Twenty-five years as Bishop of London

There have been many Bishops of London, but few who have occupied the See for twenty-five years, and when it was suggested that the celebration of Dr. Winnington Ingram’s twenty-five years’ Episcopacy called for some record of his work, and some description of the great changes in religious life during the last thirty years, it seemed very fitting that such a volume should bear the imprint of the publishers who have issued the Bishop’s books since the days before he was Bishop of Stepney.

At the same time, the name of Wells Gardner, Darton and Company, Ltd., upon the title-page necessitates an explanation that this book is, in no sense, official, nor is it issued with the Bishop’s authority. Rather it is a tribute, from an outside source, to Dr. Winnington Ingram, both as London’s loved Bishop, and as a man.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AS BISHOP OF LONDON

CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE—SCENES OF BOYHOOD—FAMILY HISTORY—CLERICAL ANCESTRY

Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram was born on January 26, 1858, at Stanford Rectory, in Worcestershire.

This statement, brief as it is, is indicative of certain facts: for the names “Foley,” “Winnington,” and “Ingram” given him hint at particular family connections. It would appear that in the eighteenth century Sir Edward Winnington, the first baronet, married a Miss Ingram, of Ribbesford House, one of twenty children who all lived to grow up, and came to reside at Stanford Court, in the County of Worcester. Thus the “Ingram” connection was established.

Sir Edward had an only son, Edward, who married the youngest daughter of Lord Foley, and thus the link with the Foleys was formed. For family reasons his second son was induced by the then Mr. Ingram, of Ribbesford House, to adopt the double-barrelled name of “Winnington Ingram.” That is why in the personal name bestowed upon the future Bishop there is a hint of the far-reaching 2family connections and traditions of “Winningtons,” “Foleys,” and “Ingrams.”

The second fact that he was born at Stanford Rectory is not surprising. His father, the Rev. Edward Winnington Ingram, of Ribbesford House, Worcestershire, was also actually Rector of Stanford-on-Teme at the time of his birth; so that even in his earliest childhood his environment was that of the clergy. His mother had inherited similar traditions, being herself the daughter of Bishop Pepys, Bishop of Worcester; another influence, which, unconsciously, set the course of the boy towards his future career. Both from his mother’s and father’s side, the pre-natal factors in his nature made for the religious temperament.

The surroundings of his early years must have steeped his boyhood in an ecclesiastical atmosphere. The Rectory itself must have been the centre of parochial matters, and some of the parish problems must have emerged in table-talk; while from the mother’s relatives and friends must have come much of the gossip of the Cathedral Close at Worcester. The boy, of course, could not adequately understand all that was said; but, if it dawned upon him that there was a great struggle being waged in the Church of England, it would not have been surprising. Certain it is that he must have grown up alive to many facts in which other boys had no concern, and with a mind unconsciously affected by the priestly life of his father, and the episcopal life of his grandfather.

From his mother he would probably learn how the Church in Worcestershire had been a great help in uplifting the people. How the monks of Malvern 3Priory had begun the forest clearing which reached from the hills to the Severn; and, how many other religious houses had spread over the county; until, at last, most of the land in it was owned by them. So it came to pass that the Bishop of Worcester became the real head of the county, and had to be a “battling bishop” in order to defend it. She would tell him that the See was founded nearly 1,200 years before, much to the annoyance of the then Bishop of Lichfield.

Perhaps he heard from her the story of how, when St. Wulfstan began to rebuild the ancient Church of St. Oswald, one of his monks noticed him standing in sad silence in the corner of the cemetery, and rallied him with the old-fashioned words: “Wherefore look ye so sadly to-day?” And Wulfstan replied: “We are pulling down the labours of holy men that we may gain honour and reputation for ourselves. The good old time was when men knew not how to build magnificently, but thought any roof good enough, if under it they could offer themselves a willing sacrifice to God. It is a miserable change if we neglect the souls of men and pile together stones.”

There were many such tales to tell—tales of the pilgrims who thronged from far and near to the shrines of the departed saints, St. Oswald and St. Wulfstan, and if the telling added a touch of the mystical in the development of the lad, we should not wonder.

When he was about ten years old he would hear much said about the work which was just being begun of restoring Worcester Cathedral. Seven long years did the work take, and it was completed 4and re-opened, Easter week, 1874. The choir between the tower and the eastern transept was restored, redecorated and adapted to the needs of a more dignified ritual. Surely when the growing lad saw the glory of the restored church, with its wonderful reredos, it was another lesson! Yes, from the buildings he knew best, and the people he loved most, and the visitors he met most often, there must always have been impressions being absorbed at an age when the mind is “like wax to receive, but like marble to retain.”

So much for the environment hinted at in the brief statement that Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram was born at Stanford Rectory! The name indicates the social environment of Winningtons, Foleys, and Ingrams, and the place the ecclesiastical environment.

But there is another factor which counts for a great deal: I mean the actual nature-surroundings. Here again, he was most fortunate!

Stanford itself was described by Mrs. Sherwood, who lived there in her early girlhood, as a sweet place “utterly impossible to give an idea of through the medium of any words which could be selected. I have travelled far, but I have never seen any region of the earth to be compared with Stanford—the verdant and rich English scenery, where every feature of the landscape of a somewhat northern climate is so assembled as to compose the most extraordinary beauty.”

But the Rectory itself in which the boy now tabernacled for a time was actually in the very centre of all this sylvan beauty.

What was most remarkable in his father’s house 5at Stanford was that it commanded four different views from the four sides, so distinct that it could hardly be conceived how these could be combined in a panorama. On the front of the house, toward the east, a great lawn, with many fair orchards beyond, sloped down to the bed of the Teme, from which arose on the opposite side a range of bold heights, richly diversified, at a distance so considerable as to show only the most pleasing features, with copses, farm-houses, fields of corn, villages with churches, and ancient manor-houses, the heights being terminated by the range of the Abberley and Woodbury hills.

On the south his father’s house looked over Stanford Court—through a series of woody valleys beyond to the remote heights of Malvern, and still more distant Broadway; this range of valleys being no other than the bed of the Teme.

The hills and woods on the west rose up almost precipitously, or rather seemed to do, for the shrubberies and gardens lay between from the windows of his father’s house, and there was such a rich mass of forest scenery, and such inequalities of ground, such magnificent dingles and waterfalls, such abrupt and bold heights, as years could not exhaust in examining; and these formed the third view.

The fourth was unlike all the rest, and presented itself at the north of the house; it commanded a deep dingle, or valley, rich with orchard and cultivated fields, from the bottom of which arose a lofty ridge of land which presented its side to the eye, and which, in its character, as far as it went, had all the appearance of some vast mountain, being partly 6covered with thick coppices, the fields under these coppices being almost precipitous in the manner in which they were disposed.

And, as without the house, so within; the superintending genius of Dr. Butt, Mrs. Sherwood’s father, who improved it years before, had given a character to every room. There was a hall of considerable height, with a hanging staircase. The rooms were all spacious, and the apartments upstairs commanded a fine view of the high woods. So that within and without, space, beauty and elegance were the settings of the future Bishop’s boyhood.

One local story he would be sure to hear, which would impress the mind of any growing boy with a sense of injustice. It would be certain to be told him, as he, with the rest of the family, visited the wonderful Southstone Rock, near Stanford.

The people there were very interesting from the very old stories they could tell of ancient Stanford. They would point out that where there was now a magnificent lake, there once stood a village; all the former inhabitants of which were simply turned out of their cottages to enable “the improvements” to be carried out. The villagers were left to find a refuge as they could. He would hear that the church at Stanford once stood on the lawn, between Stanford Court, and what is now the pool, and that there under the green sward were still the bones of the forefathers of the villagers. But the then lord of the manor moved the church to the hill where it now stands, with the coffins of the family, and levelled all the graves in the old churchyard, thus incurring much local odium. He succeeded in his determination to make a solitude round his mansion, 7and improved the view from his windows, but it was done at the expense of much suffering entailed upon others. Years before the future bishop heard the tale, it had been told to an impressionable girl, Mrs. Sherwood, and the burst of sympathy it caused in her for the unfortunate villagers was probably repeated in the growing boy. It is the very kind of incident which would fire a juvenile imagination, and perhaps laid the foundation of that extraordinary sympathy with the poorer classes that has ever characterised the career of the lad when he became a man.

It was in beautiful sylvan scenery such as this that the early days of the boy were passed; so that it is certain that his first impressions were not the swift, fleeting, panoramic, confused ones of a city boy. Country life may be uneventful, but its world is a microcosmos and all that is seen is noted.

But there was another factor at work in his life, and that was that in the rectory where he lived there was a crowd. The Rector of Stanford had ten children, Arthur being the fourth son; and that means that every one of them lived under the perpetual necessity of “give and take” and regarding themselves rather as part of a family than as mere individuals. There is little chance for the growth of egoism in a family of ten.

Then came his school days. He went at first to Hartford House, Winchfield, Hampshire, to undergo a preparatory training for a Public School, and when he was twelve years old he secured a Foundation scholarship at Marlborough and proceeded there in his thirteenth year. Winnington Ingram himself, preaching many years after at his old school, 8indicates what this experience meant to him. “A little boy has to leave home for the first time. He says good-bye to father and mother, and the old servants, and the landmarks of his home disappear one by one; and as the train at last fairly steams out of the station, he feels he has launched upon a great unknown. He leaves the private school to come up to Marlborough, and it is a launching into the deep! The private school had become like a little home to him: he is called, perhaps, even by his Christian name. Then he comes up, and finds himself in the mass of a great school, with the sound of the ocean as it were in his ears, lost among the crowd again. All his individuality seems almost swamped in the mass of humanity in which he finds himself. Then in a few years, Marlborough is quite familiar to him. He is in the Sixth; he is in the Eleven; his last term has come; he is quite surprised to think he ever looked on Marlborough as a great deep.” His elder brother, Francis Herbert Winnington Ingram, had been there already for about twenty months, and Arthur must, therefore, have been well acquainted with the life of the school to which he was now going.

The School at Marlborough had been founded years before, chiefly for the sons of the clergy; and had kept its character ever since. When Francis entered it it was under the Headship of Dr. Cotton, afterwards a well-known missionary Bishop in India; but at the time of Arthur’s entrance, Dr. Farrar had accepted the post.

A slight digression as to Marlborough itself will not be out of place here.

When Dr. Farrar’s predecessor, Dr. Cotton, went 9to Marlborough, the school was at a crisis of its history. But he faced the difficulties, and strove to gather around him a band of enthusiastic students as masters. For this purpose he watched degree lists, and one of the results was that he approached F. W. Farrar, inviting him to take a mastership, which he did.

The school itself at that time had an unenviable reputation for the insubordination of its pupils, which had proved too much for the old régime, and had culminated in an open rebellion. Beyond that, the college was overwhelmed with debt, and one of the first remarks the Head made to Farrar was: “You know, any day the school may disappear in blue smoke.”

The great difficulty was the commissariat department, and one of Farrar’s earliest recollections was seeing a huge chalk inscription on the wall, “Bread or Blood!” But the masters, headed by Cotton, took the finances into their own hands, out of those of the then bursar, and in one year’s crisis saved the school.

Even in those days the outstanding characteristic of the place was its number of parsons’ sons, who afterwards had distinguished ecclesiastical careers. Mr. Farrar tells us he remembers seeing “a boy chasing another who wore a scarlet cap, and shouting after him, ‘Keblépuris! Keblépuris!’—Greek for the ‘Redcap,’ and the boy had taken it from ‘The Birds of Aristophanes,’ which we were then reading.” The boy who was the pursuer became the Rt. Rev. the Primate of Australia; the boy in the red cap became the Rt. Rev. the Lord Bishop of Glasgow. On this incident Farrar remarks that 10it reminded him of Shenstone’s lines, the mere quoting of which reveals the trend of the master’s mind:

“Yet, nursed with skill, what dazzling fruits appear!

E’en now sagacious foresight points to show

A little bench of heedless Bishops here

And there a Chancellor in embryo.”

I wonder if he ever recalled the same quatrain as he thought of Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram in later years.

But this was before the boy was born, and as assistant-master he remained until Harrow stole him away, and kept him fifteen years. Then he returned as Head of the Marlborough School, and among the first batch of entrants who looked upon him with awe, not only as the new Head, but their new Head, was young Winnington Ingram. Practically Dr. Farrar and he started their life at Marlborough together.

It was the height of good fortune which brought this Worcestershire boy under the influence of such a man, though, of course, for years that influence would be indirect, and Farrar actually left a year before Winnington Ingram. He was only thirteen years old at the time; but that even then Dr. Farrar’s effect on him may have been great is suggested by the words of another Marlburian, who was at school with Winnington Ingram. “No one who heard the sermons ‘In the Days of thy Youth’ can wholly forget the overpowering intensity of conviction, or the fiery eloquence with which the master drove home to his boys the great truths of righteousness. I was a lad of fifteen when I heard these sermons preached.”

The Bishop himself relates: “I remember so well that Dr. Farrar used to tell us the famous old story of the two figures which once appeared before a youth—the attractive, alluring figure that led him down the path of pleasure, and the dull, unattractive figure that pointed to the path of duty. And even to this day I remember how, with a word-power which I would not attempt to imitate for a moment, he narrated how that dull, unattractive figure at last flung back the veil, and there was a face of immortal and eternal loveliness.”

It was under such a man that this other lad of thirteen came to live. Fifty-five others came in with him; another dozen joined up in April; fifty-two more in August; and nine more in September—one hundred and twenty-eight new boys in all to make impact on one another. Out of them it is characteristic to notice that fifty-eight hailed from rectory and vicarage, and were the sons of priests.

From among “his year” there sprang twenty-two military officers, amongst them Major-General Kekewich; twenty priests, amongst them the Very Rev. Dean Kite, of Hobart, Tasmania; and Arthur Winnington Ingram, Lord Bishop of London; while two years later, Arthur Chandler, who became the Rt. Rev. the Bishop of Bloemfontein, joined the school. There were also fourteen future members of the legal profession, four others who became doctors, amongst them Archibald Edward Garrod, M.D., who later gained fame as a physician, and an authority on rheumatic affections. Nine of young Winnington Ingram’s year became assistant-masters in great public schools, or Heads themselves. As for the rest, taking the year as a whole, it 12distinguished itself rather by producing boys who in architecture, stock-broking, business, farming and civil engineering, served their day and generation, as they were called on to play the part.

One may look in vain for any mention of the name of Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram in the calendar of Marlborough as a prize-winner; or as having outstanding excellence in cricket or football, rackets or swimming. He appears to have produced no impression during his residence there beyond that of a boy who plodded on for the sake of keeping up with the others. But it was at Marlborough he gained that love of sport which never left him.

A year later his brother Francis left the school, and in the following year he had the pleasure of introducing to the school life and ways his own younger brother, George Frederick, eighteen months younger than himself.

He found himself placed in the New House under the house-mastership of Mr. F. Storr.

The assistant-masters during his residence there were, in 1871, George Farrer Rodwell, Gabriel Henry Cremer. In 1872, William Joseph Toye, Henry Marty Lindsell, Walter Percy Smith. In 1873, Rev. Philip Read, Frederic John Boden, Edward Ferdinando Sutton Tylecote, Henry D’Olier Drury, Rev. Stirling Cookesley Voules, George Henry Dawson, Frederic Lewis Barnwell, Granville Sharp. In 1874, the Rev. William Mordaunt Furneaux, Rev. Darwin Wilmot, Charles Hepworth Gibson, Thomas Oliver Harding, Nevil Masterman, William James Fourneaux Bashon Baker, Lewis Edward Upcott, John Pearce Way, Manus Herbert Gould, Robert Alford, William 13Henry Payne-Smith, Charles Copeland Perry. Then came the mastership of the Rev. J. C. Bell in Winnington Ingram’s final year, and as his assistants, George William Rundall, William White, William Justice Ford, Fred Some Hewson, Herbert Leaf.

It must be clear from this account of the school and “the boys who started with him” that young Winnington Ingram had entered an institution which was deservedly becoming famous, under a deservedly famous Head. The influences behind the thirteen-year-old boy were, as we have already seen, mighty—the influences around him now were many and stimulating; it only remained to see how the boy would react to the pull and the push. The effect of the life of Marlborough upon Dr. Winnington Ingram has been very great. Marlburians have always appealed to him, and he to them. He has made his old connection with the school a bond which has strengthened through the years. He has visited the school again and again: he is a prominent member of the council, and has annually addressed the boys for a long period. One of the first visits he paid after his appointment to the See of London was to Marlborough, and he told the boys that in undertaking the duties he had just entered upon he did it feeling that Marlborough would be behind him. He stayed at the school till 1877, and then at nineteen years of age he gained a leaving scholarship and went up to Oxford with its aid. But his choice of a college there already showed the trend of his mind, for he entered himself at Keble College.

Keble College, Oxford, was founded in pious 14memory of John Keble “Sometime a Priest in the Church of God.” It was intended to be “A school of simplicity.” The idea was to provide the opportunity of a frugal life for young men, differing from the standards prevailing in so many Oxford colleges. “Some thought at the time that it would turn out a monkish institution, and would breed young monks who would do a great deal of mischief in England. Such suspicions speedily disappeared; but the very spirit of the college was to show that the highest character of an Englishman is that of the cultivated and religious man to whom wealth is a mere accident.”⁠[A]⁠

According to the Marquis of Salisbury, speaking at the same meeting already referred to, Keble had fulfilled its aim. It had shown that it was not necessary, in order to enjoy the advantages of college life, that expenses hitherto associated with college life should be added as a drawback.

It was also founded with the object of doing more in Oxford for the training of the clergy. But the careers of the college students, the place they made for themselves in the athletic life of the University also proved that the devotional life of Keble, did not tend to mere pietism, but existed synchronously with physically vigorous manhood.

Canon Liddon said: “The day will come, I suppose—when young men looking at the buildings will ask the question, ‘Who was Keble?’ To have made it inevitable that that question should be asked is to have added to the moral wealth of the world. For the answer to that question cannot but do good 15commanding wealth, or great public exploits or wide popularity of opinions, which explain the foundation of this college. It was raised to the memory of a quiet country clergyman, with a very moderate income, who held tenaciously to an unpopular school all his life. Keble College is a witness to the homage which goodness carried into the world of thought, or, indeed, any other sphere of activity, extorts from all of us. It is a proof that neither station, nor wealth, nor conspicuousness, nor popularity, is the truest and ultimate test of greatness. True greatness is to be recognised in character, and in a place like this character is largely, if not chiefly, shaped by the degree in which moral qualities are brought to bear upon the activities of mind.”

It was to “a place like this” that Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram now came!

When Arthur Winnington Ingram came up from Marlborough to Keble, Keble College was under the wardenship of the Rev. Edward Stuart Talbot, who had already been there for seven years, and who was destined to remain there for another eleven. He little dreamed that the student who had entered would one day meet him again and have close relationships with him as a fellow Bishop. But so it was, for from 1905 to 1911 he was Bishop of Southwark, where his diocese touched that of his old student on its southern borders; and for ten years previously he had been Bishop of Rochester, a See where in Metropolitan Kent he had to share a great deal of the Bishop of London’s episcopal work. But, nevertheless, he certainly was one of the first men to be impressed with the promise of this young student; he never lost sight of him and 16it was at his instigation that later on he became Head of Oxford House, Bethnal Green.

For the first two years of Winnington Ingram’s residence in Oxford, the Dean of the College and his tutor was the Rev. Francis Jayne, afterwards the Bishop of Chester. But the man who was to have a mighty influence over the young student was Canon King, then a Lecturer in Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He was afterwards referred to by him as “one of my great spiritual masters.” Over and over again in Winnington Ingram’s published utterances occur quotations from phrases of Canon King, such as this:

“I remember so well dear old Bishop King saying to us—I have often quoted it: it remains in my mind after thirty years: it must be an inspired seed thought—‘Now, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remember, when you are ordained you are ordained for the world!’”

He was also very fond of telling how once when Canon King was warning them against being nervous, or yielding to presentiments, he said:

“I had a presentiment that I should die when I was twenty-six. And sure enough, after I was ordained, it happened that in the parish where I was working, smallpox broke out. Here, I thought, is my presentiment coming true: I am twenty-six. But I had to go to the patients in pursuance of my duty. I had to sit up with them. I had to bury one myself. But,” smiling, “here I am, gentlemen, this morning. Nothing should be allowed to stand between us and doing our duty.”

Amongst the men who had gone from Marlborough immediately before him, Winnington 17Ingram found J. B. Kite; while R. E. Fiske and Ernest Frederic Newman, of his own year at Marlborough, went up with him, and a little later they were followed by Herbert J. Glennie.

His work at Oxford was not distinguished by any outstanding proficiency in scholarship, nor in athletics. His life was practically a continuation of the old Marlborough plodding combined with the cultivation of every form of healthful exercise. He entered readily into all sport, especially fives, and did his best on the river. He became honorary secretary of Keble College Boating Club, and was appointed to the coxswainship of his College eight. At the end of 1881 he gained his B.A., taking a First Class in Classical Mods. and a Second Class in Greats.

One might have expected he would quite naturally have proceeded at once to take Holy Orders. But here occurred a curious break in the apparent direction of his career. In some of his later public utterances he refers to a period of doubt which had existed in his life. Speaking quite frankly he appealed to his audience, as one who had faced in his own soul, in private, every doubt which he thought it was possible to have about the Christian faith. It can be readily understood that at this particular period, all manner of doubts would appeal to any thoughtful young man before he decided on seeking ordination in the Church of his fathers. In a history of the last hundred years of the Church of England, afterwards referred to by the Bishop, he says: “There were 800 pages, about 400 devoted to the Ritual question, the struggles as to the real meaning of the Ornaments Rubric: Are vestments 18to be worn or not? Is incense to be burnt or not? Is a stole legal? What is the real worth of a Privy Council judgment? The Gorham Case; the Mackonochie case; the Peter Green case were still agitating clerical minds. There had been the Colenso controversy, and then the controversy about Lux Mundi.”

“Now,” said the Bishop, referring to this period, many years afterwards, when he was preaching to an audience on “New Wine in Old Bottles,” “I should be the last to deny the importance of some of these controversies, but it is hard to realise how trivial, how petty, many of them must have seemed to the toiling millions of our fellow-countrymen, or how, at any rate, far above their heads the whole hurly-burly sounded.

“There they were fighting and struggling for daily bread; here we were convulsed with a question of whether a stole was legal. There they were working out their own salvation as best they might; here we were ranged into two rival camps of High Church and Low Church, and too intent upon defeating one another to have time to attend to their growing hunger for a life which could be in any sense called real life, and a home which was indeed a home.”

That was the position as Bishop Winnington Ingram described it years later, on looking back. Perhaps when he left Oxford the short break in his strictly ecclesiastical career may have been occasioned by some such line of reasoning, prompting him to ask if it were worth while. More than this he himself hints that even when he was a boy in the Sixth at Marlborough he went through a 19“most distressing time.” By his nickname of Chuckles, it is clear he was supposed to be one of the lightest-hearted boys in his school—and yet, referring to this period in after life, he says: “I remember hours of sadness when I was by myself. I remember the time when I wandered about in the playground, or elsewhere, and wondered what was behind everything: could I believe there was a God at all? I see now it was the questioning mind of the boy. I was bound to ask as a boy before I could believe as a man.”

Well, imagine that boy, with this reflective type of mind placed in the very midst of the intellectual difficulties of Oxford, and faced by the special problems of the Church, which were sure to urge for a solution at Keble, and it is not wonderful if he craved a period in which to find out his own mind and to settle whether he could be obedient to the call to give himself to serve the Church. The very fact that Canon King’s dictum already referred to made such an impression on his mind, before he was ordained—“Remember when you are ordained you are ordained for the world”—reveals the mental attitude of the young undergraduate. So it is not surprising that Winnington Ingram did not seek ordination at once, but turned his attention to private tutorial work.

The greater part of the next three years after leaving Oxford was spent in Continental travel, and it was then that he acquired his taste for Alpine climbing. But all this time his mind was at work, and the direction in which it was working is indicated by his own story of a lengthy paragraph which he read in a book which had been written by a strange 20character—William Law—who had been a clerk in Holy Orders a hundred and seventy years before. He had been a tutor to the father of Gibbon, the historian, and lived for years in his house at Putney. The book which he issued, “The Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life,” in 1729, became a deep influence, and it was not surprising that when it fell into the hands of Winnington Ingram some of its passages produced the same effect it had had upon so many others, including the Wesleys. The Bishop says: “I can never forget a story that made the deepest impression on me which I read in Law’s ‘Serious Call’ when I was a young man before I was ordained. Here is the passage: ‘A young man was dying, and his family and friends were round him, and they thought he could not hear what they were saying, as they remarked what a sad thing it was that he should die like this. “Why,” they said, “he was the best man at a bargain in the City, and had everything to live for.” But he raised himself in the bed and spoke to them thus: “I heard what you have been saying, but if you could change places with me, and knew that not all the gold in the world could buy back five minutes of life, and that in five minutes you had to meet your God, you would speak differently. I have to meet my God empty handed with nothing to show for my life.”’”

This sense that he must have something to show for his life weighed with Mr. Winnington Ingram, and he determined to take Holy Orders. He was ordained Deacon in 1884; became a curate at St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury, and was ordained priest at the end of the year.

CHAPTER II
ST. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY

Winnington Ingram was ordained on Sunday, March 19, 1884, by Dr. Maclagan, who was then Bishop of Lichfield and afterwards Archbishop of York. Thus, the young curate became one of the assistant clergy in the diocese of one of the most remarkable men of the time.

Dr. Maclagan was a singularly robust and broad-minded man. This enabled him to preserve his equanimity at a period when there was very much which was disturbing, and to insist on tolerance when others were calling for prosecutions of those who were endeavouring to revive the Catholic faith and practice. Not only did he adopt this attitude towards his fellow-Churchmen, but he assumed it also towards the members of other communions. At a time, when the passage of Mr. Morgan’s Bill in the House of Commons, throwing open parish churchyards to other burial services than those of the Established Church, produced bitter feeling, he was one of the Bishops who practically viewed it with unconcern.

In an address given by him at the Church Congress in 1887 at Wolverhampton, after referring to the wholesome issue of the Education Acts, which had also been the subject of gloomy prognostications, he had the courage to say amid cheers:

“Not less remarkable has been the result of the Burials Act. What gloomy anticipations were rife amongst us as to the disorder and scandal which would be witnessed in our churchyards if this measure should ever come to pass! And what has been the result? The Act has been to a large extent a dead letter. Our churchyards are as peaceful and orderly as they were twenty years ago. Here and there, at rare intervals, a burial service other than that of the Church of England may take place, but the Act in the main has made very little difference after all the alarm and foreboding which it excited before it passed into law.”

When Archbishop Tait was dying, Dr. Maclagan came to see him, and in the course of conversation the Archbishop remarked: “I hope you are not a great alarmist about the present state of things”—referring to the ritual difficulties in the Church. Dr. Maclagan replied: “I am not at all!” He never was. His attitude towards most matters was fair and judicial and prompted by an anxiety to see the other side of things; and it may be that from his influence during the years afterwards spent at Lichfield by Winnington Ingram that the young clergyman’s own kindly and tolerant spirit was induced.

Again and again, in his public utterances later on, Dr. Ingram shows how he readily sat at the feet of teachers of other communions, if he found they had anything to tell him. He frequently refers to Dr. Dale—the famous Congregationalist minister of Birmingham—and calls him “that grand old man of Nonconformity.” He says of him: “He brought home to me in one of his books the necessity for the 23Justice of God.” Again and again he quotes John Wesley thus: “I saw the course of light and love flow over the ocean of darkness and death and in this I saw the infinite love of God.” Again and again he quotes Dr. Gordon, the American divine, from his “Quiet Talks on Power.” Several times he mentions Andrew Murray, the African Presbyterian minister, quoting from his devotional works. All of this goes to show that Winnington Ingram had gained that habit of mind, which can pluck fruit in all manner of orchards, and understand that there are diversities of operation but the same Spirit shineth through them all.

It was this which induced Winnington Ingram’s future tolerant attitude towards the Anglo-Catholic revival. Only a man of judicial fair-mindedness could have said what he did after the great Albert Hall meeting of the Anglo-Catholics:

“Now the intellectuals (and I may include among them many of the Bishops in the past) have never been fair to the movement, and yet you had only to look into the Albert Hall about a year ago to see the immense hold it has got over thousands of our fellow-countrymen, and there is not a doubt that brighter and more ornate services appeal to many of our poorer fellow-citizens who can be reached often through the eye more easily than through the ear.

“At any rate, having the opportunity this morning, I would ask those present to lay aside prejudice and to judge accurately, as you would judge a case, and, while strengthening the hands of the Bishops in putting down real disloyalty, sympathise with the revival of spiritual life in parish after parish on lines 24absolutely different from those to which you are accustomed yourselves, and which certainly would not and do not appeal to you.”

This might have been Dr. Maclagan speaking. The voice is the voice of Winnington Ingram, but the spirit is that of Maclagan.

Well, it was under such a man that he now enlisted as one of his assistant clergy at the Church of St. Mary, Shrewsbury. He started out with two factors working in his mind. One was a memory which came from his Oxford days, of an Oxford Don, who, at the risk of his life, visited and nursed a graduate who was suffering from a contagious disease. It taught him the greatness of sacrifice, when in the line of duty. The other sprang from a layman, and how it came about can be best told in the Bishop’s own words:

“I always remember advice given me by a learned judge at a time when I was a young layman. ‘How,’ I asked him, ‘were you to be sure that a doctrine was of God?’ ‘Soak in the Gospels,’ was his reply. I find what he said was true advice; if you want to know if a piece of music is by Handel, you soak in Handel’s style, and then when you hear it played, you can tell; do you want to know if a saying is from God, soak in the sayings of God, and you will know.”

He started out in this spirit, but none the less he admits:

“I do not myself remember realising at all what religion meant until I was in the midst of two thousand poor people in my first curacy. I found myself suddenly looked upon as a sort of earthly providence, and it was a surprise to me that they 25should look to me for sympathy and help. I was a comparatively young man, and it quite drew me out of myself and made me realise Christ’s love in a way that nothing else could.”

But the actual contact with the facts of life, and the responsibility which was flung upon him as he went in and out of the homes of the 2,000 people who were under his charge in the parish of St. Mary’s, in Shrewsbury, brought the habit of reliance for power to say what he had to say, and to do what he had to do, upon the Spirit of God, Himself, in ever greater degree. He refers to one of these experiences in the following touching words:

“My memory goes back to a time, now many years ago, when, as a newly ordained deacon, I was called upon to watch through the night by the side of a little dying child. The doctor had done what he could, and had left the child for me to tend. Hour after hour of the night passed, and at last she could only say, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ over and over again. I spoke to her, held her hand, prayed by her; and at last, in the early morning, she passed away. But the worst part had not come. The mother came next day. She lived in the country, far away from telegrams, and, though the telegram had gone as quickly as might be, she arrived too late. Never to my dying day shall I forget taking that mother into the dead-house of the Infirmary to see her dead child. As she looked at the face of the child, whom she had parted with but a few weeks before, a shriek of absolute anguish rang from her lips. ‘My little lamb! My little lamb!’

“I would ask you to consider what you would have said to her that morning.”

One of his friends, who afterwards made his acquaintance at Lichfield, has pointed out to us that the fact of Winnington Ingram being ordained Deacon in March, and Priest later in the same year, was indicative of the very high opinion Bishop Maclagan had of him—it was a proceeding so very unusual that it was emphatic, and at the time it occasioned a good deal of kindly notice.

The Bishop’s opinion of him was speedily justified by Winnington Ingram’s success as a curate at St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury. St. Mary’s was an old historic church, and a leading church in the town itself. It was a trying thing for any young man to become a curate there, but there was no doubt that his advent was quickly followed by popularity to an almost phenomenal extent. He appears to have rapidly made a reputation for stirring preaching, which was characterised by practical thinking and vigorous delivery. He wrote his sermons with an eye upon the most distant listener, and broke them up into short sentences, so that they could be readily followed. In a very short time he became appreciated by many people in the town. Fortunately for him he had as his rector a first-class organiser, in the person of the Rev. Canon B. Lloyd, who afterwards deservedly was appointed Archdeacon of Salop. Through him he received a glimpse of successful methods of organisation and the business side of the life of a parish. Canon Lloyd himself resided out of the town, but he had a parish room near the church, and at two o’clock every day he regularly met his curate to arrange the next day’s work, and to receive reports of the day before.

The town itself contained a population of nearly 2727,000. It was the Parliamentary Borough, and the County and Assize town of Shropshire. Its historic associations were very appealing. There were a large number of antique timber houses among them, in Butcher Row, the former town residence of the Abbot of Lillishall. There were the remains of the town ramparts built as far back as the reign of Henry III. The castle built by Roger de Montgomery had been dismantled in the seventeenth century, but there still remained the archway of the interior gateway, the walls of the inner porch, and two large round towers erected in the time of Edward I. Roger de Montgomery also founded in 1083 the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, which was of great extent, and very richly endowed. At the dissolution the abbey was destroyed, except part of the nave and the western tower of the church. This was converted into a parish church, under the name of “Holy Cross.” There was St. Julian’s, dating back before the Conquest; St. Alkmond’s, dating from the tenth century; and St. Giles, dating from the time of Henry I. The old church of St. Chad, which had been destroyed by the fall of the tower in 1788, still had the Bishop’s chancel remaining. But amongst all these churches the one of special interest was St. Mary’s, where Winnington Ingram was curate. It was founded in the tenth century, and was a fine cruciform structure, with a tower and spire 222 feet high. The interior was specially worthy of notice for its elaborate details, its stained glass, and its ancient monuments.

The population around the church gained its living chiefly in glass staining, the spinning of flax 28and linen yarn, iron founding, brewing, malting, the preparation of brawn, and the manufacture of the well-known Shrewsbury cakes. The presence of the ancient market constantly brought the town into touch with the County agricultural interests. Other denominations beside the Church of England had flourishing causes in the town; so that practically Winnington Ingram’s first curacy was spent in a position where every problem—county, municipal, and parochial—would present itself, either in the form of industrial, educational, or denominational. It was a fine training ground, differentiating in its experiences from that which might have been his lot had he been starting in some more rural district.

In the short time he was there, Winnington Ingram put in a good deal of steady work. His visiting was easy, for it was welcomed, and in after days, as he faced the grave difficulties connected with visitation in the East End, he would often refer, humorously, to the way in which people used to dust chairs for him, and show their delight in seeing him. These country townfolk seemed to be of opinion that “calls” should be returned; and, as the curate left them after paying one, it was a common thing to hear: “You will see us at church on Sunday, sir!”

His hard work told, and in a very short time he became thoroughly appreciated. In the ordinary way the young curate would have received his reward by staying on; but from the time of his ordination Bishop Maclagan was closely observing him, and at the end of eighteen months took the earliest opportunity of suggesting his removal to 29Lichfield itself. That opportunity presented itself on this wise, and—the scene was changed!

The Bishop suddenly had a double opening present itself. He needed a private secretary-chaplain, and right-hand man for himself, and at the same time there occurred a vacancy in the City foundation of St. John’s Endowed Hospital. These endowments were for the Master and the Chaplain. There were snug quarters for both: and Winnington Ingram moved into his Chaplain’s quarters at St. John’s, and performed the duties on Sundays for the inmates, and also for any of the Lichfield public who cared to come. As a matter of fact, a good number did usually resort to the services, especially after the coming of Mr. Winnington Ingram, for he soon grew as popular as he had been at St. Mary’s.

The appointment to St. John’s relieved the young priest of parochial work, and he spent much of his time as practical secretary of the Bishop. Thus he came more intimately than ever under Dr. Maclagan’s personal influence. Some of Winnington Ingram’s contemporaries at the time in Lichfield thus describe Dr. Maclagan: “He had brought up with him from his parish ministry at St. Mary, Newington, the result of experiences which had shown him to an unusual extent the working of what may be called ‘the personal influence of religion,’ in its effects of conviction of personal sin and guilt, and the personal touch of God upon the individual. Few men seemed to realise it more deeply.” “He might almost have been a Methodist in his fervour and his insistence upon personal experience,” said one. “Yet, in the same man you had the other side 30which was perpetually laying emphasis on the importance of the Church’s system, and the administration of its Sacraments.”

There is no doubt that these two sides of Bishop Maclagan were afterwards reproduced in later life by his young Chaplain. The fervour and the sense of the necessity of experimental religion has always characterised Arthur Winnington Ingram, and the emphasis laid by Bishop Maclagan upon attention to doing all things decently and in order has been apparent also. Canon Petit says that “at the services in Lichfield Cathedral everything was thought out with meticulous care. It was especially so at ordinations. Everything went through on oiled wheels, and without muddle. The Bishop would become the centre of the scene, as he stood there, in those days without cope or mitre, but the moment there was a chance for personal contact with the ordinand he would carry it out on a personal line. Yes, it was impossible to live at the side of Dr. Maclagan as Winnington Ingram did, without a deepening conviction of the power and necessity of the personal touch of God upon the individual soul, and the equal power and necessity of the personal touch of man with man.

“When Winnington Ingram had been in Lichfield a short time, the Bishop appointed him as one of the lecturers at the Theological College. He delivered two lectures a week, each taking about an hour. The curriculum of the College was practically divided into the students of the Senior Group, and those of the Junior Group. Winnington Ingram lectured to the Senior Group, and I myself to the Junior. But apart from visiting as a lecturer, 31he was, in reality, sent there by the Bishop for quite another purpose. He had perceived the extraordinary gifts for camaraderie possessed by young Winnington Ingram, and he got him to go to the College that he might chum up with the students. He did! He played with them at fives and tennis. It was a marvel to see his rapid play at the latter, and in their Common Room he managed to make the acquaintance of the men on a personal basis before they would have to appear before the Bishop officially. Then, when that happened, and the shy students came to the Bishop’s house, Winnington Ingram was there to set them at their ease. ‘Ah, we have met before, haven’t we?’ And a chat would follow before which all nervousness and diffidence melted away. One of the students then resident, afterwards the well-known Anglo-Catholic preacher, Father Passmore, says: ‘I well remember him, and the knack Mr. Winnington Ingram had of putting his arm round your shoulder, while he was speaking to you. He had the most winning way with him.’”

Similar personal testimonies have come to us from many quarters from which we gain a mental photograph of the young chaplain, as a hand-on-your-shoulder, cheery, sympathetic, always friendly kind of man, ever on the lookout for opportunities of comradeship as an essential part of his work, and a real side of his influence.

The life in the Cathedral town introduced him to quite another type of experience. When he arrived he found among the clergy Elmer Harding, afterwards Principal of St. Aidan’s, but who later on returned to be Principal of Lichfield itself; Burrows 32Southwell, who afterwards became the Head of Bishop Jacob’s Hostel at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and later on, Resident Canon of Worcester Cathedral; and Canon Petit, now the Secretary of the Additional Curates’ Society.

He found himself mixing with men who were members of a very curious Corporation which was a survival of an ancient foundation. “The Minor Canons’ Corporation of Lichfield Cathedral consisted of the Minor Canons and the Lay Clerks.⁠[B] They were not a bit dependent on the Dean and Canons. They were independent possessors of a freehold, and could not be turned out except for moral unfitness and clear incapacity. They had their own endowments, perfectly independent of the Cathedral authorities, invested in the hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who sent the dividends on their investments four times a year to divide among themselves. The people who founded the Corporation in the Middle Ages felt that the younger clergy who did the singing might spend too much on dress and personal life. If they did not spend enough on food, their health would suffer, and if their health, then their voices would suffer, and that would mean the Cathedral services would suffer. So they saw to it that it was laid upon the Dean and Canons to provide the Minor Canons ‘with sufficient unto their daily maintenance, to wit, not less than threepence a day.’ The whole time I was there, in addition to my share of the dividends, I received under this curious provision one shilling and ninepence per week. We had a little Close all to ourselves. Winnington Ingram 33used frequently to drop in, especially if he had failed to find someone to play with him at fives: then he would look me up during those very times when I was resting before my somewhat strenuous voice efforts in that very long Cathedral. The time he had at his disposal was very limited, and it happened to fit in with the time I had at mine. So I saw a good deal of him in this way, and I can assure you that I remember him as a charming personality altogether, and a very welcome visitor in the parishes around. He and old Bishop Bromby held the posts of Master and Chaplain, and carried on the services of St. John’s between them, and he resided in the Master’s house.

“There was one fact which no doubt remains in the Bishop of London’s memory, which is connected with Lichfield Cathedral. During the Civil War between the King and the Commonwealth, the Close and the Cathedral became a fortified Royalist stronghold. Cromwell gained it, and his men stabled their horses in the nave. For their amusement they pelted the saints who were represented by the images in the niches in the west front. At the top of it all stood the figure of our Blessed Lord which they also smashed, until there was no more to smash. At the Restoration of Charles II., there were, of course, great Royalist rejoicings, and they determined to restore the damage which had been done. But money was scarce and the extent of the damage could not be repaired all at once: so they determined to fill in the great central niche where the sculptured figure of our Blessed Lord had stood, and they did it by putting in its place a statue of Charles II. himself, a fact which is, perhaps, 34a practical commentary on what they thought in those days of the Divine Right of Kings.”

It was in these surroundings that Winnington Ingram passed three years of his public life; but meanwhile it is very evident that in his inner, personal experience there were-things-which-were-happening. The young priest himself told the story twenty-two years after.

“It was a very historic moment of my life. It occurred during a sermon in Lichfield Cathedral. Now I will just paint you that. I do utterly dislike speaking about myself, but when one is addressing people who are about the same age as one was oneself then, it sometimes helps them if one honestly tells them of one’s own experience. There was brought to me in that sermon a conception, which I have never forgotten, of the work of the Church as one vast Cathedral in which we are working, and which fills the world. The reason I remember the sermon is this. I was at Lichfield. I was very comfortable. I had the dearest little church—St. John’s Hospital—in which I preached every Sunday evening. I was honorary lecturer at the College, and played games with all the young men—twenty to thirty young men—who were my great friends. I was treated much too kindly by the Bishop, whose private chaplain I was. Everything was couleur de rose. At that time, the Bishop of Brisbane, Bishop Webber, came over to try and find someone to take the place of my dear old friend, Bernard Wilson, who was his chaplain at Brisbane. He talked to me, but the old Adam was against it, and I did not want to go. I felt, however, that the call could not be resisted, and in that service, for the Church Guilds 35of the district, I was waiting for the voice from Heaven to decide. An old man, Canon Twells, preached; I can see him now; I knew him afterwards as a personal friend; and this only shows how a sermon may speak home; I can still hear his short sentences, ringing through the Cathedral, as he pointed out that ‘to every man was his work.’ I can never forget the most entrancing conception which was put before us that day—of the great Cathedral stretching throughout the world, in which you hear the chipping of the stones, far away in the distant aisle, while you may be working in another part of the same Cathedral. It made no difference if you were chipping a stone in the Brisbane aisle far away, or polishing up the reredos in the Lady Chapel at home. You hear sounds of what is going on in this one great glorious Cathedral throughout the world. Possibly it was that sermon which has always made me write, even at night—which is a bad thing to do—to many of those brothers who have gone out in the world. They want to hear the chipping of the stones at home. It cheers them in doing their duty, and they value it tremendously. They are working far away, but it is all one work, at home or abroad.

“That was the deciding message to me. In the evening I offered myself to go, never dreaming, of course, that I should not be allowed so to do.”

We think it very probable that Bishop Maclagan placed his veto upon it. Winnington Ingram had already proved his value in the work of the Lichfield diocese and especially in connection with the work of the hostel; but from whatever cause, his application 36was refused, and the young chaplain stayed on for a time.

One other experience he had which he himself has preserved for us. It occurred at a time when there was a retreat for the clergy—some hundred of them—at Lichfield Cathedral also. Bishop Gott was the Missioner, and he stood before them, and dropped the startling remark: “Don’t you think, my brethren, that if God dropped His hold on any one of us, we might fall anywhere?” One of his listeners at any rate was impressed; and to him it was as he confesses a searchlight question for many a year.

It is from the pen of the Bishop of London himself that we have the best sketch of Bishop Maclagan.⁠[C] He describes him as his second father; mentions the extreme nervousness he felt at his first interview with him, and hints that while he was at St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury, he saw little of him, except at meetings which were held by him for the younger clergy.

“When I left the people of my district in Shrewsbury, to go to Lichfield as the Bishop’s private chaplain, I soon found myself under a guidance and training which, as it turned out, was fitting me for the work of my later life. To go round with the Bishop, hear his delightful addresses to Confirmation candidates, or see the readiness with which he always had the right thing to say on every occasion, was an inspiration. What better text could you find for an address to agriculturists at the Royal Agricultural Show of the County than his, ‘Is not a man better than a sheep?’

“During the three years I was his private chaplain I never once received a cross word. In the little church where I preached every Sunday to the congregation including the old men of St. John’s Hostel, to my horror I once saw him in the audience. I need hardly say there was nothing remarkable in the sermon, but what was remarkable (and it has been a lifelong lesson to me) was the loving encouragement given to the young preacher by the Bishop afterwards, the remembrance of which has never failed to make me encourage and not depress the efforts of young preachers.”

Apparently Bishop Maclagan was very eager that deacons should be trained to preach, and no deacon was allowed to preach a sermon of his own composition more than once a month: all other sermons were to be read, copied, or learned by heart from various books selected by the Bishop. This restriction applied to the Parish Church only. Every deacon had to send his monthly sermon to Lichfield, where they were sent on to the various examining chaplains, and then redistributed to them with their notes and comments.

“But I might gossip on for long on that Lichfield time, certainly one of the happiest in my own life. What ‘days off’ we had—when we got them! When the Bishop drove us all off—and he was an excellent whip—to some distant valley, where we picknicked in the sunshine. It was really the sense that it was too happy a life for a man of thirty which made me offer myself, first for Brisbane, and then, when the Bishop would not allow that, for East London six months later.

“For years no holiday of mine was complete 38without a week at Lichfield, and afterwards at Bishopsthorpe, or at some beautiful place in Wales, and always I found the Bishop the same. Some men change towards you as life goes on. I never felt that about the Bishop (or, rather, Archbishop). There was always the same smile of welcome, the readiness to be interested in what you were doing, and the best kind of sympathy in your joys and griefs. Looking back, if I were asked to choose the adjective which best described him, I should say he was one of the most lovable men I have ever met.”

This impression was penned by the Bishop of London in 1911, but it was made during the four and a-half years in which young Winnington Ingram first came under the influence of Bishop Maclagan.

One other thing he owed to Dr. Maclagan, and that was a system of rules for the conduct of his ordinary life, to which the Bishop has not infrequently referred. These were the rules:

To devote a fixed time daily to private devotion, including Prayer, Intercession, and Meditation.
To give one hour, at least, in every day, or six hours in each week to definite Theological Study.
To be specially faithful in visiting both the sick and the whole.
To be methodical, punctual, and thorough in all things; rising early and at a fixed hour; having as far as possible definite times for different duties; and keeping a daily record of the work done for the Master.
To devote a fixed portion of our income to the service of God and the relief of the poor.
To observe in a loyal spirit, as God may guide us, the rules and directions of the Church.
39On one of the days of each Ember season to read over on our knees the vows and exhortations of the Ordinal; and to make the day as far as possible a day of retirement for self-examination and prayer.
Once in each year to seek for one or more days seclusion from the world at some Retreat or Clerical Conference, for the reviving of our spiritual life, and for higher instruction in the ways of God and in the work of our calling.
To daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of His most holy life, Whose we are and Whom we serve, and to adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.

It would appear that one of the most intimate friends of Dr. Maclagan was G. Howard Wilkinson, afterwards Vicar of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, and later, Bishop of Truro, and later on still, Bishop of St. Andrew’s, and Primus of the Scottish Church. He became to him the most closely related of all his friends.

It was perfectly natural, therefore, that a friend such as Bishop Wilkinson should meet this much younger friend, Winnington Ingram, and become deeply interested in him:—an interest which was as great on the part of the young chaplain, as of his more elderly friend. Winnington Ingram refers to him again and again as “my great spiritual master.” The one thing which impressed him about Dr. Maclagan’s intimate friend was his intense belief in the Holy Spirit. Speaking of him years later, he said, coupling his name with that of Bishop King, of Lincoln: “No one would have said they were men of striking intellectual gifts; no one, in all probability, would have said at school or at 40college that they were going to leave a lasting mark on their generation, compared perhaps with their more brilliant contemporaries. But those two men have died in a blaze of glory which will illuminate the world for years.

“I have a precious possession now—a thumbed Bible with the leaves almost falling out, which was used every day by Bishop Wilkinson; and I value that like the sword of Goliath.

“I remember so well that one day, when I was walking in Scotland with Bishop Wilkinson, I said to him: ‘I cannot thank you enough for teaching me the lesson of living “day by day” which comes out in your book the “Laws of the Kingdom,” in which one of the chapters is called the Law of Day by Day.’

“So he turned quickly to me, and said: ‘Did I say that?’ I answered: ‘Of course, you said it. You said it in the whole chapter.’

“He did not say to me anything more that day, but next day he said: ‘It was curious, Bishop, your speaking to me about “day by day.” I was so dreadfully worried yesterday about something, and it was the very thing I wanted someone to say to me.’

“I have never forgotten what Bishop Wilkinson told me about his addresses at St. Peter’s, Eaton Square; for he said that those addresses of his which were sold, I believe, at half-a-guinea a piece in West London for some charity, and which the whole of West London poured in to hear, were the same addresses, in substance, which he had given to the miners in his old parish.

“Bishop Wilkinson was a man who all his life had to struggle against a tendency to melancholia; 41yet he had his head above the mist all the time, and because he had his head above the mist he was able to convert thousands in London, and throughout the world. This man was living in a real world which gave him his extraordinary power.”

Such was the influence upon the young chaplain of the impact upon his character of this truly consecrated man.

CHAPTER III
OXFORD HOUSE

It was in 1888 that Mr. Winnington Ingram, right in the very midst of what we have already seen he described as a very comfortable life, and a very happy one, felt moved to listen to the wooing of the man who had been his former Warden at Keble College, Dr. Talbot, and to offer himself for the new Settlement work which had been started at Oxford House, Bethnal Green, in East London.

In these days the idea of such a Settlement as that of Oxford House, and the certainty of its value, is quite familiar to us, but in those days there was something of an adventure about such a scheme. According to Charles Booth in his volume dealing with Religious Influences, in his series “Life and Labour in London,” the Settlement should be described as a Residential Club with a purpose—the purpose being connected with the social, moral, or religious improvement of the neighbourhood in which the Club is established. The practical aims of all may be grouped under the headings of Education, Recreation, Charitable Effort, and Local Government. Of these four sides of the work, one or other may come into greater prominence; here, Lectures and Classes, and there, Clubs; in one case, Exhibitions; in another, Concerts or Entertainments; 43in this one, the Organisation of Charity, and in that, the active participation in the government of the district; but in some shape these four are always present. There is, moreover, a constant community of aim found in the underlying idea of neighbourliness—the “making of friendships,” which is sometimes spoken of as the fundamental idea of all Settlements alike. And, finally, there is the religious motive, whether in the foreground or the background, always present.

Practically it would be right for Settlements to inscribe over their portals, “I consider nothing alien to me which is of interest to humanity.”

Now the Oxford House in Bethnal Green was established in order that Oxford men might take part in the social and religious work of the Church in East London on these very lines. Their aim in doing this was that on the one hand they might learn something of the life of the poor, and on the other that they might try to better the conditions of the working classes, as regards health and recreation, mental culture and spiritual teaching. But above all, that they might offer an example, so far as in them lay, of a simple and religious life. Established shortly before Winnington Ingram came as its Warden, it has now for many years tried to be a beacon of light in the East End, and to help young men to acquire the mind of Christ, to look at things from His point of view, to be able to maintain it with their fellows, and to show that the mind of Christ should be the modern mind after all. To carry out these ideals was the aim of Oxford House, and it was to be the leader in these efforts that Dr. Talbot urged Winnington Ingram.

Certainly by his gifts of camaraderie, no one could have been better fitted for the task.

Before he came, and at the beginning of the movement, the scope of the work had been, so it was thought by the promoters, sufficiently covered by providing a curate to aid the labours of the curate-in-charge at St. Andrew’s, Bethnal Green. A Mr. Jackson was appointed, and it was emphasised that he was to have the guidance of any Oxford men who might volunteer to take up occasional or permanent work in East London; and he was also to act as a sort of liaison officer between such workers, and any clergy who applied for their help. But in the working out of this arrangement the several volunteers from Oxford found it necessary to have a kind of headquarters. This they fixed upon in the disused school of St. Andrew’s itself. Little by little, and room by room, it was roughly fitted up as the premises of the Oxford House Club; and, by degrees, because it was found necessary, it assumed the character of a residence.

Soon after, the Rev. J. G. Adderley took charge of the Settlement, and because it was found better in actual work, it was carried on independently of the parish of St. Andrew’s, although it still occupied the school building. Mr. Adderley was immediately succeeded by Hensley Henson, now Bishop of Durham, who, after some months of strenuous work left to become Vicar of Barking. It was on his departure that Winnington Ingram took his place as Head of Oxford House.

He entered on his new duties on New Year’s Day, 1889. He found the work so little known in the neighbourhood that on his arrival at Bethnal 45Green it was difficult for the cabman to find the place. Out of that cab he stepped, entered the apartment assigned to him, and sat down, determined that one of the first things he would do, would be to move out from these rooms and start building afresh. His plans matured in eighteen months. The foundation-stone of the new quarters was laid at the end of twenty-two months, and seven months later the new premises were opened in Mape Street, Bethnal Green.

At the opening ceremony a short service was held in the chapel, and afterwards H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught declared the building open. Among the speakers were Dr. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and, of course, Dr. Maclagan, who made it the occasion of testifying to his own personal loss, when Mr. Winnington Ingram had left him.

The new premises could house twenty-one resident students, and had several public rooms, a dining-hall, a library, and a big lecture-hall. The increased accommodation successfully drew a large number of students from Oxford. All those who came to take part in the social and spiritual work connected with Oxford House voluntarily paid thirty shillings a week during their residence. It got out in the desultory chat of the public-houses that “this ’ere Oxford ’ouse is a kind of bloomin’ ’otel. Mr. Ingram, wot’s the ’ead of it must make a fine fing out of it.” It was a considerable time before it dawned upon the residents in the side-streets, and the public-house loafers in general, that these men were supporting themselves, while they learned how to help men like their critics, and that, as for Mr. Ingram, he was only receiving “a wage” of £3 a week, and “everyfink found.”

Now what were the problems which faced the new Head? It certainly was with considerable trepidation that he confronted them. His life at St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury, and his comfortable existence at Lichfield, had not exactly qualified him for laying skilled, deft, experienced fingers on the tangled social and spiritual skein around him. We do not mean that it had disqualified him in any sense; for every such experience as he had had in dealing with men before naturally fitted him for dealing with others. Human nature, whether country-town or cathedral-city, is at the roots identical with the human nature of the crowded byways of a great City like London and even the East-End part of it. After all, one man is not merely “One man, but all Mankind’s epitome.” But in the case of the country-town and cathedral-townsman, there were no walls to be scaled. The walls were down. In the case of the streets surrounding the new Head of Oxford House the walls were still up and would need scaling. But he knew that the weak spot in the walls would be the children, especially the boys—those young hooligans, who made the streets resound with their noise by day and by night. When they were at school they were under authority, but the moment they were out of it they were simply a mass of irresponsibles, unless, as in the case of a good many, they were working as boys in a shop out of school hours, or taking on a half-time job of some kind. As for the elder boys who had just got into trousers, they imagined themselves men, and simply came back from the work connected with their first “jobs” to loaf about the streets, chaff the girls, or cadge for a drink at the corners of public-houses.

The first skirmish with these was effected by the formation of clubs. It was clear that unless some place was found as a rallying spot for them that they could only be expected to gather as they did. Unless some reasonable and attractive means was found for them of spending their time, it was only reasonable to expect them to mis-spend it. So Oxford House became the centre of many boys’ clubs, and the Head saw to it that he was one with them all when the lads did come. He knew that he must approach them on their own level if at all; so to the rough and ready lovers of fighting he offered the inducement of boxing, and the fish rose to the bait. He joined them at it himself and put on the gloves with them.

It did not take long for the news to spread. Suspicion naturally lurked in their minds; but when they found that here there were provided opportunities for them to be themselves, in a far better way than they could manage by themselves, and out of the way of the disturbance of “the copper” whom they regarded as their enemy, they began to flock in and stay in. That was the opportunity of comradeship, and Winnington Ingram used it to the full.

There now remained the next problem, which was to get at the men. But reaching them was no easy matter. They were out early in the morning, and at any rate during that period of Labour development they were rarely home until seven o’clock in the evening, and never stayed there! Out they went to their “favourright” pub, where they met their pals and spent their evening and their money, either loafing inside or outside.

The only thing to do was to drop all self-consciousness, and saunter up and down the street, at the corners of which so many of them loitered, or linger outside the public-houses, and drift into conversation with them.

Anyone who has ever tried the business will know how difficult it is. There is the absolute indifference to you as a stranger which has to be thawed, and for this purpose there must be some common ground, and it is a common ground you will have to establish yourself. You cannot say what you will, and when you will. It must be said at a convenient moment, and it must be said in an “As-You-Like-It” fashion. A journey or two up and down the streets, saying nothing, contenting oneself with casual interested looks, will accustom them to the sight of you, and in a day or so the interested look can merge into “Good-evening, mates!”

Another day or so will justify your pausing to make a remark, and then comes the crux! It will probably meet some rough, chaffing response, and, unless swift at repartee, you will not get your chance again, but if you can manage a ready, good-humoured retort it is instantly appreciated. London men love men with a gift-of-the-gab: men who sense the right thing to say, and know the right way to say it.

This Winnington Ingram had in large degree, and in establishing relations with these East-Enders, this asset was more serviceable than any other. Passion for souls might have been eager, sympathy for suffering might have been intense, but unless these could be manifested in a readily understood form, then, to these men, it would have been a case 49of the root being there, but there would have been no flower—no flower they could recognise as one.

It was not long before these rough men were discussing in their public-houses, and at the corners of streets, the advent of this stranger.

“Who is ’e?” “Wot’s ’is little game?” “’Ead of Oxford ’Ouse is ’e?” “Well, wot’s Oxford ’Ouse? Wot’s Oxford ’Ouse to do with we?”

Cute comments were made as to his business there in Mape Street.

“Oh, he’s some little game up his sleeve!” “P’r’aps he’s going to stand for Parliament, and trying to get at us like this.” Some even thought “He’s out to write a book about us.”

But whatever they thought the main thing was he had secured that they did think, and think about him. Down came the barrier of strangeness, and so the first step was taken.

But having managed to become on speaking terms with the men, there was yet to be broken down the working man’s inveterate distrust of the parson. They regard him as a “chap who ’as an easy job.” If he visits their homes in their absence, he is known as “a cove who goes to see my missus.” It takes much time and patience before they can be convinced, that a man has come among them to seek their good, and is making nothing out of it himself.

Presently, however, there filtered into their prejudiced minds the gossip they heard from their boys about Mr. Ingram. Facts are stubborn things, and when they saw these lads who had been their chief anxiety, dropping their loafing ways and hooligan habits, as they came under the influence 50of the Webbe Institute, and the Repton Club—both connected with Oxford House; when they heard them speak of the parson, as one who not only taught them to box, but boxed with them, played games with them night after night: and, whenever opportunity offered, football and cricket; when they saw him with their own eyes, coaching their lads in the art of rowing on the River Lea; or even joining with them in their crude attempts at playing “harriers,” then the conviction forced itself upon them that here was no ordinary parson.

Little by little, he got to know them personally: a few in this street, a few in that. This man’s girl was in one of his Clubs; that man’s boy was in another. The “common ground” had been found at last!

When the “common ground” had been discovered, and the men had been reached the next thing was to hold them. This had to be done by the establishment of Working Men’s Clubs.

Winnington Ingram was of opinion that “Club life is more than merely jolly. Clubs are the homes of friendship. They think like this: ‘There is “Old Tom” with whom I have a chat every night, or Jack who gives me points at billiards or bagatelle.’ A big Club is like a big Public School!”

So he established clubs for men, and with the aid of bagatelle, billiards, a reading-room, debates, lectures, concerts, dramatic performances, and non-intoxicating refreshments, he tried to get and keep a hold of the men. The Oxford House Working Men’s Club, and the University Club, very quickly became a power for good in the streets around Mape Street, and even much further from the Settlement. 51But there was a reflex good, which was also gained by the men who were residing at Oxford House. Here was provided at close quarters contact with men who spelt out life in different words from themselves, and who certainly looked at it from different angles. But the language and the angle was real enough to many thousands: yes, and to many thousands more than those young men from Oxford could ever number themselves. These East-Enders represented the type of many millions like them. The young Oxford men stood for a type, who in various ways would somehow have to think for these others, perhaps legislate for them, perhaps work amongst them as doctors, as priests, as lawyers, and even as employers; and if in the coming years their thoughts were based upon a clearer understanding of these men and their interests, gained at Oxford House, it was all to the good of both parties and the nation as a whole. But while these young University men gained incalculably from the contact they also gave. Quite insensibly the prejudice against Class broke down, as these ordinary men found themselves in touch with those who had had advantages for which they and their children could never hope, and yet put on no “side” about it.

We would point out, however, that no Settlement at Oxford House or elsewhere, wherever it may be, can ever achieve all this, as a piece of machinery. Its success depends, quite clearly depends, upon the enthusiasm and personality of a few resident men, who have gained their enthusiasm by a fire lit from within and lit from above. Mere professionalism would not do. In the early years of Oxford House 52there might have been all these splendid buildings and well-organised clubs; and yet the problems of the neighbourhood not have been adequately tackled, let alone solved. There is no getting away from the fact that it was the fire that was burning in Winnington Ingram and in some of his helpers that warmed the souls of the boys and men with whom they now came in contact.

Men came and went, staying for six months, twelve months, but Winnington Ingram and Mr. Douglas Eyre stayed and worked, and worked with one aim before them, and that was how, now they had got these men and boys into their clubs, they were able to bring real religion to work in their lives.

“Religion,” said the Head of Oxford House, “is the only thing that does any good. It is the only thing that holds them. I have seen this over and over again. We had, of course, hundreds of boys round about Oxford House, Bethnal Green, and to keep a boy from stealing and from lying, and from all kinds of bad habits, which I need not mention, the one thing essential was to make him believe in God, say his prayers, and ask for strength; then he changed.”

So with this in view, the men were invited to Sunday services, and so were the lads to Bible Classes. With regard to the latter from fifty to sixty came every Sunday of their own accord, so that they might again meet those whom they had met in the week, even, if now, they did speak to them of the things about which lads are shy. But the men had to be magnetised in a different way. They had to be attracted by the announcement of subjects, and the 53subjects had to be such as even the most flippant commonly discussed among themselves.

For instance: with a constant mortality occurring in their crowded streets, there was one question continually cropping up: the old question, “If a man die, shall he live again?” What will happen after death, is a matter of considerable moment to those who frequently witness people passing away, or their funerals passing along. The subject becomes one of—well, shall we say “interesting speculation”—if only to put it mildly. Mr. Ingram knew this, and advertised that he would speak one Sunday evening on “What shall I do five minutes after death?” That drew them, and once they were there they found another real attraction in the fact that immediately after the address he threw open the meeting to free discussion.

This was a practice he invariably adopted, and it led to lively scenes, but it furnished the necessary spice of real interest, and the meetings grew in size; so that he knew, that the day after the things which had been said were being repeated and canvassed in many a workshop, factory and yard, to say nothing of their homes.

For many years he carried on these services, and induced many speakers to come and give the men their views, and that he did not shirk the great issues which were raised is clear from the many and varied nature of the questions. Here are some of them: Are we men or clocks? Will you kindly define God? Does Science contradict Genesis? Is there a God? If so, can He be a good God to allow so much suffering in the world? Will a man who has never been baptised, but who has in every 54way led a good life, be an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven? What is the good of going on praying for something when the answer does not come to the prayer? What is the soul? Do you think of Heaven as a place or a condition of mind? Why did our Lord come to this little planet to be crucified? Why not on one of the other millions? How could a good God have created a bad devil? What happens to a man, when he dies, who has been a great sinner during life, never going to church, never seeing a priest or taking the Holy Communion? Why did God go on creating when the first man and woman proved such a failure? Is everything predestined; if so, how can we help ourselves? Is it true that when I die I shall meet my friends again? Or shall we be separated? Who was Cain’s wife? Do you believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke? Can you really credit that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still? Is it practicable to take no thought for the morrow, as the Bible tells us? What is the meaning of our Lord’s startling statement which He made when many crowds came to Him, “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple”? Would you consider it wrong to consult a Christian Scientist? Has not a man a right if he has, say, a shilling he can afford to spend upon amusement, to find his amusement in risking it on a bet?

So these questions, utterly varied in scope, would be placed before the speakers Sunday after Sunday, and whatever the question and whatever the answer, there was a certainty that the discussion would be 55continued in groups the same evening, and during the week, “when the congregation had broken up.”

But, at first, it was not plain sailing when they tried to get the men interested in lectures of any kind during the week. Mr. Ingram has left it on record that “when we started Oxford House, East London did not want to be enlightened at all. We wanted to enlighten them, and Mr. Fisher, one of the most brilliant of young Oxford men from New College, came to help us. At his first meeting there was no audience when the lecture began, so we went into the Lecture Hall and banged the chairs about for a quarter of an hour, to make the Club men outside think there was something going on. Mr. Fisher, meanwhile, was lecturing to no one. After a quarter of an hour one man came in, then another came, and then another, and that is the way the thing began.”

But making provision for sermons and lectures to the boys and men, and providing for them the opportunities of Club life; and taking care that always there was amongst them the magnetic influence of the Head or one of his similarly enthused resident lieutenants, was by no means all that had to be done. It was impossible to attempt one single branch of work without, in some way, coming slap up against the necessity of applying religion as a brake. For example, it was an easy matter to start the boating Club connected with Oxford House; but the Bishop has often referred to the fact that it led to the men of the Boating Club coming to ask about their rowing on Sunday morning. “I explained to them that I could not remain their President if their Club races were held on Sunday 56morning, that it was impossible for me to commit myself to the principle that Sunday morning was the time for a boat-race, but that I had no right merely as Head of Oxford House to dictate to them as individuals what they should do, though I lived down there to try and lead them to better ways of spending Sunday morning. And the deputation, with that perfect frankness and trust which they always gave me, said: ‘We quite understand, Mr. Ingram. You have come down here to lead us, and not to drive us.’ They could not have hit off the work of a priest of God, if he works faithfully in the spirit of God, more perfectly straight than that.”

There were questions connected with conduct which had to be faced. In the many homes to which he and his workers now had the entrée, they naturally found themselves not infrequently faced with “arrangements” existing between men and women which had never been sanctioned by marriage. These could not be winked at, nor ignored, but it needed considerable tact to induce them to put matters upon a better basis. There was the ever-recurring question of gambling: an open sore, and a most terrible hindrance to really healthy life in any crowded working-class community, and a curse which has meant stern fighting in all the years the Bishop has been in London starting from his early days at Oxford House. There was the equally recurrent question of drunkenness, and its indirect effects upon the treatment of their wives and children by men. The public-houses had to be watched; licensing questions had to be settled! And last, but not least, the “private 57view” which Mr. Ingram obtained of their lives, and their necessities, called for his interference as a matter of course, for the preservation of their public rights. For instance, over two hundred years before, there had been given to the poor of Bethnal Green for ever about seven acres of land, on condition that it was to be unoccupied by any buildings. The greater part of the trustees were moving to gain the consent of the Charity Commissioners to erect a Town Hall, a Free Library, and an Infirmary on the Trust Grounds. “No,” said Mr. Ingram. And he organised an opposition to the attempt; aroused genuine resentment against it on the part of the people, who otherwise would, perhaps, have let the matter slip through; gained a good deal of influential outside support; and, finally, fought a successful action in the Law Courts. Mr. Ingram himself became Chairman of the Board, and in 1895 the land was opened to the public as their own, and so it remains until this day.

Here, then, we see that to be Head of Oxford House meant infinitely more than to be the Warden of a mere set of buildings. It could have meant just simply that, but not to a man of the type of Winnington Ingram. To declare a place “open” and to make it “an opening” are two distinct things. Mr. Ingram was under the urge of the old cry: “Compel them to come in!” But the compulsion he exercised was that of magnetism and comradeship. At the first “the personal equation” counted for everything. Afterwards the personal equations of the men he attracted to reside, and the men he attracted to influence, supplied him with the material on which to work. After that, there was the danger, 58the awful danger that always threatens mere Settlement work, the danger of carrying on a merely ethical influence. But Mr. Ingram and his lieutenants kept the spiritual ideal before them in it all. They were not out to tune the piano down to the level of those round them, but to tune it up to concert pitch. Nothing is more evident from an examination of the records of Mr. Ingram’s work at Oxford House, than that he never lost sight of the highest aim of the priest, which is “bringing many sons unto glory.” This could only be done as it was done by our Blessed Lord Himself, by practising a veritable “kenosis,” a self-emptying in order to reach men on the level where they stood, that they might be brought up to the level where he and his workers stood.

It was a glorious ideal! There is something which, to the writer, seems almost pathetic, in this carrying on for years of work so multitudinous in its petty details, as this work of Oxford House, by men whom after events proved had been all the time capable of occupying great administrative positions. There have been many things which have been done by the Bishop of Stepney and of London since; but he has never done anything which surpasses, in the simplicity and beauty of its service, those years of commonplace routine, in which he found his way into the hearts of men and women, and boys and girls, in the gray streets which abounded around the Oxford House Settlement of Bethnal Green.

CHAPTER IV
BETHNAL GREEN

During the years that Winnington Ingram had been at Oxford House, he had received several honorary appointments. He had become Chaplain to the Bishop of St. Albans; and when the man who had shown such great interest in him already—Bishop Maclagan—had become Archbishop of York, he also appointed him to a similar post. He was also invited three successive years to become the Select Preacher at Oxford and at Cambridge.

In 1895 Dr. Temple, who was then Bishop of London, was faced with the difficulty of finding an Incumbent for St. Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. It was a position which would call for a man of an unusual order of gifts: the particular kind of gifts which Mr. Ingram had already proved he possessed. The idea impressed itself forcibly on Dr. Temple’s mind that it would be found practicable for Mr. Ingram to unite the two posts—i.e., the Headship of Oxford House and the Rectory of Bethnal Green.

On the suggestion being made to him, Mr. Ingram accepted: turned the Rectory into a residence for his curates, and proceeded to officially administer the parish with Oxford House as his headquarters.

It is a little difficult, therefore, to make this chapter distinctively treat of his work at Bethnal Green, as 60its Rector, since that and his work at Oxford House now, naturally overlapped one another. There was the same kind of work to be done throughout the parish, which had been already accomplished in the district around Mape Street; but, as he still carried on his open-air work at Victoria Park, until he removed it to St. Matthew’s, some amount of space must necessarily be allotted to this part of his work.

Mr. Ingram always found this open-air work a fruitful source of influence. In the first place it brought him into touch with many men who scorned to come to his Club, or to Oxford House, or to any centre of what they termed with scorn “Organised Christianity.” The audiences consisted largely of men who belonged to one of five classes: first, those who utterly disbelieved in God and religion of any kind; second, those who gave a kind of general patronising assent to the existence of a Deity, and to the claims of religion; third, those who were curious or indifferent; fourth, those who were simply speculative concerning religious matters; and fifth, those who were religious, but aggressively denominational.

In the first class stood men who declared they failed to find any sign of a plan, or a Providence, in the universe. One of these was cleverly imagining the difficulties of a parsonic character, whose name he borrowed from Charles Dickens, “The Rev. Mr. Stiggins.” Sarcastically, for the purpose of his argument, he placed him in an Indian jungle. Into his mouth he put these words: “Look at that beautiful fawn! Notice the designs of Providence in its lightness and beauty!” With a gesture the lecturer suddenly indicated the entrance of a tiger, 61exclaiming: “Now notice the designs of Providence in its marks and colour that the tiger may easily conceal itself! But at this moment the providentially-striped tiger leaps upon the providentially-shaped fawn, and devours it. Oh, Mr. Stiggins, oh, Mr. Stiggins! notice the designs of Providence now! And if you have any reverence for Providence you will stay yourself to be the tiger’s next meal! But Mr. Stiggins rushes with horror from that place of Providence!” So much for the first kind!

As for the second kind, a curious story illustrates their attitude told by Mr. Ingram. “I remember once in Victoria Park a man who was standing at one of the meetings, who evidently wished to encourage me, and exclaimed: ‘Well, Mr. Ingram, I vote for the existence of a God!’ and he held up his hand, and they all voted round.”

As for the third class, they merely formed the background of men who listened to arguments on both sides with equal respect, and found their highest bliss in never coming to a conclusion. Their attitude: “it don’t cut much ice neither way, so far as I can see!”

As for the fourth class, they were generally burning to air some new theory of their own. One of them used to try and persuade his hearers that Christianity was a Sun Myth, and his efforts were attended with considerable success. Others had a great deal to say about Plato. Others were great upon asserting that all the religions of the world were equally inspired. Others that those same religions were equally untrustworthy. To them it was merely the favourite engagement for their minds; they belonged to the class of whom Thomas Carlyle well 62said: “Their religion is no deeper than the merely argumentative region of them, if indeed as deep as that.”

Finally, the fifth class were exclusively denominational in their outlook. They were Baptists who stood for adult responsibility; they were Congregationalists, who stood for freedom from creed, and from forms, and for the democratic government of the Churches; they were Plymouth Brethren—Fundamentalists—who based all their thinking upon the ipsissima verba of Scripture; they were Christadelphians, who believed that their bodies were their souls, that Jerusalem was heaven, and that no one could be saved except Christadelphians.

All these represented a mixed multitude, not many of whom in all probability would have been reached anywhere else but in the open-air, or by any other methods. For years Mr. Ingram became a familiar figure, and as popular as he was familiar; for he faced the facts, and “never hedged.”

What was the net result of all this? Mr. Ingram thought that the results were these: (1) That with perfect friendliness many creeds had met without in any way compromising their principles by attendance; (2) that a great silent mass who did not speak heard three-quarters of an hour’s lecture on Why they should be Churchmen; (3) that arguments on the other side at any rate received an answer.

But there is, we think, another result which must be added. We mean the exploding of the current idea which rules among working-men that if you are to become a Christian you must not think: you must be prepared to swallow wholesale whatever 63you are taught; and between Modern Thought and the day of Jesus Christ there is great contradiction. They believe the attitude of the Church is “Open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what I will give you!” To such men the fearless appearance of Mr. Ingram, and men like him, and their direct reasonableness in argument, is an effective witness.

Practical Application of Religion to Parish Problems.

As the Incumbent of the parish, Mr. Ingram found himself faced with all manner of public problems, which he now felt it was simply his duty to tackle. He used to go round with the Sanitary Committee of the Bethnal Green Vestry, to see if houses were fit for human habitation or not, and he told all his Church workers to report at once any cases where landlords were not doing their duty to their tenants. “One house alone had eight little rooms, with a family (and in some cases a large family) in every room, where they had to eat and sleep. Three of the houses abutted on a little court a few yards square, which had to serve for the accommodation of all. The rent for these rotten, insanitary, dilapidated hovels, with the water coming in at the roof, was half-a-crown or three shillings a week for the single rooms, and the whole formed a profitable property, and belonged to a rich man in the West End of London. And,” said Mr. Ingram, “where a clear case of injustice or oppression is made out, the Church is the tribune of the people, and in the teeth of any amount of opposition to its work, or 64loss of subscriptions, must bear its witness against the wrongdoer, and like Nathan before David, must say, ‘Thou art the man!’”

Then came the question of the supply of East London water! He found for three summers in the hottest part of the year that Bethnal Green was on short supply, drains were unflushed, smells increased, inconveniences meeting the people at every turn. Mr. Ingram himself, to moisten the lips of a dying girl, had himself to go half a mile and fetch some of the water they had stored themselves from the brief early morning supply. The question had to be tackled and forced into prominence, and Mr. Ingram did not shrink from his share in doing it.

He also set about discovering the causes of the great infant mortality, and set on foot the instruction of the people, and their purveyors, as to the care to be taken with the milk supply, on the final settlement of which depended lives of hundreds of thousands of children in the crowded East End.

Finally, he tackled the housing question. He said: “What the moral effect of overcrowding is no one who knows the facts can doubt; what the physical effect is the doctors can tell us. What can I do? you ask. One thing, at any rate, you can do. You can join a Sanitary Committee of the Mansion House Council, or start a Committee where there is not one. Ours in Bethnal Green is worked by a lawyer, and has on it doctors, surveyors, one or two gentlemen of leisure, and working-men; or you could come and live here, and after a time get elected on to the Local Vestry, and when you have got the confidence of your colleagues get them to use 65the large powers put in their hands by the Local Government Board.”

Of course, in all this public work, a man like Mr. Ingram naturally made enemies; for he was up against vested interests of Water Companies, the milk trade, and the landlords. The race still exists, concerning former members of which it was said in ancient times: “It grieved them that there had come a man to seek the welfare of Israel.” To them it seemed “officiousness,” “interference,” and over and over the opinion was expressed that “the parson should stick to his spiritual work.”

He did! And how he did it can be best told from the following incidents told by the Rector at various times. Here is one picture:

“I remember a lad coming to me, his face pale as death, and—what was rare with a London boy, because as a class they are so reserved and unemotional—he flung himself on his knees and caught hold of me. I said: ‘Well, lad, what is the matter?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Mr. Ingram, do help me!’ The boy’s story was a common one. He had chucked our Club, and been drawn into the public-house by someone for a drink. There he had been induced to put his money on horses which were going to make his fortune, and that night he came to me with terror in his eyes to say that he had lost £9 from the Shop Club entrusted to him by his mates. Of course, I lent him the money.”

He collected a number of girls into a Club, and got them to attend the Church for their first service. After the service the Committee of the Club wrote: “Dear Rector,—We think it our duty to inform you that in your opinion our Club Service was a success, 66and we beg you to have such a service for us every month until further notice.”

Here is another picture:

“I remember one Christmas Day going into a home, not half a mile from the Church, where I found a blind man in terrible pain. I said to the wife: ‘What do you do when he has such terrible pains?’ ‘Oh, little Alice generally sings to him.’ ‘Then let her sing now!’ I said. And there stood up in the room a little Church-taught child and sang:

O give me Samuel’s mind,

A meek unwavering faith,

To Thee obedient and resigned

In life and death.

That I may read with childlike eyes

Things that are hidden to the wise.

And as she sang that which she had learned at Sunday School, in her clear, childish treble, the tears coursed down the blind man’s cheeks, a look of beautiful happiness came into his face and the lines of pain faded away. A fortnight afterwards he was taken down from his cross, and passed from his pain into the land where there is no more pain, but even in Paradise he will hardly hear a sweeter sound than he heard from his little child that Christmas Day.”

Here is another hint of the rector’s manifold duties:

“Every Monday for nine years did I spend in one of our great hospitals; and what I saw then convinced me of the truth—the truth the doctors tell us with one voice—that whole wards of our hospitals might be shut up. I actually heard a doctor say so myself—if only the drink curse could 67be cured in the district. I used to go up to one of the patients and say: ‘My friend, what brought you here?’ And the answer would be: ‘I slipped on the curb, Mr. Ingram, on Saturday night.’ I did not need to ask him any other question.”

Here, finally, are two human documents which show the intimate nature of the rector’s spiritual work:

“I found Jane Crease and Dick Ede in the slums in the East End. Jane Crease had been in pain for something like fifteen or sixteen years, and she was left absolutely alone, except for a hard-working father and mother, who did their best for her, but with no friends, and nothing to do all day, lying there in the little street in which she lived. I can remember my first visit, and how she welcomed me when I took on the parish work, as Rector of Bethnal Green. I raised up people to go down and bring hope to that poor girl. After about twelve months I remember going in—of course, I had been in every week to see her; but on one particular visit, when some friends had been down to cheer her up, and read to her, I remember her waving her hand round to her photographs, and saying with a smile on her face: ‘It is a changed life to me, Mr. Ingram. You see I have all my friends here with me. My life is changed now, and I owe all these friends to you.’ Now the last five years of that little woman’s life was a different thing, because she was surrounded by hopeful people who came with bright faces to tell her about this and that. We used to carry her into Bethnal Green Parish Church for her Communions when she could not move; and by the Hope of the Church her life was changed. She died 68about five years afterwards, bright and happy to the last.

“Dick Ede was long dying of consumption in that slow way which lasts for years. I took into him my young brothers from the Settlement at Oxford House. Many a young clergyman to-day has been educated by Dick Ede! Many a one has, at his first pastoral visit, learnt from that boy his patience and other lessons which he has never learnt elsewhere.”

So in the camaraderie which he exercised amongst the men and boys and women and children, as Head of Oxford House; and in fulfilling the many calls upon his time in preaching in Victoria Park, and in his public duties incurred in watching over the movements which affected and guarded the social needs of the people; and, finally, in the intimate spiritual work of Rector of the parish, Mr. Ingram passed from nine to ten years of his life. In the last year of this period he also added the care of all the churches which fell upon him as Rural Dean of Spitalfields.

At the close of this period, Lord Salisbury offered him a vacant Canonry at St. Paul’s Cathedral. His acceptance of the new post necessitated his resignation as Head of Oxford House; for he would have to take up his residence at Amen Court, but, when Dr. Creighton, the then Bishop of London, was informed by Mr. Ingram of the offer, he urged that he should take it, for he was just about to recommend him for the Suffragan Bishopric of Stepney. Whereupon, Mr. Ingram accepted the Canonry, and a short time later, Canon Winnington Ingram was consecrated Bishop-Suffragan of Stepney, following 69Dr. Forrest Browne, who had just been appointed Bishop of Bristol. The following year his old University honoured him with the degree of D.D.

Now it was that, as Canon of St. Paul’s, a far larger circle began to come into touch with the new Bishop. His sermons on Sunday afternoon at the Cathedral drew congregations of thousands; but it was chiefly for his work as Bishop of Stepney, and his efforts in connection with the East London Church Fund that he now became known.

CHAPTER V
STEPNEY

When the Letters Patent of April, 1895, were issued for “The See of Stepney, in the Diocese of London,” there was no attempt made to define the exact area contained by the bishopric. That was left to the Bishop of London to determine.

Geographically speaking, it is bounded on the east by the River Lea. All to the east of Metropolitan London—that is, what is popularly known as “The City”—is in the Stepney district, and furnishes the eastern portion of the responsibilities of the Bishop. When Dr. Winnington Ingram was consecrated to the work it contained the Deanery of Stepney, with forty-one parishes, and nearly 400,000 souls. It also contained the Deanery of Spitalfields, with twenty-three parishes, and 200,000 souls, as well as the Deanery of Shoreditch, with twenty-one parishes, and 150,000 souls; the Deanery of Hackney, with twenty-seven parishes, and 220,000 souls. This represented the work of East London. But in a northerly direction it contained the Deanery of Islington, with thirty-nine parishes, and 350,000 souls, and the Deanery of Enfield, with thirty-four parishes, and over 200,000 souls. In addition to this the Bishopric included the Deanery of St. Sepulchre, with twenty-three parishes, and 150,000 souls. So altogether, when 71Winnington Ingram assumed the episcopal supervision of this vast district it contained nearly one and three-quarter million souls in its 208 parishes. For the spiritual needs of the people there had been provided 210 incumbents, and 340 assistant curates, making in all 550 clergy, or about one to each 3,000 of the total population. This meant a total of 318,000 families to be shepherded, and the facing, for their own sakes, of the problems concerned with the betterment of their lives.

The Bishop took up his residence in the fine old house situated just off Amen Corner, Paternoster Row, and from here, as a centre, he worked to meet the calls from the varied portions of his diocese, which, roughly speaking, covered an area of twenty miles, teeming with population.

The main problem which presented itself to the Bishop was how to increase the number of the clergy, and how to augment the usefulness of those who were there, by the provision of more lay workers, both visitors and residents. To settle the clergy problem, Dr. Winnington Ingram had, as his main source of income, the resources of the East London Church Fund. Besides this there was a very large amount of monetary help given every year in private gifts to individual parishes, and there were other public societies which took some share. Much of the money which came from the Bishop of London’s Fund, as distinct from the East London Church Fund, was invariably allocated to purchasing sites and making grants towards building churches and mission rooms. That assistance, though specially earmarked in this way, was greatly needed. In many of the districts it had been 72shown by experience that no sooner did the people rise, even slightly, above the level where the work of the Church had found them, than they proceeded to move off in the endeavour to get better air, and less trying surroundings. It was no uncommon experience to discover that a complete roll of communicants was worked off and passed away in about five years. In fifteen years one incumbent had seen three numerically large sets of communicants pass from under his hands, the vast majority of whom had moved to more open districts. True, more came, but it was equally true that they had gone. The Bishop found it was absolutely necessary, in order to keep pace with these rapid removals, to put up mission churches in the new districts, and with the help of the Bishop of London’s Fund, to make provision for their spiritual necessities. He found when he asked the builders of the long rows of little houses which were fast covering so many of the once pleasant and pretty fields, that build as they would, the houses were let before they were finished. “Something fresh, something not dreary, something that has hanging about it some sort of reminiscence of blades of grass and leaves of trees not smutched with smoke, not curled and browned with chemicals, that it is that draws them from their seasoned houses in the paved streets; draws them irresistibly, though the homes to which they go have their walls reeking with damp plaster, and the roads are mere cart tracks of deep mud.” Yes, to the north and in the east, building operations were going on with startling rapidity. To make provision for that fact was one of the problems facing the new Bishop.

But there was another problem equally pressing which has already been hinted. We refer to the paucity of workers, both clerical and lay, in the congested districts. There was practically no supply on the spot of laymen and laywomen to help the clergy as district visitors and in other ways. There was, of course, a very large amount of lay help voluntarily given by those who lived in the parishes; but from the nature of their own work they could only give this help on Sundays, and for a short time on week-day evenings. So it came to pass that the incumbent of a parish might have a devoted band of helpers of this kind among his parishioners, and yet not have one single person beyond himself and his curates, who could go to read to a sick person, or be sent for in any case of emergency which happened in the day-time. Bishop Winnington Ingram declared that so far as he could judge no other difficulty hampered their work as much as this.

Dr. Winnington Ingram set himself to plead in West-End pulpits and drawing-rooms for the voluntary assistance of ladies and gentlemen who had leisure to go. He told them “the visits of our West-End neighbours are the ozone of our East-End atmosphere. The bright presence, and the gentle and genial sympathy of well-dressed men and women, supply oxygen to priests and people alike. The clergyman, who has not, perhaps, in all his parish one family of his own social position and education, is wonderfully revived by this whiff of the air he once regarded as an essential necessary of life, of healthy moral life; of any life worth living, as he once estimated what it was that made life worth the living. The sick man, lying in his poor squalid 74room, finds matter to think of and talk over for a week, in a quarter of an hour’s visit from some fellow-man of a type so different from anything he has himself been accustomed to; one to whom the sad, small cares that make up his own anxieties are quite unknown, but who feels for the cares he himself has to face, and gives the sympathy that is infinitely soothing and bracing to the tired and broken man. The worn mother of a sickly little family—sickly, but less sickly than the surroundings would lead you to expect—has a glimpse of quite a different world from any she has known or dreamed of in that half-hour’s quiet talk, on equal terms as far as hearts are concerned, with a vision of fairness and freshness. That ‘fairness’ seemed to her ‘fairiness,’ until she found that the bright brave woman has her trials and her sorrows too; and that in motherhood, and in a mother’s cares for the children God has given, there is a bond that makes them equal, makes them one. Not poor women only, but poor men, are strangely stirred and strangely soothed by that gentle presence. And not those men and women only whose whole state is summed up at its worst in the word ‘poor,’ or ‘very poor.’ When I hear—as I have to hear—of irreclaimable cases; when I hear of men and of women gone hopelessly wrong, as people say, I know that the best chance for them would be secured if we could bring them under the influence of some delicately nurtured woman. Nothing is nearly so likely to bring to them that which is, humanly speaking, the turning-point to recovery—namely, that beginning of a desire to feel once more some sort of self-respect.”

The Bishop was successful in his attempts. One rich man came to him, and said: “I am tired of writing cheques for charities, and merely subscribing to this and that. What I want myself is personally to serve. I want to go and tell somebody myself personally about Christ and His love. Can you give me half a dozen invalids in East London that I can go and visit personally?” Of course, the Bishop did. It was a touching thing to see that man in the evening, when his City work was done, personally serving those poor people in East London. He had a great desire, a deep human instinct to do something personally himself; and he found a joy in it which he had never had before. Others gave up their leisure during the day, and not a few actually came and lived in the district themselves, cheering the pathway of those around them by the unconscious influence which emanated from their presence.

It was no wonder that the appeal of the Bishop succeeded, for he forcibly brought before the people of the West End the exact facts of the East. Speaking one day at a drawing-room meeting in the West End, he said: “When I come to this or similar meetings in this part of London, I always take stock of the houses that I pass by. I find I can walk for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour and more, without seeing one house that says to me anything of this kind: ‘The people here need the individual attention of the parish clergy: they are poor; they are illiterate; they are ignorant. They have no amusements, nothing to brighten their lives. A visit of their clergyman or his wife will be an event in their weekly life. It will bring them into unwonted 76contact with a trained intelligence, a well-stored memory, a cultivated life, far and away above their own. It will do them an amount of good which cannot be over-estimated.’” Then he went on in ringing tones: “That which is not true of the very large proportion of the houses in many parts of the West—nay, not only not true but ridiculously the opposite of the truth—that is true of every house, of every floor, of every room, in many and many a parish of the districts of which I speak. Not one room in all the parish in which the visit of the clergyman, or one of his living agents, is not urgently needed. Not merely a visit once in a way, so that on the whole every room may have been visited once in a year; but frequent visits, systematic visits, a regular siege laid to each individual case, if Christ’s work is to be really done. Imagine the labour that that entails. Imagine the staff of labourers it would require, if it were adequately done. I would to God that people like yourselves who have money and who have heart could have just a week or so of my opportunities of knowing what a bitter contrast there is between the staff we ought to have and the few workers here and there which are all that we can possibly provide.”

Audiences which were spoken to in this way naturally responded to some extent. One after another families have left West London, and gone to settle in the East End. Often it is a widow and her daughter, or a young husband and his wife, and the Bishop has declared that “in no single case have I seen a family leave the West End and settle in the East without a great blessing on the sacrifice, and without their finding the spirit of the promise 77of the Gospel: ‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’”

It is perfectly true that there were cases in which some young girl who wanted to spend four or five evenings in the East End found that her mother had arranged certain things for her in Society; and the Bishop asserted that it was positively wrong for her to derange all her mother’s plans. All the same, he has been accustomed when he invited people to come to live in East London to put before their eyes as the chief attraction that they would “escape the tyranny of the card-case.” None the less, the Bishop was the first to acknowledge that there were social duties in the West of London that needed to be carried out.

The begging of funds, and the solicitation of workers for such a vast area as the Bishop of Stepney had in his hands, would seem to represent such colossal work and of such a nature that there would be the risk of a spiritual leader becoming a mere organiser, or mere official. But the Bishop escaped all that. He flung himself heart and soul into the affairs and difficulties of the 208 parishes, and became a familiar figure in every part of his diocese. Take several varieties of the work into which he threw himself as examples.

He is asked to go about eight o’clock in the evening to a parish room to receive deputations from the various parish guilds and societies, and say a few words to each about their work. When he arrives he discovers there are forty such guilds and associations, and three representatives from each. Allowing three minutes for each deputation to pass once up and once down the long room to speak to the 78Bishop, and to be spoken to, takes two hours. And three minutes is below the average. There are Church workers to be spoken to besides, and groups from a great choir that has meanwhile been singing through a long oratorio. The result is the Bishop does not get back to Amen Corner till some time after midnight, though it is not a twenty minutes’ drive home.

The next Sunday he goes to preach there. The spacious church is full, aisles and all, people standing at the west end. Throughout the sermon he cannot find one pair of eyes that does not look straight into his—a congregation of completely poor men and women, all evidently anxious to listen.

Take another kind of work—work in which he specialises amongst men. He goes to one parish after another on Sunday afternoons, where there are services for men only. One afternoon, six to seven hundred are present, and the same genius for attention manifests itself. The men are there to listen, to ponder and consider. It is to them a piece of thoughtful business which will provide discussion and consideration for home and workroom. Another afternoon he goes to a church where there are only about a hundred and fifty present. Next Sunday he speaks to about one hundred men. Most of them appear to be clerks in good positions. When the address is over he discovers that the work of the men is only beginning. They have determined to do something for the boys and girls in the streets, the children of the very poor who are left to run at large on Sunday. They go out and collect the children to one place or another, themselves providing 79all the money, and taking a delight in keeping the children occupied and amused.

He is asked to go down to a very poor parish, to be present at the annual declaration of the amounts raised in the parish for his own fund, the East London Church Fund. The large parish room is full of poor people keenly interested. It is one of the real events of the year, to learn what the whole amount contributed is. So they gather—fathers of families in plenty and mothers, and their families—a real parish gathering. The boxes from scores of poor households have been opened. The upshot of the whole is that after deducting £8 for expenses, the Bishop is cheered by a cheque being handed to him for £111. As he passes out of the room the incumbent speaks to a labourer’s wife, and afterwards the Bishop asked him: “Had she a box?” “Yes.” “Had she a family?” “Yes.” “Had the man been in full wage?” “Not all the year, but about ten months.” “How much was there in her box?” And the answer was “Twelve and six!”

After experiences of this kind he discovers that the poorest of the poor give with a generosity absolutely astonishing. He hears from one incumbent that he found a woman at her wash-tub as he went on his rounds. The previous Sunday the incumbent had asked at the mission church that the people would provide some kind of ornament for the perfectly bare walls. She now said to him in a jerky way: “I wanted to give something in memory of that little lad, that little child of the Missioner, who lately died.” And to the incumbent’s amazement she gave him a guinea towards 80the purchase of a cross for the church. Next day, while the same incumbent was visiting, three women met him in one of the poorest streets. One of them angrily asked why he hadn’t been to her for money for the church before. She gave him ten shillings, and the other two gave five each.

“And,” said the Bishop, when relating all these stories, “this very rochet I am wearing now was a gift from a working-woman in East London.”

But amidst all these episcopal labours, the Bishop still voluntarily carried on the work of his boys’ clubs in Bethnal Green, and other parishes, tearing down from Amen Court on his bicycle, and regarding it as a form of necessary physical exercise. On Saturday afternoons he frequently set aside time to conduct parties of East End factory girls around the Cathedral, holding them spellbound with stories concerning St. Paul’s, and the men who had occasioned some of its monuments. Afterwards he would entertain them all to tea. On the Sundays he would be the guest at some vicarage, and nothing delighted him more than to fraternise with the nursery element which he found in the varied homes. For three years he enthusiastically carried on the work of this East End diocese; and during that time he effectually built the bridge between the people in the West End and the people in the East. If ever a man deliberately translated in his life the spirit of the words “I am among you as one that serveth,” it was the Bishop of Stepney. The marvel is how he found time for it all: it was only done by rising early, and staying up late, and going on “going on”—“just a day at a time.”

However, his reward was coming. It came first in the absolute worship of the people, who had known him for so many years in Bethnal Green, the existence of which was proved by a singular incident. It occurred while he was taking part in the re-opening services of a church in Bethnal Green. Some disturbance arose at the end of the church, and the news flew through the neighbourhood that a crowd of interrupters were spoiling the service and insulting the Bishop. How do such panic-impressions get abroad? However, this one flew like lightning through the streets around, and the folk in the district hotly resented it. When the Bishop, after the service, came out of the vicarage where he had been chatting with the clergyman about his work, he found to his astonishment a huge mob who had gathered, as they thought, to protect him. They were all very poor people, many of them not Church-people at all; but the instant they caught sight of him there was a roar of cheers, and on his inquiring what they wanted, they said: “We’ve come to see you safe home!” The situation was rather embarrassing; for they insisted that he was in danger, and nothing he could say would shake them off, and they tramped around and behind him for half a mile, until at last he managed to get into a car, and was driven home to Amen Court. The experience was as delightful as it was spontaneous. For years he had carried on through many a discouragement, and nothing to help him forward, except those hidden compensations, which no man knows saving he that receiveth them; a period of his life never better described than in Matthew Arnold’s famous words:

“’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead

Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,

And the pale weaver, through his window seen

In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.

I met a preacher there I knew, and said:

‘Ill and o’er worked, how fare you in this scene?’

‘Bravely!’ said he; ‘for I of late have been

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the Living Bread.’”

But the crowning encouragement of all was to come quite early in the next year, 1901, for on March 8 the Bishop-Suffragan of Stepney was nominated by the Prime Minister to take up the Bishopric of London, and on March 25 the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral unanimously accepted the nomination, and the election was publicly declared and confirmed on April 17, when in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, Dr. Winnington Ingram took his oath as Bishop, both to the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury. On April 30 his enthronement took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

He was only forty-three years of age at the time. Eleven of them had been spent in the Worcestershire home; twelve of them in Preparatory School, and at Marlborough and at Keble College, Oxford; three as a tutor. In was after this that he decided to take Holy Orders and in following up his decision he had now been between sixteen and seventeen years entirely engaged in work connected with the Church. Putting aside his work, which was done at the side of Dr. Maclagan, when he was Bishop of Lichfield, which occupied three years of the sixteen, as the Bishop’s secretary and chaplain, we see that he had been allowed to spend ten years in practical performance of priestly and parochial 83duties in poverty-stricken parishes; and three more in carrying the administrative responsibilities connected with those parishes as a whole. Roughly speaking, his career had divided itself into two halves. The first half and a little more than the first half had seemed the kind of training likely to produce a cultured, almost courtly type of ecclesiastic. Marlborough with its crowd of the Sons of the Clergy; Keble with its somewhat austere traditions; Oxford with its atmosphere of conservatism; Lichfield with its Cathedral associations: these were all factors which might have been expected to produce the kind of man whose manner, methods, and outlook would have fitted him to be the popular incumbent of some wealthy and aristocratic parish. It scarcely appeared the right introduction for the work he would have to do in the grim streets of the East End. On the other hand, the years he spent in facing the problems of men and women who were passing their lives in “pulling together two ends which somehow never seemed to meet” scarcely seemed the exact preparation for one, who would one day be “A Prince of the Church,” and, the friend of Monarchs, Cabinet Ministers and ecclesiastical dignitaries. Yes, to the merely casual observer, there must seem years in Winnington Ingram’s life which at the time did not appear to tell upon the final result.

Ah, but they told upon the man who had to live it! In the counsel and purposes of God nothing is wasted. While we, in our short-sightedness, would shape the environment of men with a view to some special purpose, He shapes the men who have to fulfil it.

It was thus that Winnington Ingram was shaped! The strong man that London now needed must of necessity have been a strung man. To comprehend London’s problems he would have to be a man who understood; and that means “one who stands under, stands-at-the-roots.” But not merely at the roots of one part of its life. His experiences in the East End gave him the necessary understanding of the sacrifices, suffering, and struggles of London’s poor. The Headship of Oxford House, the rectorship of Bethnal Green, did that for him. But the East End of London is not all London. There is a West End, where there is wealth and refinement and a different type of existence. This could only be reached and led by one who understood all this: had had its advantages himself and knew its points of view. Marlborough, Oxford, Lichfield did this for him. But the East End and the West End is not all London. There are great suburban cities within and without its borders where dwell many professional people and workers, who belong to neither one nor the other. The man who can lead them must understand them too. Winnington Ingram’s Bishopric of Stepney gave him this power. In North and North-East London he became familiar with their peculiar type of life. Hampstead, Highgate, Stamford Hill, Wood Green had much to say to him that neither West End nor East End could teach him; but when at last he had had this threefold experience he understood them all—stood-at-the-roots of all their lives; knew them at their best and their worst; knew their possibilities and their limitations; knew their beliefs and their prejudices. The way in which he had gained it 85was a strange way. But at the end of the way he stood there an instrument ready and fitted for the Master’s use: and the man who understood London was called to lead it in spiritual things.

God knows and God knows best; and while we in our short-sightedness would shape the thing we call life, He shapes the men who have to live it.

CHAPTER VI
BISHOPRIC OF LONDON

The appointment of Winnington Ingram to the Bishopric of London proved to be very popular. It had already crept out as a likely fact when he addressed a meeting at the Mansion House on March 18, 1901, and he received a tremendous welcome. The comments of the day concerning his appointment were unanimous in their approval; and on April 30 the ceremony of his enthronement was conducted in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the man who had faced so many difficulties in the past until he had looked them down now confronted the forest of difficulties in the London diocese.

It was a task to make any man flinch!

The See itself had, of course, always been one of great importance, for the simple reason that it was the diocese containing England’s capital. Whoever might be its Bishop could never have escaped the pressing questions of the period in which he lived. National questions, civic questions, ecclesiastical questions, would all be certain to arise for discussion in London, if they were there at all! For example, one feels sorry for the former Bishops of London who exercised their jurisdiction during the struggle between the Stuarts and the people. Nor could it ever have been an easy task to tactfully 87administer the affairs of the many churches in the City, and in the immediate suburbs, even when those suburbs did not extend very far, and Fulham Palace itself was considered the summer country residence of the Bishops.

But with the increase in size of London itself there naturally came added responsibilities. It is not necessary to labour this point, for the facts emerge startlingly from the figures. Three hundred and twenty-five years ago the population of London was 180,000. Exactly 100 years before Winnington Ingram was enthroned, it had reached 864,000. Forty years later it had added a million; ten years later another half-a-million; ten years later still nearly another half-a-million; and twenty years later still, viz., in 1881, it had again increased by over a million. It was then that the problems of the London diocese began to be acute!

It came about in this way. There was already the beginning of the “flock-to-the-towns-movement” in every part of the United Kingdom, which has brought it to pass in these days in which we write, that out of every hundred inhabitants of the United Kingdom seventy-nine and more are town-dwellers and town-workers. This drift to the towns was already beginning to be noticed in 1871 to 1881; and nowhere was it more marked than in London.

Had the huge crowds which had thronged London simply entered in and dwelt there, making use of the churches already erected, even then the task of shepherding such masses effectively would have called for a man of great power. Why, to have merely made the round of them would have been a 365 day task, taking only two parishes per day. 88To have had the knowledge a true Bishop should have of his clergy would have meant intimate acquaintance with battalions of rectors, vicars, curates, cathedral officials, and hospital, asylum, and barrack chaplains. To meet the demands of the increased population, and to have enlarged the existing accommodation, would have meant providing for an expenditure that would have taxed the most ingenious Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yes, it would have meant all this, if the people had simply naturally increased; and if the others had simply thronged in, urged by the “drift-to-the-towns” movement.

Gradually, however, there was another problem added.

For many years shopkeepers and merchants, who used to live over their shops and warehouses, had begun to erect for themselves residences a little further out. These emigrants did not go far at first. In the west they went towards Bayswater; in the east, towards Stepney; in the north, towards Highbury and Holloway; and in the south towards Kennington and Denmark Hill. There they built for themselves important looking houses, stately-fronted, porched or terraced; and drove Citywards in the mornings by carriage, hansom, and omnibus.

It only needed a few years more, and they had moved still further out. Anywhere, anywhere, to escape the crowd! They left their former houses to be let to their managers and clerks. This was stage Number One.

A few more years yet, then these also had drifted onwards to long rows of suburban villas, from which they came in by train, and the big houses, formerly 89let to them by their employers, now reached the second stage. They were left behind by the salaried people who had now emigrated to the huge suburbs which sprang in Chelsea, Brompton, Willesden, Watford, Queen’s Park, Battersea, Wandsworth, and Clapham; Upton Park, East and West Ham, Forest Gate and Ilford; Camberwell, Peckham, and Deptford; Lee and Blackheath. The houses they left behind became tenanted by the upper wage-earning classes, who let off some portion of the house; and where one family had lived there were two or even three now found. This was the third stage!

A few years more and even these had travelled some little distance further; and the large residences became mere tenement dwellings. Little by little, room after room became let by itself, and many families struggled along under one roof. At night time, in a twelve-roomed house, there might have been counted any number from twenty upwards of sleeping people, and in the daytime the children simply swarmed in the streets. This was the final stage!

This was the condition of affairs that stretched before the gaze of the new Bishop of London. The immigration into London had presented one problem, the emigration out of London into Greater London presented quite another. The density of the population, on the one hand, called for religious provision, and the churches in its midst had to be encouraged. But the emigration from London meant that “Down Town” churches also multiplied, and “Out Town” churches had to be built and financed.

The situation bristled with difficulties; for side 90by side with Changing London came the saddening fact that the people in London were changing also. Take the West End! In Bishop Wilkinson’s day, the houses around St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, were occupied by church-going people; and St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, where Prebendary Webb-Peploe preached, once crowded every Sunday with throngs of fashionable worshippers, were two examples of the way in which the Week-End and Sunday golf habit were disastrously beginning to affect the congregations. And, if men like Prebendary Webb-Peploe, eloquent in speech, and spiritually gifted, from whom we had the statement, discovered this, what must the other churches have done? It simply meant that a large majority of the wealthy town-dwellers were too busy to pay any attention to soul culture, or to show devotion to their parishes.

A large number of others were living in expensive flats, and leaving them at the week-ends in the same way.

Another feature of London life was being produced in the better-class boarding-houses. There were many many thousands living in the boarding-houses of London, an irresponsible, undomesticated existence. The home sense—utterly destroyed—and the home ties, that counted for so much in the past, weakened! Ever on the wing, the spirit of discontent and fault-finding at every fresh house was fostered. The Sundays, if possible, were spent away. If not, then they perhaps went to the nearest church, for which they felt no devotion, like the former residents of the parish, and contented themselves with dropping anything from a penny to sixpence into the plate. Hence, the 91offertories of the churches were depleted, and the efficiency of their work hindered.

Turning to the type which was being produced among the poorer classes, the observer was faced with a phenomenon unique in the world’s history. There was a generation growing up which, in millions, had been living in the mean streets, and courts, and crowded ways of this great city, cramped in its bodily surroundings, living a hot, fretful life, working long hours of sedentary, unhealthy toil. Had you witnessed a Bank Holiday scene on Wormwood Scrubbs, or Hampstead Heath, or Battersea Park, you would have known what it meant. For hours there would be a seemingly endless stream of tired, carelessly dressed, worn-out looking mothers, with babies in their arms, and dragging at their skirts. Gangs of loud-voiced youths, and equally loud-voiced girls, were all wending their way to the centre of a noisy, roaring, rattling fair. Then they would return once more to their old cramping surroundings. Numbers of them were passing their existence losing touch with Nature, and except for a holiday, all too brief, seldom getting their vision enlarged by the sight of vast spaces, or by contact with the working of the mysterious Force of the ocean’s tide “rolling in fullest pride,” or of the equally mysterious Force of Growth in the fields. In the early years of this century, when Winnington Ingram began his work as Bishop, a great deal was heard about the irreligiousness of the masses. It was not easy to remember God, or to feel desire for worship in such a life as theirs. A new type of individual was being developed, remarkable neither for physical strength, mental power, nor spiritual 92genius; remarkable for nothing except the quick-wittedness born of their constant rubbing shoulders with a crowd.

Quite apart from these very poor, who were represented by 300,000 families, yet always on the fringe of their condition, there was a great working-class population who were found in Walthamstow, Nine Elms, Battersea, the back streets of Chelsea and Brompton, and the unbroken lines of the Queen’s Park estate. We had occasion to find a working-man in one such house in Battersea, one of a long lane of tiny dwellings, and we called at several before we could find him. They were all the same. A dirty hall, a common staircase. The street outside the playground of the children, and the rooms inside small and close. As we walked the streets scarcely one pretty face, or one lad of fine physique could be discovered. They looked undersized, crude, rude, and without ideals. The women’s faces were hard, the girls’ pert, and the men toil-worn. And miles upon miles of similar streets held hundreds of thousands of similar men and women and children. This was the London that faced Winnington Ingram as he assumed the episcopal responsibility for this—the largest city in the world!

Without hesitation he bent himself to the task.

One month after his consecration as Bishop he started to do for the “Bishop of London’s Fund” what he had been hitherto doing for the East London Church Fund. Twelve days after the enthronement in St. Paul’s he preached at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, and secured £1,500 for his fund. In the year he had wooed out of the people nearly 93£29,000. This he felt was the duty that lay nearest to his hand. He saw the city as we have described, and he felt that its one hope lay in making more provision for its changing needs; that if any uplift was to be preserved for them it must come this way. None but the churches could fight the tendency to materialisation of spirit that unchecked and unleavened was bound to come in city life.

It was with this consciousness that the Bishop of London set first and foremost in his programme of activities the provision for the spiritual needs of his vast diocese. And, in the years that followed, he never weakened in his conviction that the one thing which could save London would be the multiplication in its midst of a race of devoted clergy.

Yet no effort for the future was allowed to induce him to neglect the multitudinous duties which came upon him in carrying out the details of his episcopal position.

To record how, year after year, during his twenty-five years’ episcopate, his life was crowded with the fulfilment of many claims which were thrust upon him would call for far more space than the limits of this book could furnish. It will be sufficient to select one such year at random—one of the earliest years of his experience as a Bishop, and to say: “This is a sample!” Here it is:—

He addresses a New Year’s letter to his diocese. He visits the Royal Naval College at Osborne. He speaks to a Men’s Meeting at the City of London School. He receives a deputation from American Church Bishops. In the interests of the Church of England, seeking to weld her in bonds of sympathy with the great Eastern Church in Russia, he 94journeys to St. Petersburg. He is received by the Tsar and Tsaritza. As he returns home he visits Berlin. Immediately upon his return he addresses the “Frances Holland” School for Girls. He goes to St. Christopher’s Working Boys’ Club. On the midnight march of the Church Army through Westminster, he joins in the procession. He holds a Confirmation at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s. He opens the “Bishop Creighton” House at Fulham. He addresses the London Diocesan Conference as its President. He gives a Garden Party at Fulham to German clergy. He presides at a display by the London Diocesan Branch of the Church Lads’ Brigade. He distributes the prizes at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. He receives honorary degree at Cambridge. He opens the new Parish Room at St. Chad’s, Haggerston. He consecrates the Church of Emmanuel at Northwood. He shares in the Lenten Mission at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. He addresses a great meeting at the Albert Hall. He is present at the Balkan Committee’s Meeting on Macedonian Reform. Goes to Bethnal Green to address assembly of East London men. Rushes down to Bournemouth to plead for the East London Church Fund. Preaches at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate. Again at Christ Church, Mayfair, on “Socialism.” Speaks at Church House to Women’s Diocesan Society; again in connection with the Central Board of Missions; again to the Waifs and Strays Society; again on the East London Jews’ Fund; again on the Education Bill; again on the work of the Society of Sacred Mission, Kelham; and again on South London Church Work. He goes to St. Peter’s to unveil the Bishop 95Wilkinson memorial. At Fulham he speaks on Settlement work in the light of his Oxford House experience. At Fulham Parish Church he dedicates the tower and bells. He pleads at Grosvenor House for the Bishop of London’s Church Fund; at the Guildhall for Missions. Gives an address at the Kensington Town Hall on the Education Bill. He speaks at Lincoln’s Inn on the Incorporated Inns of Court Mission; and at the Mansion House in connection with the Pan-Anglican Congress on “Women and their Responsibility.” Speaks at the Portman Rooms on the claims of his own Church Fund. Addresses the Queens’ College students. Delivers an address at Queen’s Hall on the Chinese Opium Traffic; speaks on the Licensing Bill, and again on “Morality.” Again, at the Representative Church Council on the Licensing Bill. Again, at the Royal Albert Hall on Anglo-German relations; and again at the same place, on the Licensing Bill. Goes to St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East. Gives Good Friday addresses at St. James’s, Piccadilly. Visits St. Margaret Pattens! Gives an address at St. Mary’s Hospital on the Medical Profession and the Church. Is present at St. Michael’s, Cornhill, and addresses City men. At St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Day. At Sion College; and speaks at Union Street on Church Schools Maintenance. Preaches at Westminster Abbey for London Hospitals. Is present at the Church of England Pageant. Appeals to the public concerning the condition of the Congo Free State. Pleads the cause of the Seaside Camps for London Working Boys.

One year’s work that emerged and could be noticed publicly! But beside all this there was the 96church visitation in the week and on Sundays to which the Bishop refers in his letter as “visiting 133 parishes.” Beside all this the great amount of time spent in committees, and the still greater in correspondence!

Before the letters were all disposed of, those with whom interviews had been arranged began to arrive at the Palace, or more usually at London House as being more convenient for the clergy of his diocese.

If the Bishop’s engagements for the day were so heavy that he would have no other opportunity for a little exercise, he interviewed his clergy while walking briskly in the open air.

If to be caricatured often hits off a truth better than in any other way, then the witty lines published in Punch reveal better than anything we can say the stress of the Bishop’s public and private life:

THE LAY OF THE SUFFERING BISHOP

From morn till evening, from evening till night,

I preach and organise, lecture and write.

And all over London my gaitered legs fly.

Was ever a Bishop so busy as I?

When writing my sermons, the best of my work’ll

Be done in the trains on the Underground circle;

I can write one complete, with a fine peroration,

Between Charing Cross and Mansion House Station.

For luncheon, I swallow a sandwich of ham,

As I rush up the steps of a Whitechapel tram;

Or with excellent appetite I will discuss

A half-penny bun on a Waterloo ’bus.

No table is snowy with damask for me;

My cloth is the apron which covers my knee:

No manservants serve and no kitchenmaids dish up

The frugal repasts of this suffering Bishop.

But the mere details of his work could not be allowed to monopolise his efforts. As Bishop of London, and one of the spiritual Peers in the House of Lords, he was called to watch over the interests of the Church of England. He had only been the episcopal leader in the London diocese for little more than a year, when the struggle over the Education Bill in 1902 forced him into the arena. In the debate in the House of Lords, the Bishop of London expressed his determination to later on move an amendment to the Bill, providing for the right of the parish clergyman to teach in the school; and also safeguarding that the repairs for which the parish school was liable should only be structural.

He felt so strongly on the matter that in view of the County Council Elections at the end of 1903, he addressed a letter to the Press and the diocese, in conjunction with the Bishop of Rochester, which, while deprecating having to adopt a course which brought him, even defensively, into active collision with large bodies of Nonconformists, yet called upon Churchmen to throw their strength into the election of candidates who would be ready to work the Act impartially.

On December 30, 1903, he wrote to the people of his diocese this New Year Letter:

“Dear People,

“It has been a busy year for all of us: unmarked by any great incident, and undisturbed by any great calamity. I have continued my course of visits around the diocese, and have visited 133 more parishes during the past year. The rate at which this diocese increases may be gauged by the 98fact that I have consecrated ten new churches this year; and it would have been quite impossible for me to have borne the ever-increasing burden, if it were not for the unfailing work of my Suffragan Bishops and Archdeacons, backed up in each locality by the Rural Deans, with their band of faithful clergy behind them.”

He then referred to that letter he had already sent in conjunction with the Bishop of Rochester to The Times and other papers. He then laid it down:

“The principle we believe to be in danger is a threefold one. (1) That the teaching of definite religious truth is an integral part of true education. (2) That the religious truth taught the children should be the religion of their parents. (3) And that it should be taught them by those who believe it. Let it be made clear that we cannot surrender these principles in the case of the schools which have been built by voluntary effort.

“If the ideal of the Free Church Council expressed in their resolutions at Leicester is realised, then all schools are to be of one type. Only simple Biblical instruction is to be allowed. No test of any sort is to be applied to the teachers; and apparently no inquiry is to be made as to the fitness of the teacher who gives the Biblical instruction. What is quite clear is that we clergy have to oppose this policy root and branch.

“Is it for this we have spent £10,000 a week for eighty years on the teaching of the poor? Is it for this that one million new school places were added to our schools after the passing of the Education Act of 1870? No, it was in order that, at any 99rate, three millions of children in the Voluntary Schools throughout the country might be taught without restraint the religion of their parents, and so be enabled to start in life with a definite religious faith. In London, at any rate, there can be no talk of Nonconformist children being forced to come to Church schools against their will. There is a Board School within reach of every child: and so large is the additional grant to be made by the County Council in respect of the poor schools which it is taking over, that for the first years, at any rate, no rates will be used for the Voluntary Schools at all.”

He then proceeded to urge them to place men upon the Council, who would see that the Church interests were safeguarded, and he went on thus:

“Side by side with that a parallel duty will be laid upon us. We must not hesitate to do our part under the Act. We must hand over our schools free of debt. That will mean that, after recognition, the grant due from the Government on the appointed day will leave the sum of over £30,000 to be raised. When this appeal has come out, I wish it to be made the occasion of a great Lenten Self-Denial Week, through every parish in the diocese, whether rich or poor.

“Some day the principle for which we have contended for so long, that the ‘children shall be taught the religion of their parents, and by those who believe it,’ may be seen by all our fellow-citizens to be essentially sound and just. Then we may hope that facilities in all schools may be granted for definite religious instruction, and in such cases we shall be quite willing ourselves to grant similar 100facilities in our own schools to those who wish to avail themselves of them. But meanwhile, our immediate duty is to safeguard the spiritual interests of the 180,000 children still in the Voluntary Schools of London.

“If I have dwelt specially upon the religious question, it is because that is the question which to us as Christian men is the most fundamental, and because that is the issue upon which, as Churchmen, we are called to act in defence.

“Your affectionate friend and Bishop,
“A. F. London.”

These two sides of his ecclesiastical career have always been evident in the life of the Bishop of London. On the one hand, with the fervour and faith of a spiritual leader, he would eagerly assume great responsibilities in erecting and supporting churches in his vast diocese; and, on the other, show himself ready to devote time and energy to publicly asserting the interests of the Church of England as a whole.

It was during the public side of his work, as exhibited in the course of his many years’ episcopate, that we get a clear insight into the way the Bishop’s mind approached great vital questions. There are leaders who are always ready to oppose change because they are out of sympathy with changes of any kind; or if they are found willing even for an experiment it is on the grounds of mere utilitarianism. It is rare in public life to discover a man who is willing to bring everything to the touchstone of principle.

The Bishop of London proved himself just such a man.

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We find him in 1904 speaking in the House of Lords on the Licensing Bill; and he stated that he regarded the withdrawal of licensing powers from the local magistrates as a blow at local patriotism, and declared that he favoured the fourteen years time-limit for the licenses. It was not the working of the Bill which appealed to him, but the principle of removing control from any but those affected by it; and the other of creating a vested interest by annual renewal of the license as a matter of course, till by its renewal a custom had been established, which could be pleaded as a reason for further renewal.

When the “Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill” was passed, making it legal to marry the sister of a deceased wife, he was much exercised in his mind by the clear interference of the State with what had hitherto been regarded as an ecclesiastical matter, never in question, until it was now disturbed by regard to mere utility. He implored the Archbishop of Canterbury to make clear to the clergy what their duty really was and whether they could be justified in refusing the Holy Communion to those who, from the point of view of Church Law, were living in sin. The Archbishop replied in a long letter, in which he set forth that no one who was living within the scope of the Statutes of the Realm could be said to be “A notorious and open evil liver”—on which grounds alone Holy Communion could be withheld from any applicants. But at the same time he pointed out that the Church could not permit dictation from the Legislature as to the provisions of its own spiritual discipline. However, this appeal by the Bishop of London to the Archbishop revealed that his own mind was working towards setting spiritual 102issues above obedience to a merely utilitarian and popular measure.

The same attitude was revealed by his joining in the agitation against the proposed Johnson-Wells pugilistic contest, which prevented the fight coming off—an action on the part of the Churches, which at the time was anything but popular.

His readiness to risk anything in what he considered the cause of right, however conservative his action might appear, was indicated by the fact that in February, 1914, he presented a petition, signed by 676 priests of the Diocese of London, to the Upper House of Convocation, expressing anxiety at the unchecked denial of Christian truths by office-holders in the Church, and at the tendency to approach the problem of reunion in a way inconsistent with the recognised necessity of episcopal ordination. On April 30 this House adopted the resolution and asserted the determination of the House to maintain unimpaired the faith in the Trinity and in the Incarnation contained in the creeds and the report of the Lambeth Conference of 1908, affirming the historical facts contained in those creeds to be part of the doctrine of the Church. They also re-affirmed the principle that no man should be suffered to perform priestly functions without episcopal ordination.

This same attitude was emphasised in 1904 by his protest at the teaching of Canon Hensley Henson on the subject of the Virgin Birth, a protest which brought forth an answering letter addressed to the Bishop by Dr. Henson himself. But the Bishop complained that “there is so much ambiguity in the language of Canon Henson and of other similar 103writers; so much readiness to discuss possible effects of the results of historical criticism, as if these results were already assured; there are so many admissions, lightly made which would carry those who make them further probably than they themselves think, further certainly than the faith of the Church permits; that there is ground for legitimate anxiety as to the nature and consequences of much of this modern teaching. I am, however, very grateful for the kind tone Canon Henson adopts throughout the letter to me personally and for the respect he expresses for my office. The propositions which he lays down in his published letter may be summed up in the one proposition that—‘We must follow Truth wherever it leads.’ This principle I have not shrunk in any way from applying, as he suggests I have, to the New Testament, and, therefore, in a sermon of mine, and an address delivered to the London Diocesan Conference, I have given the reasons which lead me to believe in the Virgin Birth of our Lord.”

But though this particular incident closed on a kindly note, there was none the less a great gulf fixed between the schools of thought represented by Canon Hensley Henson and Winnington Ingram: and, years later, this fact was emphasised by the Bishop of London’s personal action over the consecration of his former friend, Hensley Henson, to the episcopate.

He explained his action in the following letter:

January 19, 1918.

“The Bishop of London has acknowledged, through the Archdeacon of London, a memorial 104presented to him by the clergy of the diocese, on the subject of the consecration of Hensley Henson to be Bishop of Hereford. He says, ‘Before I received it I had come to the painful decision to take no part in the consecration of Dr. Henson as Bishop of Hereford. I say “painful” because he is an old friend of mine for twenty-nine years, and was my predecessor at Oxford House. I only abstain because of what I consider his dangerous views with regard to the Virgin Birth and Resurrection, and certain miracles wrought by our Lord, as exemplified in passages quoted by the Bishop of Oxford in his public protest. I shall always hope that he will, if he becomes a Bishop, lay aside the controversial pen, and develop that pastoral side of his character that we who knew him and loved him at Bethnal Green knew to be so strong in him.’”

It can readily be perceived that one who, like the Bishop of London, would definitely take such a step as to refuse to support by his presence even the consecration of an old friend, would not easily yield one jot or tittle to any claims but those of his own conscience.

It was the same over the Woman’s Suffrage question. For years the struggle was intense and protracted. The members of the Militant Party amongst the suffragettes were attracting attention to their cause by measures which, in the then existing conditions, had brought them into open breaches of the law. It was in vain they were arrested and fined. They retorted by accepting prison sooner than pay fines, and once in prison, went on hunger strike, to obtain their release. Nothing 105would have been easier for a man of such intense sympathy as the Bishop of London than to show it actively on the side of these women. But from his point of view they were in revolt against Constitutional methods. On January 24, 1914, he visited Holloway Gaol, and interviewed Miss Rachel Peace, who, it was stated, had been forcibly fed. He reported that the statement was unfounded, but pleaded that she must be released on license. His plea was refused, and on January 31 he published a letter stating the fact. Its publication was followed by a wilful interruption of his service at a consecration of a church at Golders’ Green. The next day a deputation asked him to visit two women prisoners in Holloway, and then come and state his experiences before a meeting of the Woman’s Social and Political Union. He refused to do the latter, but he visited the prison and talked with the women, and found they complained of no personal unkindness beyond forcible feeding. He told them that their action was not only wrong, but impolitic. The result of his statement was that the militants picketed his house. Here again was a clear case of his willingness to risk unpopularity in asserting his own personal and considered views.

Even in the Church of England itself, the same fact came out when he found it necessary to deal with practices which seemed to him to involve greater issues, and an instance of this was found in his decision concerning the methods adopted at St. Peter’s, London Dock, in 1909.

He sent them a letter practically removing the episcopal ban on the Church, and the Vicar, the 106Rev. L. S. Wainwright, read it publicly. The Bishop wrote:

“With regard to the use of incense—in view of the fact that incense has been used in your Church for forty years and more, I make no order dealing with the matter of the Reservation of the Sacraments. I sanction its being reserved for the purpose of communicating the sick, but I direct that it shall be reserved in the Mortuary Chapel, pointed out to me on the occasion of my visit, instead of in the side Chapel where it is now reserved.”

From the instances quoted above, the position of the Bishop becomes lucidly clear. It becomes apparent that he felt he was there to protect the people in the 593 parishes of his diocese from any errors which might creep in, either of doctrine or of practice. He asked only one question: What was the principle involved? And on the principle he took his firm stand, whether within or without the Church this was always his attitude.

So the years passed, in the exercise of his episcopal duties, in the rapidly extending diocese of London; in willingly fulfilling the extra duties thrust upon him as a man of commanding influence; and in fearlessly asserting his conscience as a spiritual peer of the realm, and one of the spiritual leaders of his own Church.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, came the Great War in 1914, and to all the difficulties which had hitherto faced him was added the shouldering of responsibilities which a state of war thrust upon every man in high position and peculiarly upon himself.

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CHAPTER VII
THE BISHOP DURING WARTIME

It was a singular thing that in 1909 the Bishop of London issued a volume of addresses entitled “Into the Fighting Line.” He little dreamed that five years later that title would have to represent the attitude of the whole nation and of himself as one of its prominent leaders. It was so. In 1914 the Great War began, and the testing time of the Church came. It had to inspire the nation to a high-minded line of policy, to fill the sailors and soldiers with fortitude and courage, to give them abundant provision for the spiritual and sacramental help they needed; to set an example of self-sacrificing service; to visit the sick and wounded; to comfort mourners who were at home and to lead day and night the intercessions of the people. The Church rose nobly to the call. Within the first fortnight of the war, in addition to those who placed their services at the disposal of the Admiralty, it offered two thousand men to the War Office to be Chaplains—that is, to share the risk of danger and death with the rest of the Army. Further, the Church encouraged every young man under its influence to volunteer at once as a duty to God. Seventy per cent. of the new army were Churchmen. The Bishop himself was not long before he paid a visit to the Front; and spent two months 108in visiting the camps at home; but he declared that “I look upon the nine and a half months spent at the daily grind of Diocesan work as far more ‘heroic’—if such a word is to be used at all.”

During his visit to the Front in August and September of 1914, he spent every day with his own men—the Rifle Brigade of which he was the Hon. Chaplain.

From the very beginning, the Bishop in his public addresses, sounds a clarion note of conviction as to the righteousness of the cause of the Allies, and in the strength of that conviction urged upon all to take some personal part in the struggle. The addresses he published in 1915 will be a storehouse of incident and statement for some future historian to draw upon, when he seeks information as to the point of view of our nation during the struggle, and the ways and habits of the soldiers.

During all this time and the years of protracted struggle which followed, he was busy holding quiet days for the clergy at home on the one hand, and organising help for those abroad on the other. He had to face the problems in the Churches at home, whose finances were depleted, whose congregations were thinned down; and to find a sweet reasonable faith for those who were in the audiences, which would enable them to go on when there seemed nothing for them to go on for. He did it and laboured through the wearying days because of his absolute conviction that the Allies were fighting for the cause of “The Nailed Hand against the mailed fist.”

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At a great meeting at the Guildhall, the Bishop of London said, after he had listened to the addresses of the Statesmen, who were with him on the platform: “The Church is behind the nation in this war, and I am prepared to offer to place the whole organisation of the Church in London at the disposal of the Government.”

As for the impression that he produced while he was in France, we have the testimony of the Field-Marshal Commanding in the Field at the Front, who wrote:

“The Bishop of London arrived here and left during April. During the course of his visit his Lordship was at the Front every day, and I think I am right in saying that there was scarcely a unit in the Command which was not at one time or other present at his services. Personal fatigue and even danger was completely ignored by his Lordship. The Bishop held several services virtually under shell-fire, and it was with difficulty that he could be prevented from carrying on his ministrations under rifle-fire in the trenches.

“I am anxious to place on record my deep sense of the good effect produced throughout the Army by the self-sacrificing devotion on the part of the Bishop of London, to whom I feel personally very deeply indebted.”

Out yonder at the Front, as he passed through the trenches, there was one touching incident which connected him with his old days at Bethnal Green. One young man, little more than a boy, who was carried in from the trenches shot through the shoulder, and who was being carried to 110hospital, held out his arm to the Bishop with a radiant smile. The Bishop thought for a moment that he was in a delirium, but he turned out to be an East End lad, a communicant in the old Bethnal Green Church, who saw the Bishop passing, and knew him at once, and thus welcomed him.

In the lines at the Front the Bishop made a great point of regarding himself as having a first call upon all his efforts from the London Rifle Brigade, and insisted upon keeping his time free for administering Holy Communion to them. But, none the less, he placed himself at the disposal of many others, and amongst those others were the Canadians. The Bishop, owing to his previous visits to the Dominion of Canada, was well known to many of the Canadian soldiers, and he once took occasion to address the troops from the balcony of the Town Hall in the town where they were located. There were 10,000 of the Canadians, and the volume of welcoming sound which greeted him indicated their cheery recognition.

“This is a sight,” he began, “which reminds me of Montreal and Toronto!”

“How about Winnipeg?” several shouted.

The Bishop was not slow to let them know that we in Great Britain rejoiced to feel that the men of Canada and Great Britain were standing shoulder to shoulder.

They cheered.

“Yes, you may cheer that,” he replied.

He passed on to speak of the great cause of Freedom for the world for which they were fighting, and they cheered again.

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“Yes, you may cheer that too!” he cried, “while I get breath again.” And then, after he had turned to deeper thoughts, he closed by adding: “Now, we will say together the Lord’s Prayer.”

The sound of the deep-toned voices of the men as they uttered the words was like the voice of many waters. Then, in absolute silence, the Bishop gave the blessing, and as he left the balcony a Staff Officer turned to the Bishop’s Chaplain, and said:

“That is a really great man!”

That was the impression he produced upon all with whom he met. Probably it was deepened by the sight of his lifeguardsman height and princely presence; but it was chiefly occasioned by the simplicity and directness and simplicity of his speech and the winning nature of his ways.

So the years passed, and at length there came the day when the Great City of which he was Bishop met for thanksgiving in St. Paul’s Cathedral; and once more the Bishop was able to confine his attentions to the ever old problems of his diocese; with those added which now emerged in the time of unsettlement of all classes, which has ever since followed the war.

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CHAPTER VIII
PERSONALIA

It would be as well, before this short book is closed, to examine some of the ways in which the mind of the Bishop has always worked. We have seen in the foregoing pages how intensely practical was his outlook upon life. It could scarcely be otherwise after spending his first years in actual contact with the ugly facts of life, which emerged during his Headship of Oxford House and his incumbency of St. Matthew’s, Bethnal Green; or, again, as he faced the indifference and materialism of the West End. To him the fact that work of any kind told in the Kingdom of God was sufficient to prove its source to have been the Spirit of God. He was fond of telling how a lad on one of our foggy days held in his hand the end of a long piece of string, the other end of which was hidden by the murky atmosphere. “What have you there?” the lad was asked. And he answered, “I am holding my kite!” “Your kite!—You cannot see your kite!” “No,” he replied. “But I can feel it pull!”

And the Bishop said: “We cannot be wrong, we priests of God, Churchworkers, lay-readers, duchesses, servant-girls, men in the factories, clerks in the City—we cannot all be wrong when we say we have felt it pull.”

Another thing which kept alive the personal faith of the Bishop was the impression made upon him 113by the witness of those around him. According to him, Bishop Wilkinson, Bishop King and Canon Body were his great spiritual masters. He says of them:

“If you had known those three as I knew them, you would be as certain, as you are certain of the sun, that those men were living in a real world which gave them an extraordinary power. Take Bishop Wilkinson, a man who all his life had to struggle against a tendency against melancholia; yet he had his head above the mists all the time, and because he had his head above the mists he was able to convert thousands in London, and throughout the world. Take Bishop King, quite a different man in temperament, with a bright cheerfulness of disposition. He, too, moved above the mists, and the same was true of Canon Body. I learnt from them an intense belief in the Holy Spirit. That is to say, I believe that the Holy Spirit may use what is said and done. It is perfectly astounding how God can use the weakest word.”

A deep impression was made upon him by the workers whom he met. He told the story of the Vicar of All Saints’, Margaret Street, after he was lying dead:

“I think it was about two or three years ago he wrote me a letter, and he said: ‘I have more money in this living than I had in the last place where I was. I find there are so many hundreds a year which I do not want for my board and lodging. If Jesus Christ were visibly alive to-day, I should give that money to Him; it all belongs to Him; it is His money. As I cannot actually place it in Jesus Christ’s own hands, and you are His chief representative 114in this diocese, I hand it to you.’ And every penny that that faithful parish priest did not want for support himself—of course, it is the first duty of a man to pay for his lodgings and his clothes—he handed over to me every year to spend for Jesus Christ. He said: ‘Spend it as you like, but I would like the preference given to educating young men who cannot afford it for Holy Orders.’ I suppose, perhaps, £400 or £500 a year used to come regularly during these years into my hands.”

He refers to the impression made upon him by another living man, the Rev. H. R. L. Shepherd, as a further instance of a man with his head above the mists: “Let me say I persuaded Mr. Shepherd to be ordained when he was at Cambridge. I sent him to be Head of Oxford House. I sent him to this church. I believe the secret of his marvellous influence is this—that he is a friend of Jesus. It is not his eloquent sermons, it is not anything particular that he says, but you do feel that you are in correspondence and in touch with a real friend of Jesus Christ. That is why this church (St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields) has gone on so well in his absence. (Mr. Shepherd was away ill at the time.) He did not lead you to himself: he led you to Christ.”

“Who can forget the names of Benson and Gott? Archbishop Benson will always stand out to me as I saw him at the consecration of two Bishops in Bethnal Green Parish Church, characteristically arranged by him so that East London people might see what the consecration of a Bishop was like. Always thinking for others.”

It is in references like these that we catch glimpses of the way in which the Bishop’s mind works and 115the things which impressed him and gave him a radiant faith that the men with their heads above the mists of self, who were living for their Lord and His people, were the men who could say, like that boy, “I can feel the pull!” and were the men who could exercise it.

Having now seen the way in which the mind of the Bishop of London is itself influenced, it will be as well in bringing this book to a conclusion to indicate how he himself influences others.

He is a great believer in speaking to his audiences without the restrictive fetter of notes. We heard him quite recently on Good Friday speak at the Regent Theatre at the People’s Service. He stood there before the great audience perfectly at home, beating time with his hymn-book to their singing, and afterwards addressing them on David’s saying, “Give me the sword of Goliath, there is none like it!” In the plainest words, and with a perfect flow of language, he enlarged his theme, driving home his points with telling illustrations in the use of which he is a past-master. As a matter of fact, his addresses always abound with them. For instance, he will enforce personal responsibility thus:

“The situation is just like the case of two boys who are sent to school by their parents; to one is given the journey-money and the supplies, but the father hardly thinks that it is necessary to tell him that he has to share it with the other boy, and would be horrified if the other boy was to be left by himself on the platform at Willesden without any money and without any food. If he was, in all probability the elder boy would have been severely punished the 116next time he went home to his parents. At any rate, he ought to have taken it for granted that he was to share the money and the food, even if little had been said by the parent about it. The analogy holds good in life. I am sent with other lives linked with mine, and I am the elder brother, and I have the journey-money and the supplies are given to me. But not alone for myself.”

The necessity of self-control is hit off thus:

“There were two men driving into Cambridge in the last generation after a shooting-party. One of them was my own old father, who was a great shot in his day, and his friend—my father was driving—took off the top of the ramrod, and screwed it in the dark into the horse’s back. The horse started off at a wild gallop; the dogcart was overturned; the drunken man, as is often the case, got off scot-free, and my poor father was nearly killed. You have got an animal to control, and it is possible to control it, and you are the man to control it; but do not screw a ramrod into the horse’s back. What do I mean by that? Do not put into those bodies of yours in any great measure—of course, I believe that you had better not do it in any measure at all, but at any rate in anything but the smallest measure—that alcohol which is the irritant to the wild forces in you.”

He is alert to catch and capture an illustration anywhere as in the following:

“An illustration was forcibly brought home to me in a church in which I was preaching, where the organ of the church had lain in fragments for years, and at its restoration that morning was breathing forth beautiful music, restored to its original shape 117and form. The question we have a right to answer to those who tell us that when the grey matter of the brain ceases to act the person dies is this: ‘When that organ was lying in fragments, was the organist dead?’ He was not. He could not use the instrument at the time, but when the organ was beautifully restored, it was the same man who drew out the music from the organ. If the organ, the instrument, is in ruins, the organist lives on!”

Nothing is too commonplace for him to use and claim as grist for his mill. He is evidently not concerned to secure acknowledgment for anything but his message. He is great enough to be simple and wise enough to be clear.

In these foregoing pages we have tried to trace the growth of that individuality which has given the Bishop of London his commanding force. “The plastic circumstances”—to use a favourite term of his own—“the plastic circumstances” in which that growth has occurred have been many and varied. Country rectory, public school and university life, country curacy and life of the cathedral-close, were certainly no unusual avenue for a man to tread whose career was to be that of an ecclesiastic. But the element of the unusual appears at Oxford House and in Bethnal Green, if we watch the years there in the light of what we know now of his future. But it was there that the direct ways and simple methods of Winnington Ingram were acquired. All the power of popular appeal that exhibited itself afterwards at St. Paul’s Cathedral, when he was Canon, and later as Bishop of Stepney, as he swayed crowds in the City and East and West to sympathy with his aims, was gained in dealing 118with men and women, who, if they were to be moved at all, needed one amongst them who would “stir them up,” as St. Peter puts it. It is this mission of “stirring men up” that the Bishop appears to regard as peculiarly his own—a fact which has emerged in many parochial missions he has conducted, and particularly in his great London mission a few years since. He has all his life through apparently been obsessed with the idea that the one thing evil wants is “to be let alone.” He determined that his whole life should embody his refusal to do this. He was called for “interference,” and “interfere” he has. Only the other day, in our hearing, a well-known, highly placed clergyman said of him in tones half amused, half deprecatory: “If only he would let things alone!”

It was the finest compliment ever paid him!

Could there be a finer judgment of any man than to describe him as “one who refused to let things alone, who kicked over stones beneath which noisome things wriggled and crawled, and ruthlessly let in the light on dark corners”? Could there be a finer judgment of any man?

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Twenty-five years as Bishop of London

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AS
BISHOP OF LONDON

INTRODUCTION

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE—SCENES OF BOYHOOD—FAMILY HISTORY—CLERICAL ANCESTRY

CHAPTER II
ST. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY

CHAPTER III
OXFORD HOUSE

CHAPTER IV
BETHNAL GREEN

CHAPTER V
STEPNEY

CHAPTER VI
BISHOPRIC OF LONDON

CHAPTER VII
THE BISHOP DURING WARTIME

CHAPTER VIII
PERSONALIA

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AS BISHOP OF LONDON

INTRODUCTION

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

CHAPTER I BIRTH AND PARENTAGE—SCENES OF BOYHOOD—FAMILY HISTORY—CLERICAL ANCESTRY

CHAPTER II ST. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY

CHAPTER III OXFORD HOUSE

CHAPTER IV BETHNAL GREEN

CHAPTER V STEPNEY

CHAPTER VI BISHOPRIC OF LONDON

CHAPTER VII THE BISHOP DURING WARTIME

CHAPTER VIII PERSONALIA

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AS
BISHOP OF LONDON

CHAPTER I
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE—SCENES OF BOYHOOD—FAMILY HISTORY—CLERICAL ANCESTRY

CHAPTER II
ST. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY

CHAPTER III
OXFORD HOUSE

CHAPTER IV
BETHNAL GREEN

CHAPTER V
STEPNEY

CHAPTER VI
BISHOPRIC OF LONDON

CHAPTER VII
THE BISHOP DURING WARTIME

CHAPTER VIII
PERSONALIA