in good company 37

in good company 37

I remember the blaze in his eyes, the fury in his face, concerning a

scoundrel who had boasted of the deliberate betrayal, and cowardly

and calculated desertion of a trustful girl. Had the villain fallen

at the moment, when Stone first heard the facts, into my friend’s

hands, there would have been left upon the fellow’s body and face,

and from Stone’s fist, marks which would have borne witness to the

end of his life of the punishment he had received. His own bitterest

enemy, Stone could freely forgive, but for the man or woman whom he

held to be the enemy of God, he had small mercy. Even in matters

not of great consequence, but upon which he felt strongly, he was

inclined to override his opponent, and generally to carry things with

a high hand. That he always spoke, wrote, or acted with judgment, I

do not maintain. His motives none could question, but his judgment,

even his best friend sometimes doubted.

 

When I speak of him as obstinate, I must not be understood as

meaning the type of obstinacy which is more frequently associated

with weakness than with strength. Obstinacy, however, of a

sort--stubbornness if you so like to call it--was undoubtedly a

temperamental defect. He was inflexibly convinced that his own

beliefs in regard to God, to the Throne, to the State, to the Church,

and even in regard to politics--inherited as some of these beliefs

were, influenced as were others by class feeling, by education, and

by environment--were the only possible beliefs for a Christian,

a Churchman, an Englishman and a gentleman. Hence he could not

understand the position of those who differed, and was impatient of

opposition.

 

I once heard him described by some one who misunderstood him as a man

with a grievance, and a man with too thin a skin. His sensitiveness

I do not deny, but it was a sensitiveness which was all for others,

never for himself. And so far from being one of those single-cuticle

abnormalities whose skin “goose-fleshes” at the very thought of cold,

who at the approach of a rough blast wince in anticipation as well

as in reality, and suffer more perhaps from the imagined effects of

the buffeting than from the buffeting itself, Stone not only never

troubled to ask whether the blast was, or was not, coming his way,

but enjoyed battling with it when it came. If things went badly with

him, he took Fate’s blows unconcernedly, and blamed only himself.

About his own ills and sorrows, or breakdown in health, he was the

most cheerful of men, but he could and would concern himself about

the sorrows or troubles of others, and would move heaven and earth

in his efforts to right their wrongs, if wrongs to be righted there

were. That is not the way of the man with a grievance. The man with a

grievance growls but never fights. He wears his grievance as a badge

in his buttonhole, that all may see, and you could do him no unkinder

turn than to remove the cause of it.

 

Stone never had a grievance, but he was ready to make the grievances

of his people, real grievances, their grievous wrongs, not fancied

ones, his own; and more than one employer of sweated labour, more

than one owner of an insanitary slum, and occasionally some Parish

Council, or public body in which Bumbledom and vested interests were

not unknown, had cause to think Stone too touchy, too sensitive, and

too thin-skinned, where the lives of little children, and the bodily

and spiritual welfare of his people were concerned.

 

 

VI

 

In politics Stone was the stoutest of old-fashioned Tories, and by

every instinct and sympathy an aristocrat. Like a certain courtier

of high birth who expressed pleasure at receiving the Garter because

“there is no pretence of damned merit about it,” he believed

whole-heartedly in the hereditary principle. I am not sure, indeed,

that he would not have thought it well that spiritual as well as

temporal rank should go by inheritance. An archbishop who came of a

long line of archbishops and was trained from birth upwards for that

high office, Stone would probably have held to be a more fitting

Spiritual Head than one whose preferment was due to his politics, to

his suavity, and to the certainty that he would act upon “safe” and

conventional lines. He believed in Government at home and abroad,

in Great Britain as well as in her Dominions and Colonies, by the

“ruling orders,” by the class that he held to be born with the

power to command. In himself he possessed the power to command in a

remarkable degree. I have heard him sternly rebuke and even silence

seditious or blasphemous Sunday afternoon speakers in Victoria or

Hyde Park, and I do not remember one occasion when he was answered

with other than a certain sullen and unwilling deference, for,

in spite of his authoritative and even autocratic way, something

there was about him that compelled respect. A Socialistic orator

of my acquaintance once spoke of him--not to his face--as one

whose politics were pig-headed and his loyalty pig-iron. I am not

altogether sure what constitutes pig-iron, but if the Socialist meant

that Stone’s loyalty was rigid and unbending I do not know that I

should quarrel with the description. It was in his loyalty to the

throne that all his intolerance came out. Even those who were at

heart no less loyal than he laughed sometimes at the boyishness and

the extravagance of his worship for the Queen. The Queen, since she

reigned by divine right, could do no wrong, and had Stone lived in

Stuart times he would have died upon the scaffold, or fallen upon

the field, for his Sovereign’s sake; nor am I sure that even for a

Richard the Third or a King John, had either been his Sovereign, he

would not equally have drawn the sword.

 

In religious as in other matters, all Stone’s sympathies were with

those who have an affirmation to make, as contrasted with those

who have an objection to lodge. He detested iconoclasts, and was

prejudiced beforehand against any belief that he classed with

“negatives” as opposed to “positives.” Just as he disliked the name

of Protestant, because he could not understand a Christian man

electing to be known by a name which “protests” against another’s

faith, instead of affirming his own, so he found it hard to

understand a Church which by its name proclaimed itself as not being

in “conformity” with or as “dissenting” from another Church.

 

Stone could not understand that anyone should prefer the Free Church

to the Anglican Catholic Church, but since it was so (and that it

was so he sincerely and deeply grieved) he felt it better, while

friendly and cordial to all the Nonconformists with whom he was

brought into contact, that each should go his own way and worship God

in his own manner. Hence he was not of the school of Churchmen who

busy themselves in bringing about a closer union between Anglicanism

and the Free Churches, and are for the removal of landmarks and the

interchange of pulpits.

 

On the other hand, he attacked the religion of no one who believed

in the Fatherhood of God, the Divinity, Atonement, and Resurrection

of our Lord, but reserved all his fighting power for what (a true

Browning lover) he would have accounted “the arch fiend in visible

form”--the enemies of God and His Christ. He had no sympathy whatever

with Churchmen who occupy themselves in bickerings and controversies

with Nonconformists, or in denouncing the Church of Rome. To him

good Churchmanship--and never was there stronger Churchman than

he--meant, not disapproval of, dislike to, or antagonism towards

other Churches, be they Roman or Free, but active love, practical

loyalty and devotion to his own beloved Mother Church. Hence he

never proselytised. He never sought to turn a Nonconformist into a

Churchman, or a Roman into an English Catholic, but he would have

fought to the last to keep a member of the Church of England from

forsaking that Communion for any other.

 

But there was no indefiniteness about his attitude to Rome. Writing

to me in 1899 about some one he and I knew, who had gone over to

Rome, he said:

 

“I am deeply sorry. Rome is a real branch of the Church of the

Redemption, and has the creeds, the ministry, and the Sacraments.

But to leave our august Mother for Rome! I do not mean to imply that

to be a Roman, or to become a Roman, has necessarily anything to do

with vital error. I speak strongly only on the point of _comparison_,

and as a loyal, happy, and satisfied Catholic of the English branch.

Certain defects I own to in our English Mother, but they are very

small and few, as regards the accretions and superfluities, to say

the least of them (of which the gravest is Mariolatry), of her Roman

Sister. On the other hand they _are_ sisters.”

 

He loved the name of “Catholic,” and resented the somewhat arrogant

claim to a monopoly in that beautiful word by the Church of Rome,

and if one of his own congregation used it in this restricted sense,

he never failed, gently but firmly, to make the correction “Roman

Catholic.” His own Churchmanship he would probably have described

as that of an Anglican Catholic to which, while agreeing, I may add

that he was, at one and the same time, of the Sacerdotal and of the

Evangelical Schools.

 

Stone’s sacerdotalism, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, was not

of a “priestly” order, and “priest” was perhaps the last word which

anyone who did not know him to be a clergyman would have used of him,

or by which his personality would by a stranger have been described.

A Sacerdotalist he undoubtedly was in the sense of holding firmly by

apostolical succession; but to me he seemed a Sacerdotalist chiefly

in the taking of his sacred office sacredly. Nor to this day, and

for all his sacerdotalism, am I sure which of the two he placed the

higher--the priesthood or the people. None could have held more

firmly than he that a priest is consecrated of God. None could have

been more entirely convinced that the priesthood is consecrated

by, and exists only by, and for, the people. He was, if anything,

more of a congregationalist--using the word apart from its purely

denominational meaning--than are the majority of ministers of that

denomination themselves. The congregational character of the service

at his church was, next to reverence, the outstanding feature. The

congregation were as much in evidence throughout as the clergy.

They repeated aloud every prayer for which there was precedent, or

authority for so doing, instead of the prayer being offered, as in

most churches, only by one of the clergy.

 

So, too, with the musical service. There was no anthem, and so far

from the burden of the singing resting upon the choir, Stone often

announced a hymn thus: “The congregation alone singing all except

the first and last verses.” More “hearty” congregational singing

than at his church I have never heard outside the Metropolitan

Tabernacle (unlovely name for a Christian Church!) when under that

great preacher and true minister of God, Charles Haddon Spurgeon,

five thousand voices unaccompanied by organ or any other musical

instrument joined in singing the Old Hundredth. High Churchman as

doctrinally Stone was, he was not a Ritualist. Incense and vestments

were never used in any church of his, and though his people turned

naturally to him for help and advice in trouble, “Confessions,”

in the accepted sense of the word, were unknown. He was never in

conflict with his Bishop, or the other ecclesiastical authorities, if

only for the reason that his loyalty and his fine sense of discipline

made him constitutionally incapable of breaking the law. He knelt

reverently in prayer before and after Consecration, and at other

times, but genuflexions and ceremonious and constant bowing to the

altar on the part of the celebrant, his assistants and the choir,

were absent from the service for which he was responsible.

 

On one slight but significant act of reverential ritual he, however,

laid stress. Whenever, in church or out of church, Stone spoke or

heard spoken the name of our Lord, he never failed, no matter where

or with whom he was, reverently, even if unnoticeably, slightly to

bow his head. “God the Father and God the Holy Ghost,” I once heard

him say, “no man has ever seen. But God, the Son, for our sakes,

stooped to become Man, and to be seen of men. For that reason, a

reason surely which should make us more, not less loving and adoring,

some have doubted or denied His Godhead. Hence when I hear that Holy

Name, I incline my head in adoring worship, as a protest if you

like against the base ingratitude which--because for our sakes He

stooped to become Man--would deny that He is more than man, and in

acknowledgment of Him as my Redeemer, my Lord and my God.” He was

indeed so entirely a poet that no word or name, which stood for that

which he revered, was ever by him lightly uttered or used. Between

his mother and himself--his father died either just before, or soon

after, I came to know the son, and I never saw the two together,

though I know that their relationship was ideal--existed the most

beautiful love and devotion, and if only for her sake, the very

word “mother” was consecrate upon his lips. Four times only is the

halo seen around the head of mortal. Around the head of a little

soul newly come from God, there is seen the rainbow-hued halo of

childhood; around the head of lad or maiden, man or woman, who, in

love’s supreme and sacred season, is lifted nearest to God, there

radiates the rose-coloured halo of love; around the head of those

who have newly gone to God, glows the purple-royal halo of death; and

around the head of a young mother, fondling her first-born, shines out the white and sacred halo of motherhood.