Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 7

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It was in the very heart of the great war with France, under the pressure and strain of that dreadful struggle, that we had a superb output of great men. The babes born in that distressful hour were singularly virile, and momentous. The personalities that emerged were massive, weighty, vital. How curiously different from that nervous, feverish, distraught generation which, according to Alfred de Musset’s brilliant picture, was born in the days when their fathers looked hurriedly in at home, to snatch a kiss from wife and child in the swift intervals of war, with the smoke of the battle still reeking upon them, with the heat of the fray driving them on in the frenzy of adventure! Here the concentrated force of the determination to carry the terrible strife through at any cost issued in this sturdy and impressive result. Gladstone, Tennyson, and a dozen others stand out to us, as the giants born in those days. And Selwyn was not unworthy to take rank among them. He had the same splendid physical vigour, the same impressive type of build, with remarkable beauty in the strong features, large-hearted, large-brained, forceful. He had a certain magic in his presence which told, as much as his dauntless courage, upon the imagination of his Maoris and Melanesians.

“It was only his quick-sighted reading of character and gesture, his habits of order and forethought, besides his calmness and courage, which enabled him to walk unscathed when others would be in danger.

“He would not allow a weapon in his boat. His wonderful presence of mind and dignified bearing, and a certain something quite indefinable, had such influence over the savage mind, that the natives never seemed to contemplate the possibility of his molesting them.

“The enterprise undertaken by the Bishop was one of no little risk. It required the perfect presence of mind and dignified bearing of Bishop Selwyn, which seemed never to fail in impressing these savages with a feeling of superiority, to render such an act one of safety and prudence.

“We weighed and ran out of the roads, admiring, as we passed and waved our adieu to the Undine, the commanding figure of the truly gallant Bishop of New Zealand, as, steering his own little vessel, he stood, surrounded by the black heads of his disciples.”

This quick-sighted reading of character, combined with pluck, was never better illustrated than when he broke up a Native war by singing the Lady-Bird Song. How vividly would Bishop Abraham tell the full story, showing as it did the brilliant oratorical gift of the Maori, on which he loved to enlarge. The Bishop had gone to face a “third party” in the war--the Sons of the Red Ditch was, I think, their name. The other two tribes engaged had a quarrel of their own. The Bishop said that he could understand that. At the worst they must fight it out. “But you, Sons of the Red Ditch, have no part in that quarrel. You have nothing to fight about. Why are you here?” Unanswerable, you would think. But the Chief of the Red Ditch Sons rose and said: “We understand that there is a war in Europe between two nations who have a quarrel--the Russians and the Turks. That is all right. They must fight it out. But what are you English doing in that business? Why are you there?” The Bishop was done. It was no use to try and parry the home thrust. And then it was that, throwing his argument to the winds, he danced out and sang:--

“Ka tangi te ronniko.”

“Lady-bird, Lady-bird, fly away home!”

until all the Sons of the Red Ditch were singing it too: and, in singing it, sang themselves home.

The wonderful thing about Selwyn was his power of practical prophecy. A little paper, admirably drawn up by Canon Abraham for the commemoration of the Selwyn Centenary, gave amazing evidence of this. Who could have believed that in the dry hard years 1837-1838, he could have anticipated the full power of voluntary work of which the C.E.M.S. is giving such rich proof?

“As long as the service rendered is purely voluntary, numbers of tradesmen and others will be willing to devote their spare time to the Christian work of helping to better the condition of their neighbours. There are many who are willing to work for the pure love of God.”

Or that he should have bravely grasped all the possibilities which Kelham and Mirfield are now verifying?

“Let the Church take root downward; let every peasant in the country have an interest in the Church’s ministry. We have the best materials for the formation of a ministry from the people that ever were possessed by any nation--trained in religious principles by a sound and scriptural course of instruction. Collect the elite of our schools, carry on their teaching in the parishes up to eighteen, and then determine which shall be sent on to the University with a view to future ordination.

“Many a rustic mother will bless the Church which has adopted her son into her service; men who, by their talents and virtues, have proved themselves worthy of a higher vocation.”

Or again, is it not surprising that in 1841 he should have felt all that we are now discussing as to the right way in which the call to work should be made?

“It has never seemed to me to lie in the power of an individual to choose the field of labour most suited to his own powers. Those who are the eyes of the Church are the best judges.

“Whether it be at home or abroad is a consideration which, as regards the work to be done, must rest with those who best know what that work is, and how many and of what kind are the labourers.

“The only course seems to be to undertake it at the bidding of the proper authority, and to endeavour to execute it with all faithfulness.

“I looked upon this as the first exercise of the Church’s lawful authority, and I asked myself, What is the duty of every priest? There could be but one reply--to obey. To test this I put to myself what seemed of all to be the most improbable case, that I should ever be called upon to go, and the answer could be but this--I am ready. Are you ready to go wherever you may be sent? Are you ready to go even to the centre of Africa? I thought that If I refused to go, the bones of those who fell in Walcheren would rise up in judgment against me.... Should any soldier of Christ refuse to go to support a cause to which he has been pledged by a far more solemn engagement?”

“A high official of S.P.G. was going down to Eton to ‘sound’ Selwyn on the subject of New Zealand Bishopric. He met a friend, who dissuaded him. ‘Let the offer be from authority in the Church.’ The Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, making the call, and were immediately answered in the following terms:--

“ ‘Whatever part in the work of the ministry the Church of England, as represented by her Archbishops and Bishops, may call upon me to undertake, I trust I shall be willing to accept with all obedience and humility.’ ”

His direct prophetic insight may be noted on two special points. First, while flinging behind him all the conventionalism of an Establishment with unhesitating audacity, and offering to the Colony the picture of a Bishop who could swim rivers, dive under his ship, sail her in any seas, dig, live on roots, knock about in any quarters, carry his own luggage, and wash his own house out, he, nevertheless, far from sitting loose to ancient Church Order, set himself to revive it. It had, indeed, deadened itself into fossilized forms in the old country: but this was due, not to lack of purpose, but to lack of use. Forms were not obsolete survivals, involved in an Establishment. Nay! They were the muscles and sinews of the living Body of Christ, which Establishment had atrophied by disuse. Out here, in the open Colonial workaday world, the Body will revive in its native reality; and all true forms will reveal themselves as active functions of a living organism, essential to its health and its efficiency. So he believed in the ’Forties. As those at home were discovering in theological theory, so out there, under practical pressure, he rediscovered the significance that underlay the ecclesiastical structure. The Church revealed itself to him as the one organ of efficient activity. So he set to work to revive Synodal action. So he saw what Cathedrals really meant.

“They stand to secure the effectual organization which the Clergy are in need of--supplementary to the parochial system--a bank of supply on which the Church may draw for assistance in all her work.

1. For aid in parishes insufficiently worked.

2. For the training of the Ministry in Cathedral Colleges.

3. For the training of Teachers for Church Schools.

4. To educate and develop the spiritual energies of the nation: standing open all day for private prayer, by the appeal of art and music, by the glory of the daily services, by intercession.

5. From them should go forth the conquerors of the unconverted at home and abroad. Centres for missionary activity, and the training of preachers.

6. A spiritual heart to a Diocese, diffusing life and warmth.

7. A central office for assistance and employment, aiding those in need. Taking the lead in Church extension and building in Diocese.

8. Centre of learning and knowledge. Libraries for Clergy.”

So, again, he saw clearly what a Bishop was meant to be, and what a properly organized Province would involve.

“From 1841, for fourteen years, Selwyn laboured single-handed as Bishop of New Zealand, but never lost sight of the need of division, if only it might be had. The foundation of the Diocese of Christchurch for the care of the Southern Island was delayed till 1855; Wellington and Nelson were formed in 1858; Waiapu, the Maori Diocese, in 1859; the missionary Diocese of Melanesia in 1862; and Dunedin in 1866. Meantime Australia had been beforehand--the one Diocese of Sydney was divided, and the Sees of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Newcastle constituted in 1848. ‘Some time or other I suppose my turn will come to be relieved.’

“With the Bishops of Australia and Tasmania Selwyn took every chance that offered of conference and co-operation, uniting in Synod with the five other Bishops, ‘the first foreshadowing of that Provincial organization’ which has since obtained, and strengthened Church life, not only in Australia and New Zealand, but in Canada, South Africa, and India, etc. Relations with sister Churches, the forging of links and the binding fast by the strong bonds of knowledge and sympathy the scattered members of the body, were ever in his mind, and led afterwards to his two visits to the Churches of the United States of America and Canada.”

So determined was he to get his new Bishops consecrated that when the lawyers, as usual, invented every conceivable difficulty as to what could be done within the territory of the Queen, he declared that he would take his men out in a ship and consecrate them on the high seas, if so alone he could escape from out of the legal meshes. Thus, in a hundred ways, he detected the lines of the living Church, hidden behind the dead cumber of centuries.

And, secondly, he saw, at a glance, what it has taken us such long years to recognize, that Christianity is a Life; that it cannot therefore be transmitted by book, or handed over the counter, or merely preached; it has to be lived. It is transmitted only by the touch of life on life. Our Lord trusted to no book to convey what He taught, but only to the hearts of living men. Christianity has only one way of spreading--i.e. from heart to heart, from soul to soul. Therefore, in order to reach a native people, it must come to them in a native form. The Native, alone, can teach the Native. The white man will never, therefore, bring the full message home to a people, except through men of that people whom he has had the opportunity of inoculating with the very life so that it has passed into their blood. Native boys, passed under a white man’s care at an early impressionable age, and then slowly and laboriously re-created into the new manhood, are the only organs and instruments by which their own races can effectively be reached. And the life that is to be put into them must be built up from the very ground: it must fashion anew their innermost instincts and habits: it must cover the entire mass of their humanity. It is no mere doctrine to be taught: no mere gospel to be read in a book. It is the occupation and possession of the manhood itself by a new transfiguration.

So he planned Norfolk Island, to which home he brought boys to be adequately trained, who should then be replanted. And of their training he wrote:--

“I doubt whether converts are edified, whether the foundation is secure, whether they do not rest still upon the personal character of their English teachers; and this support will tend to fall off when other fields of fresher interest absorb the zeal of the rising generation, and carry it off to Central Africa, to China, to Japan. There is a downward tendency in the secondary stage of a mission. The only remedy is a native ministry.

“I need men of the right stamp to conduct the central organization of a system which will require an entire devotion in a spirit of the most single-minded love, of every faculty of body and mind, to duties apparently of the humblest kind, to the most petty and wearisome details of domestic life, and to the simplest rudiments of teaching; but all sanctified by the object in view, which is to take wild and native savages from among every untamed and lawless people, and to teach them to sit at the feet of Christ, ‘clothed and in their right mind.’ Religion, civilization, and sound learning--all, in short, that is needful for a man, seem to be meant by those three changes: the feet of Christ, the clothing, and the right mind.

“Our natives are most willing to be employed, but have no order or method in anything that they do except under superintendence.

“It needs minute and careful arrangement, without which no barbarous people, I am sure, can ever be thoroughly Christianized.

“Throughout the whole mission the delusion has prevailed that the Gospel will give habits as well as teach principles. My conviction is that habits uncorrected will be the thorns which will choke the good seed, and make it unfruitful.

“In England religious principle is rarely strongly developed without orderly habits.

“We are apt to forget the laborious processes by which we acquired the routine duties of cleanliness, order, method, and punctuality. We expect to find ready-made in a native people the qualities we ourselves learnt with difficulty ... the unfavourable tendency of native habits is every day dragging back into sin many who seemed to have escaped.”

To appreciate this depth and thoroughness of view we must remember that it was taken at the very hour when the influence represented by Lord Macaulay was at its height, and we were framing an Educational System for India in the belief that Western culture could be transplanted to the East through the medium of Academic Text-Books and a scheme of Competitive Examination. From that disastrous superficiality we are suffering woefully to-day.

A big man, this, charged with imaginative fire, force, and faith. No wonder that his departure to the derided mission field shook his generation with unwonted emotion--so that Dr. Keate, the famous Flogger, is recorded in Mrs. Gladstone’s diary to have been seen at the farewell Eton luncheon, amid sobbing men and women, crying like a child, with his face buried in his pocket-handkerchief, as Selwyn spoke. Yet the secret of this enthralment which he exercised over all his contemporaries was due, not merely to his muscular Christianity, to “his massive and gracious presence, his courage, gaiety, humour, tenderness, or to the electric effect of his personality, or to the attractive charm of his strength and his goodness”: though all this was his: but, rather, to the profound reality, behind all his gifts, of that surrender of the soul to Christ the Redeemer, which alone can transfigure humanity into an organ of power. It is revealed in that noble story told by Bishop Montgomery, of his answer to the fervid salutation which reached him from his far home, saying that all the mountains and waters of New Zealand spoke to them of him. “Give God the glory,” he wired back. “As for this man, we know that he is a sinner.”