Part 10

Two rarely beautiful lives were theirs--close-welded, and thereby each sharing and each doubling the beauty of the other. Their beauty was spiritual, intellectual, influential.

William sprang from the mercantile classes of the Metropolis--from a race of evangelical Free Churchmen of such liberal leanings as to throw no obstacle in his way of becoming a theological and metaphysical thinker of a decidedly 'advanced' type; while an elder brother became an eloquent Episcopalian preacher at the celebrated Temple Church.

Lucy, whose maiden name was Cummings, was the daughter of a medical man who had married a lady socially superior to himself, and was brought up by her parents in an atmosphere of 'Welsh Calvinism.'

William was a shy, sensitive boy and lad, learning quickly, given to introspection, and taking a high place in his schools. His university life was spent at Glasgow--Oxford and Cambridge being at that time (the late forties of last century) closed against all except Anglicans--and there his mental bias towards philosophy was strengthened and developed, especially by the teaching of Dr. Chalmers. From college he was sent to study law under the well-known author, Sharon Turner. This study he cordially detested, yet in after-years he confessed that compulsory training for the Bar had invigorated and disciplined his reasoning powers to a degree he learned to be grateful for. Some travels abroad, too, though at a later period--notably to Italy--matured his character and widened his outlook. His first literary efforts were articles which were accepted by the _Athenæum_, then just started. In that paper, and in _Blackwood_ (is it not singular that most of our Lake celebrities were contributors to 'Old Ebony'?) he had frequent enough insertions to earn thereby a modest income--small, but sure, and sufficient for the limited needs of a quiet-living single man. For years he followed the career of an essayist and reviewer, pondering deeply meanwhile problems that seem to admit of no definite solution during the present limitations of human knowledge--problems which have bewildered Christians and non-Christians alike for centuries past, and, if Milton's authority may be relied upon, even the fallen principalities and powers in Hades--'Fixed Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute'--the origin of evil, the eternal duration of sin's consequences, the nature of sin itself, the possibility of finding and knowing God, the attainment of final certitude on any question other than mathematical, the relation of revealed or natural religion to science, the unalterable reign of law in mental and moral as well as in physical regions--these, and many similar enigmas, whirled perpetually through his brain, and would not rest till at least an honest attempt had been made to solve them. The necessity that appeared to be laid on him to discover answers to the practically unanswerable induced a habit of seclusion and a shrinking from any society that might interrupt the flow of speculative thought. He would pass people in the streets and the country roads absolutely without seeing them; and though cheerful and apt in conversation when obliged to meet his fellows, he invariably preferred to be alone on long mountain walks that he might think his own thoughts, and by meditation work out his difficulties, and record in his MSS. for future publication the conclusions he had arrived at, even though those conclusions amounted to no more than that none could be attained to! It was while residing in solitary seclusion, first at sunny Bowness upon Windermere Lake and then across the watershed at Keswick, on the rainier side of the mountains, that his great books 'Thorndale' and 'Gravenhurst' were wrought in the secret recesses of his soul. The first, the sub-title of which is 'The Conflict of Opinion,' is constructed on the conversational model, as, indeed, is the second also. Materialist, Roman Catholic, Theist, or Unitarian, and Scientific Evolutionist, all are heard with fairness and courtesy, and the discussions are intensely interesting to readers with thoughtful minds. But there is, after all has been said that can be said, nothing more than an open verdict returned on the highest themes that can occupy human attention. There is no more settlement of any of the vast questions debated for the inquirer who has discarded Divine revelation than for him who accepts it in whole or in part. 'Gravenhurst' has for a secondary title 'Knowing and Feeling: a Contribution to Psychology.' So far as it leads us to an end that end seems hardly distinguishable from the Eastern 'Necessitarianism,' or 'Fatalism,' in which all metaphysicians sooner or later engulf us who get rid of human responsibility for sin and its consequences by making the Creator the author of both moral and material evil. Yet the conclusions are logical if only certain premises are granted. Both books are crowded with sweet and helpful thoughts--wayside flowers of brilliancy and fragrancy, the gathering of which may easily lure the reader from the watchfulness needed in travelling along these winding roads, so destitute of authoritative sign-posts; the sign-posts erected by previous explorers having been cut down by more modern pedestrians, because, forsooth! the painted directions were faded, and they had no brush wherewith to freshen them!

While William was thus developing his life-work and weaving his intellectual robes, Lucy was growing into her charming womanhood amid the happy surroundings of her home in North Wales, and evolving the noblest of characters through self-denial and loving devotion to others. As a girl she was highly educated. When past her girlhood she proved a handsome and cultured lady, sought in marriage by at least two men, both of whose offers she refused, but neither of whom espoused any other. She remained single that she might help retrieve the fortunes of her parents, which had become so reduced that the house endeared to them by long residence had to be sold, and her own little patrimony given up to the clearance of debt. The broken father and mother were thenceforth tended, and, indeed, partly supported, by Lucy, who earned something by making translations from German, and in similar ways, till she lost them both in one sad week.

It was by an apparent chance, though by a very real providence of God, that these two met, William Smith and Lucy Cummings, while mother and daughter were in one set of apartments of a Keswick lodging-house, and 'Thorndale Smith,' as he came to be called, in an upper. A pleasant comradeship began on purely literary matters, and ripened into warm friendship, and frequent correspondence after parting for the season, till they met again some time afterwards at Patterdale. Then it was that friendship suddenly sprang upwards into the unique form of love most exquisitely portrayed in the ideal biography written of her husband by Lucy, after his premature decease. This biography was written originally for private circulation among her friends, and was afterwards attached, as a preface, to a new edition of 'Gravenhurst.' It is one of the most lovely stories of wedded life in our English tongue. All that poets have imagined of 'The Angel of the House,' of love's wealth, of love's visions, of 'Love's Young Dream,' seem to have been realized in the experiences of these kindred souls, brought together at a later period in life than most people enter on the married state. After a period of unalloyed happiness William's health began to fail, and a long time of anxious watching fell to Lucy Smith. Still was their talk ever of higher things and of the deeper problems of life and humanity. Despite his assumed negative position with regard to much that Christians hold to be essential truth, there was an undercurrent of devout belief in God left in William's heart, as is evidenced by lines in his verses, as for example:

'Earth can be earth, yet rise Into the region of God's dwelling-place If Light and Love are what we call His skies.'

In his 'Athelwood,' too--a tragedy, set on the stage and played by Macready and Helen Faucit--there are passages, notably those put into the mouth of Dunston, which show the same thing:

'God, where art Thou? I call for Thee, they give me but a world, Thy mechanism; I call aloud for Thee, My Father, Friend, Sustainer, Teacher, Judge.'

Still more remarkable was his impromptu acknowledgment when he lay dying, and his wife, referring to some of his published views, said: 'William, such love as mine for you cannot be the result of mere mechanism or vital forces, can it?' 'Oh, no,' he responded; 'it has a far higher source.' 'Once,' adds his wife, 'I saw the hands clasped as in a speechless communion with the Unseen, and twice I caught the solemn word "God" uttered, not in a tone of appeal or entreaty, but as if the supreme contemplation which had been his very life meant more, revealed more, than ever!' In a former article I pointed out how seldom professed, and even perfectly sincere, doubters ever entirely shake off the impressions of Divine reality and the Divine Presence. My own conviction is that the God whom they seek (I am not thinking of the unbelief that springs from moral unfaithfulness or obliquity) does, after all, touch their hands in the darkness, and the Christ whom they fail to understand has included them in His great and universal atonement. It may be that the Holy Spirit, who shows the things of Christ to men, gives them a saving view of Calvary as they pass through the Valley of the Shadow. I cannot believe that any _bonâ fide_ seeker after God ever became a 'lost soul' in any sense of those awful words, even though his seeking endured for a lifetime without conscious finding.

Lucy Smith survived her husband's death at Brighton several years, often making her way back to their beloved Borrowdale, where some of their intensest happiness had been experienced, and to Patterdale, where their first love was awakened. In the latter place there are 'exquisite shade of birch-trees on high ground' where she and her lover read together and recited poetry--his or hers or another's; peeps of Ullswater through the woods; mossy knolls and sequestered grassy walks; and all had memory-voices for her in the midst of their outward quietude. She had, as might have been foretold, imbibed much of her husband's philosophy, and in some directions her cherished 'orthodoxy' of opinion had reached its vanishing point, but her orthodoxy of heart was not touched adversely. It actually grew as life passed onward, and her sunset-lights glowed with the radiancy of heaven. William's real creed, 'God, Immortality, Progress'--a noble residuum, after all--was hers with great assurance, and she writes that she shared 'his craving for fellowship in Christ's deep love, and for a willing acceptance of His sufferings.' They both looked to being united--to quote her own words from her verses--'In, life more high in seeing, serving God, in nearer, nobler ways.' She ripened in character, in lovable ways, in self-forgetting devotion to her friends, till her poet-heart ceased to beat, and her yearnings after a fuller and more perfect soul-life were at length realized through the mercies and merits of the One she knew but in part, though He knew her, and her aspirations and difficulties, through and through.

THE BIBLE AND ITS REVELATIONS

Wherever its Revelations of the essentials of Deity and Humanity occur they may and must be considered as the most solemn and precious of all the contents of the Bible. But even of these it should be specially noted that they are for the most part progressive. The Bible contains, in fact, a series as well as a collection of Revelations--a series, of which the earliest terms are the least, and which very gradually, and not quite uniformly, rises to its height, and only after long centuries reaches its final terms in Him who was Himself the highest Revelation which man can be conceived capable of receiving in the flesh. That there is such a progression in the Revelation of truth and duty in the Bible must be obvious at once to anyone who considers the gradual manner in which those two greatest of all ideas--God and Immortality--are disclosed in it, and how the great duty of loving all men as ourselves, and considering every man as our brother, was never at all insisted on under the older dispensations.--REV. FREDERIC MYERS: _Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology_.

XV

TWO BROAD THINKERS

FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MYERS

(FATHER AND SON)

'Must then all quests be nought, all voyage vain, All hopes the illusion of the whirling brain? Or are there eyes beyond earth's veil that see, Dreamers made strong to dream what is to be?' F. W. H. MYERS: _The Renewal of Youth_.

Frederic Myers, of Keswick, is still known by his once-celebrated 'Lectures on Great Men,' and by his two volumes of 'Catholic Thoughts' on the Church and on the Bible and theology. The lectures were delivered to his parishioners. The series commenced about 1840, in accordance with his strong conviction that a clergyman should be the educator as well as the spiritual guide of his flock, and as a consequence of his horror at the 'dreadful separation and want of sympathy of the various orders and classes of modern society.' Remember the period to which these words were applied. It was several years after this that Maurice, Kingsley, Ludlow, and their friends commenced their remarkable movement for bringing the influence, learning, and wealth of the better social strata to the aid of the poorer. Since those early days of awakening to the claims of human brotherhood many things have happened to draw 'the various classes and orders of men' nearer together. Cruel taxes upon the food of the masses, for the further enrichment of the rich, have been swept away. The awakening of the democracy has brought it political power, and with this power the felt necessity for national education. The abolition of child-labour, the regulation and inspection of factories, mines, and workshops, the removal of many sectarian restrictions upon religious equality, an interest in sanitation and the preservation of public health, and many other such things for which the great 'middle classes' have steadfastly laboured side by side with the wage-earners, are results of the transfer of power from the few to the many. Such matters as these, now looked upon as among the common-places of civic life, were then hardly deemed by their most sanguine advocates as within the reach of 'practical politics.' Kindly-hearted Christian pastors, of the type of Frederic Myers, were few and far between, though wherever they existed they provoked among the people that element of 'Divine discontent' which found many voices ere it was appeased, from the decent respectability of Christian Socialism to the plebeian, and often extravagant, cries of Chartism.

Myers, and such as he, fitly began the movement, though scarcely consciously, by seeking 'to call forth the powers within man, by the culture of his whole nature; energy of all kinds--with the simultaneous cultivation of his sympathies, the nurture of truthfulness, justice, love, and faith.' He strove to awaken a spiritual ambition among his hearers by setting before their mental vision the struggles and the conquests of men who had resolved to achieve something worth the winning, and who had in their day become epoch-makers--who had possessed in eminent degree the qualities we all ought ever to cherish, according to our capacities, and our opportunities for self-development. His dozen specimen characters are well chosen from the regions of religion, adventure, and statesmanship. His two other books are devoted to the solution of questions then being much debated after the commencement of the Romeward Oxford movement known as 'Tractarianism.' The earlier one--that on the Church--was originally printed for private circulation. It is well for us that it was fully published at a later date, for though that era was prophetic of the coming of political advancement, it also set in motion a retrograde religious stream of thought and practice which is still flowing through the Anglican Church, and affecting the spiritual well-being of the nation. The principles enunciated in this masterly reply to Newman's doctrine of the Church, and his thorough examination of the sacerdotal claims of the Puseyite Oxonians can never become antiquated. With him the primary idea of the Christian Church is of a brotherhood of 'men worshipping Christ as the revelation of the Highest.' Equality of Christian privilege is, in his view, so characteristic of its constitution that the existence of a priestly caste within its borders is destructive of it. Christian faith is in Christ Himself, and not in doctrines or formulas of even the holiest and wisest men. In the true and universal--_i.e._, the Catholic--Church there can be no majestry, only a ministry. It is a Spiritual Republic in which no worldly distinctions can be recognised. 'Apostolic Sucsession,' in the High Anglican and Romish sense of the phrase, has no place therein, and no room exists for any human assumption over the minds and souls of believers in Christ within the purely spiritual Church, which is His body. Many readers will naturally see some lack of logical sequence in the argument which follows as to the relation of the Established Anglican Church to this Catholic and Spiritual one. That the conclusions reached on this point do not seem necessarily to flow from the premises must surely be conceded by all. Either legitimate conclusions must be drawn from the assumed fundamental position, or fresh premises must be granted. Nevertheless, as the Scriptural ground of his position was generally accepted, his timely work certainly helped to save the Church of England from the medievalist enemies within its own borders. Instead of their carrying the Establishment over to Rome, several of the ablest leaders of the new ritualistic movement severed themselves from its communion, and, as is well known, entered the Papal fold, some rising to great honour and dignity within it.

The 'Thoughts on the Bible and Theology' involve the theory that sacred literature 'contains, rather than consists of, special revelations.' In it, though not wholly Divine, 'the Divine Spirit may mingle with the human, and mingling, overmaster it.' It has infirmities and imperfections, but, he hastens to add, 'less in proportion to its holy truths than the chaff is to the wheat in any harvest--yea, is even only as the small dust of the balance compared with the greatest weight that the balance will weigh.' His theological teaching cannot be presented satisfactorily in a few lines, and it must be, therefore, dismissed with the sole remark that, though far from being rationalistic, it appears highly rational, as it is based on the written words of God, and is not derived from the dogmas and traditions of Churchmen.

Frederic Myers was born in London in 1811, educated at home and at Cambridge, and became perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, in 1839, holding that living till his death in 1851, thus giving twelve years of his prime to the thoughtful activities of his ministry, and to the liberalizing of the Church of England.

Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Frederic by his second wife. He was born at Keswick, and this town was, of course, the headquarters of his boyhood and youth. Therefore we claim him for the Lake District, though the necessities of his official life made it expedient to reside afterwards in the Metropolis. The year of his birth was 1843, Blackheath and Cheltenham were the places of his school education, and Cambridge was his Alma Mater. His classical knowledge and his memory were especially good. He could recite the whole of 'Virgil,' and had a love, spoken of as 'enthusiastic,' for Pindar, Æschylus, and Homer. His culture was widened by a trip to the East, and another to America. Somewhat of an athlete and a good swimmer, he once swam across the Niagara River below the Falls. Returning to England, he became one of her late Majesty's School Inspectors. He died in 1901. This brief summary of his life must suffice.

His literary output is of more value to us than are the details of his personal career. This output all thinking men will be grateful for, whatever their opinions about his teaching on telepathy, hypnotism, and so forth. Had he only given the world his well-known poem on 'St. Paul,' he would have contributed more than most hymn-writers have done to its moral profiting. If the old Hebrew Seer was one who saw visions of the future through Time's manifold veils, and visions of Jehovah behind the marching cohorts of human generations, and who also had the Divine gift of 'discernment of spirits,' surely F. W. H. Myers may be called a nineteenth century seer. He solved in his prose works for many an earnest seeker after the truth many a scientific doubt respecting God and Immortality, while in his principal poem he seems to identify himself with the great Apostle in the yearning and the self-abandonment essential to such a herald of the Cross. As he wrote, he must have entered into close sympathy with the flaming desires with which Paul's breast was burning, and the love with which he ached for souls whom he set himself to win for the Kingdom of Heaven. To present the inner life of him whom Christ Himself chose to fill the vacant office of the fallen Judas was a daring venture, but successful. He makes Paul say:

'Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest Cannot confound Him nor deny; Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.'