CHAPTER XI DURHAM (continued) 1893-1897 THE year 1893 will be memorable in Church History for the determined attack made upon the Church of England by means of the Welsh Church Suspensory Bill. In opposition to this measure the Bishop made several speeches and wrote sundry letters. His own very decided view was that the nation must have its spiritual organ, and his great speech made at the Church's demonstration in the Albert Hall was expressive of that belief. A few days previous to the Albert Hall meeting he had addressed a vast concourse at Sunderland and had been cheered to the echo, but such a crisis as that which then threatened demanded of him service beyond his own Diocese, so that he ventured to speak in a building wherein in younger days he would have been totally inaudible. The effort was most exhausting and only partially successful, but even so he "made a profound impression on his hearers, who cheered again and again whilst his lordship was speaking." No doubt oratorically the feature of the meeting was the speech of the Duke of Argyll, who, being a Presbyterian, stood on an Anglican platform and "won the heartfelt sympathy of the ten thousand listeners when, in a manly apologia, he admitted the mistake which was made in disestablishing the Church of Ireland." However, it was generally admitted that the Bishop of Durham's speech was the one that really went to the root of the matter. His subject, as already indicated, was "The Idea of a Spiritual Organ of the Nation." In the course of his speech he said: The English nation has had from the first a spiritual organ in the National Church. It has proved on the largest scale the truth of that noble line of Spenser For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. Shall we then disown that which is the peculiar glory of our inheritance? Shall we mutilate the body of our common life? Shall we cast away for ever that which openly proclaims that the life of the nation is Divine? Is such a change, is such a sacrifice, in view of the general direction of human growth, an advance or a fall? Is it a generous reaching forth to a nobler ideal or a disastrous national retrogression? And why is the sacrifice to be made? It is said that the National Church has failed as a spiritual organ of the nation. Has it failed more than any other organ through which the nation exerts its vital forces? The confession of the national faith through the National Church may be imperfect, but it is increasingly powerful as a witness and rich in promise for the future. The National Church, I say, is powerful as a witness. It witnesses that religion is not an accident of human nature, but an essential element in every true human body. It brings all the great crises of national life into direct connexion with the unseen and the eternal; and this continual, unforced, natural exhibition of the sacred destiny of things exercises silently a subtle, penetrating influence far and wide. It is different in kind from the acknowledgment of the spiritual by an assembly of individual citizens. The fulness of the truth may not yet be apprehended, but the idea is with us; and, for statesmen, ideas are the support of resolute patience, and for the people they guard political enterprise from the irony of selfishness. At the same time the National Church is, as I said, rich in promise. It is progressive, because it is living. It has proved from age to age that it can embody the spirit of the people. It has taken up and interpreted new thoughts according to the proportion of the faith at the Reformation, at the Caroline reaction, at the Evangelical revival, at the Oxford movement, and now, again, amidst the social aspirations of the present day. The National Church is no exotic. It is not the representative of a particular school, or a small group of men. Guarding treasures new and old, it assures to its members a healthy freedom. It is in constant touch with every class of society, and draws from the contact sober wisdom. It cannot, as long as it is national, become, like the Roman Church in France, a power antagonistic to the State. It is sustained and stimulated by the sense of a universal obligation-an obligation to bring all the beneficent activities of the faith to the poorest as their birthright, and to offer the solaces of religion to those who need them, and not only to those who seek them. We have, then, in England (to say all briefly) that which gives unique completeness to our national life, a truly National Church; a Church which has shaped popular aspirations and welcomed popular influences; a Church which has again and again proved its power to assimilate new truths and to awaken dormant forces; a Church which in great crises has been able to reconcile order with progress; a Church which has used in the past, and with quickened energy is striving to use better now, for the good of the whole people, its great possessions and great place, and to bring together all classes in the unity of one life, and to offer, in all its freedom and grace, the Gospel to the poor. Shall we, then-this is the question proposed to this vast and representative gathering—shall we take the first step, I do not say to destroy the English Church -that is impossible!--but to deprive the English nation of its spiritual organ? "By nothing," it has been said most truly, "is England so glorious as by her poetry "—glorious, that is, by the "noble and profound application of ideas to life." The National Church is, I believe, the most conspicuous sign and the richest source of this characteristic glory, for it maintains through every failure the application of the divinest idea to every fragment of a people's life. On 1st August 1893 the Bishop preached a sermon1 in Newcastle Cathedral before the British Medical Association. The sermon was entitled "The Manifold Revelation of Truth." Another specially interesting sermon2 of this year was that which he preached before the Church Congress at Birmingham. On this latter occasion he spoke from the pulpit of St. Philip's Church, which stirred in him the memory of his baptism. The Bishop's text was Ephes. ii. 19, and his subject "Citizenship, Human and Divine." In the course of his sermon he said: Such thoughts are natural to me here and to-day, when I recall how England and Birmingham have grown since I was christened in this church. Every great building which represents the social life of the city-a city, alas! still without a cathedral-schools, libraries, art galleries, halls, councilchambers, courts of justice, have arisen since then. Taken together this splendid array of municipal institutions is an impressive witness to the fulness of life. Each one ought to be, each one may be, a sanctuary in which fellow-citizens of the saints meet to prepare for their work and to fulfil it. Each one-whatever occasions may seem to have been lost -is still a sign and a call to men who are citizens of heaven and earth. The Bishop was obliged to leave Birmingham in haste and proceed to Stockton, to be present at the opening of the Ropner Park by H.R.H. the Duke of 1 Published in his The Incarnation and Common Life. York. he said: In a speech delivered there after the luncheon The chief magistrate of this ancient Corporation, which was in old times so closely connected with the Bishops of Durham, has made a noble provision for his own people, and has handed down, as we trust, his name as an example to those who will come after him; and the head of our Royal house in the third generation has been graciously pleased to share in the joy of the town, and, by sharing in it, to increase it a hundredfold. I say that such munificence and such sympathy must greatly help and encourage all those who, like the ministers of Christ, have devoted their lives to the service of the people. In December 1893 my father attended a Conference at St. Paul's on "Commercial Morality." I mention this fact not because it was the only, or even the most important, conference that he attended in the course of the year, but because in connexion with this meeting he has noted in his text-book that he conversed with some one unnamed on the matter of "laughter" and "the clown." Many a time have I heard him remark that he could not fit the clown into his scheme of the universe, and have often wondered whether the very funniest of funny men could, if allowed a chance, have induced him to smile. Never during the whole course of his life, I suppose, had he any leisure or inclination for amusement, and he deeply lamented what he considered to be the overdoing of amusements in these latter days. In the course of the year 1893 my father wrote a Prefatory Note to the late Professor Hort's Hulsean Lectures entitled The Way, the Truth, the Life; and one also to the brief Memoir of the late Bishop Lightfoot, which was reprinted from the Quarterly Review. The |