More admirably, I think, because more entirely, than any of the other men I have attempted to study, Dr. Davidson sums up the virtues of Anglicanism. He stands, first and foremost, for order, decency, and good temper. If he has a passion it is for the status quo. If he has a genius it is for compromise. Lord Morley, who knows him and respects him, describes him as "a man of broad mind, sagacious temper, steady and careful judgment, good knowledge of the workable strength of rival sections." Pre-eminently the Archbishop is a practical man.
I know not out of how many crises he has contrived, both as a fisher of men and a good shepherd, to lift the Church of England by hook or by crook.
When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad state of weakness. For long weeks together—once it was for a whole year—his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.
In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire. He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness, may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth, the greatest of all the Christian Churches—greater, more catholic, than Rome.
To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which only those immediately about him can properly appraise.
Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take a day off he spends it in bed.
His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ignoble idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable, have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of the English nation.
He gives most of us the feeling of a very able man of business, an ideal family solicitor; but there is a quite different side to this character. He is by no means a mystic, as that word is usually understood, but he is a man who deeply believes in the chief instrument of the mystic's spiritual life, that is to say, in prayer. He is not a saint, in the general acceptance of that term, but his whole life is devoted with an undeviating singleness of aim to effecting the chief ambition of the saint—a knowledge of God in the hearts and minds of men. Because he believes that the best method of achieving that consummation, having regard to the present level of human intelligence, is by moderate courses, one must not think that he is lukewarm in the cause of religion. With all the force of his clear and able mind, he believes in moderation. Anything that in the least degree savours of extravagance seems to him impolitic. He does not believe in sudden bursts of emotional energy; he believes in constant pressure.
In my intercourse with him I have found him eminently sane and judicial, cold towards excessive fervour, but not cold at all towards ardent faith, inclined perhaps to miss the cause of spiritual impatience, constitutionally averse from any understanding sympathy with religious ecstasy, but never self-satisfied, intolerant, or in the remotest fashion cynical. Always he expresses his views with modesty, and sometimes with healthy good-humour, disposed to take life cheerfully, never moved to mistake a molehill for a mountain, always quietly certain that he is on the right road, whatever critics may care to say about his pace.
It is perhaps unreasonable to expect height and depth where there is excessive breadth. The Archbishop might make a bad captain, but he could have few rivals as an umpire. He is an admirable judge if an indifferent advocate.