James Hope Moulton

1

1

BX 8495 .M670 M670 ]
Moulton, W. Fiddian b. 18661
James Hope Moulton

ion

JAMES HOPE MOULTON

JAMES HOPE MOULTON

BY HIS BROTHER

Villi

With a Foreword by the
RIGHT REV. BISHOP RYLE
Dean of Westminster

LONDON
THE EPWORTH PRESS
J. ALFRED SHARP

First Edition, 1919

TO

HAROLD AND HELEN

IS DEDICATED THIS
ATTEMPTED RECORD
OF A
SACRED LEGACY

PREFACE

There are certain obvious drawbacks
attaching to Memoirs, or Appreciations,
written by relatives ; and no one is more
conscious of that fact than I am. The
only plea I would put forward in extenua-
tion is that a greater drawback would
have been risked if the book had not been
written by me — namely, that it might
not have been written at all ! And so I
risk the drawbacks rather than leave my
brother's many friends without any record,
however imperfect, of his life or estimate
of his personality and influence.

I have not attempted anything in the
way of a detailed chronicle, partly because
it would have been practically impossible
to do so, and partly because it would have
served no particularly good purpose if
it had been done. I have chosen rather

7

8 PREFACE

to attempt, with such detachment as I
could achieve, an estimate of his life,
work, and disposition ; and I have tried
to supplement, and where necessary to
correct, my own vision by that of those
who saw him from other angles. When all
is said and done it is a question of angles :
there is no divergent evidence as to fact.
A wondrous unanimity, a glowing uni-
formity, pervades all the many tributes
paid to him in East and West ; and when
they have been poured into the common
stock of memories, those of the inner
circle have recognized in the tribute from
the outer circle the same James Hope
INIoulton that they saw in the more intimate
life of the home. Indeed, to him the
world was an extended home, and the race
a wider brotherhood ; and he was what
he was because this was so.

I would express my deep sense of in-
debtedness to the Dean of Westminster
lor his generous appreciation of my brother.
Dr. Ryle conducted the funeral service
of the father ; it is fitting that words

PREFACE 9

of his should accompany the memorial to
the son — his pupil and friend. I would
also tender grateful thanks to Sir J. G.
Frazer for permission to quote from private
letters written to his friend. Dr. Rendel
Harris and Dr. A. S. Peake have, as usual,
been suggestive, helpful, tender — have been,
that is to say, themselves. My brother
was indeed to be congratulated on the
inner circle of his friends.

May, 1919.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD - - . -

I

RICHMOND

THE FAMILY STOCK -

EARLY LIFE - - . .

II

CAMBRIDGE

SCHOOLDAYS AT THE LEYS
UNIVERSITY LIFE AND INFLUENCE
EARLY MINISTERIAL CAREER

III

MANCHESTER

THE NEW SPHERE

PHASES OF SCHOLARSHIP -

II

12 CONTENTS

MANCHESTER— {continued.)

PAGE

THE METHODIST PREACHER - - 86
THREE CHARACTERISTICS — HUMILITY,

MORAL PASSION, RECONCILIATION 92
THE WAR ill

IV
INDIA

THE CALL 133

SOME ASPECTS OF THE TOUR - - 145

FACE TO FACE WITH PARSISM - - 180

THE END 191

FOREWORD

J. Hope Moulton's death has made this
life poorer through the loss of a devoted
scholar and student, a fine character, and
a strong and forceful influence.

My recollection of him goes back to
the early days when he was a young and
enthusiastic scholar at King's College,
Cambridge. I made his acquaintance soon
after he came into residence, and I re-
member being greatly impressed by his
earnestness of purpose, his splendid dili-
gence, and his sympathy with different
aspects of College Hfe. He was a keen
athlete, a fbie runner, and an ardent
lacrosse player. He was a good classical
scholar, and threw himself into the special
study of philology and of Sanskrit with
glorious energy.

More especially, I can recall the interest
13

14 FOREWORD

which he always showed in the Sunday
afternoon gatherings which used to be held
in my rooms, and at which the presence
and conversation of Dr. Westcott (after-
wards Bishop of Durham) were an especial
attraction. Moulton was always an eager
and earnest debater. He was at that
time deeply interested in modem social
questions. He amused us sometimes by
his impatience with any appeals and
references to the thought or usage of
earlier centuries of Christendom.

He was a diligent student of the New
Testament in the Greek. Later on, he
did some minute and most laborious work
over the references in the Revised Version
of the Bible. Wliatever he took up he
threw into it intense seriousness of devotion.

I watched with deep regard and admira-
tion his steady advance into the front rank
of modern New Testament philologists ;
and the enthusiasm of his investigations
into Oriental religious thought has been
the means of inspiring many a younger
student,

FOREWORD 15

I may Scay I had a very great affection
for him. He was always occupied in
things that mattered ; always full of
interested and eager inquiry about things
religious. His love for his father was,
moreover, one of the most attractive
features in his character. I felt there was
nothing he would not do to please or help
that great and good man, the late Head
Master of the Leys School.

H. E. Ryle.

James Hope Moulton

I

RICHMOND

The Family Stock

It was well within sight of the buildings of
Richmond College that the life of James
Hope Moulton took its first beginning on
October 11, 1863. He came of a stock
so saturated with Methodist traditions
that it seemed to belong to the fitness
of things that he should have been bom
under the shadow of a great Methodist
institution. Right back to the ministry
of Wesley himself there had been a direct
succession of preachers in the family, which
started with John Bakewell, the writer of
the justly famous hymn, ' Hail, thou
once despised Jesus ! ' When Bakewell

•7 B

18 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

removed from Derbyshire to Greenwich
he had as an assistant master in his school
a brilliant young Irishman named James
Egan ; and in that home Wesley was an
honoured and frequent guest. He quickly
reahzed the existence of a close attach-
ment between Mr. Egan and the clever
daughter of his friend ; and with all the
authority which was so readily conceded
to him by his devoted followers he said
to Mr. Bakewell, ' Let the young people
marry ; hand the school over to them,
and go thou and preach the gospel.' He
himself joined this gifted couple in holy
matrimony. John Bakewell went forth
to preach, djdng at the age of ninety-
eight in full possession of his faculties ;
and the Egans took on the school. It was
their daughter who married the first William
Moulton, who, although a Churchman by
upbringing, came under strong rehgious
conviction among the Methodists and
ultimately entered the Methodist ministry
in 1794. Three of his sons followed him
into that same fellowship, of whom James

RICHMOND 19^

Egan Moulton was the eldest ; and he
is the one who concerns us here, for he
was the father of Dr. W. F. Moulton, of
The Leys ; Dr. J. E. Moulton, of Sydney,
N.S.W.; the Right Hon. Lord Moulton of
Bank, K.C.B.; and Dr. R. G. Moulton, of
Chicago — the father and three uncles of
James Hope Moulton.

On his mother's side there was the same
devotion to the cause of Methodism, al-
though the connexion was not so long-
standing. Samuel Hope was a member
of a clan famous over the border, and of
that branch of the clan which had risen
to great distinction in Liverpool. But
convictions are awkward things, and Samuel
Hope relinquished the prospect of a fine
position in the family bank in Liverpool,
faced the social ostracism which was so
often the Methodist's lot in those days,
and took up a career which meant a life
of comparative poverty to the end. He
rose to an honoured place in the Church
of his choice, becoming what was prac-
tically the General Secretary for the Home

20 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

Missions, and ultimately retiring to Guern-
sey with shattered health after leading a
forlorn hope in a south country town, where
he saved Methodism from collapse at the
cost of his own Ufe. He died a year after
he reached the peaceful island home in
the sixty-third year of his age, and the
fortieth of his ministry — figures destined
to reappear in the epitaph of the distin-
guished son-in-law whom he never knew.
The fact of the Rev. James Egan Moulton
being sent in 1853 as superintendent to
the Guernsey Circuit, where Mrs. Hope
and her family continued to reside, brought
together two young people who, after an
engagement of six years — a length of
time necessitated by Methodist rule —
entered into a hallowed union and set up
that

happy home where two in heart united
In holy faith and blessed hope are one,
WTiom death a little while alone divideth
And cannot end the union here begun.

The facts of earlier family history have

RICHMOND 21

been dwelt upon because they aeem to
predestinate my brother to the course
which afterwards he chose. And when
on his marriage the Osborn and Keeling
strains came into the family to reinforce
those of the Moultons, Hopes, Fiddians,
and Egans, there was formed a Methodist
heritage extensive and rich in all those
things which go to make up well-being.

Amid the absorbing interests, the crowd-
ing cares, the multiplied distinctions which
came upon him in later years, Dr. W. F.
Moulton never lost the aroma of those
Richmond days which constituted the first
epoch of his ministerial life, and which
have their intimate relation to this sketch
as constituting the first sphere of my
brother's life. On the first draft of the
'stations' for 1858, William F. Moulton
was down for Blackburn, but Benjamin
Hellier, of sainted memory, contended
that one who had won such distinction
at London University in classics, mathe-
matics, and Hebrew, was meant by Pro-

22 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

vidence to be a tutor, and the Conference
took that Aaew, sending him as assistant
to Mr. HelUer at Richmond. For four
years he occupied those rooms in the
central tower of the college buildings
which have sheltered so many men before
and since who have been assistant tutors
at that college before going out to careers
of usefulness and distuiction in the wider
spheres of Church life. In 1862 came his
ordination, at which the candidate stand-
ing next to him was Peter Mackenzie — a
juxtaposition which speaks volumes for
the true catholicity of the Methodist
ministry — and then his marriage and settle-
ment in a home of his own. The years
that followed were years of supreme happi-
ness both at home and outside. He loved
his work, and those for whom he worked
showed — show to this day — grateful appre-
ciation of his efforts. Amid all the stress
of college work he was untiring in his
pulpit ministrations, and an entry in his
diary during 1862 reads as follows : ' For
the third time in three months I had to

RICHMOND 23

walli twont3'^-throe miles on Sunday, preach-
ing three times ; but I am all the better
for it.' He waa supremely happy in hia
friendships, and much might be said as to
the close intimacy with the families of
Mr. Barrett, who was Governor for most
of the time, and Mr. Hellier ; and this
intimacy belongs to the life of two genera-
tions, for while the tutors cherished a
warm esteem for each other there was a
liappy cameraderie between the children ;
and in all this fellowship the students
belonged to both groups — honouring their
tutors and spoiling their children ! We
have a sketch in our possession by Miss
Hellier representing the ' Molten Images '
in a perambulator, and Mr. Hugh Price
Hughes wheeling it. This cannot be his-
torically true, for the interval of three
years between us renders it unlikely that
we should occupy that chariot at one and
the same time ; but it is near enough to
the fact. I once had the audacity to
refer to the sketch at a public meeting
during Mr. Hughes's Presidency. As soon

24 JAMES HOPE MOFLTON

as the not unnatural laughter had subsided
he ejaculated, ' Well, that only shows how
soon I began to push my brethren forward ! '
For an impromptu that would be hard to
beat.

Another reminiscence of those years
calls for special mention in this particular
year (1918-9), for it was in my father's
study that Dr. Stephenson in 1868 first
unfolded his ideas as to what became
afterwards the Children's Home, and re-
ceived the encouragement, guidance, and
unwavering support from his tutor which
counted for much in confirming him in hia
purpose.

Early Life

It was amid such surroundings and under
such influences that James Hope Moulton
grew up as a boy. There are current
certain legends that my gifted brother
lisped Greek at three, and passed from
accidence to syntax before he was five ;
and although no one is asked to accept
these as sober statements of fact, they are

RICHMOND 25

at any rate suggestive of the truth. He
was no infant prodigy ; on the contrary,
he was a very human being from the first :
but, nevertheless, the instinct for studious-
ness and the acquisition of learning mani-
fested itself unusually early, and became
richly fruitful at an age when the majority
of boys have found no time to be serious,
save concerning sport. He had the price-
less advantage of good eyesight, the lack
of which had debarred his father from all
games, and he took his full share in any
form of recreation. Quite early he showed
predilections in two directions where after-
wards he manifested more or less out-
standing abiUty. One was preaching ; and
never in later years did he address more
decorous congregations than those chairs
which constituted his congregation in our
Richmond dining-room on Sunday after-
noons in the early seventies. The other was
music ; and before he left Richmond, aged
eleven, he had composed an oratorio on
the subject of Jonah, which contained
among other numbers a bass solo delivered

26 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

by the prophet from within the whale —
an effect quite worthy of Wagner ! His
scliooling in those early days was in the
hands of Mr. Edward Rush, the father of
Mr. C. E. 0. Rush, the tutor so dearly
beloved by successive generations of Cliff
College men. In his Northampton days
Mr. Rush had taught our two uncles, and
both of them are readj- to bear witness
to his great ability as a teacher. Now at
Richmond — and later, for a short period,
at The Leys — the next generation were
under him, and two of our school-
fellows there were Sidney Rupert Hodge,
who afterwards came on to The Leys, and
Mr. W. Vogel Goad.

But in 1874 there came an upheaval.
For several years much earnest considera-
tion had been given to the question of
higher education in Methodism, and the
problem of how best to retain the j'oung
people of our privileged families. The
removal of ecclesiastical tests from the
universities gave a great impetus to the
movement, for it meant facing the question.

RICHMOND 27

' How can we secure for the sons of
Metlioclism the advantages of the ancient
universities without endangering their
attachment to the Church of their fathers ? '
While all agreed that something must
be done, there was considerable difference
of opinion as to the line which should be
taken. Some were in favour of the founda-
tion of a public school, others of a Methodist
hostel in connexion with the Univer-
sity. Ultimatel}^ the committee reported
in favour of a school, the Conference
accepted its findings, and at Camborne,
in 1874, Dr, W. F. Moulton was designated
as the first head master of the school that
was to be. He had been associated with
the inquir}' from the first ; he was con-
vener of the committee appointed to report
upon the matter; and yety such was his
innate modesty that until a few weeks before
Conference he had no idea that he would
ever be brought into close relationship
with the school. Indeed, at the previous
Conference, when presenting his report,
he laid down that the post must be made

28 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

attractive enough to secure the services
of a first-class man ; and all the time he
was unconscious that his Church was looking
to him as most likely to meet the very
requirements which he himself had out-
lined. We find him writing to Dr. West-
cott in the autumn of 1874 : ' For myself,
I shall go as a matter of obedience. I don't
think I am the man for such responsibilities,
and no allurement would have induced
me to undertake them. Now, however,
I am pledged, not indeed to succeed, but
to do my best.' His brethren had desig-
nated him, and he went in January, 1875.

The Richmond days were ended, and
with them the preparatory period of J. H.
Moulton's Hfe. Wliat follows falls naturally
into three main periods, each with its own
geographical centre, and each closed with
a great sorrow. Firstly, Cambridge — the
formative period, 1875 to 1902 ; secondly,
Manchester — the citizen period, 1902 to
1915 ; thirdly, India — the missionary
period, 1915 to 1917. Of course there are
phases of his life and experience which do

RICHMOND

29

not belong exclusively to any one period.
Such matters cannot be shut up in water-
tight compartments. But for general pur-
poses this differentiation will hold good.

II

CAMBRIDGE

Schooldays at The Leys

In the natural course of things, being
just about twelve years of age, James
Hope Moulton formed one of that little
group of boys that gathered at The Leys
for the opening of its first term, and there
he stayed until he entered the university
on his nineteenth birthday. It was at
the school that he laid the foundations for
his later achievements in scholarship ; it
was there that he formed his friendships,
which were of a very lasting character ;
and it was there that he first felt and
gave himself up to those spiritual drawings
which afterwards became the ruling factor
in his life. No one could possibly have
thrown himself more heartily into the life

3°

CAMBRIDGE 31

of an institution than he did. Things
literary, scholastic, athletic, musical, re-
ligious, scientific, social — ^all claimed and
won a place in his scheme of hfe, and all
received a measure of enthusiastic atten-
tion ; but it was those among them which
were the most serious which attracted him
the most, and it would not be too much
to Bay that in the best sense he took
serious views of hfe unusuallj^ early. He
only accomplished what he did accomplish
by dint of strenuous and unremitting
apphcation, and thereby he laid the only
possible foundation for the abounding
service of later years. There comes to
mind a striking indication of the trend of
disposition, the more significant because
so largely unconscious on his part. When
he was fifteen he began sending contri-
butions to the Leys Fortnightly, the maga-
zine of his school. It is immaterial that
the subject was ' IVIilton's Minor Poems,'*
though that may be reckoned as an un-
usual type of subject for the first printed
• See p. 197 for the reappearance of the subject.

32 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

effort of a boy of fifteen. What does
matter is that this, like all his contributions
to that'magazine, bore the signature AT AN.*
At an age when to so many the world is
a playground and life a game, he intuitively
dropped upon a nom-de-plume betokening
strenuousness of effort ; and he remained
AT AN to the end. On the football-field and
on the track he ran fast, very fast ; in the
sanctuary he sang lustily, very lustily ;
on the cricket-field he bowled very fast,
with a curious action which made things
awkward on a bad wicket — and with a
hostile umpire. At lacrosse, of which
he was very fond, he could race round
most of the ' fields,' and sometimes, per-
haps, used his speed when it would have
been better to pass the ball. Wlierever
he was and whatever he was doing he was
intense and strenuous about it all ; he
played many things — very many, anything,
indeed, that came his way — but he never
played at anything, and this note was

* Pronounced Agan. AFAN, 'Adv., very much :
strongly affirmative.' Liddell and Scott.

CAMBRIDGE 33

characteristic of him throughout his life.
Indeed, one kind and discerning friend, a
seasoned Anglo-Indian who entertained
him several times at Bombay in 1915-7,
considers that, had there been less pace
and more deference to the obstacles pre-
sented by the trying Indian climate, lie
might have lived through the strain of one
more day in that open boat, and have
landed at Calvi with his dearly loved
friend, so much his senior.

It was only to be expected that his religious
life would manifest the same characteristic
of intensity and strenuousness, but not
perhaps that this would manifest itself
quite as early as it did. Two entries
in his diary for the winter of 1877, when
he was just fourteen, reveal a degree of
deep spiritual longing not often to be met
with at that age ; and it is noticeable that
in his voluminous diaries, crammed full
of the incidents, great and small, for forty
years of his life, the only field where he
makes frequent pauses for reflection is
that of inward religion. On Octol^er 11

34 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

he writes : * This is not only my birth-
day but the third anniversary of my
spiritual birth.' And on November 25 :
' I have had a great joy, in common with
the angels of God above. God has granted
me that inexpressible privilege of being
an instrument in His hands for the salvation

of . It is the first time I have felt

the peculiar joy of being instrumental
in bringing a fellow creature to the full
knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus.'
Even two years prior to these entries his
diaries — far less full and sustained — are
punctuated with heartfelt and passionate
desires for the salvation of individuals
mentioned by name. In this also the
child was the father of the man ; and those
who knew him only as a scholar, and
perhaps feared him as a critical scholar,
knew only part of his nature, and possibly
never guessed that such a passion for
evangelism coukl be united with profound
leaniing in the fields of grammar and
comparative religion. Already he was
jooking out with wistful earnestness to-

CAMBRIDGE 35

Avards the mission field ; for on one of the
many occasions when the Rev. David
Hill visited the school I find an entry —
June 28, 1881— in a diary : ' Talked with
Mr. Hill about my missionary wishes.'
In December, 1881, he preached his first
sermon, one Sunday aftenioon, in the
little Wesleyan Chapel at Waterbeach,
the village which will always be remem-
bered as the sphere of 0. H. Spurgeon's
first pastorate. >Strange to say, those
diaries, which are so full of details of mis-
cellaneous doings, omit to mention the
text taken on that interesting occasion ;
but inferences from other passages would
point to its havhig been Heb. ii. 1.

University Life and Influence

His academic distinctions had already
begun. In the London matriculation list
in June, 1881, his name appeared sixth
in the Honours list ; and in January of
the following year he won a £70 open
scholarship in Classics at King's College,
Cambridge. The double lines of academic

36 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

honour went on side by side through the
B.A. and M.A. stages, but in the end the
London D.Lit. stood without any con*es-
ponding Cambridge degree to balance it ;
for although three other universities con-
ferred upon him the Doctorate of Divinity,
tlie fact of his being a Nonconformist
constituted a statutory bar to liis receiving
a similar distinction from his own imi-
versit}^ — a disability recently and reluctantly
removed in the teeth of bitter clerical
opposition.

It was during that period of strenuous
study that another influence came into
his life which counted for yet more, but
about which little must be said, partly
because so much might be said. In 1884
there came as Superintendent of the Cam-
bridge Circuit the Rev. G. R. Osborn, the
son of the famous Dr. Osborn, who had
been the colleague of Dr. W. F. Moulton at
Richmond. The friendship which rapidly
grew up between the brilHant yoimg classic
and Mr. Osborn's elder daughter ripened
eventually into a union of uninterrupted

CAMBRIDGE 37

blessedness and jo_y which lasted for twenty-
five j'-ears ; and although Methodist rules
necessitated a somewhat lengthy engage-
ment, as in his father's case, J. H, Moulton
A\orkcd on under a new inspiration from
1885.

In November, 1882, Moody and Sankey
conducted their memorable mission in
Cambridge, and my brother's diaries con-
tain warm appreciations of their meetings.
He was present at that meeting when, for
the only time in his career, the great evan-
gelist was refused a hearing by an audience
of rowd}' and reckless undergraduates ; he
was also present two nights later when the
evangelist had his revenge — gracious and
holy — upon an audience hushed and submis-
sive, scores of whom surrendered to Christ
while Sankey sang ' Sowing the Seed ' in his
own inimitable fashion. My brother's fellow
collegian, A. C. Benson, has described the
impression left by those missioners on
iiis own mind and heart in a remarkable
passage in TJie House of Quiet; and the
description is of lasting value, as revealing

38 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

the nature of the impact of such preaching
upon one brought up in so different a
rehgibus environment. The son of the
Wcsleyan Manse naturally felt himself
more at home in such services than the
Anglican Etonian. He always looked back
to that mission as to an occasion of singular
spiritual power and awakening, and while
he would have given a cordial assent to
Benson's striking analysis of Moody's method
of appeal, he would not have stopped short
where he did, for to him the man who
could thus ' probe the secrets of the inner-
most heart ' was the man who could best
bring him ' out into a place of liberty with
the tenderness of a true father in God.'

To man} it mav have been a foregone
conclusion that he would enter that
ministry where so many ol' his relatives
had found their vocation, but no one who
knew him could imagine his being in-
fluenced by sucli considerations if an
' effectual calling ' had been absent. He
entered lhat ministry not because they
hatl done so, but because the same spirit

CAMBRIDGE 39

which had made them preachers of the
gospel filled him ; and for that reason,
and for no other, he had no choice but to
go. During the spring and early summer
of 1886 he went through the ordinary
tests demanded of all aspirants to the
Methodist ministry, whether gifted and
privileged or not. The Circuit, the Dis-
trict, the Connexion, all have their par-
ticular organs for testing candidates ; and
through all the tests he emerged as might
be expected, conspicuously successful. The
London Conference of 1886 designated him
as assistant to his father at The Leys, in
succession to the Rev. Edward Brentnall,
who had occupied the position for three
years, and in this post he remained until
he went to Manchester in 1902, although
after Dr. Moult on' s death in 1898 the nature
of his appointment somewhat altered.

This composite post — ministerial, educa-
tional, and quasi-academic-— was a mag-
nificent opening for him ; and, it may lie
added, for others as well, for James Hope
Moulton always gave what he got, and

40 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

only got in order that he might give, of the
riches of learning. It is doubtful whether
he realized the advantageousness of the
situation at the time. He would some-
times look out wistfully at wider fields,
wondering whether he was doing the best
Avith his life by staying at The Leys.
' Here I am,' I remember his once saying
to me, ' nearly fort}-, and have not done a
thing ! Wliy, father -was on the New
Testament Revision Company before ho
was thirty-six ! ' But it is easy to see —
especially so for him noM — that that forma-
tive period was of priceless value, and that
the I'ich and brilliant usefulness of the
later career was conditioned by it. It is
l^robably not claiming too much to say
that incessant collaboration with his father
was in itself a liberal education. His
3'^eaming for Christian service at home,
his passion for Foreign Missions, his ever-
deepening devotion to Greek Testament
study — these and the many other factors
in his spiritual make-up were distinctly
traceable to the fact of his having enjoyed

CAMBRIDGE 41

peculiarly close association with liis father
at just the most susceptible period of his
mental development. So far as his school
duties were concerned, there is no small
degree of truth in the frankly expressed
opinion of one who knew him intimately
and loved him warmly, that he was not a
great schoolmaster, on the groimd that
' his primary interest was not in the bo3^s
he taught but in what he taught them.'
When he had to do with pupils Uke Percy
B. Haigh,F. W. Hasluck, Harold Mattingly,
and others, whose brilliance as schoolboy's
has been fully sustained in their later
careers, then the double interest in the
boys and the subjects made his work a joy
to him ; but it must be admitted that on
the ordinary schoolmastering side he was
not in his element, that the normal duties
were somewhat of a burden to him, and
that had it not been for the conditions
amid Mhieh his hfe was passed and the
very happy relations with his colleagues, he
would have felt the burden intolerable.
Once he received a tempting offer to

42 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

change his sphere during his father's life-
time. His old college tutor at King's, J. E. C.
Welldon — now Dean of Durham, formerly
Bishop of Calcutta, and afterwards Dean
of Manchester — \^ as for a few years head
master of Harrow, and he earnestly but
unsuccessfully urged him to come and take
up a fifth-form mastership there.

In a warmly appreciative notice in the
Manchester Guardian, Bishop Welldon refers
to this offer, and puts down the refusal
to the conllicting claims of scholarship
and sclioolmastering, adding that possibly
my brother was right in deciding that if
he was to do his best work it must be under
other conditions than those of school
teaching. Yes, he was right, but that was
not his primary reason for acting as he
did. A HarroM' mastership would not
have been compatible with the sphere
which he had doliberatel}^ chosen for himself,
that of the Methodist ministry, and he was
not disposed to roliuipiish that for any of
the blue ril)bons of the teaelung profession.
Of course it may be said that Conference

CAMBRIDGE 43

would probably have placed no barrier
in the way, and would have regarded
him as a minister without pastoral charge ;
but he had a true and certain intuition as
to the difficulties involved. However fair
and generous the head master would have
been to him, there is little doubt that the
major portion of the Harrow constituency
would have felt itself affronted by the
appointment of a Dissenting minister to
the staff — a layman might have escaped
notice — to a degree that would not have
been the case with an avowed Agnostic.
Sooner or latei' the position would have
been intolerable, and it was probably best
for all concerned that the offer was not
accepted. As it was, he continued for
sixteen years in a post which, although
less distinguished than that w^hicli might
have been his, was one of great usefulness,
and afforded him singular advantages.

Alter all, Cambridge Cambridge, and
the two great ancient uni\'orsity towns
have a charm and interest peculiarly their
own. In that life James Hope Moulton

44 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

took his full share, both in respect of what
he gave and what he received. In his
diary there occurs almost every week the
phrase ' Hurried back to . . . ' ; and this
is typical of the life he led. He lectured
on the subjects comprised in Section E*
of the Classical Tripos, Part II ; he lectured
at Girton and Newnham ; and all the time
he was taking a large amount of teaching
at The Leys, partly to relieve his father
and partly in pursuance of his own duties
as a member of the teaching staff. But
no one was moie alive than he was to the
advantages afforded by Cambridge for
self -improvement, and certainly no one
was ever less disposed to regard the
Tripos as finally concluding the period of
acquisition. He availed himself to the
full of the friendship of Prof. E. B. Cowell,
the great Orientalist, and continued to
study under his direction those subjects
which afterwards became the sphere of so
uuich of his published work. Prof. Cowell
was undoubtedly one of the great inspiring
* Centring in Philology.

CAMBRIDGE 45

influences of his life during this formative
period, and he was never tired of expressing
his sense of obligation and affection to his
friend and teacher.* The Professor's house
was conveniently near to The Leys, and the
most fruitful periods of instruction were
not those spent in the lecture-room at
stated times but the hours spent in the
study of one who poured out his stores
of leaniing without stint, and was delighted
to find one who was both willing and able
thus to receive, without any of the limita-
tions which are inevitably associated with
an examination sjdlabus.

His college also remained for him a centre
of stimulating intellectual intercourse with
which he kept up his intimate relations
after he ceased to reside in the college
biiildings. King's College has always had
the reputation of being somewhat of an
intellectual aristocracy, largeh' because of
its having been for long the one college
at Cambridge wliich refused to take men
who were not intending to read for
* See below, pp. 135, 181,

46 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

an Honours Degree. Consequently, the
number of members has never been
conspicuouslj'^ large, but the average of
distinction has been conspicuously high.
Among those who were my brother's con-
temporaries there stand out the names
of Arthur C. Benson, now Master of
Magdalene College ; Montague Rhodes
James, now Provost of Eton ; G. T.owes
Dickinson, journalist, historian, philosopher;
W. R. Inge, the Dean of St. Paul's ; and
numbers of others who also have taken
distinguished positions in Church and State.
It was, perhaps, to be expected that a
degree as good as his — a high first-class
in both parts of the Tripos — should lead
to a Fellowship even amid the keen com-
petition of such a college as King's, and in
1888 he was elected to the much coveted
honour. Among the testimonials sent in
to the electors was the following from
Dr. Peilo, the great philologian, and it sheds
interesting light upon the nature of his
work at that early period :

' The character of the work is distinctly

CAMBRIDGE 47

good — very sound and thorongh. He binds
liimself to a rigorous observance of phonetic
law and never evades it ; the essay is
scientific from tlie latest philological stand-
point. . . . He has shown certainly a
capabilitj' of original investigation. He
belongs to a small number — about five —
of students in Section E since 1882 who
seem to me to stand out from the rest as
qualified to do good independent work
in comparative philology . . . Moulton's
work shows no common grasp and attain-
ment in a man of his standing.'

At the time during which he was closely
connected with the college it enjoyed the
exceptional advantage of having Dr. West-
cott as a ' Professorial Fellow,' as well as
Professor H. E. Ryle, who was a King's
man, and had been elected to a Fellowship
in the ordinary course. The influence
of these two outstanding scliolar-saints
counted for much, specially unred con-
ditions where there were many temptations
to lead the unformed and aspiring intel-
lectual to assume that among men of

48 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

intellect the Christian Faith no longer
exercised any authority ; for no one could
make that assumption with two such
examples witnessing daily in the college
to the contrar3^ Every Sunday afternoon
during term-time there were meetings held
in Professor Rj'^le's rooms for religious
discussion, which could not fail to be
stimulating — even if somewhat disconcert-
ing for the junior who had to read a paper
in the presence both of his fellow under-
graduates and of these outstanding pro-
fessors. In his tribute to Bishop Westcoti
in the London Quarterly Review* my
brother refers to these gatherings. ' I
was the victim twice, and on the first
occasion cheerfully undertook to give an
account of Methodism within the allotted
time. It was amusing to see the interest
and curiosity of my fellow undergraduates,
to whom I spake like a traveller from
Tibet. I had to stand fire for nearly an
hour, explaining to the best of my power
the dift'erence between a class-leader and
* July, 1903.

CAMBRIDGE 49

an archdeacon ; and answering other ques-
tions betraying greater or less degrees
of ignorance. Westcott's obiter dicta were
deeply interesting, showing as they did
his characteristic power of sympatlietic
insight into the reUgious position of Free
Cliurchmen. ... I liad been emphasizing
our doctrine of tixe priesthood, ami West-
cot t jemarked that if wg beUeved all
Christians to be priests ^\e ought to have
an ordination service tor them. ... If
Ave Methodists took kindly to ritual, no
doubt the service for the recognition of
new niembej's Mould have done something
in the direction of Dr. Westcott's sug-
gestion.'

But although he seemed to be so much
immersed in the things of scholarship he
remained a very human being, and alto-
gether far removed from the academic
recluse interested in nothing but the world
of scholarship. He retained his interest
in games, certain games, and he continued
to play them with zest ; and it was perhaps
characteristic of his strenuous disposition

50 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

that he did not take much mterest in
games except in so far as he could par-
ticipate in them himself. It -was only
on very exceptional occasions that he was
to be found watcliing games of any kind :
active employment was what he asked for
in every field of life. His love for music —
which had found early expression in the
oratorio fragment on the subject of Jonah,
before he was twelve— developed into a
great enthusiasm, though here again the
same characteristic manifested itself in a
greater desire to be a participator than a
mere listener. To the verj- end it was the
choral work in which he had taken part
that counted most to him, rather than the
instrinsically greater work which he had
onl}' heard from outside ; and the same
was true in respect of those orchestral
works in which as a 'cellist he had played
his part. This disposition would b}^ itself
have rendered the elaborate services of the
Church of England distasteful to him, even
if there had been no other considerations.
A musical service performed for him, instead

CAMBRIDGE 51

of one ill which he could take his share,
would have had little attraction for him ;
and the ' paid quartet ' regime so pre-
valent in America would have been
anathema. The result was that he entered
with extreme heartiness into all services
at which he was present ; and if he sang
with a vehemence which was open to
criticism both in respect of the well-being
of his own voice and the blending with
other voices, it was at any rate an outward
expression of an earnest enthusiasm which
was adequately described by AIWX in this
field as in others.

Early Ministerial Career

And what about his relation to his
Church during the sixteen years from
1886 to 1902 ? From what has been
already said it will be abundantly clear
that nothing, however alluring, would be
allowed to thrust tliat into the background.
Much of his teaching at The Leys was
in Bible subjects, and in addition to that
theie was much of the pastoral relation-

52 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

ship to the boys which gave him the oppor-
tunity of making more of a contribution to
Church hfc than could be tabulated at the
moment. Then he was preaching most
Sundays either at the school or in the
Circuit, and the scholar who was spending
Saturday evening studying the mysteries
of Sanskrit with Prof. Cowell would, as
likely as not, be expounding the precepts
of the gospel on vSunday evening to a
handful of villagers on the far side of the
Circuit. It was this blond of 'the study
and the street ' which kept him so fresh,
and saved his scholarship from having the
slightest suspicion of mould and mustiness.

Then there was the work involved in the
guidance of the Probationers of the Church.
For years his father had had charge of this
work, and now the son came in, first as
assistant and then as successor. Judging
a priori it might perhaps be expected that
one so able and learned himself would prove
unsympathetic towards beginners, and over-
disposed to view matters from a purely
intellectual point of view ; but this did

CAMBRIDGE 53

not prove to he the case with him an>' more
than M'ith his ii\{\wv ; and tliore arc hin\-
drecls of men hi the Wcslcyan M(MhodiHt
Church to-day who speak with gratitude
of what they owe both to father and son
while passing through their period of
probation.

In February, 1898, the whole aspect of
things changed, for with tragic suddenness
Dr. W. F. Moulton passed away. About
two 3^ears previously he had received
a sharp warning that there are limits to
the extent to which an able and unselfish
worker may spend himself for others, and
for several months he had been laid aside.
Gradually he came back again to the old
activities, though with the recognition that
never again must life be for him the stress-
ful rushing existence which it had been
before. But even this modified condition
of service proved too much for him ; and
one Saturdaj^ afternoon, when returning
from a visit to one of his masters who was
ill, he sat down on the steps of the bridge
over the river behind The Leys^ and in ten

64 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

minutes he had passed over not that river
but another.

The association between him and his
elder son in both public and private work
had been so peculiarly close that this
bereavement meant to my brother very
much more than an acute personal loss.
It meant the closing of an epoch in his
life ; for although he remained at the
school until 1902, in happy association with
his friend of many years, the Rev W. T. A.
Barber, who was appointed by the gover-
nors to the vacant head-mastership, it was
necessarily in an altered capacity ; and
there was always present the consciousness
that the supreme reason for his remaining
there had come to an end. \\nicn, there-
fore, he was designated for the position
of tutor at Didsbury College in 1902, he
left the old familiar scenes for a new sphere
more congenial in itself and more thoroughly
suited to his special gifts. It could not
be without deep regret that he would
leave the spots so full of hallowed mem-
ories ; and Cambridge itself had its own

CAMBRIDGE 55

unique attractions. But Manchester pre-
sented a sphere for work which was free
from the hmitations and disquahfications
which belonged to an order so largely
dominated by tradition ; and the prospect
of training ministers instead of teaching
schoolboys afforded ample compensation
for the loss of other things. At Cambridge
his Nonconformity would have remained
to the end of the chapter a disqualifica-
tion and a reproach in actual fact, even if
in theory there was a fair field and no
favour. It will take generations to exor-
cise from Oxford and Cambridge that
spirit which is far more ready to give the
right hand of fellowship to the free-
thinker than to the Nonconformist preacher.
How this strikes the outsider is shown in
the concluding paragraph of a discerning
notice of his Prolegomena, in the Cam-
bridge Revieio, May 24, 1906: 'It is now
three or four years since Dr. Moulton
left Cambridge, followed very shortly by
Mr. Rendel Harris. They are serving
each his owm denomination in little colleges

56 JAMES HOPE MOXJLTON

outside great cities, but Cambridge has
lost them. Curious how Httle effort was
made to keep tliem ! More curious that
the theological chairs of the university are
not available for scholars of such gifts!
Does the system which requires their
exclusion really help the advancement
of learning ? ' But, for the time being,
to quote from a letter to my brother
from Dr. J. G. Frazer : ' There is no
standing up against the countr^^ parson
when he arises in his might, smites the
local don under the fifth rib, bumps his
head (I mean the don's head) against a
wall, and departs in triumph leaving ua
prostrate.' Nevertheless, it is very doubt-
ful Avhether the new age will tolerate such
things much longer, and the first steps have
been taken in the direction of fairer treat-
ment.

A new university- started free from these
shackles, and there was neither the power
nor the desire to give preferential treat-
ment to any one form of Church allegiance.
As my brother playfully reminded the

CAMBRIDGE 57

Bislio]) of Ripon when he oaiiK^ to bring
fraternal greetings to tlie Bradford Con-
ference of 1910 : ' We have in the Clnivei -
sity [of Manchester j a Theological Faculty
which has been an object lesson of a very
valuable character. We ait side by side
representing all the Churches, and the
only " faculty " we have — so the Vice-
Chancellor says, and he ought to know — is
that we never quarrel. We have never
had any division in which any one could
tell from the voting which were Anglican
and which Free Church. It is, of
course, the Bible around which we are
mostly gathered, and it is a broad prin-
ciple with us that nothing shall be said that
may offend the religious opinions of any
student there. In my own New Testament
class I have students from the High Church
College and from the Presbyterian Colleges,
and it has never occurred to us what are
the differences between the Churches.'
The very fact that he later served a term
of two or three j^ears as Dean of the Faculty
emphasizes the difference between the

58 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

spirit of the new and the old universities
where matters of religious allegiance were
concerned ; and although in his moments
of loneliness later he talked of retiring to
Cambridge, it was to the Cambridge of
hallowed associations — both of life and
death, for there his much loved girl Hope
was buried, as well as his father and
mother — rather than to Cambridge as a.
sphere of work. As his friend, E. E. Kellett,
puts it : ' Cambridge gave him his learning,
but Manchester was to give him the chance
to use it.' /

Ill

MANCHESTER

The Neiv Sphere

It was in every way fortunate for my
brother that when the way opened for
his appointment to a college tutorship
it should have been at Manchester. None
of the otlier centres could have given him
tlxe same many-sided opportunities and
the blend of the University with the
denominational College. Richmond was too
isolated, while at Leeds and Birmingham
the Universities were then very far from
occupying the positions which they hold
to-day. Manchester alone among the
modem Universities of England had attained
to a maturity and a completeness of equip-
ment worthy of a great industrial centre.
In addition to these intellectual interests

59

60 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

there were the problems and possibilities
of a great city, which appealed powerfully'
to one whose interest in politics was so
wrapped up with his passion for social
reform. Here was a chance of doing^
in some degree, the very things about
which he had often spoken, and of bringing
down his politics also ' from the study to
the street.'

It was as a Methodist preacher that he
came to Didsbury, and his work in the
Methodist ministry always occupied the
first place in his regard, as indeed it took
precedence of the academic and the political
in point of time. For years the post of
theological tutor at the Wesleyan College,
Didsburj^ had been occupied bj- the Rev.
Dr. Marshall Randies, and that of classical
tutor bv the Rev. Dr. R. Waddy^ Moss.
With the retirement of Dr. Randies in
1902, there was a partial redistribution
of work, Dr. Moss taking the tutorship
in theology, and James Hope Moulton
New Testament exegesis, classics and other
kindred studies. A college such as Dids-

MANCHESTER 61

bury furnishes boundless possibilities for
the tutor who is prepared to expend his
very best on his men. The relations cmi
be very close ; they can be professional and
little more ; and it is safe to say that men
can discern very easily whether a tutor is
out to deliver lectures or to teach. No one
could fail to see that J. H. Moulton had a
very strong sense of the importance of
his subjects, and he taught them with all
the earnestness of one who was convinced
that minute matters of grammar and of
exegesis carried great significance. In so
doing he presented to his men a living plea
for painstaking accuracy, at a period of
mental development when the temptation
to cheap and shallow generalizations might
veiy well be strongly felt. One of his men
— tiie Rev. Wilbert F. Howard, M.A., B.D.,
who has accepted the important and dififi-
cult task of continuing his unfinished
Grammar of New Testament Greek — has
described* the Didsbury side of my brother's
life far better than I could possibh- do,
* 111 the Methodist Recorder.

62 JAMBS HOPE MOULTON

and I will content myself with passing on
his generous appreciation: —

' Dr. Moulton's death has left a gap in
the front rank of the world's scholars, and
hosts of friends all over the world are
mourning him. But we old Didsbury men
claim him as our own possession. We
knew him as no others could. From the
day he came amongst us he was one of
ourselves, and we were proud of this
giant of learning, who was not ashamed to
call us brethren. It is impossible to think
of Didsbury without him. And though
we know all about the many parts he filled
elsewhere, we cannot think of him apart
from Didsbury. After all, it was as Dids-
bur}^ tutor that he came to his own in
Methodism and was recognized for the
man he was — and what a man !

' Even at first we dimly knew that his
scholarship was a miracle of memory and
understanding and flawless accurac}'', and
this was years before great universities
tumbled over one another in their eagerness
to heap their honours upon him. But that

MANCHESTER 63

Avas not why we made a hero of him.
We honoured the scho'ar, we reverenced
the saint, and we loved the man. One
remembers the instinctive reverence of the
subdued voice with which, in critical dis-
cussions, he always named the name of
Christ ; one calls to mind also his sensitive-
ness for the feelings of the slow and stupid.
He was too fine a gentleman ever to make
a man look ridiculous before a roomful
of fellows. His utter disinterestedness, no
less than his humility, gave us a new
insight into ministerial honour. Of course,
he Avas very human. He had his foibles
and mannerisms, at which we smiled and
loved him none the less. But there was
never a suggestion of pomposity or pedantry,
for he had the simplicity of a child and the
purity of a Galahad. How vehement he
was in his crusading temper ! He was a
very impetuous saint, and, with all his
pre-War pacifism, he was trul}^ a leader
in Christ's Church militant here on earth.

' His class-room was never dull. Wlio
an forget that ocular demonstration with

64 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

tlie aid of the poker to distinguish between
the various kinds of aorist ? One never
knew Avhether some gem in the text would
be given a setting of tine gold extracted
from some Egyptian rubbish-heap, or
whether a passing reference would discover
the intimate connexion betAveen compara-
tive religion and some half-forgotten nursery
rhyme. The staid and stodgy may shake
their heads at his unconventional methods,
but this I do knoA\-, that, with many other
things, we learnt a great deal of Hellenistic
Greek, and always for the enrich jnent of
the soul. Dr. Moulton, alone of all teachers
whom I have kno\\ii, had the power of
breathing life into the dry bones of
grammar.

' To think that no fresh generation of
Didsbury lucn Avill watch that tall, athletic
figure striding yvith elastic step along the
west corridor, or sit at his feet in that
upper room while he eagerly unfolds to
them the Scriptures, or hear the shrill
exclamation when a misplaced accent is
detected in Westcott and Hort, or hearken

MANCHESTER 65

to those obiier dicta that reveal the insight
of genius !

' How patient he was, antl what iiinchiess
ho lavished on us ! All his Diclsbury geese
were swans, of course, but that was only
part of his aboiniding charity which
believed all things and hoped all things.
Very many of his old students at home
and abroad are now lamenting an inspiring
teacher, and, still more, their best friend.'

Phases of Scholarship

His Avork at the college thus lay entirely
along the line of his own tastes and pre-
dilections. His intimate association with
his father had led him at an early period
to accustom himself to look for substantial
contributions to exegesis from the side
of grammar, and two considerations helped
to accentuate that disposition. One was
the fact that his father's edition of Winer's
Grammar of Neio Testament Greek needed
to be re-cast and in a great degree re-
written— a task which the father had
hoped to undertake, but which was left

66 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

as a sacred legacy to the son. Upon this
he had already been engaged for several
years, and the fruit of his labours appeared
in December, 1905, with the publication
of the Prolegomena, the first instalment
of ' A Grammar of New Testament Greek,
based upon W. F. Moulton's edition of
G. B. Winer's Grammar.' The other con-
sideration was the discovery of the papyri.
Deissmann's Bible Studies, which first
appeared in 1895, called the attention
of scholars to the identity of the Greek of
the New Testament with that of the
connnon people as reflected in the papyri,
and thereby opened out a new field of
investigation. These two considerations
led James Hope Moulton to devote more
and more time to that field of study, with
results which soon became manifest in
a wider circle than that of a denomina-
tional college. In 1908 he was appointed
Greenwood Professor of Hellenistic Greek
and Indo-European Pliilology at Manchester
University, an appointment which was
doubtless due in great measure to the

MANCHESTER 67

impression produced on the world of
Biblical scholarship by the Prokgoimna.
It was recognized that here was an expert
of no mean order, and it is noticeable that
the recognition w as not confined to England.
Albert Thumb said of the book : ' We have
nothing to equal it in German,' and Har-
nack spoke of the author as ^ our foremost
expert ' in New Testament Greek — no small
praise from one so tlistinguished for his
o\\ n scholarship, and known not to be over-
partial to non-German work. Indeed, so
profound uas my brother's scholarship
that even a Cambridge papei', writing of
him after his death, spoke of him as having
been trained in Germany — a striking
example of that deplorable disposition to
ask, ' Can anything good come out of
England without German aid ? '

As to his work in the field of papyrology
little need be said here, for the subject
has become fairly familiar, and it would
not be an overstatement to say that, so
far as this country is concerned, no one
had a larger share than himself in that

68 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

familiarization ; and his booi^, From
Egyptian Rubbish-hmps, has pre.sented the
subject in a form Mliicli can be under-
stood by those wlio have no knowledge of
the subject, or even of Greek. It was a
real satisfaction to his democratic soul
to find that the Greek of the New Testa-
ment— ' the language of the Holy Ghost,'
as it had been called — was in reality just
the language of the common people ; and
he revelled in searching from the various
papyrus collections for material which
would be of service for the better under-
standing of the language of the New Testa-
ment. The bulk of his researches are
embodied in the Vocabulary of New
Testament Greek, which he commenced
in collaboration with Prof. Milligan, of
Glasgow, the son of ' Milligan of Aberdeen,'
who had been our father's colleague on
the Revision Company and collaborator
in the Connnentary on John's Gospel
in Schaff's Commentary. Only two parts
out of eight had been published before
my brother started for IntUa, and his

MANCHESTER 60

friend will be left to complete the work
by himself. A« to tiie future of that
branch of stiidj^ he was perfectly prepared
to beheve that the lat<)r yield from Egypt
and elsewhere would not be commensurate
with the earlier, partly because the As-
souan dam tended to alter the climate of
Egypt to so great a degree that the papyri
were not so likely to survive. ' I do not
think,' he writes to Dr. Rendel Harris on'
July, 1910, ' that papyrology will take
us much further. New papyrus collections
will only add details now.' But there is
no doubt as to the supreme value of the
contributions already made from that
source.

I have no claim to speak of the inner
quality of my brother's work, but I have
before me an estimate written by one
who has an authority in that field second
to none. In the Theologische Literaiur
Zeitung for April, 1906, Deissmann reviewed
the book, and there are passages in his
review which may fittingly find a place
in this memoir, in that they are not merely

70 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

the ostimate of a book, but olso the
appreciation of a Hcholar by a scliolar —
and such an one.

' James Hope Moulton's Prolegomena
to the Orammar of N.T. Greek comes before
me at the same moment as the announce-
ment of a third German N.T. Grammar :
tlie Philologica Sacra is flourishing ! As
heir of his late father W. F. Moulton's
work, whose English edition of the Winer
Grammar had for nearly forty years
exercised a favourable influence on exegetical
studies in England and America, the
3'ounger Moulton modestly introduces him-
self ; and his mother, now advanced in years,
who forty years ago had drawn up for
her husband, as now for him, the compre-
hensive index of Biblical references, sym-
bolizes for us the personal continuity
between the older and the younger genera-
tion of grammarians. The son has in-
herited before all things the tpw of the
research student, the zeal for scientific
discovery combined with warm love for
the N.T. He has further inherited the

MANCHESTER 71

solid foundation of the Winer-Moulton
book itself. But it is all Lis own that he,
equipped with modern Hellenic scholar-
ship, has built on this foundation an
entirely new work. The grammar proper
he does not here provide ; that is to follow
in Vol. II : in Vol. I, before the schoolroom
door is opened he gives us with a smile
the paper bag of almonds and raisins !
The title ' Prolegomena ' is distinctive for
the character of the first volume ; with
intentional avoidance of systematic tension
and closeness, the nine chapters he gives
us are intended to reveal in a series of
specially striking phenomena of language
the general character of the Hellenistic
world-speech, and the historical position of
the N.T. language within that world-Greek.
What the learned doctrinaire will carp at
as a short-coming in the special character
of the first volume, is for the reader, and
especially for the young reader, a great
advantage. The notion that a grammar
can only be solid if it is tedious, is alto-
gether destroyed by these Prolegomena.

72 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

One can really read Moult on ; we are not
stifled in the dense atmosphere of cxegetical
wranglings, nor drowned in a flood of
quotations. Everywhere the main facts
and the main problems are keenly perceived
and clearly formulated. And a great im-
pression may be the permanent result of
this remarkable investigation which ad-
vances science at many points, that the
N.T., treated linguistically, stands in the
liveliest connexion with its Hellenistic
surroundings.

' Wlxile earlier grammatical treatment
of our sacred Book was mainly governed
by the sense of its contrast with the world
aroimd, the newer method which is weighed
and adopted more energetically by Moulton
than b}' his German predecessors, em-
phasizes mainly the contact with that
world. As to the degree to which
Semitisms exist, the case is not yet closed ;
a large number of mistakes in earlier
exegetes depend on the failure to realize
that the popular vernacular in Greek and
* not-Greek ' has many points in common,

MANCHESTER 73

that accordingly man}'^ turns wliicli as-
tonish tlie Atticist of the sclxools and
Hebraist, which he triumphantly fastens
on as Semitisms, are not always Semitisms,
but often international vulgarisms, which
do not support tlie isolation of " N.T.
philology "... The comparison of the
papyri and inscriptions that have been
used shows the wide reading of the author,
and helps to make the N.T. available for
papyrus study and epigraphy. Admirable
also is the accuracy of the printing and
the beautiful get-up ; the only thing to
oppress us is the praise of a German who
was accidentally made aware of the papyri,
and saw there what anybody else A\ould
naturalh^ have seen.

' Adolf Deissmann.'

' There are only two things I know,'
he once said in a lecture ; ' but I have
tried to know them well.' If New Testa-
ment Greek was one, then comparative
religion — or one specific tract of that
great continent — was the othei'. It is easy

74 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

enough to see the course of his mental
development. At first classics and mathe-
matics ran fairly level, as they had done
with his father ; then classics forged ahead,
and absorbed his whole attention. But
the philological side of classics attracted
him pre-eminently, and in Part II of the
Classical Tripos he specialized in Philology,
which brought him into close touch with
Prof. E. B. Cowell, Dr. John Peile, Mr.
R. A. Neil, and, later, with Dr. Williams
Jackson and Bishop Casartelli of Salford,
through whom he came into that deep
interest in Iranian studies which charac-
terized him to the very last. Thus while
Greek Testament studies retained their
first place in his regard, owing to home
training and the career to which he felt
himself called, independently of their
intrinsic interest, he was perhaps quite
as conspicuously an expert in matters per-
taining to Zoroastrianism and the literature
of Persian religion ; and it was Zoroas-
trianism which was the subject of his
Hibbert Lectures in 1912. There was

MANCHESTER 75

awaiting him on his return an invitation
to j^ivo the SchAA'oicli Lectvirea in 1918 :
and probably some phase of comparative
religion would have been his subject.

Writing to his friend, Prof. Peake, in
1904, he describes the course of the develop-
ment of his studies : ' My work has been
slowly shifting its centre of gravity for
years. I was, of course, a comparative
philologist at Cambridge, a classic mostly
for teaching purposes, a N.T. student
from the grammar side as inheriting Winer
and disposed toward the language study,
and a Zendist as a philologue originally,
finally a disciple of Frazer from the growing
taste for comparative religion. My orbit
was consequently as incalculable as that
of a quadruple star. Here [i.e. at Didsbury
College], of course, the N.T. at once became
almost my sole concern, and the path
became a circle, with perturbations from
Frazer and some surviving Zend work. . . .
As far as I can see this new development
would (to pursue the metaphor) eliminate
the perturbations and make the orbit a

76 JAMES HOPE MOFLTON

simple ellipse with N.T. grammar (or
grammatical exegesis) and comparative
religion as its foci.'

During his life at Manchester, James
Hope Moult on found another centre of
congenial activity — ^the John Rylands
Library. Shortly after his advent in Man-
chester he had been appointed to a seat on
the council of governors in succession to
the Rev. Dr. Randies ; and throughout
his thirteen years at Didsbury College
he took very personal interest in that
institution. He frequented it both as
reader and as governor ; and it was pro-
bably because he was the former that
he took so seriously his duties and privileges
as the latter. To him it would seem no
exaggeration or misuse of terms to speak
of the mission of the John Rylands Library ;
for to him the libraiy was a personality
clearly marked, and entrusted with no
ordinary responsibilities in respect of the
world of scholarship. His friend, Mr.
Henry Guppy, the gifted librarian, has
always been keenly responsive to the

MANCHESTER 77

movings of the minds of others where the
interests of the world of letters are con-
cerned, and projects which suggested them-
selves to my brother always found in Mr.
Guppy a sympathetic Ustener. As a store-
house and a school of scholarship the John
Ry lands Library counts for very much ;
and more than ever now that Dr. Rendel
Harris is installed there as guide to those
engaged in palaeographical studies. How
his friend would have greeted such an
appointment ! With what mutual joy and
profit would they have forgathered there !
But it was not to be.

On one subject and on one only was he
both ignorant and impenitently ignorant. I
should scruple to say that were it not that
he so often avows the fact himself, and
unblushingly declares that he had no
interest in philosophy and no use for it
in his scheme of thinking and living. Pro-
bably he did himself less than justice in
this respect ; for, after all, philosophy is
but the science of living, and although he
may not have arrived at his ruling prin-

78 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

ciples of life by way of the categories of
formal philosophical theory, there was very
clear thinking at the back of his life and
work. To him it seemed as though philo-
sophy were altogether concerned with specu-
lation and with metaphysical hair-splitting,
which to his intensely practical nature
seemed solemn trifling. Of course he was
wrong ; all his best friends recognized
that it was a distinct limitation of his
quahties ; and what is more, one is half
disposed to believe that his extremely
tolerant disposition would have given a
cordial recognition of the value of philoso-
phical thought if soberly and coherently
placed before him, provided always that
no demand was made upon him to tliink
along similar lines. That he was con-
stitutionally disinclined towards speculative
and metaphysical thought as contrasted
with the practical, is made abundantl}'
clear by his views on several subjects.
The Epistle of James interested him more
than the writings of John — the one instance
of wide deviation from the Biblical views

MANCHESTER 79

of his father. Parsisni attracted him in
a way in which Buddhism and Hinduism
never did ; evangeHcalism kindled his
warmest sympathies, wliile saccrdotahsm
left him either cold or irritated ; and while
he had too much good taste and was far
too sound a thinker to echo the famous
prebendary's dictum, ' Hang theology !
Let us get to religion ! ' he had more than a
little mental sympathy mih. the disposition
that lay at the back of that outburst of
revolt. As his friend, Dr. Giles, the Master
of Emmanuel, sententiously puts it : ' As
a Christian minister no doubt Dr. Moulton's
first interest was in Christianity, not in
theology, which is not the same thing.'

But what was most conspicuous in all
his work was his uncompromising loyalty
to truth. No considerations of hallowed
associations or great traditions were allowed
to stand in the way of a change of position
if the facts demanded it. When his
father's edition of Winer was produced
it was a fundamental axiom that New
Testament Greek had the three characteris-

80 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

tics of being Hebraistic Greek, colloquial
Greek, and late Greek ; and when my
brother AVJ'ote his useful manual for students
of the subject in 1895, he started from that
position. But in the Expositor for ,1 anuary,
1904, referring to this fact, he says : ' In a
second edition just published the first of
these elements has to disappear, and w hen
" common " has been substituted for col-
loquial, it is soon made clear that the
addition of " late " makes little difference
to the definition.' On another point —
that of ' translation ' Greek — he is just
as ready to reconsider his position. ' I
am not disposed nowadays," he writes to
Dr. Rendel Harris in 1913, ' to minimize
translation Greek as I d'd in niy early
fervour.'

This is quite consistent ^\■ith a proneness
— an excessive proneness, according to
some of his best scholar friends — to coquette
wit h the most recent suggestion as to author-
ship, or emendation of the text. Take
Priscilla as an examj)le ! Possibly it was
part of his chivalrous nature, this willing-

MANCHESTER 81

nesB to give the latest adventurous gro\\i:h
a chance to prove its utility. So he intro-
duced Priscilla on every possible occasion
to the elect fellowship of the scholarh^ world
as the authoress of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, and, together with Harnack
and A. S. Peake, gave the good lady letters
of recommendation ! But having done that
much for her he left her to fend for herself
and justify her existence.

Perhaps there was nothing which as-
tonished the outsider more than the fact
that J. H. Moulton's work was always
interesting and usually piquant. To adapt
the famous phrase of Junius, learning and
dullness have so often and so long been
received for synonymous terms that the
reverse of the proposition has grown into
credit, and every man who makes himself
interesting to the crowd is taken to be
one of little learning. It was no small
achievement of my brother's that he made
it clear that the profoundest scholarship
could be expressed in a form which was
interesting and arresting. Deissmann says

F

82 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

of his Prolegomena : ' Dr. Moult on is never
wearisome ' ; and a reviewer in the Dublin
Review says of the book that it ' might
be described as the most amusing and
lively grammar ' ever produced ; and he
goes on to say that ' Dr. Moulton shares
with Dr. Rendel Harris, among New Testa-
ment scholars, a certain irrepressible gaiety
which from time to time relieves the
dullness of optatives and aorists, or sticho-
metrics and Syriac fragments, as the case
maj^ be.' One would have thought, for
instance, that the dative case did not
afford much scope for entertainment or
for any language but that of the strictest
propriety ; but the professor who was
capable of using tlie special idioms of Mrs.
Gamp to illustrate a point in his Prolego-
mena was perfectly capable of viewing a
Greek case as a human being with a per-
sonality. Thus there is to be found in
his inaugural lecture at Manchester Univer-
sity this very characteristic passage, which
will serve as an illustration of how he
wrapped up the conclusions of peculiarly

MANCHESTER 83

painstaking and accurate scholarship in
an attractive garb :

' In the first century a.d. wo find the
dative very much aUve. It was used so
freely that it ultimately ceased to be useful,
and died as we might say of fatty degenera-
tion. A case that could mean almost
anything could not be trusted out alone ;
and we cannot be surprised that nursemaid
in and nursemaid with frequently shirked
their proper work and meddled with each
other's province in attending to their
troublesome charge,'

How this struck his hearers in the
lecture-room is picturesquely described
by 'P. V. B.' in an extremely tender and
discerning appreciation in The Young Men
of India, just after my brother's death.

' It was only a few months ago that I
saw an announcement in Bomba}^ of a
public lecture by Prof. Moult on. I had
often run across his name in books and in
conversation, had seen some of his writings,
and had listened often to admirint' com-
ments on his scholarship and himself.

84 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

I knew that he had an extraordinary
record of achievement and could string
a small alphabet of letters after a name
that was in itself a title of distinction.
I had looked him np in Who's Who, found
a record bristling with doctorates, German,
Scotch, and English, and learned that he
was known as an outstanding figure by
the scholars of three continents. What
an alarming person, I thought, to meet or
listen to !

' The subject of the lecture was, if
possible, more alarming than the lecturer.
It had to do with certain characteristics
of the language and letters of the early
Iranians. But I resolved on an effort to
appear knowing, and in the hope that some
at least of the chscourse would prove com-
prehensible, plucked up courage and went.
What a surprise ! The lecturer seemed an
incarnate joint-violation of all the rules by
which the ordinary notion of the scholar
is constructetl. Of the ponderousness, tiie
pedantry, Ihe involution of thought and
speech, the spectacled adherence to a

MANCHESTER 85

musty manuscript, the terror of being
popular, tlie high disdain of common
interests and feelings, the speaker showed
not a trace. The lecture was a straight-
forward talk in the gracefully pure and
simple language of a genuine classicist
on things which were to the speaker plainly
saturated with personality. It was
astonishing how he could convert philologj^
into an adventure of the spirit among
kindred souls who lived and wrote three
thousand years ago. A dull black and white
page of Zend or Sanskrit characters seemed
to transform itself under his eye into some-
thing rich and strange, Avith its text all
illuminated in a far more living way than
the best of old-time monks would have been
equal to. To him, without any mistake,
language was "fossil poetry." Scholarship
was not, as it is for many, a process of
squeezing the heart dry to serve a tjaannous
intellect ; it was rather a process in which
the heart breathed life and beauty into the
dead facts which the intellect gathered.
It was his sympathy and rare humanity

86 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

that always served as his best commentary.
Words were a kind of coins, minted of the
very substance of the soul, and every
subtle shifting of meaning had its counter-
Ijait in the history of the mind.'

The Methodist Preacher

Throughout his life in Manchester,
crowded A\itli manifold activities in many
directions and with honours falling thick
and fast upon him, while no one could
call him a tj^pical Methodist preacher,
nevertheless he loas a Methodist preacher
by choice and conviction, as Avell as tra-
dition. His was not a typical case,
})artl\- because it had never been his lot
to occupy the position of a circuit minister,
seeing that he had, like his father, been
sent straight into educational work, and
had lost that experience — so full of joys
even if compassed about with difficulties
and 1 rials- -Mhicli forms the central fact
of Methodist life. It was a loss lo him,
whether he realized it or not ; but such
was his power of sympathy that he never

MANCHESTER 87

allowed that to prevent him from entering
fully into the lot of his brethren, and the
typical circuit minister found a gcncro\i8
and helpful friend in the professor, and in
other ways he bore his share of connexional
responsibilit3\ For some considerable time
he was Secretary for the East Anglian
District ; for many 3^ears, as colleague
to his father and then as his successor, he
was in charge of the Probationers' Examina-
tion work ; and, especially after he became
tutor at Didsbury, he had a heavy share
of committee A\'ork on behalf of his Church.
The Church showed its appreciation of
his worth by electing him, in 1904, as a
incDibcr of the Legal Hundred, which in
strict theory constitutes the Methodist
Church in the eyes of the law ; and doubt-
less had he been spared, he would haA'^e
risen to a still higher station in the Church
of his fathers.

It may be saitl ol him that in general
his position hi Church matters was that of
a radical reformer strongly tinged with
conservatism — a blend which was marked

88 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

in Hugh Price Hughes, and in other
leaders since his day. Any one who had
an adequate policy for rendering the
ministry of the Chui'ch more efficient
would find in him a keen sympathiser, and
he was more ready than most to give a
promising scheme a chance of justifying
itself, instead of seeing only the lions in
the path. He was not heedless and im-
petuous in counsel, but his leaning was
distinctly towards the disposition that is
\villing to make a venture in the hope of
its proving a gain, than towards that which
is too cautious to move for fear of making
a loss. But when it came to a matter of
personal tastes he showed himself strongly
conservative. The new hymn-book was
a case in point. 1 doubt whether he ever
quite forgave the committee for certain
of its omissions, especially in respect of
hynms from the old book that were rejected.
Two cases come to mind as I write — Bishop
Heber's touching reverie, ' The winds were
howling o'er the deep,' and W. M. Bunting's
' Blest ISpirit, from the Eternal Sire.' Tbe

MANCHESTER 89

former he frequently gave out, and used
with a great power in one of his sermons ;
but probably he would have the majority
of the Church against him on the question
of its place in a collection of hymns. As
to the second it will always remain a m3^stery
v/hy, because of one word, perhaps the
finest of all our hymns on the Holy Spirit —
at any rate one that contains the two finest
verses — should have been denied a place ;
and it was characteristic of m}'- brother that
on the Sunday evening prior to the intro-
duction of the new book he chose his
hymns entirely from the category of the
rejected.

To some within the borders of his Church
he was somewhat of a puzzle, for they did
not knoM- quite where to place him. The
higher critic they knew, and the evangelist
they knew, but what manner of man was
this who seemed to blend the parts ?
Some probabh' thought the more kindly
of views other than their own because
James Hope Moulton held them. Others
who would have liked to challenge him

90 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

came to view the situation in much the
same light as the cardinal Avho was in-
structed to tackle Lord Acton — and thought
better of it. One thing is very certain,
and that is that no views as to the literary
history or formation of the Bible narrative
impaired his faith in the truth of the
religion there enshrined, or gave anj' note
of hesitancy to his proclamation of the
supreme efficacy of the gospel, in chapel
or in street, from platform or from press,
for those at home and those in far-off lands.

Yes ; those in far-off lands bidk(>d large
in his tlioughts and sympathies, and no
dopajtment of (.'hurch work Avas nearer
to his heart than foreign missions. More
will have to be said about this later, but
it cannot be left out of the consideration
of his share in the activities of liis Church.
It was probably a phase of the chivalry of
his nature. The ver}^ fact of all these
inillious being ' down,' and through no
fault ol (heir own, at once enlisted hia
sympathies. l*>w tilings in his life moved
him like the Edinburgh Conference, and

MANCHESTER 91

nothing at those memorable meetings moved
him more than a praj^er from the lips of
Dr. Karl Kinnm, in which he recounted
a long list of names of African tribes
utterly unknown to most of us, but burnt
in upon his heart till he needed no printed
page to record them. ' The A as large as
France without a missionary ; the B as
large as Russia without a missionary ;
the C as large as Britain Avithout a mis-
sionary ' ; and so past counting, with the
grim fact overhanging all this agonized
pleading, that Islam stands waiting to
devour, and that we are poAverless to rescue
when once her laws have seized the heathen
we might have saved. ' Is it nothing to you,
0 ye that pass by — 3^e that hear the
Name that is above every name, and profess
allegiance to Him who bade us count it
our supreme object in life to bring His
kingdom near ? ' * It was therefoi'c not
at all sui'prising tliat he should have
opposed (he spending of a quarter of the

* From ' Some Rellections on the Edinburgh
Conference,' pubUshcd in the Methodist Recorder.

92 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

Twentieth Centurj' Fund upon a Church
House in London, and that he should have
given vent to his feehngs when speaking at
the annual meeting of the Missionary Society
at City Road — for which he received due
and solemn castigation at the hands- of
certain high priests of official Methodism !

Three Main Characteristics — Humility,
Moral Passion, Ministry of Reconciliation.

A life such as that of my brother, more
full of influence than of incident — at any
rate, the incident that lends itself to
chronicles — is better grasped from a sum-
mary of impressions than from a record of
occurrences ; and this will perhaps be
the most suitable point at which to try
to gather up his characteristics as a
man and as a woiker. For it was the
Manchester period which was the central
epoch of his life from every point of view.
CJambridge was formative, and as such ^^as
of priceless value ; India was sacrificial,
and as such was rich in fragrance ; but
Cambridge prepared for Manchester, and

MANCHEF5TER 93

out of Manchester came India. He was his
best and did his best in Manchester, and to
describe him as he was at Manchester is
to describe him in the truest sense.

It would not be fanciful to describe him
in terms of tlie Beatitudes, for it was the
non-aggressive virtues which counted for
most with him, and manifested themselves
most conspicuously in his own character.
To say this is not in any way to go back
upon what has already been said as to his
vehement forcefulness. He remained AF AN
to the end, but never was there a trace
of self-seeking about his aggressiveness,
and it is in his selflessness that he recalls
the Beatitudes. He was always in the
limelight — umch more than he would have
chosen had he been able to choose — but it
was always in the interests of others, and
it brought no satisfaction to him that
thousands applauded him, unless their doing
so indicated their willingness to espouse
the cause which he was advocating.

His disposition may be summed up
in three characteristics which themselves

94 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

practically embody the whole of the great
category — humility, moral passion, and
reconciliation.

To speak of his humility is to use the
word which comes nearest to the fact,
though it is far from being adequate.
People were more often astonished at
what he was not than at what he was.
They expected to find a ponderous pundit,
and they found a simple comrade. A
leading article in the Manchester Guardian
gave expression to this when it pointed out
that he ' carried his \\^eight of learning
with all the simplicity of a child.' There
was no aloofness about him ; and if he
was set upon a pedestal it certainly was
not one of his own erecting. His very
style of writing and of speech, by its free-
dom and unconvcntionalities made for
comi'adeship, for it carried with it nothing
of the exclusiveness of a caste or the
asaertiveness of privilege. Of course there
were many people who shook their heads
and muttered concerning want of dignity,
just as there are those who will prate about

MANCHESTER 95

the dignity of the pulpit until it drops, from
sheer respectability, into inanition ; l)ut
when a scholar of international standing
dared to be interesting he not only followed
the bent of his own nature but he also
helped to break down a fetish and to help
thereby lesser men than himself.

Another phase of his humbleness of
mind was seen in his readiness to recognize
worth in others and obligation to others.
There was no patronizing sense of
superiority in his relations with those less
gifted than himself. If his companion
happened to belong to a totallj' different
walk of life he would not be long in finding
a point of contact, and he would delight
in the opportunitj^ to enlarge his own
knowledge of life in another sphere, for
of him Chaucer's words held good :

Gladly would he learn and gladh- teach.

If it were some beginner in a branch of
study where he was an expert, there would
be poured out lavishly all the wealth of
knowledge, without any more demonstra-

96 JAMES HOPE MOTJLTON

tion than would belong to a conversation
about a subject interesting to both of them.
Never did he make smaller men ' feel
small,' unless it might be when there was
some element of pretentiousness which
needed to be corrected. And if he was
humble with his fellow men, how much
more so was he with his God ! His was
not the fawning, self-depreciatorj' humility
which sometimes seems to carry with
it no small flavour of affectation. It was
rather the humilit}'^ which expresses itself
in magnif^^ng the need for God, and the
whole-hearted desire that Grod should do
His perfect work in him and through him.
In one of his last letters from India he
enclosed, scribbled upon a half-sheet, some
verses which, apart from intrinsic worth —
perhaps I am not impartial — are interesting
as reflecting his character on this side
with singular felicity. He wrote them at
Bangalore, wliere he had been deeply moved
by the priv ilege of lectui'ing for a few weeks
to what he styles ' a black Didsbury.'

MANCHESTER

97

AT THE CLASSROOM DOOR

Lord, at Thy word opens yon door, inviting
Teacher and taught to feast this hour with Thee ;

Opens a Book where God in human writing
Thinks His deep thoughts, and dead tongues
live for me.

Too dread tlie task, too great the duty calling,
Too heavy far the \vcight is laid on nie !

O if mine own thought should on Thy words falling
Mar the great message, and men hear not Thee !

Give me Thy voice to speak, Thine ear to listen,
Give me Thy mind to grasp Thy mystery ;

So shall my heart throb, and my glad eyes glisten,
Rapt with the wonders Thou dost sIioav to me.

Ill the second place it would not be an
exaggeration to say that he was one of those
that hunger and thirst after righteousness,
both in respect of private conduct and
public advocacy. He was always a poli-
tician, and an eager one ; his diaries during
his teens show that clearly enough. But
the aggressiveness of his Liberalism was
the result of a strong conviction that its
principles made for social righteousness.

G

98 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

He may have been one-sided, and have
done less than justice to the Tory ; few
politicians, indeed, escape that temptation.
But because he was honestly of opinion
that Toryism was out for the safe-guarding
of vested interests at the expense of the
\^•ell-being of the mam% and was indifferent,
relatively speaking, to their interests, he
fought it. If any one repUed that the
Liberal candidate had no more passion for
social righteousness than the Tory, his
reply would be, ' So much the worse for him,
seeing that he sins against a clearer light ;
nevertheless his policy makes for better
things.'

His passion for social righteousness found
many manifestations, some positive, some
negative. Few institutions elicited more
of his enthusiasm than the Manchester and
Salford ^Mission, imder the magnificent
leadership of his friend, the Rev. S. F.
Collier. The ruhng characteristics of that
mission are far too well-known to call for
any description : for it is recognized through-
out the city as a great force making for

MANCHESTEB 99

social righteousness, even by those who
take no stock in its reUgious purposes and
agencies. But to one who not only shared
its social enthusiasms and visions, but
also looked to its spiritual life as the only
far-reaching agency by which these things
could be brought about, it was a centre
of attraction second to none, and worthj^
of unstinted service and devotion. By
advocacy, counsel, and gift he was always
ready to help Mr. ColHer, for whose work
and character he had a boundless admira-
tion, and he was seldom absent from the
anniversary platform. Shortly after his
advent in Manchester he took up a piece
of work at the Mission which aA\'akened
a keen and widespread interest. It was
a time when the influence of the Clarion
was peculiarly potent, and it was felt that
steps ought to be taken to counteract
that influence, not by criticism and attack,
but by a \dgorous, well-informed, con-
vincing presentation of the Christian Apolo-
getic on its positive side, Mr. Collier
and my brother organized a course of

100 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

vSunday afternoon lectures on ' What is
Christianity ? ' — ^the lectures being given
from many different points of view by
experts in their own field, the lecture being
followed by a question hour. For upwards
of two years this procedure was followed,
and a popular apologetic constructed which
was of a character to reinforce waverers
and convince Avell-disposed doubters, as
well as to give to believers stronger grounds
for their faith. Had he been allowed to
return to this country nothing would
have given him greater satisfaction than to
find himself in one way or other associated
with Mr. Colher in the Mission, pending
the reopening of Didsbur}^ and in his
letters from India he frequently refen'ed
to that as being the course which he would
prefer to follow if he had his way. And
the motive at the back of it all was his
strong sense that in its various activities,
evangelistic, social, educational, recreative
and industrial alike, the Mission was bringing
in righteousness, the ' rightncss ' of relation-
ships for which the gospel stands, as the
remedy for the social ills of mankind.

MANCHESTER 101

But his keen sympathy witli the positive
work of the Mission was not his only
contribution to the ideals of social right-
eousness in his city. He was always
ready to speak on temperance platforms
when he could snatch time to do so, and
he was an active member of the great
temperance societies. When a crusade was
inaugurated against the proposal to choose
a brewer as Lord Mayor of IManchester
he was in the thick of the fight at once.
He had no tolerance whatever for the
liquor trade, because it had no compassion
for the sorrows of mankind, and it seemed
to him to be an intolerable affront to the
community that an active participant in
that heartless and anti-social trade should
be elevated to the position of Manchester's
chief citizen. He brought in no per-
sonalities and suggested no personal un-
worthiness on the part of the proposed
Lord Mayor, but he maintained that his
trade disqualified him for such an office,
and that no one who was involved in such
a trade could adequately and impartially

102 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

deal as chief magistrate with crime so
largely the result of that baneful trade.
Of course they were beaten. Such efPorta
seldom succeed, for the forces against
them are enormously powerful ; but they
bore their witness, they cleared their con-
science, and they sowed their seed.

A chivalrous sympathy with the dis-
tressed and the wronged was one of the
most outstanding notes in James Hope
Moulton's make-up. To a cry of distress
he was always responsive, and fearless
knight-errantry always characterized him.
Even in his early diaries his estimates of
people are characterized by generosity
and appreciativeness at an age when the
critical faculty is usually aggressive and
infallibility most pronounced ; and in later
life he was ever ready to afford chivalrous
help to a worker with whose methods he
himself might not be in sympathj', but
who was being blessed to others. Political
oppression, whether of the countryside
Nonconformist at home or of the man
of colour by the Anglo-Indian abroad,

MANCHESTER 103

roused his anger almost to the point of
fierceness ; and the sense of fellowship with
the victims of squire and parson tyranny
as he knew it in East Anglia was always
present with him.

Of course he had the defects of his
qualities — most people have. His pupil,
Mr. Howard, whose discerning apprecia-
tion I have already quoted, points out that
' he was the Rupert rather than the Crom-
well of debate,' and that ' his enthusiasm
often outran his judgement.' But the par-
allel of the battle of Naseby must not be
pressed too far. Rupert chased the few,
and returned to find that the day had been
lost and the main body of his army routed.
J. H. Moulton had far too much sound
sense to allow him to commit that blunder.
He sometimes gave the impression of
having seen only one side of a question
and of having pressed it for more than
it was worth, and certainly he often failed
to make sufficient allowance for difficulties
in the path of reform. But that was due
partly to a sense of moral issues which

104 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

blocked out all else from his vision, and
partly to a Banctificd optimism which
'hoped all things.' And in Church life
there is normally such a vast preponderance
of those whose disposition is to magnify
difficulties, that there is a great ministry
open for the man who is big enough to
look right over the obstacles which block
the view of smaller men and see the goal.

In the third place he most certainly
came into the category of ' Blessed are the
peacemakers,' not because he was a some-
what outspoken pacifist prior to the war,
but because he was conspicuously entrusted
with a ministry of reconciliation. It may
seem strange that one who was so pro-
nounced in his advocacy should have
been so universally relied upon to act as
an intermediary between divergent interests
and bodies of opinion, but so it was. His
life was a kind of hospitable salon in which
all kinds of opinions and interests — with
certain well-marked exceptions — met with-
out jostling, and undoubtedly with no
small degree of mutual advantage.

MANCHESTER 105

To him was given a ministry of recon-
ciliation :

(i) Bettveen ScJiolarship and Evangelism,
as has already been pointed out ; and in
so acting he achieved no small good for
botli interests, in that the vision of each
was enlarged, and grounds for ill-will
lessened, by his having shown that the two
could be united in one personality. When
Sheffield University inaugurated a special
service to be conducted at the opening
of each academic year, the preacher being
alterna^€ly from the ranks of the Church of
England and the Free Churches, he was the
first Nonconformist chosen. If ever a man
might be pardoned for being academic it
would be on such an occasion as that ;
but J. H. Moulton was not academic.
To him it was an occasion for a gospel
sermon, and he took as his text ' I came
not to call the righteous but sinners.'

(ii) Between Churches. — He was the in-
timate friend of a host of AngHcan dig-
nitaries, and he was in the confidence of
most leaders of Nonconformity ; and he

106 JAMBS HOPE MOULTON

used these pri^aleges, as his father had
done before him, in the interests of achieve-
ing a better mutual understanding between
those who differed. The secret of his
heahng influence is not far to seek. The
Bishop of Manchester, in a personal letter
which I am sure he will not mind my
quoting, says of him : ' He could always see
an opponent's point of view, and his own
position rested on a basis of justice that
was quite convincing.' It is a beautiful
tribute, and covers a vast deal of ground.
He worked hard and with ultimate success,
on what came to be known as the Manchester
Concordat, as to an educational settlement
which would satisfy the legitimate aspira-
tions of both sides. He took a prominent
part in the promotion of united open-air
services in the Manchester parks ; and
when replying at the Bradford Conference
to the Bishop of Ripon and the Vicar of
Bradford (Archdeacon Gresford Jones), who
brought an address of welcome, he con-
vulsed the assembly by describing how he
and the Bishop were joint owners of three
harmoniums which ' were not iettled on any

MANCHESTER 107

model deed or anything approaching to
it.' In that same spcecli he referred to
the Edinburgh Conference, saying how the
one great thing that laid hold upon his
imagination was the possibility of so many
joining together on things common to all,
and there was not one sign of embarrass-
ment, except that no one of them seemed to
be able to put all he desired to say within
the allotted time. Such were the activities
with which he loved to busy himself, and
it was but fitting that his last long conversa-
tion with Dr. Rendel Harris on the ill-fated
City of Paris was on the subject of Free
Church Union, and that his very last hours
before the disaster were devoted to planning
a concordat on that subject which might
go out over their joint signatures.

(iii) Between Religions. — He beUeved with
all his heart in the fact of that ' light which
Ughteth every man coming into the world,'
and was prepared to beUeve that every
great faith which had obtained a sub-
stantial hold upon the hearts of men had
done so by virtue of some contribution

108 JAMES HOPE MOTJLTON

entrusted to them on behalf of the religious
inlieritance of the world ; and he would
maintain that this position was in no sense
derogatory to Christianity, whose unique
claim was that ' all things were summed up
in Christ.' No one can read his writings
on Zoroastrianism without being struck
by the generous estimate which he formed
of that faith, and the genuine and tender
regret with which he noted the divergence
between belief and practice in modern
Parsism. In short, his treatment of non-
Christian religions always took the form
of what the Rev. A. H. Lowe excellently
describes in a review of The Treasure of
the Magi as ' tolerant polemic,' due weight
being allowed to each factor. It is
' polemic ' in that it is criticism firm and
searcliing ; but it is ' tolerant ' in that there
is the fullest disposition to give recog-
nition to all that is worthy in another
camp.

(iv) Between 31 en of all Types. — His cor-
respondence and his personal intercourse
were as varied as his father's had been,

MANCHESTER 109

and often it was with those whose opinions
were poles apart from his own. When, for
instance, Dr. J. G. Frazer was considering
the pros and cons of going to Manchester,
he wrote repeatedly and at great length
to his friend, and said, 'Your friendship
is one of the attractions of Manchester
for me,' following a recognition of the
widest divergence of views and the certain
fact that ' we shall not convince each other.'
This intermediate position is not an easy
one to occupy. It requires strong con-
victions and keen perceptions if there is
not to be a disposition to surrender too
much for the sake of moderate agreement.
But the man who is strong enough to hold
his own, and intelligent enough to enter
into the thoughts and feelings of another,
has a fine ministry before him; and even
if he never succeeds in bringing a single
disputant round to his way of thinking, he
will have rendered no small service in
widening some one's vision and thought.
Of course, when it came to intercourse
with his two outstanding friends, Dr. Rendel

110 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

Harris and Dr. A. S. Peake, there was no
question of composing differences or recon-
ciling opposites, but of each contributing
some fresh modicum of hght upon the way
which they were walking in common.

In the columns of the Classical Review
there appeared, over the signature of Dr.
A. S. Peake, an appreciation that is full
of the love that is tiot blind, but loves all
the more because it sees eveiytliing ; and
in the following sentences he sums up his
friend :

' Straight, clean, magnanimous, generous,
unselfish, and free from littleness and
jealousy, he was a friend and colleague
in whom one could ^\ holly trust ; virile
in character and of irreproachable integrity,
he was womanly in his tenderness, full of
sympath,v for the suffering and gentleness
to the M-eak. His ample and varied learn-
ing raised no barrier between him and
the illiterate, and the ministry he delighted
to render them was neither spoiled by
condescension nor chilled by aloofness.
He could, and sometimes did, hit hard in

MANCHESTER 111

controversy, but never below the belt. He
had, hke the rest of us, his intellectual
hmitations. In his case it was especially
his unsympathetic attitude towards philo-
sophy, and perhaps one might add an
occasional tendency to fancifulness in his
treatment of history. But his range Avas
wide, and on his own ground ho was a great
master.'

The War

The European war, which was destined
first to rob my brother of his eldest son
and then to bring to a premature end his
own life, was a cause not onl}^ of the
deepest sorrow to him but of intellectual
perplexity. For j- ears he had strongly upheld
the Quaker position with reference to
war, and he was a vice-president of the
Peace Society. With all the vehemence
of an idealist he denounced not only war
and war-makers, but also those whom he
regarded as scare-mongers, because they
held that Germany meant ultimately to
fight us, and that our duty was to be ready.

112 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

In the earlier months of 1914 he had en-
gaged in a hterary duel with Mr. Coulson
Kernahan in the W esleyan Methodisl Maga-
zine on the subject of National Armaments,
and more especially on compulsory national
service. He maintained that ' in war and
preparation for war we turn our backs
on Christ,' that ' no Christian can con-
sistently support conscription ' ; and it is
abundantly clear that he disbelieved in
the German determination to force on a
conflict. But it came, and in its coming
forced many people, my brother amongst
them, to reconsider their position. There
was no need to reconsider his position
as to war in general, or as to the crime of
provoking war ; but the facts of the case
forced him to realize that here was an
issue whole hemispheres removed from the
doubtful ethics and sordid aims which
were mixed up with the South African
War. He was in America when war broke
out, and had no chance of making altera-
tions or additions when the articles were
reprinted, though on his return he did add

MANCHESTER 113

a postsoript which appeared in further
issues. He admitted, as he was bound to
do, that his opponent had proved to bo
the truer prophet, and he urged that the
ease with which the German miUtary
party led the whole nation into war-fever
was due to the very national service
against which he declaimed — a neat exploit
in dialectics, if nothing else ! But he was
forced to realize that there was sometliing
to be reckoned with that he had left out
of account. Granting that war is un-
christian and anti-Christian, what is to be
the attitude of Christian people when
an arrogant military power sets out to
achieve world-hegemony by force, and
begins by devastating, under the law of
military necessity, a neighbouring country
whose hberties it had sworn to protect ?
Nothing either in his sermon pubhslied
by the Peace Society or in his contribu-
tions to the pamphlet. The Black Hour,
had any vital bearing upon the new situa-
tion, and he e\adently felt it was so. He
declared that he had not changed his

H

114 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

views, and that was true ; but he
•oon came to realize that a codicil was
required to his last will and testament con-
cerning war in the event of nations being
thrown against their will into defensivd
warfare. At the Ministers' Fraternal in
Manchester on October 20, he spoke on
' Christianity and Defensive Warfare,' and
the address was published afterwards in
the London Qtiarterly Review. It is very
clear to any reader of that address that he
was being torn in two between antagonistic
forces. On the one side was the Quaker
view of war, to which he had practically
given his adherence for years, and to which
he was the more closely bound by reason
of his unquaUfied admiration for the Quaker
contribution to religious and social life.
On the other side was the consciousness
that ' there is something instinctive within
us that bids us interfere when a big bully
is murdering a helpless child,' and that
' if the New Testament leaves no room at
all for defence against a violent and un-
provoked attack, must we not say that

MANCHESTER 116

its code 18 defective in practical applica-
bility to the conditions of an imperfect
world ? ' In other words, a Jesiis M'ho made
no call for the chivalrous championship
of the oppressed and had no perception
of practical issues was not, to him, the
Jesus of the New Testament, whatever
baldly Uteral interpretation of isolated
texts might suggest ; and this address
reveals the idealism of the earlier utter-
ances, reinforced by candid common sense.
' War is from first to last un-Christian ' :
there we have the idealist. ' But while on
the one side it takes two to make a quarrel,
it is also true that if one party determines
to use violence the other party may have
to choose between resistance and extermina-
tion ' : there we have practical common
sense. While nothing would induce him
to say anything, or permit anything to
be said unchallenged in his presence, dis-
respectful to the Quaker attitude, his own
position came to be, as he put it in one
of his letters from India, that if he agreed
with the war he had no right — or would

116 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

havo had none if he had been of mihtary
age — to allow any one else to do his share
of the fighting for Iiim : if he did not
agree with the war, then he had no right
to avail himself of the services rendered
by the Navy, and had better betake himself
elsewhere. It is hard to get away from
the logic of that dilemma, and his pilgrim-
age from sheer idealism to this blend of the
idealistic and the practical is both interest-
ing and characteristic.

As the issues involved are living ones
for lis all at the present moment it may be
worth while to quote in full from some
of his letters at the time. His letters
from America during the earl}' months of
the war betray sore puzzlement as to the
facts of the case and the interpretation
to be put on them. Writing on August
8, 1914, from Mr. W. R. Moody's hospitable
home at Northfield, Mass. , he says :

'The fact that he [Lord Morley] did
resign makes me feel that there were
responsible persons of the front rank who
thought it feasible to decline Germany's

MANCHESTER 117

clialleiigc. On the information that got
over here it was clearly impossible. Wil-
helm cynically tore up treaties, attacked
a little neutral power he had promised
to respect, and they appealed to us. We
bade him behave himself as a civilized
person, and he declared Avar, as he would
have done later if lie had polished off
France and Russia. Since it is at present
hopeless to get more than one in a thousand
to take our Quaker view, it seemed that to
accept Willielm's challenge was the only
possibility : it was a matter of absolute
self-defence against the cynical and barbaric
aggression of a militarist who regarded
treaties as mere sentimentality — ^to quote
Ralph's German instructor when R. chal-
lenged him about the strategic railways
massed on the frontier of Belgium.'

That he was not altogether easy at having
thus receded from the full Quaker position
is (constantly apparent ; and yet his sound
practical common sense always brought him
round to the conclusion that there wai no

118 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

other course open for us, and that if that
was the case, then the whole body of
citizens was involved.

'September 29, 1914.
' I still feel very strongly that unless
nations do take the Quaker, that is the
Christian, view, we had no alternative but
to step in. But I want to step out as
soon as ever we can make Germany yield
to terms which it seems to me she might
accept without losing her self-respect.'

The time had not yet come when Ger-
many was to stand pilloried for infamy
unparalleled in the history of warfare ;
and it is very certain that his tender and
chivalrous nature would have boiled over
with indignation at the atrocities which
have been steadily coming to hglit. He
wanted to think the best of a people whose
scholars he esteemed so highly, the people
to which his dear friend Adolf Deissmann
belonged. But in this same letter he shows
that his forbearance was being strained
almost to breaking point.

MANCHESTER 119

' But all the idealist pictures of German
unselfishness and of the wickedness of
all the other nations in attacking her come
badly to grief among the ashes of the
Louvain libraries and the shattered walls
of Rheims. And what is worse still, there
are those intolerable outrages on helpless
women and children, which it is no use
for American commissions to deny just
because the members of them have not
seen them. My boy has talked with
victims of them, and I suppose a \\oman
who has got sabre slashes on her legs from
a German soldier is a sufficiently difficult
thing to explain aAvay. It is frightfully
difficult for those who wish well to the
German people — and to wish well of course
in the first place means to wish that the
devil may be cast out of them.'

A later letter gives the conclusion of
the whole matter so far as he was concerned,
in terms eminently characteristic of his
disposition :

'July 6, 1916.
' Of course / feel that being forced to

120 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

accept the war as a hideous necessity — the
alternative of faiUng Belgium being too
appallingly selfish to be thought of — I
couldn't leave other people to do the dirty
work. At Ralph's age I must have left
them free to put me in the firing line, and
prayed God that I might be a casualty
before my gun found a billet.'

Before that letter reached us, Ralph
had gone up to the firing hne, and in two
da3^s been a casualty.

After the death of his son he manifests
not bitterness — that was foreign to him —
but the sense that this was a life-and-deatli
struggle against savagery, to bo carried
through in the interests of all that was holy.
His first letter after he received the news
sounds a note not heard before :

' Strange that I who wrote as I did about
war two and a half years ago should now
be proud as well as heart-broken for a son
who has given his life for his country !
We pacifists made one huge mistake :
we didn't realize how fearfully evil miUtar-

MANCHESTER 121

ism is, and thought Germany was relatively
sane. That we grappled with the wild
beast in defence of humanity I cannot but
approve even now.'

But there was another aspect of the
case which he had to face. IJe was not
only a private citizen and a Christian
minister, but he was a vice-president
of the Peace Society ; and there were those
who were not slow to challenge the com-
patibihty of his utterances with his position
in the society.

In a letter, dated January 15, 1915, to
his favourite newspaper, the Westtninster
Oazette, he put his position cogentty to
meet criticism from two different sides :

' 1 have the honour of being a vice-
president of the Peace Society, which cer-
tainly holds that " war is inconsistent with
Christian principles." But I have not
felt any obHgation to resign my connexion
with the society, since I do not think its
principles forbid such warfare as we are
waging now. Of course, that is a matter

122 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

which could only be decided by a mass
meeting of its members, which has not
been called ; my own interpretation may
quite possibly contravene that of the
majority. I take it the present war is
for us one of sheer self-defence, and even
something still more altruistic — the defence
of the weak who trusted our promise. A
nation of convinced Christians would have
acted for a generation past in such a way
that the present situation could not have
arisen. But it is obvious that idealist
action is only possible in a comnmnity,
every member of which is capable of
following out all its imphcations. To refuse
to fight, even in self-defence, and to accept
even such consequences as Belgium shows
to-day, would inidoubtedly in the long
run produce a spiritual victory like that
of the early Church, which, by readiness
to die and resolute denial of force, ultimately
conquered the Roman Empire. Those who
could take so heroic a line just now ar»
few, and some even of them are hampered
by the reflection that such action involve*

MANCHESTJiR 123

refusal to help others who are not prepared
to accept its consequences. A practical
pacifist under present circumstances is
driven, I believe, to accept the war and
take whatever part he can therein, refusing
to let proxies do the dangerous work if
he is of military age. Meanwhile he strives
to keep the door open for peace, provided
it is not a mere truce, and to prepare the
way for a geimine friendship between the
peoples of England and Germany when
this nightmare has passed. Since the
Treitschke doctrine makes force justify
itself by success, there is room for hope
that failure may ij^so facto discredit it in
the minds of those reasonable and Christian
Germans who arc still hypnotized by it.'

Quite soon in the conflict he had to
J realize how bitter a cleavage the war was
to make between him and his friend Adolf
Deissmann of BerUn. For to him, Deiss-
mann was not merel}' a fellow student
in the same field of learning ; he was a
much loved friend, and the friendship

124 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

lasted to the end. Like the rest of the
German professors, Deissmann took the
fierce anti-British position, but in a country
where both pastors and professors are the
paid servants of the State, it was perhaps
impossible for him to be otherwise, so far
as any outward expression was concerned.
For a considerable time a correspondence
was carried on through a mutual friend, a
Dutch professor ; and it was in one of
these letters that Deissmann wrote : ' In
the 1870 war Germam'^ fought and won,
and that was the beginning of her end.
In this struggle Britain will win, and that
will be the beginning of her end.' The
sinking of the Lusitania roused my brother
to a great fury, as it Avell might ; and in
the postscript to his War Time Paper on
' British and German Scholarship,' he
wrote : ' By these crimes official Germany
has shown that there is no longer a con-
science to appeal to ; and if it proves
that German civilians, including the pro-
fessors, applaud these deeds, or even
abstain from denouncing them, we must

MANCHESTER 125

feel that the gulf between Germanj'^ and
the civilized world, first opened at Louvain
and Rheims, has becomo too wide for us
to bridge until time and God's Spirit have
brought contrition.' To his friend he wrote
with great frankness : ' It will be hard to
be civil to any Germans until they have
disavowed the Lusitania.'' To this there
came no repty ; and if we reverse the
situations and put ourselves in his place
we are bound to recognize that no replj'^
of a satisfactory character could be ex-
pected, or, if written, would have passed
the Censor, But two extracts from his
' Protestant Weekly Letter,' which Deiss-
mann sent me himself, through a Swiss
intermediary, show how warm was the
attachment notwithstanding the war. One
is dated Berlin, June 5, 1915.

' There is no scholar, British or American,
with whom, on account of long 3^ears of
studj'in the same field, I am more befriended
than with Dr. Moulton. For a consider-
able length of time both of us have tried

126 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

to find a place for tlie Greek of the Apostles,
i.e. its proper liintoric and linguistic setting,
and a lively coiTespoudenco found its
■upplement through repeated visit* to
England, the last one taking place three
years ago, when, at the invitation of the
University I spent a week-end in Manchester
and had the pleasure to be the guest of
Dr. and Mrs. Moulton in their charming
home. Graduall}^ when in the course of
years our esteem for each other grew, and
a far-going agreement in theological and
political questions showed itself, our close
scientific relations deepened into a warm
personal friendship, which even the terrible
war could not destro}^ although each of
us with firm conviction stands for the cause
of his own country, and although the
communications between Manchester and
Berlin naturally have come to a standstill.
. ... In the case of my correspon-
dence with Prof. Moulton the zig-zag
made was transatlantic . . . ni}' thoughts,
however, have never taken such a
zig-zag course ; during all these criti-

MANCHESTER 127

oal dnya of woe and trouble, and in
deep sorrow over tlic conflict between
European powers, 1 have thought of my
true friend in Manchester. His whole-
hearted patriotism was no secret to me,
and he in turn knew that I was ready, if
necessary, to suffer and die for my country.
But the mutual trust did not grow less
on that account.'

This letter, which in the main had dealt
with complaints as to ill-treatment of
German missionaries from the Cameroons
as they passed through Liverpool, closed
with a reference to my brother's eldest
•on, Ralph, who ' had entered the ranks of
the British army as a volunteer. The high
regard in which I have always held my
friend has thereby only been increased
and transferred upon the son as well. The
man who with clean heart and pure motives
is willing to lay down his life for his country
is entitled to the highest esteem even from
his political enemy ; and I am confident
that the more sons from England's best

128 JAMES HOPE MOFLTON

families enlist as soldiers in the army of
a coimti'y wliioh has thus far carried on
more wars and shed more blood in Europe,
Asia, and America than any other nation
in the history of the world, the quicker
it will develop into a peace-loving and
peace-promoting state. The world would
utter a sigh of relief if with compulsory
miUtary service in England would go along
the general conviction of the terribleness
of war, as it has become part of our flesh
and blood, and for this reason makes a
frivolous offensive war impossible.'

The indictment of our past record in
respect of war is historically sound, unless
Spain ought to be placed at the head of
the list ; and many of us hold that in
a country equipped with effective democratic
institutions a citizen army is less likely to
be aggressivel}' warlike than a professional
army. But Dr. Deissmann is doing us
injustice in the inference suggested in
the last paragraph — that our pugnacity
promoted this war; for the testimony

MANCHESTER 129

of Prince Lichnowsky may be taken as
having once and for all disposed of that
allegation. Indeed one great question-mark
might with propriety be placed over the
whole paragraph, suggesting as it docs the
picture of poor innocent, pacific Germany
involved in the terrors of war through the
fire-eating propensities of the Anglo-Saxon !
That one so transparently sincere should
have been able to write thus only shows
how completely the Avhole nation was
fooled by its militarist leaders and their
agents : and the subsequent events consti-
tute the nemesis on that campaign of lying.
On May 14, 1917, Deissmann writes :
' I received from Switzerland and Holland
the news that my most trusted personal
friend in England, who, also as a speciahst,
was very much valued by me, Prof. J. H.
Moulton, of Manchester University, lost
his hfe at the beginning of April, through
the destruction of his ship when saihng
through the forbidden zone on his way
from India. The last letter which I re-
ceived from him, dated February, 1917,

I

130 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

told me of his intentions to return to
England from India. The brave man faced
without illusion the chance of the death
which, in fact, he has met. A flood of
heavy thoughts came over mo as I received
this news. I hope to say more when I
have received particulars, but at first
all other things are eclipsed behind the
sense of irreparable loss both for scholar-
ship and for the circle of his friends. I
have therefore given, on May 9, at the
opening session of the New Testament
Seminar at Berlin, a memorial address,
paying tribute to his work and to that of
Prof. Gaspare Rene Gregory, who has
fallen in France for the German cause, a
memorial wliich, in the distressing strife
of nations turned enemies, was due to a
feeling which was in spite of the war
the outcome of respectful love which
escapes the grave.'

It would be easy to insert marks of
exclamation and interrogation at places in
these letters also — as, for instance, at the

MANCHESTER 131

reference to the 'forbidden zone,' and the
linking together of the death of a soldier on
the field and the murder of a civihan by
torpedo outrage. Patriotism is a strange
thing, terribly prone to distort the vision
and warp the judgement even of the best,
and perhaps we did not always see and judge
the things of ourselves and our enemies
with perfect fairness during that time of
strain and stress. But one thing is very
clearl}' marked in these letters — ^the fact
of a loving and tender nature, capable of
friendship to an unconniion degree, and
able to retain that friendship even amid
the bitterest international struggle the
world has ever known.

One of the last letters my brother ever
received from his friend was characteristic.
Deissmann had been deducing, with more
cogency to himself than to those not his
fellow countrymen, a promise of German
victory out of a passage in the sixth chapter
of the Apocalypse. I do not know whether
my brother took him to task for his inter-
pretation, but within a short time there

132 JAMBS HOPE MOULTON

came back from Berlin the following mis-
sive :

' 13-1-15.

' And I heard a great voice out of heaven
saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is
with, men . . . and they shall be His
people . . . and God shall \vipe away aU
tears from their eyes ; and there shall be
no more death . . . And He that sat upon
the throne said, Behold, I make all
things new ... I am the Alpha and the
Omega. A. D.

' Dr. James Hope Moulton,
'Manchester.'

Tliat was all, but it was much. It was
tlie avowal by a devout soul of a conviction
that God alone could unravel the tangle
of human relationships and bring order
out of chaos : and after all there is more
hope of ultimate right mindedness in an
enemy who places his faith sincerely there
than in a fellow countiyman who leaves
God out. It cannot be that in tlic end,
when all know even as they are known,
Adolf Deissmann and James Hope Moulton
will be in opposing camps.

IV

INDIA

The Call

June, 1915, found my brother over-
whelmed with a great sorrow. His wife,
with whom he had spent close upon twenty-
five years of singularlj^ happy married
life, was slight!}'- aihng, as it seemed, and
on expert advice an operation was decided
upon. Satisfactory recovery seemed to
be made, and there was nothing to suggest
complications until suddenl}^, on June 7,
new symptoms made their appearance,
her condition became rapidl}^ worse, and
in a few days she passed away. There is
no call to dwell upon such matters here.
Those who have experienced such bereave-
ments will understand, and those who have
not experienced them will not understand
133

134 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

for all that might be said ; and there are
in life both joys and soitows too sacred
for many words.

Immediately after the funeral my brother
came on to us at Chff College, whither the
cliildren had preceded him within a few
hours of their mother's death. It was on
the following Sunday he received the letter
from Dr. J. N. Farquhar in\nting him to
make the Indian tour. For my own part
I cannot regard it as other than an inter-
position of a kindly and tender Providence
that, just at the time when the very Ught
of life seemed to have gone out, there
should have come to him that which was
bound to divert his thoughts into a new
channel ; and while in no sense thrusting
into the background the ever-present sense
of tragic loss, to preclude the brooding
which could only have made it more
tragic still. A passionate grief found itself
alongside of a passionate call to living
service, and the two acted and interacted
as a work of grace on his mind and heart.

For ' Foreign Missions ' was to him no

INDIA 135

mere section of his Churcli's activitios to
be taken or left according to personal
predilection ; it was the very reason for
the Church's existence and the condition
of the Church's vitahty. Therefore, at
the risk of harking back to what has already
been suggested, and of making a con-
siderable digression, it will be worth
while at this point to dwell upon the growth
of so important a phase of his rehgious
thinking.

Any estimate of his attitude to such
matters must begin with Prof. E. B. Cowell
and his influence ; for although the mis-
sionary atmosphere of our up-bringing and
the inspiration that came with the visits of
Dr. Egan Moulton, David Hill, William
Goudie, J. A. ElUott, and others straight
from the field, were calculated to awaken
and quicken a living interest in world
evangelization, when it came to deep
thinking on comparative religion as a
factor in missionary psychologj^ and practice,
it was Cowell to whom he owed as much as
to any, and more. In the fifties of last

136 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

centurj^ Cowell had taught Persian to his
friend Edward Fitzgerald at Oxford and
had urged him to translate Omar Khay-
yam. In 1856 he took up a professorship
at Calcutta University, returi^ing to Eng-
land in 1864, and was elected to the new
professorship of Sanskrit at Cambridge
in 1867, a post which he retained until his
death in 1903. All these years, during
which he was accumulating ever increasing
stores of learning concerning Eastern re-
hgions, he remained a simple, convinced,
humble believer in the faith which is in
Christ Jesus ; and it is easy to see distinct
traces of his influence upon the eager
young classical student who speciahzed
in his own section of the Tripos. It was
fitting that my brother should have written
a review of the memoir of his master and
friend ;* and in that review he makes
quotations which, had there been no
' setting,' might perfectlj'^ well have been
taken for expressions of his own opinions.
For instance, Cowell ' writes from India

* London Quarterly Review, January, 1905.

INDIA 137

of his reading the story of the Madagascan
martyrs, and passing it on to his students,
to whom he expoimded his conviction that
"as the attacks seem to thicken against
the external evidences of Christianity, the
internal evidences are only more and more
strengthened." . . . We read how he would
take voluntary classes in the New Testa-
ment at his house, or in a room near the
college, attended by earnest and intelligent
men, with whom he would often spend
long hours in private, talking over their
difficulties of belief and leading them
persuasively to Christ. The testimonies
which followed him on his return to England
showed eloquently how many men were
brought to know the Saviour by his teach-
ing and example. Thirty years afterwards
we find him \vTiting at length on a Sunday
afternoon to one of these old pupils, and
expressing in beautiful words the serenity
of an old man's faith. His catholic spirit
is well shown in a letter to his mother from
India. " You would have been a little
startled," he WTites, "at a letter I wrote

138 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

to a Babii lately, whom I have helped bj^ a
recent correspondence in settling some
Unitarian difficulties. He wanted to know
the differences between Church and Dissent.
I told him they belonged to the region of
feeling not conscience. Those who by
temperament admired antiquity and sj'^stem
and held by the aristocratic part of our
constitution, would prefer the Church ;
while the lovers of change and reform
and the democratic principle would, as
a rule, prefer Dissent. To my mind,
any hymn-book or missionary history is
a convincing proof that the Spirit's influ-
ence is diffused on each ! " ' Would it not
be easy to imagine James Hope Moulton
having written such words ? Is it fanciful
to see in such a friendship at a formative
period a powerful influence which went
out far beyond philology and scholarship,
and invited exploration of the roads by
which the human heart has set out to
find an unknown God — unknown although
not far from any one of us ? Thus, uncon-
sciously, the hours spent on Section E of

INDIA 139

the Classical Tripos, Part II, were destined
to bear fruit in a field far enough removed
from the purely academic ; and the fact
of Prof. E. B. Cowell's direct and demon-
strable influence upon my brother in
these respects must constitute my defence
for having thus dwelt upon him and his
personality.

The nature of the invitation to visit
India may be gathered from Dr. Farquhar's
' Foreword ' to The Treasure of the Magi,
which my brother wrote while in India,
and which was indeed part of the pro-
gramme and purpose of the visit :

' In the autumn of 1915, on the invitation
of the Indian National Council of the
Y.M.C.A., three scholars from England,
Dr. T. R. Glover of Cambridge, Dr. James
Hope Moulton of Manchester, and Pro-
fessor George Hare Leonard of Bristol,
went out to spend a year in India. The
plan was that these men, who were dis-
tinguished alike for their writings and for
their close contact with the student world.

140 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

ahould spend this year in studying some
of the problems of education and of rehgion
in India, getting time for making friend-
ships with Indians, and at the same time
doing some lecturing and writing. And
whilst each was asked to travel for part of
the time in order to see something of
India and to visit the missions of his own
Communion, he was also invited to spend
several months in a single community, in
order to have time for closer stud}- and for
the forming of closer friendships. It was
hoped that books of considerable value
might result from this close contact of
English thinkers with the reMgious thought
of India. All did excellent service by
lecturing to mixed audiences in various
centres and by teaching groups of Christian
students ; and thej'^ were everywhere wel-
comed with the deep respect which scholar-
ship meets in India and with great
cordiality. Even more significant than
this interest which their lectures stirred
up were the friendships which they made
with Indians and which they valued
verj' greatly.

INDIA 141

' To Dr. Moulton the invitation was full
of attractiveness. He was always a mis-
sionary enthusiast, and he was thrilled
by the prospect of seeing the field for him-
self. For 3'ears he had studied the rehgion
of the Parsis, and now there opened out
before him the opportunity of personal
intercourse with them. Under ordinary
conditions it would not have been possible
to entertain the proposition on account of
other duties ; but the war had so affected
all theological colleges that a prolonged
absence could be contemplated as not
involving of necessity any serious inter-
ruption of his normal work. . . . He had
been invited to go to India largely that he
might use his ripe Iranian scholarship
in lecturing to the Parsis on Zoroastrianism,
and he received from that community
everywhere proofs of the warmest possible
friendship and regard and of the keenest
interest in his teaching. ... At the time
when he decided to go to India Dr. Moulton
agreed to prepare the volume which is
herewith published. His Iranian studies

142 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

had alreadj^ given him all the scientific
preparation required, while the experience
he was about to have among Parsis would
give that intercourse with those m Iio profess
Zoroastrianism which is required in order
to fulfil the condition laid down for the
volumes of this series in the Editorial
Preface.' *

It will make clearer the motive and spirit
of the whole enterprise if one paragraph
from that Editorial Preface to which Dr.
Farquhar refers be quoted ; for it presents
in a few words the conceptions of those
far-seeing men who were planning this new
type of approach to the non-Christian
mind ; and although it refers not to one
book but to the whole series, yet it does
expound the spirit in which my brother
went out to India and in which he MTote

* The Series to which The Treasure of the Magi
belongs is entitled The Religious Quest of India
(Oxford University Press), and is edited bj-- Di'.
J. N. Farquhar, Literary Secretary, National
Y.M.C.A. Council, India and Ceylon ; and Dr.
H, D. Griswold, Secretary of the Council of the
American Presbyterian Mission in India.

INDIA 143
the book which he completed just before
he left.

' They [the vvi'iters of the several volumes]
seek to set each form of Indian religion
by the side of Christianity in such a way
that the relationship ma}'' stand out clear.
Jesus Christ has become to them the hght
of all their seeing, and they believe Him
destined to be the Light of the World.
They are persuaded that sooner or later
the age-long quest of the Indian spirit for
religious truth and power will find in Him
at once its goal and a new starting-point,
and they will be content if the preparation
of this series contributes in the smallest
degree to hasten this consummation. If
there be readers to whom this motive
is unwelcome, thej- may be reminded that
no man approaches the study of a religion
without religious convictions, either positive
or negative : for both reader and writer,
therefore, it is better that these should be
explicitly stated at the outset. Moreover,
even a complete lack of sympathy with

144 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

the motive here acknowledged need not
diminish a reader's interest in following
an honest and careful attempt to bring
the rehgions of India into comparison
■with the rehgion which to-day is
their only possible rival, and to which
they largely owe their present noticeable
and significant revival'

From what has already been said as
to the general character of his disposition,
moral, intellectual, and spiritual, it ^vill
be recognized at once that no one could be
better fitted for such a mission than James
Hope Moulton. His evangelical passion,
enriched by open-mindedness and chival-
rous sympathy, made him the man for the
task, and the task the very thing for him
especialty at such a juncture. This view
was cordialh' taken by those under whose
direction he had been working, whether in
the Church or the University. His decision
was rapidly arrived at, and endorsed by
those to whom it was submitted. Three
summer months were closelj^ filled up with

INDIA 145

preparations of various kinds : arrange-
mente were made for Harold and Helen,
the two younger cliildren, to make their
home with us at such times as they were
not at school — Ralph was already in
khaki — and in October he sailed from
Marseilles for Bombay, and we never saw
him again.

Some Aspects of the Tour

It is neither possible nor necessary to
describe the course of such a tour ; but
there are many of its phases which may
with advantage be singled out as shedding
hght upon both his character and his
influence. He wrote home voluminous
letters which went the round of about
eight relatives and intimate friends. These
letters total up to nearly a million words
in all ; and from these it is easy to gather
his impressions as to what he met with,
although they are not for the most part
very quotable, neither would they present
a very clear idea of an itinerary except
to such as were prepared to go through

K

146 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

them mth a large scale map ready to
hand.

Although Bombay was his first objective,
and in a sense his main sphere of service
during the tour — owing to its being the
strongest centre for Parsism — ^he was not
by any means shut up to that one sphere.
We find him visiting the historic scenes
at Lucknow and Delhi, and rejoicing in the
history daily made in the great mission
centres of Medak and Nizamabad. He
spent a considerable time at Bangalore
and Coimbatore, stayed at Government
House, Ootacamund, visited Poona, crossed
to Ceylon, planned a flying visit to Madras
— whereby hangs a tale — and repeatedly
returned to Bombay for a greater or less
period. It was a strenuous time, and all
those characteristics which have already
been referred to as marking his Cambridge
life — what m^iy be called the AFAN note —
reappear on the Indian field with more
serious results. Dr. Mackichan, the Prin-
cipal of Wilson College, Bombay, and more

INDIA 147

recently Moderator of the United Fre«
Church of Scotland, Avhoee generous hos-
pitality my brother repeiitedly enjoyccl,
and to whom he was indebted for many a
kindness, told me that he was appalled
to note the change for the worse that had
taken place in his general aspect between
his first and his last visit to Wilson College ;
and he went so far as to give it as his
opinion that had he spared himself and
made more allowance for Indian conditions
and Indian climate he would have been
in a position to put up a stronger fight
against exhaustion in the hour of need.
He travelled sixteen thousand miles in
seventeen months under the trying con-
ditions of Indian travel ; he was constantly
preaching, lecturing, and speaking at
conferences, and as constantly writing
articles for various publications in India,
England, and America. Amid it all he
accomphshed the difficult feat of con-
centrating his mind sufficiently upon a
highly technical subject to be able to write
what was characterized by an expert as a

148 JAMES HOPE MOFLTON

brilliant book, The Treasure of the Magi,
the whole of which was written in the first
instance upon the backs of lettera, &c.,
wliich is suggestive as to the conditions
under which it saw the Ught.

All this hustle was not only tempera-
mental, it was the outcome of an ever-
present sense of duty to be fulfilled and
opportunity to be seized. One of the last
sermons he preached in India was from the
words ' I must,' and it was characteristic
of him that he should take such a theme,
for to him the whole visit was not a tour
but a mission. ' Does anything matter
now,' he writes, ' save to do what one can
to advance the coming of the Kingdom
where none shall hurt or destroy ? '

And what was the disposition that lay
behind all this restless activity and tireless
devotion to duty ? For one thing there
was an unquenchable optimism that grew
out of the very centre of his gospel. Tliere
is not only poetry but vision in the choice
of the text for his first sermon on Indian
soil : ' It was now dark, and Jesus had

INDIA 149

not yet come.' All the three ideas en-
shrined in the simple statement of fact
which is at the same time the enunciation
of a philosophy of missions — the need
of the heathen world, the sense of a better
day to come, and the ground of the hope —
these in one form or other constituted
his basis of appeal. He would have none
of Kipling's familiar dictum concerning
East and West never meeting — so true of
the ordinary things of human experience
and yet so false in face of the applicability
of the gospel to both Jew and Greek,
bond and free. ' I want,' he wi'ites, ' to
miss nothing of the Spirit which shines
in many dark places, for I am sure that
the first great Christian missionary was
right when he declared that God had never
left Himself without witness. But I shall
not pretend to think that these are anything
but broken lights of Him who came to
bring the dawning of the perfect day.'

But with all his optimism he was far
too sane and well-balanced to allow any
of his preconceptions to block out of sight

150 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

the stern facts of the case and to imagine
that the difficulties were either non-existent
or due to sheer perversity and culpable
blindness. His letters reveal him as con-
stantly on his guard against that kind of
intellectual exclusiveness which has got no
use for those who think and speak in an
idiom differing from his own. He found
himself in India face to face not only with
heathenism but \vith types of Christian
expression to which he was a total stranger
and not altogether a sj'mpatlictic one by
nature. It was this very fact, doubtless,
which led him to write one of those self-
revealing passages concerning himself which
betoken liis real greatness. Spealdng of
certain Conventions into M-hich he had been
drawn, not altogether willingly, he ^vTites :
' My experience of them is small, but I
am going to do my best to profit in this
to which I have come. I know I am in
great danger of being superciHous to\Aard8
things which do not quite coincide with
my own angle, and these meetings may
be a wholesome discipline. So far as I

INDIA 151

can analyse my own instincts, my feeling
towards the " Keswicky " is very much
hke that which nearly always finds things
that jar when I go to an Anglican service ;
and then I get angry with myself because
of the difficulty of formulating reasonably
the things I don't like. As often as not,
my intellectual power of seeing two sides
of a question — ^a power which I am glad
to believe grows with the years — tells me
that there is something to be said for the
things that rub me up the wrong way.
And then it becomes hard to acquit mj'^self
of mere liauteur ! ' A trained tliinlver who
was possessed of such a spirit of humility and
teachableness, could not fail to learn from
every source — whether KesAvick or Bombay
or Benares ; and, what counts for yet
more, it is that spirit which is calculated
to impress itself most deeply upon those
who are to be the scholars of to-moiTOAV.

It was fitting that James Hope Moulton's
first direct introduction to the mission
field should have been by a way of approach

152 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

which had for its first objective the student
life of the country, for he had long recog-
nized that the most fruitful type of mission-
ary work was that which strove to build
up a native evangehsm through the impact
of the best student life of the West upon the
student life of the East. I have before me
as I write two articles which he contributed
to the Methodist Recorder of January 9,
1896, and January 9, 1908, both of them
dealing with meetings of the World Con-
ference of the Student Missionary Union,
Liverpool being the place of meeting on
each occasion. It is impossible to escape
from the sense of urgency wliich possessed
him on this matter of world-evangelization
as the primary responsibility of the Church,
and his heart was strangely warmed by
the sheer fact of such assemblies of student
life for such a purpose, altogether apart
from any particular line of advocacy
adopted.

And now, through the far-sighted Cliris-
tian statesmanship of the Y.M.C.A., he
finds himself, as it were, in the thick of a

INDIA 163

student movement, prepared to give of
his best to it, and, unconsciously to himself,
called to contribute to its efficiency not
only by what he knew, but also by Avhat
he was ! A dogmatic assertive apologetic,
however sincere and convinced, was not
half so likely to win the assent of the
thoughtful man of the East as the humble
and teachable spirit which, while certain
of its own ground, is so abundantly willing
to beUeve the best of other phases of
thought ; and one is quite prepared to hear
of the warm expressions of gratitude which
poured upon him from all sides for an
apologetic Avhich made more certain the
message of every worker.

He went out full of deep sympathy
with missionaries and their work ; but he
came away with the sense that our highest
appreciations fall miserably short of the
merits of the case. He was stirred to the
depths of his being by the heavenly
strategy, the selfless heroism, the unfalter-
ing fidelity of the men and women on the
foreign field, as he saw it ; and the triumphs

164 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

of the gospel as he saw them at Nizamabad,
at Medak, at Benares, and many other
centres thrilled him through and through.

It was entirely characteristic of his
outlook upon the world that the work of
the Rev. C. P. Cape among the Doms of
Benares should have come peculiarly near
to his heart ; and to his chivalrous nature
the veiy fact of this work being done at
all constituted a veritable Christian apolo-
getic. ' The Doms,' he writes, ' are the
municipal scavengers, for whom Hinduism
can find no footing in the temple. The
Doms must be enunierated in the census
as Hindus, and so savcII the superiority of
the Hindu over the Moslem. But though
1 have seen a temple where dogs are
encouraged to enter, the Dom is admitted
to none. He is a hereditaiy thief and an
eas}' prey to the drink-fiend. Even Govern-
ment harries him. Let an undiscovered
theft have taken place in a Dom'a neigh-
bourhood, the police will seek the Dom who
has the largest record of convictions
and send him to prison to encourage

INDIA 155

the rest ! What was the use of trying
to escape from crime ? Every man's hand
was against him, and he might as well
be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. . . . Could
man sink lower ? Could any power on
earth upHft such men ? Most certainly
not. Hinduism was content to draw back
its garment's hem for fear of defilement.
Government alternately put them in jail
and moved them on. Why not ivy educa-
tion ? Educate a Dom ! Open a night-
school for the monkeys ! But the fact
is that to-day the Doms are not in prison,
nor in the drink-shop. They have got
a new hope. Somebody has touched them,
and virtue has gone out from Him. It is
just the old, old story, but it is a New Song,
quite different from its myi'iad predecessors
in the angel's music-rolls. My readers
know how it is done. A man who has
let the love of Christ embody itself in him
goes to the Jiopeless and degraded, and
there is a new creation at once.'

The sequel to this work of grace deserves
to be told although it docs not actually

156 JAMES HOPE MOTJLTON

belong to my brother's life. The story
is given by the Rev. William Goudie in The
East and the West as follows :

' The Doms are the scavengers of the city,
and many of them who at the missionary's
request enhsted to serve with the Indian
army in France have won strong commen-
dation from British officers who have
seen their work. It was a great risk to
send such men into such conditions un-
shepherded, and a young teacher of their
own tribe was found who, it was hoped,
might be able to go with them. He had
been taught in the mission school, he wore
the decent clothes of his new profession,
and lived in some comfort. He was wilhng
to go. But," said the missionary, ** you
must lay aside those clothes, dress as your
father dressed, and go among the scavengers
as a scavenger." "Then I will go as a
scavenger," he said; and so he went,
following, in his own life and station,
another who humbled Himself and took
upon himself the form of a servant.'

To the missionaries my brother's visit

INDIA 157

was no small encouragement and inspi-
ration, as is shown by a largo number
of letters. Apart from the specific value
of his teaching and the inspiration of his
fellowship there is little doubt that with
his world-wide distinction he helped to
strengthen the status of the workers and
the work with which he associated him-
self. It was less easy for the supercihous
to sniff contemptuously at the plain man's
message of salvation when that same
message was proclaimed with the backing
of so great intellectual attainments. And
to the jaded and depressed it was something
— and no mean something either — that
such an one cared, and cared sufficiently,
to make their anxieties and burdens his
own.

There once came into the range of vision
a possibility of his settling down at least
for a time in India. It would be too much
to say that it ever got beyond the stage
of a bare possibility, but the very fact of
the proposition being made at all is interest-
ing and significant, for it centred in the

168 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

suggestion that he should take the principal-
ship oi the Hindu College at Benares, the
nucleus of the neAv Hindu University.
The post had been offered to Prof. G. H.
Leonard, one of his associates in the Indian
tour, who had been compelled to dechne
it on the ground of obHgations at home.
They then turned to my brother and
informally approached him through an
intermediary ; would he consider it if he
were asked ? The answer, so far as this
sketch is concerned, had best be given in
his own words as contained in a letter
dated May 14, 1916, for the passage is a
self-revealing one on other things than
the matter immediately on hand :

' You will see at once why I did not
smiply say to Saunders,* " Of course,
the idea is impossible." It may be I am
more inclined to-day than yesterday to
say it is. But it is like one other audacious
proposal that came to me nearly thirty
years ago — when Welldon asked me to
take a mastership at Harrow — a thing that

♦ Indian Secretary of the Y.M.C.A,

INDIA. 169

one felt to be impoesible, and ^''et too
important in its openings to be pushed
aside without the most conscientious in-
vestigation. I have written home . . .
and here I have talked to a committee of
contiguous W.M.S. men . . . and have put
to them all one question : Wliat do you
think is the missionary value of such an
appointment, supposing they will take me
on my own terms ? Those terms would
be expressed something like this : "I
should undertake to act like a gentleman
and a Christian, and take no unfair advan-
tage from my position. But I must be
as free to let all people know my rehgion
as you are with yours. I cannot be
muzzled in preaching ; I must be free to
expound Christianity as well as other
rehgions in my lectures with absolute
fairness to all ; I must be allowed to offer
voluntary expositions of the Bible. If
you like to take me on these terms —
well and good ; if you don't — and I don't
expect you will — I go back to work at
home with a strong sense of relief, which

160 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

I should feel as strongly if you made it
Rs. 12,000 instead of Rs. 1,200 a month
(and house). I am wilhng to make a
big sacrifice if I can be quite sure I can
really serve India. But if I am going to
be hampered by a Board that will not
trust me, I no longer feel constrained to
make the sacrifice." Of course, coming
here would mean a very poor chance for
my Greek work; Sanskrit and Hinduism
would demand much of my time, teaching
and administration more. No salary would
compensate for that. What it would mean
to be separated from my children I need
not try to say. And if missionary value
is to be the test, I have to put in the other
scale the evident fact that experience of
India should make my service of missions
at Didsbury probably quite equal to any-
thing I could do under such conditions.
That's the case in a nutshell. . . . My
missionary friends are surprisingly unani-
mous, while careful to premise that they can
only spoak from the South Indian con-
ditions, where Hinduism is much more

INDIA

161

cast-iron (should I say caste-iron ?) than
in the North. Dr. Skinner said that if
they would accept me on my own terms
he would say ' Go.' But like all the rest
he felt the overwhelming improbability
that they would capitulate so far, in spite
of the astounding fact that they have
already asked a Christian minister. And
even if they bound themselves to give me
a free hand, it would be no guarantee
that they wouldn't start a cabal as soon
as I said or did something they did not
approve, which wouldn't be long, even
though Mrs. Besant and her Theosophist
Principal Arundale are out of it.'

It is easy enough to see now that there
was no possible chance of the conditions
being bearable for both sides if the invita-
tion were given — which it was not ; and
I have only referred to it at length because
it is a tribute to his scholarship that he
should have been considered desirable,
and to his open-mindedness that ho should
have been considered possible for such a
post. The view he expresses in the above

L

162 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

letter is indubitably sound, and reveals
a man who, while he had his ' eyes hft
up to heaven, the best of books in his hand,
the law of truth writ upon his lips, and the
world as cast behind him,' had his feet on
solid earth and faced the facts of the
situation. The project so far as he was
concerned came to nothing, but there is
every reason for satisfaction that the idea
should have been mooted.

It is interesting to note that in a sense
the situation had been thought out for
him some years before on another but
somewhat parallel field. Of all his cor-
respondents none counted for more to him
than Dr. J. G. Frazer,* whose researches
in Comparative ReHgion and cognate sub-
jects have given to the author of The
Golden Bough a unique position in the
esteem of the scholarly world. No
difference of rehgious faith set up any
barrier between them, and their corre-
spondence was of a very constant and
intimate character. My brother seemingly

*Now Sir J. G. Frazer.

INDIA 163

kept every line that Dr. Frazer wrote hiui,
for I have found in the bulky case filled
with his letters, post cards on such im-
material things as invitations to lunch !
It is evident that the great investigator
found no small comfort and encourage-
ment in the unfeigned interest and sym-
pathy of so competent a scholar, who
approached the question from so different
an angle ; and probably — nay, certainly —
he thought all the better of him for his
loyalty to a faith which he had found
true and satisfying. Amid all the dis-
couragement which naturally came to
the victim of shallow and undiscerning
reviews of pioneer work, which was simply
out of reach of the understanding of most
of the reviewers. Dr. Frazer would turn
to the Wesleyan professor and wTitc with
great frankness and warmth ; and I need
no letters of my brother's to tell me what
kind of reply he would send.

A letter quoted above (p. 109), refers
to the proposal that Dr. Frazer should come
to Manchester as Professor of Comparative

164 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

Religion ; and another letter, dated April
10, 1904, goes into the question at con-
siderable length. I quote it at length
because it gives, twelve years beforehand,
the soundest grounds for the decision at
which my brother arrived with reference
to the Benares proposition. Dr. Frazer
writes as follows :

' As to Manchester, about which you
speak so kindly, I was asked whether I
should be willing to accept the chair of
Comparative Rehgion if it were offered to
me, and I said I might do so on certain
conditions. But I am in two minds about
it. I have begun to doubt whether, with
my views on rehgion in general and
Christianity in particular, it would be
right for me to accept a teaching post in a
Theological Faculty instituted by Christians
for Christians, in particular for men train-
ing for the Christian ministry. How does
it strike you ? Please tell me quite frankly
as a friend. What would you do yourself
in a similar position, e.g. if j-^ou were asked

INDU 166

to lecture on religion to Buddhists and
Mohammedans with an implied stipulation
that you should say nothing that should
hurt their feelings as Buddhists and Moham-
medans, and nothing that should reveal
that you were a Christian ? Woidd you
accept a teaching post on such terms ?
I have grave doubts whether I can do so.
The case would be quite different if the
chair were established independently of any
Theological Faculty, and to teach the subject
simply as a branch of knowledge, uncon-
nected with any creed, hke mathematics
or astronomy. To make the supposed
parallel complete, the chair of reUgion
offered to you should be established and
endowed by Buddhists and Mohammedans
for the training of their respective clergy,
and you should be asked to take their
money and train them for their work as
Buddhist and Mohammedan priests, while
promising implicitly never to drop a hint
that you regarded Buddhism and Moham-
medanism as false. I begin, I think, to
foresee your answer, and my own. But

166 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

please write to me fully and frankly on
the subject. I shall regard it as a real
act of friendship if you do.'

I wonder whether my brother ever re-
called this correspondence when he came to
face a situation which had so many points
of similarity and upon which his loyalty
to principle led him to a decision along
the same line as that arrived at by his
friend whose religious position differed so
much from his own. But there is no
doubt that Frazer at Cambridge and
Moulton in India acted ahke under the
guidance of the same Spirit of Truth,
however differently they might have
defined that Spirit. There is a light that
lighteth every man coming into the world.

It would be unfair both to him and to
others to attempt to give any estimates
he formed concerning Indian thought,
and especially religious thought, as a
whole. He was the very last man to
indulge in the shallow and pretentious
egotism which, after a hurried tour of
inspection on a wide field, and under the

INDIA 167

guidance of avowed partisans, sits down

to write ' The Truth about ! ' He

formed his own impressions and expressed
them frankly and emphatically in his
letters home ; but there is a difference
between the informal home letter and
pronouncement of the printed page which
goes out to the public as a considered
judgement! Probably he would have sat
down to frame some such considered judge-
ment on all the facts as he had gathered
them, had he ever been allowed to reach
home ; and possibly his judgement would
have carried weight just because it came
from one who was well-informed and well-
equipped and sympathetic,and yet detached.
But he would have been the first to lay
down that any such reasoned estimate
on the whole question of Christianity
in India could only be formed under
conditions more favourable to consecutive
thought than the rush of a mission tour.

It wiU not be claiming too much for
James Hope Moulton to say that his
open-mindedness constituted no mean

168 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

qualification for usefulness in India. The
Englishman is always accused — sometimes
unjustly — of insular prejudice ; and cer-
tainly there is no doubt that as a nation
we are not particularly ready to be intel-
lectually sympathetic towards other bodies
of thought than our own. We are not
necessarily harsh towards them, but we
are reserved and somewhat exclusive ; and
between the two minorities of those who
will look at nothing new and those who will
coquette with anything because it is new,
there is the great average mass of inteUigent
people who are dominated to such an extent
by a kind of intellectual conservatism
that they are relatively slow to give
adequate recognition to ideas which come
out of a camp so far removed from their
own. James Hope Moulton went out
equipped with strong and well-tested
convictions on many subjects — rehgious,
ethical, political ; but also with a scholar's
aptitude to learn and readiness to revise
opinions in face of further evidence. And
in this case it was the evidence which

INDIA 169

told him that what held good of one
civilization did not necessarily hold good
of another. His religious faith he knew
to be for all — Jew and Greek, bond and
free alike ; but he very soon learned that
his political faith could not be applied
as it stood to India without very serious
danger. The eager Home Ruler recog-
nized, for instance, that the principle which
in home politics had been the very pole-
star of his thinking would in India have
worked out in the direction of the oUgarchic
tyranny of the Brahmin, narrow, prejudiced,
unequal, and in every way antagonistic
to that conception of popular self-govern-
ment which was so dear to him. In Uke
mamier on the difficult questions of rehgious
education — such matters, for instance, as
the conscience clause and concurrent endow-
ment— he fully recognized that were he
called upon to act in India it would be
along very different lines from those which
he would unhesitatingly follow in England.
His voluminous ' circular letters ' from
India are very self -revealing in a great

170 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

many directions, and nowhere more than
in this.

His ' interim judgements ' are moderate,
discerning, and very much along the Hne
of what we have learned from our most
far-seeing missionaries. He was unfavour-
ably impressed with the pliability of the
Hindu, as with the credulity which Avill
swallow ' camel miracles of his own, and
strain out the gnats of the gospel stories ' ;
and his thinking appeared inconsequent
to the Westerner ; but there is always the
readiness on my brother's part to admit
that his judgements were those of the visitor
and only given as showing how things
impressed him. But the conclusion of
the whole matter is always the same to
him from whichever side he approaches it —
the hopeless darkness of lieathenism un-
illumined b}'^ the gospel. ' The incom-
parable elevation of their creed [i.e. that
of the Parsis] above the Moslem's helps
them no more to be worthy of it than does
Islam's superiority over Hinduism help
Moslems to behave better than the Hindu.

INDIA 171

It is staring one in the face that without the
touch of Christ the purest Theism is helpless.
It reminds me of what J. A. Hutton put so
finely at the Foreign Missionary Anniversary
in the Albert Hall last April — the Kaiser
talks much of Oott but never of Christus ;
and with the Christ interpretation thrust
into the background, Gott can sink to a
mere war-demon.'

On one occasion, and one only, I believe,
during his sojourn in India did he come
into any serious conflict with native
opinions. He had been booked for a
term's lecturing at Madras during the later
part of 1916, and that visit was anticipated
with great interest both by himself and
by the Wesleyan Mission at which he was
to live. But, inifortunately, a passing
reference in one of his Methodist Recorder
articles to a certain Hindu goddess as a
she-devil, was promptly transmitted — it
is easy to see by whom — to India, and was
used to inflame opinion against the Western
professor, and incidentally against the
Wesleyan missionaries who were to be his

172 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

hostB. These crafty Brahmins succeeded
in persuading the Maharajah that this insult
to the particular object of his devotion was
a studied insult to himself, and there was
no difficulty in creating an amount of
feehng which rendered it unwise to carry
out tlie plan as arranged : indeed, there
were hints of possible violence, and also
representations to the Government as to
breach of religious non-interference ! That
one so open-minded and so generous to other
bodies of opinion than his own should have
been subjected to this humiliation was
extraordinary, and to my brother it was
extremely painful, especially because at
one time there seemed to be a reason to
fear lest the mission might be compromised
and brought into difficulty thereby. Event-
ually means were found whereby the
mind of the Maharajah was disabused of
the idea of any failure of respect to himself,
and the episode was closed by a letter
from His Highness to the Rev. D. A.
Rees, which deserves to be quoted for its
beautiful spirit : ' His Highness asks me

INDIA 173

to say in reply that he much appreciates
tlie sentiments which prompted you to
write him. His Highness has always recog-
nized that the Christian missionaries in
India, with all their loyalty to the teachings
and principles of their rehgion, have been
scrupulous in treating with respect the
rehgious convictions of others ; and he
asks me to assure you that the incident
to which you refer cannot, for the above
reason, affect the friendly relations which
have always existed between himself and
the various missionary bodies working
with so much self-sacrifice among the
people of his State. In view of the sincere
expressions of regret which are contained
in Dr. Moulton's letter to you, His Highness
will gladly treat the whole episode as for-
gotten so far as he himself is concerned.'
For thought and expression this could
hardly be excelled ; and to my brother
it came as an unspeakable relief. It was
bad enough to be pilloried as a mischief-
maker when he was by nature so much
the opposite ; but to him it was still

174 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

worse that the situation should work out
not only to his inconvenience but to the
possible detriment of the very work which
was so dear to him.

During the early part of August, 1916,
my brother was touring, and returned to
Bombay on the 16th, to receive the sad
news of his son's death at the front — one
of those tragic disappointments to high
hopes of which the war was so full. Ralph
possessed no small amount of inherited
abiht}' ; and if he did not do as well in
his Tripos as might have been expected,
it was not from lack of ability, but from a
fatal inclination to interest himself in
many fields of study instead of concen-
trating upon a course. He showed his
real quality by winning the Whewell
Scholarship for International Law in the
autunm of 191tt. During the long vacation
of 1913 and 1911: he had spent his time
abroad for the purpose of acquiring French
and German, and he was in Germany —
at Speyer — when war was declared. He
was marched to the frontier, leaving

INDIA 175

behind him all his papers, books — every-
thing, indeed, but what he could carry —
and bringing away with him moreover a
deep abhorrence of the Germans, not for
any petty discomforts which he had to
bear, but for the nameless abominations
which made themselves manifest from the
first. After considerable delay he reached
England, and a few weeks later was in
training, his commission reaching him the
same morning as the announcement that
he had Avon the Whewell. For some
reason or other he was kejrt in training in
England for upwards of eighteen months,
and it was June, 1916, before he crossed to
France. He was six weeks behind the
hues, then went up to the fighting hne,
and on the second night was laid low with
a piece of shrapnel which tore a rough
gash right through his pocket-book and
Greek Testament in his breast pocket.

It is curious indeed that a letter should
subsequently come from my brother dated
August 9, commencing with the words,
' A dream of bad news about Ralph. I

176 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

am thankful that my waking hours are
not more afflicted with what is so easj'' a
possibihty.' For the* ninth was the very
day when the first telegram reached us that
Ralph was missing ! We sent no message
out to India until the fourteenth, and that
was not received until a day or two later
owing to my brother's absence from
Bomba3^ WTien he did receive it he wrote
a letter which I will give at length in
preference to using any words of my own,
the more so as he quotes largely from
Ralph's last letter to him.

'Y.M.C.A., GiRGAmi,

'Thursday, August 17.

' It i.s very, very hard to start my journal
again ; but it has been harder still to prepare
a lecture on the Later Avesta, and I must
find a few minutes' relief talking about
him. I really have in a sense been expect-
ing this blow ever since I knew he had
gone. Did any of you liappen to see a
paper of mine on James's doctrine of
Prayer in the Expository Times, written

INDIA 177

in that blessed little Easter holiday at
Hathersage, which marked the end of the
old happiness ? I pictured two mothers,
equally godly, sending their boys to the
war, one with a radiant certainty that he
would return, and the other with " Father,
if it be possible ..." I never had that
certainty, or anything hke it, though I
was never tempted to a morbid anticipa-
tion of the blow before it fell. The dear
boy himseK cheered me in that memorable
ten minutes we got coming back from
Bramhall, on August 29 last year. He
told me how his mother's passing had
affected his inner life ; and he said he
believed he would come back. It depended
upon whether there was work for him here,
and that depended on his own worthiness ;
it was all a question of his personal fitness.
That was part of the old introspectiveness
coming up again, but it was being replaced
very rapidly by a saner and brighter
outlook. His letters to me have shown a
very happy development throughout this
year. It reached its climax in the letter

M

178 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

which he wrote two days after crossing.
You would like to read it, and it ia com-
forting to write it down. After some
prefatory words, he goes on :

*" There is no news at all that I can tell
you. I am more glad than I can say to
have come out at once from the Base.
I had made up my mind to having to stay
there for further training. But thanks to
the fact that I was coming out to my own
battahon I was let off that. A great deal
will be expected of me. There is a great
deal quite new to learn — I ought really
to be reading things up now or poring over
a map. And what is more important by
far, there is such a moral standard to rise
to. I am not at all afraid. I don't think
I shall be in action. I am curiously
unable to understand the men who are
suffering from fright before action ; it
seems to be a feehng which isn't in me,
at least as yet ; if I should crumple up
under heavy fire I do not know. But I
have to keep on a high enough level to
keep awake all the time, and cool, and

INDIA 179

strong ; and to make the men see they have
got to do what they are told to when under
fire — with men to whom one is quite new —
takes some doing. The problem of being
sensible is with me a moral, not, as it
looks, an intellectual one. I have the
faculties, only I can't bring them to bear
unless I am in the best of moral training.
I am extremely happy, and not at all
hysterical, sentimental, or even excited.
But I believe I shall be equal to the task.
It is a great thing for me, who have always
suffered (to use an accurate technical
metaphor) from running too much with
the clutch out — a great thing for me to
be leaving so soon, and taking such a
short time for a test which will really set
me on my feet and show me where I stand.
I hate writing such an egotistic letter,
but I can't send news, and I want to let
you know from the beginning what I feel
like. I shan't be able to write so much
later. I shall be too busy, or too tired."

' I cannot reahze it now in the least ;
and it will be just a long dull consciousness

180 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

of a loss, the magnitude of which the past
year has indefinitely increased. That has
really been the history of the even greater
loss with me, and I don't think time
has done anything with it. I feel it now in
just exactly the way I felt it a year ago.
That is, I can be quite calm, and talk and
think of other things, as I have had to do
even to-day. But all the time there is a
Toid that aches and aches, even while I
am talking gaily. In such a way, I take
it, the successive losses as life goes on
make us readier for the next abiding-place
in the endless journey, into which my brilliant
and noble boy has gone before his wistful
father.'

No wonder that his dear friend, Dr.
Rendel Harris, should speak eight months
later of ' superior spiritual attractions '
as a factor in weakened power of resistance
in that open boat.

Face to Face with Parsism.
Had the invitation from the Y.M.C.A.

INDIA 181

come for work along ordinary missionary
lines it would have been welcome to one
whose outlook on the world was such as
his was, but it is unquestionable that the
call to go and see Parsism at first hand
and to represent the case for the gospel to
Parsis, gave the invitation an immensely
added attractiveness ; and it may be
claimed without undue partiality that no
one else had his qualifications for that
particular piece of work. His interest
in the rehgion of Zoroaster and the Magi
was of no recent growth. As has already
been shown, it originated in his Sanskrit
studies under Prof. Cowell, and rapidlj*
developed with his increased attention to
Comparative Rehgion. As early as 1890
I find an entry in his diary referring to
his having addressed an audience of working
men on Zoroastrianism, and prior to that
he had given addresses to the Wesley
Society and to the St. John's College
Theological Society on aspects of the
subject. On coming to Manchester he
pursued his studies further and further

182 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

in that direction, and in 1912 he was recog-
nized to such an extent as an authority
that he was invited to give the Hibbert
Lectures at Oxford and London during
that year on ' Early Zoroastrianism.'
During the previous year he had issued a
Httle volume on Early Religious Poetry of
Persia^ containing not only learned exposi-
tion but a number of original translations
both in prose and verse, and had dedicated
the volume : ' In Piam Memoriam, Edvardi
Byles Co well' He therefore came to the
task mapped out for him by the Y.M.C.A.
leaders not only \nth knowledge and with
zest, but with a status and a reputation
which was known to those whom he was
to addiess. How high this reputation was
is shoA\Ti by the fact that eight lectures on
The Teaching of Zarathrustra, given by
him in Bombay to Parsis, were published
both in English and in Gujerati by those
to wlioiii they were addressed, on tlicir
own initiuti^e. No more eloquent tribut<;
both to his knowledge and to his fairness
can be imagined — a situation which could

INDIA 183

only be paralleled here if a Hindu scholar
came to lecture at the Church House on
the historical and philosophical basis of
the Apostohcal Succession, and the Bishops
of the Upper House of Convocation asked
to be allowed to publish the lectures !

On many grounds it was necessary for
him to walk warily in his intercourse
with the Parsis. For one thing, there
was the constant risk lest fraternization
and appreciation in that sphere should
lead narrow and shallow though sincere
Christians to imagine that he belittled the
great points at issue between the Christian
religion and other faiths. A case in point
arose immediately on his arrival in India.
Let him tell it in his own words, as he
described the situation in a home letter.
' Meanwhile came a sensation. Friday
evening's paper contained the news of
the death of the biggest Parsi in India,
Sir Pherozesliah Mehta, Vice-Chancellor
of the University. I saw at once that I
must move heaven and earth to get well
into the funeral ceremony, which was

184 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

likely to be an opportunity I might not
surpass if I stayed in India twenty years.
So I wrote a note to Dr. Modi, who lives
right away in Kalaba, the eastern end of
the great bay. Dr. Mackichan sent it off
by one of his " boys," who brought back
a kind reply and a card inscribed Avith
Gujerati, which was to open sesame on
Saturday morning. . . . By 8.15 I was off
in my topee and tussore suit, worn for the
first time. I was soon on the path up
which the bearers bring the corpses, passed
a gate inscribed with an Enghsh warning
against all non-Parsis, and presently found
a custodian to whom I presented my card.
He and his colleague were extremely
obliging. They took me right over the
lovely gardens, showed me the model of
the towers, and explained how the corpse-
bearers lay the body on the place prepared
for it, strip off the white covering, and
leave the tower. I saw the five towers —
one quite small, one only kept for a particular
family, two big ones appropriated to two
sects into which the Parsis spfit generations

INDIA 185

ago on the momentous question of the
right time for intercalating to put the
calendar right I And round the top of the
tower nearest to me the vultures were
sitting expectant. It was the morning
hour of funerals, the other hour being
about 5 p.m., and these pleasing big
birds know the time of day ! Meanwhile,
two small funerals came up and enabled
me to see the ritual. First came the six
bearers, carrying the body on an iron bier,
covered with a cotton sheet. They are
clothed in white cotton. Since they are
on a job that invoh es the worst kind of
pollution, they have to be put through
special purification, and anyhow are a
despised caste. Their clothes and the
coverings are, of course, specially polluted,
and have to be '* destroj^ed " — in theory !
How to destroy them ? Fire, earth, and
water must not receive them obviously,
and they are put in a receptacle and left.
But since there are four or five funerals
every day, the accumulation of clothes
would be tremendous. So I understand

186 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

there is a private rule by which the clothes
may be used again after exposure to the
Bun. If the pollution were microbic an
hour in this sun would soon destroy it.

' After quite an hour of interesting talk
. . . Dr. Modi arrived, a short, wliite-
clad, white-bearded man of 61, with the
white turban that marks the priest. He
was very cordial. He took me off through
the garden, and we watched the coming
of the big procession. They were so many
that the front came quite close up to the
bearers — there ought to be an interval of
several feet. The}' walk two by two,
each pair linking together by holding the
two ends of a handkerchief. Great num-
bers of non-Parsis came to pay honour
to this very distinguished man, but they
all stopped at the gate and went back.
The others followed to a place close up
to the tower (out of sight for me), and
there the face of the dead man was exposed
and they filed past to see it. TJien it
was taken into the towei' where only the
bearers go. i heard the clang of the iron

INDIA 187

gate. The mourners had gathered in the
lovely garden where Dr. Modi and I had
been sitting. They all turned towards
the tower, and repeated from their prayer-
books the series of Avestan texts which
Dr. Modi went over with me. They then
dispersed, washed hands and face and
went away,'

I have quoted this in full because it
has an intrinsic interest of its own, apart
from its personal element ; and probably
few Westerns lia\'e had quite such a
privileged position. But within a short
time there was an indignant letter in an
Indian newspaper — repeated, I believe, in
an English religious paper — about a clergy-
man who no sooner landed than he dis-
carded clerical dress and took part in
a Parsi rehgious service ! It is very clear
that the reference was to James Hope
Moulton ; and in a sense the facts were
accurate, though the inference was totally
false. As Dr. T. R. Glover drily remarked
in the Cambridge Review, 'There must be
more reasons than one for discarding

188 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

European clerical dress as soon as one can
after landing in Bombay, if one had not
been able to before.'

Further, there was the constant risk
lest he should be drawn into party con-
troversy on the matters which divide
Parsis. When he arrived there was wait-
ing for him an invitation to address the
Iranian Association, which represented what
may be called the Radical w ing, and which
is therefore an object of suspicion to the
orthodox and the Conservative section.
Dr. i\Iodi told him that already some of
these advanced men had been appeahng
to the authority of the Western scholar
in support of their contentions ; and, of
course, there was unquestionably a Radical
tendency in my brother's make-up — ' some
out-crop of original sin,' as he playfully
called it — which predisposed him in favour
of the Progressives on every issue. Eastern
and Western, ecclesiastical and political
alike. But he recognized the importance
of not allowing himself to be claimed at
the outset as a party champion, for that

INDIA 189

would have impaired grievously his chance
of usefulness ; and he readily undertook
to postpone any address to a sectional
association until he had several times
addressed the orthodox ' centre.' In the
end the lectures above referred to were
translated into Gujerati by one sect and
published with annotations by the other —
an interesting manifestation upon an
entirely new field of that ministry of
reconciliation which had so evidently been
committed to him.

It is not at all easy to arrive at any very
definite idea as to the value of his work
among Parsis. His lectures evidently awak-
ened wide and intelligent interest on the
part of a community which has exercised
an influence altogether out of proportion
to its numbers — only about 200,000 in
all throughout India. Any who gathered
the impression that J. H. Moulton had
gone to India to conduct a mission to
Parsis were bound to be disappointed in
respect of any visible results from the
visit, and undoubted! v there had been some

190 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

ill-considered references to his tour which
might well have awakened some such
expectations as to definite conversions.
But it is safe to say that any such frontal
attack would have been fatal to his in-
fluence upon his hearers, who would have
resented the suggestion that it was neces-
sary to send a missionary from the West
to evangehze them, of all peoples in the
East. His task rather lay in the direction
of expounding to them the nature and the
implications of their own faith, as they
presented themselves to a Western mind ;
and with great faithfulness he performed
his task. With the utmost frankness he
warned them of the Agnosticism to which
so many of them leaned ; and his very
exposition of the essence of Zoroastrianism
constituted on the one hand an appeal
to them to be worthy of a great spiritual
inheritance, and on the other a demonstra-
tion of inevitable limitations of that and
every other faith, except one. It was a
type of evangelism which would not have
commended itself to some, but it was the

INDIA 191

type best fitted for the peculiar field in
whicli he was working, and although it
is impossible to form any estimate as to
its immediate effects, it is not difficult
to see in such advocacy the foundation
for the more direct evangelism of a later
period.

The End

Throughout m}^ brother's later months
in India there had been a blended fear
and desire in respect to his home-coming.
How much he longed to see those dear to
him in England is very clear from his
letters, especially at every point where a
postponement became necessary ; and 5'^et
his work, his mission, always came first.
' I thought I was going to see your dear
faces in a few weeks, and that cup of joy
has been dashed from my lips. But I
can see clearly that it is best. I am very
unhkely to see India again. I have got
the ear of a great many people, and can
tell them sometimes what it is good for
them to know. I ought not to leave this

192 JAMES HOPE MOTTLTON

world of opportunity lightly, and the
cutting off of my work at home seems to be
a Providential indication ' (Jime 12, 1916).
But alongside of that wistful longing for
home there was the dread consciousness
that home was no longer there for him,
in the sense in which he had known it. It
will be remembered that it was only a few
months after his wife's death that he left
for India, and he dreaded the prospect of
settling down in the old spot with so much
to remind him of one who was there no
longer in visible form. Writing to Dr.
Rendel Harris, he says : ' I shall have to
work very hard to keep myself from
becoming a recluse when I get home,
except for the intolerableness of that
house, which may drive me to fill it with
voices to drown somewhat the silence
eloquent in every room. Time does so
httle to temper the dread of that home
that is home no more.'

By the time that he left India in March,
1917, he was wearj' and worn. He had
worked very hard, and as already has been

INDIA 193

noted, he had not made sufficient allowance
for the trying character of the Indian
cUmate. But the voyage, and the feUow-
Bliip on shipboard with Dr. Rendel Harris,
much revived him. He had hoped to
have his friend in India with him for
a time, but the sinking of the City of
Birmingham on Dr. Harris's outward
voyage, thwarted that, for he got no
further than Egypt. After numerous
letters and cables had been exchanged —
half of which never reached their destina-
tion— they met at Port Said, and had a
week's happy intercourse together before
the tragedy came. They knew full well
that on leaving Port Said they passed into
a danger-zone, because the enemy could
operate so easily and effectively from the
Syrian coast. One day they passed a
raft, and a Ufe-buo}', and a dead body in
a hfe-belt, which was a reminder of what
was a possible fate for them any hour of
the day or night.

* « 4t * *

There is no good purpose to be served

N

194 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

by recalling the details of the tragedy.
The last four and a half years have seen
so many such occurrences that what needs
to be said is only too famiUar, and the rest
may with advantage remain unsaid. I
will content myself with quoting the
characteristic letter with which Dr. Rendel
Harris made us acquainted with the facts.

* Grand Hotel, Ajaccio, Corsica,

'April 14, 1917.

* You will have received the sad news
of my first telegram, and will have been
waiting and watching for the further
information with regard to the passing
over of your beloved.

' I am not able to write a great deal,
and much of what I would S3,y must wait
until I return, first of all because we were
strongly advised not to communicate any
details as to the passage of our unfortunate
vessel, and second because it is too painful
to recall in detail the horrors of the days
of exposure and collapse. I think that
what operated in his case to diminish his
power of reaistance was, first of all, physical

INDIA 195

weakness, which had shown itself on the
way home from India in a violent outbreak
of boils on the face and neck, causing him
much pain and inconvenience — ^but on the
other side he succumbed to superior
spiritual attractions which he felt a long
time before the ship was struck. He
talked about his dear ones in Johannine
language as going over to prepare places
for one another, and the spiritual tension
was evidently stronger than even strong
language expressed. Those on the other
side stood to him Christ-wise, saying
Christ's words and doing Christ's deeds
to him as they had done to one another.
Under these circumstances it is not strange
that he should have collapsed, but he
played a hero's part in the boat.

' He toiled at the oar till sickness over-
came him : he assisted to bale out the
boat and to bury (is that the right word ?)
the bodies of those who fell. He said words
of prayer over poor Indian sailors, and
never, never complained or lost heart
for a moment through the whole of the

196 JAMES HOPE MOtTLTON

three days and more of his patience, though
the waves were often breaking over him
and the water must have often been up
to his middle. He passed away very
rapidly at the end, and was gone before I
could get to him. His body was lying on
the edge of the boat, and I kissed him for
you all and said some words of love which
he was past hearing outwardly. There
was no opportunity to take from his body
anj-thing except his gold watch, and one
or two trifles, which are in my keeping.
I could not search him for papers, indeed,
I doubt if he had brought any with him
from the ship.

' During the whole of the voyage his
mind was marvellously alert and active.
He talked and read and wrote incessantly —
and preached on the Sundays. On the
way home he had read the whole of the
Odyssey in the small Pickering edition ;
and amongst his first remarks to me was his
opinion as to the disparity of the twenty-
third book with the rest of the poem.

' One strange and beautiful experience

INDIA 197

we shared together with Major of

the Abyssinian Embassy, who was return-
ing to England. We developed literary
sympathies, and one day the conversation
turned on ** Lycidas." The major knew it
by heart — so did J. H. M., or almost
by heart. I was a bad third in the recita-
tion, and when we halted for a passage
J. H. M. ran to his cabin and brought his
pocket copy of Milton to verify doubtful
words with. How little we suspected what
was the meaning of our exercise ! They
laughed at my delight over the sounding
sentences, and I had to explain that it
made my blood tingle : but we did not
know that the amber flow of that Elysian
speech had become once more sacramental,
and that we were really reciting the liturgy
of the dead, that " Lycidas, your sorrow, is
not dead, sunk though he be beneath the
ocean floor." He had his own " solemn
troop " and his own " sweet society " to
make him welcome.

' It is one of our Lord's sayings that one
ehall be taken and another shall be left,

198 JAMES HOPE MOTJLTON

and the words lie dormant in meaning long
spaces of time — then rise up and smite us
in the face. Why was one taken and the
other left ? Why did that fatal, that
*' perfidious bark " discriminate between
the " sacred head that it sunk low " and
the one which was so much whiter to the
harvest ? But for questions Uke these
there is no answer yet. I would tell you
more if I could, but this is all I can say at
this present.

*With deep sympathy,
*Your friend and his,

*p.p. Rend EL Harris,
'G. O. Innes.

' P.S. — Manu med : I am so glad to have
been with him these days : to have had
him to myself, at his very best. So
Johannine, and so Pauhne ! " How Pauhne
we have become ! " he said to me ; and
twice over he quoted some great lines from
Myers' "St. Paul," to add to the ordinary
Corinthian quotations.'

That characteristic letter evokes many

INDIA

199

reflections. How strange a coincidence
that it should be ' Lj cidas ' that occupied
his thoughts on the voyage — ' Lycidas,*
which was the subject of the first article
which, as a schoolboy, he wrote for his
school magazine, and which was to be
so tragically appropriate to his condition
within a few hours ! But perhaps stranger
still is the coincidence afforded by the
closing stanzas of his own poem on
Vasco di Gama, to which was awarded
the Chancellor's Medal in 1885 :

So o'er the bosom of the unknown ocean

Youth spreads her sails before the springing wind,

Instinct with something of a heavenly motion

To seek the glory she has left behind.

And to a world of wandering men and blind

To bring the light of the supernal Day.

What though the dark clouds threaten ? There

hath shined
On the wild waves a star whose kindly ray
Shall break the gloom, and guide her onward in her

way.

Alas ! and many in those black depths have ended
Their reckless course, from the wished haven far.
By the hoarse requiem of the storm attended
While angels wept their ruin. But the war

200 JAMES HOPE MOULTON

Saw the sea stilled, and where the victors are
Flame j^et the radiant trophies that they won
From their unstoried voyage, and the Star
Lit their path, brightening till their toil was done.
Then rent the clouds, and reigned, the One, the
Eternal Sun.

Thus closed abruptly a life of singular
richness and usefulness, crowded with
activities and full of promise as to greater
things ahead. Such a tragedy adds but
one more to the melancholy catalogue
with which we have of late learned to
become onl}?^ too famiUar : and there it
must be left. But his memory will ever
continue fresh and green in the minds and
hearts of those who knew him ; and his
record will remain not only in the printed
page that bears his name, but in the
ministry of all those who in one sphere or
another were led by him to love truth for
its own sake, to love men and women for
their own sake, and to pour out life as a
sacrificial offering for God's own sake.
And no such life, be it long or short, is
spent in vain.

Printed in Great Britain by Jarrold 6- Sons, Ltd., Norwich.

Date Due

V

1 1012 01043 4894