His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will be inadequately appreciated by those who now peruse them, not only because they were composed for a given audience with special reference to the circumstances of the time, but also because the best of them gained so much by his impassioned delivery. They were all read from manuscript, and his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel 77 how he contrived to read them. I once asked him, not long after he had been promoted to the Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it easy to make himself heard in the enormous nave of the Abbey church. His frame, it ought to be stated, was spare as well as small, and his voice not powerful. He answered: “That depends on whether I am interested in what I am saying. If the sermon is on something which interests me deeply I can fill the nave; otherwise I cannot.” When he had got a worthy theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, the power of his voice and manner was wonderful. His tiny body seemed to swell, his chest vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. The farewell sermon he delivered when quitting Oxford for Westminster lives in the memory of those who heard it as a performance of extraordinary power, the power springing from the intensity of his own feeling. No sermon has ever since so moved the University.
He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he was not supposed to possess any gift for extempore speaking. But when in his later days he found himself an almost solitary champion in Convocation of the principles of universal toleration and comprehension which he held, he developed a debating power which surprised himself as well as his friends. It was to him a matter of honour and conscience to defend his principles, and to defend 78 them all the more zealously because he stood alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His courage was equal to the occasion, and his faculties responded to the call his courage made.
In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, belonging by birth to the Whig aristocracy, and disposed on most matters to take rather the Whiggish than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth of his sympathy towards the working classes, and popular with them. One of his chief pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors round the Abbey on public holidays. Like most members of the Whig families, he had no great liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, on political grounds as because he distrusted the High Churchism and anti-Erastianism of the Liberal leader. However, he never took any active part in general politics, reserving his strength for those ecclesiastical questions which seemed to lie within his peculiar province.[17] Here he had two leading ideas: one, that the Church of England must at all hazards continue to be an Established Church, in alliance with, or subjection to, the State (for his Erastianism was unqualified), and recognising the Crown as her head; the other, that she must be a comprehensive 79 Church, finding room in her bosom for every sort or description of Christian, however much or little he believed of the dogmas contained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer-Book, to which she is bound by statute. The former view cut him off from the Nonconformists and the Radicals; the latter exposed him to the fire not only of those who, like the High Churchmen and the Evangelicals, attach the utmost importance to these dogmas, but of those also among the laity who hold that a man ought under no circumstances to sign any test or use any form of prayer which does not express his own convictions. Stanley would, of course, have greatly preferred that the laws which regulate the Church of England should be so relaxed as to require little or no assent to any doctrinal propositions from her ministers. He strove for this; and he continued to hope that this might be ultimately won. But he conceived that in the meantime it was a less evil that men should be technically bound by subscriptions they objected to than that the National Church should be narrowed by the exclusion of those whose belief fell short of her dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that not only did he maintain this unpopular view of his with unshaken courage on every occasion, pleading the cause of every supposed heretic against hostile majorities with a complete forgetfulness of his own peace and ease, but that no 80 one ever thought of attributing the course he took to any selfish or sinister motive. It was generally believed that his own opinions were what nine-tenths of the Church of England would call unorthodox. But the honesty and uprightness of his character were so patent that nobody supposed that this fact made any difference, or that it was for the sake of keeping his own place that he fought the cause of others.
What his theological opinions were it might have puzzled Stanley himself to explain. His mind was not fitted to grasp abstract propositions. His historical imagination and his early associations attached him to the doctrines of the Nicene Creed; but when he came to talk of Christianity, he laid so much more stress on its ethics than on its dogmatic side that his clerical antagonists thought he held no creed at all. Dr. Pusey once said that he and Stanley did not worship the same God. The point of difference between him and them was not so much that he consciously disbelieved the dogmas they held—probably he did not—as that he did not, like them, think that true religion and final salvation depended on believing them. And the weak point in his imagination was that he seemed never to understand their position, nor to realise how sacred and how momentous to them were statements which he saw in a purely imaginative light. He never could be got to see that a Church without any 81 dogmas would not be a Church at all in the sense either of mankind in the past or of mankind in the present. An anecdote was current that once when he had in Disraeli’s presence been descanting on the harm done by the enforcement of dogmatic standards, Disraeli had observed, “But pray remember, Mr. Dean, no dogma, no Dean.”
Those who thought him a heathen would have assailed him less bitterly if he had been content to admit his own differences from them. What most incensed them was his habit of assuming that, except in mere forms of expression, there were really no differences at all, and that they also held Christianity to consist not in any body of doctrines, but in reverence for God and purity of life. They would have preferred heathenism itself to this kind of Universalism.
As ecclesiastical preferment had not discoloured the native hue of his simplicity, so neither did the influences of royal favour. It says little for human nature that few people should be proof against what the philosopher deems the trivial and fleeting fascinations of a court. Stanley’s elevation of mind was proof. Intensely interested in the knowledge of events passing behind the scenes which his relations with the reigning family opened to him, he scarcely ever referred to those relations, and seemed neither to be affected thereby, nor to care a whit more for the pomps and vanities of power or wealth, a whit less for 82 the friends and the causes he had learned to value in his youth.
In private, that which most struck one in his intellect was the quick eagerness with which his imagination fastened upon any new fact, caught its bearings, and clothed it with colour. His curiosity remained inexhaustible. His delight in visiting a new country was like that of an American scholar landing for the first time in Europe. A friend met him a year before his death at a hotel in the North of England, and found he was going to the Isle of Man. He had mastered its geography and history, and talked about it and what he was to explore there as one might talk of Rome or Athens when visiting them for the first time. When anybody told him an anecdote his susceptible imagination seized upon points which the narrator had scarcely noticed, and discovered a whole group of curious analogies from other times or countries. Whatever you planted in this fertile soil struck root and sprouted at once. Morally, he impressed those who knew him not only by his kindness of heart, but by a remarkable purity and nobleness of aim. Nothing mean or small or selfish seemed to harbour in his mind. You might think him right or wrong, but you never doubted that he was striving after the truth. He was not merely a just man; he loved justice with passion. It was partly, perhaps, 83 because justice, goodness, honour, charity, seemed to him of such paramount importance in life that he made little of doctrinal differences, having perceived that these virtues may exist, and may also be found wanting, in every form of religious creed or philosophical profession. When the Convocation of the Anglican Church met at Westminster, it was during many years his habit to invite a great number of its leading members to the deanery, the very men who had been attacking him most hotly in debate, and who would go on denouncing his latitudinarianism till Convocation met again. They yielded—sometimes reluctantly, but still they yielded—to the kindliness of his nature and the charm of his manner. He used to dart about among them, introducing opponents to one another, as indeed on all occasions he delighted to bring the most diverse people together, so that some one said the company you met at the deanery were either statesmen and duchesses or starving curates and briefless barristers.
He had on the whole a happy life. It is true that the intensity of his attachments exposed him to correspondingly intense grief when he lost those who were dearest to him; true also that, being by temperament a man of peace, he was during the latter half of his life almost constantly at war. But his home, first in the lifetime of his mother and then in that of his wife, had 84 a serene and unclouded brightness; and the care of the Abbey, rich with the associations of nearly a thousand years of history, provided a function which exactly suited him and which constituted a never-failing source of enjoyment. To dwell in the centre of the life of the Church of England, and to dwell close to the Houses of Parliament, in the midst of the making of history, knowing and seeing those who were principally concerned in making it, was in itself a pleasure to his quenchless historical curiosity. His cheerfulness and animation, although to some extent revived by his visit to America and the reception he met with there, were never the same after his wife’s death in 1876. But the sweetness of his disposition and his affection for his friends knew no diminution. He remembered everything that concerned them; was always ready with sympathy in sorrow or joy; and gave to all alike, high or low, famous or unknown, the same impression, that his friendship was for themselves, and not for any gifts or rank or other worldly advantage they might enjoy. The art of friendship is the greatest art in life. To enjoy his was to be educated in that art.