Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 11

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“E. King.”

In his message to me from his own death-bed, he just says “all is wisdom, goodness, and love.” The last words of his letter show that it was the first night of Term when the Freshmen were pouring up in bustling cabs. He always pictured anxious and occupied Angels shepherding the boys in, for their first start: and I generally got a little word sent across from him, on such a night, to show where his thoughts and prayers lay.

All through the Oxford days, we younger men clung to him for the succour of his hopefulness under dark days. Liddon had given in to despair. The University was, for him, dead. It had lost, not only its ancient association with the Church of England, but even its Christian character. Everything was to be thrown open to any or to no Creed. There was to be no witness left to any positive Truth. Education was to abandon its claim to have any spiritual and religious significance. He poured out lamentations, and denunciation. He bade us fly to Zanzibar. He ridiculed any attempts to make the best of the situation left us. “I do not see any profitable use, dear friend,” he would say, “in combing the hair of a corpse.” But--we could not accept this counsel. Our very youth forbade us to be hopeless. We were all for saying: “Clear the ground: give us an open field. We can let the whole privileged position go. We are all the better for it. Let us trust no longer to prestige and authority: but go forward on purely voluntary lines, making free appeal to all or any who will hear.” We did not desire to die in the last ditch: but to throw defences and ramparts behind us, and to charge with flags flying, and see what we could do with a clear field and no favour.

King was wholly with us. He was ready to take things gaily: to utilize all opportunities: to keep up heart: and to hope for the best. He bade us not despise the day of small things. He was quick to co-operate with all that was attempted. His presence was a perpetual godsend to us. I do not know how we should have fared through without him.

Sometimes, I think that there was only one event in his whole life that was “out of the picture.” And that was his historic trial before the Archbishop. He was not meant for that episode, which was, somehow, forced upon him. He had nothing of the Ritualist in him. Nor were those precise liturgical minutiæ, however important in themselves, in the least congenial with his nature. They served to present him to the broad glare of the world in a form that was utterly alien to him. He may have felt that his “boys” who had gone out from his hands at Cuddesdon ought not to be left alone to fight the battle over these things: and that he was shrinking, under cover, from sharing their risks. I fancy that this spirit of gallantry did move him. But he was meant by God, surely, to be kept free from the dust and heat of legal turmoil, and from the cruel misunderstandings and crudities of a public trial. It was dreadful to think of him, in the trouble and roughness and indignity of such a situation. It gave him many miserable years: which he bore with his own noble sweetness. But it was a profound relief to all who loved him, when it was over, and he was released from this uncomfortable part, and given back to the tender amenities which formed his natural atmosphere.

He was English and Anglican down to the very finger tips. There was nothing Roman about him. His very look and instinct belonged to the Church of his baptism. It was impossible to imagine him as anything else. He taught continuously the spiritual value of the Anglican “You may,” in contrast with the Roman “You must.” He revelled in the blend of the appeal to authority and of the appeal to the free personal conscience. He was steeped in the typical traditions of our particular expression of Catholic Christianity. You felt, as you looked at him, that he must actually belong to the very build of an English Country Parsonage, with some sweet church tower looking in over the garden wall.

At Lincoln, he gave his whole soul to his Confirmations. He did not attempt organization, beyond the actual diocesan necessities. Nor did he take any active part in the official councils of the Bishops. He left all the “business” side of his office alone. Only, just in his last years, he threw himself with eagerness into the work of Church Extension in Grimsby. Otherwise, he was content to go up and down every corner of the Diocese, and to take a whole day, on hopeless side-lines, reaching some far village in the wolds, and laying his hands on a half-dozen beloved plough-boys, with the pomatum and all. He delighted in the far-away look to be caught in the eyes of the shepherds on the wolds, always steadying their faces to scrutinize something seen approaching from out of the distance. “Be you a beast, or be you a man?” That is the sort of gaze with which they greeted you. He loved one of them, who had slowly learned that the candles on the altar were lighted in broad daylight, because they had no utilitarian purpose. They were not there to give light, but to bear witness. “Eh! Then yours is a Yon-side Religion, I see, Sir.” It appeals, he meant, to something beyond this world. The porters loved him. The villagers loved him. The town loved him. Twice I went down to Lincoln fair with him, all among the cocoa-nuts, and the ginger-bread, and the fat women. It was a delicious experience, to note the affection that followed him about. He drew out love, as the sun draws fragrance from the flowers. He moved in an atmosphere of love. And as we laid him to rest in that beautiful Garth, in a grave heaped high with flowers and carpeted with white lilies, the tears in the voice, as we sang our last hymn over his body, told of the deep passion of love which was following, with its longing prayers, into the quiet place, him who had shown us, as none other had ever done, what the tender Grace of the love of Jesus could mean.