Part 16 (1/2)
CHAPTER XII
ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON
_Let us be flexible, dear Grace; let us be flexible!_--HENRY JAMES.
... _the Archbishop recalled both to the gravity of the issue_.--LORD MORLEY.
Because of his great place and his many merits, both of heart and head, and also because his career raises the question I desire to discuss in my Conclusion, I have left the Archbishop of Canterbury to the last of these brief studies in religious personality.
More admirably, I think, because more entirely, than any of the other men I have attempted to study, Dr. Davidson sums up the virtues of Anglicanism. He stands, first and foremost, for order, decency, and good temper. If he has a pa.s.sion it is for the _status quo_. If he has a genius it is for compromise. Lord Morley, who knows him and respects him, describes him as ”a man of broad mind, sagacious temper, steady and careful judgment, good knowledge of the workable strength of rival sections.” Pre-eminently the Archbishop is a practical man.
I know not out of how many crises he has contrived, both as a fisher of men and a good shepherd, to lift the Church of England by hook or by crook.
When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad state of weakness. For long weeks together--once it was for a whole year--his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.
In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire.
He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness, may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth, the greatest of all the Christian Churches--greater, more catholic, than Rome.
To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which only those immediately about him can properly appraise.
Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take a day off he spends it in bed.
His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ign.o.ble idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable, have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of the English nation.
He gives most of us the feeling of a very able man of business, an ideal family solicitor; but there is a quite different side to this character.
He is by no means a mystic, as that word is usually understood, but he is a man who deeply believes in the chief instrument of the mystic's spiritual life, that is to say, in prayer. He is not a saint, in the general acceptance of that term, but his whole life is devoted with an undeviating singleness of aim to effecting the chief ambition of the saint--a knowledge of G.o.d in the hearts and minds of men. Because he believes that the best method of achieving that consummation, having regard to the present level of human intelligence, is by moderate courses, one must not think that he is lukewarm in the cause of religion. With all the force of his clear and able mind, he believes in moderation. Anything that in the least degree savours of extravagance seems to him impolitic. He does not believe in sudden bursts of emotional energy; he believes in constant pressure.
In my intercourse with him I have found him eminently sane and judicial, cold towards excessive fervour, but not cold at all towards ardent faith, inclined perhaps to miss the cause of spiritual impatience, const.i.tutionally averse from any understanding sympathy with religious ecstasy, but never self-satisfied, intolerant, or in the remotest fas.h.i.+on cynical. Always he expresses his views with modesty, and sometimes with healthy good-humour, disposed to take life cheerfully, never moved to mistake a molehill for a mountain, always quietly certain that he is on the right road, whatever critics may care to say about his pace.
It is perhaps unreasonable to expect height and depth where there is excessive breadth. The Archbishop might make a bad captain, but he could have few rivals as an umpire. He is an admirable judge if an indifferent advocate.
His grave earnestness is balanced by a conviction that humour is not without a serious purpose. He looks upon life in the average, avoiding all abnormality, and he sees the average with a genial smile. He thoroughly appreciates the oddities of English character, and would ask with Gladstone, ”In what country except ours (as I know to have happened) would a Parish Ball have been got up in order to supply funds for a Parish Hea.r.s.e?”
His att.i.tude to the excitements and sensations of the pa.s.sing day may be gathered from a simple incident. During the most heady days of the War, that is to say, days when people made least use of their heads, I encountered him at the country-house of a well-known statesman. One morning, while we were being lined up for a photograph, the boar-hound of our host came and forced himself between the Archbishop and myself.
”What would the newspapers say,” exclaimed the Archbishop in my ear, ”if they knew that his name is--_Kaiser_!”
In this manner he regards all sensational excitement of every kind. When people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy, nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia.
Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the G.o.ds, has the serpent for his effigy. ”The Devil tempts the busy man,”
says a Turkish proverb, ”but the idle man tempts the Devil.”
One of those who has worked with the Archbishop for many years, although his views are of a rather extreme order and his temperament altogether of the excessive kind, said to me the other day, ”When Randall Davidson went to Canterbury, I told those who asked me what would be the result of his reign. He will leave the Church as he found it. I was wrong. He has done much more than that.” He went on to say that there was now a far greater charity between the different schools than existed at the beginning of the century, and that if unity had not been attained, at least disruption had been avoided.
One of the most eloquent and far-sighted of the Evangelicals puts the matter to me in this fas.h.i.+on: ”It is possible that fifty years hence men may ask whether he ought not to have been constructive; but for the present we, his contemporaries, must confess that it is wonderful how he keeps things together.”
”Pull yourself together!” was the admonition addressed to a somewhat hilarious undergraduate. ”But I haven't got a together,” he made answer.