VII
Upon one incident in my long friendship with Stone I look back with pain and sorrow. He came in late one night, just as the last post had brought me the news—I would not write of such things here except in so far as it bears upon my friend—that the whole edition of my first little book had been sold out.
To-day the writing of a book, if only because it may be the means of bringing influence to bear upon others, is, I am of opinion, an occupation to be followed diligently, conscientiously, and with pleasurable zest. None the less, as compared with what some men are doing in the way of direct personal service to God, to their King, their country and their fellow creatures, it seems to me an occupation too inactive to afford cause for congratulation that one is thus employed. But in those days I desired nothing more than to be a successful author, little imagining that success in authorship does not necessarily mean the making either of literature or of a man.
When Stone came in that night, so full was I of the great news, as I held it to be, about my book, that I must needs rush at him, as volubly and importantly to pour it all out, as if the fate of empires hung upon the issue. He had a genius for friendship, and heard me out patiently and gently to the end, to say: “I am so glad, so very glad, dear fellow, and congratulate you with all my heart,” or words to that effect. Then he broached the subject of his call, a matter of infinitely more importance than any news of mine. It did not concern himself, or I should, I hope, have acted differently, but a member of his congregation, unknown to me, whom Stone was trying to assist in a time of trouble and anxiety. So far as I remember I hastily promised the assistance for which he asked, but, when he essayed to speak further of the matter, I interrupted him rudely, once again and boastfully to speak of my book.
Stone so habitually suppressed it, that few suspected how great was his gift of satire. When he chose, or rather had he so chosen, he could so wing his satiric shaft as to pierce the thickest hide, and never was he more tempted to employ this “devil’s weapon” as he held it to be, than when irritated by vulgar boastfulness.
Looking back long years after upon this incident, I know that to no one could what happened that night be more irritating, and even objectionable, than to Stone. On the part of a friend, it was an affront to everything by which he held in our social code, a wound to his own pride of breeding and good manners. How sorely I must have tempted and irritated him, I now fully realise, yet his affection for the offender held back the stinging word, and neither then, nor at any other time in our long friendship, did I ever hear from him one reproachful or ungentle word. I recall his forbearance to me—a very young man when he was becoming middle-aged, and so might reasonably have spoken—on this particular occasion, an occasion which even now I cannot recall without shame. I recall a score of times when I grieved him by my apathy upon some question upon which he felt intensely, for Stone’s convictions were so positively held that he would readily have gone to the stake in defence of them, and that those he loved, and to whom he looked for sympathy, could be apathetic upon matters which he held to be of vital consequence, was to him a positive pain. I recall all these, and many other things in which I failed or wounded him by some indifference, some thoughtless act, or unconsidered word, and remembering that never once did he fail me by sympathy, interest, help or love withheld—I sicken at my own unworthiness, and at the thought of the sorry return I made for all his love and forbearance.
It is with relief that I turn to another incident in the early days of our friendship.
One night, in the eighties, when I was dining with Stone and his and my kind old friend, the Rev. Frederick Arnold, at St. Paul’s Vicarage, Haggerston, a maid brought in the last post. Stone asked permission to run through his letters, in case there was anything requiring an immediate answer. Over one he uttered an exclamation of glad and grateful surprise.
“Good news?” one of us asked.
“Very good,” said Stone, flushed and radiant. He hesitated a moment. Then, handing Mr. Arnold the letter, he said, “There is no reason why you two, one an old, and the other a young, but both true and dear friends of mine, should not see it.”
It was from the Bishop of London—I think Bishop Jackson, but of this I am not quite sure. In any case it was a very gracious letter. Upon Stone, the Bishop said, the mantle of John Keble had by virtue of his hymns, admittedly fallen. Thus far Stone had for some fifteen years given all his time, energies, and abilities to working among poor and uneducated folk in an East End parish, where practically the whole of the small stipend was swallowed up in church work and charities, and where Stone had no time or opportunity to do justice to his gifts as a writer. The Bishop was aware, he said, that Stone was fast wearing himself out, and could not go on much longer. Hence he had pleasure in putting before Stone the offer of preferment to a West End parish, where he would have an educated, intellectual, and appreciative congregation, as well as the leisure and the opportunity to devote his great gifts as poet and hymn-writer for the benefit of the church and the world.
It was a tempting offer, for much as Stone loved sport and travel he had hitherto had neither the time nor the money for anything more extended than a few weeks in Switzerland or in “God’s Infirmary” (as quoting George MacDonald he often called the country), generally on a visit to his old friend the Rev. Donald Carr, of Woolstaston Rectory, Salop. Moreover, though Stone grudged no service given to God or to his own congregation, he grieved sometimes that he had so little time to devote to hymn-writing and to literature, concerning which he had many projects. In a letter dated June 15, 1892, he had written to me, “I am up to my ears in work and behindhand because, if you please, I am in the thick of writing a religious novel. I am not really joking!”
But grateful as he was for the Bishop’s kind and fatherly offer, Stone declined it as, later on, he declined similar offers, including a Colonial Bishopric.
“I am not and I do not expect to be the man I was,” he said to Mr. Arnold and me that night, “but I ought to be, and am, thankful that, nervously constituted as I am, I have gone through fifteen years in the East End, out of twenty-three in the Ministry. When health and strength give out, when for my people’s sake I must let the work pass into younger and stronger hands, I will go. Till then, in Haggerston, where my heart is, and where the people whom I love are living, I must remain.”
And in Haggerston he remained working early in the morning and late in the night until 1890, when the collapse, alike of nerve and physical strength, came, and he had to resign—to be appointed by the Lord Chancellor to the comparatively easy living of All Hallows, London Wall.
But Stone was not the man to spare himself in his new sphere of labour. What the wrench of parting and the strain necessitated by sweeping aside the cobwebs, and by trying to warm into life the dry bones, as he put it, of a long-neglected City church cost him, may be gathered from the one and only sad letter I ever had from him. It is written from the house of his sister, Mrs. Boyd.
Woodside Lodge,
South Norwood Hill, S.E.,
Nov. 28, 1891.My dear Kernahan,
I have, in a very busy life, never passed through such a time of depression as in the last nine or ten months. In the Spring I left the old Parish of 21 years’ work and 31 years’ memories—and how I got through the next couple of months I scarcely know. Only by Grace of God. I went to Southend for a fortnight, but it was simply a ghastly time, I was ill in body and mind. Except for the faith which Tennyson describes in the case of Enoch Arden’s coming home, through which a man (believing in the Incarnation, and therefore in the Perfect Human Sympathy of God) cannot be “all unhappy,” I don’t know what would have become of me. I left behind me, you know how much—how many is represented by 537 communicants, nearly all of them my spiritual children, and I had before me, not a “howling wilderness” but a silent wilderness of the worst of the City churches. A howling wilderness would have stirred up the soldier’s blood that is in me—but the desolation which I felt so ill was like a winding sheet. You must come and see me at All Hallows, and while I show you the beautiful present, I will show you in actual fact some of the dry bones.
I need not tell you that I have had a great deal to do Haggerstonwards. And oh! my correspondence with my old children!
I hope this does not sound to you like complaint or self-pity. I only mean it as explanation—which would not be given in these terms, except to one very much (I know) of my own temperament. Indeed, there is no cause for anything but thankfulness. My nerves were too worn out for Haggerston any longer. My successor is one almost entirely after my own heart—my new parish is exactly one (nearest to Haggerston in the City) I wished for. The task of renovation, though it makes me a poor man for a year or two, has been very good by way of distraction and for the delight of making a garden out of such a wilderness of dry bones, and after another six or nine months I may be able to afford a curate, and, having no further special financial or parochial anxieties, be able to settle to some final literary work. Indeed, I am as I ought to be, very thankful.
So far most egotistically.
I am interested with my whole heart in what you tell me of yourself. Do come and see me, to tell more. I will promise to send you what I write, if you will undertake to do the same.
God bless you, dear friend.
Ever your most affectionate,
S. J. Stone.
The depression passed, and Stone recovered sufficiently to throw himself, heart and soul, and for some years, into his now memorable work among the “hands” employed in City warehouses, shops and factories. Once again it was for the poor, or for the comparatively poor that he toiled, and once again he spared himself in nothing. His letters (I have enough almost for a book) tell of the joy and contentment he found in the work, and of his thankfulness to God for what had been done.
But he had made the change from the heavier work at Haggerston too late, and even in the easier charge, which, in order that he might husband his failing strength and outworn energies had been found for him, he would not, or could not spare himself—with the result that, in the autumn of 1899, he had another breakdown. Meeting him unexpectedly one day on the Embankment, after not seeing him for some little time, I was inexpressibly shocked at the change. He told me that he had been feeling very ill for some weeks, and was then on his way to meet the friend who was accompanying him to see a specialist, and that I should, without delay, know the result of the examination which was to be made. Not many hours had passed before I had a letter. The malady, Stone said, was cancer, it was feared in a malignant form, and there must be an operation, and soon.
With all the old and infinite thought and tenderness for others, he gave me gently to understand that the case was not too hopeful—he was terribly run down, his heart was weak: he had overstrained it while at Oxford—and even should he survive the operation, there was small likelihood of recovery. Here is the conclusion of his letter:
Keep a quiet mind about me, dear friend. I have not so learned Christ that I make any real difference between life and death, but remember me before God.
Ever yours most affectionately,
S. J. Stone.
Scarcely a day of the months which followed was free from pain. Yet he wrote, “I live in a kind of thankful wonder that I should be so encompassed by the goodness of God and the lovingkindness of men.” To the end he retained all his old interests. He continued, in the brief respites from terrible bouts of pain, to attend the church of All Hallows, of which he was still rector, and to minister to his people, and even to follow, with intense patriotic interest, every event in the South African War.
The day preceding his death, Sunday, he was at All Hallows; and the very day of his passing he wrote, “I am in such pain that I can neither write nor dictate. At others I am just able to write ‘with mine own hand.’ But whether at the worst or at the best in a bodily state, spiritually I am not only in patience, but in joy of heart and soul.” Soon after came a brief space of unconsciousness and—the end.
So died one who was liker Christ than any other man or woman I have known. His love for his fellows was so passionate and so unselfish that, could he have taken upon himself, to save them from sin, sorrow, and suffering, a similar burden to that which his Lord and Master bore, he would not have hesitated—he would gladly have hastened—to make the sacrifice.
The mistakes he made were many, though I remember none that was not made from high motive, generous impulse, misplaced zeal, or childlike singleness of purpose, which to the last led him to credit others with truth, loyalty, honour, and sincerity, like to his own. In the beautiful hymn which he so loved, and with which he so often ended evensong, we read:
And none, O Lord, have perfect rest,
For none are wholly free from sin,
but if sin there was in Stone, as in all that is human, I can truly say that, in our twenty-five years’ intimate friendship, I saw in him no sign of anything approaching sin, other than—if sins they be—a noble anger and a lofty pride. To have loved, and to have been loved and trusted by him, was no less a high privilege than it was a high responsibility, for if any of us, who at some time of our lives, shared Stone’s interests and ideals, and were brought under the compelling power and inspiration of his personality, should hereafter come to forget what manner of man he was—should play false with, or altogether fall away, from those ideals, or be content to strive after any less noble standard of conduct and character than he set and attained—then heavy indeed must be our reckoning, in the day when for these, to whom much has been given, much will be required.
For Stone had something of the talismanic personality of his Master. Just as, without one spoken word—without more than a look—from the Christ the unclean were convicted of sin by the talisman of His purity, so all that was noblest, divinest and knightliest in man, all that was white-souled, selfless, tender, true, lofty, and lovely in womanhood, recognised something of itself in Stone, and in his presence all were at their highest and their best.
Nor was this due merely to what has been called a “magnetic personality.” That there are men and women who for good or for evil (it is just as likely to be for the latter as for the former) possess some magnetic or mesmeric power over others, I am, and from personal knowledge, aware. But Stone’s influence was neither mesmeric nor magnetic. It was by the unconscious spiritual alchemy of a soul so rare (I repeat and purposely near the end of this article what I said in the beginning) as to make possible the courage of a Cœur de Lion, the honour of a King Arthur or Sir Galahad—as to make possible even in a sense the sinlessness of Christ. To have known, if only once in a lifetime—and in spite of bitter disillusionments, of repeated betrayals on the part of some others—such a man as S. J. Stone, is in itself enough to keep sweet one’s faith in humanity, in immortality, and in God.
Some time before Stone’s death I had been much thrown into the company of a gifted and brilliant thinker and man of Science, who had very little belief—I will not say in the existence of a God, but at least in the existence of a God who takes thought for the welfare of mortals, and no belief whatever in existence after death. In our walks and conversations he had adduced many arguments in support of annihilation, which it was difficult to answer; and I remember that, when on the morning that Stone died, I stooped to press my lips to the forehead of the friend I loved and revered as I have loved and revered none other since nor shall again, it seemed for a moment as if the man of whom I have spoken as disbelieving in personal immortality, were, in spirit, at my elbow and whispering in my ear. “Look well upon your friend’s face!” the Voice seemed to say, “and you shall see written there: ‘Nobly done, bravely done, greatly done, if you will,’ but you shall also see written there, ‘Done and ended! done and ended—and for evermore!’” I remember, too, that it seemed as if some evil power, outside myself, were trying, by means of what hypnotists call “suggestion,” to compel me to see, upon the dead face, what that evil power wished me to see there.
For one moment, after the whispering of the words “Done and ended! done and ended—and for evermore,” I thought I saw something in the dead face that seemed dumbly to acquiesce in, and to endorse the tempter’s words, until another and very different voice (I have wondered sometimes whether it were not my friend’s) whispered to me, “If the friend whom you loved be indeed annihilated and has ceased to be—then the Eternal and Omnipotent God whom he, a man and a mortal, ever remembered has forgotten him, for annihilation means no more and no less than utterly to be forgotten of God. If that be so, if God can forget, if He can forget those who never forgot Him, then is that God less loving, less faithful, and less remembering than the mortal whom He has made. Can you, dare you, think this awful and unthinkable thing of the Living and Loving God in whom your friend so wholly trusted?”
And, looking upon the face of my friend, I saw written there, not only the august dignity, the lone and awful majesty of death, but also the rapture, the peace, the serenity, the triumph of one who staggers spent and bleeding but victorious from the battle, to hear himself acclaimed God’s soldier and Christ’s knight, and to kneel in wondering awe, in worshipping ecstasy, at the feet of his Saviour and his God.
And remembering what I saw written on the dead face of my friend, remembering the life he led and the God in whom he trusted, I have no fear that my own faith will fail me again in life or in death.
And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.
THE END