Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

by Harold Begbie

It is not easy for anyone with profound sympathy to believe that individual Partingtons can sweep back with their little mops of beneficence and philanthropy the Atlantic Ocean of sin, suffering, and despair which floods in to the shores of our industrialism—at high tide nearly swamping its prosperity, and at low tide leaving all its ugliness, squalor, and despairing hopelessness bare to the eye of heaven.

Miss Royden looked out for something with a wider sweep, and in the year 1908 joined the Women's Suffrage Movement. It was her hope, her conviction, that woman's influence in politics might have a cleansing effect in the national life. She became an advocate of this great Movement, but an advocate who always based her argument on religious grounds. She had no delusions about materialistic politics. Her whole effort was to spiritualise the public life of England.

Here she made a discovery—a discovery of great moment to her subsequent career. She discovered that many came to her meetings, and sought personal interviews or written correspondence with her afterwards, who were not greatly interested in the franchise, but who were interested, in some tragic cases poignantly interested, in spiritual enfranchisement. Life revealed itself to her as a struggle between the higher and lower nature, a conflict in the will between good and evil. She was at the heart of evolution.

It became evident to Miss Royden that she had discovered for herself both a constituency and a church. Some years after making this discovery she abandoned all other work, and ever since, first at the City Temple and now at the Guildhouse in Eccleston Square, has been one of the most effective advocates in this country of personal religion.

She does not impress one by the force of her intellect, but rather by the force of her humanity. You take it for granted that she is a scholar; you are aware of her intellectual gifts, I mean, only as you are aware of her breeding. The main impression she makes is one of full humanity, humanity at its best, humanity that is pure but not self-righteous, charitable but not sentimental, just but not hard, true but not mechanical in consistency, frank but not gushing. Out of all this come two things, the sense of two realisms, the realism of her political faith, and the realism of her religious faith. You are aware that she feels the sufferings and the deprivations of the oppressed in her own blood, and feels the power, the presence, and the divinity of Christ in her own soul.

It is a grateful experience to sit with this woman, who is so like the best of men but is so manifestly the staunchest of women. Her face reveals the force of her emotions, her voice, which is musical and persuasive, the depth of her compassion. In her sitting-room, which is almost a study and nearly an office, hangs a portrait of Newman, and a prie-Dieu stands against one of the walls half-hidden by bookshelves. She is one of the few very busy people I have known who give one no feeling of an inward commotion.

Apart from her natural eloquence and her unmistakable sincerity, apart even from the attractive fullness of her humanity, I think the notable success of her preaching is to be attributed to a single reason, quite outside any such considerations. It is a reason of great importance to the modern student of religious psychology. Miss Royden preaches Christ as a Power.

To others she leaves the esoteric aspects of religion, and the ceremonial of worship, and the difficulties of theology, and the mechanism of parochial organisation. Her mission, as she receives it, is to preach to people who are unwilling and suffering victims of sin, or who are tortured by theological indecision, that Christ is a Power, a Power that works miracles, a Power that can change the habits of a lifetime, perhaps the very tissues of a poisoned body, and can give both peace and guidance to the soul that is dragged this way and that.

One may be pardoned for remarking that this is a rather unusual form of preaching in any of the respectable churches. Christianity as a unique power in the world, a power which transfigures human life, which tears habitude up by the roots, and which gives new strength to the will, new eyes to the soul, and a new reality to the understanding; this, strange to say, is an unusual, perhaps an unpopular subject of clerical discourse. It is Miss Royden's insistent contribution to modern theology.

She tells me that so far as her own experience goes, humanity does not seem to be troubled by intellectual doubts. She is inclined to think that it is even sick of such discussions, and is apt to describe them roughly and impatiently as "mere talk." Humanity, as she sees it, is immersed in the incessant struggle of moral evolution.