In July 1873, I find the first reference to Frederick Charrington in a letter written by the young man of seventeen from Harrow. He had already made Mr. Charrington's acquaintance, who was six years his senior, in or about the year 1871, when Mr. Charrington was on a walking tour in Aberdeenshire, and was invited by Lord Kintore to Keith Hall. In later years, when Lord Kintore had passed to his rest in 1880, Keith-Falconer wrote to Mr. E. H. Kerwin, the secretary of the Tower Hamlets Mission: "It is pleasant to me to reflect that it was my father who first introduced me to Charrington and his work, and that he so cordially supported the Tower Hamlets Mission. I hope that his sudden departure may be a means of blessing to the careless, perhaps to some who heard him speak in the Great Assembly Hall."
The following is part of the letter I have referred to, written during the closing days of Keith-Falconer's life.
"Charrington sent me a book yesterday which I have read. It is called Following Fully ... about a man who works among the cholera people in London, so hard that he at length succumbs and dies. But every page is full of Jesus Christ, so that I liked it. And I like Charrington, because he is quite devoted to Him, and has really given up all for His sake. I must go and do the same soon; how, I do not know."
There is another letter extant which was written from Mr. Charrington's house upon Stepney Green, towards the end of that same year.
It states that "after dinner we went the rounds to inspect the tent for preaching, and Charrington lent it to a little missionary to hold a midnight meeting in on Thursday. We also visited the Mission Hall, where they were making a pool for baptising people in.... In the evening a well-attended meeting at the tent; foul air. After the meeting the speakers were Dr. Sharpe, an old but very energetic and godly Scotchman, broad accent, a soldier from Wellington Barracks and Mr. Kerwin. We went to have some tea and then to the hospital to see a man supposed to be dying, but found to be recovering. I have lots to do here. I did not get to bed till nearly one o'clock, having been up nineteen hours. We visited the Boys' Homes, which I think a capital place. The dormitaries were perfect; the ventilation, cleanliness and comfort, could not have been better looked after."
At the end of the summer term of 1873, Keith-Falconer finally left Harrow, it being decided he should spend the last year before entering Cambridge with a tutor.
Even at this early age, the friendship between the two young men had become fixed and immutable. The work in the East End to which Mr. Charrington was now so fully committed, and was carrying out with such success and blessing, was one which irresistibly appealed to Lord Kintore's son. The needs, spiritual and other, of that part of London were, and are, so great as to force attention from the most casual observer. And it was what Mr. Charrington had seen at the very beginning of his career, what he was one of the first evangelists to realise, that thoroughly coincided with Keith-Falconer's frame of mind. Charrington made it as the very basis of his work, that all attempts should proceed uniformly throughout on what he justly felt was the true principle of civilising by Christianising. Mr. Charrington has never been one of those—and was not then—who start with the idea that the religious life comes more readily when the material conditions of life are improved. He knew, of course, that there would often be great material need, but in such cases he saw his duty as a teacher of the Gospel perfectly clear. He would not, of course, offer Christian teaching to men and women in such dire bodily need that they were unable to accept it, without making any effort to meet those needs. But, on the other hand, he would not insist on first civilising in every possible way save by religion—to attempt to educate the masses by art, general education, and so forth—and then, and only then, allow religion to be brought to bear and come into their lives.
In due course Mr. Keith-Falconer proceeded to Cambridge. A don of that University, speaking of him as he was at this period, and, indeed, he altered but little from this time to the end of his short life, says—
"His appearance at this time, his manner, his tastes, were all strikingly like what they were in later times. He had a remarkably tall, well-shaped figure, whose symmetry seemed to take off from his height of six feet three inches. Physically very strong he certainly was, in one sense, or his wonderful feats of athletic endeavour would have been impossible. Yet, for all those feats, which were partly due, no doubt, to the sustaining power of a strong will, he could not really be called robust.
"His kindly voice and genial smile will live in the recollection of his friends; like good Bishop Hacket of Lichfield, he might have taken as his motto, 'Serve God and be cheerful.' Side by side, however, with his geniality, there was in Keith-Falconer at all times the most perfect and, so to speak, transparent simplicity. Never was a character more free from any alloy of insincerity or meanness. No undertone of veiled unkindness, or jealousy, or selfishness, found place in his conversation. From the most absolute truthfulness he would never waver; his frank, open speech was genuine, the unmixed outcome of his feelings.
"A certain slight, very slight, deafness in one ear made him at times seem absent to those who did not know this, and unknowingly had sat or walked on the wrong side.
"A characteristic habit of his seemed now and then to give a certain degree of irrelevance in his remarks. Sometimes, when in conversation on a topic which interested him, he would, after remaining silent for a short time, join again in the conversation with a remark not altogether germane to the point at issue. He had been following out a train of thought suggested by some passing remark, and after working out the idea on his own lines, as far as it would go, made his comment on the result. Yet whenever the conversation had to do with the interests or needs of those to whom he was speaking, no one could throw himself more completely, heart and mind, into the matter. Talk for talking's sake he cordially abhorred, that talk which is simply made as though silence were necessarily a bad thing in itself.
"This interest in widely different topics of conversation was not, however, simply the result of mingled good-nature and courtesy, a mere complaisance, where it was but a careless good-nature that saved the courtesy from hollowness. Far from it. No one who knew Keith-Falconer well, needs to be told how thoroughly, how constantly, and in what varying ways, he could make the business or cause of another his own; whether it were a friend in need of help, from the most trifling to the most momentous matters, or the absolute stranger whom apparent chance had sent across his path.
"Still, with all this, his kindliness was by no means one lacking in its proper counterpoise of discretion; his strong, clear-headed, Scotch common-sense was constantly manifest, even in his schemes of beneficence. Yet even thus it must be remembered that his was a character in which the warm heart was guided in its action by the clear head, not one in which the clear head did but allow itself to be swayed more or less by the loving heart. Love was the dominant power, discretion the corrective influence."
Mr. Charrington used to visit his friend at the University, and it was there, as Mr. Richardson has informed me, that the evangelist obtained a nickname which stuck to him for a long time. Special open-air services used to be held upon "Parker's Piece" in the University city, and on one occasion Keith-Falconer got his "gyp," as the men-servants are called at Cambridge, to come and join in the meeting. At the close Mr. Charrington was in the habit of speaking to those who had attended, and in earnest expostulation with this man, not knowing who he was, he said to him, "Down on your knees." After that, Charrington was always known—in the University city, at any rate—as "Doyk."