THEBISHOP OF ARYGLL AND THE ISLES.
BLSHOP EWING'S death, at an age when a much longer career might fairly have been hoped for him—he was only fifty- nine—deprives the Episcopal Church of Scotland of, we believe, her only Broad-Church Bishop, and the Anglican Communion in general of its most spiritual and benignant prelate. No one would have said of Bishop Ewing, as it has so often been said of some of the most liberal thinkers of the English Church, that he cared more for free thought than for the spirit of worship. His mind was open enough to all fair intellectual considerations. As the beautiful and thoughtful volume of sermons which he lived to see through the press, but not to see in the hands of the public, shows, he had no cut-and-dried answer to the difficulties of thoughtful sceptics ; only they could not penetrate him, for he felt too profoundly the light and strength beneath them. He was a hearty disciple of the Christianity of the late Mr. Erskine, of Linlathen, who died only three years before him, and in whose spiritual mind and life Dr. Ewing found just that link between Christ and the life of our own day which seems to be wanting to so many of us,—a link supplying the need of a practical modern interpreter of the mind of Christ, rather than any intellectual answer to intellectual difficul- ties. At the time of Mr. Erskine's death, a powerful and thought- ful writer who knew him intimately spoke of him thus in these columns :—" Eighty years had not naturalised him here, nor delivered him from the home-sickness with which he yearned after a fuller vision of things divine than that allotted, except in rare moments, to this stage of our being. One never could with him wholly escape the feeling that he belonged to a different spiritual climate. To some, perhaps, this aloofness from ordinary life was seen only in the result of intensifying a very peculiar individuality, and sheltering it from all those influences which make men common-place This outward universe was to him no more than a parable of the true Cosmos ever before his eye, where all things, great and small, were held in their places by the spiritual gravitation of love, and he was for ever struggling to utter his impressions of spiritual laws to him far more unquestion- able than those by which the outward world is ordered." Such was the Bishop of Argyll's spiritual teacher, and Dr. Ewing's whole mind and thought were devoted to the task of transmitting to the world, so far as it came under his influence, the chief ideas of his friend and master. He had not the rare spiritual originality of Mr. Erskine,—indeed, not one man in a century has,—but he was possessed wholly by the same spiritual ideas,— that Revelation is light and knowledge, that it carries with it its own authentication, that we are not to look outside the teaching for the proof of the teaching, but to find it in the teaching itself ; that it is a light which makes the stupendous system of nature not indeed transparent, but still full of meaning to us; that it delivers us from the temptation to ask too curiously Why were we made thus ?' and helps us to accept our lot as it is, in perfect conviction that it is a lot prescribed by love ; that Revelation enables us to suffer contentedly, if we must suffer, not because we like it, but because we recognise the love from which, though shrouded in mystery, the suffering comes. The Bishop of Argyll preached this perfect and absolute self-sufficiency of the Gospel to reveal the unknown God, up to the point where faith is merged in know- ledge. He was impatient even of such forms of prayer as the persistent cries for mercy in our liturgy. To harp so plaintively on the cry for mercy was, he thought, a distrust of God, a virtual denial of revelation, and showed a tendency to ignore the fact that God, so far from needing repeated and pertinacious entreaty on our parts, was yearning for our repentance and inspiring the very hope we were putting forth. There was a great childlikeness and simplicity about Dr. Ewing. He had gentleness and great sweetness,—no bishop of our time fulfilled the paternal ideal of the bishop's office as he did,—but he harped like a child on the niEt:n strings of his devout and simple theology. He was like the Apostle John at the time when he was carried into the church only to say, "Little children, love one another." Not that Dr. Ewing's modes of expression were wanting in variety, fancy, and illustrative imagination, but that the burden of them was always the same. The gospel was an unveiling. It did not explain the mysteries of life, nature, and history, but it revealed their divine purposes so that we could wait in patience for the explanation of those mysteries. He was almost intolerant of those forms of Christianity which seemed to him to place new veils between Christ and man. The sacramental theory of the Roman Church was abhorrent to him. He was as wroth as it was in his nature to be against the notion that divine light could be secured by machinery of any sort,—that of a Council or otherwise. He had seen much
of the interior of the Catholic Church in Sicily and Italy, and was convinced that the spread of infidelity in these countries was due to the externality of the Roman Catholic worship and the hard shell of its dogma. If ever he said a severe or a narrow thing, it was against the ritualists and sacerdotalists, but even then not against them, but against their ideas. He had indeed little sym- pathy with what seems to us a true belief, that divine help comes into the heart as much through unconscious as conscious channels. In symbols he could believe, because symbols are but the hieroglyphics of thought. In channels of divine help that were something more than symbolic, that fed the spirit through the body, he could not believe, but spoke of any pleas offered for them as mere subtle apologies for magic and incantation.
Dr. Ewing had real humour, the kind of humour which so often accompanies great simplicity and childlike, evangelic feeling, and he often showed it, not only in Convocation, but in his charges to his clergy. His attack, in 1869, on the then expected dogma of the in- fallibility of the Pope was a fair illustration of this humour. The Bishops who met at Rome were the navigators, he said, of the bark that is called the Church. "The night is dark. There is no open vision. The track is unknown. The sailors meet and declare that the captain is infallible, and retire, it may be, if they please, to
sleep It is Saul seeking enchantments ; a meeting of wizards to create a brazen head like Bacon's or a calculating head
like Babbage's. There is no difference in principle between this and the methods of the Buddhists to discover truth ; we read of an election of the Dalai-Lama, the pontifical sovereign of Thibet, as follows. It is the result of the election of 1841, reported to the Emperor:—' Your servant, Meng-Pa, inserting his hand within the urn upon the altar, reverently proceeded to draw forth one of the slips. The inscription on the slip was as follows : The son of Tse-wang-teng-tche, Thibstan, present age four years.' All the attendant Lamas exclaimed unanimously, with unfeigned delight, that the lot having now fallen upon this child, it is placed beyond a doubt that the genuine re-embodiment of the Dalai-Lamas has appeared in the world, and the Church has a ruler for its govern- ment. The minds of the people are gladdened and at rest." Of course, the Roman Catholics will by no means accept that account of their doctrine of infallibility. But no one can deny that it puts with great humour and force the objection to all external guaran- tees for the accuracy of revelation.
No man of really spiritual nature can be described, for the simple reason that the spiritual side of the mind, which is the
highest and most important side, shades away into the infinite, and all that is left within our grasp is a group of impressions which carry with them the appearance of converging upon this life from an indefinitely wider region of the spiritual universe. There was something of evangelical simplicity about Dr. Ewing, both in the highest sense and, to a certain extent, even
in the technical sense in which the word 'evangelical' is
used, though he was a strong and enthusiastic opponent of all the narrow Calvinistic views. We indicated the source of this when we said that the Bishop chiefly thought of divine influence as limited to our conscious life, and disliked, as a form of superstition, any belief which ascribed much value to channels of divine influence outside the sphere of conscious experience. One of the passages in the Bible which
evidently had the most tenacious hold both on his heart and his imagination, was the account of Jacob's wrestling with the angel
until he wrung from him a blessing. That story of a victory of conscious human need over the mysterious external agents of God's Providence, a victory won by perseverance and suffering, and resulting in a crisis so definite as to be marked even by a change of name from ' Jacob ' to 'Israel, had a special fascination of its own for Dr. Ewing, which
appears not once, or twice, or thrice, but half a dozen times at least even in the thin volume of sermons which he has left behind him. We can hardly give a distincter conception of the highest side of his mind than by extracting the conclusion of the first sermon on "the Unknown God," suggested by the story of Jacob, to which we have referred :—
" Nature as a whole is silent, dark, stupendous. It was the Spirit which fashioned it—Creator Spiritus. It is the Spirit which under- stands it. It is that which signifieth and giveth life ; and so far as man understands, he has it—so far as he has it, he understands. So far as man understands, he has life, and is in intercourse and at one with the Spirit of the universe, at one with the Most High, its and his
'Creator, and Sustainer, and Governor. Behold how great a matter a little spirit is. As man recognises and comes to this, a great calm enters into him; he has not only looked upon God and lived, bathe comes to live by looking. Jacob has become Israel; the Sun has risen on Poniel; and if he halts upon his thigh, what is it when death has been swallowed up in victory, and the dark angel has become the angel of light—the light found to be the product of tho darkness—and the hard ribs and skull of the destroyer are changed into the wings and blooming features of a messenger from heaven, and the traveller unknown into the one and eternal love and righteousness ? Amen."
And the Bishop himself, though he was so childlike, playful, and spiritual, was not without the masculine strength which strives with the dark forma of earthly trial until it compels from them a blessing. He fought boldly and with great tenacity in the Pan- Anglican Synod for a broader view of Christianity than that very timid Assembly was at all inclined to admit. He was a bold and keen opponent of the Athanasian Creed and the doctrine of ever- lasting punishment as attaching to heterodox doctrine, which that creed conveys in so startling a form. It was not against sacerdotalism only that he contended. It was against everything that he thought a gospel not of light and love, but of darkness and fear. His was not a massive, but it was by no means a pliant mind. His faith threw off from it all that was inconsistent with it with a completeness and certainty of which few minds could boast. Evangelic, eager, gentle, childlike, sweet, thoroughly per- sonal in his religious devotion, keen in repelling what he thought falsehood, he was a bishop of the Johannine type, if there were one on earth, but to these qualities he added others which it is not easy to ascribe to any Hebrew, and least of all St. John,—especially a playfulness and humour which helped him to understand the world, and helped the world to understand him.
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