Part 9 (1/2)
Perhaps it may be permitted to mention two events in her life which help one to understand how it is she has come to play this masculine and feminine part in public life.
One day, a day of torrential rain, when she was a girl living in her father's house in Ches.h.i.+re, she and her sister saw a carriage and pair coming through the park towards the house. The coachman and footman on the box were soaking wet, and kept their heads down to avoid the sting of the rain in their eyes. The horses were streaming with rain and the carriage might have been a watercart.
When the caller, a rich lady, arrived in the drawing-room, polite wonder was expressed at her boldness in coming out on such a dreadful day. She seemed surprised. ”Oh, but I came in a closed carriage,” she explained.
This innocent remark opened the eyes of Miss Royden to the obliquity of vision which is wrought, all unconsciously in many cases, by the power of selfishness. The condition of her coachman and footman had never for a moment presented itself to the lady's mind. Miss Royden made acquaintance with righteous indignation. She became a reformer, and something of a vehement reformer.
The drenched carriage coming through a splash of rain to her home will remain for ever in her mind as an image of that spirit of selfishness which in its manifold and subtle workings wrecks the beauty of human existence.
Miss Royden, it should be said, had been prepared by a long experience of pain to feel sympathy with the sufferings of other people. Her mind had been lamentably ploughed up ever since the dawn of memory to receive the divine grain of compa.s.sion.
At birth both her hips were dislocated, and lameness has been her lot through life. Such was her spirit, however, that this saddening and serious affliction, d.o.g.g.i.ng her days and nights with pain, seldom prevented her from joining in the vigorous games and sports of the Royden family. She was something of a boy even in those days, and pluck was the very centre of her science of existence.
The religion of her parents suggested to her mind that this suffering had been sent by G.o.d. She accepted the perilous suggestion, but never confronted it. It neither puffed her up with spiritual pride nor created in her mind bitter thoughts of a paltry and detestable Deity. A pagan stoicism helped her to bear her lot quite as much as, if not more than, the evangelicalism of Sir Thomas and Lady Royden. Moreover, she was too much in love with life to give her mind very seriously to the difficulties of theology. Even with a body which had to wrench itself along, one could swim and row, read and think, observe and wors.h.i.+p.
Her eldest brother went to Winchester and Magdalen College at Oxford; she to Cheltenham College and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. Education was an enthusiasm. Rivalry in scholars.h.i.+p was as greatly a part of that wholesome family life as rivalry in games. There was always a Socratic ”throwing of the ball” going on, both indoors and out. Miss Royden distinguished herself in the sphere of learning and in the sphere of sports.
At Oxford the last vestiges of her religion, or rather her parents'
religion, faded from her mind, without pain of any order, hardly with any consciousness. She devoted herself wholeheartedly to the schools. No longer did she imagine that G.o.d had sent her lameness. She ceased to think of Him.
But one day she heard a sermon which made her think of Jesus as a teacher, just as one thinks of Plato and Aristotle. She reflected that she really knew more of the teaching of Plato and Aristotle than she knew of Christ's teaching. This seemed to her an unsatisfactory state of things, and she set herself, as a student of philosophy, to study the teaching of Jesus. What had He said? Never mind whether He had founded this Church or that, what had He said? And what had been His science of life, His reading of the riddle?
This study, to which she brought a philosophic mind and a candid heart, convinced her that the teaching should be tried. It was, indeed, a teaching that asked men to prove it by trial. She decided to try it, and she tried it by reading, by meditation, and by prayer. The trial was a failure. But in this failure was a mystery. For the more she failed the more profoundly conscious she became of Christ as a Power. This feeling remained with her, and it grew stronger with time. The Christ who would not help her nevertheless tarried as a shadow haunting the background of her thoughts.
There was a secret in life which she had missed, a power which she had never used. Then came the second event to which I have referred. Miss Royden met a lady who had left the Church of England and joined the Quakers, seeking by this change to intensify her spiritual experience, seeking to make faith a deep personal reality in her life. This lady told Miss Royden the following experience:
One day, at a Quakers' meeting, she had earnestly ”besieged the Throne of Grace” during the silence of prayer, imploring G.o.d to manifest Himself to her spirit. So earnestly did she ”besiege the Throne of Grace” in this silent intercession of soul that at last she was physically exhausted and could frame no further words of entreaty. At that moment she heard a voice in her soul, and this voice said to her, ”Yes, I have something to say to you, _when you stop your shouting_.”
From this experience Miss Royden learned to see the tremendous difference between physical and spiritual silence. She cultivated, with the peace of soul which is the atmosphere of surrender and dependence, silence of spirit; and out of this silence came a faith against which the gates of h.e.l.l could not prevail; and out of that faith, winged by her earliest; sympathy with all suffering and all sorrow, came a desire to give herself up to the service of G.o.d. She had found the secret, she could use the power.
Her first step towards a life of service was joining a Women's Settlement in Liverpool, a city which has wealth enough to impress and gratify the disciples of Mr. Samuel Smiles, and slums enough to excite and infuriate the disciples of Karl Marx. Here Miss Royden worked for three years, serving her novitiate as it were in the ministry of mercy, a notable figure in the dark streets of Liverpool, that little eager body, with its dragging leg, its struggling hips, its head held high to look the whole world in the face on the chance, nay, but in the hope, that a bright smile from eyes as clear as day might do some poor devil a bit of good.
She brought to the slums of Liverpool the gay cheerfulness of a University woman, Oxford's particular brand of cheerfulness, and also a tenderness of sympathy and a graciousness of helpfulness which was the fine flower of deep, inward, silent, personal religion.
It is not easy for anyone with profound sympathy to believe that individual Partingtons can sweep back with their little mops of beneficence and philanthropy the Atlantic Ocean of sin, suffering, and despair which floods in to the sh.o.r.es of our industrialism--at high tide nearly swamping its prosperity, and at low tide leaving all its ugliness, squalor, and despairing hopelessness bare to the eye of heaven.
Miss Royden looked out for something with a wider sweep, and in the year 1908 joined the Women's Suffrage Movement. It was her hope, her conviction, that woman's influence in politics might have a cleansing effect in the national life. She became an advocate of this great Movement, but an advocate who always based her argument on religious grounds. She had no delusions about materialistic politics. Her whole effort was to spiritualise the public life of England.
Here she made a discovery--a discovery of great moment to her subsequent career. She discovered that many came to her meetings, and sought personal interviews or written correspondence with her afterwards, who were not greatly interested in the franchise, but who were interested, in some tragic cases poignantly interested, in spiritual enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. Life revealed itself to her as a struggle between the higher and lower nature, a conflict in the will between good and evil.
She was at the heart of evolution.
It became evident to Miss Royden that she had discovered for herself both a const.i.tuency and a church. Some years after making this discovery she abandoned all other work, and ever since, first at the City Temple and now at the Guildhouse in Eccleston Square, has been one of the most effective advocates in this country of personal religion.
She does not impress one by the force of her intellect, but rather by the force of her humanity. You take it for granted that she is a scholar; you are aware of her intellectual gifts, I mean, only as you are aware of her breeding. The main impression she makes is one of full humanity, humanity at its best, humanity that is pure but not self-righteous, charitable but not sentimental, just but not hard, true but not mechanical in consistency, frank but not gus.h.i.+ng. Out of all this come two things, the sense of two realisms, the realism of her political faith, and the realism of her religious faith. You are aware that she feels the sufferings and the deprivations of the oppressed in her own blood, and feels the power, the presence, and the divinity of Christ in her own soul.
It is a grateful experience to sit with this woman, who is so like the best of men but is so manifestly the staunchest of women. Her face reveals the force of her emotions, her voice, which is musical and persuasive, the depth of her compa.s.sion. In her sitting-room, which is almost a study and nearly an office, hangs a portrait of Newman, and a _prie-Dieu_ stands against one of the walls half-hidden by bookshelves.
She is one of the few very busy people I have known who give one no feeling of an inward commotion.