Tales of English Minsters: St. Paul's

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

And there was something else, I think, which must have made him very happy towards the close of his life. In those days people were not above taking bribes—that is, they would take money, let us say, from a timber merchant, and promise that they would use his timber, whether it was good or bad; or from a stonemason, and use his stones, no matter how badly they were hewn. But Wren had never done this; his hands were clean, and he left such a splendid name for uprightness and honesty behind him that after his death someone wrote of him, ‘In a corrupt age, all testimonies leave him spotless.’

Now let us go inside the Cathedral, and walk round it, although it is so full of monuments that it is impossible to tell you the story of each.

As we look at them we realize that St. Paul’s still keeps its character of the Citizens’ Church.

In Westminster Abbey, Kings, and poets, and writers lie buried, or have monuments put up to their memory, but here, in St. Paul’s, most of the monuments are those of national heroes, of men who have lived and died for the Empire.

We will just look at one or two. If, as we walk up the nave, we keep to our right hand, we come, on the north side, to a recumbent statue of bronze, and we are almost certain to find one or two people standing looking at it, and perhaps someone has laid a tiny bunch of flowers against the slab on which the figure rests. For this is the monument erected to General Gordon, and there is no man who has died in recent years whose memory is held more in honour by the people of England. For he died in the attempt to save women and children from deadly peril; and these poor people were not English—they had not even white skins—but were Soudanese, who lived in far-away Khartoum. I expect that most of you have read the life of this great man, but for the sake of those who have not, I will tell you a little about him. To begin with, he was what we call ‘unique’—that is, there is no one else who is quite like him, and no one can read the story of his life without thinking of two words, ‘Hero’ and ‘Saint.’

Somehow he reminds us of a strong climber, who spends his days toiling up a great mountain, and always getting higher and higher, and nearer and nearer Heaven, while most of us are content to remain down in the valley, where life is not so hard, but where the air is less pure, and the roads are dusty.

And just as we read in the old stories about heroes having one possession that kept them strong, such as a magic sword, or shield, or helmet, so we can clearly see one thing in General Gordon’s life that made him what he was—something that enabled him to be brave, and chivalrous, and modest; to care absolutely nothing about praise, or blame, or reward, or even money (the thing that so many people care so much about)—and that one thing was absolute faith in God and in God’s Providence.

Most of us live our lives as something that belongs to ourselves; and we make our own plans, and choose our own careers, and we think twice before we do this or that, trying to see what the consequences of our act will be.

To General Gordon life was simply a time that was given to him to do God’s will—and he was certain that whatever came to him was God’s will—so it was all the same to him whether the days brought joy or sorrow, praise or blame, riches or poverty, life or death.

He was a good soldier of the Queen—for Queen Victoria was living then—but he was also a good soldier of Jesus Christ; perhaps one of the best that has ever enlisted in that great army, for he took his orders, and carried them out to the best of his power, never questioning, never grumbling, quite certain, whatever the consequences turned out to be, that everything was right.