1877 THE BISHOP'S SERMONS 44I 2. "There is one Service here every Sunday. Before Mr came the Communion had not been administered for several years." And I now have to reply to the clergy of a whole Rural Deanery, who all say, "The clergyman ought not to visit his schools too much. He must not become a Master instead of a Pastor. The less he is seen by the younger members of his flock in that capacity the better." Isn't it queer? If the Church of England dies out it will begin with this extremity. If she grows all alive again, I am sure this extremity must first be well rubbed with snow. The exhibition of one great central Church with endless plain hard work going on is essential, so England must be well stirred up somehow by our friends to keep our circulation up. Add this suffrage to your daily prayers, "Da Truronensibus Sanctam et Pretiosam Basilicam-Da Capitulo Fidem et Spiritum'." With all love, Your ever affectionate, A Cornish clergyman writes: E. W. TRURON. The Bishop took the greatest pains with sermons and addresses for small country parishes as much as for larger and more important ones. Readers of Singleheart will recollect the sternness with which, in an Ordination sermon at Lincoln, printed in that volume, he satirized "simpering simpleness," and "the affectation of unpreparedness," and "What is called 'just talking to them a little in their own way.'" Such faults he rigidly avoided. I recollect that on the occasion of a visit to Lis Escop, I noticed one morning in the study an open volume of St Gregory of Tours. The Bishop, several days before the opening of the Church of St Pinnock, a name too obscure even for the Dictionary of Christian Biography, was consulting original authorities in order to give the simple villagers some interest in their Patron Saint. Without at first naming him, he described St Pinnock, and how St Gregory ordained him a presbyter, and then as 1 The Bishop himself, in his private prayers, used a Latin Litany of intercession. One suffrage of it, for the extension of the Mission work was "Da fratribus fratres." 2 Hist. Francorum, V. 22. tonished the delighted people by the emphatic sentence, "Now that poor man was St Pinnock, whose name is on this book (the pulpit Bible)." Soon afterwards at Perran-ar-worthal (Perran upon the tidal stream) he told, in perfect simplicity, but with all the authority of research, how St Piran "sometimes touched at Perranuthnoe, sometimes landed at Perranzabuloe, sometimes went to St Keverne"; how he loved animals, and animals loved him; how his hearers must, in imitation of their Patron, show the devotion and self-sacrifice which St Piran showed. Sometimes he would himself write an account for the Press of a restored Church, or little Mission Chapel, brightening the report with some picturesque touch, and giving it an interest all its own. The climate of Cornwall did not suit the Bishop; its dreamy languor was ill adapted to his brisk and fiery temperament. The very details of its steamy humidity fretted him strangely. A climate where I have known the scent of Magnolia buds flooding the rooms of the house through the open windows on Christmas Day, was fatal to the preservation of books and papers. My father's dearly beloved volumes lost their gilding and clear outlines; the pages grew crumpled and mildewed. Engravings became foxy, written papers blurred. He himself suffered at times from a blackness of depression which was only too painfully evident. Small things weighed on his mind with fierce acuteness. I well recollect walking one day with him, when after a long silence broken only by fitful questions, he said with dark gravity that the behaviour of one of his clergy was killing him-that he would have to leave Cornwall. The Bishop was soon to have a fiercer trial of his faith and patience, and to be made more perfect in suffering. In the second year of his episcopate, my eldest brother, Martin White Benson, a scholar of Winchester, a boy of the most singular gifts of thought and expression, died of meningitis at school. 1878 DEATH OF HIS ELDEST SON 443 In Feb. 1878 my brother had an alarming attack of illness when at tea with one of the masters. He had always suffered from a stammer, but he found himself suddenly deprived of the power of speech, and endeavoured, while a doctor was being sent for, to write the word “paralysis" on a piece of paper. The attack yielded to remedies, but a few days afterwards he became unconscious and died in the Sanatorium. Some time after the Bishop showed Canon Mason a card on which Martin had been copying out in mediaeval characters the hymn "O quanta qualia,” and had laid down his pen at "quos decantabimus." He was buried in the cloister, at Winchester. My father put up a brass in his memory on the Cloister wall, near the grave. Here he is depicted in his scholar's gown, with the little silver cross, given him by his mother at his Confirmation, which he always wore upon his watch-chain, his hands clasped in prayer. After name and dates follow four lines written by my father: O Amor, O Pastor, qui quem Tibi legeris Agnum Nos, qui tam dulces per Te reminiscimur annos, I did not of course realise at the time how brilliant my brother's powers were; he was but seventeen, and had only just failed to secure the highest classical honour, the Goddard Scholarship, at Winchester. But I have been amazed in looking at his papers since, at the extraordinary profundity of his acquirements, the perfection of his taste and the maturity of his thoughts. My father's and mother's deepest hopes and affections were bound up in him. I was then at Eton and was summoned in haste. I shall never forget the look on my father's white drawn face as the train drew up at Winchester, while he stood on the platform awaiting me. To the end of his life my father visited Winchester nearly every year on the anniversary of his death with my mother and sister, to pray beside the grave. My father's grief was perfectly tragic. He could not at first bear allusion to my brother, and held, as his diary bears witness, the most deep and searching selfcommunings as to why such a burden was laid upon him. His Diary says: February, 1878. All through his illness I prayed incessantly that God would "give him perfect soundness in the presence of us all"-I fear presumptuously. For I believed in my faint heart that it would be what I meant by oλokληpía'." I shared to the full the feeling which several sensible letters sent us while we were watching him expressed-that it was "inconceivable" that he should not be restored to us. "Inconceivable"-so much past interest, skill, beauty, power, love were wrapped up in his growth and constant progress-so much hope for the future; such admirable preparation for good work, with such persuasive gentleness; such thoughtfulness and such reverence together. He seemed so sure to be "A wise Scribe furnished unto the Kingdom of Heaven on earth with things alike new and old." There were such memories about him and he wove them so: such hopes and he knew them not. It has come as such an interruption not to ambitions, not to pride, I trust, not to hopes of comfort only-But his path seemed ever to run on so completely in God's own way we thought all God's plan for him was running on so sweetly towards some noble God's work. It has changed all my views of God's work as it is to be done both in this world and the next, to be compelled to believe that God's plan for him really has run on sweetly, and rightly for him and for all-and yet he is dead. "One's views of life change very quickly," he said to me the last hour in which he spoke to me-my sweet boy, thou hast changed mine. 1 "Entire soundness," Acts iii. 16. He is gone you know. His sweetness you know. But his love to Jesus we did not know until he was near going. And now everything which shows itself hour after hour, tells us how little we had followed him, though his pureness and his penetrating judgment were wonderfully opened to me this holiday. I can say no more. We are learning not to withhold him from God in our hearts, and my dear wife is the mothers' example. To Canon Crowfoot. Feb. 1878. You I know will not think ill of me for not answering sooner your blessed letter. The fact is I must rise to it before I can. As yet, though I feel the help of his present relation to me, yet I am distinctly conscious that the help of his life near us, his thoughts, and his sweet and perfect example, were, in spite of fears of what the tone of University opinion might work, a more living, stronger help to me than now. I hope that I shall be able to win more faith. But it takes all my confidence in his present to keep me from murmuring. Orabis. To Canon Westcott. KENWYN. 15 Feb. 1878. MY DEAR WESTCOTT, If anything ought to strengthen one it is a life like Martin's we can only pray that it may. His energy and brightness were fights against we knew not what. And now a secret holiness comes out, in his books and papers, of which we knew little more. He and we yearned that he might have talked with us the last week. But God sealed his lips. Why? As surely as I see this paper he saw Jesus Christ-through, if not with, his bodily eyes and while he was quite himself. To have seen Him ourselves could not strengthen our sureness that He lives, more than the sight of Martin seeing Him. My dear wife is wonderfully "kept by the Power of God." E. W. TRURON. |