ inches, xxvi. + 342 pp.
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Vol. II. — BUTLER'S SERMONS FOR
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Advent Addresses* By the Rev. FREDERICK M.
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Studies in Ceremonial* Essays illustrative of English
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ADVERTISEMENTS Vll

Short Homilies on the Gospels for the Sundays of the
Liturgical Year, By the Very Rev. VERNON
STALEY, Provost of Inverness Cathedral. In
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The Ritual Reason Why. Edited by the late
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The Congregation in Church. A Plain Guide to
Reverent and Intelligent Participation in the Public
Services of Holy Church. Revised by the Very
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A Brief Directory of Elementary Ritual. Chiefly
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The Layman's Introduction to the Book of Common
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page in a Lay Folk's Prayer Book of the fourteenth
century. Fifteenth thousand. 7^6 x 5^ inches,
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A Companion to the Daily Services of the Church in
England. Traces the Praise and Prayer made
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Vlll ADVERTISEMENTS

Ritual Notes on the Order of Divine Service. By the
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A Companion to the Prayer Book* A Liturgical and
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On the Reverence due to the Altar* Bishop Jeremy
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with the addition of Notes and Appendices. By
the Very Rev. VERNON STALEY, Provost of
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The Fasting Days to be observed in the English
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the Very Rev. VERNON STALEY, Provost of
Inverness Cathedral. New Edition, with five
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Notes on Fifty Parables and Miracles* For a Bible
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The Teaching of the Occasional Offices* Seven Ser
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How the Church came to England* (With Six full-
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Sketches of Kafir Life. (With Illustrations.) By the
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Alan G. S. Gibson, D.D., Coadjutor Bishop of
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Tales of the Church in England* " BOESCUS— A TALE
OF ROMAN BRITAIN." " THE FURY OF THE
HEATHEN." "PRO ECCLESIA DEL" With 6
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The Resurrection and the Life* READINGS FOR THE
GREAT FORTY DAYS AND WHITSUNTIDE. Arranged
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and Precentor of S. Paul's Cathedral. 9^ x 6^
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In Heaviness and in Joy

Daily Meditations by the Author of The Sanctus Bell, etc.

Edited by the Rev. Christopher Bromby, M.A.

5l/4 x 33A inches.
FROM ADVENT TO SEPTUAGESIMA. 234 pp. Cloth,

2/- net.
FROM SEPTUAGESIMA TO THE ASCENSION. 304 pp.

Cloth, 2/- net.
FOR ALL HOLY DAYS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. 360 pp.

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Memories* A Tale. By K. E. S. 7^ x 4^ inches,
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Simple Meditationi for the Different Seasons of the
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Part I— THE WAY UP TO JERUSALEM. For Septua-
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Advent to Septuagesima. Part VI — WARFARE
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Mothers of God's Children. Twelve Old Testament
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"Watchful Servants. Twenty Readings for the Sick and
Aged. By the Rev. G. LACEY MAY, M.A.
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Meditations by Elizabeth Harcourt Mitchell

Meditations on Genesis. A course of Simple Meditations
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Grains of Wheat. Containing Meditations on the
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The Hidden Glory* Thoughts for Church people upon
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Bright Thoughts for Every Day. By the Rev.
HAYMAN CUMMINGS, A.K.C., Lond., Chaplain
Oxford County Asylum ; Author of The Preacher's
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Orient Leaves* A Book of Quotations in Poetry and
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year. With Preface by the Rev. Father Congreve,
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Simple Words about the Christ Life. By HELENA
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Thoughts on the Collects. From Advent to Trinity
Sunday. By ETHEL ROMANES. 5^ x 3^
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Thoughts on the Gospels* Short and very simple
Meditations for all the Sundays and Holy Days of
the Christian Year. By ETHEL ROMANES.
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The Church'i Year* Being Original Verses for the
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Xll ADVERTISEMENTS

A Message from the King* Being mainly an Explana
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40 pp. Paper, i/- net.

Church Doctrine, By the Rev. D. J. WHITE, Vicar
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Out of the Body* Of the various states of souls awaiting
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My Morning Text Book, Edited and arranged by
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A Daily Text Book for Invalids. Selected and Com
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Christian Thoughts for every day of the month, with
a Prayer. Wherein is represented the nature of
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250 Short Readings from the Bible- Arranged by
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Peace, Perfect Peace* Messages of Comfort from various
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Communion with God* Meditations and Prayers for
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The Childhood of our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ* For
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My Catechism Book. A Simple Explanation of the
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The Desire of the Nations. Stories from the Old
Testament, for Children of the Church. By M. A.
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The Sunday Portfolio. A Set of Sixty Pictures illus
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XIV ADVERTISEMENTS

Scenes and Stories from the New Testament. Full
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The Story of the Promise. Being Simple Readings on
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York. 68 Illustrations by Wyndham Hughes.
T}i x 5^3 inches. 264 pp. Cloth boards, 2/- net ;
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Daily Talks with Children. A Book of Readings for
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Saints' Days — 32 pp., $d. net.

Stories from the Lives of Saints and Martyrs of the
Church told in Simple Language. By JETTA S.
WOLFF. Edited, with an Introduction, by the
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224 pp. Cloth, 2/- net.

A Short and Simple Life of S. Paul. By AGNES
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The Story of the Gospels. For the Use of Children.
By the author of Charles Lowder. With 24 Illustra
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"Seek Me Early." Faith and Morality simply illustrated.
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Early Teachings about Heavenly Things* Stories
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The Holy Eucharist in Type and Shadow. Twelve
Addresses. Bythe Rev.NATHANIEL KEYMER,
M.A., Rector of Headon, and Canon Missioner in
the Diocese of Southwell. 6^ X4^6 inches. 100 pp.
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A Manual of Addresses to Communicants. By the late
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Devotional Instructions on the Eucharistic Office of the

English Church. By the late Rev. GEORGE
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On the Blessed Sacrament. Preparation, Attendance,
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XVI ADVERTISEMENTS

Twelve Simple Addresses to a Communicants' Class*
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Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion. 7)4 x 4^
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The Eucharistic Glory of the Incarnation, By
FENDER H. CUDLIP, Vicar of Sparkwell, and
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Worship, Meditations on the Revelations of the Resurrec
tion, Why I should be Confirmed, and Chart showing
continuity of Old and New Testament Worship. With
a Preface by the Ven. Archdeacon W. H. Hutchings,
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The Eucharistic Life* Considerations on the place of
Holy Communion in the Christian Life, with a
chapter on what is commonly called 4 Non-communi
cating Attendance.' By the Rev. CHARLES C.
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York. 5^3 x 2^ inches. 72 pp. Cloth, gd. net ;
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The Bread of Life. A Manual of Devotion and
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late Rev. A. D. CRAKE, B.A., sometime Vicar of
Cholsey, Berks. 5^ X 3^ inches. 212 pp.
Cloth boards, 1/6 ; Cheap Edition, cloth, i/-.

The Sanctus Bell* A Series of Devotions and Special
Intentions for the use of Communicants, arranged
in the order of the Church's Year. By the Author
of Supplications, Prayers, Intercessions, and Thanks
givings. Edited, with a Preface, by the Rev. N.
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ADVERTISEMENTS XV11

The Priest's Book of Private Devotion. Compiled by
the late Rev. JOSEPH OLDKNOW, D.D., and
the late Rev. A. D. CRAKE, B.A. Edited and
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Prime and Hours according to the Use of the Church
of England, with other Devotions* With
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Parochialia. A collection of Articles, Doctrinal,
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for Reproduction in Parish Magazines. Compiled
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The Lord's Supper* The Text of the Service and
Explanations arranged in parallel columns, with
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DAVEY BIGGS, D.D., Vicar of S. Philip and
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Notes of Mission Instructions on the Spiritual Life.
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XVlii ADVERTISEMENTS

"In Memoriam Crucis," the Daily Sequence of the
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Three Great Days of Grace; or, the Sacramental Work
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Brisbane, Queensland. With a Preface by the
Rev. George Body, D.D., Canon Missioner of
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The Cowley Carol Book. For Christmas, Easter, and
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Rev. GEORGE R. WOODWARD, M.A. Words
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and Words. 9^ x 5^ inches. 86 pp. Paper, i/-
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Memories of a Sister of S. Saviour's Priory. With a
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Sketches of English Nonconformity. By the Rev.
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Workers together with God. A Series of Papers on
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That Land and This* A Series of Allegories for the
Seasons of the Christian Year. By GERTRUDE
HOLLIS. With a Preface by the Rev. G. Body,
D.D., Canon Missioner of Durham. 6x3^ inches.
150 pp. Cloth, 1/6 net.

Hymns for the Home and Thoughts in Verse* By
"FIDES," Author of Changes and Chances, etc.
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Missionary Lessons on India. Edited by the Rev.
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Life's Possibilities. A Book for Young Women and
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The Sunshine of Everyday Life* A Book for Girls.
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