Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

by Harold Begbie

The dark tapestried room, the carved ceiling, the heavy furniture, the embrasured windows, the whole sombre magnificence of the historic setting, quiet, almost somnolent, with the enduring memories of Cuthbert Tunstall and Butler, Lightfoot and Westcott, add a most telling vivacity to the slim and dominating figure of this boylike bishop, who is so athletic in the use of his intellect and so happy in every thesis he sets himself to establish.

It is an equally memorable sight to see him in his castle at Bishop Auckland in the rôle of host, entertaining people of intelligence with the history of the place, showing the pictures and the chapel, exhibiting curious relics of the past—a restless and energetic figure, holding its own in effectiveness against men of greater stature and more commanding presence by an inward force which has something of the tang of a twitching bow-string.

So much energy would suggest a source of almost inexhaustible power. But that is perhaps the greatest disappointment of all in the Bishop's psychology. In the case of Dr. Inge one is very conscious of a rich and deep background, a background of mysticism, from which the intellect emerges with slow emphasis to play its part on the world's stage. In the case of Bishop Ryle one is conscious behind the pleasant, courtierlike, and scholarly manner of a background of very wholesome and unquestioning moral earnestness. But in Dr. Henson one is conscious of nothing behind the intellect but intellect itself, an intellect which has absorbed his spiritual life into itself and will permit no other tenant of his mind to divert attention for a single moment from its luminous brilliance, its perfection of mechanism.

One may be quite wrong, of course; one can speak only of the impression which he makes upon oneself and perhaps a few of one's friends; but it would almost seem as if he had ever regarded Christianity as a thesis to be argued, not a religion to be preached, a principle to be enunciated, not a practice to be extended, a tradition to be maintained, not a passion to be communicated.

Yet his sermons, which a great Anglo-Catholic declared to me with a mocking mordancy to be full of "edification," do often enter that region of religion which seems to demand an appeal to the emotions; moreover, it is not to be thought for a moment that the Bishop is not deeply concerned with all moral questions, that he is in the least degree indifferent to the high importance of conduct. But for myself these excursions, earnest and well-intentioned as they are, proclaim rather the social energy of the good citizen than the fervent zeal of an apostle on fire with his Master's message. The evangelicalism of the Bishop has taken, as it were, the cast of politics, and he enters the pulpit of Christ to proclaim the reasonableness of the moral law with the alacrity of the lecturer.

This is what makes him so interesting a study for those curious about the workings of religious psychology. Here is a thoroughly good man, as fearless and upright as any man in the kingdom, a figure among scholars, a power among organisers, a very able, sincere, and trenchant personality, who has thrown the whole weight of all he has to give on the side of Christianity, but who, for some reason, in despite of all his hard work and unquestionable earnestness, does not convey any idea of the attraction of Christ.

It makes one doubt, not that the Bishop has reserved his feelings for another affection, but whether he has any feelings to bestow. One thinks that he has drawn up and concentrated so effectually all the forces of his personality into the intellect that it is now impossible for him to see religion except as an intellectual problem. One thinks, too, that he has never dreamed of converting other people to his views, but only of arguing them out of theirs. Yet, after all, there are more ways of converting the world than beating a drum.

I am certain, however, that he could easier convince a socialistic collier or a communistic iron-moulder of the absurdity of his economics than persuade either the one or the other of the spiritual satisfaction of his own religion. Perhaps religion presents itself to the Bishop, as it does to a great number of other people, as a consecration of moral law, and clearly moral law is something to be established by reason, not commended by appeals to the sentiments; not for one moment, all the same, would he countenance the famous cynicism of Gibbon—"The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful"—for no man sees more clearly the permanent need of religion in the human spirit, and no man is more sincerely convinced of the truth of the Christian religion. But he brings to religion, as I think, only his intellect, and so he has intellectualised its ethic, and has left its deepest meaning to those who possess, what he has either always lacked or has forfeited in his intellectual discipleship, the qualities of mysticism.

One might almost say that he has intellectualised the Sermon on the Mount, dissected the Prodigal Son as a study in psychology, and taken the heart out of the Fourth Gospel.

His usefulness, however, is of a high order. With the sole exception of Dean Inge, no front bench Churchman has displayed a more admirable courage in confronting democracy and challenging its Materialistic politics. Moreover, although he modestly doubts his effectiveness as a public speaker, he has shown an acute judgment in these attacks which has not been lost upon the steadier minds in the Labour world of the north. Perhaps he has done as much as any man up there to convince an embittered and disillusioned proletariat that it must accept the inevitable rulings of economic law.