DEAN CHURCH

[Richard William Church was born 25th April 1815, a nephew of the Sir Richard Church who led the Greeks in the war of Liberation. His youth was spent in Italy, but at thirteen years old he went to a school near Bristol, from which he passed to Oxford. He took a first class in 1836, and two years subsequently was elected to an Oriel fellowship, at a time when Keble, Newman, and Hurrell Froude were Fellows of the College. He signalised his proctorship by vetoing in Convocation the proposal to censure Tract 90. While in Oxford he wrote several essays for the British Critic, notably one on Anselm, and continued to write for it when, after Newman's secession, it became the Christian Remembrancer. He was one of the founders of the Guardian, to which he frequently contributed, as well as to the Saturday Review. In 1853 he married, and retired to the small country living of Whatley in Somerset, refusing every more public appointment offered him, until in 1871 he accepted, after much pressure, the Deanery of St. Paul's, which he held till his death (9th December 1890). His works comprise a volume of essays collected in 1854, including that on Dante, since published separately; lives of St. Anselm (1870), Spenser (1879), and Bacon (1884), an essay on Wordsworth in Ward's Poets (1887), a history of the Oxford movement (1891), and various volumes of sermons.]

OF no modern writer is the saying so obviously true as of Church, that the style is the man. What interests us far more than any particular page in his writings is the personality behind them, a personality concealed rather than obtruded, but plainly individual and full of charm. His peculiar note is a melancholy compounded of many simples, and including those of the scholar, the divine, the traveller, and the accomplished gentleman. He was a student at once of books and of men. Born at Lisbon and bred in Italy, the son of an English merchant of cosmopolitan business and interests, by a lady of German extraction, he was by nature and inclination sealed of the tribe of the wise Ithacan, who knew the cities and ways of men. Hence he was never trammelled by those insular prejudices which surprise us in so many of the religious leaders of his time. Moreover his paternal

grandparents were both Quakers; and this fact, while it would still further broaden and deepen his sympathies, may account also for that peculiar vein of quietism and humility which distinguished him; a love of retirement and aversion from great place, in which he recalled his great predecessor at St. Paul's, Dean Colet, whose favourite motto, Si vis divinus esse, late ut Deus, Church might well have adopted for his own.

The note then of Church's writing is, as we should expect, a reflective note, a note of moderation and wide sympathy. His best work consists of critical studies of Anselm, Dante, Spenser, and Bacon. He was gifted with considerable historical insight and historical imagination, and some of his shorter studies, such as those on early Ottoman history, and the court of Leo X., are admirable specimens of their class. In theology his interest was in moral rather than doctrinal or philosophical questions; his book on Anselm, for instance, ignores almost altogether the philosophical treatises, and his sermons before the Universities or at St. Paul's were always upon such topics as "Civilisation and Religion," "Human Life and its Conditions," "The Discipline of the Christian Character," subjects which required a large and clear outlook, a mind versed in facts more than theories, and a knowledge of historical perspective. His style, properly so called, may be defined as in the best sense academic; it is periodic in structure, correct in syntax, and harmonious in flow and cadence. It is not hard to trace in it the influence of Newman; the qualities which Church had in common or by contact with Newman, candour, lucidity, and precision, are reflected in his style; amongst smaller points of resemblance may be noted the occasional startling use of very familiar phrases; but it lacks Newman's extraordinary flexibility and ease. defect is the defect of the academic style, a tendency to become dry; and the defect of excessive moderation, a tendency to become tame. Further, the periods are not always well managed, the principle of suspense is too freely used, or, on the other hand, the paragraphs run to seed. But when at its best, the style is vigorous and vivid, and at no time is it without dignity.

H. C. BECHING.

Its

SPENSER

THE Faery Queen is the work of an unformed literature, the product of an unperfected art. English poetry, English language, in Spenser's nay Shakespeare's day, had much to learn, much to unlearn. They never, perhaps, have been stronger or richer, than in that marvellous burst of youth, with all its freedom of invention, of observation, of reflection. But they had not that which only the experience and practice of eventful centuries could give them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time. It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognise, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always limited and imperfect. (From Spenser.)

ANSELM

ANSELM had won a great victory. What was gained by it?

It was, of course, directly and outwardly, the victory of a cause

which has never been popular in England; it renewed and strengthened the ties which connected England with that great centre of Christendom, where justice and corruption, high aims and the vilest rapacity and fraud, undeniable majesty and undeniable hollowness, were then, as they have ever been, so strangely and inextricably combined. Anselm's victory, with its circumstances, was one of the steps, and a very important one, which made Rome more powerful in England: even with the profound and undoubting beliefs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that did not recommend it to the sympathy of Englishmen; it is not likely to do so now. But those who judge of events not merely by the light of what has happened since, and of what, perhaps, have been their direct consequences, but by the conditions of the times when they happened, ought to ask themselves before they regret such a victory as an evil, what would have come to pass if, in days like those of William the Red and his brother, with the king's clerical family as a nursery for bishops, and with clerks like Ralph Flambard or Gerard of York, or even William Warelwast, for rulers of the Church, the king and his party had triumphed, and the claims founded on the "usages" to the submission of the Church and the unreserved obedience of the bishops had prevailed without check or counterpoise? Would a feudalised clergy, isolated and subservient, have done better for religion, for justice, for liberty, for resistance to arbitrary will, for law, for progress, than a clergy connected with the rest of Christendom; sharing for good, and also, no doubt, for evil, in its general movement and fortunes, and bound by strong and real ties not only to England, but to what was then, after all, the school and focus of religious activity and effort, as well as the seat of an encroaching and usurping centralisation, the Roman Church? Men must do what they can in their own day against what are the evils and dangers of their own day; they must use against them the helps and remedies which their own day gives. There was in those times no question of what we now put all our trust in, the power of the law; the growth of our long histories and hard experiences, and of the prolonged thought of the greatest intellects of many generations. The power which presented itself to men in those days as the help of right against might, the refuge and protector of the weak against the strong, the place where reason might make its appeal against will and custom, where liberty was welcomed and honoured, where it was

a familiar and stirring household word, was not the law and its judgment-seats, but the Church, with its authority concentrated and represented in the Pope. That belief was just as much a genuine and natural growth of the age, as the belief which had also grown up about kings as embodying the power of the nation; that it was abused by tyranny or weakness was no more felt to be an argument against the one than against the other. The question which men like Anselm asked themselves was, how best they could restrain wrong, and counteract what were the plainly evil and dangerous tendencies round them. He did so by throwing himself on the spiritual power behind him, which all in his times acknowledged greater than any power in this world. What else could any man in his struggle against tyranny and vice have done? What better, what more natural course could any man have taken, earnest in his belief of the paramount authority of spiritual things over material, and of reason over force; earnest in his longing for reformation and improvement? The central power of the Pope, which Anselm strengthened, grew rapidly with the growth and advance of the times: it grew to be abused; it usurped on the powers to which it was the counterpoise; it threatened, as they had threatened, to absorb all rights of sovereignty, all national and personal claims to independence and freedom; it had, in its turn, to be resisted, restrained, at last in England expelled. It went through the usual course of successful power in human hands. But this is no reason why at the time it should not have been the best, perhaps, even the only defence of the greatest interests of mankind against the immediate pressure of the tyrannies and selfishness of the time. If anything else could then have taken its place in those days, the history of Europe has not disclosed it.

And if nothing else had been gained, or if, when he was gone, the tide of new things-new disputes, new failures, new abuses and corruptions-flowed over his work, breaking it up and making it useless or harmful, this at least was gained, which was more lasting the example of a man in the highest places of the world who, when a great principle seemed entrusted to him, was true to it, and accepted all tasks, all disappointments, all humiliations in its service. The liberty of God's Church, obedience to its law and its divinely-appointed chief, this was the cause for which Anselm believed himself called to do his best. And he was not