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.