Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

ART. VIII.-CHURCHMEN, SCHOLARS AND GENTLEMEN.

1. The Life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury. By his son, Arthur Christopher Benson. Two vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1899.

2. A Memoir of Richard Durnford, D.D., sometime Bishop of Chichester, with Selections from his Correspondence. Edited by W. R. W. Stephens, B.D., F.S.A., Dean of Winchester. London: John Murray, 1899.

3. Life and Letters of Dean Church. Edited by his daughter, Mary C. Church, with a Preface by the Dean of Christ Church. Second edition. London: Macmillan and Co., 1897. 4. Edward Meyrick Goulburn, D.D., D.C.L., Dean of Norwich. A Memoir by Berdmore Compton, Prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedral. London: John Murray, 1899.

5. Henry George Liddell, D.D., Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. A Memoir by the Rev. Henry L. Thompson, M.A. London: John Murray, 1899.

6. Autobiography of Dean Merivale, with Selections from his Correspondence. Edited by his daughter, Judith Anne Merivale. London: Arnold, 1899.

7. Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. A Biographical Sketch. By his son, Arthur Milman, M.A., LL.D. London: John Murray, 1900.

A tutor has

1670 the sharpest contemporary critic declared that 'the ordinary sort of our English clergy do far excel in learning the common priests of the Church of Rome'; and how Bishop Atterbury asserted later that 'for depth of learning, as well as other things, the English clergy is not to be paralleled in the whole Christian world'*; while a distinguished living historian, who from his learning and his detached position will be accepted as an impartial witness, has arrived at similar conclusions.

[ocr errors]

'It is at least one great test of a living Church,' writes Mr. Lecky, that the best intellect of the country can enter into its ministry, that it contains men who, in nearly all branches of literature, are looked upon by lay scholars with respect or admiration. . . . . One of the most important features of the English ecclesiastical system has been the education of those who are intended for the Church [i.e. the ministry] in common with other students in the great national universities. Other systems of education may produce a clergy of

* Hutton: The Church in Great Britain,' 1900, p. 237.

greater professional learning and more intense and exclusive zeal, but no other system of education is so efficacious in maintaining a general harmony of thought and tendency between the Church and the average educated opinion of the nation.'

We do not propose to follow these writers in the invidious task of comparing the clergy of one communion with those of another, but to seize the opportunity, which is presented to us by the remarkable group of biographies now lying upon our table, for considering some of the prominent forces which have recently moulded life and thought in the English Church and among English-speaking peoples. Our group is formed on the arbitrary principle of date of publication, but the names selected will at once suggest many others equally illustrative of our theme. To write of Benson is to recall not only Lightfoot and Westcott, but also Prince Lee, to whom all three traced their inspiration; to follow them to Trinity is to link them with Hort, the brothers Vaughan, and Llewellyn Davies, with Whewell and Sedgwick and other giants of the past. To mention Durnford is to recall Keate at Eton and Routh at Magdalen. To think of Church is to call to mind Hawkins and Pusey, Liddon and Stubbs. Goulburn was the schoolfellow and life-long friend, though sometimes the opponent, of Stanley and Lake; he was successor at Rugby to Tait and Arnold, predecessor of Temple, and biographer of Burgon. Liddell was in the same brilliant class list with W. E. Jelf, R. Scott, and Jackson, Bishop of London; his earlier days brought him into contact with Archdeacon Denison, then a hot Radical, his later with Dean Buckland at Westminster, with Wilberforce and Jowett at Oxford. Merivale rowed in the Lady Margaret boat with Trench and William and George Selwyn; and in the first Oxford and Cambridge race against Charles Wordsworth, a future bishop, and Garnier and Fremantle, future deans; among his Cambridge friends were Christopher Wordsworth, afterwards his kinsman, Thirlwall, Kennedy, Peacock, Alford, Thompson. Milman's memories carry us back to Burney, Goodall, and Harness: Longley and Keble were among his Oxford friends.

In the group itself the personage rendered most prominent by his position, by his characteristics, and by the striking presentation of them for which we are indebted to his son, is the late Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward White Benson was descended from a stock of Yorkshire dalesmen. The name White came from a chapter clerk of Ripon, who left an estate to the family in 1777. The Archbishop's mother belonged

*The Map of Life,' 1899, pp. 201-2.

to a family of staunch Unitarians, but she became a Churchwoman before her marriage with his father, who was a strong Evangelical. The father was a scientific man, who made some important chemical discoveries, and became a Fellow of the Edinburgh Botanical Society. The maternal grandfather, Thomas Baker, had been headmaster of the Lancastrian School and afterwards inspector of the Birmingham markets. Westcott's father, it is interesting to note in this connexion, was also a Birmingham man of science and secretary to the Botanical Gardens; while Lightfoot's mother, sister of Barber the artist and widow of a Liverpool accountant, had settled in Birmingham for the advantages of King Edward's School. The Archbishop was born in Lombard Street, Birmingham, on July 14th, 1829, one year after Lightfoot, three years after Westcott; and the reader who takes interest in such details will find in the 'Life' a full-page view of the house, which is much like many other houses in many other towns; a photograph of 'Big School,' like what many such rooms are now, but very unlike what most of such rooms must have been then; and a drawing of the headmaster's desk. It would have been more interesting to have a sketch of Prince Lee himself from the engraving dear to old Birmingham boys; but there is a graphic description of him. Of his linguistic teaching Mr. Benson

says:

[ocr errors]

In the case of Bishop Westcott it left traces in the ingenious, almost fanciful, pressing of words that made him, it is reported, say to the evangelist who asked him whether he was saved, "Do you mean σωθείς, σωζόμενος, οι σεσωσμένος ?” On Bishop Light foot, a man of harder and more strictly logical mind, the results were admirable. In my father, so far as regarded written expression, the results were not altogether fortunate. As a young man he wrote a most elaborate uneasy English, and in his later years he wrote a style which must be called crabbed and bewildering."*

Whatever may have been the results of his grammar, it may be said with confidence that but for the attractiveness and inspiration of Prince Lee's character and religious teaching we should not have had three of the greatest bishops of this generation.

When Benson entered the school Westcott was already a senior boy, the only boy allowed to lean his head on his hand as the first class stood round the master's desk, and the intimacy with him dates from Trinity days; but with Lightfoot there sprang up at once the affectionate friendship of schoolboys of

* 'Life,' i, 37-8.

similar ages, tastes, and powers. They were already keen theologians and budding liturgiologists. Benson had fitted up an oratory in a disused room, where alone or with a school friend he said the canonical hours, and had fixed a booby-trap to protect it from the profane invasion of sisters. So early as 1843 he added this postscript to a letter: 'Dear Uncle, if I continue to wish to be a clergyman, do you think there is any probability of it? E.W.B.' Two years later a favourable business offer from a friend of his grandfather's, in consideration of the altered circumstances of his widowed mother, led to an anxious consultation with Prince Lee, whose confidence in the boy's academical future prevailed and induced two relatives-one of the Sidgwicks, and William Jackson the Bampton lecturer, a most generous friend -to meet the school expenses and start him at the university.

The last school year saw the commencement of a voluminous correspondence with Lightfoot, then at Cambridge, on religious and theological subjects, in which Lightfoot at first appears as the higher Churchman. In view of their later position and influence special interest will attach to the extracts from these letters.* The following October found Benson at Trinity, holding a sub-sizarship and one or two small exhibitions from Birmingham. There was little room for extravagance, and the one festivity which was regularly indulged in was the Sunday morning breakfast with Lightfoot on a veal-and-ham pie, followed by a patristic discussion. This was the first introduction to Cyprian, whose 'De Unitate' they read together. Benson was far from strong during his university course, and his health probably suffered from the res angusta domi and the strain and responsibilities which fell upon him. In 1849 he lost his mother suddenly; and her death left him, with a younger brother and three sisters, very slenderly provided for. Fortunately, by the aid of relatives and friends, especially that of Mr. Martin, Bursar of Trinity, who practically adopted young Benson, financial difficulties were got over, and the lad was enabled to complete his undergraduate studies. His life at Cambridge was one of hard work and thankful happiness. He is Westcott's admiring pupil and Lightfoot's great friend, cultivates the acquaintance of Prince Frederic of SchleswigHolstein, reads for both triposes, finds time for full journals and long letters, says the canonical hours, gathers liturgical lore, sketches ecclesiastical details, studies the Fathers, lives in the older world, and in these and other ways foreshadows the later life.

*Life,' i, pp. 48 et seq.

Mr. Arthur Benson has given us some extracts from a prize oration delivered by his father in the hall of Trinity College on Commemoration Day 1851, on the 'Praise of George Herbert,' which, if delivered in our own day, might well be taken to be a portrait of himself. We are unwillingly limited to the following words:

are

'Nay, Coleridge narrows yet more the circle of his true admirers: "a cultivated judgment, a classical taste, a poetic sensibility not enough, he implies, to lead us into the recesses of the Temple. The reader must be a Christian, both a zealous and an orthodox, a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional disposition to ceremoniousness in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives and the region in which he moves.'*

Benson's Cambridge career was successful, but not one of unmixed success. To quote from the 'Life':

'My father was also Members' Prizeman for a Latin Essay. He never won a University Scholarship or a Browne Medal. Indeed, I believe that his scholarship was always of an eclectic type, and bore too strongly the impress of his own vivid tastes and prejudices. He was a writer of beautiful Latin verses, but his Greek composition was seldom quite first-rate. He remained to the end strangely ignorant of accents, which he thought frivolous. Eventually he came out a Senior Optime in mathematics. . . . eighth Classic in the Classical Tripos-a bitter disappointment-and Senior Chancellor's Medallist, which atoned for all his disappointments.'

In 1852 he sat for a fellowship without success, which is not surprising when it is remembered that Lightfoot and Hort were his competitors; but in classics he was then second only to Lightfoot, and in the following year was elected. Inferior in width and depth of learning and in exactness of scholarship, as probably in mental power and concentration, to his schoolfellows Westcott and Lightfoot, he was rich in the gifts of sympathy and attraction, and he was perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of the pupils of Prince Lee, who from a comparatively small school sent to Cambridge in the course of nine years thirteen First-Class men, of whom five were Senior Classics, and eight became Fellows of Trinity.t

The high degree and the Chancellor's medal were not unnaturally followed by the offer of a mastership, and it was part

*Life,' i, p. 101.

Vol. 191.-No. 382.

† Cf. Quarterly Review, January 1893, p. 76.

2 F

« PredošláPokračovať »