Gerald Eversley's Friendship: A Study in Real Life

by J. E. C. Welldon

In the stir and eagerness of the last days at St. Anselm’s Gerald Eversley had not much time for thought.

On the Saturday evening before the last Sunday Harry Venniker asked him if he were going to communion the next morning, and rather than excite suspicion of his spiritual state (though he somehow felt that he was acting a part) he answered Yes. The two friends knelt for the last time side by side in the memorial of the Divine Passion. There were very many communicants; the service was not over until nearly two o’clock.

The last Sunday evening service at the chapel at St. Anselm’s was always an impressive occasion. Who could look without emotion on such a multitude of young lives gathered for the last time in that place of holy memories and associations? So often had they worshipped together during their school lives. When would they all meet for worship again?

At all times the striking feature of a school service is its unity. A common parochial congregation is made up of diverse elements, the young and the aged, the rich and the poor, masters and servants, men, women, and little children; they meet, as it were, accidentally, their lives are various and separate, they are bound by no strong personal ties each to the other; and the preacher, if he appeals to one class from the pulpit, is necessarily oblivious or neglectful of another. Among the boys of the same great school it is not so; they are one in sentiment, tradition, association, life; the honour of each is the interest of all; they are trustees, the weakest as well as the strongest, of the name and fame of an institution greater than themselves, and in the congregation itself they are not one element out of many—they are all. And some of them are in the morning of their days as yet unclouded, and some in the chequered midway of school life, and some on the very verge of the great change, going forth into the world; and there are those who will make shipwreck of faith or morals in after-days, or will be wasted with suffering, or will die heroic deaths in far-off lands, and those who will rule senates or parliaments, or expand the confines of learning, or mitigate the sufferings of the poor, and those, too, who will lead the forlorn hopes of philanthropy and plant the Cross where the tortured slave kneels down to die.

It is not hard to believe that such thoughts as these filled Dr. Pearson’s mind as he looked in silence upon that congregation before beginning his sermon. He chose as his text the words, ‘Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men.’ A profound stillness reigned in the chapel while he spoke. Even in dark days afterwards, Gerald Eversley did not forget that sermon. At two or three points of the sermon some boys sitting on the front benches drew their handkerchiefs from their pockets, then hastily thrust them back again, as if ashamed of themselves.

It is not possible to give an abstract of the sermon. Some few phrases of it Gerald seems to have written down the same evening; they were probably such as struck him most. Dr. Pearson began by speaking of the intimacy of his own relation to the school. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘except, perhaps, your parents, can have the same interest in any one of you—no one the same interest in you all—as I have had.’ There must have been some direct reference to the achievements, perhaps also to the failures and shortcomings, of the school; for he spoke of the common corporate life at St. Anselm’s, ‘a life in which the honour of each one of us has been the honour of all, and if any shame has fallen upon any one of us, even the humblest, we have felt it, every one, as his own personal stain.’ And then, addressing the boys who were so soon about to leave the school, he told them that it was for them, when the enforced discipline of school life should come to an end, to see that their lives were ever controlled and inspired by the more sacred, because more arduous, self-discipline that Christ taught. He bade them remember that it was harder to live nobly than to die nobly; and he begged emphatically that, if they knew any boy who was coming back to school to be in danger of going wrong, they would not—even if in the past they had done wrong themselves—leave St. Anselm’s without asking him to give it up. The last few sentences of his sermon were somewhat as these: ‘I have spoken to you, my dear boys, many a time in this sacred place. To some of you—to those who are leaving—I am speaking now for the last time. Let me then ask of you all, and of them especially, these three things—I ask them as a personal favour in my Master’s name—first of all, that you will never say, or permit it to be said in your presence, that the thing which is right, however difficult it may be, cannot be done, or that the thing which is wrong, however tempting it may be, must needs be done; secondly, that, whatever your profession may be, you will take some part, though it be but slight, in ministering, directly or indirectly, to the relief of human suffering, and so in making this world, or some corner of it, a little better for your lives; and thirdly—knowing, as I must know, what are the difficulties of religious faith in a time like this—that you will not altogether break at any period of your lives with the ordinances of religion, above all, that you will not abandon the privilege of prayer.’ And he told them in a few sacred sentences what the religion of Christ had been to his own soul. Dr. Pearson pressed these requests with an affectionate and pathetic earnestness as one who felt in his heart of hearts his responsibility for the young souls committed to his care. The boys were sobered and melted by his words. They remained kneeling for an unusually long time after the sermon. It was followed by the hymn that long usage had consecrated in the minds of the boys of St. Anselm’s, and of other schools too, as pre-eminently suited to the last Sunday of the school year, with its touching prayer for those who are leaving, and its equally touching prayer, no less needed, for those who will come back:

Let Thy father-hand be shielding
All who here shall meet no more;
May their seed-time past be yielding
Year by year a richer store;
Those returning
Make more faithful than before.

The sermon was over. The tender notes of the voluntary, ‘O rest in the Lord,’ sounded on the organ as the boys slowly and reverently left the chapel.

O sacred beloved spot on earth—the chapel of a great school! It is there, if anywhere in the world, that worship is realised in its purity, far away from the discords of contending creeds—there, if anywhere, that the angels meet us, and we feel in our souls the benediction of the Eternal.

But Gerald Eversley was as one who saw and heard not.