BOOKS.
BISHOP WESTCOTT'S LAST BOOK.*
DEATH does indeed give a solemnity to the last words of a life, lending them, as the poet says, "a power to live, after the vanished voice, and speak to men." But it did not need the death of the saintly, spiritual, and venerable writer of this book to invest it with a rare and weighty authority. Already in his lifetime the late Bishop of Durham had acquired a position in the general regard, which his death has perhaps, as appears from many quarters, more clearly revealed, but hardly enhanced. And this book, though it comes to us now as his last message, is not really a death-bed utterance, and is indeed commended and enforced rather by the Bishop's life than by his death. Here is the faith, in its richly varied aspects and manifold applications, in which no doubt he died, but still more in the strength of which he lived all his life through. What were the character and tenor of that life ? The aalient features which struck the world were these,—that he was from boyhood a scholar, one, with Benson and Light- foot, of that remarkable trio, perhaps the most remarkable in its way that any school or any Head-Master ever produced, Bent by Dr. Prince Lee from Birmingham to Cambridge; that there he was a high classic ; that then he was for seventeen LONDIU from
Durkara Work, Brooke Pow Westoott, D.D., Biahop of
. London : and Co. [68.] years a Harrow Master, and then a Cambridge Professor, occupied for twenty years in the minutest, most abstruse niceties of textual criticism, living, it seemed, in the library, in the past, in another world ; that lastly at a sudden call he went down to Durham to take up the threads which had just dropped from the hands of Lightfoot, and showed himself not only a devoted diocesan and deep spiritual force, but a practical man of the world, so that the frail, pensive figure of the mystic and the student was able to appear in the thick of the industrial battle, almost, it may now be said, like a being from another sphere, and to compose the bitter struggle of the keenest business heads and the most stubborn tempers of the rough toilers on Tyneside. How was this paradox accomplished ? Why was he able to effect it? He was able to effect it just because he was what he was ; because he was so thoroughly a Christian and so thoroughly a student ; because his wide sympathy was no mere democratic profession, but a genuine belief in the common dignity and essential equality of men as men ; because he weighed truth and justice, the value of words and the value of facts, to the last grain and the last hair; because it was clear that the only reward he sought was the blessing of the peacemaker.
What he was appears on every page of this book. He had a singular openness of mind and catholicity of temper. He held, and acted implicitly upon, the belief that absolutely all things work together for good to the man who really loves God. Nothing less than to bring all life and all knowledge under the sanction and sanctification of his faith was his aim. His, it may be said, was a Christian application of Goethe's famous maxim, to live resolutely in the whole, the good, the true. The Christian student, he says himself, who has mastered the scope of his work will enlarge the memorable confession of human sympathy and say, Christianus sum, nihil in reruns nature a me alienum puto.
Again, Christianity, if it has any reality, is no dead legacy of the past, but a living force and factor immediately applicable and constantly applying itself to every incident of life, public and private, around us at this hour. We are members of an historic Church, no doubt, but we are still making its history. The message of Christianity is not ex- hausted. This view the Bishop repeats again and again : "We are still living under the new order of revelation." Again : "These also are days of Christ in which the living Lord speaks with His people." And once more : "There are to- day miracles for us to work, an inspiration for us to claim." This is the attitude the Bishop takes, and desires the Church, especially the English Church, to take. It lifts him above many difficulties, alike of disunion, of doubt, of party controversy. It enables him to contemplate without fear, nay to welcome, the developments which time brings in its course. Revelation is progressive, it is gradual, as gradual and as slow, but also as sure, as evolution. Indeed, the doctrine of evolution, he says, in so many words, "so far from being opposed to revelation, falls in exactly with what the Bible teaches us of the spiritual progress of man." He, too, has a doctrine of " Development " of his own. Christianity, as once for all delivered, is not changed, but its meaning is more and more richly apprehended as the ages roll on. "The truth moves because it lives." Physical science has taught us much. His- torical criticism, another mode of apprehending truth, has taught us much. Socialism, despite its dangers, is bringing home to us new or latent, and hitherto underestimated, truths of the Christian creed. Each age again, and each new nationality as it arises, adds something to the whole. "Syrian, Greek, African, Latin, Teuton, have each contributed to the better understanding of the whole Gospel, and the Church waits with confidence for new interpreters." "In this light we can see the grandeur of hope which lies in Missions to India, and the East." In this light, too, we see the duty and opportunity of the English Church, resting itself on Scripture, and looking to find truth through life rather than through logic, still national, and still preserving in its Coronation Service the thought which underlay the Imperial system. Further, the very fact of this progressive adaptability is the best credential of Christianity. "I cannot conceive," he says, "any other verification of a final revelation by God to men than that it satisfies the human wants which found expression in earlier religions, and afterwards meets new wants which arise in the
evolution of society." And so "Theology, far from being stationary, as has been said, is, in its essence," he pronounces, • ' the most progressive of all sciences, for it advances with the accumulated movement of all."
• Thus with a literal acceptance of the words, "the truth shall make you free," the Bishop goes fearlessly forward, with a sober but striking optimism, to consider and attack the problems, the phenomena, of the world about him, political, intellectual, social, moral. What does he say about these
problems ? It would be impossible here to note half the many points on which he touches. We turn naturally to his words about organisation of industry, about Unions and Boards of Conciliation. He believes, of course, in such Boards, and in arbitration by their means. But they must rest upon a "free personal devotion to a common cause." "Compulsion is wholly ineffective in such a ease." "I cannot consider the result of legislation in New Zealand encourag- ing." "Collectivism puts on one side the spring of energy. There cannot be any nationalisation of intellectual and moral power, and without these, capital and labour are paralysed." He believes most heartily in Co-operation and in profit- sharing. He emphasises the duty of consumers. We turn again, naturally at this moment, to what he says upon " Empire " and "Our Attitude towards War." Here again he is very hopeful. He welcomes Empire as the largest kind of combination, as embodying on the amplest scale the ideas of association and service, as "a further step in history to the attainment of the earthly destiny of man, the federation of the world,' a corporate fellow- ship of men as men." Meanwhile, even now, he sees truly that "an Empire makes for peace, not indeed as its primary aim, but as its natural result." War, though we must look forward to its abolition, is, at the present stage of the world, a necessary sanction to law, and "must be recog- nised by Christians as an ultimate means for maintaining a righteous cause."
The duty of the student, the duty of laymen, these are other topics which will interest special readers. It follows from what has been already laid down that the Bishop would call on laymen to do more, not only to witness to and main- tain Christianity in every act of their ordinary everyday affairs, but to come forward and take more definitely their place and function in the Christian society. But we have not space for all the Bishop's topics, and, indeed, many of them are, or become, as handled in these pages, almost too deep or too high for cursory comment. "We are not worthy even to speak of their prevailing mysteries": but we have said enough to show what is of paramount importance,—the temper, the spirit, the attitude of the book. Years ago Bishop Westcott began to be called a mystic. The title was true, but not exhaustive. He was a mystic, but a mystic careful of the letter; a mystic, but a mystic, as we have seen, who could hold his own in the market-place. And yet he was a mystic in a beautiful and true sense. Much of his most characteristic scholarly work was done on the Fourth Gospel and on the Epistles of St. John. Their spirit, the spirit of the aged, loved, and loving disciple is pre-eminently his. Especially is it manifest in his language, the last utterance of an old man, to the young. No passage, perhaps, in these pages is more characteristic or touching than the concluding paragraphs addressed at the end of last year, at her Commemoration of Benefactors, to the students of hiS own
Cambridge College, Trinity. He looks forward and backward, and tries, as he says a University should try, to teach his hearers to view life sub specie aeternitatis "In this Chapel," he says, "and in these Courts, fifty-six years ago, I saw visions as it is promised that young men shall see them in these last days, visions which, in their outward circumstances, have been immeasurably more than fulfilled. . . . . . So now an old man, I dream dreams of great hope when I plead with those who will carry forward what my own generation has left am- attempted or =accomplished, to welcome the ideal which breaks in light upon them, the only possible ideal for man, even the fullest realisation of self, the completest service for others, the devoutest fellowship with God ; to strive towards it untiringly even if it seems to fade, for ever and for ever as we move."
Such is the Bishop of Durham's fullest, final message. his last vtord to those he loved, to the generations he had watched and served, and to the..generation which was to take the place of
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