ii. Service of Compline, in which, as far as I can

gather, the choir practically absolve the priest.

iii. Extempore prayer.

iv. Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament in Cope.

v. Vespers for the Dead.

“If I could think that you would be ready to meet the Bishop with these concessions, it seems to me that you would still have your service with all its essential ritual and beauty, with only certain excrescences, as it seems to me, lopped off; and I am sure that you would find our Bishop most anxious to meet you in any way he could, and only too glad to be able to show his appreciation of your unwearied labours in our Master’s cause. It seemed to me so sad that there should be any misunderstanding keeping you apart from our Bishop, that I have ventured thus to act as a sort of go-between, and earnestly to express my hope--nay, my prayer--that God may bring good out of our meeting on Thursday. I am sure you will be happier in your work, if even some things have to be given up, if you gain, on the other hand, your Bishop’s approval of your work.

“Always I am, “Your very faithful friend, “GEORGE HENRY GUILDFORD.

“REV. R. DOLLING.”

In a succeeding chapter you will read the reasons why I introduced these services, and why I felt I could not possibly surrender them. The objections to Compline and extempore prayer seemed to me most extraordinary, but I am especially glad to insert the letter, because it is a proof of the great kindness with which Bishop Harold Browne and his Suffragan always treated us, and to show that even though we differed, there was never anything but the most cordial good-will between us.

I think I have said that I was in the habit of preaching to men alone on Sunday afternoons. Osborne, my fellow-priest, and I thought that the time had come now for striving to get the ear of at least some of the thousands of Dockyard-men who passed our church on week-days, and so we asked the Guild of S. Matthew to send us down a set of preachers for the six Sundays in the Lent of 1890. Mr. Stewart Headlam was the first of these preachers. Osborne and I listened to the sermon with very great attention, and we did not discover in it anything different from the lectures which he and I had been continually delivering in S. Agatha’s. To our utter astonishment we received almost immediately the letter from the Bishop which I print.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_February 28, 1890_.

“MY DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“After what passed between us here some weeks ago, I was hardly anticipating that I should have to remonstrate with you on a farther and far more serious cause for difference between us.

“Without any intimation to me you invite a clergyman to teach in your chapel, who has been inhibited by his own Bishop for teaching on the very subject on which you advertise him as a preacher. Anything more contrary to every law of the Church Catholic or the Church of England it is difficult to imagine.

“If the report in the newspaper be correct, he, Mr. Stewart Headlam, delivered a highly inflammatory political address, calculated to set class against class, and drawing down from an excited audience frequent expressions of applause, in a building devoted to Christian worship and called by you S. Agatha’s Church.

“The teaching, according to _The Evening News_, was of this kind. Mr. Headlam represented our Lord’s mission, not as intended to lead men to heaven, nor, apparently, to convert them to greater holiness, nor to reveal to them great spiritual truths, nor even to set up a great _spiritual_ kingdom upon earth; but to establish a commonwealth in which there should be social equality and community of wealth (or poverty), from the good-will of all the members if possible, but, if not so, then from compulsion exercised by the many on the few.

“I have tried hard to see if the words can mean anything but this. I cannot possibly interpret them otherwise. The evil of such teaching appears to me incalculable. It is the substituting of a Political Christ for the loving Saviour of the world, a carnal kingdom for the great spiritual kingdom of the Church, earthly hopes and aspirations for divine and heavenly, and instead of love of the brethren springing from love of their Lord, a great probability, at least, of a system of plunder and terrorising such as prevailed in the French Revolution, and has been threatened of late by Nihilists and Communists. The theory that our Blessed Lord was a Social Reformer with a tinge of religious fanaticism is the favourite theory of political unbelievers. I do not mean to charge Mr. Headlam with holding this. But his teaching plays into the hands of such. I have always thought it to be the only theory which unbelievers can advance, with any appearance of plausibility, to account for the teaching and the success of Christ. The danger, therefore, of giving standing ground for such a theory is not easily exaggerated.

“I am not indifferent to varieties of ritual and the like; but tapers, and incense, and red-vested acolytes, nay! Romanism, Methodism, and any other varieties of Christian worship may be compatible with true faith in Christ and true love to Him and His. This so-called Christian Socialism, as exhibited in the report of Mr. Headlam’s address, in the writings of Count Leo Tolstoi and others, appears to me to strike at the very root of all Christianity. I have, as you know, declined to interfere with your proceedings, lest I should mar your Mission work. If you are to introduce teachers of such strange doctrines into a church or chapel, which you hold by virtue of my license, I must consider whether the good of our Mission is not more than neutralised by the evil of those whom you associate with you; and whether I can suffer it to go on under my authority. I am very sorry to write so strongly, but I dare not be indifferent.

“I am, dear Mr. Dolling, “Very truly yours, “G. H. WINTON.”

In my answer I tried to point out to the Bishop, first, that Mr. Headlam had never been inhibited, and, secondly, that while I would, in deference to him, have the lectures delivered in the gymnasium instead of in the church, I must protest against the way in which he had spoken of the lecturers. Several other letters passed between us, but in the meantime Canon Jacob had written to the Headmaster of Winchester (I insert a letter he wrote to me), had withdrawn his subscription from the Mission, and had written to the Bishop to say what he had done.

“PORTSEA VICARAGE, “_March 3rd, 1890_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have read with much pain, in the _Hampshire Post_ and the _Hants Telegraph_, the report of Mr. Stewart Headlam’s sermon at S. Agatha’s. I sent a copy of the former paper on Friday to Dr. Fearon, and told him my extreme pain at finding my Old School Mission identified with such doctrines.

“I have gone on subscribing £1 1s. a year to your work through the Old Wykehamist Mission, in spite of much that I could not approve, but this has reached a limit which makes it necessary for me to reconsider the whole position. I do not wish to take any action inconsiderately, or without careful thought. It may be that you have explanations to offer. But I think it right to tell you at once that I am deeply pained to find how much you have added to our already sad and unhappy divisions.

“I am, faithfully yours, “EDGAR JACOB.”

I also received from the Warden of Winchester College letters of the strongest condemnation, letters, the first of which is signed “Warden,” in which he says Mr. Headlam is a Socialist in the bad sense of the word; and of myself, that, with my ultra High Church proclivities on the one hand, and Socialist teaching on the other, no sober and loyal-minded citizens can be expected to support the Mission, and that his connection with it must be severed, so long as I remained the head of it.

I felt that Canon Jacob and the Warden must be taken in a large measure to represent Wykehamical feeling, not, perhaps, just those few who knew me and S. Agatha’s well, but that large number who supported the Mission, and that, therefore, there was no alternative left me but to resign. So on Sunday morning I preached a sermon defending the line I had taken, and at the same time telling the people that I thought for peace it was better for me to leave. Never can I forget the kindness of Dr. Fearon, other Winchester masters, and old Wykehamists during the next week. Letters from all kinds and sorts of people, whom we had never heard of, came to us, hoping that we would not resign, and presently I received a letter from the Warden, in which he told me that he had only written in his private capacity, and that he did not represent either the school or anybody else but himself. I felt very strongly, too, not only the kindness of people outside, but the devotion of our people at home; and it seemed to me a plain duty that, if Winchester wished me to remain, I should do so. This duty was rendered all the more imperative by the very great desire expressed by the Bishop himself that I should remain.

As we have no legal status, the Mission not being a parish, a change of Bishops is a matter of great importance, and I looked forward with some anxiety to Bishop Thorold’s coming. So it was with much thanksgiving that I received this answer from him, soon after his appointment, to a letter of mine about confirmation.

“BUTE HOUSE, CAMPDEN HILL, W., “_16th January, 1891_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I am glad to hear from you, for I have heard much of you and your duty.

“Soon I hope to ask you here to dine and sleep, that we may have some talk about your difficult work, which has a charm and interest for me. We have eight such missions in South London, and I have fostered them as with a father’s love.

“We will see about the Confirmation, but I prefer to do my work myself, if in my power.

“When you write again, perhaps you will be able to write all your letter yourself, ‘a lot of time’ for preparation is scarcely classical.

“May the blessing of the Holy Spirit rest upon you, and the sheep in the wilderness.

“Ever truly yours, “A. W. ROFFEN.”

Dr. Harold Browne had always refused to come to S. Agatha’s, but he had allowed us to choose the Bishop who, from year to year, confirmed our people. But here was a Bishop who was not only coming himself, but who evidently was going to throw himself, heart and soul, into our work, and with the sufficient humour which just enables a man to slide over the difficulties of life. This goodness towards us, and endeavour to help us, never once ceased during the four years in which he ruled our diocese. My heart is often sorry for hard words I may have said about him.

In a week or two he asked me to stay with him in London, and we talked for many hours. He drew out from me every detail of our work, approving or disapproving, but ever ready to hear reasons, telling me quite plainly that there was much he liked, much he disliked. Especially was he interested in our schools--he thought we had been very brave in gaining them--in our house, in which he hoped soon to stay; and, above all, in our temporary church, and the manner of our memorials, the lists of soldiers, sailors, emigrants, the confirmed, and the blessed dead; and this led to explaining to him how we used the Holy Communion as our best and most prevailing intercession. He had been delighted when I told him that at our prayer meetings these names were read out, but I am quite sure that at first, at any rate, he was shocked at people coming to the celebrations for intercession and not for communion. I explained to him how impossible it was for our people to communicate frequently, the stress of their business and their ignorance making preparation very difficult; and, I think, from words he let fall, that he considered we were in some sense lowering the dignity of the Blessed Sacrament by permitting it to be used for any other purpose but communion, though he told me himself how often his best intercessions were made when he was receiving communion. This did not apply to intercessions for the dead. He evidently disbelieved in any such being beneficial to them, or helpful to the persons making them; but we prayed long in his study, after family prayers were over, and I felt that I had gained one who, whatever our differences were, would act towards me as a real father. The next morning, walking round and round his beautiful garden--a wonderful oasis in the overcrowded desert of Kensington, alas! now pulled down and turned into flats; I could almost cry as I look at it, when I pass Campden Hill each Sunday morning this Lent--he talked over the matter again and again, specially desirous that I should discontinue the Mass for the Dead, and that I should never have a celebration without communicants. I told him--I hope with all dutifulness--that these two requests were impossible; the first because I considered I was exercising one of the greatest privileges of my priesthood, and because this special office for the dead had been a wonderful help to many of our poor people--an act of real reparation for stumbling-blocks they had put in the way of companions now beyond their reach by any other method, and also because the remembrance of the dead kindles and draws out, even in the most brutish, an understanding of the supernatural, which becomes a realisation of hope otherwise impossible; the second because it would be impossible for the clergy and workers to bear the burden of toil and responsibility that rested upon us every hour of the day, if it were not for the help of those daily morning celebrations, and that the only method by which that rubric as to communicants could be obeyed, would be by compelling my workers to take turns--three on Monday, three on Tuesday, &c.--however much indisposed they might feel at the moment to make their communions. He said at once that this would be a most hateful method, and I left him knowing that we were going to continue these two things of which he disapproved; but he did not forbid them, and his last words showed me that he was fully prepared to trust us. I think what pleased him most was what he called our straightforwardness and honesty; and I thank God that neither then nor since have I ever hid anything from him.

His stay with us, when he came to confirm, very considerably deepened our mutual affection. The confirmation was to be at eight p.m. The people began to come into church at seven, according to their custom. I always delighted in this hour before the confirmation as giving an opportunity by extempore prayers, by heads for intercession, and by singing hymns, of getting the friends of the candidates into a proper frame of mind. The candidates knew exactly their places, for they had sat in them at the three previous Sunday nights’ Mission services. They knew exactly, too, in what order they were to go up to the Bishop. Many a confirmation--indeed, many a first communion too--has lost all its grace from want of preparation, not of the heart, but of the mode of reception. The Bishop had been quite hurt when he found that only a curate had been sent to meet him; but I think when he opened the west door of S. Agatha’s, and saw the church quite full, people in the aisles as well as in the seats, kneeling in humble prayer between each verse of “When I survey the wondrous cross,” he forgave me for not meeting him. In the vestry I said to him, “The service, of course, is yours. You will make whatever arrangement you like about acolytes, &c.” He asked those in red cassocks to take them off, and when I told him that a crucifix was always carried in the procession, he asked that it might be put away; but when I told him that there was one on the high altar, he said, “Oh, I shall not see that one!” No words of mine can fittingly express his tenderness towards those he confirmed. More than half of them were grown men and women, many of them, whose former lives could hardly be told about, drawn from the lowest slums by the attractive power of the Cross, with a real and true belief in the grace which they were about to receive at his hands, with a humility and yet perfect trust which the soul, conscious of its own weakness and of Christ’s power to save, alone experiences.

Meanwhile in our own house small difficulties had arisen. The Bishop, whose digestion even at that time was greatly impaired, had kindly sent us on a little sheet of paper his _menu_, headed, “What I desire to eat,” a morsel of fish, a mutton chop, a rice pudding. But he had not told us that he was going to bring a servant, and would use some particular kind of sheets. When I got in I heard that Mary was disturbed, and the disturbance of Mary was no small matter in our household, because, finding the servant putting on these sheets, her honour was grievously wounded, she deeming the Bishop thought that the beds in our house were dirty. However, things righted themselves. Our rule of common food had to be broken through, as the servant objected to meal with the Bishop, and fed somewhere by himself. One could see how utterly overtired Bishop Thorold was, but he put that altogether on one side, and evinced the kindest interest in all our inmates, until at last, when he could speak not another word, he went off to bed; and yet I never shall forget how fatigue was conquered in the long, earnest, loving intercession he offered to Almighty God for me and mine.

The next morning he examined the old church very attentively, remarked upon what he considered the ugliness of our little altar, on which there were painted in panels a priest in black vestments saying Mass for the Dead; and a soul being carried by angels into paradise; again told us he disapproved altogether of prayers for the dead, and yet more of Masses, but never said one word to forbid them, and then drove off to the garrison church, where he was going to confirm. I had looked forward with considerable dread to his coming. I knew he wanted to like us, but I was terribly afraid of the ordeal. But after the visit I believed that through his episcopate there would be nothing but peace between us. However, the enemy was not going to give us peace, and in November, 1892, we noticed a gentleman attending the children’s Mass armed with a pair of opera-glasses. I urged him to go into the front pew, where he would not have to use them, thereby disturbing the congregation. Very shortly afterwards I received from the Bishop a long document sent to him by the Protestant Alliance, and asking me particulars about the service, and to send him the children’s Mass book. On December 16th I received the following letter from him.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_December 16, 1892_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“With respect to the Sunday School Book now in use at S. Agatha’s Mission Chapel, I do not feel that this is a moment when I can equitably press upon you to withdraw it from use.

“My opinion, however, as to the grave inconsistency of its contents with our Anglican standards remains unchanged, and though it may be a matter of indifference to you, it is a matter of real concern to me that the influence and development of a mission conducted with such zeal and self-denial should be in any way prejudiced in the eyes of those whose prayers and sympathy ought not to go for nothing in your eyes, by the use of a manual not vital to your ministrations, and but scantily adopted in the Church.

“It is my hope and desire that you will consider the wisdom and duty of quietly discontinuing it, when you can do so without loss of self-respect, or feeling of giving way to ignorant clamour; and I shall hope to hear from you before Trinity Sunday that you have found yourself able to comply with this advice.

“Very truly yours, “A. WINTON.”

I answered back at once, that I was quite ready to withdraw the book, and to substitute another in its place, but that for my own sake I should like to prove to him that there was no expression in it which might not be discovered in the writings of the great Anglican divines, and he wrote that he would be very glad to receive such a catena. Dear Osborne at once set to work on a library of the Anglo-Catholic Fathers, which we bought for the purpose, and submitted a defence to the Bishop. Indeed the Bishop was kind enough to ask both of us to go to Farnham. I think he was rather astonished when we arrived with a large trunk full of books, but he was very patient while Osborne, who is a theologian, which I am not, expounded out of Bramhall, Andrewes, and others, that there has been a continual witness, oftentimes on the part of the most learned prelates and authorities in the Church of England, to the right to believe and to teach within its fold the doctrine of pleading the Blessed Sacrament for the living and the dead, as was taught in the little book.

This very characteristic letter left only one course possible to us, the writing of a new book, which we did at once.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_January 21, 1893_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have now read, and with much interest, the extracts from the writings of eminent Anglican divines on Eucharistic doctrine, which you have collected with so much industry and laudable anxiety to justify your own position.

“While I cannot admit--and in this you will doubtless concur with me--that the _ipse dixit_ of any individual, eminent and learned though he be, can accurately be quoted as the mind of the Church at large, I have no wish to demur to the authorities you quote as undeserving of great reverence and consideration. It is also particularly agreeable to me, though I have never expressed any doubt on the subject, to be assured that your great desire is to be loyal to Anglican standards and teaching, and that you have not knowingly transgressed them in this instance.

“You will remember that on your own teaching I pronounced no opinion whatever. It was the book used at S. Agatha’s that seemed to deserve, and I still think deserves, my grave remonstrance.

“After thinking it well over, I am clear that I should prefer the withdrawal of the book, and your substituting for it one of your own compiling. You will not be unwilling to introduce into such a book, nor ashamed of so doing, more of the exact language of our Prayer Book and of our Lord Himself. While it would be inconsistent for me to sanction a book which from your own point of view might in some of its statements widely diverge from that I hold to be sound teaching, I could at least protect you in the use of it. The last thing in the world I intend or desire is to limit in the very least degree the liberty of the clergy to hold and teach what may equitably be held to be supported and countenanced by our standards. You know me well enough to trust me when I say that I value your work, recognise your sacrifices, cherish your friendship, and will gladly, so far as I can, strengthen your hands.

“Your friend and father in God,

“A. WINTON.”

But in the meanwhile, to his astonishment as well as ours, a letter not intended for publication, which he had written to the Secretary of the Protestant Alliance, appeared in the papers:

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY.

“SIR,--Since acknowledging your memorial, I have procured and examined the S. Agatha’s Sunday School Book, and have also referred it to one of my examining chaplains, in whose learning and judgment I have great confidence. While I do not consider that all the passages in it on which you have animadverted can be accurately pronounced to be as distinctly Roman in doctrine as you have not unreasonably conceived them to be, the general substance of the book is, in my opinion, quite irreconcilable with the Eucharistic teaching of the Church of England; nay, I have no hesitation in saying that I consider the general atmosphere and phraseology of the volume to be even more objectionable and dangerous, than any of the precise expressions which have caused you such intelligible offence.

“It is right, however, that I should here explain that, if I am correctly informed, the officiating clergyman, when this book is used, himself says nothing except what is in the Common Prayer Book.

“At the present moment I am in correspondence with Mr. Dolling on the subject; but I wish at once to observe that his work at S. Agatha’s, though disfigured by errors and eccentricities, which, in common with not a few of his truest friends, I sincerely deprecate, is of a kind which very few other men are capable of accomplishing, and reaches a class of society too frequently left to itself out of sheer helplessness and despair.

“I have twice confirmed in S. Agatha’s Chapel, and have stayed a night under Mr. Dolling’s roof, and have given myself ample opportunity for observing and gauging the nature of his work, and the measure of his personal influence in the neighbourhood where he resides. In my opinion, the substantial good he is enabled to effect by his self-denying and Christian activities far outweighs by its usefulness any distress that may be caused to those who are gravely alarmed by doctrines and practices which they consider to be quite inconsistent with the standards of the Reformed Church.

“With this view I hope to be able to continue to him my support and countenance, in the belief that he will again be ready, as he has already shown himself to be ready, to accept my fatherly direction, when responsibly and kindly offered. Hereby he will move out of the way of his undisputed usefulness causes of offence which alienate outside sympathy and disappoint sincere well-wishers on the spot, and will also, if at the sacrifice of some cherished convictions, strengthen his own cause, and help the work he loves.

“I am, your faithful servant, “A. WINTON.”

At first it seemed that, in justice to ourselves, it would be necessary to print the whole of our correspondence with the Bishop, and our defence of the little book. But, after thinking the matter over, it seemed best to leave things as they were. After all, it was no business of the public, and the question would only have opened up a controversy which would have done more harm than good. But the Bishop, with extraordinary generosity, sent me a letter, which he allowed me, if I thought it would serve a good purpose, to print:

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_February 6, 1893_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“It was as disappointing to me as it must have been distressing to you, that my reply to the complaint of the Secretary to the Protestant Alliance, in which I do not find a syllable about his intention to publish it, should have been sent to the papers without my knowledge or sanction. But for our friendship all hopes of arrangement might have been wrecked.

“You have intimated your willingness to withdraw the book of which complaint has been made, and I think reasonably, and to prepare another to be used in its place. I trust that the new one will be less liable to misconstruction than the one you are using now. While I have neither the desire nor the right to arrogate to myself an infallible interpretation of the Church’s standards, it is my plain duty to counsel, and even admonish, where it is made plain to me that there is a divergence from them. If this is not a Bishop’s duty, one of the most solemn of his consecration vows becomes a hollow verbiage. I have no sort of intention of withdrawing from you the countenance and support which hitherto I have readily given to your work at S. Agatha’s. To be consciously unjust to you is, I assure you, an impossibility for me. But justice to you implies some sort of justice to myself. You have never expected nor asked me to say that with all your methods and teaching I can profess sympathy. It is but straightforward for me to add that it is your self-denying life, with the manly, generous activities behind it which God is so manifestly blessing, that makes me more than ready to condone what I and others would with satisfaction find to be eliminated from your public services; and, in renewing an expression of my good-will and personal affection, I desire not to be thought to be acting inconsistently with the principles and aspirations of a ministry of 44 years.

“Sincerely yours, A. WINTON.”

Nothing could exceed his kindness to us ever afterwards, and as his eye ever had a twinkle in it, so his kindness had ever a delightful playfulness. This letter of November 30th, 1893, will show how ready he was to meet our wishes at personal inconvenience to himself.

“THE DEANERY, WINCHESTER.

“MY DEAR SIR,

“In reply to your letter of the 27th instant, the Bishop of Winchester desires me to say that he has never yet fixed a day that suited you, and never expects to be so fortunate. But, of course, your confirmation shall be put off.

Faithfully yours, “G. E. HITCHCOCK, _Chaplain_.”

This of March 28, 1894, was in answer to a request of mine for a general licence in his diocese, as I had none, and, as I had been elected to the Conference, it was supposed I might be objected to on those grounds.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY.

“MY DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“A free lance will be wise to keep his freedom.

With all good-will,

Yours, A. WINTON.”

And this, of May 11, 1894, in explanation of a mistake he had made about Mr. Dowglass, whom I had asked him to license as our curate.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY.

“MY DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I receive your rebuke with becoming meekness. But if you had so many things of all sorts in your head as I have, and were continually on the drive, away from all books of reference, you would be merciful to me for not always recognising the identity of curates with not uncommon names.

“Mr. Dowglass has been excellently reported to me, and I am only too glad to have him in the diocese, and, of course, I will license him when his papers are ready, and sent in.

With much contrition, “I am, always faithfully yours, “A. WINTON.”

I might just add one proof of his real liberality. On the death of my friend and neighbour, Mr. Shute, who had created, with wonderful energy and untiring zeal, S. Michael’s, the church next to ours, the Bishop offered the incumbency to my fellow-priest Osborne, who had so ably defended the little book which the Bishop had condemned.

He took, too, a continual interest in the building of our new church. He saw all the plans, and himself suggested that it would not need a new licence, so that all formality and red tape might be prevented. Above all he urged us to move in all our memorials, and to make the church as homely as we possibly could for our poor. A passion for the poor consumed his heart, and he seemed to have kept them and the outcast always in his mind, often asking me about someone whose story I had told him perhaps a year before, and not only treating me in his own house with the greatest tenderness and affection, but on public occasions like the Diocesan Conference, when I felt it my duty to say things about the Establishment and Social Questions, which few of my brethren agreed with, he always gained for me a patient hearing, and often said kindly things afterwards. Alas! if he had lived a little longer, I should have been still at S. Agatha’s; and yet who could wish him to live, when every hour was but an agony, and only an intense sense of duty enabled him bravely to bear the burden of his flesh, which he was so willing to surrender at any moment into his loving Master’s hands.

I am only sorry that my own angry passions and bitter way of looking at questions have, from time to time, moved me to say and write unkind and unworthy things about him. But from the first day I ever saw him I was conscious of a real love and affection, which deepened, until God took him, and which will ever remain in my mind as a special grace and gift of God, granted to me through four of the most difficult years of my life.

I had often talked with Bishop Thorold of a fitting time for me to leave Portsmouth, and he had agreed with me that, as soon as the people were accustomed to the new church, I might resign. We had hoped that the church might be opened on the first Sunday in October. It was the anniversary of my taking full charge of the Mission, and the progress of the parish had been marked each year by the dedication to the glory of God and the use of our people, of some special piece of parish machinery. I was greatly in need of rest, for my work, with its threefold responsibility at Landport, Winchester, and begging, was beginning to tell upon me, and for the last four years I had not had one single day’s holiday. If the church were opened on the first Sunday in October, I thought it would be quite permissible for me to leave the following Easter, and I had told Dr. Fearon of this intention. When I announced this to our own people, they at once began to make every effort to induce me to alter my determination.

But in the meantime two circumstances had happened which disarranged all our plans. First, Bishop Thorold died; and secondly, we discovered the church could not be opened till quite the end of October. It had been my boast that the whole fabric of the church was completed by Portsmouth men, and I can never speak too highly of the punctuality and excellence of their work. The builders, Messrs. Light and Son--Portsmouth is mourning now the head of the firm, one of the most useful, honoured, and respected of its citizens--Townsend, the foreman, indeed all down to the men who mixed the mortar, and the boys who ran the messages, had striven to make the church the enormous success that it is. But we had employed a London firm to do the wood flooring and the marble work. Their workmen were Italians; and Light’s men, all Trade Unionists, almost refused to work with them, because they said that they did not work for a proper rate of wages. However, the arrangement had been made, and so, though the foreman told me he was sure I would suffer for employing them, the work had to go on. They had a row amongst themselves their first Saturday, and one got stabbed in the hand, but, be the cause what it was, we found that the opening of the church must be delayed a month. On September 28th I wrote to Bishop Davidson, telling him that the church would be opened on October 27th, and saying that Dr. Thorold had thought that no new licence would be needed, as the old and the new church were practically joined together by the vestry. I heard from him on October 4th, saying that though he himself thought that it would be better that a new licence should be given to the new building, yet Bishop Thorold’s opinion would justify us going forward with our arrangements, and that he would let us know later on. On October 17th we heard from him that he had considered the question of the new licence, and it seemed clear to him that it ought to be granted, and that the Rural Dean would visit us for the purpose of inspecting the building.

In the meantime a dear friend had told us that the Bishop was hurt at not being asked to take part in the opening services. The friend, I afterwards discovered, was perfectly mistaken in his judgment; but acting on that information, I wrote to the Bishop to explain why I had not asked him to be present at the opening, and I thought the best way to show him that no disrespect was intended was by telling him that I had not intended asking Bishop Thorold, because I knew that our manner of service would pain him very deeply.

On October 24th, I received a long letter from the Bishop, the purport of which was that he could not grant the licence, until a question so important as the third altar had been submitted to the proper authorities, or the altar itself had been removed, but saying that he would be glad to see me the next morning. And so on October 25th, I spent the morning at Farnham.

Nothing could exceed the Bishop’s kindness and straightforwardness during that interview. He is a man of most delightful manners. A theologian at Oxford said of him, soon after his appointment to the Deanery of Windsor: “He is a Nuncio already,” though he slily added, “but not from Peter.” But I felt a good deal more than the mere charm of his manner. He was evidently conscious that we were both in a very difficult position. He seemed most desirous to do his duty towards me and my people, and deeply felt the responsibility that was resting on him. At the very outset of our conversation he said, “This is no red-tape question of three altars, but of the services said at those altars.” When I proposed to him that we should continue in the old church until his judgment was pronounced, he seemed to feel that it would be a mistake to upset the existing arrangements, and that it would be better to screen off the third altar for the present and proceed with the opening. I gave in to his desire at once, though I had brought with me fifty-two telegrams ready for despatch should the opening be delayed. When I got home, those who worked with me were very distressed that I had not put off the opening, and I feel now that they were certainly right, and that much pain and a certain amount of scandal to the Church might have been saved if I had pursued this course.

So we opened the new church on October 27th. Dr. Fearon had arranged for the masters and men at Winchester to come down on the Monday after the opening, and I had asked the Bishop of Southwell, the founder of the Mission, to come and preach to them. He not only consented to do this, but offered to preach the first sermon in the new church on the Sunday morning at 11 o’clock. When he came down on the night before, he kindly sent word to say that he would celebrate at 8 o’clock the next morning. There were more than four hundred communicants at the four early services, and at 11 we started to take possession of the new church. I, who remembered the hooting and stoning of ten years ago, could hardly believe it was the same place. Mr. Dyer-Edwardes, a great benefactor to the Mission, had lent us a magnificent silver crucifix to be carried in front of the procession, but everything else in the procession belonged to the Mission. Dear Barratt, the truest friend a priest has ever had, with the incense, and then our little choir lads, and our choirmen, such loyal and earnest supporters of the Mission; then the acolytes in red, most of whom had been with me ever since they were little children, directed by Pennell, our ceremoniarius, then the Bishop in his convocation robes, who, not desiring to pontificate, walked before the unworthy priest who was to sing the first Mass in the new S. Agatha’s. Directly behind me, leading the congregation, Mr. White and Mr. Claxon, who have acted as churchwardens during the ten years, and then an innumerable number of parishioners and old friends, who had come home for the day. There was, I think, through the whole of that crowd, blocking up all the streets and making it difficult for us to pass through them, but one attitude of respect, I might even say of affection, and a realising, too, that a great act of worship was being offered to that God, Who is our common Father. If, when the procession entered the building, there was a little unseemly rush, that was not to be wondered at. Even at S. Peter’s, in the presence of the Pope, English people do not always behave reverently and well. But long before I had gained the altar there was a hush of reverent devotion, and the wonderful beauty of the church made itself, for the first time, manifest, its dignity and simplicity, its fittingness for magnificent worship, and, above all, its excellent acoustic properties--a proud moment, indeed, for Mr. Ball, the architect, and if it had not been for the shadow which the covering of the third altar threw over my troubled heart, a proud moment for me.

Many letters, which will be found in an appendix, passed between the Bishop and myself. On November 15th, at his kind invitation, I spent a long morning at Farnham. I was suffering from a bad attack of influenza at the time. The Bishop’s position and mine were naturally very difficult, for he had to discover matter for judgment out of the mouth of the accused. I am quite conscious of not being a theologian, and I answered as plainly and as simply as I could all his questions, and I am since aware that I used an expression, which he afterwards quoted in his judgment, which may be very liable to misconstruction. My intercourse with Dr. Thorold had been so very different. There had been perfect freedom in all conversations between us, nay more, I had often volunteered information which he had not asked for. A hundred times the memory of him flashed across my mind, and his many words of prayer came back again and again to my remembrance. I was sitting in the same study, but now I was accused, and I was conscious that my own and my people’s happiness, nay, perhaps the safety of weak, timid souls, was hanging in the balance. I pray that none of my readers may ever have such an hour and a half as I passed at Farnham.

Meanwhile, until the Bishop’s judgment was pronounced, only one duty lay before me--to go on as if nothing had occurred. My mind, however, since the opening of the church, had altered upon one point. If the Bishop permitted it, I should be forced to remain much longer than Easter. I was told of a petition of over 5000 people, signed by all classes, and by people of all shades of opinion, wanting me to stay in Portsmouth. I discovered that the debt upon the church would be much greater than I had anticipated, so many things having to be added at the end. But, above all, I felt that it would take a considerable time to make new S. Agatha’s really the home of the people. I knew, of course, that other priests could work much more consistently and successfully than I had done. That I never doubted for a moment. But I knew, too, that I was the only one who had ten years of experience teaching me how to deal with these particular people. On December 7th the Bishop’s judgment came, and it left me, I conceived, no alternative but to resign, which I did the next day. I believed directly I read it that the judgment forbade us to say our Mass for the Dead, or to have Celebrations without Communicants. The surrender of these two points I felt it impossible to make. An error has largely arisen that I left because I could not have a third altar in my church, but this is quite incorrect. The Bishop, at the very commencement, said it was not a red-tape question of a third altar, but a question of the services said at that altar, and I myself, and my communicants, and a magistrate in the town, who thought that I had not been explicit in making it, made the offer that the altar should be moved, but the services maintained. I am condemned also, by many, for having been disobedient to the Bishop. Indeed, I think this was the reason why the Bishop of Durham prevented me preaching a Mission in his diocese. But I am sure that the Bishop of Winchester would be the first to say that this was not the case. In one sense, if I had wished to stay, it would have been very difficult to put me out. For I have created almost everything that exists at S. Agatha’s, and I am either joint or sole trustee for all the property; and I am, even now, responsible for £3000 incurred either on the church or on property which has been recently acquired for the Mission purposes. I say this in no spirit of boasting, but only to set myself right with the public. If I were to express my private opinion, I should say it would have been much wiser for a Bishop just entering on his diocese to have let S. Agatha’s, at any rate for a year or two, be ruled by the decision of his predecessor; but Bishop Davidson had every right to take a different view of the case, and, doubtless, he only put into action what is the mature judgment of many English Churchmen. One of the most learned and devoted of the High Church school has said that it is for the good of the body that excrescences should be cut off. I am an excrescence, ergo, when an opportunity arises, it is wise to lop me off. But, if mine is intended as an object-lesson, I fear it will hardly be so accepted by the other excrescences. They are all well sheltered by their freeholds, and few bishops to-day would like to undertake the odium of a ritual prosecution, far less the expense it entails. After all, too, the excrescence is not so unlike the healthy limb. It differs more in expression than in fact. By my resignation the Bishop gains two points. First, though my successor will, every Friday, say Mass for the Dead, he will only use outwardly the words of the Book of Common Prayer. Secondly, he has asked the communicants to arrange amongst themselves that there shall be three communicants at both the 10 and 11 o’clock Masses on Sundays. And this being so, he will say the part of the service relating to communicants. But he requests that they will come fasting, and give him notice beforehand. His desire to obey the Prayer Book has, I think, landed him rather on the horns of a dilemma. If no one gives him notice, will he have the Celebration, using the Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution, knowing that no communicants will be present? Or, will he give up the 10 and 11 o’clock Celebrations? The same difficulty will apply to the week-day Masses. We condemn as a fundamental error the idea that men were created for the sake of the Sacraments. We believe that the Sacraments were created for the sake of men. But it seems that, by this new theory, men were created for the sake of the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. I make no complaint whatsoever. I have no right to make a complaint. And if, on the one hand, my conscience would have allowed me to say, for instance, this week the service for the second Sunday after Lent, in black vestments, or to have used a collect from the Visitation of the Sick, or from the Burial of the Dead, either saying them in a sense not intended by the Book of Common Prayer, or interpolating words of my own, and secretly to say the rest of the Office for the Dead; and, on the other, to invite people to make the most solemn of all our public confessions, and to pronounce Absolution over them, when I knew that not one of them was going to receive that Communion, which necessitated such a confession and warranted such an absolution, I should be still at S. Agatha’s. There is one solemn question which I should like to ask those who lop us off. Do they wish that we should go into lay-communion, and our work, as priests, be lost to the Church of England? Or do they want us to exercise our priesthood in another Communion? Before the old diocesans gaily commence their course of lopping, or a new diocesan, refusing to walk in the safer paths of his predecessors, proceeds to lop, I pray them pause and consider.

XII.

=Our Money-Grubbing.=

You so often hear it said now, “Only a rich man can afford to take that living.” I doubt if there could be any more dangerous idea about the position of the parish priest. Once let the parishioners, and the Church at large, imagine that the Vicar is going to pay everything out of his own pocket, and you destroy that most needed of all Christian duties--systematic giving. The false idea, so largely believed--that the clergy are all State-paid, and, therefore, well paid--is one of the reasons why, in so many places, members of the Church of England are utterly wanting in the duty of almsgiving. When Dr. Fearon chose me, he chose the poorest man in England. As I have told you, I had to pawn my watch on my first visit to the Bishop. And I believe that this is the very reason why God has so wonderfully blessed us with money. If we lived in mediæval times, people might almost believe of the Mission the old legends of the miraculous multiplication of food and money, for there have been many occasions when we were literally without a penny; but those were the very times when money came to us the most strangely. And why should we doubt that miracles are wrought to-day? Though I could nearly always make a shrewd guess as to where the money came from, even if it came anonymously, still I know it came in answer to those two powers by which all miracles have been wrought--faith and prayer; not my own, indeed, for that often failed, but those of my helpers and my own people. I think the Bishop of Winchester must have felt something like this when he kindly came and saw round the Mission the week before we left. I could not, of course, show to him our real treasures--men and women, clothed, and in their right mind, sitting at the Saviour’s feet, a few years back lost to all sense of shame and decency. I could not show him our Communicants’ Society: it would have been putting too great a strain upon my people’s patience. But I could show him the outward signs of our success--the changed streets, and the unmurmuring attitude of those who at once saw that he was the Bishop. Many years before I had helped to save his predecessor, when he was Bishop of Rochester, from being stoned in Lorimer Square; but I had no fear that even one rude word would be spoken to him. This, at any rate, was a discipline that our people had learned. I was able to show him, too, our wonderful gymnasium, the parsonage, the day-schools, the alms-houses, the Mission-house, old S. Agatha’s, and new S. Agatha’s, nearly all of which had been built by my begging. I wonder if any thought passed through his mind that he was actually, at that moment, killing the goose that had laid the golden eggs--truly a goose, for was it wise to lay out ten years of one’s life in effecting all this; indeed, to entail upon one’s self future years of begging, without any assurance more than the implied consent of the Bishop for the time being that I should be permitted to finish it? But, surely, it is only the faithless who would think it was foolish. For to labour, and to know that others will enter into your labour, is but a necessary consequence of being the servant of a Church whose work is one and continuous, whomsoever it is done by; and our part is only to be as grateful as our niggardly natures allow us, because we have been permitted to share, ever so little, in the glorious work by which, to-day, the Church of England is restoring to herself her lapsed children. Whether it is prudent of rulers to kill the goose, is a different question; they know their own business best, and, at any rate, one admires those who have the courage to act upon their convictions. They, too, who see the poor at second-hand--that is, through the appeals which come to them--can hardly be expected to realise the awful burden and difficulty of begging. I calculate that I have devoted one day out of every week that I spent at Portsmouth to this work alone.

You will notice in the accounts, which I hope you will read, a very large item for postage and for travelling. This represents my begging machinery. Every quarter I sent out to every subscriber, and to every man at Winchester, an account of the quarter’s work. Few duties were more irksome than the writing of these reports. One was bound to tell the truth, and to tell it so as to interest. The days of writing these reports will be remembered by every inmate of our house. I have often heard new inmates told by old ones, “I would not ask him anything. He is in a raging temper to-day.” At meals we all sat perfectly silent; even George Kerr, drinking his cod-liver oil between meat and pudding, or the antics and blandishments of the latest Buddha, could not make us smile. And if Mary heard a piano-organ coming anywhere near, she would run out with twopence to bribe them to go away. Everyone knew I was writing the report; everyone knew how much depended upon its success. I expect lots of the subscribers never read them; I am sure the majority of Winchester men did not. But, still, I believe they were the great means of keeping alive the knowledge of the Mission, and interest in it.

Then the begging by word of mouth. How extraordinarily kind people have been to us in this respect. I have got offertories in no less than eighty-one churches, and have spoken in drawing-rooms and public halls; I have been sandwiched into classical concerts and comic concerts; I have lectured in boys’ schools and girls’ schools, and have collected in this way £3137, and yet this sum does not all represent the actual amount received, for many a cheque came afterwards. I remember once preaching at a little church at Nice, and being very much annoyed with the clergyman for asking me, as there were only about ten people present; and yet there I discovered Mr. Dyer-Edwardes, who has been one of our greatest helpers, not only giving us money but supplying most delightful holidays for the clergy in his beautiful home in Gloucestershire. People at the meetings have always been so kind, but they generally remarked, “Oh, it evidently gives you no trouble to speak, you require no preparation.” They little knew the sleepless nights which evolved perhaps one single joke, and the tremendous difficulty of speaking time after time on the same subject without getting exaggerated or inaccurate. This living in the train, too, is terribly distressing, especially if you always want to get home at night, and I never felt that I slept at ease away from home. A house like ours was a responsibility, even greater than getting the money to keep it going. In Lent preaching seven or eight courses in London besides all my sermons at home, I have come home two or three times a week by the midnight train, so much so that at last I found it cheaper to have a season ticket. Yet even this was a reproach, for people seeing me travel second class thought I was proud and extravagant; as was also a fur coat, which one of my sisters gave me, as I suffer greatly from the cold when travelling at night, for I heard a lady, who passed me when coming out of a vestry, say, “If I had known he had a coat like that, I should not have put five shillings in the collection.” Then think of the moral deterioration of oneself. You look at everyone from the point of view, What shall I get out of him? Sneaking in at the vestry door you look round the corner to see if there are any carriages. And yet one does not grudge all this, for it means the larger part of £50,000 collected for the Church of England during ten years.

Of course in all this collecting Winchester has been our chief contributor. The men and masters were responsible for £150 of my salary. There is an offertory three times a year in chapel. The balance goes to a Central Wykehamist Fund, which is managed by a committee of members elected by present Wykehamists, with the Headmaster as chairman. This committee has sent me £11,292. But this does not represent at all what I have received from Wykehamists, past and present. Looking over the names of subscribers I should say I have received £15,000 more. I cannot be grateful enough for this money. Much of it has come from those, whom I know gave with difficulty. Much of it came from those who did not agree, some with my social, some with my religious, some with any of my opinions. But they gave it because they believed that a good work was being done in Landport, which reacted even upon the school itself.

A great deal of it has come, far more than one would believe, from the people of S. Agatha’s. Gold is an unknown quantity almost in S. Agatha’s offertories. When White and Claxon, who always counted the money, discovered a five-shilling piece, they nearly had a fit. And yet mostly in coppers, threepences, sixpences, and a few shillings, we averaged over £4 on general Sundays, with a considerable addition on any special day. Four years ago we started a parochial fund, every regular communicant subscribing to it each quarter any sum they liked, some a penny, some threepence, and some a half-crown. There were 286 members, and their subscriptions amounted to £380 in the four years. The benefit of this fund does not consist in the amount of money, but in the sense of having a stake in the parish, the possibility of using with reality the word “my,” as “my church,” “my service,” “my clergy.” The number would have been increased, but in many cases whole families are communicants, and the father would give for all, or at any rate for his wife, even if the children who were in work gave themselves.

Then the special funds were mostly collected in the parish; for a poor scavenger who was killed, £130; for Mr. Osborne, when he left us, £123; for the _Victoria_ catastrophe, £114, the mothers giving up their treat that year; in the parochial sales also, both in the buying and selling departments, parishioners were largely represented. The last fund that they collected, amounting to £100 14s. 6d. in six months, was to buy a new altar for the church, and when, on leaving, I asked them whether I might use this for paying off part of the beautifying of the Lady Chapel, every subscriber but one willingly gave me leave. If the widow, who cast her mite into the Treasury, brought joy into the heart of the great Watcher of all men’s deeds, surely that heart has received joy over and over again in our poor Landport slum, for His eye saw the self-denial entailed. There are some who give that which costs them nothing. There are some who give that which costs them their pleasure. There are some who give that which costs them their daily bread. At that cost over and over again many of our people have cast into the Treasury of God.

On the day before I left, and they had only been collecting about three weeks, they gave me £175, making me promise to spend it upon myself. I need not say the great Godsend it has been to me, for I left S. Agatha’s as poor as I went there, even poorer, for once, when in dire necessity, I had to sell all my books. And so, as I am now without salary or employment, I am living on that money. I remember their generosity at every meal I eat, and every time I lie down in bed, and it is a joy to me beyond all joys that I owe this, as very nearly all else during this last ten years, to their love and forethought. For I still have to be very busy. You will see by this account that I have a debt of over £3000 to pay. I thought at one moment of his interview that the Bishop would have said something about this debt, for I am paying for the church in which I shall never minister again, for an increased playground for the school in which I shall never teach again, for the bad house next the parsonage, so that it may be enlarged, though I may never live there again, for an organ for the new church. And then there are some boys whom I am still bound to help, and one or two other cases, which I consider depend on me. At any rate, the practical question arises, the builder, the lawyer, and the architect must be paid. I am specially anxious about the builder. The head of the firm is just dead, and of necessity they must arrange business matters. They have been most upright and honourable, completing their business in a most satisfactory manner. I have overdrawn my bank account, I have borrowed from friends, I have even borrowed from money which was given me to spend upon myself, and by these means I have paid £800 more than I have received. I still owe them £1200. I am preaching ten courses of sermons a week this Lent to try and raise this money.

An old Wykehamist, overcoming his shyness, penetrated into the vestry of a church where I was preaching, and asked me if he could do anything for me. He had only just left school, so he could not give me money, but he proposed that his mother should get up a drawing-room meeting. Lord Encombe kindly came and took the chair, and Mrs. Burton sent me £58, the proceeds of the meeting. I think I am proudest of all that her servants, who hear me preach in London, all contributed to that result. A kind friend has taken the Pump-room at Tunbridge Wells, to give me an opportunity of lecturing, as well as preaching at S. Barnabas there. A lady is giving me her drawing-room in Chester Street early in May. I cannot take the holiday which I need so much, far less think of undertaking any new work, even if anybody would offer it me, until I have collected this £3000. And I am afraid that it will be very hard for me to get this money. The action of the Bishops of Durham and Worcester, and of the Rector of Croydon, not only prevent me getting money in these actual places (though I have just heard from the Vicar of Evesham, where the Bishop inhibited me, that the good people there, whom I have never seen, are going to send me their Lent savings), but have a tendency to prejudice me in the minds of other people. But I am sure if anybody would go down to see S. Agatha’s, walk round the parish, examine our buildings, etc., they would discover that there has been no waste in our expenditure, and that we have taught our people not only to give, for they subscribe to all our funds, but, however mistaken I may be myself in my own opinions, to be loyal and dutiful members of the Church of England. Of course, if I had left after another two years there would have been no difficulty about the money; indeed, I do not think that, even if I had left at Easter, there would have been much. At any rate, everything that is there now belongs to the Church of England. The Bishop has approved of the priest-in-charge. If I wished it, I could not interfere in one single ceremony, or give one single instruction, and so I do think that, if there is anyone who admires our work, or thinks it has been useful and done good, now is the time that they should prove it by helping me to pay these debts. A meeting was once held to sympathise with a poor woman, who had lost her husband. Two gentlemen delivered very eloquent speeches, which drew tears from the eyes of those who heard them. The third speaker said, “I have no eloquence, but I sympathise £10,” which he put down upon the table. The kindest things imaginable have been said about me by all sorts of people, and written in all sorts of papers. I am extremely grateful and gratified, but I think I should now appreciate a little of the other kind of speaking.

BALANCE SHEET.

RECEIPTS. £ _s._ _d._ Central Wykehamist Committee 11,292 3 0 Church Societies 1,074 7 1 Diocesan Societies 759 12 6 Special Funds 899 12 4 S. Agatha’s Offertories 3,032 13 11 Sales and Collections in Parish 1,786 1 11 Profit of Shop 646 1 0 Rents and Club Dues 499 4 11 Debts Repaid and sums under £1 471 16 1 Winchester Houses 121 17 11 R. R. D. 313 7 0 Offertories, Meetings, Concerts, etc. 3,137 0 8 Anonymous Donations 6,428 1 9 Subscribers 17,352 14 8 Debt (for which Rev. R. R. Dolling is responsible) 3,090 0 0 ---------------------- £50,904 14 9 ======================

EXPENDITURE. £ _s._ _d._ Travelling 446 6 5 Postage, Stationery, Bank Charges 863 16 7 Clubs 984 3 7 Mission 5,530 18 0 Charity 3,258 13 8 Salaries 5,591 17 9 Chapel Expenses 1,317 10 7 Buildings Bought 5,325 14 1 Special Offertories 1,226 13 7 Penitentiary 1,360 9 0 Emigration 1,115 5 1 Building Schools 3,384 11 10 Sunday Schools 397 1 10 Special Funds 662 11 4 Building Parsonage 1,381 17 1 S. Agatha’s Orphanage 4,500 0 0 New Church 11,308 11 4 Endowment 1,300 0 0 Remitted to J. G. Talbot, Esq., _re_ New Church 948 13 0 ---------------------- £50,904 14 9 ======================

XIII.

=Winchester.=

In this book, which tries to tell of the Winchester College Mission, you will perhaps be disappointed that so little is said actually about Winchester; but that was the most distinctive part of their method; from first to last they never wanted to intrude. They put me in charge of the Mission, they paid me my salary, they entrusted me, as you will have seen, with large sums of money; but they never from first to last desired to dictate methods, or to hinder even when my methods were not quite at one with their own. It was an extraordinary generosity, and I am afraid that I have oftentimes put it to the test.

Placing the Mission at Landport was a stroke of genius on the part of the late Headmaster, Dr. Ridding. It enabled the men to become quite familiar with the work which was being carried on in their name. Prefects could come down from Saturday to Sunday night, and on leave-out days any man in the school could come down. Recently some change as to leave-out days has made this more difficult, but it is a matter of great congratulation to me that most of the elder men, both present and past, do not know the Mission merely by hearsay. Bedrooms were always kept ready for them, and I think, as a rule, they enjoyed themselves when they stayed with us, or, at least, they had the grace to appear to do so. When I speak of this, people always say, “What did they do?” I am afraid I have to answer, they did not do anything. Someone used to take them round the parish on Saturday night, and show them the different clubs, or they stayed in the gymnasium, or they came up to my own room and talked. Sometimes, if there was a great stress of work, they would help us in directing envelopes, or copying circulars. On Sunday they went to church, and took their meals with us--a plain breakfast of bread and butter, which we have to have on Sundays because so many breakfast with us, was never objected to by them; and the Sunday dinner was shared with thirty or forty other people, mostly of a different rank of life to which they were accustomed. Writing it down now in cold blood it does not seem anything, but I am sure it was everything--a liberal education, a discovery that all men are pretty much the same, that even the grossest sin, the direst poverty, has not the power of annihilating true manhood--above all the lesson that true worth consists not in what a man has, but what a man is; and perhaps they just guessed at the higher lesson that union with God is not only the power of a perfect cleansing, but the power of a renewed life, which renders him who possesses it true and beautiful. Of course, some men grasped all this easily, others saw things only as they were; but I do not believe that any man ever stayed with us who did not go away better for the visit.

I have been astonished oftentimes, when men came back long after they left school to stay with us how much more deeply such thoughts had penetrated their souls than I at the moment had believed. It seemed to them very difficult to realise that almost all our inmates were of what are called the lower, oftentimes of the degraded, classes; but men are strangely imitative, and our inmates naturally adopted the customs of those amongst whom they lived. The boy, too, of the lower class is generally wanting in self-consciousness. He talks freely and easily. The things he talks about are generally matters of experience to him. He seldom theorises. He is desirous of making those in his company feel at ease. I have seen Winchester men coming to us very anxious to condescend, to be polite, and I have seen them utterly nonplussed at the extraordinary good manners, simplicity, and powers of conversation of the fellows sitting round our table. Practically they came to teach, they remained to learn. I do not suppose that they were conscious of their intention, or of the result of their visit.

Then, too, their coming down gave me an opportunity of speaking plainer and straighter than I well could at Winchester. It was a great gain, having this opportunity with the leading men and heads of houses. It is very wonderful that they never seemed to resent this at all; sometimes I even flatter myself they liked it. They saw, too, the awful havoc which sin makes in character. Their lives at Winchester are so happy and so employed that they have little time or, perhaps inclination, to imagine the lives of those who are the very opposite of themselves, and, I think, seeing these lives did impress them very much. I judge this not only from what they said, but from the fact that several, I might say many, of them have privately helped me not only with money, but by taking pains in getting lads situations. And this interest has not been merely for a moment, just quickened by the sight of the poverty or distress, but has lasted after they left Winchester. Men did me even the honour of making me their confidant about themselves, or about some other man in the school for whom they were anxious. I grieve to-day, now that the chance has gone from me, over many opportunities wasted, sloth and pride so often preventing one, and one’s own selfish nature continually supplying the excuse, “This is not the proper moment to speak,” or, “You might lose your influence by speaking.”

These days spent with me gave me the right to ask for hospitality in return. At first I only went to College, Joseph, my first Prefect of Hall, making this a very easy matter for me; and where Mrs. Richardson, the second master’s wife, is, there can never be embarrassment. And so under her hospitable roof I began my venture of spending one day a week in Winchester. Then Harold Bilbrough, head of Mr. Kensington’s house, asked me to go there. And soon the kind hospitality of the House Dons enabled me to visit every House in the school. I arrived in time to dine with the men in their hall. Then in the afternoon we watched cricket or football, or whatever was going on; in the winter the House Prefects giving me tea up at the House, in the summer ices, or an equivalent, at Louisa’s. Alas! Louisa’s is now no more; there is a school shop instead. The House Don usually asked four or five men in to dinner in the evening; sometimes I was asked to say a few words at “_Preces_”; then the head of the House would take me into each gallery, and I saw all the fellows in bed, got to know, if possible, the younger ones, saw if there were any clothes I could take down to my people at home; a chance often arose of saying in jest a word that went deeper, or sometimes a word of comfort, but at any rate it broke down all shyness. I cannot for one single moment flatter myself that I exercised much influence, certainly not a religious influence strictly so-called. That was not my business. My religious mission was to Landport, not to Winchester, and I should have been utterly disloyal to the Winchester authorities and the parents of the boys if I had even tried to exercise such influence. On the other hand, I do believe that I was able to help many a man in the crisis of his school life, and to say many a word which would last after he left Winchester, and I judge from many letters received long after men have left the school, and from kind words which Dr. Fearon and the masters have said to me, that they thought the influence which I had at Winchester was really helpful to the school life.

Though it is difficult for me to speak of this, it is very easy for me to speak of the extraordinary help Winchester has been, personally, to me. The days spent there were days of perfect relaxation. In the summer watching cricket in Meads was a pure joy, one after another, men and Dons coming up to tell of all the news, and to discuss what was going on. There is, perhaps, no playing-field as beautiful in the whole of England; in front of you S. Catherine’s Hill with its crown of trees, on one side the College Chapel, on the other S. Cross; everywhere gleams of beauty, and even on the sultriest day a delightful breeze. Then the most restful of all surroundings, a perfectly smooth green sward, and to give life the extraordinary excitement of the game, when the one thing that one desired most was that a man’s batting or bowling in a foreign match should entitle him to get into Lord’s; on the less sacred sward games innumerable, the anxiety of House captains about the younger men coming on, and dear Fort coaching and encouraging everybody. Beautiful as it all was, I am not sure that the intense excitement of Sixes or Fifteens, our Winchester football, was not even greater; the endeavour to fathom the mystery why commoners have a special go and _verve_ of their own, the discussing it over and over again with House men and College men and with Dons. Sometimes people talk as if too much is made of games, that they are altogether Philistine, destroying refinement. At any rate, at Winchester this was never the case. From an experience of ten years, I would say that the vast majority of men in the Eleven and the Football teams were the nicest men in the school, and I have grown to know most of these men extremely well. My first year I did not; men were shy of me. Perhaps they thought that, because I was a parson, I was likely to be a “smug.” But I remember well my second year, when the Captain of Lord’s, I think it was Thesiger, walked arm in arm with me across Meads, I felt I had won a final victory. And the real beauty of the whole thing was, these men never guessed what they were doing for me. Their pure kindness was so modest, so unassuming, it was like eating and drinking new life. Age has nothing to do with years, the Winchester Missioner never can become an old man. Living amongst my own boys at home one did not gain this, there is so much of tears and sorrow, so much that is sordid mixed up in their lives, they are often so very old themselves. But to see these, one succeeding to another, ever young, ever enthusiastic, with literally no cares, and just as much work as was good for them, and to be allowed to enter into their life, to become part of the school, this rendered possible by their wonderful generosity, was to realise all the liberality of their environment and the beauty of their homes. I have come to Winchester oftentimes with a heart almost broken with sorrow; that heart-break has never lasted out one hour. Of course there is another side. We English deem that because a system suits eighty out of every hundred boys, it must suit the other twenty, and so the other twenty have to come to school. It is an atmosphere where they do not develop, where what is best and truest in them seems to be for ever driven back into their own hearts, until the best ceases to be good and sometimes becomes the worst--boys timid in will, weak in body, real cowards in spirit, they cannot help it. If parents, discovering such a one in their family, would devise some other method of education for them, it would be better for them and better for schools, for it is these boys who bring out in others whatever is vulgar and cruel, and there is latent vulgarity and cruelty in most boys from fourteen to sixteen. The best set of Prefect’s eyes cannot be everywhere, and consequently little eyes are sometimes dimmed with tears, and little hearts are broken. And then there are bad boys. Take any four hundred men, women, or girls, and you will find bad ones amongst them. And badness has a strange way of impressing itself on others. Thank God, at that age it does not sink very deep, the bad is very superficial, and leaves little or no mark behind it. Oh, the blessed power of recovery in the young!

We have two great blessings at Winchester. We are a small school--only four hundred--and none of our men are very rich. There is a perfect friendliness between all the masters and the men. Of course, I have heard words of anger against Dons, but I have never known a real hard thought about one of them. It is an extraordinary friendliness, and this friendliness passes down into the whole school. There are generations of brothers, coming one after the other, sometimes three in the same house at the same time, the greatest safeguard possible. And, above all, a deep, wholesome, religious spirit--not perhaps what would satisfy exact theologians, but manly and straightforward. For as I believe of my own children at Landport, so I believe of Winchester men. All that is necessary for the soul’s salvation is all that it is necessary for a boy to learn--the power of prayer, the power of repentance, the power of the Sacraments, and these can be learned long before a boy comes to school--his mother the one priceless teacher. We need at school the opportunity of testing the religion learned, far more than of learning religion, and when the boy is equipped with the simple armour which I have spoken of, he is well prepared for every emergency of temptation. I remember a little lad once saying to me, when I saw him working late at night, “I am mugging John.” I suppose when boys reach the sixth form they are intellectual enough to understand criticism, even of the Greek Testament; but I deprecate myself the Bible in any case being turned into a school book, and I think the parents who imagine that they can impose upon the school-master their duty of teaching religion to their children, inflict on their children a cruel wrong, on the master an impossible task.

I would I had the power to write what I feel about Winchester. I would I had words to make you feel how I have realised the magnificence of its great tradition--an unbroken chain of upright English gentlemen, holding the most useful place in their nation’s history; not perchance the most brilliant, but certainly amongst the most dependable men of their time--and how earnestly I believe that this tradition is realised by almost every man in the school, and that the nation will realise it just as truly in times to come as in times past.

This intimate knowledge of men at school naturally led to my knowing many of their families, in Winchester language their “pitch-up”; and truly the Mission has discovered a new interpretation of that notion, if not perhaps its origin; for I think almost every family that I have known has contributed to the funds of the Mission, not only in money, but in clothes, in asking parties of us to spend the day with them, sometimes even in supporting cases that we were very anxious about. It has led, too, to a kind of association of prayer for the Mission’s welfare, composed of relatives of past and present Wykehamists. Miss Wigram, of South Lodge, Champion Hill, S.E., the sister of “The Cat” and “The Kitten,” would be glad to give particulars.

Once or twice a year, too, I was able to go up to Oxford, sometimes to Cambridge, and thus keep in touch with the men there. There is something especially charming in this hospitality, though I doubt if one could stand it for very long, unless one could discover the curious secret of Mr. Lucraft. There is perhaps nothing more attractive than seeing a man act host for the first time, especially when he has got the kitchens and plate-closet of Magdalen behind him. I remember on one visit a distinguished Low Church clergyman suddenly asking me what I had been doing for the spread of religion, and I could only answer, “Taking three square meals a day.” I think he was very much shocked; but you will likely understand that under this hospitality there was hidden a true generosity, and an interest in the Mission and myself. New College was naturally my head-quarters, and men took really extraordinary pains to arrange that I should see as many Wykehamists as possible at the different centres of hospitality, and I have always thought that taking trouble, certainly at Oxford, was the greatest proof of taking real interest. God, too, allows one to speak more plainly at Oxford than one could at Winchester, and there come into my memory now many conversations full of the deepest interest. At any rate, it is a great privilege to have won the right to speak, even if men did not always follow the advice given, and letters received years after the conversation--many received since men knew that I was leaving Landport--almost induce me to flatter myself that the Mission has been a much greater help than at the time I ever realised. Of course, it is natural that men who knew me at Winchester should have some interest in the Mission, one would have been disappointed if they had not; but to discover that a large number of old Wykehamists were cordially ready to befriend us, not only with money, but with sympathy, was a very astonishing revelation to me. The larger part of the money has come from them; and when you think that it was given into the hands of a socialistic Ritualist to use and to distribute, you can measure something of the generosity. It would not be becoming for me to mention names, but if this book falls into the hands of men who have been on the Committee, especially the Treasurers and Secretaries for the last ten years, I would like them to realise how their loyalty to us has been one of the chief factors in a generous Wykehamical support, which gave us the grace of perseverance in the most difficult time of our work. I am conscious, as no one else can be, how often my own actions have strained this loyalty. I know that not only old Wykehamists, but even the school authorities themselves, have often been very severely tried by things we have deemed it our duty to say or to do. Sometimes a word in a letter, or reading between the lines, might suggest caution to us, but never during the whole of these ten years has any single word been said by anyone in authority, or by others who had gained the right by having contributed to our funds, that could be construed into any other meaning than the tenderest love and the truest desire to help. Perhaps there could be no greater sign of that real liberalism that permeates every true Englishman, in whatever camp, either political or religious, circumstance may have placed him. To Wykehamists at Oxford or Cambridge, to men in the City and at the Bar, to soldiers scattered throughout the world, and to priests working at home and abroad, to schoolmasters, Indian civilians, and to Bishops, I, who have failed in my endeavour to do some work for Winchester, venture to offer my heartiest thanks for innumerable acts of kindness and generosity during these ten years.

XIV.

=Our Method of Services.=

I hope through all this description of social work at Landport, Winchester, Oxford, and elsewhere, you have been able to read a deeper truth than mere Socialism even at its best. The lesson which is the foundation of all work like ours is that, however earnestly you may strive to change circumstances, you must realise that change of character is the thing to be aimed at, and practically if you do not achieve this, you have hardly achieved anything at all. And I know but one method by which this change of character can be effected, the method of Jesus Christ, not merely to show to people the perfection and beauty of His character--that oftentimes might lead only to despair--but to enable them, by the means which He Himself has ordained, to be partakers of His very nature. To say to a poor sin-ruled creature, whom you know all his old companions, every public-house door as it swings open, will allure into the ways of sin again, “Be like Jesus, be good,” is only making a demand that you yourself know can never be fulfilled. But to be able to say to him, “Here is this Jesus, Who for your sake became a real man, as you are a man, Who worked in the carpenter’s shop, earning, with the sweat of His brow, daily bread for Himself, His dear mother, and her husband, Who was disappointed and injured by His friends as well as by His enemies, Who was really tempted by the devil, Whose life in many respects was just like your own, Who never turned away His face from any poor wretched outcast, but spoke to them tenderly and gently words of love and hope, Who when He could do no more for you by way of example, willed to die for you: having nothing else to give, He gave His own life-blood, and in the giving of that, won for you a power of union with Himself, that though you must do your part, and be sorry for your sins, and try to be better, He will as surely do His part by letting His precious blood wash away your sin, and strengthen you to live an amended life. Here is this Jesus standing as it were between the living and the dead, so few, few living, so many, many dead, dead with a death more terrible by far than the worm and corruption can effect, for they but touch the outward covering of a man, with a death which has destroyed the real life, the knowledge that God was their Father, that they had souls capable of everything that was beautiful and true. Here is Jesus, Who can give even to the clumsy vulgar body the power of doing gracious acts, of speaking true words, Who can give to the intellect the power of realising true noble ideals, and so assimilating them, that they may become a very fibre of their thoughts.” In almost all our people there was this death, this living, hopeless, faithless death. Who could deliver them from the body of this death? One Who could restore to them faith in the supernatural, hope in themselves, love towards their fellow-men. No preaching can do this. I believe nothing can but the Blessed Sacrament. The compassion, which Jesus learned in the trials of His life, taught Him to realise that man, if he is to be touched, must be touched in his entirety, that an attempt to deal with him spiritually alone is bound to fail. How Christ-destroying is all that theology that tries to be wiser and more spiritual than the Christ! The Blessed Sacrament is not only the prolongation of the Incarnation in the world, but it is a means by which Jesus wills that He shall be apprehended by the multitude. And so ten and a half years ago I set before myself this as the method of my ministry. Some I know make the Blessed Sacrament the crown of their religion. I desired to make it the foundation as well. As the Incarnation is the revelation to us of God the Father, so the Divine Son wills to be known in the breaking of bread.

How far we succeeded in this, the following letter from Father Maturin will show:

“ST. ANDREW’S, N.B., “_April 1st, 1896_.

“MY DEAR DOLLING,

“The wrench from S. Agatha’s must be a great one for you, and I deplore it very much. For I had exceptional opportunities of seeing behind the scenes into the real work, and its effects upon the people, during the mission which Robinson and I gave there a few months ago. Some things have left an impression upon my mind which I shall never, I think, quite forget.

“One was the extraordinary simplicity and reality of the people’s worship. I do not think I have ever seen anything quite like it in the Church of England, though I have had a rather exceptionally wide experience of different parishes in England and America. The stiffness and formalism which haunts us and hampers us everywhere, was not known at S. Agatha’s. You somehow succeeded in laying that ghost, and in teaching the people that the church is their home, where they should behave as if they are at home. Men came and went there as to a place of rest which they loved. Some time ago the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bishops, made a move to have the churches left open for private prayer, but the people seldom use them. Somehow at S. Agatha’s they do use their church; it had the appearance of being homelike and in constant use. I have often gone into some of our best-known churches in London in the daytime, and felt chilled and lonely. I have a very vivid memory of two occasions, amongst others, at S. Agatha’s--one was a Saturday during the mission, when I had to go over to Southampton, and coming back in the afternoon I went straight to the church, and found many people in the church on their knees, and a constant stream of people coming and going. The other occasion was your last day at S. Agatha’s. I got there late in the evening, and found a large congregation saying their own prayers, no service, and the people seeming to feel no need of help, but knowing themselves how to lay their needs before God. I shall never forget that devout congregation kneeling in perfect stillness in the dark church, having apparently learnt that lesson so hard to teach, especially to those who can’t read, how to pour out their souls to God. It was the same at the Masses and other services; the people seemed to know how to pray.

“If you ask me to what this quite exceptional power of prayer is to be attributed, I think I can say without hesitation that, so far as I could judge, I should trace it to two things:

“(i.) One is your constantly keeping up their interest in all that was going on amongst them, by telling them of the needs and troubles of others, and suggesting prayers, _extempore_ and others, to them. I could feel myself its power, and the way in which the people appeared to have grown used to bringing their own and others’ difficulties constantly before God. Rigidity had to bend and yield before this, and it did, and real personal devotion took its place. At the same time the regular services in no sense lost any of their dignity. I have never seen a more dignified and devout Mass anywhere.

“(ii.) The other cause to which I attribute so much of the spirit of prayer, and the chief one, was that the people, however poor and ignorant, seemed to have a grasp upon and a love of the Blessed Sacrament such as I have seldom, if ever, seen elsewhere. Their worship and their Christian life centred round it. You had wholly banished from their minds the idea that the Presence was only confined to the act of communion. It was enough for them to know the Blessed Sacrament was upon the altar, to crowd to the church--that attraction which draws Christendom was exercising its full sway over them, and the result was what one would expect. I feel convinced by what I saw, that we shall never get people to realise the Real Presence in all its fulness without reservation. The poorest at S. Agatha’s ‘knew what they worshipped.’

“No doubt along with all this there must have been careful and thorough teaching, but of that I will not speak. Only one other thing I will notice, though I might speak of many things. I was very much struck with the very extraordinary conversions. Some of those who had led very bad lives a few years before, appeared to have broken from the past in a way I have seldom seen before, and in the place of vice and degradation there was an extraordinary refinement; the past seemed gone. I have some cases especially in my mind at this moment. I believe--indeed, I have no doubt--this was owing in part, at least, to the fact that probably these poor people had never resisted; for they had never had the offer of the grace of the Sacraments, and with the first waking of conscience came the blessing of the knowledge of the Catholic Faith in its fulness. I should like to have taken some of those who criticise any departure from rigid conformity to Prayer Book methods, to see what I saw. Certainly no good results would justify anything that is wrong, but I conceive that, so far as I could see, the methods of S. Agatha’s were no greater a departure from Prayer Book ways than is used, I suppose, in the vast majority of parishes in England.

“But I must not write more. I only hope that S. Agatha’s may go on for the future upon the lines so well and so prayerfully laid down.

“Ever affectionately yours, “B. W. MATURIN.”

Dr. Linklater built a very fitting Mission Church; it seated about five hundred people, and I found Celebrations on Sunday at seven and eight, morning and evening prayer, and a children’s service; and on week-days, Celebrations twice a week, and evensong every night. I felt that it would be wiser to leave the Sunday services unchanged for two years, supplementing them if I saw it was needed. But the week-day services I took in hand very soon after I came. For my brother priests and for my workers, it was very soon necessary to have a daily Celebration, not only for the nourishment of our own souls, but to give us the opportunity of pleading that Sacrifice for the whole body of Christ’s Church, and especially for the wants of our own district. I say it with the fullest confidence, that this daily Celebration has been the chief strength of the parochial life.

But here, at the very outset, we were met by the difficulty of that rubric about three communicants, which seems to have become the shibboleth which proves loyalty or otherwise to the Church of England. Our numbers made it almost impossible for us to arrange for three communicants each morning, even if I could conscientiously have done this. I am told that there are churches which qualify for saying a daily Mass by arranging that three people will be responsible for each morning in the week. I can understand few customs that are so likely to injure souls. Very soon one and another beside the clergy and helpers began to drop in. Remember, the poor have no room where they can pray alone. The church becomes for them the customary place where prayer is to be made, except the very brief morning and evening prayer. The Celebrations, too, were offered on the different mornings with different intentions. Soldiers, sailors, and emigrants one morning, Penitentiary work another, and so on. Often the silent tears trickling down a woman’s face would show you she was praying for her own boy or her own girl. To these poor feeble folk, with no power of prayer or concentration of mind, with but few words which they can use, even in their daily intercourse, the knowledge that their just saying “Jack” or “Mary” as they knelt in silence, was the truest intercession, gathering all the sighs and tears of their heart in union with that all-sufficient Sacrifice, which alone could bring joy and peace to Jack or Mary. I had a better right to know this, for often as I went up into the vestry a name would be whispered in my ear, or a little piece of paper pressed into my hand. I think when I first told this to Bishop Thorold, he feared it was a kind of superstition, but when I could assure him that this grace of prayer gained before the Blessed Sacrament became the custom of the whole life, he no longer thought that we were making a superstitious use of it, or were training people to trust so in this great gift of God that they could not realise His presence elsewhere.

Soon, too, we found it necessary to arrange a special place for communicants. We had been able from the first to exercise a great deal of discipline in the parish. Remember the Church of England is the only religious body which exercises no discipline about Holy Communion. Of course, a great deal can be said on the side of the liberty of the communicant, and his being the best judge of his worthiness to receive. But surely something may be said on the other side, the duty of the priest to consider the Blessed Sacrament as a great trust. Practically I am sure it is a great hindrance to the authority of the Church among large numbers of people. Over and over again, in talking to earnest Nonconformists, they have expressed to me their wonder and amazement that we, who profess to honour the Blessed Sacrament so much, should actually take no pains to see it is not profaned. Their admirable system of letters of commendation at once puts the new-comer in communication with their church authorities, and it enables those authorities to judge about the man’s fitness for Communion. I received a curious letter bearing upon this from an earnest Christian the other day. “When I was young and strong I devoted myself to organising in certain fields of philanthropy. I was a Churchman, and I taught both in the Sunday Schools of Conformity and Nonconformity. It will seem to you, perhaps, terribly lax, but I saw no valid reason why I should not communicate in the chapel as well as regularly in my parish church. Before I was allowed to attend Communion at the chapel, I had to undergo a solemn probation. At the church no question of any kind was put to me, my fitness was entirely treated as either my own affair or a matter of indifference.” At any rate, I am perfectly sure of this, that it would be fatal in a Mission district to offer the Sacraments freely without fencing them round with all possible discipline.

There is another great inconvenience in not knowing the number of communicants; sometimes too many Hosts are consecrated, sometimes too few. I suppose that three week-day mornings out of the six we had no communicants. It seemed to me, therefore, a perfectly profane thing to invite people to receive the Communion, to turn round and say “to them that come to receive the Holy Communion,” when I knew no one was coming, most solemn, nay, awful words, then to allow my minister to make confession, perhaps the most grave and weighty possible in language, “in the name of all those who are minded to receive the Holy Communion,” when he and I knew that no one was so minded, and, still more profane, to pronounce an absolution over those who have made no confession, or if they have, had no right to make that confession. Thus one set of rubrics and prayers in the Prayer Book landed me on the horns of a dilemma; either I was compelled to say what I knew was a mockery, or to give up my daily celebration. Ninety-nine clergymen out of a hundred, finding another rubric as to giving notice of Communion and another exhortation a difficulty, get rid of the difficulty by disregarding the rubric and by leaving the exhortation unsaid. Why should I not do the same?

The same kind of difficulty had to be faced with regard to the week-day evening service. It was wretchedly attended, and I do not wonder. We are told that in pre-Reformation times people came readily to the week-day offices. But what proof have we of this? Was the daily office, of which our Matins and Evensong is a survival, ever frequented by the laity? Perhaps people will answer that there is no obligation for the laity to go to church on a week-day, though the obligation has from the earliest days, I believe, been binding on the clergy to say their offices. Therefore these offices were constructed for the use of the clergy. But in a Mission district, where the people are practically heathen, and where you have little chance of instructing them except in church, the service of necessity must be such that they can join in it with edification. I believe you want two kinds of worship--one very dignified and ornate, which enables them to realise that they are making an offering to the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the other very simple and familiar, that they are talking to a loving Father Who knows all their needs and wants to help them. If you had the ornate worship alone, there would be a danger of mere ritualism. If you had the familiar worship alone, there might be a danger of what some people seem to be so unnaturally afraid of--too much familiarity. At any rate, saying Evensong every night, you would certainly have neither of the dangers, but, on the other hand, you would have none of the educational or heart-touching power.

I am not venturing to make any suggestion about churches except such as those in my own district. But when we had said evening prayer to empty benches for a year, we thought the thing was hopeless. People would come to a prayer meeting in the Mission room, or in one of our own rooms, but they would not come to church, which was the very place where we wanted to get them. But directly we began a prayer meeting in church many people came, and God granted to us such visible proofs--His answer seen by all the people--that many times during the year, because we have continued the prayer meetings on Monday ever since, people would come with some special need, quite sure that, in some way or another, God would answer it. The Bishop of Guildford made it a strong point in his endeavour to arrange matters with the Bishop of Winchester that we should give up this extempore prayer, but I would rather have left the Mission than done so.

Then on Thursdays we began the Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament. This Bishop Harold Browne also objected to till he had read it, and then he said it was one of the most beautiful and scriptural services he had ever seen. I expect a good deal of ecclesiastical troubles might be stopped if Bishops would see things before they condemned them. The same psalms being always sung in the Vespers, the antiphon drawing out, as it were, the sacramental meaning of the psalm, was a wonderful education; the cope, the acolytes, and the incense, added a great dignity, a dignity which, at S. Agatha’s, has never been stilted or unnatural; and the impress of this act of solemn worship upon many an ignorant heart left a true sense of the dignity of worship and a glimpse of the supernatural. Those who can read little, learn through ear and eye. These psalms, too, have been a great heritage to many of our people. I have known many a pain-stricken one recite them over and over again, a grace which certainly would never have been gained by saying different psalms every evening. And no one who has ever seen them at S. Agatha’s can doubt the power of the Stations. As I sit thinking now, I have not the courage to speak of them; but Friday after Friday they were like a great sob going up from the heart of this sinful place, to tell Jesus how sorry we were that we had been His very murderers, driving the thorns into His head, and the nails into His hands and feet. The objection to Compline, that the congregation absolved the priest, was so strangely ignorant, that the Bishop withdrew it at once. Thus our week-day services took their present form, which have continued the last eight years, with generally a little sermon added. The common people always hear gladly.

Very soon the difficulty about the children pressed upon us. They certainly had no conception of reverence or of worship. After much prayer and consideration, I determined that the only solution was to have a Children’s Mass. I wonder if any parish priest has ever been blessed with such Sunday School teachers as I have; many had taught for Dr. Linklater; and though I don’t think they liked me at all at first--they thought I was very rough and severe--they loyally stuck to me. At first, when we spoke of the Children’s Mass, many of them seemed to object to it; but a year’s hard work had well prepared the children for it. I was permitted to use the book in use at St. Alban’s, Holborn, and so got rid of that awful difficulty of inattentive children, for in this book they are employed from the time they come into church till they go out, either listening to the priest in those parts of the service which he says aloud, or, while he is saying his private devotions, being led by some responsible person in their own. What wonderful services these have been. How they have trained boys and girls naturally to come on to Communion. How they have impressed every child with the dignity and solemnity of worship. How they have taught them to realise God and the supernatural. And almost all this is due to the devotion of the teachers. It is invidious, perhaps, to mention names, but all the teachers will understand why dear Barratt’s name and Miss Damerum’s come to my mind; they stand as a kind of representatives of the rest. And, if I might add one special parochial benefit, the Children’s Mass gave us the first idea of the congregation singing their own Mass, for the children had no choir, and yet they sang Creed, Gloria, Benedictus, Agnus, everything.

This giving the children a service of their own mercifully got rid of them from Matins at 11 o’clock. Soon the older people, coming in at the end of the children’s service, began to ask why they could not have the same kind of service. There were, however, two difficulties in the way. I felt bound to make no alteration in the morning and evening services on Sundays until I had been in the parish for two years. What a blessed probation this was, for it gave us time to train choir, acolytes, and congregation. When I told the original choir that they would have to go out of the chancel, which was very small and confined, and virtually sit in a corner, and that there would be a Celebration instead of Matins, they nearly all objected to the alteration. I am afraid I had tried them very much before; I always have been very hard on choirs. I had made them give up singing Gregorians--I never yet heard congregational Gregorians. Then when Major Foote kindly joined the choir, when he was stationed at Portsmouth, and tried to teach them proper time, etc., with one accord they suggested that they could not learn to sing right, and he must accommodate his singing to theirs. I am afraid, as I have said, I was very hard on them, and not nearly patient enough. So we had to get a new choir ready when they would leave, train a set of acolytes, and teach the congregation. Nothing is more fatal than to introduce any change which people do not thoroughly understand. On Sunday nights, after Evensong, most of the congregation used to remain behind. I showed them all the vestments one by one, I made them follow in the Prayer Book every word of the service, I made them learn, to two easy settings of the Holy Communion, all the parts they had to sing, and this without any choir. I also explained to them all about the incense. I made them, either in rows, or individually, stand up and answer questions to show that they understood. At first, of course, they were shy, but Blind Willie, who, one might almost say, was divinely taught in these things, began by answering, and the others soon followed. We have never given up this habit of catechising, and so every change in worship has been well understood by the whole congregation. Some of our first acolytes have gone away from Portsmouth, some have married and given their place to others, some, like dear George Norton, are still upon the altar. Surely no place has ever been served like S. Agatha’s. Their wonderful simplicity, their utter want of mannerism, not a ritualist amongst them all. From the first we had given out notice that no one could receive Communion at the children’s service unless they had previously given in their names. This we had done in anticipation of the Sunday when Matins should be said at 9 o’clock, and the Holy Eucharist become the central act of our worship. No one had given in their names on that first Sunday morning, so we did not expect any communicants. But, while the children’s service was going on, three smartly-dressed ladies came in, and, not content to kneel like other people at the bottom of the church until that service was over, pushed their way up amongst the children, whispering and looking about, to the utter amazement of the children, who judged from their teachers that it was utterly impossible that a grown-up person could behave badly in church. Seeing them in the front pew before the service began at 11, I ventured to ask them why they had come, and they said they had heard that this was such a curious church that they would like to see it, and that they were going to receive the Holy Communion. I found that they had come from close to S. Jude’s Church. I saw by their manners that our church would disconcert them very much, and certainly not help them in preparing for a good Communion, so I whispered to the verger to get a cab, and, as soon as it came, I said, “It will be much better for you to make your Communions at S. Jude’s, as you have not given me notice.” So I walked down the church with them, put them into the cab, and paid the driver. Luckily this story got repeated, and that, together with the discomfort of the church, has largely kept sightseers away. Perhaps you will think I was very severe upon these ladies, but I am sure it was one of the most useful lessons I have ever given, both to them and to my people as well. Nothing can be so bad as going to a church because we hear that the preaching or the service is curious. One such person mars the whole atmosphere of religion, and, above all, I was anxious to keep Southsea people away, except those who worshipped with us from conviction.

Soon we added a dignity to the Evensong by vesting the officiant in a cope, and offering incense at the Magnificat. But I think I can say that there have been no changes in the services or ritual of S. Agatha’s during the last eight years, except that we have added services for men and women alone, a second Celebration daily, and an extra one on the first Sunday in the month, and evening prayer daily at 6.30; so that when we went into our new church we had five services daily, eight services every Sunday, and ten on the first Sunday in the month.

During the winter, too, late at night, so as to catch the impossibles, my dear friend Hobbs, chief school-master on the _Vernon_, enabled us to give a magic-lantern service, which was extremely valuable.

Very largely, too, we have been helped in all this by our blind organist, dear Richard Whittick. There is a wonderful tenderness in the sympathetic touch of a blind player, and he has given a note of refinement to the whole of our services, playing on the worst organ that ever was built, and yet bringing music out of it. The services made a great demand upon him, because we required him almost every night, and so it was very lucky for him that Mr. Attree, the organist of the Dockyard Church, relieved him on Thursday evenings, and at two of the Sunday services. We owe to Mr. Attree many of the beautiful photographs with which this book is illustrated. By the way, among the other things I have to pay, though I only had the use of it for six weeks, is £225 to Messrs. Hill for our new organ. Perhaps it is to our present choir that my greatest apologies are due, for they have quite willingly altogether effaced themselves, content merely to lead the congregation, and to have whatever music and hymns I thought best. And yet we all felt that in moving into a new church the choir needed strengthening, and so, when dear Mr. Roe left us because his health had broken down, God sent the Reverend Stanley Gresham, the exact man we needed. With the boys and the choirmen he really did wonders, and he is only just another instance, if we needed one, how from September, 1885, till January, 1896, we have never lacked either the persons or the things which we needed. There were ninety-nine communicants on our first Easter Sunday, and over five hundred on our last Easter Sunday. “Increase Celebrations, encourage non-communicating attendance, and you will lessen the number of communicants.” How often this is said. Let S. Agatha’s answer it. “Teach too much about the Blessed Sacrament, give people an exaggerated belief about it, and you will train them to neglect other church services; their objective worship will destroy their subjective faith in God.” Let S. Agatha’s answer. “Have all these ornate services, increase this ritualism, press confession, and you will alienate the lay people, and drive worshippers away from their own church.” Let S. Agatha’s answer. For ten years we have taught and encouraged non-communicating attendance. Our communicants had outgrown our Mission Church. We had taught practically nothing else but that the Blessed Sacrament is the revelation of Christ, Who is the revelation of the Father. Not only our Eucharists but our other services were filled to overflowing, and faith in Christ as a personal Saviour, and the Father as a personal Providence, had permeated the whole of our parish. For ten years we have taught confession, heard confessions openly in church, for eight years we have had all these ritualistic services, and though five times the Bishop of the Diocese has seen fit to summon us to his presence, and to remonstrate with us upon some practice or doctrine, yet no single complaint has ever been made by one person in our parish.

XV.

=Our Method of Religion.=

Of course, the actual church services must, in every well-ordered parish, be supplemented by a considerable amount of religious work outside the church, and our first object being to make Communion a real bond of union between us all, we strove by Bible Classes, and by private instruction, to either prepare for Confirmation, or, if people had already been confirmed, to restore them to their privileges. I differ, I know, from many of my brethren about the age of Confirmation. Very seldom has anyone been presented at S. Agatha’s under fourteen, and I should think that more than half of those confirmed were over twenty, many of them much older. The preparation took about four months each year, the lady-workers taking the girls and young women, I the married women, and my assistant clergy sharing with me the boys and men. Classes had often to be held at half-past nine, and even later, our younger people worked so late. It was possible to weed out a great many during the first two months, those who could but would not attend, and those who, though attending, showed by their manner that they had no real interest in it. I am sure it was far better to repress rather than over-encourage, and if there was any grit or desire, those who were refused were bound to offer themselves next year. It was of the utmost importance for their mates and companions not to make it too cheap. The individual work, if it was only ten minutes a week, was infinitely more precious than all classes, and then there were the three final preparations in church, of which I have spoken before. We never made confession compulsory--I do not think that it would be honest in the Church of England to do so--and though instances occurred in which one was sorry one could not, and believed that it would have been greatly to the benefit of the candidate, yet on the other hand, one realised the great danger it would have been if it had been forced, and therefore not really natural. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the voluntary system in this, as in most other things, is really the best. It is wonderful what experience these Confirmation seasons gave to us. Last night I was preaching at Kennington, and the parish priest told me, “The people here say that you seem to know all about them and their lives.” I am quite sure all this knowledge came from my Confirmation work at Landport. There is a simplicity and naturalness in people without any veneer of society, so that, when they trust you, they will literally tell you anything about themselves, and very often those who, when they first came to us, would have scoffed at the idea of making a confession, practically made their confessions long before they formally did so.

We had ten Confirmations during my time, and 580 people were confirmed. And here you will see that the great difficulty of a parish like ours, and one of its chief sorrows, are the migratory habits of the population, especially amongst the men; 46 of these have become soldiers and sailors, 38 have been emigrated, 141 have left the town, 30 have moved too far away from the church to remain communicants with us, and 40 are dead. Thus more than half have passed away from our immediate influence, and no longer strengthen the parochial life. Of the 285 who remain, 46 have lapsed altogether from Communion, 37 are irregular communicants, about three or four times a year, and 202 are members of the Communicants’ League, most of them communicating once a month. It is over these lapsed ones that we sorrow most, and there come up before one’s mind, now that one has no further chance with them, so many wasted opportunities. It is only God Who is never hopeless about any single soul, but Whose divine excuse, “They know not what they do,” is said continually for even the most sinful in the moments of their greatest depravity. I am sure that if we could only have translated into our ministry something of this hope, this excuse, I should not have to write the awful words, “46 lapsed,” and yet, thank God, the judgment of their having lapsed is only our judgment, not His, and perhaps He might write over us, that if we were only more honest we would have lapsed too. Remember, nothing in their surroundings urges them towards religion. How many of us, especially the clergy, are religious because we needs must. Many of those who have gone away write to us continually, and we know all about them, but, except by their prayers, they can no longer strengthen S. Agatha’s. If all these had stayed our Easter Communion would have been over eight hundred instead of five hundred. The following letter just received will show how a boy we prepared for Confirmation fulfilled his obligations:

“SYDNEY, N.S.W., “_February 11th, 1896_.

“DEAR FATHER DOLLING,

“After a very long silence, I again write these few lines to you, hoping to find you in good health; and also to let you know that I am still alive and well, and (thanks to your kind teaching) I am living a sober and quiet life, and have done so since I came out here. But I should very much like to see you again, and also dear old S. Agatha’s. I am making Melbourne my home when I am on shore, and I attend Christ Church, South Yarra (Canon Tucker). Do you know him? He is a good man. I have quite lost sight of W----. I think that he must either be dead or gone home again. The times are getting better out here, as there are thousands of people flocking to the West Australian gold-fields. But they die there by hundreds. I want to ask you one favour. I should like to have one of your cabinet photos like you used to sell at the shop. Do send me one. So now I think I must draw to a close. With kind regards to all and best wishes,

“I remain, yours faithfully, “W. H. L----.”

And here is a letter about a boy whom we emigrated three years ago, about whom we were extremely doubtful, but who has done so well that he is trying to emigrate his family.

“EAST END EMIGRATION FUND, “_March 26th, 1896_.

“DEAR SIR,

“You will be glad to hear that I received the following report from our agent in Montreal with reference to this family:--

“‘I went three times to Bluebonnets to see Stigant before I met him. He married a few months ago; he and his wife seem very happy and comfortable. He has only two rooms at present, but has rented a good house for the 1st May. He is quite confident he can procure work for Stevens and his brothers on arrival. He seems an earnest, steady fellow, and I think his people will get along very well with him. They might come on the first ship, arriving here about May 1st.’

“I feel sure that you will be glad to hear this satisfactory report of young Stigant.

“Yours truly, “WALTER BARRATT.”

I do not suppose that anyone considers that the Tractarian movement, in its later developments, has been a pure gain to the Church of England. I can remember, when I was a lad, a week’s preparation for the monthly Communion, in which all the family shared, the mentioning of it at daily family prayer, the putting off of engagements during the week, the private talks both with my father and my mother, and thanksgiving at family prayer the night after. We who talk so condescendingly of the past have very grievous need to ask ourselves whether, while religion has increased, piety has decreased; and whether the multiplication of weekly communicants really and truly means better Communions, and does not often mean a Communion without preparation before, and without thanksgiving after. God forbid I should say that this is the case, but we all know that every privilege entails an increased responsibility, and that the body is in danger just as much from over, as from undernourishment, unless that nourishment be perfectly assimilated to the whole system. At any rate, I endeavoured to keep this thought before me when planning our only parochial society, which we called our Communicants’ League. It was unique, at any rate, in one respect: it had no rules. I have so oftentimes found, in hearing confessions, how burdensome the rule becomes even of saying a daily collect, and there is nothing more fatal to the progress of the soul, especially to the timid soul, than incurring unnecessary responsibilities. I believe that no member of the League ever passed a day without thinking of S. Agatha’s, and oftentimes among the ignorant, who have so little power of expressing themselves, thoughts are the best prayers. But the League had four suggestions: first, to be present at Mass every Sunday; secondly, to prepare for Communion on the first Sunday in the month, if conscience taught, to go to confession, and, if possible, making the Communion; thirdly, to make it fasting, if possible; fourthly, to contribute something to the expenses of the parish every quarter, the sum being left wholly to the conscience of the contributor. None of these rules were obligatory, but they were almost universally kept, except as regards making the Communion, because some only came to Communion once in two months. In order that there might be no difficulty about the preparation, there were services on Mondays, for women alone, at 3 p.m.; on Wednesdays, for lads, at 9 p.m.; on Thursdays, for girls, at 9 p.m.; a general preparation of conscience, for women, at 8 p.m. on Fridays, for men at 8 p.m. on Saturdays; and I sat in church practically the whole of the last four days of the week to hear confessions. The preparation of conscience was very valuable. I said aloud a commandment, then asked eight or ten questions about it making a little pause after each question; beyond getting drunk, doing wrong as they call it, and stealing, the poor have very little knowledge of what sin is. This system of examination prepared many for their first confessions. The League has 441 members. On the first Sunday in the month everybody gives their name as they come into church, and their Communions are marked in a book. We are able thus to test their attendance, and also mark change of address, a very important matter in a migratory parish. The League was responsible, also, for the Day of Perpetual Intercession, of which I have spoken, and for a service for men alone on Sunday afternoons.

Once a year, in S. Agatha’s week, we kept a great festival, when we all supped together, anyone sending what they liked in the way of food. Sometimes there was too much, though our appetites were generally good. Sometimes we had not enough. But that was all part of S. Agatha’s system. At these meetings the whole of the secrets of the parish for the coming year were disclosed. How splendid our great gymnasium used to look, filled with tables covered with all kinds and sorts of things, the most curious puddings, the most extraordinary cakes, in the funniest plates and dishes. Such an intense union and harmony amongst us all. Even when I had to say, as I often had, hard, really hard, things, with what love, what tenderness, were they accepted. I, at any rate, shall never see the like again, for it is seldom granted twice to a man in his life to be called to a work like this, for they were all, in the truest sense, my own children; I had begotten them nearly all in Jesus Christ, and they have proved their loyalty not, I thank God, to me, but to our common Master. When I had to leave, all our farewells were said in church. During those last few days, when they saw us in the street, they went within doors themselves. And yet, with all that, not one was absent from their duty to the priest who came to take temporary charge. No single one said, “Because Mr. Dolling has left I leave.” They knew their duty was to Christ and His Church, not to me. And yet it was a very grievous trial to them, so grievous that, to many of them, it almost meant shipwreck. I think I am committing no breach of confidence if I let you read one or two of the letters which I received just after I left.

“DEAR FATHER,

“I went to church on friday night no stations of the cross. I went on Sunday it looked nice to see the Bishop their for he looked like us very much cut up. our text was Jesus weep and God shall wipe away all tears from every eye. it do not matter were we look weather up high or down low the very bricks seem to say you cannot do without him but we are all going to be very good to this father because he speaks so good of you so you must make haste and get better. I hope Misses Dolling are better.

“I remain yours truly.”

The Bishop referred to is the Bishop of Southwell.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“You didn’t come to see me before you went, and my heart was too full to come and see you. I have not been to Church yet, for I have been very poorly, for this job have pretty nigh broke me up altogether, after sitting under you for ten years, and never have been inside another church nor chapel since, and I hope the Bishop won’t close his eyes to go to sleep till he sends you back again, for I can’t sleep, and I don’t see for why he should, but, please God, I shall go up to Church in the week, and go to receive my Communion on Sunday the same as usual, but I don’t know how I shall feel not to see you there, nor Miss Dolling, nor nobody. You are gone, but you will never be forgotten by me. Give my love to Miss Dolling and Miss Blair and Miss Geraldine and Miss Rowan, and if we do not meet in this world, I hope we shall in the next, where there won’t be no sorrow.

“Yours affectionately.”

The Bishop referred to is the Bishop of Winchester.

“Dear rev. farther, the new priest that come is so nice he do ofer up some beautful prayers and speaks so nice to us all but ther will never be on that will be nearest our hearts as you dear farther. O I bless the day I ented St. Agathas that wer I was first converted and O how your prayers have reached my heart I have cried may a time over them I have blessed you and I praye for you and your dear sisters for they was always good and kind to me a unworthy sinner but my dear Jesus will bless you all for what you have done for me for he knowed I was one of his lost sheep that was lost. O my dear Jesus good to me a sinner to take me back to his foild. I often think of the text the Bishop gave us. Yea I have loved thee with an everlasting love therefore with loveing kindness have I drawn thee and it is quite true for my dear Jesus how gently have he drawn me when I have been in any trouble I have heard words in my ear ask the Savour to healp you and he will carry you though, I never mean to neglect my dear Savour any more I will allways bless him not only with my lips but with all my live. so no more till I have the pleasure of writing to you again.

from your most humble servant.”

The Bishop referred to is the Bishop of Guildford, who confirmed her.

“DEAR FATHER

“According to your request I am sending a few words, they will be but few. I have not been to Church since Thursday Evening until the 11 celebration this morning. It will, I know, greatly please you to hear that the Church was quite full, mostly our own people, and it was a very nice service, ‘Alike, but, oh, how different.’ How my heart ached to see another priest in your place, my heart and eyes were full, but I remembered that we had to trust, wait patiently for the answer to the loving prayer that was going up to God from every heart of your people, and, oh, we do hope and pray that the time will soon come when we shall have you all back again with us. We cannot let you stay away from St. Agatha’s. Our best love and respects to you and all the dear ladies. Trusting, dear Father, you will remember us in all your prayers, I remain in all truth and loyalty,

“Your deeply grieving child in God.”

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“It seems like a dream to-day, more than ever, to be at St. Agatha’s, without our good Father Dolling and other dear faces, yet the fact remains but too true, and yet not without you in the truest sense, for we met together in the Spirit this morning in the blessed Sacrament, and may our united prayers ascend to Almighty God to support you and yours and the whole of St. Agatha’s in this our fiery trial and affliction, and that we may come forth purged and glorified, and win the victory by His dear mercy. Hoping yours and dear one’s health may be good, even after the difficult task of leave taking. We have already made the acquaintance of Mr. Bull, he is a very nice man indeed, he preached a very appropriate sermon this morning from 1 Cor. iii. 13. I think we had a good number of communicants this morning at 7 o’clock, we were about 20 or 30, and, I believe, many more at 8. This evening, instead of the Mission Service, all the communicants who can will meet Mr. Bull in Church for further acquaintance. Now, with earnest hope of seeing you back at Portsmouth again very soon in good health, and with prayers for your own and dear St. Agatha’s welfare,

“Believe me yours very sincerely.”

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“It is not an easy thing to be off with the old love before you are on with the new. The new clergy are here, and they appear to be very earnest priests. Of course, one cannot judge how things will go along yet, but I hope for the best. God never has deserted St. Agatha’s, and never will. Knowing you will have a great number of letters to read, I will not bore you with a long one.

“Yours very truly.”

There was hardly a word of complaint out of four hundred letters, because they knew it would vex me; but everyone testified to the heartiness and affection with which they had met the tact and kindness and sympathy of Fr. Bull. Perhaps I ought not to write all this, but I feel so proud of them, so thankful to God for them. You will forgive me inserting a letter which Fr. Bull wrote me after he left.

“RADLEY VICARAGE, ABINGDON.

“DEAR FATHER DOLLING,

“I cannot leave the work at S. Agatha’s without writing to tell you how deeply impressed I am by all that I have seen during my six weeks’ charge. I came to the work with many misgivings, expecting to find your people made sore and irritable by all the troubles which brought your ministry at S. Agatha’s to a close. But nothing could have been more beautiful than the patience with which they bore their sorrow, and the loyalty and courage with which they carried on the work of the parish.

“The points which made the profoundest impression on me were, I think, these:

“1. First, the true depth and reality of their love for our dear Redeemer. I dare not try to describe the manifestation of so sacred a feeling, but it is enough to say that it made itself felt in every detail of work and worship, sanctifying what is sometimes looked upon as secular, inspiring every movement of ritual, and filling the outward forms of religion with a real outpouring of the heart.

“2. Then the very healthy type of devotion. It was ‘Jesus only’ in every variety of service; no wandering from the narrow way of true devotion into the sentimental bye-paths of ‘fancy’ religion.

“3. Real faith in the power of prayer. People at S. Agatha’s had thoroughly realised that prayer has a great influence on the course of events, and they prayed with a readiness and fervour unknown in those places where the spirit of prayer has been strangled by _the exclusive_ use of unvarying forms. I am sure that your people learned to pray so well, chiefly in the training of those services supplementary to matins and evensong.

“4. The combination of discipline and independence. This was most striking. Men of strong will and very decided character worked together in perfect harmony, and carried on the work of the parish with strength and vigour, because they recognised the difference between liberty and licence and the duty of loyalty. I found the parish practically self-working.

“5. The happy relationship between priest and people. The people look on their priest as a father and a friend, and not merely as a relieving officer to the parish. The account of your life and work among them, which, I believe, you are preparing, will explain how this was accomplished. But it will be a joy to you to know that the lessons you taught are not forgotten, and that your people readily extend the same confidence and love to any priest who brings them the same faith and sacraments. This is only one of many signs which show that you won these souls to Christ, and not merely to yourself.

“6. I cannot conclude without bearing witness to a fact which forces itself constantly on the attention of anyone who has seen the inside of your work; namely, that your faithful teaching of the doctrine of the Church about the future life, and our duty to those who have been taken from us for a time, is undoubtedly the secret of your work at S. Agatha’s. To quote only one of many pathetic letters I received, one man writes thus: ‘Prayers for and with our dear ones in paradise is the only thing that has made life tolerable to me for the last twenty-six years.’ I felt all the time that I only saw a part of that dear family which you have gathered together round their Father’s table, and that by far the larger part of those who shared in our prayers and Sacrifice were wanderers over sea and land in foreign countries, or souls at rest in paradise.

“Forgive me if anything I have said may seem to be patronising. You know my only wish is to bear witness to the depth and soundness of your work, which has been so much misunderstood and misrepresented. I will not dwell on the kind way in which you did your best to make my work easy for me, nor on the wonderful love and patience with which your people welcomed me; it was as overwhelming as it was undeserved.

“I am, yours very faithfully, “PAUL B. BULL.”

Many younger clergy and people from a distance wounded by the Bishop’s action in insisting on a change in our services which had been in use for eight years, wrote to me about going to Rome, but no such word was even whispered in S. Agatha’s. And this was not to be wondered at; for neither from me, nor from my curates, nor from my helpers, had they ever learned anything distinctly Roman, unless reservation of the Blessed Sacrament can be so called. We tried to make our religion manly, natural, dignified, and yet, in the truest sense, homely. Every word from the altar was spoken plainly, so that everyone could hear it. There were no concealments from the Bishop or anyone else. If there had been, I should be there still.

Our one object was to translate into the new church all that there had been in the old. My first idea of the new church was that it should be built as plainly as possible. I, who had suffered so much from begging, deemed it wrong to add any further burden to myself. Besides, I felt I had already over-exhausted the generosity of my many friends. But then, God sent Mr. Ball, the architect; and directly I talked to him I saw how wrong this intention had been. If there is one place which needs a magnificent and impressive church, it is a slum. He had made a study of the church architecture which I liked best, and which I had learned to know in Northern Italy. Directly you enter the new S. Agatha’s you realise it is a temple of God--of God Eternal, of God Almighty; and, as it stands now, it has satisfied all my desires. Every act done at the altar can be seen through the whole church; every word spoken there, or from the pulpit, can be heard. There is no use my trying to describe it; I do not think even Mr. Ruskin ever made us understand what a building is like. I think one of the reasons why the people at once felt at home in it was because they had been working for it so long. For two years Miss Wright had been directing a number of ladies in getting the vestments complete. It is almost impossible for me to say what S. Agatha’s owes to Miss Wright. Then the people themselves had bought a chalice and paten, a set of Stations which cost £140, all of the cassocks; indeed, they had contributed over £330, all collected in small sums during the last three years. Winchester had done some special work for us, too. A little boy in Mr. Smith’s house, who died some years ago, gave us our oak lectern, which cost £75. College, past and present, clothed with alabaster one of the pillars of the sanctuary. Three houses gave me nearly £60 for the oak panelling, on which the names from the old church are translated into the new. The great central pillar was clothed in alabaster and marble, and its capital carved in memory of one of my dear lads--a middy--who died of scarlet fever on board ship, and who had made his first Communion in old S. Agatha’s. One of the granite pillars was paid for, and its capital carved in memory of a brother and sister very dear to me, who died within a year of one another. There is still a debt of £230 on the ornamentation of the church, part of it due to Messrs. Powell, who did the beautiful mosaic work in the Lady apse, and whom I am most anxious to pay off. It is wonderful how the magnificence of this mosaic work harmonises with the simplicity and beauty of Mr. Summer’s sgraffitto work. It was a great gift of God to discover an artist who does not only superintend, but actually, with his own hands, religiously perfects his work. I felt, as I took my last look at the church, that it was impossible for me to express in words what I felt I owe, and what Landport and Winchester people owe, to Mr. Ball and Mr. Light--a debt which we can never repay. But there is a debt which we can pay--£100 to Mr. Ball, £1400 to Mr. Light, and £350 to the Bank, which they have advanced to me on Mr. Light’s account.

My own pressing need of discharging these debts, perhaps, has made me forget one special benefit of a church like ours. It practically admits of continuous ornamentation. We have built but the roughest of brick walls. And I feel that this is of infinite importance, that each generation should be able to say, “my” church. That hideous desire to get things finished is the secret of the shoddy, ugly churches which disfigure Christianity, and having to pay nothing for them is one of the greatest wrongs that can be done to a congregation. These great wall-spaces of Italian architecture are designed for the very purpose of being the ignorant man’s Bible, and the poor man’s opportunity of offering his mite to God; and I have no doubt that S. Agatha’s people will, by degrees, create it, what Mr. Ruskin says S. Mark’s is to the Venetians--“an open Bible,” which even the most unlearned and ignorant may easily read.

XVI.

=A Plea for Toleration.=

My work in Landport is finished. I hand over to the Bishop of Winchester all necessary plant for the future of S. Agatha’s--Church, Schools, Mission House, Parsonage, Gymnasium, Clubs, Almshouses--which the generosity of Wykehamists and my own friends has enabled me to build for the Church of England. I hand him over a parish with a communicants’ roll of 441, so united that for ten years there has never been a difference amongst us, so full of zeal for Holy Religion that they have created admiration and wonder in the heart of that most experienced missioner Father Maturin, and who welcomed, without one single murmur, Father Bull, who took my place, when the Bishop’s demand for alteration in the services caused me to resign. Into the Bishop’s hands, and the hands of my successor appointed by Winchester College, I place this great trust to which God appointed me ten and a half years ago, and I pray God that they may be able to administer it with greater zeal, self-denial, and success than I have been able.

I have taken it for granted that this book will generally be read by those who know S. Agatha’s, and therefore I have frequently spoken about persons and things without any introduction, knowing that these readers would know what I meant; but for the sake of others who do not know me or the work, I should like to make a few explanations. In the first place “I” always stands for “we,” and “my” always stands for “ours”; for I have had round me a body of the most devoted helpers that parish priest ever had, not only my own sisters and the ladies who lived with them, my fellow-clergy, and the laymen who lived with me, but the day-school and Sunday-school teachers, the district visitors, all who served in the church, either on the altar or in the choir, my own personal clerks, the servants in my own and Miss Dolling’s house, our shopwoman, and many more too numerous to mention. Every parochial plan was well discussed by those who had to administer it; objections were stated, differences were heard, but when once we had arrived at what was deemed to be the right course, one mouth spoke the judgment--one brain, one hand, executed it. There was no degradation of service, there was no unstinted labour, there was no demand on heart and enthusiasm that I have ever asked and been refused by one of my workers. I could almost dare to use some of S. Paul’s expressions with regard to the unselfish loyalty with which I have been supported; and I know the parish felt that, whether it was they or I; so we preached, and so they believed. Might I give two instances?

As I have said before, I am an unlearned man, unable to pass even my “little go” at Cambridge. When Charles Osborne came to me, I had no knowledge of exact theology at all, except what I had been able to scrape together during one year at Salisbury Theological College, where the Rev. E. B. Ottley was particularly kind and patient with me. But Osborne devoted an hour a day all the time he was with me to talking theology with me. There is no method of learning so easy as the conversational method, especially such conversation as his, and when the opportunity came to me to occupy London pulpits, he prepared the notes of many of my sermons, and looked up the references; and ever since he left me, though he now has work almost as time-exhausting as my own, he has never failed to send me at Lent, and at other times when I needed them, courses of sermons. I have often felt little better than a humbug, delivering sermons which are the fruit of his brain. And when I left Portsmouth, my then secretary followed me to London, and has remained with me, so as to prevent the compositors who set up this book committing suicide, or the world being scandalised with my bad spelling. These are but two little instances of countless acts of love and devotion which it has been our extraordinary privilege for the last ten years to enjoy; and when you hear of trades’ unions of curates and vicars, and of disloyalty on the one side, and humiliations on the other, I should like you to realise that our work was successful because, though I was the apparent doer of it, I merely represented a community bound together by the tenderest ties of mutual service. People take a very exaggerated view of mission work. It is not only the pleasantest and most rewarding, but it is really the easiest done. Preaching about a great deal, and giving retreats and missions, enables one to judge, I think, pretty fairly of the difficulties of other clergymen’s work, and I am quite sure that I am speaking only the literal truth when I say that I have never been in any parish where the work was as easy as in my own. Of course, we added to ourselves many things that were not strictly parochial; and if these had not been begun, and we had merely stuck to working amongst our own people, this truth would have been even more apparent. Faith in humanity is the foundation of all mission work, very easy to be attained in a slum where, every single day, some soul reveals to you progress; very difficult to attain in a parish where your church is well filled by a respectable congregation. Then a greater elasticity of method is allowed, and it was just the attempt to check this that never could have occurred if Bishop Thorold had lived. And yet I think that if reasonable people, unprejudiced and unbiassed, would consider the Prayer Book, and the methods by which it has been interpreted for the last fifty years, they would be less anxious to desire to curtail this greater liberty of method.

At best surely the Prayer Book is a compromise, for which, indeed, we may be most grateful to Almighty God, when we consider the character of those who constructed it, and the Court pressure under which many of them were continually coerced. But surely a compromise, fond as we are of them in England, is never a lasting arrangement. Fifty years ago people might conscientiously call our Liturgy incomparable, because, as a witty Irishman said, they had no others to compare it with. But now, when the inexhaustible treasures of both East and West have been rediscovered by us, and when those Catholic doctrines, long hidden away in the hearts of a few learned clerics, were, by the Oxford movement, scattered broadcast over England, the method by which those doctrines alone could be understanded of the people, was by interpreting the Prayer Book according to Catholic ceremonial, and the progress which has been made in this interpretation is a fact that we, who see its effects, can hardly appreciate. Is it not true to say that fifty years ago almost every single Bishop on the English bench would have proclaimed the priest a traitor, and endeavoured to deprive him, for doctrines that are taught, and for ceremonies which are performed, in twenty-five per cent. of the churches in their dioceses to-day? Remember, the things which have been condemned in S. Agatha’s are done in a large number of churches in England. Earnest souls everywhere are crying out for Masses to be said for their dear dead. There is no service in the Prayer Book appointed for this purpose. But the Catholic priest who understands and appreciates the piety of this desire, who believes himself that he has this treasure committed to him by God, will not surely be deemed disloyal to the Church of England if he ventures to use either the service in the Prayer Book of Edward VI., which our own Prayer Book declares “doth not contain anything contrary to the Word of God, or to sound doctrine,” or chooses from some ancient source a like office. It seems to me that this is a far more honest practice than to use in a forced sense the Commendatory Prayer from the Visitation of the Sick, the first prayer in the Burial Service, or the first Good Friday collect, the use which my successor has adopted in deference, I suppose, to the Bishop’s wish. I know his great integrity of purpose, and his utter honesty of mind, and, therefore, I am sure that he considers his method a more honest one than mine. But the chief thing which commended S. Agatha’s to Bishop Thorold, to my numerous supporters, and to my poor people, was the plainness of speech and calling things by their names, which oftentimes superficial gazers may deem unwise, but which I have ever found to pay in the long run. But if it might be said that putting in a new prayer is disloyal, no one can say that leaving out a prayer, or disregarding a rubric is disloyal. I do not suppose that there is any church in England where every prayer is said, and every rubric obeyed; nay, the service would be intolerable, impossible, if it were so. People have, however, a convenient way of saying, “This rubric is obsolete; that prayer may be lawfully left out, that exhortation never read.” Who is the best judge of that? The parish priest who has laboured ten years amongst his people, and knows every one of them, and the Bishop who has visited, loved, and blessed that work for four years, or the Bishop who has been in the diocese for three weeks? Two rubrics stand side by side in the Book of Common Prayer. One of them as to having notice given of Communion I obeyed, the other as to the number of communicants I disobeyed. Ninety-nine clergy out of a hundred disobey the one I obeyed, eighty obey the one that I disobeyed. Let me illustrate, by my successor’s action, the enormous difficulty of obeying both. He says, You must give notice if you are coming to the Holy Communion, and he has told the people that, unless notice is given so that he may know that there will be communicants, the Children’s Mass at 10, and the High Mass at 11, must be given up. The notice is to be given in on Saturday night. If two communicants give notice, or one, or none, what would his action be? Would he wait till people came to church and tell them that there would be a different kind of service, and thus prevent many of his faithful from being present at a Celebration, which many of them believe to be a Christian obligation, or would he get certain people to promise, three for 10, and three for 11 each Sunday?--a strain on their loyalty that I, whom they loved and knew, would never have dared to demand, for the working woman with children an utter impossibility, for the District Visitor from Southsea a walk of a mile and a half there and back, entailing most likely an illness and a breakdown, for the working man living with all his children round him, breakfast a common meal shared by all on Sunday--I am not talking of the irreligious man who eats his breakfast, and lies in bed till one or two p.m.--the binding upon him of a burden, which we ourselves, who are often forced to say late Masses, can hardly sustain. This line of thought applies just as well to the daily Masses in a place in which it was utterly impossible, with all my workers round me, to manufacture six communicants every day.

I have ventured to go into this question again at length, because I am anxious that the public should understand it. If the Bishops are going to make an attack all round on beneficed as well as unbeneficed clergy, on High, Low, and Broad equally, then I and my people would have no right to complain. But I doubt very much whether the Church of England could stand the strain of such an attack. If such an attack is to be made it must be uniform, and not according to the individual mind of the Bishop; Bishop Perowne might succeed Bishop King, Bishop Ryle might succeed Bishop Temple. And surely this danger ought to be realised before fresh power is put into the Bishops’ hands, such power as is proposed in the recent Patronage Act, which would have meant in my case that if I had been presented to a living, either in the diocese of Durham or of Worcester, I should not only have been refused by the Bishop, but--as I read the Act--my patron would have lost his nomination, and the prelate would have appointed his own nominee. Far more dangerous would it be, as a recent bill in Convocation proposed, to allow the Bishop to be sole judge of what rubrics are obsolete, and what must of necessity be observed.

We are told that these are days when every Church Society is being starved, when the Bishops can neither get money nor men for their great overgrown dioceses, and therefore that the masses are in a large extent lost to the Church of England. Here is a place where over £50,000 has been spent in ten years, only £760 of it coming from a Diocesan Fund. Here is a place where three clergy, and many earnest laymen and women, have been working at no cost to the official resources of the Church at all. Here is a place where large numbers of the poorest and most ignorant have been instructed in the saving truths of Holy Religion. Here is a place which the late Bishop of the diocese fostered with truest tenderness and care. I do not venture to ask the question which I was going to ask, but I leave it to the judgment of my readers to answer the question themselves. I know that one answer is conceivable. “No work, no labour, no success is any excuse, when disobedience to the Prayer Book is practised alongside of it.” But does anyone pretend to believe that this is the consistent method of the Church of England; or, if it had been so for the last fifty years, would one spark of life have been left in her?

If this little book has interested you at all, I would earnestly ask you to help me to pay off my debt. During the last three months people have been very generous to me, and I have paid off £800. This leaves me still owing £2290. Many Winchester men are very anxious, I know, that the Wykehamist Committee should become responsible for this debt, and I shall be very grateful if they do, because that might enable me to raise from the bank the money that I require to pay the builders. But even if they make themselves responsible, I feel it to be my bounden duty to do all I can to get this money together, for all the time that they are collecting it, they will be able to give my successor very little for his Mission work. I know that in many things he excels me, but I know that I am a better beggar than he is. He will require every penny that he can possibly scrape together, and so I am most anxious to set all Wykehamical resources free, by paying off this sum as quickly as possible.

Many people write and ask me, What are you going to do yourself? The answer to that rests in other hands than mine. When this debt is paid, if the Church of England offers me work, and I believe that it is God’s intention that I should accept it, I will at once. In the meantime I am trying to learn a little lesson that one of my dearest children, a Jesuit priest, wrote down for me, “God allows you to build the fibre of your brain, the blood of your heart, into a temple for His glory, and then with one breath of His nostril o’erturns it, that He may see whether you will bear this also.”

APPENDIX

“17, CLARENCE STREET, LANDPORT, “_September 28th, 1895_.

“MY LORD BISHOP,

“We are taking possession of our new church on October 27th. It practically is joined by the vestries to the old church, which was licensed for celebrations by Bishop Harold Browne, and your predecessor did not think it would require a new licence.

“As at present the district is not a legal Parish, the question of consecration does not arise.

“I am, your lordship’s obedient servant, “R. RADCLYFFE DOLLING.”

“DALMENY PARK, EDINBURGH, “_4th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“Your letter of Sept. 28th has only now reached me in Scotland. Everything has been upset somewhat during our removal from one house to another.

“I am greatly interested to learn that you hope to enter so soon upon the use of the new church. I shall be anxious, so far as possible, to meet your wishes in every way with regard to licence. If you were told by Bishop Thorold that no fresh licence would be necessary, I have no doubt such is the case, but I should, myself, have thought it would probably be better that a new licence should be given for the new building. This, however, we can talk over when we meet, and I trust the meeting may take place ere long, as I am most anxious to see something of your work, upon the spot. I have heard much of it, and I pray God to grant you all guidance and blessing among the difficulties by which you are surrounded.

“Bishop Thorold’s opinion that no fresh licence is required will, at least, justify you in going forward now with all your arrangements, and if it turns out hereafter that it is desirable to issue a fresh licence, there will, I imagine, be no difficulty in doing so. I hope to be at Farnham next week, and to enter as speedily as possible upon diocesan work. I know I may rely upon your giving me the help of your prayers.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“17, CLARENCE STREET, LANDPORT, “_October 7th, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I am most grateful for your kind letter. Bishop Thorold’s idea was that until the church was consecrated (that would be as soon as the parish was created), the old licence would suffice. But I quite feel that your lordship’s wish is most reasonable, and as soon as convenient to yourself the required formalities could be performed.

“We have never ceased to pray for your lordship since your election, and there are no priest or people more desirous to welcome you.

“The Bishop of Southwell, or the Bishop of Reading, will be with us at the opening, or during the octave. There is one of my soldier children on furlough, who needs to be confirmed. Might he have your permission to do it?

“Yours very obediently, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_10th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I thank you for your letter. I will consider the question of licence. In the meantime, do not let the postponement of a decision on that point interfere in any way with your plans and arrangements.

“With regard to the confirmation of the lad you refer to, I should be quite willing that the Bishop of Southwell or the Bishop of Reading should confirm him if you think this desirable, and if such Bishop is willing, at your request, to do it.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“FARNHAM, “_17th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have considered the question of a licence for your new church, or rather, for you to minister therein, and it seems clear that such a licence ought to be issued. I have, therefore, asked the Rural Dean, in ordinary course, to send me the usual report that he has visited the building, and that all is in due order.

“Of course, in strict accordance with rule, no service should take place in the building till the proper licence (after the Rural Dean’s letter) has been received by you.

“But as I know you have been making arrangements for your opening services, and that it was owing to the change of Bishops that you did not sooner apply to me, I am quite willing that your arrangements should be proceeded with, and you will, of course, understand that, in the very improbable event of any question arising as to the building or its due ‘appointments,’ I am not to be regarded as hereby prejudging such question.

“I am sure it will be your wish that all should be in due order, and I pray that the blessing of God may rest in rich measure on you and on your work.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_October 18th, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I shall be very glad to see Canon Jacob. I am very distressed to hear from ... that you are hurt at my action about the Opening, and I venture to assure you that the arrangements that I have made are those which I contemplated before there was any vacancy in the See, arrangements which I had planned in accordance with the action of the two late Bishops towards the Mission.

“Bishop Harold Browne would never come here at all, or send his Suffragan, but allowed me to choose a Bishop to confer Confirmation.

“Bishop Thorold came himself, and sent his Suffragan, to Confirm, but otherwise he never took part in any ceremony in the church, and he personally often told me that he greatly disliked the ritual. And even when he came to Confirm, as of course the service was altogether his own and not ours, he did not allow the acolytes to wear red cassocks, and when I pointed out that the Crucifix was carried in front of the Procession, he ordered it not to be used, though when I told him there was another on the altar, and offered to take it down, he said, ‘No; I shall not see that one.’ I should certainly never have asked him to come to any other service at S. Agatha’s, as I am sure it would have pained him very deeply, and my people here are so very ignorant, that I could not have altered it, had he happened to be present.

“I would not have you think from this, that I did not revere and respect him, even perhaps love him, and we have oftentimes been very near to each other in prayer. And, therefore, I had determined not to ask him to take any part in the ceremonies connected with the Opening of the church, until the time of the Consecration should come, and for the same reason, of course, I would not ask his Suffragan, though the Bishop of Southampton is a Wykehamist, and I should much like to have had him here.

“I do not like to intrude upon your Lordship at such great length, but I should not like your Lordship to think that I am at all lacking in respect to your person or to your great office.

Yours very obediently, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_20th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I thank you for your letter, but either you must, I think, have misunderstood ... or he must have misunderstood me. Perhaps both.

“I perfectly understand the position as you now explain it, namely, that you are simply following out arrangements which were made in Bishop Thorold’s time, and which were such as you thought he would desire.

“Nothing could be further from my mind than to be ‘hurt’ by anything that has passed. I have too much respect for you and for your work. I feel sure you have wished to do all that is right, and (as I said in a former letter) I am anxious not to disturb arrangements which were made before I was responsible.

“I hear to-day from the Rural Dean that he has arranged with you to pay his visit next Wednesday, so perhaps after all the new licence may reach you in time.

“I pray that the blessing and guidance of God may be given you in your difficult task.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_24th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have this morning received the Rural Dean’s report of his visit yesterday to your new church. While expressing his admiration of the building, he tells me the fittings are not yet _in situ_, though they will for the most part be ready by Saturday next. He cannot therefore report upon them in detail. But speaking generally, it is clear that the arrangements are in so forward a condition that, if no question of difficulty arose, a licence might be sent to you forthwith, authorising you in the usual form to minister the offices of the Church therein. Of course, if it were a question of now consecrating the church, and thereby giving legal authority to what stands therein, I should require, as always, a more detailed report when everything is _in situ_. But as you do not ask for Consecration at present, legal questions in the technical sense do not arise in quite the same manner.

“There is, however, one important matter mentioned by the Rural Dean which I must at once bring before you. Canon Jacob says: ‘It is proposed to place a third altar in the middle of the South Aisle ... and the altar is avowedly to be used for Masses for the Dead. Mr. Dolling said that Bishop Thorold saw this in the temporary church (there it was simply the second altar, corresponding to that in the east end of the south aisle of the new church), and intensely disliked it. Here, however, it assumes a far greater prominence, for it is not the altar for ordinary daily use, as in the temporary church, but simply to be used for Masses for the Dead. Mr. Dolling lays the greatest stress on this.’

“Now here is a matter of supreme importance. I have no wish to prejudge any legal question which may arise, and I am not aware whether any authoritative decision has been given in the Church Courts respecting the legality of a third altar in such a position in such a church.

“But I should obviously be treating you unfairly, were I now to send you a licence virtually sanctioning such an arrangement as this, and then, hereafter, when the time comes for consecrating the church, and when your people have grown used to the arrangement, to direct the removal of so prominent a feature on the ground that when duly submitted for the consideration of the Diocesan Court, it is found to be illegal. My belief is that, if the circumstances are such as Canon Jacob has described, it would be so declared, though in this I may, of course, be mistaken.

“I do not know what sanction was originally obtained for the plans of your church. If plans distinctly exhibiting this feature received Bishop Thorold’s signature and sanction, I would ask you to tell me so at once. In lack, however, of such information, I must ask that the church be not publicly opened for Divine Service until a question so important as this has been submitted to the proper authorities for decision, or until the altar in question has been removed from the building. I think you must see that this is no matter of subordinate detail. Were it such, I should not wish, in the very peculiar circumstances of this case, to be over-particular at this moment. But large principles are involved, and it would therefore be quite wrong to prejudge what may be the ultimate decision on so important a matter, by formally licensing you to minister in a building containing thus prominently a feature upon which, if the Rural Dean correctly reports, you lay the greatest stress.

“I am exceedingly sorry to seem thus to interfere at the last moment with the arrangements you have made; but you are aware that this is not my fault, and I think I am only treating you with such fairness and openness as I should wish myself to meet with in like circumstances. Let me recall to you briefly what has passed.

“On October 2nd I received from you a letter telling me, for the first time, that you proposed taking possession of the new church on October 27th, and adding that Bishop Thorold did not think it would require a new licence. In my reply, while I sanctioned your going forward with the arrangements which had been already made for the opening services, I said that I should myself have thought it would probably be better that a new licence should be given for the new building. To this you quite assented, and I accordingly directed the Rural Dean to pay the usual preliminary visit. The first intimation I received from you that any difficult question would be likely to arise was in your letter of October 18th, in which you said: ‘I should certainly never have asked Bishop Thorold to come to any other service at St. Agatha’s (_i.e._, other than Confirmation), as I am sure it would have pained him very deeply.’ I merely recall these facts in order to remind you that I could not have written sooner on this subject. Had I had reason to suppose at an earlier date that there were likely to be difficulties of this kind, I should have asked you to postpone the opening services until the question of licence had been further considered.

“You are aware from my former letters how cordially I appreciate and value your vigorous work at Landport, and how anxious I am to promote and help it in every legitimate way. I am most anxious not to make a fuss about trifles, and I desire to recognise to the full the due elasticity and variety desirable in the services of the Church, especially in such neighbourhoods as yours. You will never find me inclined to be needlessly rigid about comparative trifles, but a Bishop’s responsibility is so grave that when large questions arise he must of necessity act with the utmost care.

“I trust that it may be possible for you so to modify the arrangements as to enable your proposed opening services to take place, postponing for the present the decision upon the particular point to which I have called attention.

“If you desire to see me upon the subject, I shall be at your service here at any hour to-morrow, except 1.30 to 3, when I have another engagement. If you are coming, please telegraph to say so.

I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.

“Since writing the above I have thought it may be a convenience to you that I should send it to you by hand. My chaplain accordingly bears it.”

An interview took place on October 25th. (See p. 167.)

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_25th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I must send a few lines to thank you for the honest and simple straightforwardness and frankness with which you this morning put before me your position in the question which has arisen, and for your ultimate acquiescence in the suggestion I made as to your proper course of procedure.

“I pray God that to each of us, in our respective positions of anxious and responsible work, may be given from on high that right judgment in all things for which we are accustomed to ask; and whatever may ultimately be decided with respect to the particular point which is now under consideration, I feel sure we shall not lose or loose that bond of fellowship which unites in heart and spirit those who have in common the one great aim of advancing to the best of our power, and in accordance with what seems to us to be the due order of our Church of England, the Kingdom of our Blessed Lord.

“I am, with kindest regards, “Very truly yours, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_25th October, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I send you the statement I read out to my people. I have directed the architect to prepare you the plans. I shall be grateful if, when you receive them, you will give me a date when I may expect your decision.

“I am, yours very obediently, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“As our new church practically joins on to the old church, the late Bishop considered that no new licence would be needed. When I communicated this fact to our new Bishop, he desired that a new licence should be granted, and therefore sent the Rural Dean to report on the fabric and ornaments of the church.

“Acting on his report, the Bishop feels that it is impossible to grant this licence until he has consulted authorities as to the legality of the Third Altar, the one which you beautified in memory of Henry Ross, and which used to stand in the old church with the Memorials of the Dead around it. He therefore wrote to me that the licence would not be granted until the Altar was removed. My own feelings under these circumstances were that it would be better for us to remain in the old church, and not to open the new church. But when I saw the Bishop this morning, he very much disliked this idea, and suggested, as an alternative, that we should proceed with the opening, screening off the Altar and the Memorials of the Dead; that the plans should be at once submitted to him, showing every detail; and that he should proceed after due time to deliver judgment; if he can license the Altar, I am to remove the screen; if he cannot, I am at once to resign, so that a successor may be appointed who will remove the Altar and the Memorials.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_26th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have just received your letter enclosing a copy of the intimation you read yesterday to your people. I feel sure it was not your wish to say anything which would convey a mistaken impression of what has passed between us on the question at issue, but you have certainly done so, however unintentionally.

“Your words, ‘The Bishop wrote to me that the Licence would not be granted until the Altar was removed,’ are surely inconsistent with the purport of the actual letter, in which I tried to point out to you that the question was one which I ought not to prejudge, and that it required time for consideration.

“Again, I never, either in letter or conversation, desired you to screen off the ‘Memorials of the Dead.’ If the temporary screening off of the site intended for the proposed third altar necessarily involves this--which I did not understand--it is merely incidental, and your words would convey the wholly false impression that I had objected to the erection of ‘Memorials of the Dead.’ I have not seen them, and I do not know their precise character, nor did I mention them in any way.

“Most important of all, your final sentence practically says that in the event of such a third altar being found to be inadmissible, it is my wish that you should resign.

“You will remember that on the contrary I expressed my great regret at hearing from you that such would in that event be your course of action, although you assured me that in any circumstances you had already settled to leave S. Agatha’s a few months hence. My own wish would be strongly against your resignation.

“I feel sure, as I have said, that it was not your intention to mislead any who may have heard or read your words, and I do not doubt that you will desire at once to set the matter right, by giving publicity to this letter or otherwise.

“I am, dear Mr. Dolling, “Yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.

“REV. R. R. DOLLING.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_October 28th, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I am very sorry, indeed, if I have in any way misrepresented our conversation, but in your letter to me of the 24th, you say:

“‘I must ask that the church be not publicly opened for Divine Service, until a question so important as this has been submitted to the proper authorities for decision, or until the altar in question has been removed from the building.’

“You yourself told me, when I saw you, that it would be a scandal if the church was not opened, and, therefore, surely it was only left to me by your letter of the 24th, to create a scandal or to remove the altar.

“Secondly, the memorials are practically a part of the altar, as a frame is to the picture, and without these memorials, the altar would, I take it, be unobjectionable, or rather, as I think you said yourself, the question is not the red-tape question whether there is to be a third altar, but whether it is to be an altar of this kind--_i.e._, Dedicated to the Dead. There will be the twelve Celebrations said at it every week, and only two of them will be said for the Dead. I certainly supposed that your injunction, therefore, referred to the character of the thing as a whole.

“Thirdly, I certainly do not say that you would wish me to resign. What I do say is, ‘If he cannot license the altar, I am at once to resign, so that a successor may be appointed, who will remove the altar and the memorials.’ This surely does not convey the meaning that you wish me to resign, but that the action which you quite conscientiously may be compelled to take, may necessitate my resignation, which is quite a different thing. I believe that there is not a man in all the Diocese more anxious that I should remain than you are. I have written to the Portsmouth paper which mentioned the fact. I enclose you the letter.

“Canon Jacob’s letter which I enclose, and which please return, may enable the question to be decided in a more satisfactory way than by your Lordship’s personal judgment.

“I hope that in a few weeks the fabric of the church will be free of debt. I have built a Parsonage House, and I have £1100 in hand towards the endowment. If on these terms the district can be created into a parish, the question would then be one which could be decided by the highest ecclesiastical legal authorities.

“I should be very grateful for your Lordship’s opinion on this matter.

“Ever your obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_29th October, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I thank you for your letter of yesterday. If, as I suppose, the letter to the _Evening News_ which you send me in manuscript has been published in that paper, it meets the chief objection I felt to the wording of the memorandum you sent me, and I am obliged to you for making the point clear to those who might have misunderstood it. If you are satisfied, I do not wish to dwell further upon the other points mentioned in my letter to you, although I still think your words would convey to most hearers or readers a different impression from that which you can yourself have intended. With regard to the suggestion, that an endeavour should now be made to have the district legally assigned, and the church duly consecrated as a parish church, I should like a little time for consideration and consultation with others before giving you definite advice. You will remember that the Diocese is still new to me, and that in a matter like this local knowledge is almost essential to a right decision. Such knowledge I will do my best to acquire speedily. I retain in the meantime Canon Jacob’s letter upon the subject.

I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“S. AGATHA, LANDPORT, “_November 4th, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I send you plans of east end, with its two apses and altars, and north and south side of church, showing stations and third altar. The only place not shown is the baptistery under the tower. I had intended putting an altar in this for the use of parents on the morning of the baptism of their children. I did not speak of this to Bishop Thorold, for it was only suggested to me when I showed the baptistery and font to some of the mothers, and they said what a comfort and help it would be to take Communion in the baptistery. I will send you a little plan of this. I mentioned it to Canon Jacob, but he said there was no use in speaking of it to you. Most of the columns, paintings, &c., are memorials; they will all have on them, ‘Pray for the soul of,’ &c. The altars all have candlesticks on them. There is a large crucifix by the pulpit.

“Ever yours very truly, “R. R. DOLLING.”

We always have confession in public in church, so there would be three seats for this purpose in the church.

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_6th November, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I received last night your letter of the previous day, enclosing the plans. Now that I have these before me I can better consider the subject, and ask such counsel as seems desirable. It is difficult for me to say by what day I may be able to give you my decision upon the matter.

“I am much pressed at present with work of every kind, but I will take care that there is no unnecessary delay. I should hope, in a fortnight’s time at the latest, to be able to write to you definitely.

“It is possible I may wish to see you again. May I ask you to tell me whether any particular day in the week would be specially convenient or inconvenient to you for the journey to Farnham?

“Nothing could, I think, be gained by my seeing the architect, as the plans seem perfectly clear.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_11th November, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“Would it suit you to call here next Saturday morning, November 16th, or, if more convenient, to dine and sleep here on Friday night, the 15th, leaving as early as you like on Saturday morning?

“I am anxious, if possible, not to postpone our interview beyond next week. Please let me know when I may expect you.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

A prolonged interview took place on November 15th. (See p. 170.)

“CLARENCE STREET, LANDPORT, “_15th November, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I am very grateful to you for your patience this afternoon. You will he glad to hear that I do not feel any the worse. It would be a great relief to me if your lordship could tell me about the date when your lordship is likely to deliver judgment. Of course, we do not mean for one moment to hasten you, but our own minds would be more at rest if we knew about the date.

“Mr. Gresham desires to join with me in many thanks to Mrs. Davidson for her great kindness.

“Yours very obediently, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_16th November, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I send you our Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament, our Stations, our Mass for the Dead, and our children’s Mass book, and the rules of our Communicants’ Society. Our conversation of yesterday was so different from what I have had with Bishops in former days. They seemed to desire to deal with things concerning which complaint had been made to them, and so, when I had ventured on other details of our service here, they stopped me, as though to say, ‘That question is not before me, I do not desire to know it.’ It seemed to me, yesterday, that your attitude was the very opposite of this. You wanted to know everything we do at S. Agatha’s, and, therefore, praying over it all last night, and thinking about it, I was very anxious to discover if I was perfectly honest and straightforward, and I think I was. But when I was leaving your room you said to me, ‘Have you anything more to say?’ I took that, at the moment, to mean, ‘Is there any defence more that you would like to make concerning your doings?’ But, on thinking it over, it seems to me it may have meant, ‘Are there any other services or practices that you ought to tell me about?’ If this is your meaning, pray let me know, and I will send to you, in detail, everything else that we do. If, on the other hand, this thought of mine is over scrupulosity, please don’t answer this letter.

“Your obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_21st November, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I have not had a moment in which to reply to your letter received two days ago.

“When I asked you at our recent interview whether you had anything more to say, I did not in the least mean to ask you for a detailed account of all the services you hold. Some day I should be interested to hear from you about everything, in order that I may thoroughly understand your position and teaching. But all I desired in our recent interview was to understand the present situation in all its bearings, so that my decision may be based upon a really sufficient knowledge.

“I have been so much pressed during this last week by unexpected matters, including the illness and death of a dear friend, that I have been ceaselessly on the railway, and it has been impossible for me to give to S. Agatha’s matters the attention they deserve. Hence there may be a little delay in my sending you the formal letter I have promised. I can only say that I am doing my best.

“I remain, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_7th December, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I am now able to write to you definitely upon the question which has arisen with regard to S. Agatha’s church, and as you may probably wish to make my letter public, it will be convenient that I should briefly recall what has taken place. On October 2nd, a few days after I had become Bishop of Winchester, I heard from you that you had made arrangements to open the new church for divine service on October 27th. With a view, therefore, to your receiving the necessary licence, I directed Canon Jacob, as Rural Dean, to pay the customary preliminary visit to the church, and to report to me whether all was in due order. On October 24th I received this report. He told me of the beauty and dignity of the building, and its general suitableness for divine service in a great parish. The fittings and ornaments were not yet _in situ_, and he was, therefore, unable to report upon them in detail. But he directed my attention, as in duty bound, to the structural arrangements for Holy Communion. These, as shown in his report, and in his subsequent explanations to me with appended plans, are as follows: One large Holy Table or Altar in the usual position in the centre of the east end of the church; a second (for less largely attended services) at the east end of the south aisle; and a third in the south aisle, placed against the side wall of the church. It is also your wish to place a fourth in your Baptistery at the west end of the north aisle, but that question is not at present before us.

“When Canon Jacob paid his official visit to the church, the proposed third altar had not yet been erected; and after full correspondence and conversation between yourself and me upon the subject, it was decided that the opening services should be held in accordance with the arrangements you had already made before I became Bishop, but that the site of the proposed third altar should be temporarily curtained off, and its erection at the least postponed, so that I should have time before issuing formal licence for the conduct of divine service in the building, to consider the arrangements proposed. You urged me to give you an answer as speedily as possible, as in the event of my being unable to sanction the proposed arrangements you would feel it necessary to withdraw immediately from S. Agatha’s, instead of remaining until Easter next, when you proposed in any case to resign.

“As it is not proposed that the church should be consecrated at present, the question raised does not, and, indeed, cannot, now come formally before the Diocesan Court. Pending consecration, it rests with the Bishop to grant or withhold at his discretion the necessary licence for the conduct of divine service in the new building. In order, therefore, to understand in all its bearings the question to which you attach so much importance, I have, in addition to our correspondence, had two prolonged interviews with you; and I am anxious again to express to you my appreciation of the honest and straightforward readiness you have throughout shown to give me all possible information as to your usages and the opinions on which they are based. In a matter of this kind, where we have but one object--namely, to arrive at a right conclusion in accordance with the doctrines and laws of the Church of England--it is of paramount importance that there should be no concealment or reserve in setting the facts before the Bishop, on whom lies the grave responsibility of decision.

“I am cordially grateful to you, therefore, for freeing me from any difficulty of that sort. After deliberately weighing all that you have put before me, I have come to the conclusion that I should act wrongly were I, on my personal authority, now to sanction the erection and use of the proposed third altar in the situation and for the purposes you have described to me. When the church is consecrated it would, of course, be possible for you, or your successor, to apply to the Diocesan Court for a faculty for the erection of such a third altar; and, were the faculty refused, you would have the opportunity--which you tell me you desire--of bringing the question before the higher Courts on appeal from the decision of the Chancellor.

“In the meantime, as I have fully explained to you in conversation, I cannot, in exercising my discretion upon a proposition so unusual, regard the question as merely the technical one--may there be three altars or holy tables in one church?

“It is easy to conceive a church or cathedral of such dimensions or construction as to render it desirable to extend yet further the principle upon which a second altar or holy table has been sanctioned in many of our churches for more convenient use when the number of communicants is small; and, whatever might be the legal decision on such a point, no question of doctrine or principle need thereby be raised. But such is not the case at S. Agatha’s. You do not ask for my sanction of the third altar on grounds of convenience (in the ordinary sense of the word); and, indeed, it is obvious that in that respect it would have no advantage over the second, or subsidiary, altar, to which I have raised no objection. You have explained to me that your wish for the addition rests, in the main, on quite different grounds. The altar in question is intended to have special association with a deceased friend, whose memory is rightly cherished in the parish.

“You desire that it should be surrounded with memorials of the dead, and that its special, though not exclusive, use should be for the celebration of what you describe as ‘Mass for the Dead.’

“I endeavoured, in our recent conversation, to ascertain exactly what you mean by this term, and you explained candidly and clearly what it is that you believe and teach. You regard the Celebration of Holy Communion ‘for the dead’ as having the effect [you add, ‘we know not how’] of shortening the period during which the souls of the faithful departed are in a state of ‘purgation’ or ‘preparation,’ and of hastening their admission to the Beatific state.

“Now, I have no wish to dictate to you, or to dogmatise, upon the mysterious and difficult question of what is known as ‘prayer for the dead’--a term obviously capable of a great variety of meaning, ranging from the words we use in the Prayer for the Church Militant to doctrines of quite another sort. The whole subject is of great importance, and I will gladly discuss it with you hereafter; but, whatever liberty of private opinion and individual devotion may be permissible, I have no hesitation in saying that I should depart both from the spirit and the letter of our Church’s formularies were I definitely to sanction the addition of a third altar to S. Agatha’s with the knowledge that one main purpose of its erection is that it should be a centre for services and teaching of the character above described.

“I myself believe your teaching on this subject to be contrariant to some of the distinctive principles of the Church of England, and I am bound to add further that I am unable to reconcile your usages in celebrating the Holy Communion with the specific directions in the Book of Common Prayer, which both you and I have solemnly pledged ourselves to follow. You tell me, for example, that in S. Agatha’s Church, where you have about twenty celebrations of the Holy Communion every week, more than half the celebrations on week-days, ‘perhaps eight out of fifteen,’ are in ordinary circumstances without communicants. You have so arranged that the celebrant shall know beforehand if any desire to communicate, and, if not, the celebrant omits the Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution from the Service.

“On week-days, unless they are festivals, the Creed and the _Gloria in Excelsis_ are always omitted.

“It is impossible for me to disregard these facts in coming to a decision as to what I ought, at this juncture, to do. You have, as it seems to me, dealt practically at your will with our Church’s Rules.

“I do not, for a moment, doubt that your motive is a good one. Your services are those which, in your individual opinion, are best calculated to lead your people into a knowledge of what you believe to be the truth.

“But the Church of England does not allow us thus to deal at our will with the Book of Common Prayer, and in the event of your deciding to remain at S. Agatha’s, I must carefully discuss with you what modifications are required in order to bring your services into harmony with the Prayer Book.

“I need not repeat to you what I have so often said as to my sense of the value of your devoted work in the midst of special difficulties. Many of your distinctive Church Services seem to me to have a special value, as bringing home to the minds of unlearned people, by the use of anniversaries and memorials and otherwise, the links which bind us to the world unseen.

“These are, I believe, compatible with perfect loyalty to the Book of Common Prayer.

“I earnestly trust you may not think it necessary to sever yourself at present from a parish in which God has signally blessed your energy, your self-devotion, and your enthusiasm; and you may rely upon my constant endeavour to help and further your work in every legitimate way.

“I am, my dear Mr. Dolling, “Yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, “LANDPORT, PORTSMOUTH, “_9th December, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I have to-day sent to Dr. Fearon my resignation. I think your account of our interviews is quite correct, except in one detail. I did not intend to say that I did not know how the Service of the Holy Communion affected the state of the dead. There is, however, one practical question.

“I must conduct the Services as I have for the last ten years. Do you wish me and my staff to go away at once, or to wait until Dr. Fearon has appointed my successor? I am ready to follow either course; only for fear of mistakes arising, I should like to say that as long as I am in charge the Sunday and daily services remain the same.

I am, your lordship’s obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_10th December, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I am exceedingly sorry to learn that you feel it to be your duty to leave St. Agatha’s forthwith, but, of course, I recognise that your decision is perfectly consistent with what you said to me at our first interview.

“With regard to your question, What is to be done as to the services until your resignation takes effect, I have no sort of wish to press unfairly upon you, and I think it would be a grave misfortune were St. Agatha’s Church to be closed pending the appointment of your successor.

“I think that until that appointment is made you had better continue to officiate. This will, I hope, be in accordance both with your own wish and with the wish of your people; and, though I must not be supposed to be giving formal sanction to the teaching or usages to which I have called your attention, and must adhere to my decision respecting the third altar, I am far from wishing to cause unnecessary difficulty in any way. Should anything lead you to modify your decision, and to desire to remain at St. Agatha’s, it will be a pleasure to me to hear from you to that effect. I am glad that I succeeded in my endeavour to represent fairly what you told me at our interviews. The particular words to which alone you take exception in my account, are contained in the memorandum I made at the moment, and read to you for your approval. But the point is comparatively unimportant, and, of course, I accept the correction you desire to make.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_11th December, 1895_.

“DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“You will not blame me if I say that your letter amazes me. If my teaching is so contrary to the mind of the Church of England that it necessitates a step so disastrous as the disruption of a work like this, I cannot imagine how you can allow me to remain here one single day.

“I want, therefore, to make it clearly understood that I have unscreened the altar, and am using it, and that I shall conduct the services exactly as I have conducted them for the last eight years. I know you will understand that I do not say this in any spirit of bravado, but I desire, above all things, to be perfectly plain with you. Having said this, I am content to stay here for a short time, but there are two reasons that urge me to request you to fix a date not later than January 10th--(1) The Mission expenses are nearly £100 per month, and I am already very much overpressed with debts; in fact, winding up all the different charities and other expenses here, and repairing the parsonage and other property I have bought, and the paying for the church, will, I think, necessitate my begging £1500 before I leave, perhaps even more, and your action will very likely dry up some of our sources of charity. (2) I have to consider my own and my sister’s health. I doubt if your lordship could imagine what it is to be here. It is almost impossible for us to go out of doors; the tears and lamentations of our poor people are more than we can bear for any length of time. I write this all with more confidence because your letter of to-day confirms my own remembrance of our interviews when I assured you I should have to leave, and, therefore, I am assured you have already considered the difficult question of a successor.

“I am, your lordship’s obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“OXFORD, “_13th December, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“Owing to ceaseless pressure of other work I have not, since your letter reached me yesterday, had a free moment for writing to you.

“I can only repeat that I have no sort of wish to expedite the resignation on which you have, to my great regret, and in spite of my remonstrance, decided.

“I cannot easily reconcile your action in ‘unscreening’ the third altar with what you said to me on our first interview, but in present circumstances I say no more upon that, and I am anxious to make every allowance for your acts and words at a time of such stress and strain.

“I have just read in the _Times_ what you are reported to have said at a meeting last night. I can hardly doubt that the report must be inaccurate. You could not, I feel sure, have represented me, after all that has passed, as thinking it ‘necessary that disruption should take place,’ or as harassing you with minute insistence on matters of mere rubrical detail. A grave question of Church order has come formally before me for decision as Bishop of the Diocese. With anxious care, and with an earnest wish to consider your difficulties, I have decided in accordance with what seems to be my duty, and thereupon, to my great regret, you have resigned at once, instead of waiting until the time you have publicly announced. I can scarcely conceive that anyone who studies our Ordinal, and realises a Bishop’s obligations and responsibilities, could wish me to have acted otherwise than I have.

“I must in all kindness remonstrate against your resignation--even at a time of excitement--as though it were my act rather than your own. Few things in my life have caused me more sorrow and anxiety than this.

“With regard to the date when you cease to officiate at St. Agatha’s; the appointment of your successor rests, as you know, with others, and not with me.

“I earnestly trust that if you persist in your resignation you will consider the difficulties of the Mission District, or Parish, and of those with whom the appointment rests, and will do what you can to meet, or to relieve them.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_14th December, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I cannot quite understand what you mean by ‘in spite of my remonstrance you are resigning.’

“Under your two predecessors we conducted service exactly as we desire to do in our new church. The little altar is the same, the memorials are the same, except that they are put on better materials. But no single act do we desire to perform, no single word to say, that was not done and said in old S. Agatha’s. That is, as far as I can judge, if your predecessor had been here, we should not have gone away.

“He objected personally to the little altar, but not officially. The people here feel this so strongly that they want to lock up the new church and return to the old. Therefore it is surely through your action--unwilling action, I am sure--that I must either alter things or go away. Is there any other alternative? I cannot alter things, because I should be declaring to my own people that doctrines which have been taught among them for the last eight years I could conscientiously change at your bidding.

“I quite recognise your difficulty in the matter, and I hope that you will, in the enclosed paper, from which report that in the _Times_ is condensed, read what I say about your action. It is your condemnation of my teachings, which you deem so erroneous and contrary to the forms of the Church of England, that necessitates the disruption.

“Dr. Fearon has already consulted with your Lordship about my successor; and has already, with your consent, offered the post to another man. So there is no difficulty about my going. Indeed he thinks the date--January 10--reasonable. I have told him that I shall be delighted to show the new Priest the details of the work here, and introduce him to the church workers, etc.; and I have sent him a few statistics about the parish, copies of which I send to your Lordship, and I am sure they will interest you.

I am, “Your Lordship’s obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_17th December, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I thank you for your letter of the 14th. It followed me to Bournemouth, where I was busy all day yesterday. Hence the delay in my reply. The cutting you kindly sent me shows that, as I supposed, the summary published in the London papers failed, perhaps necessarily, to represent quite fairly what you really said; and I thank you for the tone of many parts of your speech, and for the statistics you have enclosed.

“Pardon me if I say that it still seems to me to be true that ‘you are resigning in spite of my remonstrance.’ When, at our first interview, you told me of your intention, I deprecated it, and I do so still. Elementary principles of Church order seem to me to suggest a different course as at least possible, but I realise that you have made up your mind, and that it is useless to press you further.

“With regard to your reference to my predecessors in the See, you cannot, I think, suppose that if the question which came formally before me had come formally before either Bishop Thorold or Bishop Harold Browne, the ultimate decision would have been a different one.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_17th December, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“The question would not have come before Dr. Thorold officially. He provided for that by not requiring a new licence.

“From memory I cannot speak with much authority of Bishop Harold Browne’s attitude towards us, except that several times different Protestant Societies complained to him about us; and though, as far as I remember, he wrote letters showing that he personally did not approve of our methods, he never publicly or officially condemned them.

“But about Dr. Thorold I can speak with assurance. Directly he was designated by the Crown for the Bishopric, he asked me to stay with him in London, and we had two very long conversations about our work here; and I quite well remember his saying to me, when I told him how many celebrations we had on Sundays and on week-days, ‘Surely it is not good for your people to go so often to Communion.’ And when I explained to him that at some of the celebrations on Sundays, and many on week-days, there were no communicants, he turned round sharply, and said, ‘Mr. Dolling, I do not like that at all.’

“After I had explained my difficulties to him, and the power that I believed these celebrations were to us and to my people, though I do not think he was convinced by my argument, he made no further objection.

“The first time he stayed here to confirm he went with me to look over the church. He was delighted with the memorials of the confirmed, &c.; but when he came to our little altar he said, ‘I think that is the ugliest thing I ever saw.’ And when I explained to him more about celebrations for the departed and prayers for the dead, he said, ‘I don’t believe in it for a moment.’

“We talked over the point for a long time, but I am positively sure that he never forbade me; and when I showed him at Farnham the plans of the new church, after he had said, ‘I am so glad you are building a basilica,’ though objecting to the baldacchino which was in the picture, I enlarged upon my intention of making the church as beautiful as I could by paintings, mosaics, &c. I said, ‘We are going to have nothing ugly or unworthy in it; even the little altar which you thought so ugly the people have collected money to beautify, in memory of Ross’--and I told him the story. I think there were tears in his eyes when I had finished, and I am quite certain he said nothing.

“Of course I have written all this from memory, but I can give you an exact proof. Some years ago he was approached by the Protestant Alliance, on the subject of a book which our children used at their Celebration, and at his request, I withdrew it, and wrote a new book, which though he could not personally sanction, he permitted us to use. In the enclosed copy you will find in pages 25, 26, the words which the children use aloud directly after the Consecration, and especially on page 26, you will see the Memorial of the Dead. On pages 10–12 you will see what I teach about representing to the Eternal Father, both for the Living and the Dead, the Propitiatory Sacrifice, which our Lord made once for all upon the Cross.

“You will see, therefore, that he perfectly understood my attitude with regard to these two questions, and my method of teaching them to my children.

“If by going back to our old church, we could put back our altars in their former places, and be authorised by you to use the exact services we have used in the past under your predecessors, it might solve the difficulty.

“Or the alternative, whether in the new church at the High Altar or at the Subsidiary Altar, we could use the services we have used under your predecessor, is, I think, a question for your Lordship to suggest to me.

“But the two points which your letter seemed to forbid, were the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice for the Dead, and the Celebrations without Communion, and not the merely technical point whether there may be three altars in the church.

“Of course, Winchester is the chief factor in the question, and I think that the enclosed letter of Dr. Fearon, when I told him that our people had proposed, as a _modus vivendi_, that we should settle the question by going back into the old church, determines the matter as far as I am concerned.

I am, your Lordship’s obedient servant, “R. RADCLYFFE DOLLING.”

“FARNHAM CASTLE, SURREY, “_19th December, 1895_.

“DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“I thank you for your letter of yesterday, telling me further details of what passed between my predecessors and yourself. What you say seems to make it quite clear that, whatever may have passed in conversation, the question now at issue was never formally submitted to either of them.

“My replies addressed yesterday to the two memorials from ‘The Church Workers of S. Agatha’s’ and from ‘Communicants of S. Agatha’s,’ taken in connection with my previous letters to yourself, will, I hope, have made clear to you what is my position in the matter, and I do not think you will feel it to be necessary that I should add anything further.

I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

“WINCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION, LANDPORT, “_20th December, 1895_.

“MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,

“I cannot bear to close this correspondence without saying that if, by any word of mine, I have spoken with disrespect either of you personally, or of your high office, I beg you will pardon it, and believe that it was perfectly unintentional.

“We leave on the morning of January 11th, and I shall be here every day till then getting matters finally arranged.

“I hardly like to suggest to your Lordship, because, of course, you know what is best; but I think it would materially help your guidance of this most needy place, in the future, if you could spare a few hours to see it before I go.

“There are matters about the church schools, which I won with great difficulty, which are especially pressing.

“I would offer to come to Farnham, if you would receive me, but I do not think you would be able to judge unless you came here.

“I am, your Lordship’s obedient servant, “R. R. DOLLING.”

“_Friday Night, 20th December, 1895._

“MY DEAR MR. DOLLING,

“In the stress of Ember days, with an ordination pending to-morrow, and some thirty men in the house, I can but send you a single line to reply to your letter just received. Pray believe that nothing could be further from my thoughts than to find cause of offence in any word you have said during this time of extreme trial for both of us. I have felt far too deeply for you to even think of such trifles. I remember you many times daily in my prayers.

“It can seldom, I hope, happen to anyone in a position of responsible authority in the Church to have to give a decision so painful to himself in the consequences it is found to involve, as that which it was my duty to give in this matter. I can but rest on the firm belief that He who calls one to the discharge of such responsibilities, will give ear to the prayer for grace that they may be discharged aright.

“While the question of what you would finally resolve to do remained in any way open, I felt that I might seriously confuse the issue to the minds of your people, were I to visit the parish, as though to judge of the work going on; whereas, as it seemed to me, the point at issue was quite independent of this. Now that you have come to a final decision, I should esteem it a privilege to go quietly and privately over the ground with you, and learn any details that you can tell me. Next week is not, perhaps, a good one for such a purpose, but it seems my only chance. If I go on Friday, 27th, would it suit you? I could be with you on that day from 11.39 to 2.15.

“I am, yours very truly, “RANDALL WINTON.”

SOME OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

“_It is the record of a work very remarkable in all its aspects, written with all modesty; and we think that to not a few weary workers among the sinful and degraded it may bring fresh lessons of courage and hopefulness._”--CHURCH TIMES.

“_Will be read with the greatest interest by all who desire to learn the secret of Mr. Dolling’s wonderful success in a most difficult task._”--GUARDIAN.

“_A vivid and breezy account, from Mr. Dolling’s own unconventional pen, of the singularly successful work done by him in connexion with the Winchester College Mission, in the regeneration of the district of St. Agatha’s, Landport._”--TIMES.

“_Simply it is the record of ten years’ stupendous work, performed by Mr. Dolling among the poor of the difficult district of Portsmouth known as Landport; and, moreover, it is a record most modestly--even pathetically modestly--presented; a record that is convincing in its bare truth, and in every line of it beyond expression interesting. He has given lay readers a picture of such work that they should, in all humility, most carefully study. It is not too much to say that the book is absorbingly full of incentives to thought; for every page reveals something wonderful in the way of resource, self-restraint, and accomplishment, not only on Mr. Dolling’s part, but on the part of those connected with him at St. Agatha’s._”--PALL MALL GAZETTE.

“_It would be wholly impossible for us to give any detailed account of the working of the Mission described in Mr. Dolling’s book. But the full account will be found in the book itself. A record of ministration to little children, to boys and girls, to young men and women, to old men and women, to sailors and soldiers, to waifs and outcasts, to prostitutes and thieves. A story which is alive with human interest._”--DAILY NEWS.

“_We cannot lay down his book without regretting that its author should be whipped from pillar to post in the Church of England. We know of no slum record so well told or so important in its practical significance. Mr. Dolling gives the reader an excellent idea of the district and people. Liberal Churchmen ought to consider these chapters, as they have an important bearing upon the future of the Church of England; and the book should be carefully read by everyone interested in the practical work of social reform. Mr. Dolling’s method, as the world knows, is religion of the broadly sympathetic and ceremonial kind._”--PROGRESSIVE REVIEW.

“_It is the story of a genial, vigorous, unconventional, and thoroughly liberal-minded worker._”--SPEAKER.

“_His Mission has been, from first to last, a triumph of the voluntary principle._”--DAILY CHRONICLE.

“_A book to make men think and act._”--THE COMMONWEALTH.

“_The book is enthrallingly interesting, and this value is greatly enhanced by the illustrations._”--CHURCH REVIEW.

PLYMOUTH: WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, PRINTERS.

Transcriber’s Notes:

1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.

2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original.

3. Italics are shown as _xxx_.

3. Different font is shown as =xxx=.