NINE FAMOUS BIRMINGHAM MEN 
 
Nine Famous 
 Birmingham Men 
 
 Lectures Delivered in the 
 University 
 
 \^>/ r.-l Edited by 
 
 J.'H. M airhead, LL.D 
 
 Professor of Philosophy in the 
 University of Birmingham 
 
 " Not walls but men make a City." 
 — Thucydides. 
 
 Second Edition 
 Birmingham 
 
 Cornish Brothers, Ltd 
 
 Publishers to the University 
 
 37, New Street 
 
 1909 
 

 / iU/'v 
 
 /v/' 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It hardly needs to be said that these are only 
 a few of the men who have been the spiritual 
 builders of the city of Birmingham as we know 
 it, or who have otherwise lent it lustre. Besides 
 those selected for the present course, the names 
 of Boulton, Sturge, Cox, Vince, Bunce, Short- 
 house, Lightfoot, Benson (to confine ourselves 
 to the past) readily occur. Of the nine, only a 
 few are Birmingham men in the sense of having 
 been born in the town. But there is no reason 
 why a city should not take as much credit for 
 attracting as for giving birth to distinguished 
 men. Birmingham has had a happy gift for 
 this method of attachment. 
 
 The Course was arranged somewhat hastily 
 by the Social Study Committee of the Univer- 
 sity as a contribution to the programme of the 
 Workers' Educational Association for the session 
 1908-9. Its aim was, while doing honour to 
 great names, to show how it takes all sorts of 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 men and movements to make a great modern 
 city. College lectures may aim at education 
 in more than one way. They may seek ta 
 inform and organize thought on a particular 
 subject, or they may aim at touching feeling 
 and inspiring the will. While some of the 
 lectures which follow may, it is hoped, prove 
 contributions to the literature of the subjects 
 of which they treat, all of them are a call to 
 the younger generation of Birmingham citizens 
 to remember to what manner of city they 
 belong and to what manner of men they 
 owe it. 
 
 A fear was expressed by some that the Course 
 might raise controversies foreign to education 
 and thus introduce elements of discord into 
 the movement it was intended to help. The 
 Committee was confident that the fear was 
 groundless. They believed that Birmingham 
 men and women had sufficient magnanimity to 
 come together to do honour to great names 
 without respect to party or creed. They remem- 
 bered Carlyle's saying of himself and John 
 Sterling that " they were agreed in every- 
 thing but opinion," and felt convinced that the 
 general result would be the wholesome recogni- 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 tion of the insignificance of theoretic differences 
 in view of practical agreement on the great 
 ends and issues of Hfe. 
 
 Thanks are due to the generosity of a well- 
 known citizen of Birmingham, who desires to 
 remain anonymous, for enabling the publishers 
 to add the portraits which accompany the lec- 
 tures, without adding to the cost of the volume. 
 These portraits may be regarded as his gift to 
 the working men and women of Birmingham. 
 
 Birmingham, March, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY i 
 
 By Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Principal of 
 the University of Birmingham. 
 
 GEORGE DIXON 51 
 
 By George H. Kenrick, Lord Mayor of Bir- 
 mingham. 
 
 GEORGE DAWSON 75 
 
 By a. W. W. Dale, LL.D. (Vice-Chancellor of 
 Liverpool University). 
 
 JAMES WATT 109 
 
 By F. W. Burstall, M.A., M.Sc, Professor of 
 Engineering in the University of Birming- 
 ham. 
 
 JOHN BRIGHT 131 
 
 By C. a. Vince, M.A. 
 
 BISHOP WESTCOTT 159 
 
 By the Rev. Canon J. H. B. Masterman, 
 Professor of History in the University of 
 Birmingham. 
 
 tARDINAL NEWMAN 183 
 By J. H. Muirhead, LL.D., Professor of 
 Philosophy in the University of Birming- 
 \ ham. 
 
 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES . . .225 
 
 By R. Catterson Smith, Headmaster of the 
 
 Birmingham Municipal School of Art. 
 
 R. W. DALE 253 
 
 By the Rev. Charles Silvester Horne, M.A. 
 
 I 
 
 zi 
 
LIST OF PORTRAITS 
 
 Facing Page 
 Joseph Priestley ...... i 
 
 By kind permission of the Librarian of the Dr. Williams 
 Library. 
 
 George Dixon ...... 
 
 From a photograph by Whitlock. 
 
 George Dawson ...... 
 
 From a photograph lent by T. F. Walker, Esq. 
 
 James Watt ...... 
 
 From an old engraving. 
 
 John Bright 
 
 From a photograph by Elliott & Fry. 
 
 Bishop Westcott ..... 
 
 From a photograph by Elliott & Fry. 
 
 John Henry Newman, M.A., Vicar of St. Mary's, 
 
 Oxford i83\ 
 
 John Henry Cardinal Newman .... 205 
 
 By kind permission of the Congregation of the Oratory of St. 
 Philip Neri. 
 
 Sir Edward Bume-Jones ..... 225 
 
 From a photograph by Frederick Hollyer, from the painting 
 by G. F. Watts 
 
 R. W. Dale 253 
 
 From a photograph by Whitlock. 
 
 5iv 
 
 75v 
 
 109 
 
 133V 
 
 i59x 
 
 zu 
 
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 Born near Leeds, 1733. Died in Pennsylvania, 1804. 
 Lived in Birmingham from 1780 to 1791. 
 
 By Oliver Lodge 
 
 One hundred and five years ago, Joseph 
 Priestley died in America, whither he had been 
 driven by persecution and popular clamour. 
 But the greater part of his life was spent, and 
 his work was done, in England ; America was 
 merely a refuge for one whose ideas were too 
 advanced for his native country, which would 
 not allow him reasonable freedom of speech ; 
 the popular notions of freedom in England, at 
 that particular time, being of the most rudi- 
 mentary character. 
 
 His life has a double aspect. On one side 
 he was an experimental chemist : on the other 
 a religious teacher and civil reformer. He 
 never seems to have taken any share in party 
 politics, technically so-called, but he was always 
 on the side of civil and religious freedom ; and 
 his earnest religious spirit forbade him to keep 
 silent at a period when men's prejudices were 
 
 L.F.M. 1 B 
 
2 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 violently agitated by the occurrences of the 
 French Revolution, and when a bigoted atti- 
 tude in both Church and State was far more 
 prevalent than it is now. He never made himself 
 the least obnoxious to the law, but he did lay 
 himself open to the lawlessness of his country- 
 men. And unfortunately the ignorant mob 
 of those days was at the beck and call of the 
 party of superstition and bigotry, being only 
 too ready to carry out its behests and to 
 persecute any conspicuous person who was 
 disapproved of by that protean party. To this 
 persecution therefore it is impossible for any 
 one treating of Priestley's life to shut his eyes. 
 It would be absurd to treat him as if he were 
 only a chemical philosopher ; for although his 
 services to experimental chemistry were astonish- 
 ing, his constant and dignified pleadings for civil 
 and religious liberty were of even more value. 
 
 On this head I will quote the testimony of a 
 man of science, Dr. Thorpe, F.R.S., himself 
 the author of a very useful small Life of Priestley 
 in the " English Men of Science " series : 
 
 Such is the irony of circumstance, that Priestley's name 
 mainly lives as that of a chemical philosopher. When 
 men have desired to do him honour, and have sought to 
 
EARLY LIFE 3 
 
 perpetuate his memory by statues in public places, he is 
 generally represented as making a chemical experiment. 
 In reality, great as Priestley's merit is as an experimen- 
 tarian philosopher, his greater claim on our regard and 
 esteem rests upon his struggles and his sufferings in the 
 cause of civil, political, and religious liberty. 
 
 Priestley's father was a manufacturer of 
 home-spun ; and he and his ancestors were sim- 
 ple, honest, religious folk — hand-loom weavers 
 for the most part — living in the country near 
 Leeds, owning a small piece of land and a 
 horse or cow : in fact they belonged to that 
 solid homely conservative class which our 
 townsman, the Right Honourable Jesse CoUings, 
 is endeavouring to establish in greater num- 
 bers among us. Joseph was born in York- 
 shire, in 1733. At school he learnt Greek, 
 and in the holidays made an effort at acquiring 
 Hebrew ; while after leaving school, he taught 
 himself the chief modern European languages. 
 He was to be trained for the Ministry, and at 
 the age of nineteen was sent for that purpose 
 to Daventry — where was a small educational 
 institution of importance in the history of 
 English Nonconformity. Concerning it, and 
 speaking as a Dissenter, Priestley expresses him- 
 self as follows : 
 
4 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 Shutting the doors of the Universities against us, and 
 keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may 
 think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give 
 you disturbance. But though ignominiously and unjustly 
 excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the 
 expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific 
 education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, 
 that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened 
 age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to 
 answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus 
 while your Universities resemble pools of stagnant water 
 secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, 
 taking their natural course, fertilize a whole country. 
 
 Fortunately this accusation cannot with truth 
 be made now, against either the ancient or the 
 modern Universities. 
 
 Priestley's marked mental characteristics were 
 a sturdy independence of thought, resolute 
 regard for truth, and repudiation of dogmatic 
 authority. These intellectual traits dominated 
 his character, gave it strength, and ultimately 
 brought upon him his misfortunes. 
 
 His first ministry was at Needham Market 
 in Suffolk, where he seems to have been 
 wretchedly poor, partly because he would not 
 receive contributions from those members of 
 his congregation with whose opinions he did not 
 agree. His income we are told was thirty 
 pounds a year. His preaching also, though 
 
TRAINING 5 
 
 weighty and vigorous, was hampered by a 
 stammer, with which he had to struggle through 
 the greater part of his Ufe. So after three years 
 he migrated to Nantwich, where he conducted 
 a school. Here he was better off, and acquired 
 some philosophic instruments as well as books ; 
 notably an air-pump and an electrical machine, 
 which he taught his pupils to use and to keep 
 in order, though at that time he had no leisure 
 to make original observations. 
 
 At the age of twenty-eight he was removed 
 to Warrington, to become a teacher in the 
 Warrington Academy for the education of 
 young men of every religious denomination 
 for the Christian ministry or as laymen. Here 
 he became able to marry and to take up the 
 more serious study of Natural Philosophy. 
 
 But what particularly impressed him, as a 
 practical educationist, was that, whilst most 
 of his pupils were designed for situations in 
 civil and active life, every article in the plan of 
 their education was adapted to the learned 
 professions ; and at a later date he proceeded 
 to trace the cause of this anomaly : 
 
 Formerly none but the clergy were thought to have 
 any occasion for learning. It was natural, therefore, that 
 
6 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 the whole plan of education, from the Grammar School 
 to the finishing at the University, should be calculated for 
 their use. 
 
 Besides, in those days, the great ends of human society 
 seem to have been but little understood. Men of the 
 greatest rank, fortune, and influence, who took the lead 
 in all the affairs of State, had no idea of the great objects 
 of wise and extensive policy, and therefore could never 
 apprehend that any fund of knowledge was requisite for 
 the most eminent stations in the community. 
 
 This state of things to a great extent still 
 persists, among leaders of society and some 
 of the governing classes, not excepting the 
 average Member of Parliament ; but a more 
 reasonable and comprehensive plan of education 
 is fortunately being initiated, and ultimately, 
 it is to be hoped, will permeate even more of 
 the Government Offices than at present. 
 
 It was from Warrington that Priestley paid 
 his first visit to London. He seems to have 
 spent a Christmas there at the end of the year 
 1765, and to have encountered not only John 
 Canton, an admirable experimental philoso- 
 pher, but also that exceptionally great man, 
 Benjamin Franklin, then about sixty years of 
 age. Franklin and Priestley seem to have 
 become close friends; and the result was a 
 stimulated interest and keenness in Natural 
 Philosophy on the part of Priestley. 
 
ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTS 7 
 
 On his return to Warrington he made some 
 notable electrical discoveries concerning the 
 discharge of a Ley den jar round a long circuit. 
 Among other things he discovered — what I myself 
 happened to rediscover in 1888, thinking they 
 were new — the two series of experiments called 
 respectively " the alternative path " and " the 
 side flash." A conductor transmitting a current 
 of great magnitude and suddenness is able to spit 
 off a spark even to an insulated body in the 
 neighbourhood ; which conductor however is 
 not thereby charged, for it is instantaneously 
 discharged again. The spark is, in fact, a 
 double one, both in and out. Even an electro- 
 scope is hardly affected at all by such a spark 
 — proper precautions being taken to prevent 
 any permanent or residual effect, due to im- 
 perfect earth connexion. This ' side flash ' is 
 a phenomenon of importance in connexion with 
 lightning conductors. 
 
 The discovery of the other experiment — 
 that of " the alternative path " — led in his case, 
 as in my own, to a large number of measure 
 ments of the impedance of conductors, of various 
 shapes and of many materials ; the alternative 
 spark length across an air-gap being a measure 
 
8 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 of the potential required to force the current 
 round a closed circuit. The theory in his day 
 was, of course, not understood, because the 
 data were not available, as they were in 1888 ; 
 the whole subject of "self-induction," which 
 dominates the phenomenon, being completely 
 unknown — unknown till Faraday made his 
 experiments and Maxwell gave the essential 
 mathematical features of their theory. 
 
 These and other experiments of Priestley 
 revived in this country the use of large electrical 
 machines and batteries of Ley den jars — together 
 with other experiments which had also been 
 most energetically carried out by Franklin in 
 the American colonies. 
 
 It was probably in connexion with these 
 observations that the University of Edinburgh 
 conferred upon Priestley the Honorary Degree 
 of LL.D., and he thus became Dr. Priestley. 
 
 At the age of thirty-four he was invited to 
 leave the school at Warrington, where he had 
 been very successful, and take charge of the 
 congregation of Mill Hill Chapel at Leeds ; his 
 stammer having been, by pertinacious care 
 and personal trouble, very greatly reduced in 
 intensity. 
 
WORK AT LEEDS 9 
 
 From Leeds he issued a number of pamphlets, 
 vindicating the cause of civil and religious 
 liberty, and standing up for Nonconformist prin- 
 ciples against what he considered the prejudices 
 of his countrymen. He was well aware that 
 some of these pamphlets were obnoxious to people 
 in authority, and that he ran the risk of some 
 personal danger by their publication ; for he 
 says in one of his letters : 
 
 I am about to make a bolder push than ever for the 
 pillory, the King's Bench Prison, or something worse. 
 
 It is thought that he is here referring to a 
 pamphlet that he wrote on Wilkes and Liberty 
 in connexion with the struggle between the 
 electors of Middlesex and the House of Commons 
 of that day. 
 
 The most important fact in connexion with 
 Leeds, however, is that he there began his chemi- 
 cal experiments on gases, — and published what 
 he called Enquiries into the doctrine of air ; 
 by which series of experiments he became one 
 of the greatest chemical discoverers of his 
 time. 
 
 It must be understood that the name " gas " 
 had not then come into use, and all kinds of 
 gases were called " airs." Indeed the doctrine 
 
10 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 of the four elements, "earth," "air," "fire" 
 and " water," still persisted. Even now many 
 minerals are spoken of as " earths," as if they 
 were varieties of the one element. Some liquids 
 are still popularly spoken of as " waters," like 
 "aqua fortis " and "aqua regia " ; oils and 
 spirits being also recognized — for instance " oil of 
 vitriol," and " spirit of nitre " ; though there 
 is neither water, oil, nor spirit in the compo- 
 sition of any of them. Even to this day only 
 one variety of "fire" is popularly recognized — 
 that due to combustion, — but we know that the 
 heat of the sun and of the electric spark and arc 
 are independent of combustion. Indeed it is not 
 very easy to specify what is meant by the " tem- 
 perature " of an electric spark or of the discharge 
 in a vacuum tube. 
 
 Anyway, in Priestley's time the gases were 
 called " airs " ; one of the best known being 
 the " fixed air " or " choke damp " of the 
 mines ; another kind being " fire damp " or 
 " inflammable air." " Fixed air " was what 
 we now call carbonic acid or carbon dioxide ; 
 " inflammable air " was either hydrogen or 
 marsh gas or any other undiscriminated hydro- 
 carbon that burnt with a flame. The word 
 
SODA WATER ii 
 
 " damp " is used in middle English for gases, 
 and is still found in German for vapour. 
 
 Priestley's first experiments on ' fixed ' air were 
 made with the gas which was given off by 
 fermenting wort, at a neighbouring brewery. 
 He wrote a pamphlet on the impregnation of 
 water with fixed air, which was translated into 
 French and excited a good deal of interest. 
 He advocated the use of a condensing engine 
 for pumping the gas into water ; and, what is 
 more surprising, succeeded in getting the Admir- 
 alty to fit two warships with apparatus for the 
 production of what we now call soda-water, in 
 order, as he thought, to prevent the ravages of 
 scurvy on board ship. 
 
 He became a Fellow of the Royal Society 
 about this time ; and the Council of the Society 
 so much appreciated the invention of soda- 
 water as to bestow on him, for this and his other 
 experiments, the Copley Medal ; which is now, 
 and presumably was then, their highest honour ! 
 
 When Priestley left Leeds, at apparently the 
 age of about forty-six, he entered the service 
 of Lord Shelburne ; after the fashion of those 
 days, when a nobleman was usually accepted 
 as the patron of a man of letters or a man of 
 
12 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 science, as the case might be, — faciUtating his 
 researches and sharing some of their interest 
 and fame. With Lord Shelburne he travelled 
 about Europe and met many people of impor- 
 tance. What struck him was the prevalent 
 atmosphere of agnosticism, which was evidently 
 very marked during the latter half of the 
 eighteenth century. He reports that the com- 
 pany which he met at Lord Shelburne' s for the 
 most part hardly knew what Christianity was, 
 and they considered it very remarkable that 
 a man of whose understanding they had some 
 opinion could profess to believe in it. 
 
 Priestley was thus led to write his Letters to 
 a Philosophical Unbeliever, hoping to be able 
 to combat their prejudices with advantage : 
 indeed he felt that the prestige of his philo- 
 sophical pursuits was chiefly of value in enabling 
 him to be listened to. when he defended the 
 principles of Christianity and tried to free it 
 from those corruptions which prevented its 
 reception by thoughtful people. 
 
 He also wrote on Natural and Revealed Reli- 
 gion, and a Harmony of the Gospels. 
 
 But the result of these publications was other 
 than he had expected, and indeed other than 
 
MODERNISM 13 
 
 any one at the present time could imagine to 
 be likely. His efforts at conciliating un- 
 believers and bringing them towards something 
 like orthodoxy (like similar efforts in our own 
 time, known under the title of Modernism) were 
 the subject of bitter attack and outcry from the 
 rigidly orthodox, and from their numerous though 
 barely qualified disciples. He was attacked in 
 almost every periodical, was regarded as an 
 unbeliever in revelation, and was spoken of as 
 little better than an atheist. 
 
 This outbreak of mistaken bigotry had the 
 effect of separating him from Lord Shelburne ; 
 for though they parted amicably and with 
 mutual esteem, and though Lord Shelburne 
 paid him a liberal pension or annuity to the end 
 of his life, the patron did not care to be any 
 longer associated with a philosopher who was 
 liable to be so rabidly abused. 
 
 Priestley went to London, and there met 
 with help from Parker, the optician, and from 
 Josiah Wedgwood, the great potter, who kept 
 him supplied with the appliances that he wanted 
 in order to continue his chemical experiments* 
 which otherwise, in his comparative poverty, 
 he would have been obliged to suspend. He 
 
14 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 also saw a good deal more of Franklin, and his 
 testimony to the attitude of this great man in 
 connexion with the rupture between England 
 and the American Colonies is of value ; because 
 it is often thought that Franklin wished to 
 separate the two countries, whereas his real 
 desire was to unite them into one great and 
 glorious Empire. The following is Priestley's 
 testimony to Franklin : 
 
 The unity of the British Empire in all its parts was a 
 favourite idea of his. He used to compare it to a beauti- 
 ful china vase which, if ever broken, could never be put 
 together again ; and so great an admirer was he of the 
 British constitution that he said he saw no inconvenience 
 from its being extended over a great part of the globe. 
 
 I can bear witness that he was so far from promoting, 
 as was generally supposed, that he took every method in 
 his power to prevent, a rupture between the two countries. 
 
 In fact, what Franklin was working for was 
 the ideal towards which so many are nowadays 
 quietly striving, namely the effective Federation 
 of the English-speaking race. 
 
 In 1780, at the age of about forty-seven, 
 Priestley came to settle in Birmingham. Here, 
 says Dr. Thorpe, he had friends prepared to 
 welcome him, and a society in every way 
 sympathetic and congenial. Moreover, he was 
 
LUNAR SOCIETY 15 
 
 desirous of resuming his ministerial duties, which 
 had been intermitted for the past six or seven 
 years ; and an opportunity of doing so, with a 
 congregation not less liberal than he had served 
 at Leeds, offered itself, owing to the approaching 
 retirement of Mr. Hawkes from the charge of 
 the " New Meeting." As regards his philosophi- 
 cal pursuits, he had the convenience of good 
 workmen of every kind, and he could count 
 upon the practical sympathy and interest of 
 men like Watt and his partner Boulton, Keir, 
 Withering, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and 
 the Galtons — all at that time living in Birming- 
 ham or in its vicinity. These men and their 
 friends constituted a cultured society without 
 a parallel in any other town in the kingdom, 
 except possibly the Metropolis. 
 
 He became a member of a society founded by 
 Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin, called 
 " the Lunar Society," which consisted of ten 
 or a dozen members, who met at each other's 
 houses once a month, regulating their meetings 
 by the full moon, so that they might be able to 
 see their way home, since the illumination 
 of the streets and roads in those days was 
 exceedingly defective. They occasionally had 
 
i6 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 friends to visit them, and among others we find 
 not only Wedgwood, but also Sir William 
 Herschel, the astronomer, and Smeaton, the 
 designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse. 
 
 In this society, says Priestley, we had nothing 
 to do with the religious or political principles 
 of each other ; we were united by a common 
 love of science, which we thought sufficient to 
 bring together persons of all distinctions — 
 Christians and Jews, Mahometans and heathens, 
 Monarchists and Republicans. 
 
 No wonder they were interested in science, 
 for it was an epoch of great activity — the era of 
 Black and Cavendish, of Laplace and Herschel. 
 
 One of the chief subjects for discussion was 
 Priestley's new experiments in pneumatic chem- 
 istry, and many were the controversies between 
 him and James Watt as to the composition of 
 water ; for, difficult as it is to realize, even the 
 composition of water was in those days unknown 
 Chemistry, truly, was in its infancy. 
 
 Not only with Watt did he have controversies, 
 but also with the French chemists, under the 
 leadership of Lavoisier, to whom he had shown 
 some of his experiments while on a visit to 
 Paris. The experiments were Priestley's, but 
 
PHLOGISTON 17 
 
 the insight into their meaning was Lavoisier's. 
 Priestley, in his theoretical views, ran aground 
 on an unprofitable and unproductive doctrine 
 of " phlogiston " — an imaginary entity whereby 
 he thought that metals differed from their ores 
 or rusts. It is difficult to explain what phlogis- 
 ton is now, because it does not exist ; and it is 
 needless therefore to try to reconstruct the ideas 
 of those times. The ideas are only of interest 
 as showing with what difficulty even the elemen- 
 tary facts of chemistry were understood and 
 assimilated. Priestley thought that an ore 
 was turned into a metal by pumping into it 
 phlogiston or the property of inflammability ; 
 md that when any metal, say iron, lost its 
 phlogiston it crumbled into powder or turned 
 into rust. 
 
 Lavoisier weighed the rust, and found that 
 it weighed more than the original metal, thus 
 showing that it had gained something ; and his 
 doctrine was that the metal had combined 
 with some other material (which later on he 
 called oxygen) so as to form an oxide. In fact, 
 ae gave the true explanation. But Priestley 
 md the believers in phlogiston were not per- 
 lurbed by the experiment and demonstration of 
 
 L.F.M. C 
 
i8 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 the increase in weight when a metal is oxidized. 
 They admitted the increase, but claimed that 
 phlogiston was the principle of levity, that it 
 was therefore opposed to gravitation, that it 
 tended upwards as flame did, and therefore 
 that the more a thing lost of it the heavier it 
 naturally got. 
 
 The controversy, you see, lay between the 
 gain of a positive substance and the loss of a 
 negative or hostile principle ; and it is not always 
 easy to decide between alternatives such as these. 
 
 The same kind of controversy seems likely j 
 to occur in connexion with the effect of vegeta- 
 tion on the soil — an effect which renders the 
 rotation of crops a necessity. Continual growth 
 of one variety of crop exhausts the soil: but 
 why does it exhaust it ? Is it because it has ■ 
 taken something out, essential to the growth 
 of future crops of the same kind ; or is it that i 
 it has secreted a poison or something hostile 
 to the growth of the same kind of crop ? This 
 latter has been suspected ; and it is a moot 
 point which of these two opposing views is true. 
 
 Accordingly we are in this matter in the 
 position of the controversialists of the Priestley- 
 Lavoisier period : we do not know what the 
 
PHLOGISTON 19 
 
 deleterious influence is due to — whether it is 
 'due to the introduction of a poison, or to the 
 removal of a healthy and sustaining element ; 
 ior whether there is truth in both assertions. It 
 :is a matter for experiment and investigation ; 
 'and doubtless in another ten years or so an 
 answer may be given. I only quote it as an 
 instance of a similar kind of difficulty, in order 
 Eto show that the error which Priestley made 
 was not an unnatural one, and that all the 
 difficulties of the men of old time may be gener- 
 ally paralleled by something which in our 
 present state of knowledge seems equally difficult 
 and uncertain. 
 
 [ The following is an extract from a letter of 
 IBoulton to Wedgwood, dated March 30, 1781 : 
 
 We have long talked of phlogiston without knowing 
 What we talked about : but now that Dr. Priestley hath 
 prought the matter to light, we can pour that element out 
 pf one vessel into another ; can tell how much of it by 
 iccurate measurement is necessary to reduce a calx to a 
 -netal, which is easily done, and without putting that calx 
 }nto contact with any visible thing. In short, this goddess 
 )f levity can be measured and weighed like other matter, 
 "or the rest, I refer you to the doctor himself. 
 
 . And Priestley himself speaks as follows : 
 S My experiments are certainly inconsistent with Mr. 
 
20 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 Lavoisier's supposition of there being no such thing as 
 phlogiston, and that it is the addition of air, and not the 
 loss of anything, that converts a metal into a calx. 
 
 That mercury in its metallic state does contain phlogis- 
 ton or inflammable air is evident from the production of 
 nitrous air by the solution of it in spirits of nitre, and I 
 make nitrous air from nothing but nitrous vapour and 
 inflammable air ; so that it indisputably consists of these 
 two ingredients. 
 
 The " calx," or oxide, on which Priestley 
 made his most famous experiment, was the red 
 oxide of mercury, obtained by heating metallic 
 mercury in contact with air. Some of this red 
 powder, which in his view had lost its phlogiston, 
 he put into a test-tube with some mercury, 
 and inverted it in a small bath of quicksilver, 
 so that its open mouth was submerged and the 
 red powder collected at the upper closed end 
 of the tube. Upon this powder he then con- 
 centrated the rays of the sun with a burning 
 glass, with the intention of putting back the! 
 phlogiston and re-converting it into metallic 
 mercury. The red powder slowly became metal- 
 lic mercury, under the influence of the solar 
 heat, and at the same time the quicksilver was 
 forced down the tube by the exhalation of 
 a kind of air, which in reality was oxygen — 
 viz. the oxygen which the red powder had 
 
 il 
 
OXYGEN 21 
 
 ^possessed in combination, but which was now 
 expelled. This is the experiment represented 
 by the statue in Victoria Square, Birming- 
 ham. With the "air" so given off from the 
 calx or oxide of mercury — what he called 
 1 "dephlogisticated air," and what we call oxygen — 
 he made many famous experiments — such as are 
 'to this day repeated in elementary courses of 
 chemistry, and are familiar to aU, even junior, 
 students of the subject. 
 
 Priestley called it dephlogisticated air be- 
 cause he thought that phlogiston had been 
 removed from it and transferred to the metallic 
 mercury. Lavoisier called it " oxygen " (acid- 
 'producer — the Germans similarly call it Sauer- 
 'Stoff — the essence, of sourness) under the idea 
 that it was responsible for the generation of 
 jacid properties when it entered into compounds. 
 'That idea about its acid-generating property, 
 'though it survived for more than half a century, 
 ■later on was abandoned and, when I learnt 
 ^chemistry, was practically extinct. 
 • Curiously enough, there are signs, within the 
 'last year or two, of a revival of this idea ; at 
 iny rate there are one or two chemists who see 
 ^reason for supposing that oxygen is really, after 
 
22 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 all, the acid-generating principle, and not hydro- 
 gen, as had been thought in the interim. I do 
 not for a moment say that this view is right, 
 or express any opinion upon it : it is not a 
 matter to be discussed except by experts ; I 
 only instance it as a curious example of the way 
 in which scientific theory winds itself round in 
 spirals, so that to the scoffer and man of ignor- 
 ance it may appear as if there were no progress, 
 whereas really there is very essential progress 
 all the time, and each turn of the spiral is a 
 great deal higher than the one which preceded 
 it. 
 
 What we ought to learn from the facts I 
 have narrated is never to be contemptuous of old 
 and extinct views, but always to keep our minds 
 open to recognize the germ of truth that may 
 underlie them. It is that germ of truth which 
 gave them their vitality ; and when they have 
 had time to shake off the admixture of error 
 which confused and enshrouded them, they 
 may emerge at length the better and brighter 
 for the experience — all the clearer for the rest 
 and peace pertaining to obscurity. 
 
 At this stage I think I had better give a list 
 of the gases which Priestley discovered; and 
 
 I 
 
OXYGEN 23 
 
 some of the experiments by which he manu- 
 factured them I will repeat before you. 
 
 But first I will quote his remarkably accurate 
 anticipation of the uses of the new gas, oxygen 
 or dephlogisticated air. The following is an 
 extract from his writings : 
 
 Nothing would be easier than to augment the force 
 of fire to a prodigious degree by blowing it with dephlogis- 
 ticated air instead of common air. Possibly piatina might 
 be melted by means of it. 
 
 From the greater strength and vivacity of the flame 
 of a candle, in this pure air, it may be conjectured that it 
 might be peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid 
 cases. . . . But perhaps we may also infer from these experi- 
 ments that though pure dephlogisticated air might be very 
 useful as a medicine, it might not be so proper for us in the 
 usual healthy state of the body : for, as a candle bums 
 out much faster in dephlogisticated than in common air, 
 so we might, as may be said, live out too fast, and the animal 
 powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air. A 
 moralist, at least, may say that the air which Nature has 
 provided for us is as good as we deserve. . , . Who can tell 
 but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable 
 article in luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself 
 have had the privilege of breathing it. 
 
 That is excellent, and typical of his genius 
 and shrewdness ; but unfortunately his very 
 ingenuity helped him to retain wrong ideas. 
 In theory he had no instinct for guessing right, 
 such as the great men of science have had — an 
 
24 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 intuitive feeling for the right end of any 
 stick : he may almost be said to have had a 
 predilection for the wrong end ; and that fact 
 alone puts him out of the first flight of scientific 
 men. He was a skilful and painstaking experi- 
 mentalist, and possessed scientific ability of a 
 high kind, but never does he approach the level 
 of Faraday or of James Watt. These men, 
 and especially Faraday, had an instinct for 
 being right ; while as to Sir Isaac Newton — the 
 accuracy not only of his theories but even of his 
 guesses strikes us now as almost superhuman. 
 Of Priestley's oxygen memoir Dr. Thorpe 
 speaks as follows : j 
 
 This paper is in certain respects one of the most note! 
 worthy of Priestley's productions. The experiments are 
 original, ingenious, and striking, but as an example of hi^ 
 inductive capacity, or as an indication of its author's 
 logical power, or of his ability to try judicially the very 
 issue he has raised, it is significant only of the profound 
 truth of his own words that " we may take a maxim so| 
 strongly for granted that the plainest evidence of sens© 
 will not entirely change, and often hardly modify, our 
 persuasions ; and the more ingenious a man is, the more 
 effectually he is entangled in his errors ; his ingenuity 
 only helping him to deceive himself by evading the ion 
 of truth." 
 
 Indeed Priestley often speaks of Lavoisier' 
 arguments as so plausible and ingenious tha 
 
THEORY 25 
 
 he feels nearly upset by them ; but he calls his 
 own ingenuity to his aid, and once more success- 
 fully resists, or, as he himself says, '* evades " 
 the force of truth — not of course recognizing 
 it for a moment as such. In fact, his attitude 
 is a standing caution to scholars against wrong- 
 headed scientific dogmatism. His experiments 
 were* admirable, but his perception of their 
 theoretical relations was entirely inadequate 
 and, as we now think, quite erroneous. It 
 needed a good deal of ability to adhere so 
 forcibly to the wrong and therefore the cumbrous 
 view. 
 
 Of all the gases which Priestley manufactured, 
 some he is held to have discovered ; others, 
 although he made them and examined their 
 properties, are not identified with his name, 
 because he did not sufficiently discriminate 
 them from others. For instance, he made 
 carbonic oxide, and said it burned with a blue 
 flame ; but he called it inflammable air, and did 
 not seem to know that it was really different 
 from hydrogen and marsh gas. So also with 
 phosphuretted hydrogen and chlorine : he pre- 
 pared them, but did not follow the matter up. 
 The gases which he is really held to have dis- 
 
26 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 covered are the following, — and a remarkable 
 list it is : — 
 
 1. Nitrogen, which he called phlogisticated 
 air, and which he obtained by burning hydro- 
 carbons in a closed vessel and then absorbing 
 the carbonic acid produced, leaving a gas which 
 would no longer support combustion, but which 
 was not soluble in water, and did not precipitate 
 lime — as fixed air did. The simplest substance 
 to burn, for the purpose of thus isolating atmo- 
 spheric nitrogen, is phosphorus. 
 
 2. Nitric oxide (NO), which he called nitrous 
 air, and made from copper and nitric acid in 
 the usual way. 
 
 He also showed that on bubbling oxygen up 
 into this gas, collected over water, fumes were 
 formed, which rapidly dissolved, leaving the 
 gas less than before ; and he remarks on the 
 astonishing phenomenon of one gas thus swal- 
 lowing up another and destro5dng it. He even 
 used this method for incipient quantitative 
 analysis, showing that it enabled the amount 
 of oxygen present to be estimated, thus begin- 
 ning the subject of Eudiometry. 
 
 3. Nitrous oxide (N2O) which he called de- 
 phlogisticated nitrous air. 
 
DISCOVERY OF GASES 27 
 
 4. Hydrochloric acid (HCl), which he called 
 marine acid air. 
 
 5. Ammonia (NH3) which he called alkaline 
 air, and showed that these last two, when put 
 together, destroyed each other and formed a 
 solid cloud. 
 
 6. Sulphurous acid (SO2), which he called 
 vitriolic air. 
 
 7. Oxygen, which he called dephlogisticated 
 air. 
 
 8. Silicon Fluoride (Si FJ, which he called 
 Fluor-acid air, and showed its singular pro- 
 perty of coating itself over with stone or flint 
 when bubbles of it were sent up into water. 
 
 9. Sulphuretted hydrogen, which he called 
 sulphuretted inflammable air. 
 
 He likewise made experiments on the effect 
 of different gases on sound, by ringing a bell 
 in an air-pump receiver, filled with the gases. 
 f But one of his most weighty and important 
 observations consisted in discovering the effect 
 of vegetation upon air ; which he published in a 
 paper under the title On Air in which a candle 
 has been burned. For in this air he had put a 
 sprig of mint, and he found that after a few 
 days of sunshine the air which had extinguished 
 
28 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 a candle could once more support combustion 
 and also life. He had to prove that this was 
 not a peculiar property of mint : so he next 
 tried balsam, and found that it acted in the 
 same way. But it might be argued that these 
 were stimulating and spicy kinds of plants, 
 which might be expected to recuperate an 
 exhausted substance. He therefore tried com- 
 mon weeds like groundsel, which also acted in 
 the same way ; and vegetables like spinach, 
 which he found specially competent. He also 
 took water plants and exposed them to sunshine 
 under water, so as to see the cloud of little 
 bubbles rising under the action of the solar rays. 
 These bubbles he collected and proved to be 
 dephlogisticated air, or oxygen. He thus arrived 
 at the important conclusion that the air which 
 was spoilt by animal life was renewed by plant 
 life — that the two acted in opposite directions, 
 and so kept the atmosphere of constant quality 
 — a matter clearly of the first importance. 
 
 One short paragraph I will quote from his 
 writings, indicating what now seems to us an 
 amusing sort of ignorance at the time ; namely 
 a paragraph relating to indiarubber : 
 I^^Since this work was printed off I have seen a substance 
 
 II 
 
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 29 
 
 excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping off from 
 paper the marks of black lead pencil. It must therefore 
 be of singular use to those who practise drawing. It is 
 sold by Mr. Nairne, mathematical instrument maker, 
 opposite the Royal Exchange. He sells a cubical piece 
 of about half an inch for three shillings, and he says it will 
 last several years. 
 
 It is necessary now to give some indications 
 of the position of Priestley as a Political Philo- 
 sopher, and to exhibit his importance in the 
 history of Sociology. But as this falls within 
 Professor Muirhead's province, and he may be 
 able to do it, I hope, without undue trouble, I 
 have asked him to insert here a few paragraphs, 
 either from one of his Courses of Lectures, or 
 from some other store, illustrative of Priestley 
 the citizen and his Political ideals. 
 
 For a full account of the ideas which Priestley 
 expounded in his Essay on the First Principles 
 of Government, and his other political writings it 
 would be necessary to go at some length into the 
 political conditions and opinions of the time. It 
 must be sufficient here to recall that the chief 
 need of the eighteenth century in the latter 
 half of which he wrote was the assertion of in- 
 dividual rights against misguided interference 
 
30 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 of the government ; while that of the nineteenth 
 century (the ideas of which Priestley partly 
 anticipated), was the assertion of the common 
 good against institutions which were based either 
 on mere right of prescription or on the interest 
 and influence of a section of the community. 
 Hence it was that the watchword of the one was 
 the "natural rights of the individual/' that of 
 the other was the " good of the whole." Priest- 
 ley represents the transition between these two 
 movements. Sir Oliver Lodge has shown that 
 he had little instinct for true theory in chemis- 
 try, and even showed a lamentable faculty of 
 getting hold of the stick by the wrong end. 
 There is a similar want of clarity in his political 
 theory. He may be said to have got hold of 
 the stick by both ends and not to have known 
 which was the right one. Yet two points stand 
 clearly out in connexion with each of the above 
 affinities, establishing his claim to honour in 
 political and moral philosophy as well as in 
 chemistry. 
 
 I. He asserted the claim of the right of private 
 judgment and the principle of toleration with 
 a completeness and consistency that excelled 
 even John Locke and his own distinguished 
 
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 31 
 
 contemporary and brother-at-arms in the same 
 cause, Dr. Price. " The whole system of 
 uniformity seems to me to be founded on very 
 narrow and shortsighted views of poHcy"; 
 " unbounded freedom in thinking upon all kinds 
 of subjects may certainly be attended by some 
 inconvenience, but it cannot be restrained with- 
 out infinitely greater inconvenience"; "let us 
 be free ourselves and leave the blessings of 
 freedom to our posterity" ; "I stand in need 
 of liberty myself, and I wish that every creature 
 of God may enjoy it equally with myself," are 
 some of his most characteristic sayings. 
 
 2. To him belonged the merit of striking the 
 note which Bentham took up and extended with 
 such power and variation in his Utilitarian 
 philosophy. Writing of the growth of his own 
 opinions Bentham tells us that it was by a 
 pamphlet of Priestley's that " light was added 
 to warmth. In the phrase ' the greatest happi- 
 ness of the greatest number,' I there saw 
 delineated for the first time a plain as well as 
 a true standard of whatever is right and wrong, 
 useful and useless or mischievous in human 
 conduct, whether in the field of morals or 
 politics." ^ In a more picturesque reference 
 * Works, vol. X. 69. 
 
32 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 Bentham tells us he came on Priestley's pam- 
 phlet in a London coffee-house and rose from 
 the table crying '* Eureka ! " 
 
 While clearly indicating the Utilitarian prin- 
 ciple, Priestley brought with him, what was 
 uncommon in those times, the caution of a 
 scientific observer into the field of politics. 
 Any governmental interference, he held in true 
 Utilitarian spirit, may be justified if it be for 
 the good of the Community, yet legislation is 
 a high and difficult art, " We are so little capable 
 of arguing d priori in matters of government 
 that it may seem experiments only can deter- 
 mine how far this power of the legislature 
 ought to extend." This speculative caution is 
 perhaps the reason why he failed (as Bentham 
 elsewhere accuses him of doing) to make any 
 adequate application of the principle he had 
 the honour of formulating. Be this as it may» 
 there is a pleasure in tracing the hospitable 
 tolerance of all forms of religious opinion, and 
 the sane collectivism in politics that have 
 always been characteristic of Birmingham to 
 the teaching of one of the earliest of its famous 
 men. (J. H. M.) 
 
WORK IN BIRMINGHAM 33 
 
 We must now turn to the remainder of his 
 life. His time in Birmingham was not wholly 
 devoted to science : much of it was given to 
 theology, to preaching, and to public work. 
 Of his preaching, the following is written by a 
 member of his congregation : 
 
 I look upon his character as a preacher to be as amiable 
 as his character as a philosopher is great. In the pulpit 
 he is mild, persuasive, and unaffected, and his sermons are 
 full of sound reasoning and good sense. He is not what 
 is called an orator; he uses no actions, no declamation ; 
 but his voice and manner are those of one friend speaking 
 to another. 
 
 His Birmingham congregation is described as 
 
 the most liberal in England. And a member 
 
 of it describes him thus : 
 
 A man of admirable simplicity, gentleness, and kind- 
 ness of heart, united with great acuteness of intellect. 
 j I can never forget the impression produced on me by the 
 serene expression of his countenance. 
 
 In the domestic relations of life he was uniformly kind 
 and affectionate. Not malice itself could ever fix a stain 
 ■on his private conduct or impeach his integrity. 
 
 ' While in Birmingham he wrote a book The 
 History of the Corruptions of Christianity, in 
 
 'which he attacked many of what we now see to 
 be the errors and superstitions which grew 
 round the simplicity of the early Gospel. He 
 could hardly expect this book to pass unopposed ; 
 
 L.F.M. D 
 
34 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 in fact it was received with a storm of dis- 
 approval, and at Dordrecht on the Continent 
 it was burnt by the common hangman. The 
 contentions contained in it were, however, what 
 we should now consider to be of a reasonable 
 and sensible character, and have been summar- 
 ized thus : 
 
 The New Testament, in Priestley's view, is not to be 
 construed as a book of enigmas which might belong to any 
 age. It is not dropped straight out of heaven into the 
 hands of the man of to-day for him to make what he will 
 of it. It belongs to a specific period ; it was written for a 
 given class of persons ; it was written to be understood. 
 
 Accordingly, it is the whole object of Priestley's his- 
 tories of doctrine to get at the mind of the common Christian 
 people in the first age ; to make their primary under- 
 standing of Scripture the norm for its true interpretation. 
 
 The plan was novel, the conception original, the whole 
 endeavour strictly scientific in its method and basis. 
 
 Another ground of offence appears to have 
 been the enthusiasm with which he supported i 
 the Sunday-school movement. We are told 
 that this movement began in Birmingham ini 
 1784, and was favoured by most denomina- 
 tions. It was opposed, however, by certain ^ 
 people who insisted that all children should 
 attend the worship of the Established Church. 
 
 It must be admitted that the times were 
 
LIBRARIES 35 
 
 desperately narrow, and I regret to have to 
 refer to them. I am making no appeal to 
 prejudice or sectarian animosity : it is merely 
 a question of history. We can congratulate 
 ourselves, I hope, in recognizing how different 
 the atmosphere is now, and how out of date 
 such controversies are. 
 
 Another service which Priestley achieved, of 
 benefit to any community with whom he resided, 
 was the establishment of a library. I believe 
 that the Old Library in Birmingham, as well 
 as the one in Leeds, owes its initiation to him. 
 But I regret to say that even popular access to 
 books was at that time strongly objected to : 
 it was said to tend to the spread of Rationalism, 
 and the library with its contents was vigorously 
 abused by the orthodox. 
 
 Nevertheless Priestley considered that his 
 time in Birmingham was the happiest period 
 of his life, and in an autobiographical sketch 
 he speaks of it as follows : 
 
 I esteem it a singular happiness to have lived in an 
 'age and country in which I have been at full liberty both 
 jto investigate, and by preaching and writing to propagate, 
 "eligious truth ; for though the freedom I have used for 
 this purpose was for some time disadvantageous to me, it 
 'A^as not long so ; and my present situation is such that 
 
36 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 I can, with the greatest openness, urge whatever appears 
 to me the truth of the Gospel, not only without giving the 
 least offence, but with the entire approbation of those 
 with whom I am particularly connected. 
 
 But alas, this peaceful period was not to 
 continue. Indeed, almost as he was writing, 
 preparations must have been made for that 
 mad outburst of popular passion which eventu- 
 ally drove him to America. It seems to have 
 begun on the first anniversary of the taking of the 
 Bastille in Paris. The fourteenth of July, 1791, 
 was celebrated in several towns, among others 
 in Birmingham. What party it was that stimu- 
 lated the rising of the mob I prefer not to inquire, 
 but certainly those who instigated and directed 
 the outrage soon lost all control over the forces 
 which they invoked ; and the result was a riot 
 or series of riots of the most disgraceful as well 
 as of the most alarming character. 
 
 The controversial methods of those times 
 seem to have been miserably unfair, no attempt 
 being made to understand the position of an 
 opponent ; phrases divorced from their con- 
 text, and employed only in a symbolical sense, 
 were quoted as if they had been intended 
 literally. A notable instance of this is a quota-' 
 
BIGOTRY 37 
 
 tion from one of Priestley's Familiar Letters 
 Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, 
 where Priestley compares the process of free 
 inquiry to the action of gunpowder, in a passage 
 which concludes thus : 
 
 The present silent propagation of truth may even be 
 compared to those causes in Nature which lie dormant 
 for a time, but which in proper circumstances act with the 
 greatest violence. We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, 
 grain by grain, under the old building of error and super- 
 stition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as 
 to produce an instantaneous explosion ; in consequence 
 of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the 
 work of ages, may be overturned, in a moment, and so 
 effectually as that the same foundation can never be buOt 
 upon again. 
 
 This paragraph became to the enemies of 
 the Dissenters a common topic of allusion, and 
 was read in the House of Commons as an un- 
 questionable proof of the dangerous designs 
 of that body with respect to the constitution 
 of this country. Hence the mischievous thinkers 
 found no difficulty in persuading the unthinking 
 actors that the real intention of the Dissenters 
 [Was to destroy the churches. 
 
 By this kind of false witness it became possi- 
 ble to rouse the passions of an ignorant mob, 
 ^and it is clear that some who ought to have 
 
38 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 known better were not altogether averse from a 
 lesson being read, by some sort of mob violence, 
 to people whom they considered schismatics 
 and revolutionaries. They did not indeed in- 
 tend that it should go to the length to which 
 it actually went, but as usual the forces they 
 had aroused soon got beyond their control ; 
 and however much they might wish to stop the 
 outbreak when it got beyond a certain point, 
 they found themselves quite unable to do so. 
 
 It seems to me that whoever, in support of 
 any cause, appeals to the prejudices and pas- 
 sions of a mob, is committing a crime. It is a 
 very dangerous thing to have a mass of violent 
 ignorance in our midst, and the effort of all 
 educationists, and all social workers, is to 
 endeavour to remove this ignorance ; but so 
 long as it exists, its stirring up is a great 
 responsibility. So far as I am able to judge 
 from the past, a mob has generally been utilized 
 in favour of the forces of vested interests and 
 what is called "reaction" or putting back the 
 clock. 
 
 Mob law is always bad law. A mob is 
 actuated by prejudices and superstitions, not 
 by intelligence and reason. A mob stirred up 
 
RIOTING 39 
 
 I by priests is liable to be an agent of cruelty 
 and blasphemy ; and, from the days of " Crucify 
 Him " until now, has always — I think always — 
 taken the wrong side. 
 
 The immediate outbreak at Birmingham 
 
 began in connexion with a public dinner at an 
 
 hotel, presumably '* The Olde Royal/' in 
 
 Temple Row. A number of gentlemen met 
 
 there to celebrate the anniversary of the taking 
 
 of the Bastille — the beginning of the French 
 
 ' Revolution, which many enlightened people in 
 
 this country, including the poet Wordsworth, 
 
 s regarded as a movement fraught with hope 
 
 I and goodwill to mankind. The excesses and 
 
 1 crimes of the later revolution, and its collapse 
 
 : into military empire, could not of course be 
 
 : foreseen. 
 
 ; Priestley, as a matter of fact, did not go to 
 ; the dinner : he appears to have had nothing to 
 [ do with it, but was playing backgammon at 
 I home with his wife in his own back parlour. 
 J But the mob assembled outside the hotel, all 
 the same, and at a given signal (the signal being 
 ; the cry ** Church and King ") the windows in 
 ) front of the hotel were broken. Then, being 
 [ assured of Priestley's absence, they swept away 
 
40 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 to the New Meeting House, which they assailed, 
 we are told, with incredible fury. 
 
 The gates and doors were soon burst open, the pews 
 demolished, the cushions and fragments carried out and 
 burnt in front of the building, and at length fire was carried 
 in which consumed it to the outer walls. The mob was now 
 roused to frenzy. Some of the magistrates strove to quell 
 the riot, and even those who had connived at the outrage 
 grew alarmed at the dangerous temper which they had 
 aroused. But the infuriated rabble by this time was 
 thoroughly out of control, and no sufficient force was at 
 hand to cope with it. The Old Meeting-house was next 
 demolished, with the regularity of workmen employed for 
 the purpose. A party armed with crow-bars, bludgeons, 
 etc., tore down the pulpit, pews and galleries, and burnt 
 them in the burying-ground, afterwards setting fire to the 
 body of the meeting-house. 
 
 By no means satiated with these exploits, 
 they now marched in a body to Priestley's house 
 at Fair Hill, the cry of " Church and King " 
 being again raised ; and though it did not belong 
 to Priestley, but to a gentleman who, we are 
 told, was deservedly a favourite of the poor, 
 yet, because it was the dwelling of Dr. Priestley, 
 it was doomed to destruction, and was attacked 
 with the most savage and determined fury. 
 
 Priestley's personal escape was due to the 
 foresight of a friend, Mr. Samuel Ryland, wh 
 had just managed to hurry him and Mrs, 
 
 
BIRMINGHAM RIOTS 41 
 
 Priestley into a chaise, and on to the house of 
 a friend at a smaU distance, Mr. Russell. Here 
 a room for the night was prepared, and the 
 doctor was expressing thankfulness in being 
 permitted to lie down in peace and comfort, 
 when Mr. Russell hurried in to say that the mob 
 had become more violent than ever ; that they 
 now swore to find Dr. Priestley and take his 
 life, and were coming in search of him with 
 shouts of " Stone him." The chaise was again 
 brought out, and they drove off, scarcely knowing 
 whither to go. Next day he intended to set off 
 on horseback for Worcester, to catch the Lon- 
 don mail ; but the fugitives lost their way on a 
 common between Heath Forge and Bridge- 
 north and wandered about all night. They 
 managed however to reach Kidderminster in 
 the early morning, and were there met by Mr. 
 Ryland, so that ultimately they got away to 
 London. 
 
 As a result of the activity of the mob, " Showell 
 Green was destroyed, as were Bordesley Hall 
 and Moseley Hall, and other houses in the 
 vicinity of Moseley ; Mr. Ryland' s house at Easy 
 Hill, and Mr. Hutton's house in High Street 
 and his country seat at Wash wood Heath." 
 
42 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 Ultimately, the magistrates being powerless 
 to deal with the rioters, the soldiers were sent 
 for, and the mob retreated to its dens. 
 
 The attitude exhibited to these events bjij 
 people in authority indicated a curious mixture 
 of disapprobation and satisfaction ; and, reading 
 between the lines, one perceives that the result 
 was not whole-heartedly regretted. For in- 
 stance, the King, George III, writing to Mr. 
 Secretary Dundas in approval of dragoons 
 having been sent to Birmingham to quell the 
 tumult, thus continues : 
 
 Though I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley 
 is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have 
 instilled, and that the people see them in their true light, yet 
 I cannot approve of their having employed such atrocioui 
 means of showing their discontent. 
 
 M 
 
 The attitude of Priestley himself to these 
 extraordinary persecutions, which overburdened 
 his wife with anxiety and permanently ruined 
 her health, is indicated by the following letter 
 or Memorial which he addressed to his late 
 co-citizens : 
 
 To THE Inhabitants of the Town of Birmingham. 
 
 " My late Townsmen and Neighbours, — After living 
 with you eleven years, in which you had uniform experience 
 of my peaceful behaviour, in my attention to the quiet 
 
BIRMINGHAM RIOTS 43 
 
 studies of my profession and those of philosophy, I was 
 far from expecting the injuries which I and my friends 
 have lately received from you. But you have been misled. 
 By hearing the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarian 
 Dissenters, continually railed at, as enemies to the present 
 government in Church and State, you have been led to 
 consider any injury done to us as a meritorious thing ; and 
 not having been better informed, the means were not 
 attended to. When the object was right you thought the 
 means could not be wrong. . . . 
 
 You were prepared for every species of outrage, thinking 
 that whatever you could do to spite and injure us was for 
 the support of Government and especially the Church. 
 In destroying us you have been led to think you did God 
 and your country the most substantial service. 
 
 HappUy the minds of Englishmen have a horror of 
 murder, and therefore you did not, I hope, think of that, 
 though by your clamorous demanding of me at the hotel 
 it is probable that at that time some of you intended me 
 some personal injury. But what is the value of life when 
 everything is done to make it wretched ? In many cases 
 there would be greater mercy in despatching the inhabit- 
 ants than in burning their houses. However, I infinitely 
 prefer what I feel from the spoiling of my goods to the 
 disposition of those who have misled you. 
 
 You have destroyed the most truly valuable and 
 useful apparatus of philosophical instruments that perhaps 
 any individual in this or any other country was ever pos- 
 sessed of, in my use of which I annually spent large sums, 
 with no pecuniary view whatever, but only in the advance- 
 ment of science, for the benefit of my country and of man- 
 kind. You have destroyed a library corresponding to 
 that apparatus which no money can re-purchase, except 
 in a course of time. But what I feel far more, you have 
 destroyed manuscripts, which have been the result of the 
 
44 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 laborious study of many years, and which I shall never be 
 able to recompose ; and this has been done to one who 
 never did, or imagined you, any harm. 
 
 And that there was something more in the 
 disturbance than merely mob violence, at any 
 rate in the opinion of contemporary people oi 
 importance, is indicated by the following lettei 
 from Josiah Wedgwood to Priestley : 
 
 If the brutality had arisen merely from the ungovem'c 
 madness of a mob [composed of] the lowest order of our 
 species one would then lament all its effects like those of a 
 storm or hurricane, but if there is reason to believe that the 
 rabble were acted upon and encouraged to such proceedings 
 by those who should be their superiors, one cannot but 
 perceive the too evident spirit of the times, or of the place, 
 at least, by which you and so many of your worthy neigh- 
 bours have suffered. 
 
 The times, however, were naturally somewhat 
 violent. The French Revolution must have 
 been exciting intense interest, and, I should 
 suppose, a good deal of alarm among the Party 
 who at that time imagined itself to represent 
 aristocratic opinion. For instance, Mr. Matthew 
 Davenport Hill tells us of an instance whiclAl 
 shows that feeling ran high, and that even so 
 apparently loyal and harmless a toast as 
 " Church and King " had become an instru- 
 
BIGOTRY 45 
 
 ment of offence ; — which is not to be wondered 
 at, seeing that it was that cry to which the 
 riotous mob had responded on the occasion just 
 described, for reasons which to its inteUigence, 
 if it had had any, would have been quite unin- 
 telligible, 
 
 " The years following the riot of 1791," he writes, 
 " witnessed various displays of hostile sentiment. At a 
 municipal dinner shortly after that event . . . Dr. Parr was 
 present, though the sturdy divine must have surmised that 
 he would be the only representative of his opinions. The 
 cloth being drawn, the chairman proposed, as the Doctor 
 no doubt expected, the toast of ' Church and King.' 
 
 " Parr instantly started to his feet, proclaiming in a 
 stem voice his dissent. ' No, sir,' said he, ' I will not drink 
 that toast. It was the cry of Jacobites, it is the cry of 
 incendiaries. It means a Church without the Gospel, and 
 a King above the Law.' " 
 
 Such was the trouble of the times that even 
 in London Priestley's position was very insecure. 
 He could hardly persuade a landlord to take 
 him as a tenant, for fear his house would be 
 demolished ; and though he tried to continue 
 his chemical work and his preaching, the ran- 
 cour of his enemies made life intolerable. He 
 was, in point of fact, boycotted ; servants 
 were afraid to remain long with him, and the 
 tradespeople hesitated to take his custom. He 
 
46 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 was several times burnt in effigy, with Thomas 
 Paine ; and gross caricatures, in which he 
 was described as " the treacherous rebel and 
 Birmingham rioter," were exhibited. He re- 
 ceived insulting letters likening him to Guy 
 Fawkes, and to the devil ; some coming from 
 people calling themselves ministers of the 
 Gospel. In one of these he was threatened with 
 being burned alive before a slow fire. 
 
 Burke inveighed against him in the House 
 of Commons, and many of his associates in the 
 Royal Society shunned him. 
 
 In those days the Government did not hesitate 
 to take strong measures against any unpalatable 
 reformer ; and a Mr. Thomas F. Palmer, a highly 
 respectable gentlemen in Bedfordshire, had 
 been sent to Botany Bay for seven years be- 
 cause he had published a paper in favour of 
 Parliamentary Reform. 
 
 In answer to remonstrances, and urgings to 
 leave the country, from his friends, Dr. Priestley 
 writes as follows : 
 
 After the riots in Birmingham, it was the expectation, 
 and evidently the wish of many persons, that I should 
 immediately fly to France or America. But I had no con- 
 sciousness of guilt to induce me to fly from my country. 
 
 Ill-treated as I thought I had been, notmerely by the 
 
EMIGRATION 47 
 
 populace of Birmingham, for they were the mere tools of 
 their superiors, but by the country in general, which evi- 
 dently exulted in our sufferings, and afterwards by the 
 representatives of the nation, who refused to inquire into 
 the cause of them, I own I was not without deliberating 
 upon the subject of emigration. 
 
 I hoped to have had no occasion for more than one, 
 and that a final, remove. But the circumstances above 
 mentioned have induced me, though with great and sincere 
 regret, to undertake another, and to a greater distance than 
 any I have hitherto made. . . . And I trust that the same 
 good Providence which has attended me hitherto, and made 
 me happy in my present situation, and all my former ones, 
 will attend and bless me in what may still be before me. 
 In aU events the will of God be done. 
 
 Further life in England had now become 
 intolerable, and emigration had to be faced. 
 Accordingly on April 8, 1794, Priestley and his 
 wife set sail from London, and on June 4 they 
 arrived in New York. 
 
 His friend and scientific opponent, Lavoisier, 
 had met with even worse treatment at the 
 hands of his ungrateful country. Sentence had 
 been pronounced upon him, with the infamous 
 ejaculation " the Republic has no need of 
 chemists," and Lavoisier was executed by the 
 guillotine. 
 
 Such was the treatment bestowed on the best 
 of their citizens by two nations which considered 
 
48 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 themselves as without exception the most 
 civiHzed and enhghtened in the world. 
 
 At New York Priestley was well received ; 
 addresses of welcome were presented to him, 
 and he was offered the Professorship of Chemis- 
 try ill the University of Philadelphia. But he 
 preferred to live in the country ; and his wife, 
 who had never recovered from the shock of the 
 Birmingham riots, needed rest and quiet. He 
 declined therefore to take up any teaching work 
 again, but spent his time in the laboratory or 
 study — for the most part composing theological 
 works, and repeating with enthusiasm and 
 eagerness the experiments of Volta then being 
 published. 
 
 He was now, however, aged seventy, and it 
 was evident that his end was not far off. He 
 was anxious to live six months longer, he told 
 his physician, in order that he might complete 
 the printing of his works. 
 
 On February 4, 1804, he finally took to his 
 bed ; though he was still able to read proof sheets 
 and check Greek and Hebrew quotations. In 
 the evening he had his grandchildren brought 
 to his bedside, saying that it gave him great 
 pleasure to see the little things kneel. 
 
HUXLEY'S OPINION 4g 
 
 He lingered through the night, and in the 
 early morning requested his son to take down 
 some additions and alterations he wished in- 
 serted in his proofs, dictating as clearly and 
 distinctly as he had ever done in his life. 
 When these were read to him he said, " That is 
 right, I have now done." Shortly afterwards 
 he put his hand over his face and breathed his 
 last, so easily that those who were sitting close 
 to him hardly perceived that he had passed 
 away. 
 
 In 1874 a statue of Priestley was erected by 
 the inhabitants of Birmingham, and on that 
 occasion Professor Huxley gave an address 
 which appears as the first of his Essays on 
 Science and Education. To everything in 
 that volume I heartily commend the attention 
 of readers, and with some of the opening words 
 of that address we may fitly conclude this 
 biographical sketch. 
 
 If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have 
 this day raised a statue had been asked on what part of 
 his busy hfe's work he set the highest value, he would 
 undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous contributions 
 to theology. . . . 
 
 L.F.M. E 
 
50 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 
 
 In this cause he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy 
 from the bigoted and the unthinking, and came wittiin 
 sight of martyrdom ; but bore with that which is muc|i 
 harder to be borne than all these, the unfeigned astonisl^ 
 ment and hardly disguised contempt of a briUiant society, [ 
 composed of men whose sympathy and esteem must have 
 been most dear to him, and to whom it was simply incom- 
 prehensible that a philosopher should seriously occupy 
 himself with any form of Christianity. 
 
 If appears to me that the man who, setting before 
 himself such an ideal of life, acted up to it consistently, 
 is worthy of the deepest respect. . . . 
 
 But our purpose to-day is to do honour, not to Priestley 
 the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley the fearless defender 
 of rational freedom in thought and in action : to Priestley 
 the philosophic thinker ; to that Priestley who held a fore- 
 most place among " the swift runners who hand over the 
 lamp of life," and transmit from one generation to another 
 the fire kindled, in the childhood of the world, at the Pro- 
 methean altar of Science. 
 
II 
 
GEORGE DIXON 
 
 Born, 1820. Came to Birmingham, 1838. Died, 1898. 
 
 By George H. Kenrick 
 
 George Dixon, the son of a Whitehaven man, 
 was born at Gomersall, Yorkshire, in 1820. 
 He was educated at the Leeds Grammar School, 
 and spent two years in France learning the 
 language. In 1838 he came to Birmingham 
 with his brother and joined the firm of Rabone 
 Bros. In 1844 he was made a partner and subse- 
 quently became the head of the firm in which 
 he remained all his life. In 1855 Mr. Dixon 
 married the daughter of the late James Stans- 
 feld, judge of the County Court of Halifax. In 
 1863 Mr. Dixon entered the Council as member 
 for Edgbaston Ward. Three years later he was 
 elected Mayor, November, 1866. In July of 
 the following year he resigned his office to be- 
 come a candidate for Parliament on the death of 
 Mr. William Scholefield, and was duly elected 
 on the 23rd of that month by a majority of 
 1,605 votes. In 1873 Mr. Dixon was elected on 
 the School Board and became chairman in 1876, 
 
52 
 
 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 when he was compelled to retire from Parlia- 
 ment, owing to the state of Mrs. Dixon's health. 
 In 1885 he contested the Edgbaston Division of 
 the Parliamentary borough and was returned by 
 a majority of 1,191, and he continued in Parlia- 
 ment until his death in 1898. 
 
 Such is the brief chronicle of the life of one 
 whom Birmingham may well regard as one of 
 its greatest citizens. It is to me at once an 
 honour and a pleasure to be allowed to speak 
 of one whom I regard as a kind of educational 
 godfather, since it was he who introduced me 
 to public life in relation to education. And, 
 indeed, it is as an advocate of education that 
 Mr. Dixon will be recollected in the future. 
 Had it not been for this bent of his mind he 
 might well have been remembered as typical 
 of the best kind of commercial greatness. Keen, 
 broadminded, well informed, scrupulously hon- 
 ourable, he was well fitted to raise the tone and 
 enlarge the sphere of commercial dealing, and 
 he speedily put his firm in the front rank of 
 Birmingham merchants. As a town councillor, 
 and subsequently Mayor, he showed himself by 
 his generous sympathy and by his wise actions 
 to be possessed of all those qualities that have 
 
 I 
 
EDUCATION AID SOCIETY 53 
 
 distinguished the great EngHsh towns in their 
 admirable self-government, and on his election 
 to Parliament he was probably the most popular 
 man in Birmingham. 
 
 But his devotion to education overshadowed 
 all these things, and in the future George Dixon 
 and the people's schools will always remain 
 connected. No doubt, were he living to-day 
 the secondary school and the University would 
 have his constant attention and devotion, but 
 in his day the problem of the education of the 
 masses forced itself to the front, and pushed 
 aside all other educational problems. 
 
 The first intimation we have of the interest 
 
 of Mr. Dixon in the question was shown when 
 
 he was Mayor in January, 1867. He then 
 
 summoned a private conference at his house, at 
 
 ■ which it may be said all the leading men of the 
 
 ' town without distinction of party or sect were 
 
 ' present to consider what could be done to 
 
 remedy the want of education, then so striking 
 
 '. a feature of our great towns. My father was 
 
 present, and I well recollect his telling us how 
 
 . surprised he was at finding so many discordant 
 
 ' elements joined in a common cause. The time 
 
 ' was ripe for the movement, and in March of the 
 
54 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 same year a public meeting was held in the 
 Town Hall, at which was formed an Education 
 Aid Society similar to one at that time existing 
 in Manchester. 
 
 The Society raised a considerable annual 
 income, most of which was spent in paying the 
 school fees of the children, for the schools of 
 Birmingham, deficient in number as they were at 
 that time, were by no means crowded. There 
 were places for about 30,000 children, but another 
 25,000 places were required before it could be said 
 that there was room for every child in the town. 
 But the Society did much towards ascertaining 
 the actual facts concerning these matters, and 
 still more in rousing public opinion. 
 
 Mr. Jesse Collings became the honorary 
 secretary of that society, and I need not tell 
 you that the Society did not go to sleep. Mr|j 
 Dixon himself, in some most remarkable words 
 used by him at the meeting in 1867, showed 
 that he at any rate fully grasped the magnitude 
 of the situation. These words — more or less 
 varied — have been used by so many speakers 
 since then that they have become almost th< 
 watchwords of education in England, and 
 make no apology for quoting them again. 
 
NATIONAL EDUCATION LEAGUE 55 
 
 It was most important that they should seek in all 
 educational work that they took in hand, to make the 
 ultimate end of that work a gradation of schools — schools 
 that is, not uniform, not of the same character, but so 
 diverse that they should be adapted to the wants of every 
 class of the community, from the richest down to the very 
 lowest, and that they should be so easy of access from the 
 lower schools to the higher that they should feel that there 
 was not one boy in Birmingham, however low in the school, 
 or however indifferent his parents might be to his education, 
 if he had really those natural powers which would enable 
 him to profit in an extraordinary degree by the advan- 
 
 . tages offered, who would have anything in the shape of 
 a barrier put in the way of his progress upwards, even to 
 
 ' the highest honours of the University. 
 
 It would have been an immense pleasure for 
 I Mr. Dixon to have been told that his views, so 
 clearly and so early expressed, have since then 
 been realized, and that one at least of those boys 
 coming from the bottom of the elementary 
 school has gained the highest honours of the 
 ( University of Cambridge. 
 
 ! It was not long before the Education Societies 
 ; had prepared the way for a much bolder scheme, 
 i and in 1869 the " National Education League " 
 ■ appeared with Mr. Dixon as chairman, and Mr. 
 Chamberlain, Mr. George Dawson, Dr. Dale, 
 '. Mr. Jesse CoUings, Mr. William Harris and 
 many others among its local supporters, and a 
 
56 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 fund of £14,000 subscribed by twenty gentlemen 
 for the furtherance of its objects. 
 
 Its objects were concisely stated as " The 
 establishment of a system which shall secure 
 the education of^ every child in the country," 
 and the means recommended were admirably 
 clear. 
 
 1. Local authorities shall be compelled by 
 
 law to see that sufficient school accom- 
 modation is provided for every child in 
 their district. 
 
 2. The cost of founding and mamtaining such 
 
 schools as may be required, shall be 
 provided out of local rates, supplemented 
 by Government grants. 
 
 3. All schools aided by local rates shall be 
 
 under the management of local authori- 
 ties and subject to Government in- 
 spection. 
 
 4. All schools aided by local rates shall be 
 
 unsectarian. 
 
 5. To all schools aided by local rates admission 
 
 shall be free. 
 
 6. School accommodation being provided, 
 
 the State or the local authorities shall 
 have power to compel the attendance of 
 
PROGRAMME OF LEAGUE 57 
 
 children of suitable age not otherwise 
 receiving education. 
 
 To show what leading people thought of the 
 plan it is enough to state that before any public 
 meetings were held, 2,500 names were on the 
 roll of the Society. Then local committees 
 were formed in all the large towns, and the great- 
 est enthusiasm prevailed. The League had a 
 subscription of over £6,000 a year, besides sums 
 raised locally. 
 
 The first general meeting of the League was 
 held in October, 1869, in the Birmingham 
 Assembly Room, when Mr. Dixon presided. Arch- 
 deacon Sandford moved the adoption of the 
 report, and warned the members that they must 
 be prepared for opposition, saying, " I am quite 
 satisfied that very many severe things will be 
 said of your platform. We shall be told no 
 doubt that it is a godless scheme ; that it is a 
 revolutionary scheme ; that it is a scheme 
 utterly unsuited to the taste and feeling of the 
 British people ; that it cannot succeed ; and 
 that if carried out it will flood the land with 
 atheists and infidels." 
 
 Later in the meeting a resolution was carried 
 urging that a bill should be prepared for pre- 
 sentation in the next session of Parliament. 
 
58 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 The conference ended with a great meeting 
 in the Town Hall, when Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. 
 Mundella and Professor Fawcett were among 
 the speakers. 
 
 Mr. Dixon threw himself into the campaign 
 with enthusiasm, sometimes presiding at the 
 meetings — there were over loo held before the 
 introduction of the Bill — and always counselling 
 the numerous adherents of the League in which 
 his parliamentary experience served him well. 
 
 It would take too long to go further into the 
 work of the League. It lasted for eight years, 
 and in its earlier period it was actively served 
 by many prominent citizens of Birmingham, 
 including of course Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. 
 Jesse Collings, and not forgetting Mr. Bunce. 
 Perhaps few movements of modern times had 
 so much work put into them in so short a time, 
 and its fiery activity soon had the effect of 
 starting opposition " Unions," one in Birming- 
 ham and one in Manchester. 
 
 Archdeacon Sandford's prophecy was soon 
 fulfilled, and the controversy was long and 
 strong. But in the end the programme ol 
 the League has triumphed, and of its sis 
 articles as enumerated above, all but one are 
 
GLADSTONE'S GOVERNMENT 59 
 
 now in force, and even that one, " all schools 
 aided by local rates shall be unsectarian," 
 applies to about half the schools in England and 
 Wales. 
 
 Nothing to my mind is a clearer proof of 
 the sound sense and the foresight of Mr. Dixon 
 than the acceptance by him of this programme 
 at a time when he at least knew all about the 
 opposition that it would invoke. Mr. Dixon 
 had spent a good deal of time in Australia, and 
 it is probable that he found there conditions 
 regarding education among English people — 
 for at that time they were more English than 
 they are now — suggesting to him what might 
 be acceptable in time even in England itself. 
 At this time Mr. Gladstone's government of 1868 
 was in power. It was a Whig government, and 
 had but little of the democratic spirit which has 
 since permeated both political parties, but the 
 influence of the agitation could not be denied, 
 and Mr. Forster, the Vice-President of the Council 
 representing the educational policy of the Govern- 
 ment, undertook to introduce a bill dealing with 
 the whole subject. Thereupon Mr. Dixon, who 
 had been preparing with the officers of the 
 League a bill upon the subject, and had an- 
 
6o GEORGE DIXON 
 
 nounced his intention in Parliament of proceed- 
 ing with it, undertook to suspend further action 
 pending the production of the Government 
 bill. 
 
 It seemed, indeed, as though the League 
 were extraordinarily fortunate. It had only 
 been in existence for a few months, and here was 
 the Government of the day about to introduce 
 under the guidance of Mr. Forster, a Noncon- 
 formist, and in those days a Radical, a measure 
 which was to carry into effect the principles 
 which it had been advocating. It sounded 
 too good, and events soon proved that it was 
 a very different matter from what was expected. 
 
 I do not propose to traverse at great length the 
 discussion and eventual passing of the Bill. It 
 was, no doubt, a momentous period in Mr. 
 Dixon's life, for he was one of the protagonists 
 in the fight, not so much as an ardent sup- 
 porter — the position he hoped to occupy — but 
 as a critic and the mover of amendments. 
 
 The Government Bill was hesitating and ineffi 
 cient. Compulsion was left to the locahties ; 
 School Boards were only to be created where 
 there was manifest want of schools, and the 
 denominations were given one year of grace 
 
THE BILL OF 1870 61 
 
 in which to supply deficiencies ; fees were 
 to be continued, but under certain conditions 
 School Boards could grant remission. But 
 worst of all, instead of conferring with the 
 League, Mr. Forster had consultedthe" Unions." 
 He had, in fact, bought off the opposition, but 
 had paid too high a price. 
 
 Mr. Dixon, with the assent of the League, 
 moved an amendment on the second reading, 
 and it was seconded by Mr. Illingworth, a most 
 unusual course for a supporter of the Govern- 
 ment, and one that did not fail to call forth 
 complaint from Mr. Forster. 
 
 Three nights were occupied in its discussion, 
 and in the end, after the promise of certain con- 
 cessions, Mr. Dixon withdrew his amendment. 
 
 In Committee Mr. Dixon was untiring in his 
 efforts to persuade the Government to accept 
 more of the programme of the League, one of 
 the results being the celebrated Cowper-Temple 
 clause, whereby in what we now call provided 
 schools, no dogma nor catechism peculiar to 
 any denomination can be taught at the public 
 expense, and another being the application of 
 the ballot in the election of School Boards. 
 
 On August 9 the Act received the Royal 
 
62 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 Assent, and during the autumn of 1870, the 
 first School Boards were elected. 
 
 It is perhaps difficult now to understand the 
 bitter disappointment of the friends of the 
 National Education League, but that it was both 
 deep and wide may be gathered from the subse- 
 quent party history, and also from the fact that 
 Mr. Forster, in his own constituency, had to 
 submit to the following vote of censure: 
 
 " That this meeting, having heard Mr. Forster's 
 account of his parliamentary services during 
 the past session, and fully recognizing his pre- 
 vious services to the Liberal cause, regrets its 
 inability to approve of the educational measure 
 passed mainly by his exertions, and deep! 
 deplores the means resorted to, to secure it 
 adoption in a Liberal House of Commons 
 
 Nevertheless, bearing in mind subsequent 
 events, it appears that Mr. Forster took a truer 
 view of the whole situation than did the leaders 
 of the National Education League, who, if they 
 had persisted in their programme might have 
 delayed any substantial Education Act for 
 another ten years. Mr. Forster's Act, hesitating 
 and feeble as it was, did lead to an immense 
 activity in education, and to an expenditure 
 
 1 
 
THE RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY 63 
 
 certainly far greater than was expected by Mr. 
 Dixon and his friends. 
 
 Since that date two important measures, the 
 Bill of 1896 and that of 1906, although proceed- 
 ing from different sides of the House, have both 
 been withdrawn, owing to the strong opposition 
 roused by them, and the Act of 1902, while it 
 admittedly has done much for education, has also 
 laid the foundation of a widespread discontent, 
 which every one agrees must be dealt with and 
 satisfied before very long. 
 
 It is not too much to say that education, harm- 
 less and attractive as it appears, is a deadly sub- 
 ject for the politician, and this is explained by 
 the fact that the feelings aroused in connexion 
 with it are among the strongest that exercise men 
 and women. It is now nearly forty years since 
 the Act of 1870 was passed, and the struggle 
 emphasized by the '' Leagues " and " Unions" 
 of those days still goes on, and apparently must 
 go on until our system of education is of a more 
 national character than it is at present. But 
 at the same time education goes on and has 
 stretched out until it has reached every child in 
 the kingdom, and indeed until a generation of 
 those trained in public elementary schools, has 
 
64 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 arisen, of whom it may be said that their educa- 
 tion, for the most part, is equal to what passed 
 for secondary education thirty years ago. More- 
 over, under the Act of 1902, a vast amount of 
 the secondary education in the kingdom has 
 passed under the control of elected bodies and 
 become subject to a very careful inspection 
 by the Board of Education. There has thus 
 been opened up from the elementary school to 
 the University the path so clearly indicated by 
 Mr. Dixon in 1867, that may be followed by 
 those who have the natural powers to enable 
 them to take advantage of it. 
 
 It is always interesting to speculate how the 
 situations of to-day would have been dealt with 
 by those who are no longer with us, but to 
 whom we know that such situations would; 
 have strongly appealed. 
 
 It may well be asked how Mr. Dixon would 
 have regarded our problems, and it may be 
 worth while referring to some of his speeches in 
 order to ascertain from them his views. 
 
 In the first place, let us consider what may be 
 called the problems. They are mainly two. 
 
 I. The question of rate contribution to schools 
 only partially under local control. 
 
DENOMINATIONAL SCHOOLS 65 
 
 2. The future position of all public schools. 
 
 Since the Act of 1902 there has always existed 
 a strong feeling against rate contribution under 
 these conditions in certain influential quarters. 
 This has manifested itself in the passive resistance 
 movement, and has moved the present Govern- 
 ment to introduce two bills, with the object of 
 overcoming the difficulty. 
 
 Now, the Education League did not find itself 
 contemplating the present position of affairs. 
 It provided that " all schools aided by local 
 rates shall be unsectarian," but while doing so 
 evidently expected that many schools would 
 not be so aided, and this was exactly what 
 happened until 1902. 
 
 In 1876 Mr. Dixon introduced a bill to estab- 
 lish School Boards, in areas already provided 
 with sufficient schools, with power to accept 
 the existing schools just as they were, and appar- 
 ently without the Cowper-Temple clause, and 
 among his arguments in favour of this plan he 
 urged that it might be accepted now, but later 
 on the Nonconformists would probably object 
 to it, and demand that in every such district a 
 school should be built *of the ordinary Board 
 School type of that day. 
 
 L.F.M. F 
 
66 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 Mr. Dixon, therefore, suggested that the 
 Church of England party should make haste to 
 accept such an offer while it was still available. 
 
 The bill was rejected by the House, but found 
 a considerable number of supporters, and to me 
 it is quite clear from this that Mr. Dixon would 
 have been prepared to accept any proposition 
 that moved in the direction of his idea as to 
 the ultimate position of the education question. 
 
 What was that position ? 
 
 There is no doubt that Mr. Dixon expected 
 a very large diminution of the denomina- 
 tional schools in regard to which he invented 
 the phrase, " painless extinction," that will 
 always be associated with his name, meaning 
 that from time to time as the transfer of such 
 schools became less repugnant to the managers, 
 such transfers would be made. His continual 
 use also of the phrase a " national system " 
 clearly indicates that he contemplated the great 
 majority of schools being conducted under public 
 management on undenominational lines. But 
 he was far too good an educationist to wish to 
 crush individuality where it was really strong 
 and vital, and he was far too good a student of 
 human nature to desire to curb every effort of 
 
HOPES FOR A NATIONAL SYSTEM 67 
 
 strong natures by the steel of one uniform code. 
 I think he would have been well satisfied if 
 75 per cent, of the schools had fallen into line, 
 and would have been tolerant as to the remainder, 
 provided that the education given was always 
 up to the mark and did not become slack under 
 the guise of being religious. 
 
 Looking through some of his earlier speeches 
 on the subject of education, I have been struck 
 with one or two particularly interesting remarks. 
 
 Speaking at Rochdale in 1873, he says : 
 
 There is no greater loss of wealth to a country than 
 an uneducated people ; never, therefore, let the idea of 
 economy come between you and a high class and universal 
 education. 
 
 In 1874 Speaking locally and on the question 
 
 of an increase of rates : 
 
 The educational rates will rise and possibly some little 
 regret will be expressed about it. That will be the time 
 for you to be no longer silent, but to tell such persons that 
 the education thus being provided for the children of the 
 present generation was an education not merely worth the 
 money paid for it, but worth any sum the town could 
 pay for it. Whatever we are called upon to pay we shall 
 receive back again. 
 
 In 1876, in Parliament, when introducing his 
 
 Bill he said: 
 
 But it always appeared to me that it was a great ad- 
 vantage in any district that there should be only one 
 
68 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 governing body and not a multiplied number of governing 
 bodies. I should be very glad if in our boroughs all the 
 powers of the Town Council, the School Board and the Board 
 of Guardians were thrown into one body and if in the 
 country districts also we could have one governing body 
 into which you could throw the duties of administering 
 the affairs of the whole locality. 
 
 Also in 1879 3. propos of increased rates he 
 
 said : 
 
 In the event of the voluntary schools in Birmingham 
 being handed over to the Board is. 2d. might be reached, 
 but I do not think that would be exceeded, in fact it would 
 probably not be reached because all the schools would 
 not be handed over. 
 
 The schools are not handed over now, but 
 the expenses are, and these, together with second- 
 ary and evening schools and other items notf i 
 existing when Mr. Dixon spoke, have raised 
 our rate to is. 6^d. for 1908. 
 
 Passing from these political topics, it is a 
 relief to come back to the subject of local admin- 
 istration in which Mr. Dixon took a prominent 
 part since he was a member of the School Board 
 from its beginning in 1870 until he resigned in 
 1896, and became chairman when Mr. Chamber- 
 lain went into Parliament in 1876. Birmingham 
 was one of the towns in which the largest 
 deficiency of school buildings was found, and 
 
THE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL BOARD 69 
 
 no time was lost in erecting buildings in various 
 parts of the town, nor was there any difficulty 
 in making them of a size which has continued 
 to be the type of Birmingham schools ever since. 
 The schools are for about 1,000 children. 
 
 With so large a number of important schools 
 under its management, the Birmingham Board 
 was able to take a leading part in guiding other 
 Boards throughout the country, and with Mr. 
 Dixon at its head there was no difficulty in shap- 
 ing a policy liberal in its views, but very full 
 of common sense in working out its problems. 
 
 Mr. Dixon was always for providing whatever 
 was considered best at the time, feeling, no 
 doubt, how much behindhand we were, even in 
 our ideas, and foreseeing the time when our first 
 schemes would be considered quite too paltry, 
 and would require remodelling. In this he was 
 abundantly justified, and the plans of many of 
 the schools have been altered at the request of 
 the very Department which twenty years before 
 would never have allowed such alterations to 
 be made. 
 
 Another maxim of Mr. Dixon's was that of 
 experiments. He said that it was always 
 necessary to be making experiments in every 
 
70 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 of them failed, but without experiment there 
 was no life and no progress. 
 
 One of his experiments was that of the Bridge 
 Street Technical School. Mr. Dixon said he 
 would find the building if the Board would allow 
 some of the brighter boys from the elementary 
 schools to be drafted into this building where 
 they might be taught science and mechanics, 
 and remain beyond the usual leaving age. 
 
 The Department consented, and even helped 
 Mr. Dixon by promising substantial grants, so 
 that little cost might fall upon the ratepayer. 
 The school was a great success. Clever boys 
 were readily found, and they received an excel- 
 lent training in science, which at that time was 
 hardly to be found in any secondary school. 
 The experiment was repeated elsewhere, and 
 School Boards in most of the large towns took 
 up the work with enthusiasm, so that secondary 
 schools of a new and valuable type were set 
 up in many parts. At a later period came the 
 Technical Instruction Act, which enabled Town 
 Councils to provide education of this character, 
 and when this Act was endowed with the "beer 
 money " it became a fruitful source of education 
 
TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION 71 
 
 of a new kind, including instruction in the even- 
 ing. Mr. Dixon's school was largely responsible 
 for this, for it clearly indicated that talent existed, 
 and plenty of it, if it could only be allowed to 
 find its way to the right place. 
 
 A blow at this kind of education was given 
 by the Cockerton judgment, but that only made 
 it easier to insert in the Act of 1902 certain very 
 wide provisions, regarding secondary education, 
 of which large advantage has been taken. 
 
 To any one who knew Mr. Dixon, to say 
 that he was " thorough " would be superfluous. 
 No one could talk with him without seeing 
 that he completely grasped every problem before 
 he dealt with it, and although it might cost him 
 much time to really get at the bottom of things, 
 he did not grudge such time, and never forgot 
 what he had acquired. As a leader of a party 
 he was a model. Always ready and eager to 
 greet the success of any of those working under 
 him, he never relaxed his own efforts, and 
 was always spurring us on to fresh activity. I 
 well remember when he asked me to become a 
 member of the Board that he pointed out that 
 I should find plenty to do in two fields. "Look 
 after the games and exercises," he said ; " there is 
 
72 GEORGE DIXON 
 
 nothing being done in that direction — and look 
 after the attendance, it is very poor." 
 
 To-day games and exercises are constantly 
 being pressed upon us by the Board of Educa- 
 tion, though not, perhaps, so much in Bir- 
 mingham, for we have had them for many 
 years. As for attendance, that of the elementary 
 school is now pretty much up to the standard 
 of the secondary school, and whereas we used 
 to be content with anything over 70 per cent., 
 now we expect something over 90 per cent. 
 
 When in 1885 Mr. Dixon again returned to 
 Parliament, his long apprenticeship to the admin- 
 istration of elementary schools gave him immense 
 advantage, and he was constantly referred to 
 as an authority on all such matters. 
 
 Mr. Dixon's courtesy towards all those with 
 whom he came in contact was always a theme 
 upon which people in Birmingham loved to 
 dwell, and it undoubtedly contributed to that 
 trust in his honesty and fairness which prevailed 
 throughout the city. 
 
 There was also a simplicity in his character 
 that was very charming, and he frequently told 
 stories at his own expense, into the enjoyment of 
 which he thoroughly entered. 
 
ILLNESS AND RETIREMENT 73 
 
 When at length his illness compelled him to 
 retire from the Board, he still retained his inter- 
 est in what was going on, and was glad to see his 
 old colleagues, and hear what was being done, 
 and this intense love of what had been the work 
 of his life he retained up to the end. 
 
 I said at the beginning that Mr. Dixon would 
 be regarded as one of Birmingham's greatest 
 citizens. I hope that I have said something 
 to induce you to share that feeling, and I 
 believe that many years will elapse before we 
 shall be able to boast of one who devoted his 
 talents and his fortune so wisely to the city of 
 his adoption. 
 
GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 Born in London, 1821. Came to Birmingham, 1844. 
 Died, 1876. 
 
 By a. W. W. Dale 
 
 I 
 
 It is a true instinct — if I may venture to say so 
 — that has led those who arranged for this course 
 of lectures to set us to speak about men rather 
 than movements or events; for it is men who 
 make the City or the State, not laws, not 
 institutions. Men make the convictions that 
 the laws express, and without men to work 
 them, the best of institutions is but an engine 
 without the power that moves it. 
 
 You have asked me to speak to you about 
 one of those who helped to make this city what 
 it is, and I will try to tell you what I can of 
 George Dawson ; what kind of man he was, 
 what kind of work he did, and what of aim, 
 ideal, example and inspiration, he has left to 
 those who come after him. 
 
 How clearly, how vividly, he stands out in 
 memory ! The mass of iron-grey hair heavily 
 
76 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 streaked with white, nearly covering his ears, 
 quite covering his broad, low forehead ; bushy 
 eyebrows nearly straight, and beneath them dark 
 brown eyes that twinkled and flashed and blazed 
 and melted ; the nose straight or nearly so ; the 
 mouth partly hidden by a straggling beard, — 
 firm, but not so firm that it could not curve with 
 scorn or quiver with emotion. The face was 
 lined and seamed — the face of a man who had 
 known many sorrows, who had carried his own 
 burden of care, and the burden of others also. 
 His voice, when he spoke to you, was full and 
 deep and rather husky — the voice of a man who 
 had struggled and suffered, who had known dis- 
 appointment and defeat in the service of great 
 causes and in the pursuit of noble ideals. There 
 was a note of scorn in it at times, a note of pity 
 in it always. The man himself of middle height, 
 broad and sturdy, slow in the movements of 
 the body, swift in the movements of the head. 
 And, lastly — one of the little things — almost al- 
 ways a velvet coat, or at least a velvet waistcoat, 
 with a necktie that was any colour but white. 
 In short, a man thoroughly unclerical, unpro- 
 fessional, unusual, altogether unlike ordinary 
 men. If you saw him in a crowd, you would 
 
EARLY YEARS 77 
 
 have marked him out ; if you had heard him 
 speak, you would have watched him and waited 
 for him to speak again. In other words, a man 
 with strong, attractive — one might say magnetic 
 — power. Such was George Dawson in the 
 later years of his life. But he was a young --nan 
 when he came to Birmingham, and he came with 
 the fire and freshness of youth. All that 
 need be said about the history of his life can be 
 put into a few sentences : the life itself was 
 neither eventful nor long. 
 
 II 
 
 He was born in London on February 24, 1821, 
 in one of those obscure streets that converge on 
 Brunswick Square. London, no doubt, is an over- 
 rated place ; but Birmingham, after all, owes 
 something to it, for London gave Birmingham 
 three, at least, of the men who, in recent times, 
 have done most to shape its life and thought — 
 George Dawson, Joseph Chamberlain, and a 
 third whose name I need not mention. 
 
 George Dawson's father, Jonathan Dawson, 
 conducted what was then known as " a high-class 
 academy " — we should call it a good private 
 
78 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 school, — and for more than thirty years he pros- 
 pered in his calUng. He was a Baptist, a man 
 of simple faith and simple life. It was natural 
 that the son should be brought up in his father's 
 school, and he remained there till he was six- 
 teen. It was natural, too, that he should be 
 drawn into the Baptist ministry, for seventy 
 years ago there were few other callings open to 
 the son of a Nonconformist who loved books 
 and all that books stand for. 
 
 So, Oxford and Cambridge being closed to him 
 as a Nonconformist, Dawson went North, entered 
 the University of Aberdeen, and then, a year 
 later, transferred himself to Glasgow where he 
 spent three years, 1838-41, graduating with 
 honours at the close of his course. Then, for 
 the best part of two years, he served in his 
 father's school as an assistant master — "usher " 
 they would have called it then. During that 
 time he preached occasionally in various Baptist 
 meeting-houses, and among others in a little 
 chapel at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. 
 In 1843 he was invited to become its pastor, and 
 accepted the invitation. He was never ordained 
 to the ministry, and he never took any systema- 
 tic course in theology as a preparation for it — 
 
GRAHAM STREET 79 
 
 two facts worth remembering, for the second, at 
 any rate, throws some Hght on his later history. 
 
 At Rickmansworth he spent only a few months, 
 for on August 4, 1844, he preached his first 
 sermon in Mount Zion Chapel, Graham Street, 
 afterwards to be associated with the work and 
 memory of Charles Vince, the best-beloved, 
 perhaps, of all the Birmingham ministers of his 
 time. When the office-bearers of the church 
 asked Dawson on what terms he would come, 
 his reply was characteristic : — " Bread and 
 cheese for the first year," he said, " afterwards 
 what I am worth." He was not the man to 
 drive a bargain, and he had faith enough in him- 
 self and his powers to feel sure that when a church 
 — an intelligent church — had found what he 
 had to give them, they would be eager to offer 
 what he would have been slow to ask. In 
 the ministry, at any rate — the ministry of all 
 churches — the man who covets money is not the 
 man who gets it. 
 
 And then trouble came. The Graham Street 
 church had trust deeds ; the trust deeds con- 
 tained a creed ; and Dawson soon found himself 
 in revolt against the creed that he was bound 
 to teach. You will not expect me to enter into 
 
8o GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 the theological differences that arose. The sub- 
 stance of them may be stated briefly. The 
 creed of the church laid stress on the salvation 
 of man by our Lord's death : Dawson laid stress 
 on the salvation of man by our Lord's life. 
 The church thought of Him as the divine Media- 
 tor : Dawson thought of Him as the divine 
 Example. That is a rough and ready statement 
 of facts, but you may take it as fairly accurate. 
 As a rule, theological differences, when they 
 arise, produce more heat than light, and con- 
 troversy is apt to bring out the baser and meaner 
 side of the best of men ; for, unfortunately, it 
 is true that all gentlemen are not Christians, 
 and, still more unfortunately, that all Christians 
 are not gentlemen. But this case was an excep- 
 tion, and both those who stood by the church 
 and those who stood by the minister parted, 
 at the end of 1845, without rancour and without 
 malice, which did honour to both sides alike. 
 
 His friends — and he had made many in less 
 than eighteen months — were determined not 
 to let him go. They joined together to build a 
 new chapel for him under conditions that should 
 ensure perfect freedom, and in August, 1847, the 
 Church of the Saviour was opened, based on 
 
CHURCH OF THE SAVIOUR 8i 
 
 these principles : that no pledge should be 
 required of minister or congregation ; that 
 no form of theological belief should be implied 
 by membership ; that difference of creed 
 should be no bar to union in practical 
 Christian work. In that church George Dawson 
 carried on his work for nearly thirty years. 
 How the principles worked out in practice, and 
 to what extent his pastoral work was lasting, I do 
 not attempt to inquire. It is enough to know this 
 — that he drew round him hundreds and thou- 
 sands of men and women who would have found 
 no religious home elsewhere ; and that from his 
 teaching they gained such strength, and such 
 hope, and such repose of heart as they needed, 
 and such hold as might be on the things that 
 belong to eternity and not to time. 
 
 And now he settled down to the work of his 
 life — his religious work in the church, as preacher 
 and pastor, his intellectual work as a lecturer 
 and teacher, his public work as a citizen and a 
 patriot. It will be convenient to deal separately 
 with these three fields or provinces of service. 
 But you must allow me to handle them broadly 
 rather than in detail, leaving much to be filled 
 in by yourselves. 
 
 L.F.M. c 
 
82 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 III 
 
 First, let me speak of his work in the pulpit 
 and the church. If I were to pass it by in silence 
 it would be a sorry compliment to you ; for it 
 would suggest unwillingness to listen to opinions 
 that you may not share : it would be a dishonour 
 to him ; for it would degrade the work in which 
 he manifested his finest powers to a secondary 
 and subordinate place. And so I shall make 
 bold to speak freely, but, I hope, with no lack 
 of sympathy or of charity. 
 
 It must be remembered that Dawson was not 
 a trained theologian. He had never been put 
 through a course of systematic theology. It 
 may be doubted if he ever constructed for himself 
 a definite system of belief. He cared more for 
 spirit than for substance — more for feeling than 
 for form. He would have sympathized with the 
 words of a great German divine who denounced 
 the exhibition of what was known as the Holy 
 Coat of Treves — " The Founder of the Christian 
 religion bequeathed to His apostles and disciples 
 — not His coat, but His spirit. His coat belongs 
 to the executioner." 
 
 Dawson was less unorthodox than many people 
 imagined. But against tradition — the tradition 
 
EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT 83 
 
 that benumbs and petrifies — he was ever in revolt. 
 His first impression on the pubHc mind, when he 
 began his ministry, was made by attacking 
 EvangeHcahsm — the traditional, though not' 
 perhaps, the real faith. Far be it from me to 
 disparage or to underrate what the Evangelical 
 Revival had done for the spiritual life of the 
 nation in earlier days. It flooded the world with 
 a new ardour of devotion. It transfigured and 
 transformed the souls of men with the passion 
 that inspired the faith of the early Church. 
 When the Wesleys and Whitefield went through 
 the kingdom with the Gospel that had come 
 to them, the divine grave, open in the ages 
 of faith and sealed in the ages of doubt, was open 
 once more ; and the churches which they quick- 
 ened recovered the strong and simple faith of 
 the Church of the Resurrection. But the divine 
 fire died down. The revelation that had inspired 
 one generation became the orthodox tradition 
 of the next. What once had been a living faith 
 degenerated, in part if not altogether, into a 
 thing of words, phrases, conventions. Dawson 
 saw the surface, though he did not see the heart ; 
 and he hated and despised what he saw. He 
 struck for reality — for reality in every part of 
 
84 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 life ; for reality in religion, which is the crown 
 of life. He knew that no generation can thrive 
 merely on the religious experience of those who 
 have gone before ; that to keep the soul strong 
 and sound, a man must get his spiritual food 
 day by day. So was it with the manna which 
 the children of Israel gathered in the wilder- 
 ness, " the corn of heaven," as the Psalmist calls 
 it — " when man did eat angels' food." It was 
 of the day, and for the day : if kept to the mor- 
 row, it " bred worms and stank." That is a 
 law, an abiding law, of the spiritual life. Daw- 
 son's revolt against the Evangelical tradition 
 was due not to any want of faith, but to his con- 
 viction that religion, if it is to be of any avail, 
 must be intimate, spontaneous, natural, and 
 direct. And this should be reckoned to him for 
 righteousness. 
 
 There was another line of cleavage. It would 
 be rash to assert that the earlier Evangelicals 
 held that religion had nothing to do with con- 
 duct ; but the tendency of the school, among 
 its later adherents, was to lay stress on the 
 negative, rather than on the positive side of the 
 principle. If a man did not dance, did not play 
 cards or billiards, did not go to the theatre, did 
 
UNWORLDLINESS 85 
 
 not read plays or novels, he was accounted a 
 religious man. If he did any of these things, 
 he was set down as a worldly man. Dawson 
 made short work of these artificial distinctions 
 and of the ingenious compromises that grew out 
 of them. To his mind, what a man did was 
 far more important than what he abstained 
 from doing. '' What doest thou more ? " is the 
 question that we have to answer — not " What 
 doest thou less ? " A man might obey the law 
 of prohibition — the law " Thou shalt not " — in its 
 minutest details, and yet be far from the king- 
 dom of heaven ; for true unworldliness is not of 
 the letter, but of the spirit. He would have 
 accepted, without reserve, the definition of un- 
 worldliness that some of you may have read 
 elsewhere : " Unworldliness does not consist in 
 the most rigid and conscientious observance of 
 any external rules of conduct, but in the spirit 
 and temper, and in the habit of living created 
 by the vision of God, by constant fellowship 
 with Him, by a personal and vivid experience 
 of the greatness of the Christian redemption, 
 and by the settled purpose to do the will of God 
 always, in all things, and at all times." That 
 was the substance of Dawson's own teaching 
 
86 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 from the very first. But when he began his 
 ministry, the men and women who had been 
 trained to walk in the old ways were not ready 
 to grasp the new truth. 
 
 There was another element in Dawson's 
 preaching that should not be overlooked — the 
 vigour and the force with which he dwelt upon 
 the everyday duties of life. One who heard him 
 often in his early days used to recall Dawson's 
 freedom and freshness in dealing with the com- 
 mon faults and failings of common people. 
 Religion, as Dawson understood it, was concerned, 
 not with a bit of a man's life, but with the whole 
 of it. There are seven days in the we^k, and 
 not one ; and Dawson's sermons were not for 
 Sunday alone, but for week-days as well. Hugh 
 Latimer did not shrink from plainness of speech 
 in the pulpit, neither did he. 
 
 He would talk to his congregation about scales and 
 about yard measures, about tea and sugar, about adul- 
 terated mustard, and about butter half of which was 
 fat, about stock-taking and long credit, about dressing 
 shop windows, about all the details of the doings of a 
 scoundrel who had been tried a day or two before for his 
 transactions in connexion with a fraudulent stock 
 company, about dress and jewellery, about dinners and 
 evening parties, about all the follies and sins and vanities 
 of the day. 
 
 il 
 
ETHICAL PREACHING 87 
 
 He spoke of the facts of life as they were ; of 
 the world as it was, and not as some people 
 would have liked it to be, with half the grim facts 
 of experience suppressed and ignored. For if 
 life is to be made sound and straight, we must 
 know the moral and physical laws by which life 
 is governed. We must know the law and under- 
 stand the law if we are to obey the law ; and it 
 is only in obedience that we find our safety and 
 our strength. His preaching was effective because 
 it was in touch with realities, and because he 
 was real himself. And the inner secret of his 
 power was this — if I may borrow a sentence from 
 my old friend, Mr. G. J. Johnson — that Dawson 
 ** was not a preaching man, but a man preach- 
 ing." Or, to put the truth in another way, 
 he preached not " as a dying man to dying men," 
 — that was the old idea of preaching — but as a 
 living man to living men who found life no 
 simple or easy matter. Preaching of that type 
 was a new thing at that time. Since then, others 
 have learnt the secret ; and I venture to say 
 that in two such books as The Ten Command- 
 ments and The Laws of Christ for Common Life, 
 you will find the fruit and the flower of the seed 
 that George Dawson had sown. 
 
88 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 Some people then held that, a sermon, to 
 deserve the name, should deal only with such 
 themes and mysteries as — 
 
 Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate ; 
 Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute. 
 
 They held that to bring the business of the 
 week into the stillness of the sanctuary was to 
 profane the temple. And others resented such 
 preaching from baser motives. There was an 
 American minister who went down into the 
 Southern States after the war, and for obvious 
 reasons set himself to preach a good deal about 
 morahty. He began to expound the Ten Com- 
 mandments. When he had reached the fourth 
 or fifth, a deputation came to him from the con- 
 gregation. They thanked him for all that he 
 had done, and expressed their deep personal 
 esteem for him ; but they asked him whether 
 he would mind preaching his sermons on the 
 rest of the Commandments at the week evening 
 service, when only the devout were present, 
 instead of on the Sunday when saints and sinners 
 were mixed; "for," said they, "we think — 
 
 Religion never was designed 
 To make our pleasures less." 
 
JOURNALISM 89 
 
 There were some in Birmingham who might 
 have said the same ; there were others who, if 
 they had said what they thought, would have 
 altered a word in the old lines : 
 
 Religion never was designed 
 To make our profits less. 
 
 To such as these his preaching was unwel- 
 come. But the mass of the people heard him 
 gladly ; for he spoke to them as one who knew 
 their difficulties, their temptations, and their 
 struggles ; and he had a gospel to give them by 
 which they could live. — All men are grateful for 
 that. 
 
 IV 
 
 Let me next speak of Dawson's work as a 
 teacher and lecturer. However opinion may 
 differ as to the effect of his preaching, there can 
 be little difference as to his unrivalled power to 
 awaken and enlighten. I say this, not forget- 
 ting the fact that on three separate occasions 
 he became the editor of a daily newspaper 
 — the Mercury in 1848, the Daily Free Press 
 in 1855, and the Morning News in 1871. But 
 it may be said in extenuation that these 
 
90 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 lapses were brief and at long intervals, and 
 that the newspapers which he edited soon 
 came to confusion, if not to liquidation. No 
 one — not even the most thorough-going of his 
 admirers — would claim for him that he was a 
 great editor. But no one who heard him would 
 deny his charm as a lecturer. Charles Kingsley, 
 who had little love for Nonconformists, and even 
 less knowledge of them, described Dawson as 
 " the greatest talker in England " ; Mr. Johnson, 
 whom I have already quoted, said that " talking 
 came to him as easily as breathing." He was 
 a talker, not an orator. He attempted no 
 sustained intensity or elaboration of utterance 
 — not even the elaboration that achieves sim- 
 plicity. In speaking, whether in the pulpit or 
 on the platform, he spoke as he might have 
 spoken to half a dozen friends gathered round the 
 fireside. The style was easy, natural, intimate, 
 unstudied, and direct. The tone varied, and so 
 did the mood. He might slip from indignation 
 to pathos, or from humour to disdain, in swift 
 succession ; but he never shouted and he never 
 stormed. It was talk — talk at its best ; it was 
 not declamation. And the talk was never hazy, 
 but always clear. 
 
LUCIDITY 91 
 
 Some men think in a fog and speak in a fog, 
 and the fog soon spreads from the man who speaks 
 to the men who listen. For if you are to have 
 any chance of making yourself understood by 
 others, the first condition of success is that you 
 should understand yourself. Now Dawson 
 always understood what he wished to say at the 
 time when he said it ; and those who heard him 
 — if they were persons of ordinary intelligence — 
 understood it too. What he thought, what 
 he said, this week might be different from 
 what he would think and from what he would 
 say next week ; for his estimates and judgments 
 varied with his moods, and though his balance was 
 not an unjust balance, the scale that sank down 
 heavily to-day might kick the beam to-morrow. 
 It was sometimes difficult to reconcile what he 
 was saying with what he had said before — partly, 
 no doubt, because he was content to say one 
 thing at a time, without much heed of qualifica- 
 tions and conditions ; but there was never any 
 difficulty in following what he said while he was 
 saying it. For he had learnt one thing that 
 some men never learn — the relation of the speaker 
 to the listener. What was said of John Brad- 
 ford, the old Puritan preacher, might have been 
 
92 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 said with equal truth of George Dawson. Brad- 
 ford, we are told, " was a master of speech, but 
 he had learned not to speak what he could 
 speak, but what his hearers could hear. He 
 knew that clearness of speech was the excellency 
 of speech ; and therefore resolved like a good 
 orator to speak beneath himself rather than 
 above his audience." Aim low if you mean to 
 hit your mark : that is the speaker's first 
 law. 
 
 Dawson commenced to lecture, in 1845, and 
 he went on lecturing to the very end of his 
 life. It would be an exaggeration to say 
 that like Bacon he took all knowledge for 
 his province ; but there were few subjects in 
 literature or in life that he did not touch. I 
 spare you a catalogue in detail, though I could 
 take up several minutes with the list. When 
 I say that he ranged from Calvin at one end to 
 Benvenuto Cellini at the other, from Rousseau 
 to Beau Brummel, from Tennyson to Voltaire, 
 from " Ill-used men " to " Church decora- 
 tion," from the music of Mendelssohn to the 
 pictures of Holman Hunt, you can form some 
 idea of the ground that he covered ; and if 
 there was a great movement stirring the 
 
INTERPRETER 
 
 93 
 
 hearts and the hopes of men, or a great event 
 that seemed likely to become a landmark in 
 history, Dawson had his say about it. He went 
 up and down the country with his lectures, 
 and his voice was heard in every city throughout 
 the land. 
 
 In those days when books and magazines 
 and newspapers were far fewer and less accessible 
 to ordinary people than they are to-day, his 
 coming was an event, and he quickened the 
 minds of those who heard him in little country 
 towns with a force that lasted and leavened long 
 after he had gone away. He taught people, not 
 of set purpose, but by suggestion, what to read 
 and how to read ; and he took them to the great 
 books that are best worth reading. For a great 
 book not only teaches and inspires, it reveals. 
 At the heart of every great book is a man ; and 
 the book reveals the man who wrote it to the 
 man who reads it. It also reveals the man who 
 reads it to himself. And the harvest of a great 
 book is not only what we find in it, but what it 
 helps us to find in ourselves, Dawson was the 
 most skilful of interpreters, in showing men what 
 to look for and where to find it. 
 
 When he died the Spectator described him as 
 
94 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 the most famous intellectual " middle-man " of his 
 day. If it spoke without any deliberate con- 
 tempt, it certainly spoke with a certain air of 
 patronage, such as we are accustomed to expect 
 in a newspaper that has always had a Moses of 
 its own to go up into the mount on every 
 Thursday afternoon and to bring back with 
 him the infallible oracles of heaven for Satur- 
 day's ** leader." But to be a " middleman " — 
 even in literature and philosophy — is no re- 
 proach. The man who can make plain to the 
 many the thought of the one, who can enable 
 them to hear, each in his own tongue, the words 
 of wonder (which are the works of wonder) — 
 such a man, to fulfil his mission, must be endued 
 with a double gift of insight, wisdom, and sym- 
 pathy. For he must be able to think and feel, 
 and speak, not in one world, but in two. He 
 must be akin to genius, the genius of the poets, 
 prophets and sages of our race, on the one hand, 
 and akin to poor commonplace humanity on 
 the other. And he must be able to express 
 the mind and the emotion of the immortals 
 in the bare and broken speech that belongs to the 
 creatures of a day. That was what Dawson did 
 for thousands of unlettered men and women. 
 
EUROPEAN FREEDOM 95 
 
 And as they listened their eyes were opened to 
 the glory of the world : — 
 
 Hesperus with the host of heaven came. 
 And all creation widened on their view. 
 
 There is another service that Dawson rendered 
 in broadening thought and sympathy to which 
 I must refer in passing. When he began his 
 public work, the average Englishman, still under 
 the influence of the reaction that followed the 
 French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, 
 knew little, and cared less, about the movements 
 for liberty and enlightenment in other lands. 
 He believed that freedom was good for Britons, 
 and that " Britons never should be slaves." 
 But as for other nations — " the nations not so 
 blest as we " — he was not quite sure that they 
 were fit for freedom, or that they could be trusted 
 to use freedom if they got it. 
 
 But Dawson believed with his whole heart that 
 freedom was good for all, and not only for Eng- 
 lishmen. He was the first man in Birmingham 
 to study and to understand foreign politics, and 
 to raise a genuine interest in the affairs of 
 Hungary, Italy and France. He welcomed 
 Kossuth, the great Hungarian leader ; he was 
 
96 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 the friend of Mazzini, and of Garibaldi, who 
 together helped to make the free and united 
 Italy of to-day. His heart went out to the men 
 in France who led the ineffective revolution of 
 1848 ; and to those who withstood the tyranny 
 and the corruption that were avenged at Sedan. 
 He was a patriot ; but there was nothing paro- 
 chial in his patriotism ; he gave others some- 
 thing of his own broad outlook. And a man's 
 convictions and enthusiasms are fullest, deepest 
 and strongest, when they are fed, not from the 
 narrow range of personal, or local, or even 
 national experience, but from the wide water- 
 shed of the world. 
 
 V 
 
 And now, in the last place, I pass on to speak 
 of the debt that this city owes, as a city, to Daw- 
 son's work and teaching. It is the hardest part 
 of my task, because there is so much to say, 
 and also because it involves some knowledge of 
 municipal history. But if you will bear with me 
 for a few minutes more, I shall do my best to put 
 the case briefly before you. 
 
 Dawson came to Birmingham in 1844. Five 
 
INCORPORATION— AND AFTER 97 
 
 years before, in 1839, the borough had received 
 its charter of incorporation. But the vahdity 
 of the charter was contested. The overseers 
 refused to levy a borough rate. And it was not 
 until August, 1842, that the charter of incorpora- 
 tion was finally confirmed by statute. Even 
 then, power was still divided between the borough 
 council and other local authorities ; for there 
 were four sets of commissioners who exercised 
 control in different parts of the town for various 
 purposes ; and it was not till 185 1 that the 
 powers hitherto vested in those separate bodies 
 were consolidated and transferred to the town 
 council, establishing it as the sole governing 
 authority for municipal purposes. 
 
 The conflict had been long and severe. The 
 reformers, when they had won their victory, were 
 worn out and exhausted. They had neither spirit 
 nor strength left to initiate a new and vigorous 
 policy and to enter upon a fresh campaign to 
 carry such a policy into effect. They were 
 content, for the moment, to encamp upon the 
 ground that they had won. The Town Council 
 itself had little energy or enthusiasm. It was 
 not without men of character and ability; but 
 they had no definite aim, and no bond of union. 
 
 L.F.M. H 
 
98 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 Their policy — if it can be called a policy — was to 
 move slowly, and to do as little as they could. 
 Those of you who have read the report on 
 the state of the town drawn up by Mr. Rawlinson 
 for the Board of Health in 1849, will know how 
 much there was to do. Even in the better parts 
 of the town the sanitary conditions were dis- 
 graceful. In Hagley Road and in Bristol Road 
 house drains discharged into the open gutters 
 of the street. In George Street — as it was then 
 called — the sewage of the houses ran into the 
 canal. Many houses in the same district drew 
 their water supply from wells that were separ- 
 ated only by a few feet from a cesspool or a 
 midden. And in the less prosperous parts of 
 the borough the state of affairs was even worse. 
 Duddeston and Nechells had a surveyor of 
 their own. They paid him £-^0 a year. He 
 described himself as a " universal genius, "though, 
 as he said, " he never had no instruction," 
 and " never could see that there was any art in 
 laying down sewers." He did not know how to 
 use a spirit-level, and took his levels with three 
 sticks. Even in the centre of the town the 
 streets were mean and sordid, badly paved, and 
 badly lighted. Two gas companies supplied 
 
THE AGE OF DARKNESS 99 
 
 the town, but on such terms that prices were 
 not lowered by competition. Further out, row 
 upon row of grimy dwarf houses extended in 
 all directions ; and behind the streets lay two 
 thousand close courts, each approached by a 
 narrow passage and doorway — for the most part 
 without pavement or drainage, as indecent 
 within as they were unwholesome. The burial 
 grounds attached to the churches and chapels 
 of the town were full to overflowing. Wells 
 contaminated by the filth that was left to soak 
 into the soil supplied two-thirds of the popula- 
 tion. A water company supplied the remaining 
 third on two days in the week. Disease was 
 rife, and the death-rate high. Whole districts 
 in the heart of the town were abandoned to vice 
 and to crime. 
 
 That is a dark picture, is it not ? Dark, but 
 not over-coloured : every line in it is confirmed 
 by bluebooks, reports and records : if you will 
 examine the evidence for yourselves, you will 
 agree that I have exaggerated nothing. Bir- 
 mingham in those days was nothing better than 
 an overgrown and ill-governed village. 
 
 There was work enough for the most ardent 
 of municipal reformers. But Dawson's vision 
 
100 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 passed beyond the limits of conventional reform. 
 To him a city meant something besides the 
 policeman and the scavenger : it had larger 
 and higher functions than to maintain public 
 order and to provide for the public health. 
 For a city, as he conceived it, was a society, 
 established by the divine will, as the family, 
 the State, and the Church are established, for 
 common life and common purpose and common 
 action. It was not a bundle of individuals — 
 not '* a mere aggregation of individual bipeds," 
 as Coleridge puts it, but an organism with 
 definite functions to discharge ; functions that 
 grow in range and in importance as the city 
 rises from its humble beginnings, and advances 
 in power and dignity and fame. This truth 
 was one that he held and set forth and main- 
 tained throughout his public life. In the noble 
 address that he delivered at the opening of the 
 Reference Library in 1866 he said only what he 
 had often said before. That library, as he viewed 
 it (I give you his own words), " was the first- 
 fruits of a clear understanding that a great town 
 exists to discharge towards the people of that 
 town the duties that a great nation exists to 
 discharge towards the people of that nation ; 
 
THE NEW CIVIC IDEAL loi 
 
 that a town exists here by the grace of God ; that 
 a great town is a solemn organism through 
 which should flow, and in which should be shaped, 
 all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man's 
 intellectual and moral nature." 
 
 " Not by bread alone " — we all know that. 
 Man does not live by bread alone, nor by law 
 alone, nor by politics alone. And when we 
 have done all that we can for his comfort, his 
 health, his security, and for the health, comfort 
 and safety of those who are dear to him, we 
 have touched only one side of his nature, have 
 not ministered to all his wants, have not given 
 him all that he has a right to claim : mind and 
 spirit have needs of their own as well as the 
 body ; and those needs must be satisfied. This 
 means that the city which is a city must have 
 its parks as well as its prisons, its art gallery as 
 well as its asylum, its books and its libraries as 
 well as its baths and washhouses, its schools as 
 well as its sewers : that it must think of beauty 
 and of dignity no less than of order and of 
 health. 
 
 Such was the task that Birmingham had 
 before it when Dawson first set himself to preach 
 the new municipal gospel ; some of it obvious, 
 
102 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 even then, and some of it at that time a dim 
 and distant ideal. You know in what wonderful 
 ways it has been put into practice. You can 
 estimate for yourselves how much Birmingham 
 owes to Dawson for his share in the achievement. 
 Let me indicate — it is all that I can do — the 
 lines on which he worked. 
 
 In the first place, he stoutly maintained that 
 the principle of individual freedom must be sup- 
 plemented by the principle of collective respon- 
 sibility, and that the policy of " let-alone,'' at 
 that time the dominant idea, was bad for the 
 city and bad for the state. The voluntary 
 system, he was convinced, has its limits. Public 
 duties are not to be left to private enterprise. 
 In the administration of justice, private enter- 
 prise degenerates into Lynch law. In other 
 cases private enterprise means that men shirk 
 their share of burdens that belong to all, and 
 leave the whole burden on the shoulders of a 
 few. If a man will not do his duty by love, 
 ** then," said Dawson, " make him do it by 
 law." To " the fat, double-chinned prosperous 
 people who have no public spirit in them, and 
 who take all they can get from their country, 
 and give nothing for it," the rate-collector and 
 
THE DUTY OF PUBLIC SERVICE 103 
 
 the tax-gatherer are ministers of grace. Inter- 
 ference with the Hberty of the subject ? That 
 is why he hked it. He rejoiced to see that kind 
 of Hberty — hberty to shirk pubhc duty — cur- 
 tailed. " Bondage is better than hberty," said 
 he, " if hberty means the shirking of duty, the 
 neglecting of other people, and simply the getting 
 all you can out of your country, and putting it 
 into your own pocket and giving none." 
 
 In the second place, he laid stress upon the 
 duty of personal service. If a man had leisure, 
 if he had wealth, if he had been trained in the 
 management of affairs, those advantages, those 
 privileges, carried with them duties to corre- 
 spond. If a man had the ability to serve the 
 town in public work, he was bound to serve. 
 For the city needs its best men ; and if the best 
 men hang back and hold aloof, then the business 
 of the city will not be done as it should be. 
 Inferior men are not the men to lead. *' Never 
 send a man into the Council," said Dawson, 
 *' whom you would not like to be Mayor." If a 
 man is not fit to lead, the interests of the city 
 are not safe in his hands. 
 
 Thirdly, he insisted that the business of the 
 town should be transacted not only with hon- 
 
104 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 esty but with dignity. Those of you who are 
 old enough to remember how and where pub- 
 He affairs were discussed and settled in earlier 
 days will understand how necessary it was to 
 drive that principle into men's minds. 
 
 I have told the story of the Woodman else- 
 where : but to some of you it may be new, and 
 I shall venture to tell it again. Even after the 
 old system had begun to pass away, it was still 
 the custom of certain prominent members of 
 the Council to meet at the Woodmaii, a well- 
 known tavern in the town, and to discuss the 
 Council business in a kind of informal caucus. 
 There was nothing against the house. It 
 was not a drunken Woodman, or a dissolute 
 Woodman ; but it was a beery and a gin-and- 
 watery Woodman. The habit was, to say the 
 least, undignified, and it was keenly resented 
 by the men of the new school. Direct 
 protest would have done more harm than 
 good ; but at last an opportunity for pro- 
 test came. It was at the time when the 
 country rose in arms to support Mr. Plimsoll's 
 demand that the Government should take 
 action against unsea worthy ships. A town's 
 meeting was held in the Town Hall, presided 
 
 I 
 
THE "WOODMAN" 105 
 
 over by the Mayor. Mr. Vince — who always 
 fought smiHng — was one of the speakers. He 
 reminded the meeting that the sailor's whole 
 life was bounded by his ship. It was his home 
 and his prison, his free library and his art 
 gallery. "And if, Mr. Mayor," he continued, 
 "he wants to spend an hour in the parlour of the 
 Woodman, the ship must be his Woodman too." 
 The Mayor of the day was understood to be 
 one of the most regular frequenters of the tavern, 
 and the thrust was received with a tumult of 
 laughter. Then suddenly the laughter stopped ; 
 the audience saw the reproof that the jest veiled, 
 and with one impulse they began to applaud 
 steadily — I might say solemnly, and they 
 continued to applaud for several minutes. The 
 hour of judgment had come for the Woodman, 
 and all that the Woodman stood for. That 
 night the town set up a new standard of dignity 
 for its public men. 
 
 I shall not try to follow the course of the 
 movement. It began, as all such movements do, 
 in the dream of solitary and silent hours. Then 
 it made its way into the minds of a few men of 
 kindred spirit. And the dream became an ideal ; 
 and the ideal grew into a conviction ; and con- 
 
io6 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 viction flamed into enthusiasm ; and enthusiasm 
 took shape in poHcy, and passed from the study 
 and the club to the platform and the pulpit, and 
 swept through the wards of the city, and fired 
 men's minds and kindled their hearts, until 
 the ideal that had once been a dream had become 
 a reality. Those years in which the new gospel 
 began to spread and to prevail — those glorious 
 hours of crowded strife — can we ever forget 
 them ? 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive ; 
 But to be young was very heaven. 
 
 Other men had their part in the work. Others 
 did more to apply principles in practice. But 
 Dawson came first. He led the way where 
 others followed. And for myself, I hold in 
 highest honour the man who is first to see when a 
 great reform is needed, and first to point out 
 how reform may be effected. Others may flock 
 round the standard he has raised ; others may 
 devise methods and details of policy ; others 
 may inscribe the new law in the statute-book : 
 we are debtors to all of them. But we owe 
 most to the man who first believed — and 
 taught others to believe — that reform was pos- 
 sible. Such is the debt that this city owes to 
 
OUR DEBT AND ITS DISCHARGE 107 
 
 George Dawson for what it has achieved in per- 
 fecting and purifying its municipal hfe, and 
 for the nobler ideals and aims of civic duty 
 that it has followed with steady purpose and 
 unfaltering faith. 
 
 VI 
 
 And now that I have spoken of the man and 
 his work, let me ask you how you are acknow- 
 ledging, how you are repaying the debt that 
 you owe him ? Is the old spirit still alive in 
 this place ? May a man still say the thing he 
 will, and be sure of a hearing, even if he con- 
 fronts alone the prejudice and passion of the 
 hour ? Are your best men still ready to spend 
 themselves in the service of the city ? And when 
 the best offer for service, do you accept the offer 
 that they make ? When you have chosen your 
 leaders, do you give them your hearts with your 
 votes ? And do you stand by them staunchly 
 and loyally, through good repute and through 
 evil, through water and through fire ? Are 
 there still among you some men, many men, 
 who care httle for the things that concern the 
 pocket, and much for the things that concern the 
 mind and the spirit ? Have you a few men still 
 
io8 GEORGE DAWSON 
 
 who dream dreams and see visions, and who 
 upHft the Hves of others by their loftier ideals ? 
 Are your hearts tender for the armies of the 
 homeless and unfed, for those who are out of 
 the way, and for those who are ready to perish ? 
 Are you eager, in a spirit of divine compassion, 
 to seek and to save ? If this be so — if *' the 
 silent voices of the dead " are the voices that 
 you heed and obey, then George Dawson's 
 work abides, and he has served not only the 
 generation for which he laboured until he fell 
 on sleep, but generations untold that are yet 
 to be. 
 
JAMES WATT 
 
 Born in Greenock 1736. Came to Birmingham 1774. 
 Died in Birmingham 181 9 
 
 By F. W. BURSTALL.i 
 
 Before I proceed to deal with James Watt I 
 want to give a picture of the times before his 
 great engine was invented. 
 
 The idea of using the elastic force of steam 
 was not new, as it had been proposed for the 
 purpose of draining mines by the Marquis of 
 Worcester in the time of Charles II, but only in 
 a vague form which never reached the practical 
 stage. 
 
 Papin was the first to propose the use of the 
 piston working in a cylinder, and shortly 
 afterwards Savery used an ingenious arrangement 
 of vessels which were alternately filled with 
 water and steam for the purpose of pumping : 
 
 ^ Professor Burstall's lecture loses more than any of 
 the others owing to the impossibility of reproducing the 
 admirable series of slides with which he illustrated it. 
 With his permission I have inserted short passages 
 (pp. 111-114, 116-117, 117-118), chiefly on the authority 
 of Smiles' s Life of James Watt, in further explanation of 
 some of the circumstances mentioned in the text. 
 
 109 
 
no JAMES WATT 
 
 the Savery engine is still used for low lifts under 
 the name of the Pulsometer. 
 
 The first real pumping engine which was 
 successfully employed was that invented by 
 Newcomen, a Devonshire blacksmith, which 
 became widely used throughout Devonshire 
 and Cornwall for draining the copper and tin 
 mines and to some extent for pumping in the 
 coal mines of the Midlands. 
 
 The engine consisted of a cylinder fitted with 
 a movable piston and connected to the boiler 
 by a pipe and valve. During the outward stroke 
 of the piston the valve was opened, so that 
 steam filled the cylinder ; at the end of the 
 stroke the steam valve was shut and a jet of 
 cold water injected into the cylinder which 
 produced a vacuum and forced down the 
 piston. At first the two valves were opened 
 and shut by a boy attendant. Later Humphrey 
 Potter arranged for the engine to become self- 
 acting. 
 
 The Newcomen engine was brought to a high 
 pitch of perfection before the time of Watt. 
 Smeaton built several of large size, one of which 
 had a fifty-inch cylinder and was used for drain- 
 ing the Chasewater mine in Cornwall. 
 
 I 
 
A WORKMAN'S DIFFICULTIES iii 
 
 The great objection to the Newcomen engine 
 was the enormous quantity of coal that was 
 consumed, which made it a question as to whether 
 it was not better to close down the mine rather 
 than keep the engine working. 
 
 James Watt was brought up to the trade of 
 an instrument maker, and learned his trade 
 in London making compasses, sextants, and 
 other instruments required in navigation. He 
 then went to Glasgow, his native town, to set 
 up for himself as an instrument maker. 
 
 In spite of all that is said in praise of modern 
 civilization and of modern industrial methods, 
 it is sometimes urged that the workers have 
 made no substantial advance towards individual 
 liberty. The early struggles of James Watt tell 
 a different story. Before going to Glasgow he 
 had experienced the hardships that could be 
 inflicted upon the working-man by an imperfect 
 system of police and by the regulations of a 
 trade guild. We can hardly realize the terror 
 inspired by press-gang men and by kidnappers 
 in the employment of the East India Company 
 and the planters of America. Like other peace- 
 able citizens at that time Watt lived in dread 
 
112 JAMES WATT 
 
 of seizure, legal and illegal. In London he 
 had found a berth in the shop of a mathematical 
 instrument maker, though without binding him- 
 self to the usual seven years' apprenticeship. But 
 between the press-gang and the guild regulations 
 he was kept in constant fear of capture and exile. 
 In 1756 he wrote to his father, ** They now press 
 anybody they can get, landsmen asweUas seamen, 
 except it be in the liberties of the city, where they 
 are obliged to carry them before the Lord Mayor 
 first, and unless one be either a 'prentice or a 
 creditable tradesman, there is scarce any getting 
 off again. And if I was carried before my Lord 
 Mayor I durst not avow that I wrought in 
 the city, it being against their laws for any 
 unfree man to work even as a journeyman 
 within the liberties." It was doubtless the 
 opinion of the time that these restrictions were 
 necessary to safeguard the workers' standard 
 of life. But the fact that they have all 
 been swept away, that the worker's standard 
 is higher and more secure to-day than ever 
 before, suggests that we ought not to be 
 too dogmatic respecting the necessity of any 
 particular means for the attainment of such a 
 desirable end. 
 
FREEDOM OF WORK 113 
 
 The same obstacle that threatened Watt in 
 London threatened him again in Glasgow. In 
 trying to learn his trade he was again beset with 
 difficulties. He tried to establish himself in 
 business only to find himself a " stranger" : he 
 was neither the son of a burgess nor had he 
 served an apprenticeship within the borough. 
 There were at that time no makers of mathe- 
 matical instruments in the town, yet the Guild 
 of the Hammermen, jealous of their rights, re- 
 fused to allow him to open a business. In vain he 
 besought the Guild to permit him at least the use 
 of a small workshop in which to experiment. For- 
 tunately a way was opened from another quarter. 
 At this stage in his career the University of 
 Glasgow, to its lasting credit, came to the rescue 
 of the future inventor. Within the precincts 
 of the University buildings the Professors exer- 
 cised an absolute authority. Watt was already 
 known to the Professor of Natural Philosophy, 
 by whom he had been employed to repair some 
 instruments that had recently been bequeathed 
 to the University. The Senate now determined 
 to offer him an asylum from the tyranny of the 
 Guilds, and a workshop was fitted up for him in a 
 room in the inner quadrangle. This room was 
 
 L.F.M. I 
 
114 JAMES WATT 
 
 kept sacred to Watt until, in my own under- 
 graduate days, the University was removed to 
 its present site. In addition a shop was appro- 
 priated to his use in the front of the College 
 buildings which faced the High Street. The 
 University, it is pleasant to think, was dedicated 
 to freedom of work as well as freedom of 
 thought. 
 
 It was this accident very largely which 
 caused Watt to turn his attention to the 
 steam engine. It so happened that one of 
 the professors, named Anderson, had among 
 his models one of the new engine, which was 
 out of order, and this was sent to Watt so 
 that he might repair it for Professor Anderson. 
 Most ordinary mechanics would, no doubt, 
 have acted very differently. Having repaired 
 it they would have returned it and thought 
 no more about it. But James Watt was one 
 of those men who could not resist the tempta- 
 tion to find out what was inside. He made 
 repeated attempts to get the model to work but 
 could not succeed, because the quantities of 
 steam were insufficient for the purpose. He 
 mentioned this to the celebrated Dr. Black, who 
 enUghtened Watt on the theory of the weight 
 
THE FIRST STEP 115 
 
 of steam and gave him a scientific insiglit into 
 its general properties. A great deal was done 
 to get the model to work, but nothing came of it . 
 
 James Watt tells the story how he came to 
 make the invention. He relates how as he 
 was walking down the College Green towards 
 Greenock the thought suddenly came into his 
 head— why not separate the condenser from the 
 cyhnder ? It was thus that he made the first 
 great step in his invention. This was in 1765. 
 The next step was to make this invention into a 
 commercial possibility, and here were all the 
 drawbacks and all the difficulties which every 
 inventor has to meet. It was impossible for 
 him to go very far. To construct an engine 
 to demonstrate its usefulness, meant capital, and 
 Watt himself was a poor man. 
 
 The first man to take up the invention was 
 a Dr. Roebuck, who was then trying to start 
 the Carron Ironworks. Roebuck encouraged 
 Watt and found a considerable amount of 
 capital. A small engine was constructed, but 
 here came the great difficulty which handicapped 
 Watt in his efforts to bring his engine to com- 
 pletion. There were in those days no tools 
 of precision. The workmen were unskilled in 
 
ii6 JAMES WATT 
 
 manufacturing models to the degree of nicety 
 that was required to make the engine a success, 
 and the whole of the first set of engines that was 
 supplied was a failure owing to the fact that he 
 could not get his piston steam tight. There were 
 no boring tools available ; the methods were 
 of the roughest description, and to produce 
 accurate work was very nearly an impossibility. 
 From 1765 until 1769 the engine dragged 
 on a more or less miserable existence. Watt 
 himself rapidly lost heart, being by nature timid 
 and cautious, and easily depressed by failure. 
 Roebuck, on the other hand, was a very san- 
 guine man and encouraged him to go on. 
 
 It is recorded that as far back as the time 
 of the Ancient Britons, swords were forged in 
 Birmingham. In 1533 Leland the antiquarian 
 found " many smiths in the town that use to 
 make knives and all manner of cutting tools . " A 
 century later we are told that the place was " full 
 of inhabitants and resounding with hammers audi 
 anvils." Later still, finer work, buckles, buttons," 
 clasps and all sorts of ornamented metal-ware 
 were manufactured. Burke spoke of Birming- 
 ham as the great toy-shop of Europe. Hutton, 
 
BOULTON AND WATT 117 
 
 the bookseller and historian of this town, came 
 to it in 1740 and he recalls the look of the passing 
 workmen. " I had been among dreamers, but 
 now I saw men awake. Their very steps shewed 
 alacrity." Doubtless this busy hum attracted 
 Watt. 
 
 It would appear, however, that he had in any 
 case decided to leave his own country to take 
 the road which Dr. Johnson called the finest 
 in Scotland, the road that leads into England. 
 This is no matter for surprise. In one of his 
 letters, written just before his departure, we 
 read : " There are too many beggars in this 
 country, which I am afraid is going to the devil 
 altogether. Provisions continue dear and laws 
 are made to keep them so." '' Luckily," he 
 adds, " the spirit of emigrating rises high and the 
 people seem disposed to shew their oppressing 
 masters that they can live without them." 
 
 In 1769 we get the first meeting between 
 Boulton and Watt when Watt was inspecting 
 the Soho works, which were one of the finest 
 in Europe. At that time they employed a 
 large number of people in making metal articles 
 generally, but not engines. 
 
ii8 JAMES WATT 
 
 Before turning to the latter, it is interesting to 
 notice that Boulton was not merely a manufac- 
 turer. He loved beauty for its own sake. He saw 
 that metal work "is a large field for fancy," and 
 resolved, so far as he was concerned, to rid 
 Birmingham of all reproach. " The prejudice," 
 he writes, "that Birmingham hath so justly 
 established against itself makes every fault con- 
 spicuous in all articles that have the least pre- 
 tensions to taste. How can I expect the public 
 to countenance rubbish from Soho while they 
 can procure sound and perfect work from any 
 other quarter ? " He was thus a precursor in 
 the movement that established our School of 
 Art and would have resisted, for the sake of 
 Birmingham and the future of its manufacture, 
 any departure from the highest standards of 
 artistic training. 
 
 Boulton was then seeking for something to 
 drive his factory. Up to that time it had been 
 driven by water power, but that was quite im- 
 possible when they had a dry summer, the result 
 being that the factory had to be stopped. 
 Boulton at first was very reluctant to undertake 
 the manufacture of the engine. He was engaged 
 
WILLIAM MURDOCK 119 
 
 in a large number of concerns, his time and 
 capital were fully occupied, and but for the 
 fact that in 1774 Roebuck became involved in 
 the Carron Ironworks it is very doubtful whether 
 Boulton would have joined the firm. When 
 Boulton found the amount of money that had 
 to be spent he saw difficulties and Watt and 
 his concern were taken over as a bad debt. 
 The engine was then removed to Soho, where 
 it was put up and another attempt was made 
 to start it. This was in 1772. 
 
 During this time an interesting figure comes 
 on the scene — one of the greatest and in some 
 respects most remarkable inventors we have 
 had — whose name is little known — William 
 Murdock (Scotice : Murdoch). The story of his 
 introduction to Boulton will, I think, bear telling. 
 Murdock came from Glasgow in order to get work 
 at Soho, which was a very famous place. He was 
 introduced to Boulton, who told him that he 
 wanted no fresh hands at that time. At the 
 same time Boulton was looking very carefully at 
 a hat which Murdock was rather nervously 
 twitching about in his hands, and his 
 curiosity was at last so great that he asked 
 him what the hat was made of. Murdock 
 
120 JAMES WATT 
 
 replied " that it was made of timber turned 
 on a lathe," and Boulton at once saw that a 
 man who could turn a hat to such a shape was no 
 ordinary individual. Murdock was taken on and 
 remained until the end of his life in 1839 ^^ the 
 service of Boulton and Watt. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable in consider- 
 ing the career of Watt than the rapidity with 
 which he produced an invention when it was 
 wanted for any purpose. Practically every 
 feature of the steam engine to-day has either 
 been invented or prophesied by Watt. He it 
 was who prophesied the application of steam 
 to " fire carriages." He saw it would be applied 
 to the propulsion of ships. To have forecast the 
 expansive working of steam is perfectly wonderful 
 when you consider that when he took up the 
 subject there was nothing whatever known about 
 it. The main slide valve of to-day is one of 
 Watt's inventions. The parallel motion is again 
 one of Watt's inventions. He invented quite 
 a number of other things which people commonly 
 think were not invented at all but somehow 
 grew. You are all acquainted with the pro- 
 cess of copying letters. That was the invention 
 of James Watt, and he got it out because he 
 
CHASEWATER 121 
 
 did not care for the process of writing two letters 
 by hand. The copying press was resisted by 
 the merchants of the day because they thought 
 it would facilitate forgery, and it was with great 
 difficulty that Boulton induced them to take it 
 up, but by 1800 it had come to be generally used. 
 
 After many difficulties the Watt engine be- 
 came a firmly established commercial success. 
 In 1778 the Chasewater engine was built 
 and put to work. Chasewater was then the 
 deepest mine in Cornwall, some sixty-six fathoms 
 down. There are some very interesting letters 
 from Watt to Boulton, telling how the engine 
 was getting on, and he makes the remark that 
 the captain of the mine would not have the 
 engine throttled down as he appeared to think 
 that it was not doing its work unless it made 
 a terrible noise. The miners came in from all 
 parts of the county to see this wonderful engine 
 fork the water from the deepest levels. The 
 term " fork " instead of pump was then used, 
 but the derivation of the term, like many of those 
 in engineering, is not known. 
 
 The economy of the Watt engine over the 
 Newcomen was proved, as it used only about 
 one-third of the coal. It was then mainly used in 
 
122 JAMES WATT 
 
 Cornwall, and there were a great variety of con- 
 ditions which made it extremely difficult for the 
 engine to get its fair chance. Watt and Boulton, 
 the adventurers as they were called, were poor 
 men, and having formed a company for the 
 engines they held out as long as they could, but 
 many, many times they were hanging on the 
 verge of bankruptcy, and the letters to Boulton 
 from Watt for years and years reflected the 
 agony of mind of James Watt at the little success 
 which the engine had then achieved. He is 
 repeatedly saying that the best part of his life 
 had gone without any sign of success. It is 
 really a most interesting thing to read and recall 
 the struggles of the man who is perhaps one of 
 the greatest inventors the world has ever seen ; 
 and it ought to encourage the younger men to 
 think that even then the greatest things were 
 not got at once. 
 
 Watt's patent taken out in 1765 would nor- 
 mally run out in 1779. Boulton saw, however, 
 that unless something was done they would sim- 
 ply do all the work and their competitors would 
 share with them the profits. The result was 
 that after a good deal of opposition an extension 
 was secured, and this undoubtedly was the saving 
 
THE STEAM ENGINE IN BEING 123 
 
 point of Boulton and Watt. In those days, even 
 as now, commercial honesty was not perhaps 
 quite what it ought to be, and there were a 
 number of people who seized on every point 
 they could to build other rival engines. We find 
 several contemporaries — Horncastle of Bristol 
 and Bond the Cornish engineer — repeatedly 
 declaring that they had got engines as good as 
 Boulton and Watt, with the result that the 
 " adventurers " were only able to establish their 
 rights after a great deal of litigation. 
 
 The first engine outside their own works was 
 built for Wilkinson, an iron founder, to blow 
 his bellows. In the next few years several 
 engines were erected round about London. 
 
 You must remember that in those days fac- 
 tories were practically unknown, and there was 
 no great demand for power. Most men worked 
 their own small concern and did not require 
 an engine of any sort. There were, however, 
 some cases in which power was required, the 
 most important being the making of flour, which 
 up to then had been carried on with water mills. 
 In the north of London the number of manu- 
 facturers was comparatively small, and all the 
 power they wanted was got from water in the 
 
124 JAMES WATT 
 
 form of water mills. The first engine to demon- 
 strate the power of steam for general factory 
 purposes was the engine built for the Albion Flour 
 Mills in London. This was in 1786. It was 
 a complete success in grinding the corn at a 
 rate at which no corn had ever been ground 
 before. 
 
 In those days people were not particularly 
 enlightened, and the report was spread about 
 that the engine was taking the bread from the 
 workers' mouths. Not long after the mills 
 were destroyed by a fire which was set down to 
 the malice of the operatives. 
 
 William Murdock very soon rose to a more 
 important position in the works of Boulton and 
 Watt. He was a remarkably clever mechanic, 
 and what seemed in those days a rather difficult 
 thing to get, he was steady and trustworthy. I 
 should say that the working man of to-day is 
 an infinitely better creature than in those days. 
 
 In 1790 Murdock made and constructed a 
 small steam engine to work on the road, and this 
 was the first mechanically propelled vehicle that 
 was ever produced. 
 
 There are a good many stories of the fright 
 of the simple-minded Cornish people when they 
 
BIRMINGHAM INVENTIONS 125 
 
 met Murdock with his fire engine going along 
 the road. The times were against the develop- 
 ment of mechanically-propelled vehicles. It 
 took rather over a hundred years before people 
 were convinced that the roads were suitable for 
 fire carriages. 
 
 Another of Mur dock's simple inventions was 
 coal-gas lighting. It is to Murdock alone to 
 whom the whole credit must be given for 
 the production of illuminant gas. In 1805 at 
 the celebration of the Peace of Amiens the Soho 
 Foundry was illuminated by coal gas, and before 
 1820 the use of illuminating gas was extended 
 to nearly all the large cities. Unfortunately 
 for Murdock he did not take out any patents, so 
 did not profit by his invention. He also among 
 other things invented the transmission of power 
 by means of compressed air. It is now in use 
 in every part of the world. He drove a little 
 engine in the pattern shop by compressed air, 
 and showed how the air could be transmitted 
 through pipes. 
 
 Boulton was the first to show how copper 
 coinage could be produced. He it was who 
 reaUy inaugurated the modern system of coin- 
 ing, but it took him nearly ten years before he 
 
126 
 
 JAMES WATT 
 
 could persuade the Government to give him 
 the power of making a copper coin. It is 
 worthy of note that the French Republican 
 Government actually had large quantities made 
 for it by Boulton. This coin was withdrawn 
 from circulation after the destruction of the 
 Republic by Napoleon. 
 
 Another important invention by Boulton 
 was a method of producing pictures in colour. 
 By some process which has now become quite 
 extinct, Boulton made a copy of a picture in 
 colours. It has been suspected that it was 
 a photographic process, but the probability is 
 that it was a simple press process. Some of the 
 copies are still in existence. 
 
 In comparison with Watt it is almost inevit- 
 able that Boulton should to some extent be over- 
 shadowed; yet Boulton's business capacity and 
 knowledge of how to manage men certainly 
 was a large factor in the success of the 
 engine. 
 
 Boulton was the first captain of industry, and 
 in his day, one of the most important citizens of 
 Birmingham. It is certainly a matter for regret 
 that no public memorial of Boulton exists in the 
 city which he did so much to advance. 
 
WATT'S RETIREMENT 127 
 
 In 1800 the partnership between Boulton 
 and Watt came to an end. Watt was then 64 
 and Boulton was about 72. Watt himself was 
 a man, as I have tried to show, who hated 
 business but loved mechanical pursuits, and 
 he took the earliest opportunity of retiring 
 from active business, leaving it to his son, 
 James Watt, junior, who carried on the 
 firm with the aid of Matthew Robinson 
 Boulton — Boulton's son. Watt himself then 
 retired to Heathfield Hall, and spent the re- 
 mainder of his life apparently much happier in 
 working out all kinds of mechanical devices. Be- 
 sides being the great father of power production 
 he was a versatile man inasmuch as he was a 
 great linguist and keenly interested in science. 
 At the same time he had all the instincts necessary 
 for the practical application of his ideas. Such 
 a man as he was had not come before. There 
 had been scientific men who had ideas, and there 
 had been practical men, but the combination 
 was a new one, and in Watt it was realized more 
 perfectly than it has ever been since. As Lord 
 Brougham observed after his death, Watt was 
 a creator. He was a man who went further 
 than a mere improver. He was able to origin- 
 
128 JAMES WATT 
 
 ate things in an extraordinary way. The im- 
 provements which have been made in the engine 
 since his death are all quite small in comparison 
 to the details that he devised. Had he had the 
 appliances of to-day there is not the slightest 
 doubt that Watt would have done everything 
 we are doing now. His successors were mere 
 pigmies in comparison with himself. George 
 Stephenson and Robert Stephenson, to whom is 
 given the credit of the locomotive railway 
 engine, only took Watt's schemes and put them 
 on four wheels. It was quite a minor arrange- 
 ment. But the engine cylinder, the valves, 
 the methods of driving, the separate con- 
 denser, the governor, remain the same now as 
 they were in his day. Yet with all this he 
 was so retiring and modest that at the end of 
 his life when he was offered a baronetcy he 
 declined it, saying he wanted to live out the 
 remainder of his life in peace and quietness. 
 And we must admire the man who refused such 
 an honour. He was above a title of that sort. 
 James Watt could afford to remain plain 
 James Watt to the end of time; he could have 
 no higher title. Murdock remained with the 
 younger Watt until about 1830, when he retired 
 
THE SOHO WORKS 129 
 
 and died in Handsworth after a long and arduous 
 life. 
 
 The interesting point to our minds is to notice 
 how Boulton, Watt and Murdock between them 
 left the mark of cleavage as between the old 
 methods of manufacture and those of our own 
 day. Before that time there had been no organ- 
 ized manufacture of any kind. These three 
 men, working together, practically made all 
 the modern machine tools, and they were the 
 first to collect large numbers of men in one 
 organization. At their best the Soho works 
 employed nearly one thousand men in various 
 operations, a number far greater than had 
 ever been engaged together in manufacture 
 before. Moreover, they practically origin- 
 ated the same methods as are used to-day in 
 factory organization, with its managers and 
 foremen. All the organization of that kind 
 was developed by Boulton, and I think that it 
 is only right that occasionally at meetings such 
 as this some credit should be given to these 
 almost forgotten people. 
 
 The present generation engaged in manufactur- 
 ing and engineering has very scanty respect 
 for its predecessors, but it is necessary to look 
 
 L.F.M. K 
 
130 JAMES WATT 
 
 upon the work of those who have gone before 
 with some reverence, because they had nothing 
 to begin with. They originated and brought 
 out of chaos all the means which we find 
 available and convenient, and this should be 
 brought occasionally to our minds. Above all 
 we ought here to be very grateful to them, 
 that the world-wide power which has made the 
 present civilization possible originated within 
 three miles of the centre of Birmingham. 
 
JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 Born, i6 Nov., 1811 ; first elected Member for Birming- 
 ham, 10 Aug., 1857 ; died, 27 March, 1889. 
 
 By C. a. Vince 
 
 Of the nine eminent men whose names are in- 
 cluded in this series of lectures, John Bright is 
 the only one who at no time was resident in 
 Birmingham. His connexion with our city 
 began when he was already a person of national 
 importance, and the leader of an army of 
 politicians scattered over all parts of the United 
 Kingdom. He made the acquaintance of 
 Birmingham men at a time of life when friend- 
 ship rarely ripens into intimacy. His visits were 
 not very frequent ; and he never took much 
 interest in our local concerns. To the last in 
 addressing his constituents he never spoke of 
 Birmingham as " our city," but always as 
 " your city." Birmingham in fact never sup- 
 planted Manchester in his heart, though it was 
 the fickleness of Manchester that gave the 
 opportunity for the more steadfast affection of 
 
 Birmingham. 
 
 m 
 
132 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 Nevertheless, we can easily justify our claim 
 to treat Bright as a Birmingham man ; and we 
 may hope that the name of our city will be for 
 ever associated in history with whatever is 
 enduring in his renown. He represented Birm- 
 ingham in the House of Commons continuously 
 for the last thirty-two years of his long life 
 (1857-1889). Our Town Hall was the scene 
 of not a few of the great orations that have 
 taken their place among the classical achieve- 
 ments of English eloquence. The men of 
 Birmingham were joined with Bright as pioneers 
 in the most arduous enterprise of his life, and 
 shared his greatest triumph. He drew from 
 the support of our burgesses, given with the 
 unchanging loyalty which we claim as a char- 
 acteristic virtue, no small part of the strength 
 he needed for the struggle which he described 
 as a long battle against privilege. The influ- 
 ence which he exercised throughout those thirty 
 years over the movement of the popular mind 
 in the political province can hardly be over- 
 estimated ; and we know that, whenever the 
 silver trumpet sounded, the most alert and 
 whole-hearted response came from the working- 
 men of Birmingham. Nor is the force of that 
 
MEMBER FOR BIRMINGHAM 133 
 
 influence yet exhausted ; though it be undeni- 
 able that, in more directions than one, the dis- 
 ciples have transgressed the limits of political 
 purpose and action laid down by the master. 
 
 If, then, Bright moulded to his will — though 
 never wilfully, never for selfish or ambitious 
 purposes — the political impulses of Birming- 
 ham, can we claim that Birmingham exercised 
 any reciprocal influence on Bright' s own career ? 
 That is not a question to be answered con- 
 fidently. But I think that we can discern that, 
 for whatever reason. Bright' s faith in the people 
 grew stronger, and the democratic side of his 
 purposes more prominent from and after the 
 time of his first association with Birmingham. 
 In order, however, to make good this point, I 
 will now introduce such a brief account of 
 Bright' s earlier career as seems necessary for 
 our purpose. 
 
 John Bright was born at Rochdale on Novem- 
 ber 16, 181 1. Thus he came of age in the 
 memorable year 1832 — the year of the first 
 Reform Act. Two facts that belong to his 
 heredity as well as his personality should con- 
 stantly be borne in mind by the student of his 
 career : he, and his immediate ancestors, were 
 
134 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 Nonconformists — members of the Society of 
 Friends — and they were manufacturers. Bright 
 was the first Protestant Nonconformist, and one 
 of the first of the manufacturing class, to become 
 a cabinet minister. His earliest public speeches 
 were made in defence of the refusal of Rochdale 
 Dissenters to pay church rates ; and it is not 
 surprising that throughout his life he was never 
 so likely to be betrayed into asperity of language 
 as when he had anything to say about the 
 privileges of the Established Church. When 
 the Anti-Corn-Law League was formed (1839) 
 he,- like many other Lancashire men of his class, 
 offered his services to the League. In Sep- 
 tember, 1841, he dedicated himself to public 
 work. He related more than once, in language 
 of the most touching pathos, how in that month 
 Richard Cobden visited him at Leamington, and 
 urged this vocation upon him when he was 
 mourning the recent death of his young wife. 
 His way was made easy by the public spirit of 
 his brothers, who generously liberated him from 
 his share in the work of the family business. 
 Thenceforward he was the trusty lieutenant, 
 and soon the most intimate personal friend, 
 of the great leader of the Free Trade movement. 
 
BRIGHT AND COBDEN 135 
 
 He entered Parliament as member of the city 
 of Durham in 1843, and four years later was 
 rewarded for his share in the triumph of 1846 
 by his election for Manchester, the home of 
 the League. 
 
 His eloquence won the attention of the House 
 of Commons from the first ; and he gained 
 great renown by his popular speeches, delivered 
 in every part of England and Scotland. His 
 more emotional rhetoric admirably supple- 
 mented the vigorous argumentation of Cobden, 
 whose speeches are still the best extant model 
 of the popular presentation of a chain of reason- 
 ing. Cobden made men think as he thought ; 
 Bright made them feel as he felt. Nevertheless, 
 it was no doubt by a wise discretion that the 
 editor of his Speeches included only one of the 
 League speeches on Free Trade. There is abun- 
 dant testimony that at this time his eloquence 
 was already stimulating and effective ; but it 
 was only by degrees that it attained the force, 
 the dignity, and the matchless felicity of phras- 
 ing and rhythm that compelled admiration 
 in the maturity of his genius. 
 
 Bright never ceased to look back with satis- 
 faction on the part he had taken in establishing 
 
136 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 the FreeTrade system ; and many of the speeches 
 of his old age were filled with reminiscences of 
 that old contention, designed to strengthen the 
 faith of his hearers in economical principles 
 which he believed to be of lasting and universal 
 validity. This is not the place for any discus- 
 sion of the principles of the League ; but there 
 are two observations that are of some importance 
 as bearing on Bright' s later career. 
 
 First, the struggle for the repeal of the Corn 
 Law was of the nature of a contention between 
 two powerful orders — the landowning aristo- 
 cracy, whose influence was still predominant in 
 both of the great parties, and the new order 
 of wealthy manufacturers, the magnates of 
 machinery and the factory system, — the cotton 
 spinners, as they were often called, — the whole 
 class taking its name from the most conspicuous 
 example of wealth rapidly acquired by the new 
 mechanical inventions, and the substitution of 
 great mills and factories, with their life-blood 
 of capital, and their complex organization of 
 industry, for the old independent handi- 
 crafts. It is difficult for us to realize the bitter- 
 ness of this feud. The landowners reproached 
 the manufacturers with the miseries of the fac- 
 
FREE TRADE 137 
 
 tory system, the overcrowding of towns, the 
 hard Hfe of the mill-hands, the scanty wages of 
 nursing mothers and children of tender years. 
 The manufacturers retorted by pictures, equally 
 distressing, and equally true to life, of rural 
 poverty and dependence. The landowners sus- 
 pected the manufacturers of desiring the repeal 
 of the Corn Duty, and the ruin of agriculture, 
 in order that the labour of the mills might be 
 cheaper ; the manufacturers demanded the 
 removal of a system, miscalled protection of 
 native industry, which protected the rents of 
 the squires, but left the labourer unprotected 
 against competition. The one imputation may 
 seem to be partly justified by the strenuous 
 opposition which many Free-traders, notably 
 Peel, Bright, Cobden and Villiers, offered to 
 legislation for the control of the factory system, 
 — e.g. to Fielden's Ten Hours Bill (1846) ; the 
 other by such maladroit defences as that of the 
 protectionist vvho clinched the argument by 
 asking how country gentlemen could provide 
 dowries for their daughters if the Corn Laws 
 were repealed. 
 
 Bright, at any rate, who then and always 
 regarded the doctrines which Cobden learned 
 
138 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 from the economists, and expounded with 
 matchless skill to Parliament and people, as 
 convincing to any ordinary intelligence, believed 
 that, in resisting repeal, the landowners were 
 sinning against the light, levying tribute on 
 industry, and maintaining for selfish purposes 
 a system that impoverished the nation. Thus he 
 entered politics as a sworn enemy of oligarch- 
 ical privilege. By the reciprocation of this 
 enmity Bright was held up as an extremist, a 
 revolutionary, an overturner of institutions. 
 Yet I believe that a candid examination of his 
 speeches and letters will reveal him as a man 
 whose habit of mind was essentially and fun- 
 damentally conservative. No reformer was 
 ever less of an idealogue ; none more distrustful 
 of violent or disorderly methods. 
 
 While this epoch-making strife was waging 
 between the old aristocracy and the middle 
 class, the class of wage-earners was divided 
 or indifferent. Artisans interested in politics 
 for the most part went with the Chartists, who 
 were not friendly to the League. A significant 
 incident in Bright' s early career was a debate 
 at Northampton (1844) between him and the 
 leader of the Chartists, Feargus O'Connor, 
 
BRIGHT AS ECONOMIST 139 
 
 who supported the Corn Law. Thus, although 
 Bright dehghted in large popular audiences, 
 there was nothing in the work of the League 
 to make him what he became later as member 
 for Birmingham, the leader of a movement 
 for the admission of artisans to full citizenship. 
 Secondly, the victory of the Anti-Corn-Law 
 League was also a victory of Economists, of 
 men disposed to measure national prosperity 
 in terms of money earned and saved, zealous 
 for the national wealth, and for a scientific 
 theory of the national wealth. It was natural 
 that such men should be economists in another 
 sense, complaining of the waste of the resources 
 of the nation by taxation larger than was 
 necessary for the legitimate needs of the State. 
 Here Bright worked with Hume and Moles- 
 worth, the spokesmen of the Philosophical 
 Radicals in this matter. Many of you may 
 remember that, when rooms were decorated 
 in his honour, one of the mottoes was always 
 " A Free Breakfast Table " ; he wished the 
 State to dispense with all taxation on common 
 articles of food. Nay more, he went so far 
 as to assent to the policy of a Financial Reform 
 Association, which desired to abolish all indirect 
 
140 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 taxation, and would have given us not only 
 free (i.e. untaxed) food, but also free beer 
 and free tobacco. 
 
 This — the cry for retrenchment — is the 
 connecting link between the first and the second 
 of Bright' s enterprises. The results of the 
 Reform of 1832 had disappointed the Economists. 
 The middle-class Parliament had indeed abolished 
 the corn duties, accepted the principle of Free 
 Trade, reformed the Poor Law, and rendered 
 other services to sound economics ; but it 
 had failed to curb the rapacity of the Exchequer. 
 In 1849, when the Economists put their protest 
 on record, they were able to complain that the 
 national expenditure had increased by nearly 
 £10,000,000 in fourteen years, and had reached 
 the alarming amount of £54,000,000. Bright 
 conceived the hope that a new reform of the 
 Parlimentary system would produce a House 
 of Commons better disposed to check national 
 extravagance. To this proposal Cobden assented 
 with some reluctance — for his faith in the 
 middle-class regime was less easily shaken 
 than that of Bright. 
 
 Bright' s advocacy of a new measure of Parlia- 
 mentary reform began as early as 1848 ; but 
 
FIRST SPEECH IN BIRMINGHAM 141 
 
 the popular movement of which he was the 
 leader may be said to have been initiated by 
 the first speech that he made to his new con- 
 stituents — almost exactly fifty years ago (Octo- 
 ber 27, 1858). As I mention that speech I 
 cannot but recall vivid descriptions of its 
 extraordinary effect which I heard from 
 the lips of two Birmingham politicians who 
 have since followed Bright into the eternal 
 silence — Mr. Powell Williams and Mr. Bunce. 
 Mr. Bunce was at that time editor of a Tory 
 newspaper here. When he heard Bright his 
 conscience began to trouble him ; he found 
 conviction of sin ; he resigned his occupation, 
 and Birmingham might have lost one of its most 
 useful citizens but for a fortunate vacancy in 
 the editorship of the Daily Post. Remember 
 that the part taken by Birmingham in the 
 agitation for Free Trade had been inconsider- 
 able, but that in the earlier struggle for Parlia- 
 mentary reform our city had led the country. 
 Many of the veterans of that conflict, the men 
 who, as Bright phrased it, had " shaken the 
 fabric of privilege to its base," survived to 
 welcome the new leader to Birmingham ; and 
 in their presence, appealing to their white 
 
142 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 hairs, he called on their sons to join him in a 
 new campaign against the old enemy. 
 
 But here an inevitable question compels 
 another digression. How did it come to pass 
 that the Lancashire statesman, the friend of 
 Richard Cobden, Alderman of Manchester, the 
 champion of the cotton spinners, came to 
 Birmingham at all ? The cause of Bright's rejec- 
 tion by the Liberals of Manchester was, in 
 general, his persistent antagonism to Palmerston 
 — one of the two Whig aristocrats who com- 
 peted for the lead of the Liberal party, and 
 at that time the only man competent to form 
 a Liberal administration ; and, in particular, 
 his vehement opposition to the policy that had 
 involved the country in the Crimean War. Bright 
 and Palmerston were in character and disposi- 
 tion most strongly antipathetic ; and so long 
 as Palmerston was a Liberal leader. Bright 
 found it impossible to be a loyal member of 
 the party. Bright always held and expressed 
 the strongest aversion to a policy of fidgety 
 interference in European affairs, and cherished 
 a special hatred for a phrase that was then 
 often on the lips of statesmen — the " balance 
 of power " — which seemed to him to serve as a 
 
 I 
 
BRIGHT AND PALMERSTON 143 
 
 pretext for a great deal of perilous and provoc- 
 ative intermeddling. Such intermeddling, in 
 Bright' s view, had often endangered peace ; 
 and now it had at last brought its natural 
 consequence in an international embroilment, 
 and a war waged at the other end of Europe for 
 the sake of a quarrel in which the interest of 
 this country was remote, if not iUusory. 
 It cannot be stated too distinctly that neither 
 in 1854, nor at any other crisis, did Bright, as 
 a politician, lay down the principle of peace 
 at any price. His maxim was : No interfer- 
 ence with other nations, except where British 
 interests were directly involved. Time does 
 not permit me to discuss the question whether 
 or not Bright was justified in the view that war 
 might have been averted without dishonour ; 
 but I do not think any one can read Bright' s 
 speeches, and compare them with Kinglake's 
 narrative of the diplomatic proceedings, without 
 admitting that Bright successfully convicted 
 Lord Aberdeen's Government of some grave 
 errors, of vacillation and inconsistency, of 
 slovenly definition of their purposes, and of 
 weakness in letting themselves be twisted out 
 of the straight path by the obstinacy of 
 
144 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 their ambassador, and the cunning of their 
 disreputable ally. We now know from Greville's 
 Diary that Bright' s view of the diplomatic 
 blunders was shared to the full by a competent, 
 well-informed, and unbiassed observer. 
 
 The five Crimean speeches — four of which 
 are to be found in Thorold Rogers's edition 
 — are in my judgment the finest flower of Bright' s 
 incomparable eloquence — forcible in argument, 
 measured in denunciation, and glowing with 
 an emotion that is generous, humane, and most 
 assuredly patriotic. Note also, as a proof of 
 his courage and candour, that the Government 
 that made the war, the Government that 
 he denounced as an " incapable and guilty 
 administration," was the first Government 
 formed on a Free-trade basis, being composed 
 of a coalition of Liberals with Conservatives, 
 like Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, who 
 had separated from their own party for the 
 sake of Free Trade. 
 
 If these speeches won immortal renown 
 for Bright' s eloquence, they imperilled his 
 popularity, and exposed him to cruel opprob- 
 rium. How bitter was the resentment he 
 provoked you may judge from three well- 
 
THE CRIMEAN WAR 145 
 
 known lines in Tennyson's poem " Maud." 
 This fragment of satire was universally believed 
 to have been aimed at Bright until we were 
 informed in Tennyson's biography that the 
 poet himself disowned the application. The 
 internal evidence, however, appears to me 
 to be decisive ; and I prefer to believe that 
 the poet's memory misled him when his wrath 
 had subsided. The hero of the poem, a glorifier 
 of the war policy, goes to a peace meeting and 
 listens with much disgust to a speaker whom 
 he describes as — 
 
 The broad-brimmed hawker of holy things, 
 Whose ear is stuffed with his cotton, and rings 
 Even in dreams to the chink of his pence. 
 
 Remembering that the only two politicians of 
 the first rank who protested against the war 
 were Cobden and Bright, observe, first, that 
 the person here satirized was a Quaker — 
 " broad-brimmed." For many years both be- 
 fore and after this time. Bright, and no other 
 public man except Bright, was always repre- 
 sented in Punch as wearing a broad-brimmed 
 hat, though in fact he did not advertise his 
 opinions by means of his head-gear, but wore 
 
 L.F.M. L 
 
146 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 hats of any shape that was in common use. 
 Secondly, he was a cotton-spinner — " his cot- 
 ton " ; and " his ears were stuffed with his 
 cotton," that is, his interest in the cotton trade 
 made him deaf to the voice of patriotism. 
 Thirdly, he was a "hawker of holy things"; 
 a phrase which the future annotator of Tenny- 
 son will have no difficulty in explaining by 
 reference to Bright' s characteristic habit of 
 appealing to the moral law, and especially 
 of citing the words of Holy Scripture in 
 political speeches. That habit exposed him 
 to malevolent imputations ; but in a thoroughly 
 genuine character there was nothing more 
 genuine than the simplicity of his piety. It 
 may have been a Puritan, but it was not a 
 Puritanical, habit ; what Bright inherited was 
 the earnestness of the real Puritans, not the 
 hypocrisy of the sham Puritans. Our com- 
 mentator may also remind the reader how 
 Palmerston had recently insulted Bright by 
 calling him "the hon. and rev. gentleman." 
 Fourthly, *' his ears rang even in dreams to the 
 chink of his pence." No accusation was more 
 constantly brought against Bright than that his 
 zeal for national thrift made him negligent of 
 
DEMOCRACY FOR ITS OWN SAKE 147 
 
 national honour ; that he judged policies 
 by asking which was the cheapest. 
 
 With such a view of Bright' s pohtical char- 
 acter prevalent even in his own class and within 
 his own party, we may claim the virtue of 
 magnanimity for the Birmingham which elected 
 him without a contest so soon after his rejection 
 by Manchester. I have said that Bright's 
 democratic sympathies developed rapidly from 
 the time of his association with the men of 
 Birmingham ; no doubt the war, and the 
 odium he incurred by opposing the war, 
 strengthened his distrust of middle-class govern- 
 ment, and his determination to look for sym- 
 pathy to the unenfranchised thousands who 
 were knocking at the door of the constitution. 
 He no longer demanded reform chiefly for 
 the sake of retrenchment, but as one desiring 
 democracy for its own sake. In his earlier 
 speeches he had laid most stress on such a redis- 
 tribution as should give more power to the in- 
 dustrial towns, and less to rural districts ; now 
 his chief purpose was to strengthen the State by 
 the enrolment of an army of competent citizens. 
 To treat the settlement of 1832 as final was, he 
 said, '' to erect the middle class into a sort of 
 
148 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 oligarchy." " The class which has hitherto 
 ruled in this country has failed miserably. If a 
 class has failed, let us try the nation. That is 
 our faith, that is our purpose, that is our cry : 
 Let us try the nation ! " 
 
 Neither of the two parties professed hostility 
 to Reform ; neither seemed to be in earnest 
 about Reform. The Liberal Government in 
 1852, the Coalition Government in 1854, the 
 Conservative Government in 1859, ^^'^^ ^^^ 
 Liberal Government in i860, all brought in 
 Reform Bills, and then dropped them. Finally, 
 the Liberal Bill of 1866, which was really meant 
 to pass, was defeated by the AduUamite seces- 
 sion, and the opportunity passed to Disraeli. 
 All this time a popular party was forming that 
 demanded the new enfranchisement with a 
 resolution that grew in intensity ; and of that 
 party Bright was the acknowledged leader. 
 Never was there a more peaceable agitation ; 
 never such astonishing success in arousing 
 popular enthusiasm to the highest degree of 
 fervour, yet restraining it within the limits of 
 good order. The Reform Bill of 1867 was in 
 truth the crowning triumph of Bright' s career. 
 The Bill was Disraeh's Bill, as the Bill that 
 
THE VICTORY OF REFORM 149 
 
 repealed the Corn Law had been Peel's Bill ; but 
 just as Peel in 1846 insisted on handing the 
 laurel wreath on to Cobden, so with equal pro- 
 priety Disraeli might have hailed Bright as the 
 real victor of the long battle for reform. Both 
 the two parties had been aristocratic coteries ; 
 Bright had democratized the Liberal party by 
 sustained effort, and Disraeli had democratized 
 the Conservative party by a single stroke of 
 genius — unless indeed you prefer to attribute 
 both achievements to the unseen and impersonal 
 forces of progress. 
 
 The view of Bright' s career which I desire to 
 submit to your consideration is this. He is 
 a figure of first-rate importance in the political 
 history of the Victorian Era, because, both 
 before and after 1867, he was the chief political 
 educator of the men who in that year were called 
 to the full duties of citizenship. The appre- 
 hensions with which men, who were neither 
 foolish nor ill-instructed, looked forward to 
 the results of the leap in the dark, may be 
 read in the speeches of Lowe and Salisbury, 
 the leaders of the recalcitrant Liberals and 
 the recalcitrant Conservatives, or, more con- 
 veniently, in Carlyle's furious pamphlet, " Shoot- 
 
150 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 ing Niagara." None of you, I hope, will assent 
 to Carlyle's view that the achievement of '' John 
 of Bromwicham " had been " the calling in 
 of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, 
 bribeability, and amenability to beer and 
 balderdash " ; but on the other hand, perhaps 
 none of you will deny that there must always 
 be grave perils in any new democratic experi- 
 ment. I beg you to reflect how much more dis- 
 tasteful the immediate results of reform might 
 have been to those who desire an orderly, secure, 
 and measured progress, if the hero of trium- 
 phant democracy forty years ago had not been 
 a man of moderate aims, of equable temper, 
 void of personal ambition, and singularly immune 
 from the temptations that beset a successful 
 demagogue. 
 
 The victory of 1867 made a great change in 
 Bright's career. He had hated Palmerston, 
 and he had not loved Russell ; but at last he 
 had found a leader whom he could follow 
 without misgiving, and thenceforward until 
 the catastrophe of 1886, he was content to serve 
 his country as a loyal member of the Liberal 
 party. He became a Minister of the Crown 
 with much reluctance, and would have declined 
 
BRIGHT AS ADMINISTRATOR 151 
 
 office but for the urgent remonstrances of his 
 friends. He exposed himself to some reproach 
 by refusing the office of Secretary for India, 
 for he had been an unsparing critic of the faults 
 of the British administration of India. But 
 in truth he was not well qualified for any office 
 that required diligent attention to details of 
 business. He was constitutionally indolent, 
 and a hard worker only under the stimulus of a 
 strong sense of duty ; and he had already been 
 warned by illness that mental exertion was 
 perilous to him. We have the testimony of 
 his colleagues to the value of his counsels in the 
 deliberations of the Cabinets ; but as an admin- 
 istrator he gained no new distinction. One 
 important legislative achievement is put to 
 his credit. He had been the earliest and most 
 persistent advocate of state-aided land purchase 
 by tenants as a remedy for Irish agrarian 
 troubles. The clauses in the Irish Church Act 
 and the Irish Land Act by which this experi- 
 ment, since so largely developed, was initiated, 
 are known as the Bright Clauses. 
 
 In other ways, no doubt, Bright contributed 
 to the successes of the first and second Gladstone 
 administrations ; but — let me repeat it — it is 
 
152 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 as a political educator that he has a place in 
 history. He brought to that task an over- 
 mastering earnestness of purpose, unsuspected 
 integrity and candour, generous sympathy, 
 an untroubled faith in the doctrines of the 
 Philosophical Radicals, and that luminous and 
 persuasive eloquence that entitles him to the 
 first place among the orators of his century. 
 The words of his speeches are on record ; and 
 many of you can recall the dignity of his manner, 
 the melody of his voice, the refinement of his 
 noble features, the restraint of his gestures. 
 Those who never saw him may read something 
 of his manner and character in the fine portrait 
 that adorns our Art Gallery ; or they may try 
 to imagine a man as different as it is possible 
 to conceive from the coarse-featured, bawling, 
 gesticulating demagogue of the Punch cartoons. 
 The most important part of Bright' s political 
 teaching may be summarized under four heads : 
 Democracy, or trust in the people ; Religious 
 Equality ; Peace, or non-interference abroad ; 
 Laisser-faire, or non-interference at home. Of 
 his services to democracy I have said all I 
 wish to say. As for Religious Equality it is 
 sufficient to remind you that he witnessed and 
 
NON-INTERVENTION 153 
 
 helped to forward four important enactments 
 based on this principle, viz., the abolition of 
 Church rates, the admission of Jews to Parlia- 
 ment, the abrogation of religious tests at the 
 ancient Universities, and the Act which estab- 
 lished the rights of Nonconformists in parish 
 churchyards. He lent his eloquence to the 
 service of the Liberation Society ; and his only 
 disagreement with Cobden, who was a Church- 
 man, was when he opposed, and Cobden sup- 
 ported, the increase of the Maynooth Grant. 
 To what has been said about his protest 
 against the war with Russia, it has to be added 
 that in 1883 he resigned office immediately 
 after the bombardment of Alexandria ; and 
 that he was always on the alert to raise his 
 voice against any adventurous policy that 
 reminded him of the bad days of Palmerston. 
 He would not tolerate any intervention that 
 might possibly lead to bloodshed, even when 
 it was represented that humanity required 
 British aid for the oppressed ; Britain, he 
 protested, had no vocation to be " the knight 
 errant of the human race." It is true that he 
 once said " Perish Savoy " ; it is not true that 
 he ever said " Perish India." I will not venture 
 
154 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 to estimate to what degree he succeeded in 
 indoctrinating the democratic mind with his 
 principle of non-intervention ; but it may at 
 least be said that the people will never allow 
 Great Britain to go to war without some stronger 
 reason than was considered sufficient in 1854. 
 It is when we contemplate Bright' s ardent 
 devotion to the old Radical doctrine of laisser- 
 faire that we realize how far we have drifted 
 from his moorings. He was by no means 
 content with the application of this doctrine 
 to the fiscal or commercial system. " Most 
 of our evils," he declared, " arise from legislative 
 interference." He opposed the Ten Hours Act 
 as illegitimate interference with freedom of 
 contract, although his friend Mill had distinctly 
 excepted the regulation of hours of labour from 
 the general doctrine. When further factory 
 legislation was proposed he said he would prefer 
 to " leave the country and go somewhere else 
 where capital and labour were allowed to fight 
 their own battle on their own ground without 
 legislative interference." He resented the ex- 
 tension of the Truck Act. He objected to 
 compulsory vaccination, not because it was 
 vaccination, but because it was compulsory ; 
 
LAISSER-FAIRE 155 
 
 and he did not like compulsory education. He 
 was for many years one of the advocates of a 
 voluntary system of education, i.e. a system 
 under which schools should be neither controlled 
 nor supported by the State or the municipalities. 
 This opinion he changed ; but it is probable 
 that he was saved from a disagreement with 
 his Birmingham friends by the illness that 
 secluded him from public work in 1870. He 
 warned the Trade Unions that it was impos- 
 sible to keep up wages by combination. He was a 
 friend of temperance, but refused support to 
 temperance legislation. The officials of the 
 Board of Trade told Mr. Chamberlain that, 
 when Bright was President, he rarely interfered 
 with their discretion, and when he did do so it 
 was always to countermand, never to direct, the 
 exercise of the powers of the Department. 
 
 It is impossible to avoid burning questions 
 in dealing with the career of a man whose 
 work consisted of the enunciation of very empha- 
 tic opinions on topics of which many are still con- 
 troversial. Bright' s confident assertion of his 
 judgments exposed him to the charge of being 
 intolerant and dogmatic ; but looked at from 
 the other side this characteristic will appear 
 
156 JOHN BRIGHT 
 
 to be the virtue of a man too honest for com- 
 promise and caring more for principles than 
 for tactics. Observe also that no man more 
 often enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing propos- 
 als which he had supported as one of a small 
 minority adopted by general consent. Such 
 an experience tends to fortify self-confidence. 
 Yet it seems safe to conjecture that, even in 
 an audience so diversified as this, there is no man 
 or woman who does not dissent from some of 
 the opinions which Bright advanced in his 
 uncompromising way. Such indeed must be 
 the posthumous fate of all political teachers, 
 when the eternal truths of one generation have 
 become the discarded errors of the next. Bright 
 had a great multitude of admiring disciples ; 
 but the successful educator is not the man whose 
 pupils turn his sayings into articles of faith, 
 but he who has inspired them with the spirit 
 of honest inquiry and independent judgment. 
 Bright was the preacher of a political creed, 
 but he was also the apostle of a political religion, 
 — and religions live longer than creeds. He 
 taught the men of Birmingham to treat politics, 
 the art and science of national well-being, as a 
 study worthy of the most earnest attention ; 
 
A POLITICAL RELIGION 157 
 
 he never spoke without hfting them above the 
 pettiness and flippancy of daily poHtical conten- 
 tion ; and he never allowed them to forget one 
 central doctrine, which really is an eternal 
 verity, though all the maxims, and watchwords 
 of all the parties should perish, that the moral 
 law was enacted for states and empires as well 
 as for men and citizens, and that even in politics 
 the path of righteousness is the way of salvation . 
 
BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 Born in Birmingham, 1825. Died, 1901. 
 
 By J. H. B. Masterman 
 
 There are two kinds of citizens that a city 
 like ours ought to dehght to honour. There 
 are the citizens who, often coming into the city 
 from outside, have spent their hves in its ser- 
 vice ; and there are the citizens who, equipped 
 here, have gone out into the world and played 
 their part in shaping the life of the nation. 
 
 Bishop Westcott belongs to the second class. 
 After he left school his connexion with Birming- 
 ham virtually ended, though he never ceased 
 to think with gratitude of the early lessons 
 learnt here. 
 
 King Edward's School, Birmingham, gave 
 to the Church of England three of her greatest 
 leaders in the last generation. And these 
 three leaders represent in a very interesting way 
 the many-sidedness of Church life. Light- 
 foot's special province was the past. His vast 
 range of historical knowledge threw light on 
 much that was obscure in the early history of 
 
i6o BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 the Christian society. Benson's special pro- 
 vince was the present, his great desire was to 
 make the English Church an effective instru- 
 ment for meeting the actual needs of to-day. 
 But Westcott's special province was the future. 
 There was something of the prophet's vision 
 always in those keen eyes of his. In a very 
 real sense he watched all his life long for the 
 coming of Christ. 
 
 The outer facts of Westcott's life can be 
 soon told. He was born in Birmingham in 
 1825. His father, a man of retiring habits, 
 was a keen botanist, and was for some years 
 lecturer on Botany at the Sydenham College 
 Medical School — the precursor of Queen's Col- 
 lege, and therefore of the Medical Faculty of 
 this University. From him the Bishop inherited 
 his great love for flowers. In due course young 
 Westcott proceeded to King Edward's School, 
 then under Dr. Prince Lee. There he won the 
 respect of his schoolfellows by his intellectual 
 ability and — perhaps even more — by his high 
 moral character. From early life Westcott's 
 religious instincts were strong. One of his school 
 friends notices his habit of talking about " points 
 of theology, problems of morality and the ethics 
 
CAMBRIDGE i6i 
 
 of politics." But though studious and thought- 
 ful beyond his years, young Westcott was not 
 a prig. 
 
 The period of Westcott' s childhood was one 
 of political ferment in Birmingham. Among 
 his earliest recollections was one of Thomas 
 Attwood leading a great procession of men to a 
 Political Union meeting in 183 1. A few years 
 later Chartism led to serious disturbances in 
 the city and Westcott referred long afterwards 
 to the deep impression made on him by the 
 experiences of that time. 
 
 From the school he passed to Cambridge, 
 where he won many academic honours. 
 After taking his degree he stayed up for some 
 years, and among the pupils with whom he read 
 during this time were two old King Edward School 
 boys of a younger generation, with whom he kept 
 up a lifelong friendship — Joseph Barber Light- 
 foot, afterwards the great scholar and Bishop 
 of Durham, and Edward White Benson, after- 
 wards Archbishop of Canterbury. Another of 
 his pupils was F. J. A. Hort, who was destined 
 to be his colleague in one of his greatest tasks — 
 the revision of the text of the Greek New Testa- 
 ment. A few words may be said here about 
 
 L.F.M. M 
 
i62 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 Westcott as a teacher. All his teaching work 
 was marked by two special characteristics. 
 The first of these was his intense enthusiasm 
 for his subject — an enthusiasm comprehensive 
 enough to include Greek particles and social 
 reforms. It was noble, yet also pathetic, to 
 hear Dr. Westcott trying to awaken in a class- 
 room of undergraduates the same enthusiasm 
 that he felt for the subtler meaning of some 
 Greek construction or the views of some 
 unfamiliar Christian Father. The best men 
 responded to the stimulus of such teaching, and 
 even the more unresponsive carried away the 
 startling impression that it was possible for a 
 man to feel the same intense interest in matters 
 of scholarship that we most of us bestow on 
 other, and perhaps less worthy objects. The 
 other characteristic of Dr. Westcott's teaching 
 was its thoroughness. It would almost be 
 true to say that he and Lightfoot introduced 
 a new standard of thoroughness into English 
 theological work. While rivalling the great 
 German scholars of the time in minuteness of 
 research, they brought to the task of the com- 
 mentator a breadth of view that we often miss 
 in German theological work. A remark once 
 
LITERARY WORK 163 
 
 made about Lightfoot would be equally true of 
 Westcott — where he has reaped, little is left for 
 the gleaners. 
 
 A remarkable example of the patient labour 
 of the true scholar is afforded by the so-called 
 Cambridge Text of the Greek New Testament. 
 In 1853 Westcott and his friend Hort decided 
 to prepare a revised text of the New Testament. 
 Twenty-eight years passed before the now fa- 
 mous volumes that announced the completion 
 of their task saw the light. During these years 
 every variant reading had been subjected to a 
 detailed investigation such as had probably 
 never before been given to it, and whatever may 
 be the ultimate verdict of criticism on Westcott 
 and Hort's text, it will remain one of the finest 
 products of English scholarship of the last 
 century. 
 
 In 1852, being anxious to marry a lady whom 
 he had known from early boyhood, he accepted 
 a mastership at Harrow, where he stayed for 
 nearly eighteen years. His work at the school 
 left him leisure for theological writing, and 
 during these years he produced a number of 
 theological works of first-rate importance. 
 At a time when many Churchmen still regarded 
 
i64 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 historical criticism and modern science with 
 distrust, Westcott was prepared to accept 
 both. He believed that the remedy for rash 
 conclusions lay not in obscurantism but in 
 long and patient investigation. 
 
 In historical criticism it is specially important 
 to realize that the most startling and revolu- 
 tionary opinion is not necessarily the truest. At 
 the time when Westcott' s earlier books were 
 written, the accepted conclusions as to date and 
 authorship of the books of the New Testament 
 were being challenged with great confidence. 
 He lived to see a large body of the most com- 
 petent scholars returning to the more conserva- 
 tive views that he had defended. 
 
 No account of Westcott' s life at Harrow would 
 be complete without some reference to a scheme 
 that at one time greatly attracted him. He 
 abhorred the growing luxury of modern life, 
 and desired to see a simpler standard of living. 
 But he felt that this simpler standard must be 
 exhibited in family and not merely in individual 
 life. So he suggested what he called a '* Coeno- 
 bium," a kind of College of families living a 
 common life under simple rules of work, devo- 
 tion and expenditure. 
 
RETURN TO CAMBRIDGE 165 
 
 The old monastic rule of poverty, chastity 
 and obedience was to take the form of a pledge 
 of poverty, study and devotion. He wrote an 
 article on the subject in the Contemporary 
 Review, and corresponded about it with his 
 friends. He was, as his son says, " very much 
 in earnest " about it, but, like Coleridge's 
 Pantocracy and many other similar schemes, it 
 never reached the stage of practical experiment. 
 
 In 1869 Westcott accepted a Canonry at Peter- 
 borough under Bishop Magee ; and it is an 
 interesting comment on the current ideas of fat 
 livings and comfortable Canonries that it was 
 only by banishing meat from the family 
 breakfast-table that the future Bishop managed 
 to live within his income. After a time, largely 
 through the influence of Lightfoot, he was 
 elected to the Regius Professorship of Theology 
 in the University of Cambridge, and returned 
 there to do much important service in the 
 organization of the theological work of the 
 University. For a time he held this office in 
 conjunction with a Canonry at Westminster, 
 and then, in 1890, he was called, at the age 
 of 65, to succeed his old pupil and friend, 
 Lightfoot, as Bishop of Durham. 
 
i66 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 It was during his eleven years at Durham 
 that the Bishop's deep interest in social and 
 labour problems became known to the public, 
 though his friends and pupils knew that for 
 many years he had thought deeply about these 
 things. The most striking event of these years 
 was his successful intervention in the great 
 Coal Strike. I need not tell the story in de- 
 tail, but it illustrates the kind of service that 
 an impartial and sympathetic outsider can 
 render in trade disputes. The Coal Strike had 
 lasted about three months, and directly affected 
 over 80,000 workers. Unwillingness on both 
 sides to " give in " prevented any settlement, 
 though the North of England was suffering 
 acute distress. What was wanted was the 
 intervention of some wise counsellor, whom 
 both parties could trust, to smooth the friction 
 that made negotiations difficult. Here was 
 the Bishop's opportunity. He had won the 
 confidence of the Durham miners, and his char- 
 acter and position secured for him the respect 
 of the employers. At the Conference that met 
 at Bishop Auckland, under his chairmanship, 
 he laid down the principle, the recognition of 
 which alone, in his opinion, could secure last- 
 
THE COAL STRIKE 167 
 
 iiig peace — the principle that the true relation 
 of capital and labour was not hostility but 
 fellowship. After much discussion, the workers' 
 representatives agreed to a reduction of 10 per 
 cent, and the establishment of a Conciliation 
 Board to avert future discord. 
 
 Will you bear with me if I say just a word 
 about the lesson that seems to me to be taught 
 by this incident ? Many Churchmen believe — 
 as Bishop Westcott certainly did — that the 
 present industrial system, by which the worker 
 is divorced from any effective responsibility 
 for the organization of the industry to which 
 he contributes the only capital he has — his own 
 life — cannot be regarded as a satisfactory or 
 permanent solution of the industrial problem. 
 But though it is the duty of the Church to 
 bear witness, in season and out of season, to 
 those principles of brotherhood and social 
 justice out of which alone any better solution 
 can come, any attempt to identify the Church 
 with particular schemes of reconstruction, and 
 to make the Christian society an instrument of 
 industrial revolution, can only mean the loss 
 of priceless opportunities of effective social 
 service. The future must grow out of the 
 
i68 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 present, not by embittered contest and the 
 upheaval of the foundations of society, but 
 by the awakening power of ideal sthat make 
 selfishness manifestly ignoble and idleness and 
 luxury disgraceful. Prince Lee's last words to 
 his old pupil — " Be not afraid, only believe " — 
 may seem tame as a watchword of social 
 progress. But courage and faith constitute 
 a mightier agent of social regeneration than we 
 have yet learned to recognize. 
 
 I cannot spend much time in speaking of 
 Bishop Westcott's lifelong work as a theological 
 teacher. Every student of the Bible is his 
 debtor for years of strenuous labour on the 
 text of the New Testament, and for his com- 
 mentaries on the writings of St. John and the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. But the distinctive 
 feature of Westcott's teaching was his effort 
 to keep theology in touch with life. I began 
 my career at Cambridge just after he had left 
 for Durham, and I found his influence still 
 potent among the younger men who had grown 
 up under the inspiration of his guidance. The 
 ideal he had impressed on us all might be 
 summed up in the one word " Service." The 
 true measure of life's wealth was not in what 
 
CITIZENSHIP 169 
 
 it gets but in what it gives. " Shall I stay in 
 Cambridge as a don or go abroad as a mis- 
 sionary ? " ** Shall I become a schoolmaster 
 or a curate in a slum parish ? " To all such 
 questions he taught us to apply the one test — 
 the test of service. 
 
 And this idea of service was not narrowly 
 restricted within ecclesiastical hedgerows. All 
 civic life spoke to him of the same ideal. In 
 a sermon at the Birmingham Church Con- 
 gress in 1893, on " Citizenship, Human and 
 Divine," he referred to the great public build- 
 ings of our city that had grown up here since 
 the days of his boyhood : 
 
 Every great building which represents the social 
 life of the city — a city, alas, still without a Cathedral — 
 schools, libraries, art galleries, halls, council chambers, 
 courts of justice, have arisen since then. Taken together, 
 this splendid array of municipal institutions is an impres- 
 sive witness to the fulness of life. Each one ought to be, 
 each one may be, a sanctuary in which fellow-citizens 
 of the saints meet to prepare for their work and to fulfil 
 it. Each one — whatever occasions may seem to have 
 been lost — is still a sign and a call to men who are citizens 
 of heaven and earth. 
 
 Westcott had no sympathy for the man whose 
 religion did not rouse in him the sense of civic 
 duty. He felt that the great social evils of 
 
170 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 our time were a trumpet-call to the Christian 
 Society. Speaking in Hartlepool about the 
 problem of overcrowding he said : 
 
 The facts as to overcrowding and the consequences 
 of the facts, are not always in evidence, and we have dull 
 imaginations. I plead then in the name of our Faith, 
 I plead on behalf of those who by God's will are "joint-heirs 
 with us of the grace of life " that in every urban and rural 
 council some from amongst us should learn the facts as 
 to overcrowding and make them known. The evils will 
 then be met. The awakened Christian conscience will 
 find no rest till the remediable causes of moral infection 
 are removed. To corrupt the development of life is not 
 less criminal than to maim the body. We are guUty of 
 conniving at the defilement of temples of God till we faco 
 the problem according to our opportunities and strive te 
 solve it. 
 
 But all social service needs knowledge as 
 well as zeal, and it was the realization of this 
 truth that led Bishop Westcott to take a lead- 
 ing share in the establishment of the Christian 
 Social Union, of which he was the first Presi- 
 dent^an office in which he has been succeeded 
 by our own Bishop of Birmingham. For the 
 object of the Christian Social Union is not to 
 issue manifestos or organize movements, but 
 to gather Churchmen together for the careful 
 study of actual facts. It exists to persuade 
 clergymen to read bluebooks, and district 
 
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION 171 
 
 visitors to study Acts of Parliament, and church- 
 wardens to explore slums. It seeks to educate 
 the conscience of the Christian Society. And 
 no one who is in touch with the Church life 
 of to-day can fail to recognize the awakening 
 of the English Church to a new consciousness 
 of her social mission. 
 
 Few movements awakened a stronger sym- 
 pathy in Westcott than the University Exten- 
 sion movement. He cared for it because he 
 saw in it the beginning of a new bond of sym- 
 pathy between the University and the larger 
 world outside. In a Conference at Cambridge 
 twenty years ago he drew a glowing picture of 
 the time when " miners in Northumbrian coal- 
 fields, artisans in Midland factories, toilers in 
 the country and in the cities, will repeat with 
 glad pride what is not our motto only but their 
 motto also, when they find their lives enlightened 
 and purified, I will venture to say ennobled and 
 hallowed, by the conception of higher education 
 which it has been the privilege of this University 
 to bring home to them." 
 
 Had he been alive to-day, and able to revisit 
 his native place, I am sure that two things would 
 have specially rejoiced his heart — the fulfil- 
 
172 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 merit of his cherished hopes in the establish- 
 ment of a bishopric of Birmingham (and, may 
 I add, the appointment of his old Harrow pupil, 
 Dr. Gore, as the first bishop), and the establish- 
 ment of our University as a centre for the 
 educational life of the Midlands. 
 
 What he would have said to us is, I think, 
 indicated by some words of his at a meeting of 
 the London University Extension Society in 
 1888 :— 
 
 " Special training is not the work of a Univer- 
 sity, and, if I may speak my whole mind, I 
 confess that I am alarmed and ashamed when 
 I hear the results of science treated as instru- 
 ments for successful competition ; when I hear 
 the language, the methods, the aims of war 
 transferred to the conditions of commerce and 
 the circumstances of daily life. No University 
 will lend itself to the pursuit of such an end. 
 Universities exist to maintain and propagate a 
 nobler faith. So far as we have entered into 
 their spirit, we believe, and we strive to spread 
 the belief, that life is as the man is ; that if a 
 man is sordid, selfish, narrow, mean, his life, 
 however affluent, will reflect his character ; 
 and, on the other hand, that there is about us 
 
UNIVERSITY IDEALS 173 
 
 an inexhaustible store of unrealized possibilities, 
 a treasure of spiritual wealth, open to the poor- 
 est, which grows with the using if only we know 
 how to use it. And we believe that true edu- 
 cation opens the eyes of the soul ; that it is a 
 strength in the difficulties which we must face ; 
 a solace in the sorrows that we must bear ; an 
 inspiration in interpreting the new truths which 
 claim to receive from us a harmonious place 
 beside the old ; that it offers to all a vision of a 
 larger order truly human and truly divine ; 
 that it is, in the noble words of your motto, * not 
 a means of livelihood, but a means of life.* " 
 
 But how came it that this rather shy and 
 retiring Christian scholar, protected by the 
 circumstances of his life from contact with the 
 squalid realities of modern industrialism, be- 
 came one of the great inspiring influences in 
 the " socializing " of Christian thought ? The 
 answer to that question brings us back to the 
 region of theology. Under the influence of the 
 great Augustine, Latin theology has dominated 
 Western thought for centuries. And Latin 
 theology starts from the fact of sin. Born 
 in a world dying of its own corruption, it 
 cries for revolution in the individual and in 
 
174 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 society. It stands armed before the world 
 that has crucified its Master. It calls men to 
 flee from the wrath to come. 
 
 Now in all this there is truth, but it is not the 
 whole truth. Bishop Westcott, like Frederick 
 Denison Maurice, was a disciple of the Greek 
 Fathers — Clement, Origen, Athanasius. And 
 the Greek Fathers begin not with sin but 
 with God and the Incarnation. They see 
 human life as Divine before they turn to 
 see it defiled and degraded. And therefore 
 the redemption of man means to them the 
 restoration of human life to its true condition 
 — the will of God done on earth as it is in Heaven. 
 Greek theology is the theology of evolution — of 
 a Divine purpose working in human society 
 for the restoration of the lost ideals of brother- 
 hood and fellowship. Founded on the truth 
 that God became human, it holds out to all men 
 the promise that man shall become Divine — 
 not Divine as an isolated being but in fellowship 
 with the whole society of redeemed humanity. 
 
 It was noticed by some close friends of West- 
 cott that he could only meet the worst exam- 
 ples of human depravity with blank incredulity. 
 He could not fit them into his scheme of things. 
 
THE INCARNATION 175 
 
 It was he who, characteristically, pointed out 
 the note of hope in the last outcry of Guido 
 in Browning's The Ring and the Book. 
 
 You cannot separate Westcott's theology 
 from his social teaching. In the Preface of his 
 last work, he writes : 
 
 I approached my subject in the light of the Incarna- 
 tion ; and I have endeavoured to show from first to last 
 how this central fact of history — the life of all life — illum- 
 inates the problems which meet us alike in our daily 
 work and in our boldest speculations. 
 
 So at a Conference on International Peace 
 — a subject very near to his heart — he said : 
 
 The question of international relations has not hitherto 
 been considered in the light of the Incarnation, and till 
 this has been done, I do not see that we can look for the 
 establishment of that peace which was heralded at the 
 nativity. 
 
 " The increase of popular power," he said on another 
 occasion, " involves the increase of popular responsibility, 
 and for the people, as has been truly said by non-Chris- 
 tian teachers, every question is finally a religious question." 
 
 But still less can you separate Westcott's 
 social teaching from his personality. Like all 
 really great teachers, he taught by what he was 
 more than by what he said. Words that seem 
 tame as we read them now came with the glow- 
 
176 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 ing force of passionate conviction to those who 
 heard them from him. His power did not 
 depend on any rhetorical abihty, or tricks of 
 oratory. He generally spoke in a quiet and 
 restrained manner, though sometimes there was 
 the note as of a trumpet in his high, thin voice. 
 But I doubt whether any other man of the last 
 generation had so great a power of raising any 
 question that he touched into the atmosphere 
 of eternal things. He made us see that Co-opera- 
 tion and Boards of Conciliation and Hague 
 Conferences had a spiritual meaning. His whole 
 life was one long protest against the identifica- 
 tion of spiritual with ecclesiastical things. 
 
 Westcott has often been called a mystic, and 
 a mystic he was if a mystic is a man who " sees 
 the infinite in things." In the long run a man 
 must either come to believe that all life is sacred 
 or that all life is secular. His Heaven must 
 have no temple, either because " the Lord God 
 Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it," 
 or because temples have no place in his con- 
 ception of life. 
 
 Like all mystics, Westcott was often charged 
 with obscurity. There is a very familiar 
 story of how ^Dr. Liddon once accounted for a 
 
SOCIAL TEACHING 177 
 
 sudden fog in the town by conjecturing that 
 Westcott must have opened his window ! There 
 is a certain class of mind that is always irritated 
 by any religious teacher who cannot be labelled. 
 But, mercifully for humanity, many of our 
 greatest teachers defy our attempts at classifi- 
 cation. 
 
 Was Bishop Westcott a Socialist ? Yes, if 
 by a Socialist you mean a man who believes, 
 with the intensest conviction, that every group 
 of men is meant to be a society and not a mere 
 aggregation of contending atoms. No, if by a 
 Socialist you mean a man who hopes to escape 
 from the confusion of our present social con- 
 ditions by bringing all alike under the despotism 
 of the State. In one of his latest utter- 
 ances, he defined the " momentous problem 
 of our age " as the reconciliation of " authority 
 with freedom, the united action of the Society 
 with the conscious and responsible co-operation 
 of all its members." 
 
 In many ways Westcott's social teaching 
 resembles that of Ruskin, of whose writings 
 he was a careful student. Both desire to secure 
 for every worker his share of the joy, as well 
 as the burden of labour. Both hold that 
 
 L.F.M. N 
 
178 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 " there is no wealth but life." Both plead for 
 simpler ideals, and nobler standards of life. 
 
 We may summarize what remains to be 
 said in the answer to two questions. What did 
 Birmingham do for Westcott ? and what did 
 Westcott do for England ? In regard to the 
 first question the Bishop left us in no doubt 
 as to the extent of the debt he conceived him- 
 self as owing to his native city. On the occa- 
 sion of his last visit to Birmingham he said : 
 
 It is impossible to describe the feeling with which 
 I stand here this evening in the hall of my native city 
 and look back to all that I owed to Birmingham in my school 
 years. Those were stirring years. We who passed through 
 them felt that the old order was changing, and that a 
 revolution was going on about us, the issue of which could 
 not be foreseen. The first event of which I have a clear 
 recollection was the meeting of the Political Union on 
 NewhaU Hill in 1831. I can see stiU the crown and Royal 
 Standard in front of the platform, which reassured my 
 childish heart, startled by wild words of violence and 
 rebellion. The Chartist movement followed soon after. 
 I listened to Fergus O'Connor, and I saw the blackened 
 ruins in the Bull Ring guarded by soldiers. Then came the 
 Corn Law Agitation and the Factory Acts. . . . They 
 were stirring times ; political, economic, social, religious 
 changes came in quick succession, and, looking forward 
 already to the work of a priest and teacher, I watched 
 them with the keenest interest. 
 
 Early impressions strike deepest ; and it 
 
INFLUENCE OF WESTCOTT 179 
 
 was Birmingham that kept Westcott's scholar 
 mind in touch with the realities of life and 
 that enabled him to keep the scholar's concen- 
 tration while he conquered the scholar's aloof- 
 ness. 
 
 What did Westcott give to England ? In 
 trying to answer that question we need to 
 remember that every teacher is of necessity the 
 product of his time as well as its maker. Much 
 of what Westcott said to us had been said 
 already by that great thinker, F. D. Maurice, 
 and was being said by other men at the Uni- 
 versities and elsewhere. If Westcott's voice 
 seemed more potent, it was because his long 
 residence at Cambridge brought generations 
 of younger minds under his influence. I doubt 
 whether he ever understood the younger 
 school of Oxford theologians, and I doubt 
 even more whether they ever really under- 
 stood him. On one occasion he half humor- 
 ously complained to Archbishop Benson that 
 he had spent days (mostly in vain) in the effort 
 to make Oxford men understand Cambridge 
 ways of thinking. "Quite naturally," he adds, 
 " they forget that there is such a place." But 
 if Oxford loves her own prophets best, certainly 
 
i8o BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 we in Cambridge knew that in our three great 
 scholars, Lightfoot, Westcott and Hort, there 
 had been vouchsafed to us a gift such as does 
 not often enrich even an ancient University. 
 Perhaps the gift was too great ; perhaps the 
 younger men were overshadowed and dwarfed. 
 But there are hundreds of clergy now serving 
 their own generation in English vicarages or 
 in mission stations under other skies, who can 
 look back to Westcott's influence and example 
 as the inspiration that taught them first truly 
 to understand the meaning of the old words, 
 " He that is chief among you, let him be the 
 servant of all." 
 
 During the nineteenth century the Church 
 of England has been influenced by three schools 
 of thought that successively arose for the enrich- 
 ment of her life. The first of these was the 
 evangelical revival. It began during the latter 
 half of the eighteenth century, and is associated 
 with the names of Wesley, Newton, Wilberforce, 
 Simeon, and many others. Its special aim was 
 the reassertion of the importance of personal 
 religion. It called men from intellectual con- 
 troversy to the need of repentance and the 
 possibility of holiness. 
 
INFLUENCE OF WESTCOTT i8i 
 
 The second was the Oxford movement, which 
 began about 1830, and among whose leaders 
 were Newman, Keble, Pusey and Church. Its 
 purpose was to assert that personal religion 
 needed incorporation into the life of a society 
 — that order and symbolism had their place in 
 the world of grace as in the world of nature. 
 
 The third was the movement with which West- 
 cott was most closely associated. It began about 
 1850 or a little earlier, and among its leaders 
 have been Maurice, Kingsley, Westcott, Canon 
 Scott Holland and Dr. Gore. Its purpose has 
 been to assert that the Christian society is not 
 an end in itself but a means to a larger end — that 
 the protest for social righteousness, the truceless 
 war against all that degrades and divides men, 
 is the very purpose for which the Church exists. 
 
 I will not cease from mental fight, 
 
 Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
 
 Till we have built Jerusalem 
 
 In England's green and pleasant land. 
 
 Those lines of Blake's express the thought 
 that men like Bishop Westcott have passed on 
 to our own generation. You will hear in an- 
 other lecture of this course of another great 
 Birmingham citizen, who did much to foster the 
 
i82 BISHOP WESTCOTT 
 
 same ideal of Christian citizenship among the 
 Christian bodies outside the Church of Eng- 
 land. To Westcott and Dale alike the Kingdom 
 of God was not an impracticable dream, but a 
 reality to be achieved here and now by the 
 ceaseless effort and unconquerable hope of 
 men. 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 Born 1801. Came to Birmingham, 1847. 
 Died, 1890. 
 
 By John H. Muirhead. 
 
 I FEEL that I have a difficult task in the present 
 lecture. Newman has been the storm-centre 
 of religious debate for nearly three-quarters 
 of a century. His name stands for theological 
 controversy. He differs, moreover, from the 
 other men who have been the texts of these 
 lectures, in that while they received much from 
 Birmingham, and gave much in return, he 
 owed it little but a resting-place. He lived, 
 it is true, for the last forty years of his life in 
 Birmingham, but he took no part in its business 
 or government. He was as effectively cut 
 off from its busy life as was the quiet chamber 
 in which he thought and wrote, behind these 
 great iron railings, from the noise and traffic of 
 the Hagley Road. 
 
 But I have a further difficulty. I am speak- 
 ing to an audience keenly alive to all pro- 
 gressive movements, to whom what is not 
 social and democratic does not count ; and I 
 
 183 
 
i84 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 am going to try to enlist your sympathies 
 for a man who not only was not identified with 
 any of these movements, but so far as he took 
 part in politics at all, strenuously resisted 
 reforms which everybody now admits to have 
 been just and beneficial — Catholic Emanci- 
 pation, the opening of the Universities to 
 Dissenters by the abolition of tests, the great 
 electoral Reform of 1832 itself. To the end, 
 Newman showed little interest in the social, still 
 less in the labour movement with which his 
 brother-Cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, so 
 enthusiastically identified himself. 
 
 Though it would not be difficult, as I hope 
 to show, to explain this part of his life, and 
 though there is a far more intimate connexion 
 between the movement he initiated and the 
 present democratic and even socialistic ten- 
 dency of the Church of England than might 
 appear, this is not the claim I desire to empha- 
 size this evening. Even though it could be 
 shown that Newman's life and work were 
 entirely without manifest fruit in this direction, 
 his name would still stand for interests that are 
 of the deepest import for human life. If for the 
 moment these interests are obscured by others 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 185 
 
 of more immediately pressing importance, and 
 by the prevailing tendency of modern thought 
 and feeling, there is all the more need to have 
 them recalled to our thoughts on an occasion 
 like this. 
 
 I am going to ask you to do what you some- 
 times find yourselves doing when you look at 
 a picture or a landscape : to shut out for the 
 moment the brighter and more prominent 
 objects and colours in the foreground, in order 
 to let the deeper and more delicate values 
 that lie in the background have their chance. 
 
 I 
 
 Our first business is to try to comprehend 
 the man. This, some one has said, is the sen- 
 tence which a great man passes on his time — 
 the task of understanding him. It is a par- 
 ticularly difficult one in the present case, and 
 when we have done our best there will be much 
 that remains a mystery. 
 
 Newman's birth coincided with that of the 
 nineteenth century. Let me begin by recall- 
 ing to your minds some of the chief features of 
 the time in which he comes before us — both 
 inside and outside the Church of England. 
 
i86 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 If we were to try to express in a word the 
 characteristic note of eighteenth, as contrasted 
 with the nineteenth century thought and feel- 
 ing, we should find it in a certain hardness 
 and clearness of outline with which things 
 were felt and seen. "Everything," as one of 
 its great writers said, " is what it is and not 
 another thing." Everything is isolated and 
 rounded into a whole for itself. Going along 
 with this was a limitation to the more super- 
 ficial qualities of things. It was the age of 
 artificiality in poetry, of materialism in science, 
 of utilitarianism in morals. But it was in the 
 field of politics and religion that the characters 
 which have been named came out most strik- 
 ingly. In politics it was the age of individual- 
 ism, of the rights that separate rather than of 
 the duties and the affections that unite. In reli- 
 gion it was the age of deism — the doctrine 
 that asserts the existence of God, but as of One 
 who is far off from nature and human life, 
 their well-wisher perhaps, but otherwise aloof 
 from their operations. There were of course 
 great exceptions. Already, moreover, new 
 voices were being heard, notably some great 
 poets like Blake and Robert Burns. But 
 
THE CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 187 
 
 man's spirit as a whole was still in bonds, 
 his eyes and heart were still sealed to the new 
 visions and the new emotions that were pre- 
 paring for him in the coming century. 
 
 Turning to the condition of the Church we 
 have to recognize that at no time has the 
 Church of England been without witness to the 
 power of the Spirit. At the time of which we 
 are speaking, the spirit represented by George 
 Whiteiield, John and Charles Wesley, still 
 survived in the Evangelical party. This kept 
 alive in many souls the faith in the Unseen. 
 But it was inadequate to the needs of the new 
 age. It wanted depth and constructive power. 
 It talked much of salvation, but it lacked 
 imagination to give meaning and purpose to 
 the convert's life. "It treated the soul as 
 though it were always coming to Christ, not 
 as though it were in Christ and to be kept 
 there." ^ It was too ready to compromise 
 with the weaknesses of the classes to which it 
 appealed. It failed to distinguish between joy 
 in life and mere pleasure or sensuous gratifica- 
 tion, and while maintaining a strict standard 
 
 ^ Abbott, The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman, 
 Vol. I., p. 45. 
 
i88 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 of moral purity and sobriety, showed itself 
 too ready to connive at a life of selfish and 
 luxurious comfort. With no coherent philo- 
 sophy of its own, moreover, it had nothing to 
 oppose to the rising tide of materialistic thought. 
 For the rest, the state of the Church is best 
 described in the phrase of the time : " high 
 and dry. " It took little interest in philanthropy. 
 If not actually at ease in Zion (for the clergy 
 were often active magistrates and parish rulers) 
 its activity could hardly be called spiritual. 
 *' The worse members," says a writer, who 
 knew it in these days, " were jobbers and 
 hunters after preferment, or country gentle- 
 men in orders, who rode to hounds, and shot 
 and danced and farmed, and often did worse 
 things. The average were kindly and helpful, 
 but often dull and pompous, and when not 
 dull insufferably dogmatic and quarrelsome." 
 What was true of the High Church generally, 
 was true of the High Church Professors and 
 Lecturers at the Universities. One might say 
 of them what the prophet Ezekiel said of the 
 bones in the valley — "they were very many, 
 and lo ! they were very dry ! " i 
 
 ^ See Church's Oxford Movement, pp. 3, 4. 
 
SPIRIT OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 189 
 
 Such in general was the spirit of the time 
 at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 If we were to try to describe what the new 
 spirit, as it expressed itself in the best literature 
 and life of the coming generation, was, we 
 should best do it in terms the opposite of those 
 I have been using. I shall not stop to attempt 
 it, but try to sum them up in the word that has 
 come to be accepted as the most general de- 
 scription of them. It was the spirit of romance. 
 Though in many respects unsuited to express 
 what is meant, romance stands for that earnest 
 and imaginative look at things which pierces 
 below the hard outlines of their superficial 
 appearance to their deeper nature, and there- 
 with to their afiinities and deep-set relations 
 with other things, bringing into view the links 
 that bind man to man, man to nature, nature 
 and man to the universal spirit that pervades 
 " all thinking things, all objects of all thought." 
 If you would understand the men and institu- 
 tions or movements of last century, or for the 
 matter of that of our own, in any department, 
 this is the question you have to ask — the 
 test you have to apply : how far are they 
 in touch with, how far do they give utterance 
 
190 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 to, this new spirit ? how far have they still clinging 
 about them the remnants and reminiscences 
 of the old ? 
 
 Newman was the son of a London banker, 
 and a lady of Huguenot extraction, thus 
 owning on the one side, like so many great 
 Englishmen, a French descent. He was brought 
 up in the unromantic suburb of Ealing. 
 But the interest of his early years is not in his 
 outer circumstances, but in his inner life : 
 the books he read and the thoughts they left 
 with him. This is true throughout. What- 
 ever the interest of the events that were taking 
 place in the world about him, it is the events 
 of his inner life that claim our attention. It 
 is the history of a soul that we are following. 
 
 Of his childhood he himself tells us that he 
 had already anticipated an idea that in one 
 form or another remained with him to the 
 end. " I thought," he says, '' life might be a 
 dream, or I an angel, and all this world a 
 deception , my feUow-angels by a playful 
 device concealing themselves from me and 
 deceiving me with the semblance of a material 
 world." On the other hand, his boyhood 
 
CALVINISM 191 
 
 seems to have been occupied with quite other 
 thoughts. Tom Paine was the Charles Brad- 
 laugh or Robert Blatchford, and David Hume 
 the Herbert Spencer or the Professor Huxley 
 of these days. At fourteen, he tells us he had 
 read all that Paine had to say against the 
 Old Testament and Hume against the miracles. 
 At least he told his father so, though he thinks 
 it may have been merely a boy's swagger — 
 put on I suppose to make the good banker's 
 flesh creep. It is pleasant to know that he 
 was like other boys in one thing at least. 
 
 At fifteen he underwent a great change. 
 He " fell under the influence of a definite creed." 
 The creed was Calvinism. I do not know 
 whether there is any one in this hall except 
 myself who was brought up a Calvinist. It 
 is a horrible faith. Some parts of it are horribly 
 (or at any rate terribly) true ; other parts are 
 horribly false. What is true is the momentous- 
 ness of the difference between right and wrong, 
 and the need in every soul that is going to rise 
 to anything worthy of its better nature, of 
 some sort of regeneration, some sort of new 
 birth. What is false is the doctrine that 
 regeneration is a definite unalterable act of 
 
192 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 favour wrought upon an elect few by a Will 
 outside their own, instead of the daily renewal 
 of a spiritual life from sources which by the 
 grace of a merciful Heaven are open to us all. 
 What this faith did for Newman in these days 
 was further to isolate him from the objects 
 that surrounded him, and deepen his distrust 
 of the material world — to lead him, as he says, 
 to rest more implicitly in " the thought of 
 two, and two only absolute and luminously 
 self-evident beings — myself and my Creator." 
 His next impressions came from a book I 
 can remember well, occupying a small sanctum 
 by itself in my grandmother's house. No one 
 perhaps reads Scott's Commentary on the Bible 
 nowadays, but the influence it exercised in 
 the religious life of last century was immense. 
 From it Newman tells us he learned two great 
 truths : " Holiness better than peace " and 
 " Growth the only evidence of life," which he 
 took thenceforth for mottoes. These, with the 
 deepening of the mind that comes from the 
 study of history and the older writers, and 
 the balancing doctrine that the Pope was 
 Antichrist and Rome the Scarlet Woman, may 
 be said to have been the first deposit of religious 
 belief in his mind. 
 
BUTLER'S ANALOGY 193 
 
 The second stratum was partly, one might 
 say, of the same material as the first, only a 
 more finely granulated form of it, partly it 
 was a new and not less significant deposit. 
 Bishop Butler's Analogy has probably played 
 a greater part than any other single book after 
 the Bible in moulding the matter and spirit of 
 English theology. It is concerned, as the name 
 indicates, with the analogy between the natural 
 and the spiritual order, or more strictly between 
 natural and revealed religion. We are here 
 concerned, not with its detailed argument but 
 with the bent it gave to Newman's mind. He 
 tells us it affected him powerfully in two re- 
 spects. In the first place it extended and 
 refined his childish doctrine of angels. These 
 now became to him spiritual powers acting 
 behind the laws of nature and the wills of 
 races and nations and classes of men. " Every 
 breath of air and ray of light and heat, every 
 beautiful prospect was as it were the skirts 
 of their garments, the waving of the robes of 
 those whose faces see God. What would be the 
 thoughts of a man," he asks, " who when examin- 
 ing a flower or herb, or a pebble or a ray of 
 light, which he treats as something so beneath 
 
 L.F.M. O 
 
194 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 him in the scale of existence, suddenly dis- 
 covered that he was in the presence of some 
 powerful being, who was hidden behind the 
 visible things he was inspecting, who though 
 concealing his wise hand was giving them their 
 beauty, grace and perfection — nay, whose robes 
 and ornaments these objects were which he 
 was so eager to analyse ? " Such thoughts, he 
 tells us, were his. From the same source came 
 too, he thought — though here there was room 
 for admixture of evil — " the action of bodies 
 politic and associations which is often so differ- 
 ent from that of individuals who compose them. 
 Hence the character and instinct of states and 
 governments, of religious communities and 
 communions. I thought these assemblages had 
 their life in certain unseen powers." It was only 
 an extension of this doctrine when he came later 
 to realize that Scripture itself " was an allegory : 
 pagan literature, philosophy and mythology, 
 properly understood, were but a preparation 
 for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages 
 were in a certain sense prophets ; for * thoughts 
 beyond their thoughts to those high bards 
 were given.' " That was the first lesson he 
 learned from Butler — a deepening, you will 
 
FAITH AND REASON 195 
 
 see, of former impressions. His " preference 
 for the personal to the abstract " still gave 
 it a picturesque form. But stripped of the 
 fanciful elements his imagination imported 
 into it, this was the same truth that formed 
 the inspiration of the new romantic movement 
 and lived in the poetry of Burns and Wordsworth 
 and Shelley, not to speak of the new voices 
 in Tennyson and Browning that were about 
 to break the silence. The defect of Newman's 
 way of presenting it was that the spiritual 
 counterpart was apt to fade away into an un- 
 known and unimaginable form of being beyond 
 or behind the material and temporal, instead 
 of being felt to be the deeper meaning of 
 it as the soul is the deeper meaning of the 
 body. 
 
 The other lesson he learned from Butler was 
 that contained in the philosopher's doctrine 
 that " probability " and not logical certainty 
 " is the guide of life." Here too we have the 
 anticipation of a great truth. It is profoundly 
 true that the syllogism and the mathematical 
 equation are inapplicable to the deeper truths 
 of life and religion. As St. Ambrose said : 
 ** It has not pleased God to save His 
 
196 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 people by Logic." ^ But this is wrongly inter- 
 preted when it is taken to mean that science 
 and philosophy are one thing and rest upon 
 reason walking in the light of certainty, 
 while Religion is another resting in a faith 
 which is always of the nature of a leap in 
 the dark, a " venture " not only from the 
 known to the unknown but from the known 
 to the contrary of the known, from the normal 
 to the miraculous. To set faith and reason 
 thus in opposition to one another is to set 
 human nature against itself, and is a mode of 
 stating the foundation or the foundationlessness 
 of religion, which is unlikely ever to satisfy the 
 human mind. I shall return to this at a later 
 point. Meantime it is sufficient to indicate it 
 as that which more than anything else separates 
 Newman from the main line of philosophical 
 thought in his own century. 
 
 I have now traced the history of Newman's 
 mind down to his twenty-fifth year. The 
 thoughts and beliefs with which he left college 
 had a stamp given to them by his own mind, but 
 they were in themselves large and genial thoughts 
 ^ The motto of Newman's Grammar of Assent. 
 
FELLOW OF ORIEL 197 
 
 which he shared with the greatest minds of his 
 own time containing no particular menace 
 to anything, far less to the Church and the 
 University which he loved. 
 
 What I have now to try to make clear is, 
 by what admixture they became the explosive 
 compound that was to create the deepest dis- 
 turbance that had taken place in either since 
 the Reformation, and if not to shatter, at any 
 rate to rend asunder one of them in the midst. 
 
 It came from the men with whom he found 
 himself when the fellowship at Oriel College, 
 Oxford, which he won in 1822, " raised him," 
 as he says, " to the high and broad platform 
 of University society and intelligence." But 
 to explain precisely what it was, and how it 
 came, I must recall your minds to the state 
 of the country in the later twenties of last 
 century. 
 
 It was, you will remember, a period of rising 
 Liberalism. The chief intellectual influence of 
 the time was that of Jeremy Bentham and his 
 school. However narrow Utilitarianism might 
 be in morals, economics and religion, it had an 
 undoubtedly broadening influence in politics. 
 It was the enemy of all sorts of intolerance and 
 
w 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 sectarianism, all merely class interests, all that 
 existed merely by the right of prescription. 
 Particularly it was pledged to the relief of 
 Roman Catholics from all civil disabilities owing 
 to their religion. But it went further and threat- 
 ened Disestablishment. The great reform of 
 1832 was already in view which would transfer 
 political power to the party that was pledged 
 to these things. It was the day of the deliver- 
 ance of the State, but it looked as though this 
 would be the day of the captivity or the de- 
 struction of the Church. Either the Church 
 would remain established and become the 
 bond-servant of a free-thinking or indifferent 
 government, or it would be cast loose to sink 
 or swim as one among contending sects. 
 
 It was thoughts like these that were moving 
 to their depths the minds of thoughtful and 
 zealous churchmen in those days ; among 
 others, none more than the mind of John 
 Keble. Keble's Christian Year appeared in 
 1827. It was published from the retirement 
 of the country and anonymously. But Keble 
 was no recluse. He followed public events 
 with the keenest interest ; had no delusions 
 as to the course of things ; asked himself quite 
 
KEBLE 199 
 
 dejfinitely the questions, where the Church 
 would stand m case of disestabhshment, and 
 answered with equal clearness and definite- 
 ness, " where she had always stood, upon her 
 own Catholicity and Apostolicalness." Her 
 claim to be the Church of Christ and the in- 
 heritor of the Apostles took a new hold upon 
 his mind, and formed thenceforth the centre 
 of his thoughts. But Keble was no party 
 leader to inspire ; he was no preacher to strike 
 and subdue ^ ; he was no thinker and theologian 
 to strengthen and edify. He lived, moreover, 
 in the depths of the country. So far as he 
 was concerned this doctrine, after flashing out 
 occasionally in his University sermons and 
 lectures, might have died and been buried 
 with him at Hursley. 
 
 On the other hand, Newman was already 
 showing himself to possess all the needed gifts. 
 In 1828, moreover, he had been made Vicar of 
 St. Mary's and was already speaking to the 
 heart from the centre of the great University. 
 But there was as yet no connexion between the 
 older and the younger man. The connecting 
 link was that fiery heart — the Lord Byron of the 
 ^ Barry's Newman, p. 31. 
 
200 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 Oxford Movement — Richard Hurrell Froude. 
 One is tempted to dwell on this picturesque, al- 
 most weird figure. I can only afford to mention 
 him here as the torch which kindled the con- 
 flagration by indoctrinating Newman with the 
 ideas of Keble. " Do you know the story," 
 Froude writes, " of the murderer who had 
 done one good thing in his life ? Well, if I 
 was asked what good deed I have ever done, 
 I should say I had brought Keble and Newman 
 to understand each other." The opportunity 
 came when Froude returned from reading 
 with Keble to become Fellow of Oriel in 1826. 
 The intimacy deepened in the enforced leisure 
 from business that came with the disagreement 
 between the Head and Fellows which ended 
 in the importation of outside tutors to do the 
 work of the College, a kind of academic black- 
 leg against whom the regular staff was power- 
 less. It was still further deepened by the 
 winter which they spent together in the Medi- 
 terranean. It was during this time that New- 
 man's conviction became fixed. The brilliant 
 scenes of the South flitted past him like phan- 
 toms. His mind was bent inwards. The future 
 was dark and uncertain, but one clear, leading 
 
THE VIA MEDIA 201 
 
 light was rising before him — the sense of a 
 mission to his Church, and as he thought to 
 his time and country. It was while tossing 
 about in an orange-boat in the Strait of Bonifacio 
 that he wrote '' Lead, Kindly Light," the march- 
 ing song, as it has been called, of the Trac- 
 tarian movement. Surely never a hymn that 
 came more directly out of the heart ; perhaps 
 none that goes more directly to it. Its very 
 title, by which few now know it, " The Pillar of 
 the Cloud," adds to its pathos. To Newman 
 the sign was too often a pillar of cloud by day — 
 a darkening of the light — rather than a pillar 
 of fire by night. 
 
 He himself attributes the beginning of the 
 movement for the rescue from bondage of the 
 Church of England, to a sermon that Keble 
 preached on " National Apostasy " in 1833. 
 But it was the preparation of the ground in 
 Newman's mind, and not the accidental word 
 that was the decisive fact — the determination 
 with which he landed again in England " to 
 force on the public mind, in a way which could 
 not be evaded, the great article of the creed, 
 * I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church.' " ^ 
 ^ Church's Oxford Movement, p. 29. 
 
202 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 For his new-formed purpose he had an organ 
 to his hand in his pulpit at St. Mary's, but 
 there was need of the more powerful organ 
 of the press. Newman was equal to the 
 occasion. To the gifts of the preacher he 
 added a consummate talent for the higher 
 journalism. The result was the Tracts for 
 the Times. Many hands were employed upon 
 them ; the inspiring, controlling, directing brain 
 was Newman's. This was the beginning of 
 the great change. " The new age was upon 
 the Church." 
 
 It is impossible to give any adequate idea 
 of the issues that were now raised — the amaze- 
 ment on the one hand of hope and joyful con- 
 fidence, on the other hand of fear and dark 
 suspicion that now fell upon men's minds. 
 To the one party, the Tractarian Movement 
 meant the Romanizing and destruction of the 
 Church of England. To the other it seemed the 
 dawn of a new life within it, the exaltation 
 of its horn at once against free thought, with 
 the atheism that must follow, and against the 
 Church of Rome. By the intelligent appeal 
 to history and tradition, a wall of protection 
 might be raised against the devastating flood 
 
TRACT NINETY 203 
 
 of " Liberalism," while at the same time the 
 purity of Anglican doctrine and ritual would 
 form a clear and effective barrier against 
 Roman corruptions. This was the celebrated 
 Via Media, to Newman and his party the one 
 clear and sohd footing in the surrounding fen, 
 to their opponents a shaking quagmire from 
 the beginning. 
 
 So far as its leader was concerned, the move- 
 ment fell into two parts. For the first five 
 years, with the pulpit of St. Mary's and the 
 Tracts as his organs Newman led his gathering 
 party through a period of brilliant successes 
 only to be followed by a period of disillu- 
 sionment and disastrous collapse. The turn- 
 ing point was the celebrated Tract Ninety. 
 Like the first of the tracts, the last was the 
 work of Newman's single hand. Its aim was 
 to show that '' the Articles are not framed on 
 the principle of excluding those who prefer the 
 theology of the early ages to that of the Reform- 
 ation. Their framers constructed them in 
 such a way as best to comprehend those who 
 did not go so far in Protestantism as themselves. 
 Anglo-Catholics are but the successors and 
 representatives of those moderate reformers ; 
 
204 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 and their case has been directly anticipated 
 in the wording of the Articles." ^ Though 
 nothing was affirmed which had not been over 
 and over again implied in the previous series, 
 this open statement was too much for the 
 authorities. In the Church of the time you 
 could say what you liked, so long as you said 
 it obscurely : so long as you did not say what 
 you meant or mean what you said. But here 
 was a man who was determined to force his 
 doctrine on the public mind, who could say 
 what he meant and meant what he said. The 
 gathering storm burst. The Tract was de- 
 nounced at headquarters, and the denuncia- 
 tions of the authorities in turn stirred the 
 younger members of the part}/ into more 
 startling and uncompromising statements. Be- 
 tween the two Newman was between the 
 upper and the nether millstone. The history 
 is soon told. The " movement " broke into 
 two. Pusey and Keble rallied the bulk of the 
 party which remained loyal to the Church of 
 England, and may since be said to have won 
 it to their side. A smaller part stood staunchly 
 by Newman, some, like the ablest of them, 
 ^ Trad Ninety, 2nd edition, pp. 81, 82. 
 
RECEPTION 205 
 
 W. G. Ward, preceding him, others following 
 him to Rome. A few like Froude, the historian, 
 and later on Mark Pattison — " the modern 
 man," who. Dr. Barry thinks, might under more 
 favourable circumstances have done for New- 
 man's later life what Hurrell Froude did for 
 his earlier — passed to " Liberalism." 
 
 But the interest of these years centred then, 
 as it centres still, round the solitary figure in 
 the village of Littlemore, to which Newman 
 had retired on giving up his pulpit at St. Mary's. 
 The Via Media had faded into moonshine and 
 the ground was sinking beneath his feet. " From 
 the end of 1841," he says, '* I was on my 
 deathbed as regards my membership of the 
 Anglican Church." But he had still a long 
 spiritual conflict before him. It was not till 
 four years later that he was received into the 
 Church of Rome : the light, you might say, of 
 the University, the greatest of its living sons, 
 knelt before a simple and ignorant Italian 
 Passionist friar in the little room still shown 
 in the Free Cottage Library at Littlemore. 
 
 Newman came to Birmingham in 1847 and 
 lived in your city for the rest of his life : in it. 
 
2o6 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 but not of it ; yet perhaps of it too as far as 
 it was possible for one like him to be of any 
 earthly city. He had come to anchor. He 
 had escaped from all intellectual doubts and 
 hesitations. Henceforth he lived at peace with 
 himself. But at what expense was peace pur- 
 chased ? We can understand the cloud of 
 Anglican suspicion, almost of execration, under 
 which he retired to Edgbaston. But it 
 might have been expected that he would have 
 been understood and trusted by the Church 
 of his adoption — all the more because of the 
 sacrifices he had made. The truth was, he 
 had drunk too deeply of the Protestant spirit, 
 particularly of the doctrine of the rights of 
 conscience and of private judgment, to find 
 himself wholly at home in the Church of Rome. 
 Hence while Protestants found it incompre- 
 hensible how an intellect like his could consent 
 to submit itself to Papal authority, Catholics 
 found it equally impossible to understand 
 how, having accepted the light, he should 
 still keep peering into the darkness, seeking 
 to test the sun of his own rushlight ; how 
 having entered the harbour, he should continue 
 making his observations and setting his com- 
 
LIFE AT THE ORATORY 207 
 
 pass as though he were still on the high seas. 
 
 It was not till the publication of his greatest 
 book, the Apologia pro Vita Sua in 1864, that 
 the cloud of English suspicion was rolled away, 
 and not till Leo XIII came to the papal seat 
 in 1879 that he received full recognition by 
 the Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 Would we know what his life at Edgbaston 
 between this and his death in 1890 was, 
 we must wait for the Life that is promised from 
 the Oratory. Meantime we can perhaps get a 
 glimpse of it in his own description of the life 
 of St. Philip of Neri, the saint to whom he 
 dedicated himself when he entered the Church 
 of Rome. " He was not a hunter of souls, 
 but preferred tranquilly to cast in his net to 
 gain them ; he preferred to yield to the stream 
 and direct the current which he could not stop 
 of science, literature, art and fashion, and to 
 sweeten and to sanctify what God had made 
 very good and man had spoilt. Whatever 
 was exact and systematic pleased him not, 
 he put from him monastic rule and authorita- 
 tive speech as David refused the armour of 
 his king. He did not so much seek his own, 
 as draw them to him. He sat in his small 
 
2o8 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 room and they in their gay, worldly dress, 
 the rich and the well born as well as the simple 
 and the illiterate crowded into it. He was all 
 things to all men. When he was called upon to 
 be merry he was so ; if there was a demand upon 
 his sympathy he was equally ready. He gave 
 the same welcome to all, wearying himself to 
 assist all to the utmost limits of his power." 
 Newman died in 1890. He lies buried in the quiet 
 burial-ground at Rednal beside the Lickeys. 
 His memorial tablet is in the Church of the 
 Oratory, and bears beneath the Cardinal's 
 shield with its motto — " Cor ad cor loquitur " : 
 heart speaketh unto heart — the simple inscrip- 
 tion of his name, with the words, also chosen 
 by himself — "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veri- 
 tatem " : from shadows and semblances to the 
 truth. 
 
 II 
 
 I have tried to make Newman's life com- 
 prehensible in the light of one central con- 
 viction, his faith in the Unseen, and the strong 
 reaction this set up in his mind against the 
 shallow popular philosophy of his time. But 
 something — perhaps the chief thing — remains 
 
NEWMAN AND CARLYLE 209 
 
 still obscure. Others shared this conviction. 
 It might be said to have been the note of the 
 deeper mind of the time. It meant, as we now 
 see, a forward movement to a larger faith in 
 man, a deeper conception of God and His mode 
 of operation in the world, a wider interpre- 
 tation of what is meant by revelation. In 
 spite of his belief in Conscience, Newman 
 seemed to end in a distrust of human nature, 
 a doubt as to whether there is any real evidence 
 of the control of men's hearts by the divine, 
 and an overmastering need to find a rest for 
 his faith in some authoritative utterance coming 
 from without. It was as though he had only 
 got out into the stream to be caught in a back 
 current and carried further up than the point 
 from which he started. This is brought out 
 by the contrast his life and teaching offer to 
 those of his great contemporary Carlyle. " Two 
 writers," says Froude, " have affected power- 
 fully the present generation of Englishmen, 
 Newman is one, Thomas Carlyle is the other." 
 In Carlyle more than any one else we see the 
 great forces of the century awakening and 
 stretching themselves — with some grotesqueness 
 of gesture, it is true, but powerfully and 
 
 L.F.M. P 
 
210 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 effectively. Like Newman he was a lover of 
 the past and the ages of faith, but he recognized 
 that they were also the ages of childhood : he 
 felt that their darknesses and credulities were 
 things of the past. He believed in the Church, 
 but it was the Church of the future whose 
 " organic filaments " were coming together 
 in obscure corners with quite other binding 
 power than that of the authority of any man 
 or any tradition. He believed in God, but it 
 was a God who revealed Himself every- 
 where in nature and history, " weaving in 
 time," not in any one time alone, " the 
 garment we know him by " — whose best 
 and greatest was not in the past but in the 
 future. Whence the difference ? 
 
 To understand it we must come back to 
 a point where we all are one. Here we are 
 in this " bank of time," the meeting-point, 
 as Carlyle himself would say, of two eternities — 
 all with one supreme human interest how to 
 find assurance that we are not mere creatures 
 of the moment, but parts of an eternal order, 
 and that not as atoms might be parts of an 
 eternal matter — drops of an eternal ocean, 
 but lives and souls of an eternal Life or Soul, 
 
DISTRUST OF REASON 211 
 
 minds and wills of an eternal Mind and 
 Will. 
 
 Let now a man be convinced that this is 
 the deepest, most precious of all truths ; but 
 let him be all in the dark as to how he is to 
 come to assurance of it by way of human 
 knowledge and inference. Let him even be 
 assured that the human reason is a false light, 
 sure if we put our trust in it alone to lead us 
 further from the central truth on which he 
 feels that salvation depends. On the other 
 hand, let him have been brought up in the 
 belief that out of the darkness at a particular 
 time and through a particular organ the 
 Eternal had once spoken in human voice and 
 that the assurance which he seeks can be 
 attained only by once for all renouncing the 
 guidance of reason and accepting the outer 
 testimony in simple trust. What choice, under 
 these circumstances, would he have ? To one 
 to whom this outer voice was incredible, who 
 held that natural experience and the reasoning 
 founded upon it were the one path to whatever 
 truth was attainable, such a renunciation 
 would seem like putting out one's eyes in order 
 to see. But to the seeker for assurance him- 
 
212 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 self it would seem like keeping open the single 
 window that looked out on Eternity. ^; 
 
 Some such was Newman's case. No man 
 had ever a profounder faith in the reality of the 
 Unseen. No man had ever a more insistent 
 craving to have a reasoned assurance of it. 
 Yet this was just what his age seemed to show 
 to be impossible. To cast off authority and seek 
 to justify this belief through reason and philo- 
 sophy, could only end in one way. Here there 
 was no Via Media. On the one hand was faith, 
 on the other reason. These two led opposite 
 ways and there was no third. This opposition 
 between faith and reason was an antithesis 
 he never got beyond. More than anything 
 else it is the light in which we must read his 
 mental history. He held it at the outset. He 
 held it at the end. The intermediate period 
 was occupied in realizing what it involved. 
 As he himself puts it — " Turn away from the 
 Catholic Church and to whom will you go ? 
 It is your only chance of peace in this turbulent 
 and changing world. There is nothing between 
 it and scepticism." ^ Much indeed still remained 
 dark to him. The doctrines of the Church were 
 ^ Discourses to Mixed Congregations, 
 
THE ONE GROUND 213 
 
 changing from age to age. At best perhaps 
 they were only symbols of deeper unimagin- 
 able things, " the expressions in human lan- 
 guage of truths to which the human mind is 
 unequal." But such as they were, they were 
 our only guide. 
 
 He was like a man who finds himself on a 
 steep mountain side with a narrow ledge to 
 stand upon, a cave of comparative shelter and 
 safety behind him. Above him far away is 
 the clear mountain top with its sunshine and 
 peace, its true outlook on the world around. 
 But how to get there he knows not, no map 
 which he has shows the way. There is, indeed, 
 a path which appears to lead forwards but it 
 leads only downwards, and from what he knows 
 or thinks he knows of the fate of those who have 
 taken it there is little encouragement to try 
 it. Is it much wonder that in these circum- 
 stances he clings to his ledge for such assurance 
 of safety as it can give, or seeks a larger and 
 more commodious resting-place that offers easy 
 approach along the path by which he has come ? 
 But suppose the maps and the observations 
 on which his estimate of the forward path is 
 founded, are old and out of date. Suppose 
 
214 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 the path, though apparently starting down- 
 wards and full of peril, turns nevertheless in 
 the end upwards, and leads always to fuller 
 light. In such a case it would be possible to 
 see and sympathize with the life and teaching 
 of this great lonely pilgrim, to reahze the pathos, 
 the sincerity, and the essential truth of his 
 underlying faith, and yet to feel that the 
 position he has taken up is no true resting- 
 place for us who have other lights to guide us. 
 This I wish to suggest is what has actually 
 happened. Already in Newman's time there 
 were other thoughts of the evidences for the 
 great truths for which he stood. Since he 
 wrote, these have become widely known, and 
 taken hold of the mind of large sections of the 
 Christian world, entirely altering the intellectual 
 outlook. What in detail these are, where 
 they have come from and what they seem to 
 justify, is too long a story to enter upon here. 
 What is clear to any one who can read the 
 signs of the times, is that among Protestants 
 and Catholics alike there has spread in these 
 days a conviction that human experience, both 
 inner and outer, when rightly interpreted, not 
 only does not contradict, but offers reliable 
 
PURPOSE IN THE WORLD 215 
 
 evidence for the existence of a spiritual purpose 
 in human affairs. Not only in the voice of 
 conscience which Newman admitted, but in 
 the course of human development which he 
 refused as evidence, it has become possible for 
 us to read the signs of purpose and guidance. 
 To take but one example, was there a single 
 man whose heart and mind did not respond 
 the other day, when at your Annual Meeting 
 a leading speaker broke from the level of the 
 commonplace with the words, " I believe there 
 is a divine purpose in democracy ! " ^ 
 
 I do not wish to pursue this thought but 
 to apply it at once to the opposition between 
 faith and reason on which Newman's teaching 
 rests. It is true that it is a different thing 
 to believe in the end of life, to " trust the 
 larger hope," and to believe in a mathematical 
 equation. But this is not a difference between 
 beliei upon more and upon less valid evidence- 
 It is not a difference of degree but of kind. Let 
 me try to illustrate from the latter example. 
 You have heard of the man who refused to 
 admit that one and one are two till he knew 
 what was going to be made of the admission. 
 ^ Speech by Bishop Gore. 
 
2i6 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 It seems absurd, but there is a good deal to be 
 said for his caution. When the certainty of 
 figures is pressed upon me I often feel inclined 
 to reply — " I acknowledge your equation but I 
 can make nothing of it — in fact I do not believe 
 it unless you will condescend to tell me what 
 one and one you mean." 
 
 Here are two men in a college lecture-room. 
 Each is one, but one and one do not make 
 two men, but tutor and student, and this is 
 different. If you ask me what makes the 
 difference, what it is that is added, I answer^ 
 it is the whole world of knowledge and of the 
 purposes of life. I agree that I cannot show 
 it by another equation. If you like to say I 
 know it by faith, you may do so. But it is 
 a faith which is not different from my reasoning 
 as the uncertain or the unknown from the 
 certain and the known. Rather it differs from 
 equational logic as the more comprehensive 
 and significant from the less, even as life itself 
 differs from mathematics. 
 
 Though different then, faith and reason can- 
 not be opposed. Faith indeed leaps to the end. 
 It is the completion of what our reason leaves 
 incomplete. But we should never reason un- 
 
UNITY OF FAITH AND REASON 217 
 
 less we had faith in the ends of reason. As 
 Pascal (another of Newman's great masters) 
 said, '' We should never seek for God unless 
 we had already found Him." It is this con- 
 viction of the unity of faith and reason in all 
 human experience which underlay the teaching 
 of Carlyle and made it so fruitful in his time. 
 But it was a truth that was hidden from New- 
 man, partly, we now see, by reason of the 
 narrowness of his own intellectual training ; 
 partly by the intellectual timidity which was 
 so marked a feature of his mind. With the 
 recognition of this truth there falls away the 
 fatal alternative which his teaching offers. 
 
 If it be asked how, in spite of this, the repre- 
 sentatives of the newer thought in the Church 
 of Rome can yet appeal, as Father Tyrrell does 
 in the Hibbert Journal of January of the present 
 year,^ to the teaching of Newman, in support 
 of the tendencies which he represents, the answer 
 is not far to seek. An honest perusal of the 
 chief of his writings leaves no doubt at all that 
 he is a devout believer in the ordinary Roman 
 Catholic doctrines — the miraculousness of the 
 Church, the unity and coherence of Romanist 
 theology which must be accepted whole or not 
 
 1 1908. 
 
2i8 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 at all, the infallibility of the interpretations 
 of Council and Pope. In harmony with all 
 this is his account of faith as acceptance on 
 authority of what we cannot know. " By 
 * faith ' I mean the Creed and assent to the 
 Creed." ^ With this before him Father Gerard 
 in the same number of the Hihhert Journal 
 can say " the difference between Newman 
 and his alleged successors is fundamental and 
 absolute." On the other hand, Newman was 
 far too sensitive to the deeper currents of the 
 thought about him, far too deeply touched 
 with the spirit of his time, not to feel that there 
 was a deeper than any external authority, and 
 that revelation can be no isolated or completed 
 process. Hence it comes that it is possible 
 to read not only between the lines but, in many 
 finely expressed passages of his greatest books, 
 suggestions of a teaching, " hints and seeds of 
 thought," incompatible with the older doctrines. ^ 
 This is particularly manifest in his theory of 
 the Development of Doctrine. It would cer- 
 tainly be wrong to attribute to Newman writing 
 
 ^ Anglican Difficulties. 
 
 2 See e.g. Grammar of Assent, 4th ed., pp. 349-51, 
 353. 386-8, 402, 410, 429, 486. 
 
MODERNISM 219 
 
 in 1845 the idea of development that Darwin 
 announced in his Origin of Species in 1859. In 
 Newman's exposition there is much that is 
 arbitrary and artificial. Yet the truth remains 
 that he clearly conceived of ideas and doctrines, 
 and among them those of Christianity, as hav- 
 ing had to enter into conflict for existence with 
 other ideas, and as having been subjected in 
 the process to transformations and enlarge- 
 ments comparable to those of organic growth.^ 
 Such a view is clearly incompatible with belief 
 in a body of doctrine inalterably stereotyped 
 for all time, and handed on from age to age for 
 uncritical acceptance by the Christian world. 
 With this in view his Roman Catholic biographer 
 can write with truth that Newman "has reacted 
 on the mental habits of those whom he joined 
 by teaching them a language they could not 
 have gained without him, modelling afresh 
 their methods of Apologetics," ^ and Father 
 Tyrrell can maintain the essential " solidarity 
 of Newmanism with modernism." 
 
 With the results of this attempt to under- 
 
 ^ See Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 
 chapter i., section i. 
 
 2 See Dr. Barry's Newman, p. 275 and following. 
 
220 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 stand the man, the movement which he initiated, 
 and the immediate and remoter bearing of his 
 thought before us, we come back to the question 
 with which we started — the capitaHzed value 
 of his teaching for us. So far I may be said 
 to have advanced to an answer in connecting 
 him with ideas and feehngs characteristic of 
 the deeper mind of the nineteenth century. 
 But others, we have seen, gave utterance to 
 these ideas with equal conviction and with 
 greater force and consistency. Is the conclusion 
 then that Newman merely succeeded in ex- 
 pressing in a weaker and more effeminate form 
 the great truths for which these others stood ? 
 It has been said of Newman's poetry that it is 
 the poetry of Wordsworth cast in the language 
 of women. Is this all that we can say of his 
 teaching in general ? I think there is more. 
 I. Others taught the reality of the Unseen. 
 To Newman it was given to realize it as a 
 constant inward presence, the source of an 
 inward ideal of purity and fullness of spiritual 
 life. Inward perfection better than peace; 
 growth the mark of life : we have seen how 
 early he took these as his watchwords. In 
 the teaching of Carlyle there is little of this 
 
THE IDEA OF A SAINT 221 
 
 His is a gospel of work. God is manifested 
 in the hero, and the hero is the swallower of 
 formulas, too often of scruples. Newman holds 
 up the opposite and complementary ideal — 
 the ideal of the saint, the devoted or devout. ^ 
 Taken alone this also has its weakness. It is 
 too apt to fade away into scrupulosity, un- 
 reality and ineffectiveness, or to be connected 
 with some single and partial obj ect . Nevertheless 
 it is one the world cannot afford to do without. 
 It is the ideal of Buddha and of Socrates, of 
 the Hebrew prophets, and of the Greatest of 
 them, of St. Francis and St. Catherine, of John 
 Stuart Mill as well as of John Henry Newman. 
 It is this that gives beauty and refinement 
 to character and in its best types is recognized 
 as the very crown of life. In times like our own, 
 full of the call to social work and social reform, 
 there is a real danger of its being overlooked. 
 No thought and effort can be too great in the 
 cause of material reform. But the reformer can 
 never safely forget what it is in the last resort 
 that makes the life for which we strive worth 
 striving for, and that sustains us in striving for 
 
 ^ See especially " Saintliness, the Standard," Discourses 
 to Mixed Congregations, v. 
 
222 CARDINx\L NEWMAN 
 
 it. Movements, like men, have their souls, not as 
 something in the next world, but as what makes 
 life worth having in this. What shall it profit 
 the best of them if they gain the whole world, 
 and lose their own soul ? or what will they 
 give in exchange for their soul ? 
 
 2. This is the first truth for which Newmanism 
 stands : what he called the '' idea of a saint." 
 The second is closely related to it. It is the 
 need of organized spiritual fellowship if the 
 soul is to rise to the height of its calling. Re- 
 generation is no individual matter. It can only 
 be begun, continued and perfected in a society 
 devoted to that end — in a " fellowship of the 
 saints." It was the perception of this truth 
 that explains the central place in human life, 
 that Newman assigned to the Church. To 
 it are committed the means of grace. " The 
 Church," he says, " aims at three special 
 virtues as reconciling and uniting the soul to 
 its Maker, — faith, purity and charity, — for 
 two of which the world cares nothing. The 
 Church regards, consults for, labours for the 
 individual soul; her one object is to quit her- 
 self of this responsibility, to take offences out 
 of the way, to rescue from evil, to convert^ 
 
THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 223 
 
 teach, feed, protect, perfect. Good and evil 
 to her are not Hghts and shades passing over 
 the surface of society, but living powers spring- 
 ing from the depths of the heart." ^ Here 
 ; 00, doubtless, there is room for fatal mistake. 
 Belief in the place and power of the Church in 
 the life of the soul is apt to degenerate into a 
 belief in the special and miraculous sanctity 
 of some particular Church. But this is one 
 of the things the human mind is likely to out- 
 grow, has indeed, in the view of many, already 
 outgrown. The idea itself will not grow old — 
 the idea of a fellowship of men and women 
 " holding the unity of the Spirit in the bond 
 of peace " with a tradition, a continuity, an 
 atmosphere of its own — a meeting-place, a ser- 
 vice and a ritual, however simple, round which 
 associations may gather — calls and directions 
 to human service, in which mind and char- 
 acter may find their discipline, and religion 
 its reality. 
 
 It is a long cry from the rich, august, 
 historic Church to which Newman looked, 
 to these last products of Democracy, the 
 
 ^ DifflcuUies felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 
 chapter viii (condensed). 
 
224 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 Adult Classes and the Labour Churches of 
 our own city. But it is the same human 
 need that has given birth to both ; it is the 
 same spirit and, if not the same belief, I think 
 we may say that it is the same faith that 
 underlies the work of the teachers, adminis- 
 trators, members of both. 
 
 It is the clearness with which Newman 
 realized these two complementary ideas, the 
 idea of inward devotedness and the idea of an 
 outward and visible embodiment of spiritual 
 fellowship that lifts his teaching above the 
 limitations of time and circumstance, and gives 
 him the place that Froude claims for him as 
 one of the two great centres of spiritual influence 
 in the nineteenth century. 
 
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SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 Born in Birmingham, 1833. Died in London, 1898. 
 
 By R. Catterson Smith 
 
 Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., was born in 
 this city on August 28, 1833, at No. 11, Ben- 
 nett's Hill — a house on the left hand as you 
 walk up the hill from New Street. It is now 
 marked by a tablet between the first floor 
 windows. His mother died within a week of 
 his birth. His father was a framemaker, carver 
 and gilder by trade, but not of the successful 
 type. He said of him : " My father was a 
 very poetical Httle fellow, tender-hearted and 
 touching, quite unfit for the world into which 
 he was pitched. We had very, very few books, 
 but they were poets all of them, and I remember 
 when I was about twelve or so he used to read 
 to me little poems he made himself, but as time 
 went on he grew shy of reading them to 
 me. He used to read in a very touching voice, 
 melodious and pathetic, believing everything he 
 
 L.F.M. 225 Q 
 
226 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 read. I never heard such sympathetic reading. 
 And he beheved all good things that were ever 
 said of any one and was altogether unworldly 
 and pious. Like his countrymen he knew no- 
 thing at all of art, and couldn't understand 
 what it was all about or why it should be ; but 
 for Nature he had a passion, and would seldom 
 miss a sunrise if it could be seen, and would 
 walk tired miles to see a cornfield." With 
 that statement we must be satisfied, if we are 
 seeking in parents or ancestors for indications 
 of the gifts which blossomed in the boy. It 
 would have been interesting to us in this city 
 if he had come of a line of jewellers. 
 
 The child seems to have been delicate and 
 was, in consequence, sent into the neighbouring 
 country constantly for the sake of fresh air. 
 One place he remembered late in life was caUed 
 " Nineveh," which was probably mixed up in his 
 mind with the Biblical city of that name. 
 Doubtless those little trips to the green fields 
 and flowers fed the fast-opening soul of the 
 little boy with impressions which were after- 
 wards given back to the world in the back- 
 grounds of pictures of most romantic charms. 
 
 In 1844 at eleven years of age he became a 
 
SCHOOL DAYS 227 
 
 pupil at King Edward's School, New Street, 
 being placed on the commercial, but later on 
 the classical side, I suppose from indications 
 he showed of being gifted in that direction. So 
 far as his drawing went in school, his master 
 — Thomas Clarke — reported that his " drawing 
 might be better if he exhibited more industry." 
 It appears, however, that he showed consider- 
 able industry in drawing out of his head, and 
 he had a reputation amongst the boys for 
 drawing devils. 
 
 Books on history and romance in prose and 
 verse he devoured. Msop's Fables was a 
 special favourite ; while from Macpherson's 
 Ossian he says he got his first love for Celtic 
 lore. 
 
 He had a strong predilection for matters 
 theological and ecclesiastical, as may be seen by 
 letters he wrote. He fancied signing himself — 
 
 " Edw. C. B. Jones. 
 " Archbishop of Canterbury (Elect). 
 " Edguard Cardinal de Birmingham." 
 
 He evidently steeped himself in the pictur- 
 esqueness of Church usages, and that feeling 
 appears never to have left him through life. 
 At seventeen years of age we find a few indica- 
 
228 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 tions of his powers of drawing, or perhaps I 
 should say his power of graphic expression, a great 
 advance upon the devils of two years before. The 
 group of people, like a football scrum — the recep- 
 tion of a returning relative — is full of representa- 
 tive fun, invention and observation, not giving 
 the least hint of the special developments of the 
 future artist. Perhaps the drawing in a letter 
 to his father from London, a memory of the 
 British Museum, may suggest the future a little 
 more. 
 
 The year 1852 was the 300th anniversary of 
 the foundation of King Edward's School, in 
 commemoration of which prizes were offered 
 for essays. Edward Burne-Jones as a candidate 
 for one of these wrote an essay on " The state 
 of literature in England in the time of Edward 
 the Sixth," but he was not successful in winning 
 the exhibition or scholarship which would have 
 paid his way in Oxford, to which University 
 his father had decided to send him. Before 
 leaving his school period I should like to give 
 his tribute to one of his teachers. Though I 
 think it well to say that he nearly always steeped 
 his admiration in the sweet essence of his mind, 
 he always romanced. 
 
ABRAHAM KERR THOMPSON 229 
 
 " At Bideford," he writes, " died the only master I 
 ever had who had any brains. His name was Abraham 
 Thompson, a doctor of divinity he was ; black hair grew 
 on the back of his hands which I used to marvel at ; he was 
 very handsome and black. Funny httle boys are — how 
 they watch. He could be very angry and caned furiously; 
 at times I caught it. I think he grew very poor in his 
 last years and had the school at Bideford. I never heard 
 about him at the end. I worshipped him when I was 
 little, and we used to look at each other in class. I wonder 
 what he thought when he looked ; / used to think Abraham 
 of the Chaldees was like him. I was always sorry that 
 he was called Thompson, for I liked lovely names — should 
 have liked one myself and a handsome form — yes I should. 
 So that was Thompson. I have thought how far more 
 needful with a lad is one year with a man of intellect than 
 ten years of useless teaching. He taught us few facts, 
 but spent all the time drilling us that we might know what 
 to do with them when they came. Abraham Kerr Thomp- 
 son, that was his name, I wonder if any one remembers 
 him. A strange thing he would do, unlike any other I 
 ever heard of ; he would call up the class, and open any 
 book and make the head boy read out a chance sentence, 
 and then he would set to work with every word — how it 
 grew and came to mean this or that. With the flattest 
 sentence in the world he would take us to ocean waters 
 and the marches of Babylon and hills of Caucasus and 
 the wilds of Tartary and the constellations and abysses of 
 space. Yes, no one ever taught me anything but he 
 only." 
 
 This passage gives a good idea of his manner 
 of speech which had a certain playfulness with 
 a touch of whimsicality in it. 
 
230 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 In 1853 we find him in Oxford at Exeter 
 College, somewhat disappointed. The reli- 
 gious enthusiasm with which the writings of 
 Cardinal Newman had inspired him, gave him 
 great hope that there he would find fervid and 
 learned men on every side — he found languor and 
 indifference instead. But if he found short- 
 comings in that direction, he found a life-long 
 friend in that wonder of men, William Morris. 
 Both these men were intended for the Church 
 by their parents, but other forces were at work 
 as well as the decision of parents. 
 
 " The daily work of the schools," he says, 
 speaking of himself and Morris, "was un- 
 interesting to them, and made absolutely 
 desolate by the manner of teaching ; but little 
 by little we fed ourselves with the food that 
 fitted us." 
 
 That food was the reading of Ruskin, Tenny- 
 son, Carlyle, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Malory's 
 Morte d' Arthur and everything they could get 
 dealing with mediae valism. 
 
 They paid a visit to London and saw several 
 pre-Raphaelite pictures, amongst them Madox 
 Brown's " Last of England." But the picture 
 which delighted them the most was one by 
 
 t 
 
VISITS NORTH FRANCE 231 
 
 D. G. Rossetti of Dante drawing an angel when 
 he was disturbed by " certain people of import- 
 ance." 
 
 In one of the long vacations they decided 
 to form a party and visit the churches of Nor- 
 thern France — Morris had been there the year 
 before and reported their magnificence. 
 
 They went straight from Boulogne to Abbe- 
 ville, where they arrived late in the evening, 
 but Morris, the eager, the strong and the restless, 
 was up and about early next morning, and 
 they wandered the streets before breakfast. 
 Off again in the afternoon for Amiens. They 
 saw Beauvais, Paris with Notre Dame, the 
 Cluny Museum and the Louvre. At the Louvre 
 Morris led Burne-Jones blindfold up to Fra 
 Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that he 
 might see him under the shock of sudden delight. 
 They also saw Chartres and Rouen. On their 
 way home on the quay of Havre at night they 
 definitely resolved to devote their lives to 
 Art — Morris to be an architect and Burne- 
 Jones to be a painter. " That was the most 
 memorable moment of my life," says Burne- 
 Jones. 
 
 Before leaving Oxford in fulfilment of this 
 
232 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 resolve, the idea of publishing a magazine ^ which 
 would give the ideas of the little set of enthusiasts 
 of which these two men were the centre, was 
 formed. The expense was to fall on Morris, as 
 he was the moneyed man. By Burne- Jones's 
 contributions to it, it was shown that he had 
 fine literary gifts. His most important contribu- 
 tion was an essay on Thackeray's The Newcombs, 
 then just published, in which he expressed 
 some of his artistic faith as well as his high 
 admiration of the gifts of Thackeray. Two 
 sentences will suffice to show the serious and 
 exalted state of his mind. 
 
 When shall we learn to read a picture as we would a 
 poem, to find some story from it, some little atom of human 
 interest that may feed our hearts ? 
 
 An artist should be no faint echo of other men's 
 thoughts, but a voice concurrent or prophetical, full of 
 meaning. 
 
 Busy while at Oxford with book learning, he 
 was by no means neglectful of art — for he was 
 continually designing— we hear of designs from 
 the Lady of Shalott, and illustrations to the 
 Fairy Family, by Archibald Maclaren. Doubt- 
 less many others were in hand which never saw 
 
 1 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Twelve parts 
 were all that appeared, 1856. 
 
 II 
 
FIRST MEETS ROSSETTI 233 
 
 completion, or have been lost in the course of 
 time. 
 
 He never took a degree at Oxford. ^ He left 
 the University in 1855. Then began his artistic 
 life in real earnest, the first great event in which 
 was his meeting with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 which took place one night at the Working 
 Man's College, where Ruskin, Rossetti and 
 others took part in the teaching. The impres- 
 sion made upon Rossetti by young Burne-Jones 
 is expressed in a letter from Rossetti to a friend, 
 thus : 
 
 One of the nicest young fellows in — dreamland. 
 
 The friendship with Rossetti grew, and with 
 it the stimulus of his fine work and as fine a 
 personality — such a personality that I have 
 heard Morris say whatever Rossetti said became 
 a fixed law for them. 
 
 Burne-Jones had no regular art training. 
 He did while in Birmingham attend a school 
 of design three evenings a week, but now that 
 he had launched out into the career of an 
 artist he felt severely his want of executive 
 power, and to help himself in this respect he 
 
 ^ He was made an honorary D.C.L. in 1881, and Honorary 
 Fellow of Exeter College in 1882. 
 
234 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 attended the drawing and painting classes at 
 Leigh's School in Newman Street, Oxford Street. 
 This was a private school whereto went art 
 aspirants — art heretics very often — who did 
 not enter the Royal Academy or other schools 
 that had regular systems through which the 
 pupils had to wade. That was all the art 
 schooling Burne-Jones ever had, I believe. 
 
 Of this period are several designs clearly 
 inspired by Rossetti, of which " Going to 
 Battle " is one. In it will be seen the deliberate 
 imitation of Rossetti' s manner of representing 
 the watery ripple of hair — which has been 
 carried by that artist to a beauty never attained 
 before, to my knowledge. 
 
 Suddenly we find Edward Burne-Jones in 
 correspondence with Ruskin. He writes to his 
 friend Mr. Cormell Price : 
 
 I'm not Ned any longer. I'm not Edward Burne- 
 Jones any longer. I've dropped my personality. I'm 
 a correspondent with Ruskin, and my future title is the 
 man who wrote to Ruskin and got an answer by return. 
 
 His first actual meeting with Ruskin took 
 place in 1856, when he was twenty-four years 
 of age. He records their meeting in a letter : 
 
 Just come back from being with our hero for four 
 
ROSSETTI'S ADVICE 235 
 
 hours. So happy we've been : he is so kind to us : calls 
 us his dear boys, and makes us feel such old friends. To- 
 night he comes down to our rooms to carry off my draw- 
 ing and show it to lots of people ; to-morrow night he 
 comes again, and every Thursday night the same — isn't 
 that like a dream ? 
 
 The rooms referred to were the rooms in which 
 he and William Morris lodged — and for which 
 William Morris was having furniture made after 
 his own designs. In true mediaeval fashion 
 they were being painted upon by Rossetti and 
 Burne-Jones. 
 
 Burne-Jones painted a little in the studio of 
 Rossetti. But of more value to him than the 
 actual painting was the guiding advice Rossetti 
 gave him — indeed, the guiding principle of his 
 artistic life — which he has recorded in the 
 following words: 
 
 He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own 
 ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to 
 be altogether myself, and this not in any words I can 
 remember, but in the tenor of his conversation always, 
 and in the spirit of everything he said. So what I chiefly 
 gained from him was not to be afraid of myself, and to 
 do the thing I liked most : but in those first years I never 
 wanted to think but as he thought, and all he did and 
 said fitted me through and through. 
 
 What does this advice, Not to be afraid, or 
 ashamed of his own ideas, mean ? We must 
 
236 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 be clear upon that point if we are to get at the 
 underlying principle of Burne- Jones's art. 
 
 The answer is, that there were several paths 
 open to the young man — several schools of 
 painting into which he might drift. There 
 was the residue of the school of which Reynolds 
 and Gainsborough were the greatest ornaments — 
 which came down to us through Sir Thomas Law- 
 rence, Sir Benjamin West, Sir Charles Eastlake : 
 the art of fiunkeydom it might be called, which 
 had wasted the talents of many a gifted one. 
 There was a school of painting which dealt with 
 the appearances of actual life. And there was the 
 school which dealt with those visions or dreams 
 which spring within the mind from its contact 
 with old legends, and from thoughts which have 
 to be expressed by allegories and symbols. Ros- 
 setti saw in the young man the rare capacity 
 to become an artist of the latter school, but he 
 also knew that the surrounding influences were 
 likely to work against that capacity, and to 
 fill his mind with doubts as to the wisdom of 
 following such visions and dreams. He may 
 also have feared that his young disciple might 
 think it necessary to trim his ideas to bring 
 them into line with work of the sort that had 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S MOSES 237 
 
 been done or was being done, that the fear 
 of being unusual might get hold of him. 
 
 Let us take another view of the matter. We 
 all have a double power of vision. We have 
 eyes which see the outer world, and we have 
 eyes which see the world within our minds — a 
 world wherein wander all kinds of dim dreams 
 and memories. Each of these worlds is equally 
 real, equally natural. A few of us have our 
 mind-eyes more open than our outer-world 
 eyes, most of us have very dim mind-eyes. 
 What are those mind images like as a rule ? 
 Vague enough, I think. 
 
 Take any well-known legendary person such 
 as Moses. We have all heard of him often 
 enough to have formed some impression of him. 
 Well, what is that impression ? Michael Angelo 
 made a great statue in marble of him, which is 
 in Rome in one of the churches. It gives the 
 impression he formed of Moses. He conceives 
 of him as a great force — a great leader of men. 
 It will be remembered that " horns of light " 
 stood out of his head — Michael Angelo has put 
 horns on him, but they are short horns like 
 those on a young bull. Did he intend them to 
 look like horns of light, or did he put them there 
 
238 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 to be a sign of Moses ? I think he put them 
 there because they suggested to his mind 
 the wilderness and the reversion of man 
 through forty years of wandering there to his 
 primitive life amid shepherds and goats. You 
 and I do not translate them into horns 
 of light — but they convey to us a goatlike 
 suggestion — which is also helped out by the 
 long, ropey beard. The costume is not Egyp- 
 tian nor in any way local or belonging to an 
 historic period. It rather looks like pieces of 
 drapery tied rudely on — as might be supposed 
 to happen in the case of men wandering where 
 all the formal clothes of civilization would have 
 disappeared. That rendering of Moses by 
 Michael Angelo I think falls in with, and em- 
 bodies, the vague general impression we have 
 of him ; and once having seen that figure, I 
 think it takes its place in our minds as a 
 wonderful interpretation of that great fierce 
 lover of liberty wandering in the wilderness, 
 who saw God face to face. 
 
 William Blake translated the Book of Job 
 in the same way, and I am informed that an 
 eminent translator of the books of the Bible 
 says that Blake's rendering of it gives the truest 
 
MORTE D'ARTHUR 239 
 
 impression of the original. Burne-Jones has 
 done similar work, though not on the same 
 high plane. 
 
 Such men we may call translators of the 
 visions of the mind. The order of men who 
 people the mind's world for us who have less 
 clear seeing. 
 
 I have just said Burne-Jones has done similar 
 work " though not on the same high plane." 
 I think the difference between Burne-Jones and 
 these two men is, that they thought less of 
 beauty than of the idea they were expressing, 
 while he thought more of beauty than of the 
 idea. He was more of a decorator and less of 
 a visionary than they were. 
 
 Burne-Jones's pictures of King Arthur and 
 the Knights of the Round Table have visualized 
 for many of us the glamour of that strange 
 period outside actual history. We may not 
 care about its kings and queens, and ever fight- 
 ing knights, its plotting ladies, its wizardry, 
 its illicit loves made so beautiful as to be almost 
 justified, with self-renunciation lifted to the 
 highest virtue, and the mysterious quest of 
 the cup which received the blood-drops of Christ 
 when he hung on the Cross — 
 
240 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 So haggard and so woe-begone. 
 
 That sort of thing was in the air then : 
 Tennyson had dressed it sweetly for drawing- 
 room use — Rossetti, Morris and others were 
 singing it too — and the cultured classes were 
 crying out for more. 
 
 It is beautiful in its own unreal way. But 
 we have wakened to a wider view of things. 
 Although Burne-Jones knew it to be a Celtic 
 story he did not dress his people in historic 
 Celtic garb, nor did he use Celtic ornament to 
 decorate them. His shields are not Celtic, 
 nor his armour, nor his architecture. He did 
 not want to represent an historic period, but 
 to translate the impressions that the legend 
 made on his mind, and he has done so in a most 
 wonderful and convincing manner, endowing 
 them with a sense of mystery unique in art. 
 
 The danger likely to beset an artist who 
 relies upon the visions or fancies of his mind is 
 that he is apt to drift further and further 
 from wide human interests and from the natural 
 appearances with which other people are fami- 
 liar, and to cultivate idiosyncrasies ; to shut 
 himself up in a little close garden and to grow 
 curious flowers which may please a small number 
 
A LANGUAGE OF PAINTING 241 
 
 of specially cultivated people. That has un- 
 fortunately happened over and over again, 
 and even in the case of Rossetti himself. Burne- 
 Jones is not altogether free from it. 
 
 At first he painted in the early style of Ros- 
 setti, representing scenes as if they took place 
 in actual life, somewhat like the work of the 
 pre-Raphaelites, but not pledged quite so much 
 to fact. Later he adopted a purely unreal 
 treatment. He did not desire that his audience 
 should compare his pictures with nature or 
 with pictures representing nature, so that 
 those people — and there are a great many — 
 who say that his work is unnatural and unreal 
 are so far quite right, but they should not 
 expect in his pictures what he did not intend 
 them to convey. 
 
 To express himself, he had to discover a lan- 
 guage, a language of painting fitted to his 
 particular service. Few of his contemporaries 
 were engaged upon that kind of work — none 
 almost. To the ancient painters he had to 
 appeal for help. For those ancient painters 
 worked upon conventional lines which had been 
 developed after long effort to express ideas in 
 the most beautiful and spiritually truthful way. 
 
 L.F.M. R 
 
242 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 They were not realists. As illustrative of what 
 I mean, a very early crucifix enters into painful 
 details, streaming blood and gaping wounds. 
 But in the later crucifix that sort of realism 
 disappears, at least in Italy, and we get the 
 crucifix as a beautiful symbol free of all agony. 
 The spiritual idea has taken the place of the 
 physical suffering. 
 
 His visits to Italy were, therefore, of the 
 utmost importance to him. The first was in 
 1859, when he was twenty-seven years of 
 age. Two years later another. Then over ten 
 years intervened and he paid another visit, 
 and his last a year later in his fortieth year. 
 Four visits in all. He saw the chief cities 
 north of Rome and they had a profound 
 influence upon him, corroborating all he felt 
 and all he believed in. 
 
 The painters who influenced him most were, 
 I think : Sandro Botticelli, Mantegna, Giotto, 
 Carpaccio, Era Angelico and Michael Angelo. 
 He assimilated something from each of them, 
 and from many others. Biit it will be found 
 that they were all before the art of painting 
 gained its greatest power of expressing real- 
 ity. 
 
 t 
 
" COPHETUA " 243 
 
 Modern painters, with the exception of the 
 pre-RaphaeHtes, were uninteresting to him. 
 Turner, that great master of paint and Hght 
 and atmosphere, was nothing to him or to 
 WilHam Morris — in spite of Ruskin's champion- 
 ing of him. They both saw through mediaeval 
 spectacles. 
 
 Let us try if we can apply to one of his own 
 pictures his desire that we should be able to 
 " read a picture as we do a poem." 
 
 Take Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. 
 
 This is the old story of the charm of lowly 
 beauty subduing the great. 
 
 Look at her sitting up there — alert — not 
 quite at ease. Look at her far-off expression, 
 as if she beheld some vision of liberty and joy 
 perhaps about to vanish from her life, or felt 
 some wonder come upon her. What if all the 
 splendours of the palace meant a prison ! What 
 if they took from her the joy in the singing of 
 birds, in the sheep up the mountain-side, the sun- 
 rise and the sunset, and all the simple pleasures 
 of the peasant's life ! 
 
 Perhaps those youths standing up behind 
 the throne are chanting some love-song laden 
 with power to ensnare her heart. 
 
244 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 He sits — in silent adoration — as if afraid to 
 wreck her vision by word or deed, seeing in her 
 a guileless human soul. See how he sits below 
 her, and with side-glance watches, lest he 
 should even by the turn of his head, disturb 
 her reverie, lest he should force the life he 
 would have her lead with him upon her, with- 
 out due thought and her soul's full consent. 
 
 And what an old world wonder of a place it 
 is ! What strange and mystery-haunted images 
 are wrought upon that throne ! 
 
 Through the opening at the top are seen the 
 battlements and the distant solemn tree-tops, 
 and one band of quiet cloud, giving a feeling 
 of profound repose. 
 
 Note that she is barefooted, with a girdle of 
 sheep's wool, is slightly clad, but not with rags. 
 The painter does not want us to pity the ragged 
 beggar, but to love the simple soul. He never 
 painted rags. 
 
 Let us take another picture. The Star of 
 Bethlehem — which is in the Art Gallery here, 
 and which was originally designed for William 
 Morris to reproduce in tapestry. 
 
 The scene represents the visit of the wise 
 men to the Holy Mother and Child. How far 
 
"THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM" 245 
 
 this is from the actual or probable ! He felt 
 that the subject was of eternal interest. No 
 nation, no time was of importance ; and indeed 
 who, reading the New Testament story, sees 
 it all happening in the East ? This is the Divine 
 Mother and that the Divine Child for all time. 
 Those wise men — three kings — are presenting 
 their crowns to the Child. And note they repre- 
 sent the three races of man. The Eastern, the 
 European and the African. The star is not 
 an astronomical one, but is a ball of light borne 
 by an angel, which, I think, is an original in- 
 vention by the painter. The Mother has that 
 strange look of resignation to a state of exalta- 
 tion bewildering to her understanding, which 
 some of the ancient painters, especially Sandro 
 Botticelli, gave to the Blessed Virgin. The 
 place is not in a town, but out by a lonely wood- 
 side ; the shed, a canopy of straw, but roses 
 are about them and beneath their feet flowers. 
 The shed is the treatment of it used by many 
 of the ancient painters. 
 
 The general colour of this picture is of a 
 moonlight grey, showing very little more than 
 would be seen in moonlight. 
 
 The greatest judgment and invention is 
 
246 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 shown in the ornaments, the crown on the 
 ground being most beautiful, all evincing 
 deep sympathy with the craftsmanship of the 
 early centuries. The angel here, as in his Annun- 
 ciation, is designed under the influence of the 
 figures in the porch of Chartres Cathedral. 
 
 These two pictures can be read somewhat, 
 and are full of meaning. 
 
 Take another. The Golden Stairs. WTiat 
 does it mean ? We might as well ask what 
 does a piece of music mean. It is simply a 
 delightfully bewitching snare to catch the fancy, 
 an artist's expression of beautiful lines and 
 contrasts in a mysterious nowhere. Tested 
 by actuality: what of the dangerous stairs? 
 where is this crowd of listless maidens coming 
 from ? or where are they going to ? It may be 
 a bit of the far-off land of peace and ease, eternal 
 youth and music which we dream of in contrast 
 to the strenuous life which we are doomed to 
 at present. 
 
 Now, although I have made an attempt to 
 explain or analyse these pictures, it must never 
 be forgotten that it is quite impossible to 
 express in words what a good picture conveys 
 
COLOUR 247 
 
 to the mind. There is so much in the way 
 it is done — so much in unspeakable deHcacies, 
 which can only be seen by the searching eye, 
 and felt by our most sympathetic nerves. A 
 really good picture needs no name. Its subject 
 may be obvious or it may not. You stand 
 in front of it and look — only look — but you 
 take away more from it than you are con- 
 scious of. If it is beautiful, and earnest, and 
 true, the ideal in the centre of your soul 
 has had its proper food, and the far-off hopes 
 of man are brought nearer by your uplifting. 
 
 " Colour," which to the average mind only 
 means a pleasant arrangement of hues, may be 
 far more than that ; just as music may be far 
 more than an agreeable arrangement of sounds. 
 The average artist arranges colour to please the 
 eye only. But artists of the magnitude of Burne- 
 Jones have a wider range of meaning in colour. 
 
 We find in him three phases of colour — the 
 first giving the feeling of the chasteness of a 
 spring day, when the thought is religious ; the 
 second like the mellow richness of the autumn, 
 when the senses are appealed to ; the third 
 somewhat like the grey of twilight, when the 
 thought is solemn. 
 
248 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 These phases he used to create the mental 
 atmosphere he desired in his audience. 
 
 As a portrait painter he painted into his 
 people his own fancy rather than what could 
 be said to represent them. They are conse- 
 quently more representative of his own mind 
 than of his sitters. He feared to paint the 
 natural complexion of the face — made them 
 mostly pale. This he did in obedience to his 
 dislike to realism. 
 
 I have now dealt briefly with his pictures, 
 but there is besides a vast region of work touch- 
 ing the lesser crafts. Of these, stained glass 
 windows come next to his pictures in import- 
 ance. Birmingham is the proud possessor of 
 four of the finest in the Cathedral Church of 
 St. Philip. 
 
 No man ever had greater powers of graceful 
 arrangement of forms, and if one asks for 
 melody in line only, he gives that perfectly. 
 He had the power to make things " sing," as 
 he was in the habit of calling it. In fact, he 
 could design too easily, and his work has a 
 tendency to over-sweetness in consequence. 
 
 His appeal is, on the whole, to the cultured 
 
ROYAL ACADEMY 249 
 
 more than to the mass of people. And I cannot 
 help thinking that if his education had been 
 less literary he would have produced work 
 which would have touched a wider audience. 
 
 People who are familiar with his serious work 
 only, do not suspect the strong vein of fun 
 which was in him. Those who were near him 
 saw it constantly, and it now is to be seen in 
 the many humorous drawings he made. 
 
 It is an everlasting pity and shame that he 
 was not employed to decorate the walls of 
 some fine building — a thing he would have 
 loved to do. What it would be to have a great 
 hall covered with the legends of King Arthur 
 by him — and another of the " Book of Job," 
 by Wilham Blake ! 
 
 Manchester has had the wisdom to have its 
 Town Hall decorated by Madox Brown, and 
 many will be the pilgrims to that city to see 
 those pictures. 
 
 He was elected an Associate of the Royal 
 Academy in his fifty-second year, although he 
 never sent a picture to its exhibition until after 
 that. He resigned that associateship after three 
 years, as it had not been followed by the full 
 membership. 
 
250 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 He was created a baronet on the recom- 
 mendation of Mr. Gladstone in January, 1894. 
 
 He died suddenly in June, 1898. 
 
 Since I completed this lecture I found the 
 following letter in Mr. Comyns Carr's recently 
 published book. Some Eminent Victorians. It 
 is a reply by Burne-Jones to a letter from 
 Mr. Comyns Carr asking for information about 
 certain pictures he had chosen for notice in 
 his " Ignotus " articles which he was about 
 to republish. It is a piece of self-criticism of 
 great interest, when it is remembered that 
 the writer was by no means a disappointed 
 artist, or one who had not an abundance of 
 admirers. 
 
 I need not say that such a flattering review of them 
 gave me pleasure, for whatever cause I have to see them 
 with disappointment, such sjonpathy as you express 
 cannot be anything but most welcome. But there is so 
 little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and 
 I should like to say nothing, for a sudden feeUng of being 
 ridiculous ovenvhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, 
 therefore no right to begin art at all, never having learnt 
 one bit about it practically, nor till that time having seen 
 any ancient picture at all to my remembrance. Pro- 
 vincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and 
 Landseer — you know them all. I think Morris's friend- 
 ship began everything for me, everything that I afterwards 
 cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, 
 whose friendship I sought and obtained. He taught me 
 
SELF-CRITICISM 251 
 
 practically all I ever learned ; afterwards I made a method 
 for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to 
 commit myself to imagination without shame, a thing 
 both good and bad for me. It was Watts much later who 
 compelled me to try and draw better. I quarrel with 
 Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland and I to Italy, 
 which is a symbol. And I quarrel too with Rossetti. 
 If I could travel backwards, I think my heart's desire 
 would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli. I 
 do feel out of time and place, and then you should let me 
 go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for 
 anything else but a museum. You see I am writing in 
 front of my work and ought to know, and I do know. 
 
R. W. DALE 
 
 Born December ist, 1829. Died March 13th, 1895. 
 
 By Charles Silvester Horne 
 
 While I appreciate highly my privilege this 
 evening in being permitted to speak on such 
 a theme to such an audience, I shall have to 
 crave your indulgence because of the special 
 difficulty of my task. It is, in the first place, 
 impossible for me to assume an attitude of 
 detached criticism as one might try to do in 
 estimating the work, and the life, of some man 
 of distinction whom one had never known. I 
 knew and loved Dr. Dale. Stories of his college 
 friendship were a golden tradition in the home 
 in the Midlands where I was brought up. I 
 surrendered to the spirit of hero-worship for 
 Dale of Birmingham before I first experienced 
 the bracing influence of his personality, or 
 sat spellbound beneath his eloquence. I frankly 
 confess myself incapable of even an approxima- 
 tion to impartiality in discussing either the 
 
 253 
 
254 R- W. DALE 
 
 creed or the public service of one who did more 
 than any other teacher and leader of my genera- 
 tion to shape the ideals and determine the 
 life work of the younger ministers. But the 
 second difficulty which I feel is that though I 
 have so vivid and grateful a memory of him, 
 I cannot speak to you as an old Birmingham 
 friend and associate would have been able to 
 do — some colleague of his through those strenu- 
 ous and memorable years when the architects 
 and builders of municipal Birmingham were 
 not only adding fresh fame to this city, but 
 inaugurating a new era of civic and social 
 progress. So far as intimate personal famil- 
 iarity with the local details of that historic 
 struggle is the qualification for any appreciation 
 of Dr. Dale and his work, I am disqualified, 
 and can only claim the secondary qualification 
 of genuine enthusiasm for those ideals which 
 Birmingham contributed to our national life. 
 Disabled therefore for the part of critic by 
 reason at once of too sacred memories and too 
 imperfect knowledge, you will forgive me if I 
 play the more congenial role of eulogist, and 
 if this lecture takes the form of the tribute 
 of a disciple to a dead but ever-dear master. 
 
LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM 255 
 
 There need be no quarrel between Birmingham 
 and London as to the credit for the two famous 
 citizens Mr. Chamberlain and Dr. Dale. It 
 is, of course, open to London to suggest that 
 Birmingham had to come to the metropolis 
 for the men of genius which she could not 
 produce herself. It is equally open to Birming- 
 ham to retort that these two men gave early 
 proof of sagacity by leaving London and coming 
 to the only city capable of doing them justice. 
 London may avow herself so rich in talent that 
 she can supply citizens and statesmen for the 
 rest of the kingdom ; Birmingham may reflect 
 that despite changes in her fiscal theories she 
 has no objection to the free importation of good 
 raw material. The quality of the raw material 
 is, of course, an all-important thing ; but even 
 the best may be of little value if you do not 
 know what to make of it when you have got it. 
 It is enough to say that so far as Dr. Dale was 
 concerned he was Dale of Birmingham the 
 world over. Nearly forty years' association 
 with this city would have sufficed to strengthen 
 any languid hands and confirm any feeble 
 knees that might have been a lamentable 
 legacy from London. London, truth to tell, 
 
256 R. W. DALE 
 
 was associated with the mortification of his 
 early ambitions, Birmingham with the reahza- 
 tion of them. A great name in London in the 
 forties was Dr. John Campbell, minister of 
 Whitefield's Tabernacle, Moorfields, where the 
 Dales attended. He was as grim an old cham- 
 pion of an intolerant orthodoxy as ever roasted 
 a heretic, and with that note of papal infalli- 
 bility which has not been wanting in very 
 extreme Protestants in all ages. Dictatorial 
 and domineering, he was incapable of any effort 
 of the imagination so daring and dazzling as 
 the conception that in the young lad of a poor 
 home there might have arisen a greater than 
 the Solomon of the Moorfields' Tabernacle. 
 It was Dr. Campbell who put his foot down 
 with every appearance of finality on the ambi- 
 tion of the young man and his parents, and 
 refused a recommendation to one of the colleges 
 where he might have been trained for the 
 ministry. From which it appears that even 
 the decrees of Nonconformist Vaticans are not 
 always infallible wisdom, any more than those 
 of a more pretentious establishment else- 
 where. 
 But if London was thus associated with a 
 
THE BIRTH OF FAITH 257 
 
 keen disappointment, it is only fair to point 
 out that there is another and nobler association 
 to be chronicled. Difficult as it is to treat the 
 sacredest of all subjects in a public lecture, any 
 incident that uncovers the secret springs of 
 the inner life of such a man as Dr. Dale must 
 detain us for a moment. For we may as well 
 set it forth once for all that, great and famous 
 as he subsequently became in the civic and 
 political, the educational and ecclesiastical 
 worlds, these were not the worlds in which he 
 most of all lived and moved and had his being. 
 The most original fact about Dr. Dale was 
 undoubtedly his religious faith. He himself 
 would never at any time have hesitated 
 to trace his public activities to certain 
 religious convictions, which again were the 
 product of certain spiritual experiences. Mr. 
 Lecky has told us in his history how a humble 
 meeting in Aldersgate Street, at which John 
 Wesley experienced the spiritual change that 
 profoundly affected his life, " marks an epoch 
 in English history." It is worth your while 
 to reflect how much of the municipal and educa- 
 tional history of this city is intimately connected 
 with the preaching of a sermon by the Rev. 
 
 L.F.M. s 
 
258 R. W. DALE 
 
 James Sherman, the immediate result of which 
 was that Robert WilHam Dale, as I heard him 
 tell the story, left the chapel as in a dream, 
 aware that something had happened which had 
 affected his life at the centre. Such spiritual 
 crises, where they are real and profound, mean 
 the quickening of the whole being ; and great 
 national and ecclesiastical movements, like 
 mighty rivers, can, not infrequently, be traced 
 to some simple source in the birth of a new man- 
 hood beneath a creative influence which is at 
 once the most mysterious and the most efficient 
 of all the forces that make or mar our lives. 
 
 It is sixty years ago since Dr. Dale entered 
 as a student at Spring Hill College in this city 
 to prepare himself for the Congregational 
 ministry. Dr. J. B. Paton of Nottingham is 
 almost the only survivor of the brilliant band 
 of men who won no little reputation in the land 
 for what was then relatively a small theological 
 seminary. It is not, however, numbers that 
 make a school or a college great, but primarily 
 personality in the teachers ; and Spring Hill 
 College was associated with one professor of 
 genius. I mean, of course, Henry Rogers, an-j 
 other name of which Birmingham may be justb 
 
HENRY ROGERS 259 
 
 proud, the friend and literary colleague of 
 Macaulay, Stephen, Whateley and others. He 
 was a philosopher and student of history, a 
 brilliant essayist, a keen and subtle thinker, a wit, 
 an inspiring conversationalist, and through all 
 and above all a kindly and devout Christian 
 gentleman. It can hardly be doubted, I think, 
 that among the earliest of the formative influ- 
 ences of Dr. Dale's life this one ranked highest. 
 Henry Rogers was in the best sense of the word 
 a man of the world, deeply interested in, and 
 interesting his students in every living move- 
 ment of thought and action. We have often 
 had reason to complain of the narrowing and 
 even monastic effect of life in a seminary, and 
 nothing could have been healthier by way of 
 abatement of any such tendency than personal 
 contact with one whose tastes and ideas were 
 so cosmopolitan, and who regarded it as belong- 
 ing to the function of a college professor not to 
 discourage but to compel original thought on 
 the part of his men. We can imagine how 
 congenial such a personality would be to a 
 young man of Dale's temperament. The semin- 
 ary has yet to be built that could have made 
 a monk of him. For the ascetic spirit he had 
 
26o R. W. DALE 
 
 less than no respect. He had no ambition to 
 play the part of the small coasting vessel, skirt- 
 ing timidly about among the shallows and 
 sheltered places, and exploring the petty creeks 
 and estuaries of thought. He was built for 
 the high seas. He was happy in the great 
 waters. He moved, as only great minds can, 
 with a superb ease and power, where men of 
 smaller build are timid and vacillating. He was, 
 as we all know so well, a man of massive and 
 masculine intellect, and John Bright' s old say- 
 ing about him, that he suggested the Church 
 militant was emphatically true. It was never 
 his way to evade discussion and controversy. 
 He had a soldier's instinct for the storm-centre, 
 and the " happy warrior's " joy in battle. 
 What distinguished his fighting was not the 
 smart and supple use of the rapier, but the 
 tremendous sweep of the broadsword, as of 
 some knight of heroic mould and giant stature 
 bearing down all before him in the thickest of 
 the fray. One consequence of this was that 
 he was never afraid of theology, nor, let me 
 add, of theological controversy. Whether con- 
 troversy is noble or ignoble depends absolutely 
 on the spirit of the controversialists. He had 
 
DALE AND DAWSON 261 
 
 no sympathy with a tame and weak surrender 
 where great truths were at stake simply because, 
 as is sometimes argued, good and pious people 
 differ, and therefore it is best to leave the sub- 
 ject alone. He was drawn by sheer intellectual 
 and spiritual interest to the discussion of the 
 biggest and most momentous problems of life 
 and religion, and believed that the Church of 
 Christ in England would suffer irreparable loss 
 if she did not face the problems of theology 
 with as firm and inflexible an intellectual cour- 
 age as the leaders of science or philosophy 
 have dedicated to the problems on which 
 they have spent their strength. 
 
 I have been led to say so much on this point 
 not only because it explains why at this forma- 
 tive period a leader of thought like Henry 
 Rogers would be invaluable to him, but because 
 it also explains why another famous Birming- 
 ham teacher, who inspired some of his most 
 characteristic ideals, could yet never wholly 
 satisfy him. In that biography of Dr. Dale, 
 by his son, which is in the way of becoming a 
 Nonconformist classic, the author recognizes fully 
 the influence of George Dawson in strengthening 
 convictions in. Dale which afterwards bore fruit 
 
262 R. W. DALE 
 
 in the masterly books which he devoted to the 
 exposition of Christian ethics. There is no 
 reference in that biography to the very interest- 
 ing appreciation by John Ruskin, in the 87/A 
 Fors, of an article on George Dawson contri- 
 buted by Dale to the Nineteenth Century, and 
 which is an admirable indication of the writer's 
 standpoint. There are two passages in it at 
 once critical of and appreciative of George 
 Dawson, which Mr. Ruskin commended so 
 absolutely that he announced his intention 
 to place them " for an abiding comfort and 
 power in St. George's Schools." Suffer me to 
 read to you these two passages that were so 
 fortunate as to win the unqualified favour of that 
 fastidious and somewhat capricious critic. The 
 first is this — " To despise the creeds in which 
 the noblest intellects of Christendom in times 
 past found rest is presumptuous folly ; to sup- 
 pose that these creeds are a final and exact 
 statement of all that the Church can ever know 
 is to forget that in every creed there are two 
 elements — the divine substance and the human 
 form. The form must change with the changing 
 thoughts of man, and even the substance may 
 come to shine with clearer liglit and to reveal 
 
RUSKIN ON DALE 263 
 
 unsuspected glories as God and man come 
 nearer together." 
 
 In that saying there stand expressed his 
 convictions very early formed: (i) that the form 
 of the Christian creed must necessarily change 
 with the changing times ; and (2) that any 
 new form must enshrine the very substance of 
 the great faith " in which the noblest intellects 
 of Christendom found rest." 
 
 Now let us read together this other " most 
 important and noble passage," as Mr. Ruskin 
 calls it. George Dawson, Dale has contended, 
 cast anchor in the belief that '' the facts of the 
 universe are steadfast and not to be changed 
 by human fancies or follies." Then follows 
 Dale's addition : " The spiritual universe is 
 no more to be made out of a man's head than 
 the material or the moral universe. There, 
 too, the conditions of human life are fixed. 
 There, too, we have to respect the facts ; and 
 whether we respect them or not the facts 
 remain. There, too, we have to confess the 
 authority of the actual laws ; and whether 
 we confess it or not we shall suffer for breaking 
 them. To suppose that in relation to the 
 spiritual universe it is safe or right to believe 
 
264 R. W. DALE 
 
 what we think it pleasant to believe — to suppose 
 that because we think it is eminently desirable 
 that the spiritual universe should be ordered 
 in a particular way, therefore we are at liberty 
 to act as though this were certainly the way in 
 which it is ordered, and that though we happen 
 to be wrong it will make no difference — is pre- 
 posterous. No ; water drowns, fire burns, 
 whether we believe it or not. No belief of ours 
 will change the facts, or reverse the laws of the 
 spiritual universe. It is our first business to 
 discover the laws, and to learn how the facts 
 stand." 
 
 Such were the passages that captured John 
 Ruskin's admiration, and how familiar to some 
 of us the words sound ! How we seem to 
 hear again the voice of one who scorned to 
 claim any quarter, or ask any favours, for the 
 system of thought which was to him the very 
 queen of sciences ! What granite common- 
 sense revealed itself as the foundation of every 
 fabric of philosophy or theology that we owe 
 to him ! How he insisted on the facts, the 
 proven facts — but all the facts — so that scientific 
 observation, analysis and co-ordination of actual 
 experiences might lead up to sound theory and 
 
 I 
 
INTELLECT IN PREACHING 265 
 
 rational belief. Those who frankly recognize 
 this necessity may nevertheless arrive at totally 
 different conclusions, but they will respect one 
 another, for they are at least agreed on the 
 only method that can help us in the search for 
 truth. 
 
 Some of you may feel a little impatient 
 that I should spend so much time on this aspect 
 of Dr. Dale's character. But the fact is that 
 unless we understand this, the perspective will 
 be all wrong. When he settled at Carr's Lane 
 he did not propose to serve up to his con- 
 gregations merely dainty and highly-spiced 
 confectionery, but strong meat such as would 
 produce a robust type of Christian citizen. The 
 sermons that consist of anecdotes, platitudes, 
 and a quotation from Longfellow were not his 
 style. The prophecy has become famous of 
 the Congregational minister who told him that 
 the congregation at Carr's Lane would never 
 stand doctrinal preaching. " They will have 
 to stand it " was the reply. One of his most 
 highly educated hearers complained that it 
 was " hard work " to follow his sermons on the 
 Romans. Hard work, no doubt, it was, but 
 the people of Birmingham soon discovered 
 
266 R. W. DALE 
 
 that it was worth while to work hard at the 
 highest of all themes under his guidance. I 
 remember very well his saying to me that the 
 skilled artisan of Birmingham was the best 
 hearer he had ever found ; one who would 
 take and appreciate the strongest thinking 
 that could be offered him. He respected his 
 audience, and his audience came to respect 
 him. I will not weary you with the narrative 
 of the early years of this momentous and historic 
 ministry in Birmingham, when those who could 
 not recognize old truth unless it took the form 
 of old shibboleth bemoaned to one another the 
 young man's heretical tendencies, and shook 
 their heads over his probable eventual destiny. 
 Nor have I time for more than a sentence of 
 recognition of the chivalrous and courageous 
 attitude assumed towards him by his grand 
 old colleague, the veteran John Angell James, 
 who differed often and radically from the 
 younger man's doctrines but defended him 
 with magnificent staunchness, knowing full 
 well his essential loyalty to the evangelic faith. 
 All this is known to you — is it not written in 
 the Book of the Chronicles of the dissenting 
 divines of England ? 
 
HIS IDEAL OF THE MINISTRY 267 
 
 This, then, was the new force that was to 
 be brought to bear upon local and national 
 politics in the mid-years of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. You and I are so familiar to-day with 
 the position that it is the duty of every true 
 minister and every true Church to be interested 
 in all aspects of human life collective as well 
 as individual, that we hardly reahze that when 
 a young Congregational minister in those days 
 began not only to preach this thing but actually 
 to practise what he preached, every saint over 
 fifty was apt to regard it as a deplorable and 
 disastrous innovation. Dale was nothing if 
 not drastic and thorough in the application of 
 his principles. He found no warrant in the 
 earliest charter of the Church for the distinction 
 between priest and people. He believed that 
 all Christians were priests, and he objected to 
 be regarded as a member of a sacred caste, and 
 marked out by certain disabilities as a distinct 
 order of human being. He held that a man 
 forfeits no privilege and abdicates no duty in 
 becoming a minister of a church. He may not, 
 on that account, repudiate his citizen obhgation. 
 He may not separate himself, by artificial 
 distinctions, from the rest of the common- 
 
268 R. M'. DALE 
 
 wealth. So, with admirable directness, Dale 
 put his principles into practice. He forswore 
 the white tie and the ministerial costume. He 
 deliberately and definitely broke down every 
 monastic habit and custom that had clung to 
 the Puritan minister in spite of his puritanism. 
 The Genevan gown went the way of the white 
 stock. Despite the well-meant protest that 
 they invested ministers with an air of levity 
 and worldliness, he grew a beard and a mous- 
 tache. He took care to have it known that 
 he had an invincible objection to the title 
 ' ' Reverend. ' ' He made no secret of the fact that 
 he smoked a pipe. The souls of some of the 
 faithful froze with horror at these iconoclastic 
 methods. But he was undismayed. Yet it 
 is worth while to observe that he fought his 
 battle out in his own community at Carr's 
 Lane, before he ventured forth into the wider 
 arena. He fought and he won. The plain 
 men and women of Birmingham understood 
 him ; and Nonconformity soon recognized that 
 it had nothing to lose but everything to gain 
 by getting rid of some outworn trappings which 
 disguised rather than expressed its true soul 
 and meaning. When Dale proceeded to carry 
 
SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL INTEREST 269 
 
 out his principles still more freely, and made 
 full public proof of his citizenship, he had 
 secured the co-operation of his Church, he had 
 conquered their prejudices, and he went forth 
 into wider service followed by the conviction 
 and enthusiasm of a united people who had 
 responded with magnificent unanimity to the 
 new ideals of life which he had advocated and 
 exemplified in their midst. 
 
 The old prejudice which Dale was bent on 
 breaking down was, in a word, that a minister 
 existed for a limited number of Church members 
 and pew-holders, and not for the whole popula- 
 tion of a city. His responsibility to God and 
 the Church was for the right discharge of his 
 mission to Birmingham, and to the greater 
 world outside. He was, as you all know, an 
 ardent denominationalist, but he never dreamed, 
 to use a modern phrase, of contracting himself 
 out of the national system to serve denomina- 
 tionalism more efficiently. He began with a 
 close first-hand investigation of the conditions 
 of business and industrial life in Birmingham. 
 He studied the factory, the shop, the office. 
 He interested himself in all the facts of work 
 and wages. " The last translation of the 
 
270 R. W. DALE 
 
 Bible," he once said, "will be its translation into 
 the vernacular of daily conduct and custom." 
 Many was the young man afterwards who was 
 amazed to find that Dale knew more about the 
 inner workings of the business in which he was 
 engaged than he knew himself. Readers of 
 his Week-day Sermons, and the Laws of Christ 
 for Common Life, will realize how intimate was 
 his knowledge of the everyday affairs of the 
 working world. From these wide interests he 
 advanced with sure and steady tread to a close 
 examination of the more public questions — 
 questions which equally involved ethical con- 
 siderations, and to the solution of which prin- 
 ciples of national righteousness must be applied. 
 Into that world of politics he was constrained 
 to enter by the ideal that he had formed of what 
 the Christian ministry ought to be. He could 
 not admit that in the public affairs of a city 
 alone conscience and reason and the humaner 
 instincts had nothing to say. But not only 
 was he prepared to enter this world himself — a 
 world that had often been treated as common 
 and unclean by professing Christian people — 
 but he was determined that the members of 
 this Church should be confronted with their 
 
THE TRUE VIEW OF POLITICS 271 
 
 responsibility in this respect. He once said, 
 in his lectures on preaching, that he believed 
 the day would come when those who refused to 
 vote would be subjected to Church disciphne 
 as well as people who refused to pay their debts. 
 And the saying exactly expressed what he felt ; 
 for every citizen owes a debt to his city, and 
 if he does not pay his debt, he defrauds the 
 city of its due. That was, as you well know, 
 a characteristic article of his creed ; and with 
 what wealth of illustration and argument he 
 expounded it from pulpit and platform as well 
 as in the press and in the polling-booth itself 
 all England may bear witness. Speaking in 
 your Town Hall on one occasion when Mr. 
 Bright was present he devoted himself to this 
 theme. " Of all secular affairs," he said, " poli- 
 tics rightly considered are among the most un- 
 worldly, inasmuch as the man who is devoted 
 to political life ought to be seeking no personal 
 or private good. The true political spirit is 
 the mind that was in Christ Jesus, who ' looked 
 not on His own things but also on the things 
 of others.' " "I feel," he went on, *' a grave and 
 solemn conviction which deepens year by year 
 that in a country like this, where the public 
 
272 R. W. DALE 
 
 business of the State is the private duty of 
 every citizen, those who decHne to use their 
 pohtical power are guilty of treachery both to 
 God and man." Nobody felt more keenly than 
 he that the effect of this " treachery " on the 
 part of religious people is to jeopardize the best 
 interests of the commonwealth by leaving them 
 to those who have private axes to grind. It is 
 easy to condemn corruption in these latter, but 
 the former deserved, in Dale's thought, an equal 
 share of condemnation. " The rogues do public 
 work in order to make money ; the honest men 
 neglect public work in order to save money 
 Judged by the laws of public morality there is 
 not much to choose between them." That is 
 plain talking, but such talk was needed in the 
 mid- Victorian days if our Churches were to be 
 saved from what Dr. Dale truly called " an 
 exquisitely delicate and valetudinarian spirit- 
 uality." 
 
 That they were effectually saved from that 
 weak and futile attitude was due mainly, I think, 
 to him. Through all his preaching and speak- 
 ing one hears this strong dominant note. He 
 was Christ's servant for the sake of the Church, 
 the city, the commonwealth, the world. Eng- 
 
HIS LOVE FOR BIRMINGHAM 273 
 
 land has never had a more perfect example of a 
 man of whom it could be said that every prac- 
 tical activity rooted itself in a spiritual principle. 
 Dearly as he loved Carr's Lane, and dearly as 
 the Church at Carr's Lane loved him, he could 
 not and would not narrow his affections, nor 
 consent to circumscribe the area of his activities. 
 He faced the logical consequence of his own 
 creed. He was bent on making Birmingham 
 a very metropolis of liberty, education, and 
 courageous municipal government. The city, 
 its possibilities and opportunities, possessed 
 his imagination, and captured his devotion. 
 The human interest was paramount with him. 
 He was never insensitive to the appeal of sub- 
 lime and beautiful scenery. He appreciated 
 the quiet resting-places of life as much as any- 
 body. But it was in the crowded streets, with 
 the men and women fighting hard beneath the 
 battle-smoke, that his heart was ; and he could 
 never be long separated from them. The pas- 
 sage in one of his letters is inevitable in a lecture 
 like this — " At this moment," he writes during a 
 summer holiday, " when I raise my eyes, the 
 Lake of Lucerne with its guardian mountains 
 is before me — the noblest scenery as some think 
 
 L.F.M. T 
 
274 R. W. DALE 
 
 in all Europe ; but I declare that there is no- 
 thing in this magnificent view which makes me 
 feel half the thrill I have sometimes felt when 
 I have looked down on the smoky streets of 
 Birmingham from the railway as I have returned 
 to my work among you after a holiday. The 
 thought of having to do more or less directly 
 with all that mass of human thought and action 
 which is covered with the ceaseless smoke which 
 hangs over us — the thought that you and I 
 together may, with God's help, save multitudes 
 — sends the blood through one's veins with an 
 exultation and glow which the most magnificent 
 aspects of the material universe cannot create." 
 The spirit in which he entered upon his strenu- 
 ous and often stormy political and municipal 
 life may be best illustrated by two stories 
 gathered from different sections of his son's 
 biography. The first refers to the unveiling of 
 a monument to Joseph Sturge, and George 
 Dawson's perverse and undiscerning remark 
 that Joseph Sturge '' was a singularly un- 
 practical man." Dale was roused. " The most 
 practical thing in the world," he replied, " is 
 to believe in God's law, and to try to hold fast 
 to it." That, as his biographer says, was a 
 
SOCIAL REFORM 275 
 
 summary of his whole Hfe and philosophy. He 
 was in politics because it was God's law for him ; 
 and he could not stay outside without breaking 
 that law. The other story is of a retort which 
 he made, in a little private gathering, to Mr. 
 O'Sullivan, an educational antagonist. *' Dale," 
 said O' Sullivan, '' when do you mean to quit 
 politics and look after your soul ? " The reply 
 was as decisive as the question was pointed. '' I 
 have given my soul to Christ to look after ; He 
 can do it better than I can ; my duty is to do 
 His will, and to leave the rest with Him." About 
 that " will," so far as the immediate content 
 was concerned, he was troubled with few doubts. 
 He would tell the story of Alderman White's 
 public stewardship — the teacher of a large Bible 
 Class for young men ; how he visited every 
 street, every court in his ward ; how he set 
 forth the facts as to the squalid homes in which 
 the poor lived, destructive to health and ren- 
 dering all high moral Christian life almost im- 
 possible ; how he then submitted to the Council 
 an elaborate scheme for sweeping all the wretched 
 district away at a cost of four and a half millions, 
 a proposal which the Council unanimously 
 accepted. " Now I believe," said Dale, " that 
 
276 R. W. DALE 
 
 my friend was ttying to get the will of God done 
 on earth as it is in heaven, just as much when 
 he was fighting St. Mary's ward, and speaking 
 in the Council as when he was teaching his Bible 
 Class on Sunday morning." It is no exaggera- 
 tion to say that the eyes of the nation were on 
 Birmingham, where a new civic spirit was created 
 largely by the inspiring Gospel of Christian 
 citizenship preached pre-eminently by Dale, 
 Dawson, and Vince ; and illustrated in the 
 City life by such lay-comrades as Mr. Chamber- 
 lain, Mr. Dixon, Mr. J. S. Wright and many 
 others. Then it was proved that even the plat- 
 form of municipal politics might be converted 
 into a pulpit from which might be published a 
 new evangel. Ideals were no longer despised. 
 Men of vision were not thereby disqualified 
 for public affairs. To quote Dr. Dale's own 
 description, " the speakers dwelt with glowing 
 enthusiasm on what a great and prosperous 
 town like Birmingham might do for its people. 
 They spoke of sweeping away streets in which 
 it was not possible to live a healthy and decent 
 life ; of making the town cleaner, sweeter, 
 brighter ; of providing gardens and parks and 
 music ; of erecting baths and free libraries, an 
 
CIVIC IDEALS 277 
 
 art gallery and a museum. They insisted that 
 great monopolies like the gas and water supply 
 should be in the hands of the Corporation ; that 
 good water should be supplied without stint at 
 the lowest possible prices ; that the profits of 
 the gas-supply should relieve the pressure of 
 the rates. Sometimes an adventurous oratoi 
 would excite his audience by dwelling on the 
 glories of Florence and of the other cities of 
 Italy in the Middle Ages, and suggest that Birm- 
 ingham too might become the home of a noble 
 literature and art." I shrewdly suspect that 
 he himself was that " adventurous orator." 
 
 In that final sentence there lay a clue to 
 another article of his creed with which his name 
 and fame wiU always be associated. He did 
 not enter either municipal or national politics 
 simply to realize certain materialistic ends. 
 Municipal baths and wash-houses, gas and water, 
 clean streets and adequate drains, modern 
 houses and improved locomotion, all belong 
 to the necessaries rather than the luxuries 
 of a democratic civilization. But a very large 
 part of their value will always depend on the 
 sort of men and women who are going to make 
 use of them. While as for libraries, galleries, aiid 
 
278 R. W. DALE 
 
 museums, it is mere waste of good money to 
 provide these things unless you are also pre- 
 pared to educate the people to enjoy them 
 and benefit by them. 
 
 We have arrived now at those stormy years 
 around 1870 when the battle for national educa- 
 tion was fought out, and as a result a limited and 
 maimed national system did get on to its feet and 
 hobble along. So far as the theory of com- 
 pulsory universal education was concerned Dale 
 was one of the pioneers, breaking a lance for it 
 when few even of his closest denominational 
 allies could be found to sympathize with him. 
 Nobody saw clearer than he did that the old 
 hard individualism was no sort of a theory to 
 meet the necessities of our modern society. 
 He realized that the broadening of the citizen- 
 ship of the nation had made education more 
 necessary than ever ; but he argued the case 
 also from a modern point of view in the rights 
 of the children, and the duty of the State to 
 enforce that right. The State cannot permit 
 physical starvation ; and no humane and 
 advanced State can permit mental starvation 
 either. To that position he had to convert 
 the mass of Liberals and Nonconformists of 
 
STATE EDUCATION 279 
 
 the old school who resented any interference 
 with those people who regard it as a sacred 
 parental privilege to be able to starve the minds 
 and overwork the bodies of their children. It 
 was not that the best minds in England were 
 indifferent to the value of education, but that 
 they thought it was one of those interests that 
 might better be left to the haphazard voluntary 
 system. Dale had done all that one man might 
 to make voluntaryism effective ; he had pleaded 
 for funds ; he had to complain that voluntary- 
 ism to many people meant '' freedom to give 
 nothing." He now saw clearly that there was 
 no escape from universal compulsory education 
 paid for out of State funds if England was not 
 to be outstripped by other great competitive 
 nations. With a conviction and enthusiasm 
 that were irresistible he flung himself into the 
 new fray ; he wrote masterly articles in the 
 leading magazines ; he fought the matter out 
 at private conferences ; he conquered the rank 
 and file from the public platform. No single 
 man did more than he to make national educa- 
 tion an inevitable article of the Liberal creed ; 
 a question which the great Liberal majority 
 of 1868 dared not shirk even if they would. 
 
28o R. W. DALE 
 
 I have not time to devote more than a sen- 
 tence or two to the revolt which Dale eventually 
 led against the famous 1870 Act of Mr. Forster, 
 and the contempt for the essential principle of 
 religious equality which, as Dale maintained, 
 was manifest in that measure. That State 
 grants without State control should be conceded 
 to denominational schools was, as he argued 
 then, a vicious and mischievous principle capable 
 of indefinite expansion. He was equally 
 offended at some of the provisions relative to 
 the School Boards, an inadequate conscience 
 clause, and the indefiniteness of the Cowper- 
 Temple regulation for Bible teaching. He had 
 a great horror of seeing the schools which should 
 make for the unity and harmony of the common- 
 wealth converted into places for emphasizing 
 religious and denominational distinctions. 
 Hence it was that he adopted the policy to 
 which after fierce debate he secured the adhesion 
 of the Congregational Union Committee, " that 
 in any system of national education secular in- 
 struction alone should be provided by the State, 
 and that the care of religious instruction should 
 be remitted to parents and churches." It may 
 be added that the more subtle question as to 
 
THE NONCONFORMIST REVOLT 281 
 
 the exact definition of secular education had 
 not then arisen ; nor had the failure of an 
 admirable attempt to prove the sufficiency of 
 the " right of entry" in Birmingham shown 
 conclusively that voluntar}/ Biblical instruction 
 at all events is not a practical proposition. He 
 always regarded it as a concession on his part 
 when he subsequently consented that the Bible 
 should be read in the schools without note or 
 comment, and in later years he returned to the 
 severely secular position which he defended 
 with renewed energy upon his return from 
 Australia, and after an investigation of the 
 Australian school systems. At the moment, 
 however, he felt that in the Act of 1870 with 
 its state recognition of denominationalism, 
 essential Liberalism had been betrayed and 
 the principle of religious equality dishonoured. 
 He led the revolt against Mr. Forster and Mr. 
 Gladstone which did more than anything else 
 to produce the reaction which brought Mr. 
 Disraeli into power in 1874. It was no doubt 
 a heavy price to pay for loyalty to a single 
 principle. But the fact that Dale and thousands 
 with him were content to pay it was the strongest 
 proof that could be offered of the value they 
 
282 R. W. DALE 
 
 set on education, and equal justice to all children 
 in the schools of the nation ; and when one 
 considers the endless sequence of ecclesiastical 
 strife and political intrigue that has been the 
 fatal fruit of the double-minded policy of 1870, 
 he is indeed a bold critic who is prepared 
 roundly to deny that if Liberalism had been led 
 then, not by W. E. Forster but by R. W. Dale, 
 we should have been spared many years of 
 controversy inimical alike to education and to 
 religion. Once, however, the 1870 Bill was 
 law, he made up his mind that its worst 
 perils must be obviated in administration. 
 From 1870 to 1880 he was, as you all know, 
 responsible, with distinguished colleagues, for 
 the great constructive work which covered 
 this city with Board Schools of which she is 
 justly proud. If by force of circumstances he 
 was compelled from time to time to fight 
 vehemently in what seemed to be a negative 
 crusade, his efforts during those years proved 
 him to be predominantly a constructive states- 
 man, and an educational enthusiast. Nobody 
 rejoiced more than he did whenever he was 
 able to suspend hostilities against ecclesiasticism 
 and join his ability and energy to those of all 
 
A HIGH CHURCHMAN 283 
 
 good citizens in perfecting the education of 
 the children. 
 
 There is only one other controversy into 
 which we need follow him. It was the one in 
 which his genius could not fail to mark him 
 out for leadership, and it has the advantage 
 that it leads us back in closing to what was 
 most fundamental in his thinking. We have 
 already seen what was his view of the Church. 
 In the true sense of the word he was a great 
 Churchman, and, as he never failed to claim, 
 he was a High Churchman. He believed that 
 Christian men and women, however simple 
 and uncultured, might have the presence of 
 Christ with them in their counsels ; and that 
 because uhi Christus ihi ecclesia, "where 
 Christ is there is a church," is eternally true, 
 therefore they might receive direction from the 
 Head of the Church and assume the respon- 
 sible functions of a Church which Christ Him- 
 self has inspired and guided. He argued 
 that, such being the clear New Testament 
 teaching, for it to be assumed that such a 
 Church is not to be intrusted with the choice 
 of a minister, or the management of its own 
 worship and spiritual affairs, is to discredit 
 
284 R. W. DALE 
 
 the reality of Christ's Headship and the suffi- 
 ciency of His promise. He felt that for the 
 State to dictate to Christ's Church within its 
 borders who should be its chief pastors, what 
 should be its creeds and rubrics and lectionary — 
 in short for Parliament to be called in to de- 
 fine the liberties and enforce the discipline of 
 the Church of Christ was and is an intolerable 
 and presumptuous usurpation. Such, as we 
 have seen, was his view of the Church. 
 
 We have seen also what was his view of the 
 State ; how he identified himself with the 
 school of thinkers who argued for an extension 
 of the State's legitimate authority, and the 
 enlargement of its functions ; but how, at the 
 same time, when the problem of religious educa- 
 tion arose he declined absolutely to admit the 
 competence of the State to prescribe the religion 
 suitable for its children, or to train the teachers 
 capable of teaching it. No man holding by 
 these principles as fundamental to all his 
 thinking can possibly acquiesce in the existing 
 relations of Church and State. In association 
 with Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain he made 
 Birmingham the Mecca of the Liberation move- 
 ment. I believe I should speak the literal 
 
THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE 285 
 
 truth if I were to say that in all the political 
 history of England there is no parallel to this 
 triple alliance of orators each of whom was 
 perfect in his own style and order, one star 
 differing from another star in glory. Mr. Cham- 
 berlain's unique gift of keen incisive logic, Mr. 
 Bright's magnificent purple rhetoric, and Dale's 
 aptitude for massive intellectual and ethical 
 arguments were mutually complementary. If 
 their Rome was ever attacked, the enemy 
 might well hesitate to storm the bridge " where 
 stood the dauntless three." John Bright's 
 speeches on the disestablishment of the Irish 
 Church are among the noblest in the language. 
 Dale and Chamberlain fought the battle as 
 vehemently in the Midlands as Bright fought 
 it in Parliament ; and in contradistinction to 
 Mr. Gladstone they never pretended that it 
 was other than one apphcation of a principle 
 that is essentially just and true, and that 
 must eventually have recognition everywhere. 
 This was the principle to the exposition of 
 which, in association with Dr. Guinness Rogers, 
 Dale gave his whole strength in the prime of his 
 days 'in a campaign that became memorable. 
 As his son has well said, he was concerned not 
 
286 R. W. DALE 
 
 so much to right Nonconformity as to right 
 Christianity, which he felt was misrepresented 
 and perverted, disabled and discrowned, by the 
 mere fact of Parliamentary control. 
 
 It ought, I think, to be said that Dale's " Root 
 and Branch " opinions on this great subject — for 
 he was a sound disciple of John Milton — while 
 in his early days in Birmingham they scandalized 
 and alienated many whom he would have 
 desired to have as allies, came in course of time 
 to be thoroughly understood and appreciated, 
 and his relations with such men as Bishop West- 
 cott and Cardinal Newman were relations of 
 mutual friendliness and respect. No one was 
 ever more ready than he at all times to acknow- 
 ledge the personal debt which he owed to the 
 great Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. 
 Nobody was better able to sympathize with them 
 in their reverence for the Church idea. When 
 Dr. Welldon once in Exeter Hall claimed him 
 as a Churchman no one who saw him will forget 
 the energetic nod of the head as he retorted, 
 " There's no mistake about that." But what 
 so many found it difficult to understand was 
 that he was a Churchman because he was anti- 
 clerical, and he claimed no authority in the 
 
HIS ELOQUENCE 287 
 
 Church that did not equally belong to its hum- 
 blest member. It was this combination, as I 
 hold, of an intense jealousy for the rights and 
 prerogatives of the Church, with the sturdy 
 and uncompromising repudiation of the clerical 
 claims, that made him a unique and original 
 force in the Christian thought and life of his 
 time. Possibly it will make his position clear 
 if I quote a passage which at once illustrates 
 his attitude, and is a fine example of his sonorous 
 eloquence — an eloquence of an order and quality 
 in which he had no living rival — an eloquence 
 of the old stately style of which Burke, on 
 whom he deliberately formed himself, was the 
 supreme master, and of which, alas ! in these 
 latter days, we have no representative left. 
 It is not necessary that you should agree with the 
 sentiment to be able to admire and to enjoy 
 this example of impassioned polemic. 
 
 I am not insensible to the majesty and grandeur of the 
 Church of Rome. It has other and nobler claims on our 
 wonder and admiration than those which rest upon the 
 elaborate perfection of its organization, the vast number 
 of its adherents, its venerable antiquity, and the great 
 part which it has played in the history of Christendom. I 
 have wept over the story of the heroism, the sufferings, 
 the unquenchable ardour of its illustrious missionaries. 
 The massive and stately structure of its theology, built up 
 
288 R. W. DALE 
 
 by the gigantic labours and enormous learning of innumer- 
 able doctors, through a long succession of generations, 
 has filled me with intellectual awe. I have been melted, and 
 I have been thrilled, by the transcendent eloquence of 
 its great preachers, from Bossuet to Lacordaire. I know 
 something of the wealth of spiritual wisdom to be found in 
 the spiritual writings of its great mystics who, in the 
 strength of an intense faith in the unseen, have been able 
 to dissolve the spell of a sensuous worship, and to penetrate 
 through an elaborate ceremonial into the immediate pres- 
 ence of God. The saints who have been the strength and 
 the glory of the Romish Church in days gone by have their 
 successors in our own times, and God forbid that I should 
 ever forget that those who love Christ, whatever their 
 Church and whatever their creed, are regenerate of the 
 Holy Ghost, and heirs together of God's eternal glory. But 
 against the pretensions of this Church to be the exclusive 
 minister of God's grace and to stand between even the 
 humblest and obscurest of God's children and their hea- 
 venly Father ; against the assumptions on which her priests 
 and her bishops rest their claim to control national policy 
 and legislation ; against the authority asserted on behalf 
 of her chief ruler to interfere in the name of God with the 
 free development of the intellectual, political, and social 
 life of mankind ; against these I must declare my intense 
 and implacable hostility. Never, never again, I trust, 
 will the people of England and Scotland permit the emis- 
 saries of an Italian bishop to menace their Parliaments 
 and to control their kings. If we have to fight over again 
 the old battle — the battle between the theology of Rome 
 and the pure truth of Christ, between the pretensions of 
 her priesthood and the liberty of immediate access to God 
 which Christ confers on every one that receives His grace, 
 I trust we shall have the sanctity and the learning and the 
 genius to win a controversial triumph as illustrious as that 
 
HOME RULE 289 
 
 which our fathers won. And if the battle is to be fought 
 in another form — if the Roman Cathohc priesthood tell 
 us that freedom is not enough for them, but that they 
 must have privilege ; if they tell us that it is not enough 
 that the Irish people have been emancipated from the 
 injustice of having to support a Church whose faith, and 
 whose worship they reject ; if they insist on having imperial 
 grants, in larger and still larger proportions, voted for 
 the maintenance of schools intended to propagate the 
 Romish faith; and if they tell us that in the event of 
 our refusing to concede their claims they will provoke 
 civil disturbance and render British rule in Ireland im- 
 possible ; I trust that those threats will but stir the heart 
 and brace the courage of the English and Scottish people, 
 and that we shall tell them that the high spirit of this 
 ancient empire has not decayed, that we are resolved to 
 pursue a policy of justice and of freedom, that we scorn 
 their threats and defy their power, and may God defend 
 the right ! 
 
 My time has gone, and I can but ask your 
 patience for a sentence or two by way of con- 
 clusion. The political schism that cleft into 
 two hostile camps those with whom he had been 
 so closely associated, when the Home Rule 
 question was raised in an acute form in 1886, 
 caused him more distress than perhaps to any 
 other prominent public man. He had hosts 
 of friends among both parties to the dispute ; 
 and he saw from the first how disastrous this 
 fissure would be to many of the causes for which 
 he cared most. Already he had sorely over- 
 
 L.F.M. u 
 
290 R. W. DALE 
 
 taxed his strength, and it may be doubted 
 whether his visit to AustraHa, with its exacting 
 programme of engagements, helped to mend 
 matters. On his return to England he realized 
 that his political work was done. It was " time 
 to be old," and " to take in sail." To many 
 men who had lived so much in the public eye 
 this would have been almost an intolerable cross. 
 But I have spoken indeed to little purpose 
 if I have not made it apparent that his pre- 
 dominant interest lay throughout in the world 
 of idea and belief ; and that even more vital 
 to the Commonwealth than the practical order- 
 ing of its affairs was, in his estimation, the clear 
 and sound exposition of the principles and mo- 
 tives of action. To this work he consecrated 
 his closing years. If any credence were still 
 given to the old fallacy that much contact with 
 public affairs unfits a man for religious and 
 theological leadership, and that no one who 
 rubs shoulders with politicians and adminis- 
 trators of all sorts and conditions can retain 
 unabated the interest and experience which 
 combine to form the only true saintly character, 
 then Dr. Dale would seem to have been speci- 
 ally raised up to confute such theory. It 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 291 
 
 was not necessary to accept all his theological 
 conclusions to admire his intellectual grasp, 
 to envy his extraordinary power of cogent 
 argument, and to sympathize with his lofty 
 moral and spiritual ideals. The practical work- 
 ing faith that had been his inspiration through 
 strenuous and stormy years did not fail him 
 now ; and as the weather-beaten vessel drew 
 on toward the haven and into calmer waters, 
 he had time for reflection, time to confirm 
 and illustrate for others the fundamental laws 
 and principles by which he had navigated these 
 earthly seas. He had taken his bearings from 
 the sun, and he had read direction in the stars ; 
 and he was confident not only that they had 
 not betrayed him, but that all human instru- 
 ments and calculations would ever need to be 
 tested and corrected, as the ages move on, by 
 these eternal facts of our spiritual firmament 
 If the last days were not without pain, they 
 were at least without dread. To him Emer- 
 son's magical lines might have been spoken : 
 
 Lowly-faithful banish fear. 
 
 Right onward drive unharmed ; 
 
 The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
 
 And every wave is charmed. 
 
292 R. W. DALE 
 
 Birmingham does well to be proud of its 
 famous sons. Great men have been among 
 you, hands that penned and tongues that uttered 
 wisdom. No city is so rich in living leaders 
 that it can afford to blot out of the book of its 
 remembrance the apostles and prophets who 
 laid the very foundations of its civic well-being. 
 Few cities in the world have so good a right as 
 this to draw up a calendar of saints and seers, 
 men of wide vision, and noble disinterested 
 activity. It has been well for you to do homage 
 to those worthies who have deserved and 
 achieved a place among the nation's immor- 
 tals. I, too, rejoice with you in your inheritance 
 in the name and fame of those who have been 
 celebrated here by other and abler lecturers than 
 I ; and yet, as I remember the manifold distinc- 
 tions of him of whom I have been privileged 
 to speak, his permanent contributions to the 
 theological and ethical thinking of the modern 
 world, his ripe sagacity, his rare fortitude, his 
 spiritual genius, his high and unblemished 
 character, his chivalrous championship of great 
 causes, you must not attribute it wholly to the 
 fond preference of a prejudiced disciple if I 
 hazard the verdict as I close — " this was the 
 noblest Roman of them all." 
 
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