And spoken words of unbelieving scorn.
Alas! for those, of eyes and heart both blind,
Who in such symbol find but empty rite,
Who, dazzled by a false and flickering light,
See not the cross wherewith the palm is signed.
Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, Mass.
THE LATE Mr. T. W. M. MARSHALL.[[39]]
On the 14th of December, 1877, died, at the age of sixty-two years and a half, Mr. T. W. M. Marshall. He had borne a long and trying illness of many months with invariable patience and resignation, and gave up his soul to his Maker and Redeemer after a most Christian preparation. He has well deserved that some more explicit notice of his life and what he did in it should be made public than what has hitherto, so far as we know, been given in any native or American source of information. The following slight account is drawn up by one who has known him well for nearly a quarter of a century.
Mr. Marshall was born the 19th of June, 1815; was educated under Dr. Burnup at Greenwich and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Anglican Church by the bishop of Salisbury in 1842. In 1844 he published his Notes on the Episcopal Polity of the Church of England, for which he received the thanks of the then archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley. This was the prelate, it may be remarked, to whom the writers of the famous Tracts for the Times dedicated their translation of what they called “this library of ancient bishops, Fathers, doctors, martyrs, confessors of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church,” with, as they added, “his grace’s permission, in token of reverence for his person and sacred office, and of gratitude for his episcopal kindness.” We mention this, because thanks from such a man in such an office for a work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England in 1844, when that polity was not a little canvassed, was an omen of good things to come for the writer, who was then nestled in a very small and poor cure among the Wiltshire downs, once a house of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. These prospects were blighted for ever by Mr. Marshall’s conversion in the following year, 1845. Indeed, he seems in that year to have committed two acts, one blameless and the other highly to be commended, which yet in their conjunction foreboded a life of no small anxiety in temporal matters; we mean to say that his marriage was followed in a few months by his reception into the church at Oscott by Dr. Wiseman. Thus the nest in the southern hills was lost just as he wanted its shelter most, and instead of the future protection of him whom the Tractarian dedication called “The most reverend Father in God, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England”—a patron, it may be added, of one hundred and seventy livings, besides canonries and options—Mr. Marshall, at the age of thirty, with a young wife, commenced a new life without a profession and without prospect, and with fifty pounds in his pocket. It may be said Mr. Marshall was true all his life long to the spirit which he thus showed at the first crisis of it.
It may be conjectured that the studies made by Mr. Marshall in composing his work on the episcopal polity of the Church of England predisposed his mind in the following year to seek admission into that world-wide community over which presides the head and source of the episcopate.