Charles H. Dant

“ When once you have passed beyond those limits, you have arrived at the confines of heresy. The private interpretation of Scripture by a provincial Synod seems to me to differ only in degree from the claim of the individual to interpret for himself. Both processes are Protestant to the core. What differentiates a sect from the Catholic Church is that the sect has its own system, its own doctrine, its own discipline, its own absolute independence. If, then, the Church of England has its own peculiar doctrine and discipline, it is a sect it is not the Catholic Church in England. ”

“ Twenty years ago, the Society had just emerged from a period of grave difficulty and anxiety. Funds had failed, and missionaries eager for the work had been kept back two years running, but friends had responded to the needs of the crisis, and by the middle of 1881 the Society was once more borne forward upon a rising tide of interest, sympathy and prayer. God was raising up able and devoted men for His service abroad, and was inclining the hearts of His people to provide the means for sending them out. Never once has there been pause or check in the continuous progress. ”

“ To our soldiers—the necessary defenders of our country—opportunities equally worthy present themselves: in the presence of the sick and of the dying as well as of those in health, on battlefields and stations in foreign lands, they may, at the same time as they uphold the banner of their country, support the emblem of Christianity; and they will, let us hope, render the awful services demanded of them in times of conflict with that feeling of intense peace which is born alone of spiritual preparation for, and an unshaken faith in, the life to come. ”

“ We despair of influencing them for good.” But we who know soldiers well, with all their temptations and their sins, are not hopeless, are not filled with despair. I have become the more hopeful the more I have known of a soldier's life and a soldier's possibilities. There is solid ground for a living hope beneath all the depressing facts which present themselves to us. My opinion to-day is precisely the same, only strengthened, perhaps, through longer experience with our soldiers.”
“It would, I think, be interesting to learn something of the actual work of the Church in the Army?” ”

“ Throughout life the Vicar of Onslow Square has given proof of marked individuality, coupled with great strength of will, which have enabled him to override difficulties against which many a man with as good a heart, but Jess happily endowed in other respects, has struggled in vain. Over and over again his health has given way under the strain of his self-imposed tasks and his zeal to accomplish much in the service of his Master. But it is characteristic of the man, if he should thus stumble, to rise again with an unconquerable desire to achieve his purpose. ”

“ Patience and a good, genial spirit may be said to have stood Dr Maclure in excellent stead. Than he, probably no man was wider awake to the fact that originality can only be maintained at the cost of much difference of opinion, much criticism, verbal and literary, possibly even much abuse from the mouths of extremists. If so, conjecture for once was well-founded. To-day it is nothing new to readers of both London and provincial journals to find their Church news prefaced with some such line as “The Dean of Manchester and His Critics.” ”

“ It is a great question, I know and I say it after all my experience in the West End for a clergyman to decide whether he will give himself to social life for so many nights in every week, and thus try and influence people at dinners and social parties, or whether he will give himself entirely to preaching and meetings, which may be arranged every night if he has any gift of speech at all, and I dare not give a decision. ”

“ To begin with, the voting system is not adopted, nor has personal or other influence the slightest weight in the deliberations of the case committee. The most destitute, and therefore the most deserving case, has the best chance of being accepted; in fact, the great majority of the children under the Society's care have been so friendless that they have been accepted as entirely free cases. Wherever friends are interested who can afford to help the Society, it is only natural that the committee should look to them to make some monetary recognition of the Society's benefits. ”

“ The work is peculiar; it has its special dangers, its special requisites; it is one long continued mission, for men ever coming and going, so that we have continually to begin afresh; it is a succession of new starts, needing no ordinary powers of body and mind. But the true soldier prefers the danger of the sharpest battle to the inglorious inactivity of looking on. ”

“ What is the response many people make to Christ's command to feed the soldiers with Divine Food? “Send them away. We have nothing to do with soldiers. We do not like them or their work. Send them away. We do not feel called to provide for them. They are a self-willed multitude; their calling must make them hard and callous. Nothing good can be done with soldiers. Amuse them if you will. Keep them in a good temper, for an angry Army might be inconvenient; but send them away from the Church of God. Let the State do its best to make them skilled life-destroyers by keeping them from drink and lust ”

“ The leading laity also in Manchester have not been slow in showing their profound interest in everything that concerns the social and educational welfare of the people. Where so many churches and clergy are to be found it is needless to say that there are wide differences of opinion in religious matters. From time to time these have, doubtless, become acute; but under the wise administration of three of the ablest Bishops who ever sat upon the bench—I mean Dr Lee, Dr Fraser, and Dr Moorhouse—the course of the Church's history has been continuously progressive. ”

“ Many temperance reformers are most intemperate men, and the consequence is that they throw back their cause a long way. The extremely rabid teetotalers are so intolerant that they think that every man who takes alcoholic drinks should be tabooed. The consequence is they put people's backs up. Although legislation may do much to promote temperance, I think it is by moral influence that the great work will be chiefly done, if it is ever done—such as providing healthy recreation for the young, and putting good opportunities in their way as much as possible. ”

“ This is what I said in proof of the Church's responsibility towards men in the Army:—Soldiers are not merely men, but they are young men. Burning passions and craving appetites demand satisfaction. It is not the soldier, but the young man, that succumbs to temptation and is wrecked. Soldiers are just at that age when all workers for God find it so difficult to exert or to retain any influence for good over men. ”

“ The Cardinal is right : we are far better off as we are. Surely any one who will contrast the state of England from 1560 to 1688 (130 years of civil war, discord, plots, intrigues and unrest) with the last 210 years under the Declaration and the Coronation Oath and the Protestant Constitution, must frankly acknowledge that we have indeed abundant cause for thankfulness, and determine that we prefer the latter to the former. In taking this position we are acting for the interest of all creeds, not for the Protestant only, but for the Roman Catholics also. ”

“ In New South Wales it is laid down in the Public School Act that ‘secular education’—by which, I suppose, is meant education for the work of this life—is impossible without ‘general religious instruction,’ and, accordingly, such general instruction ought to be given, and in some considerable degree is given, by the teachers of the schools. ”

“ No; although we don't attack the Roman Catholics, the Roman Catholics attack us. They gave us some trouble at one time in Uganda. But I have not heard any serious complaints lately. The area of their work is limited, and I doubt if their influence is extending. It has certainly no such hold on the body of the people as a Christianity which takes the Bible for its supreme authority can gain. The Roman Catholics, you know, look upon us as being as much outside the Church as the heathen. ”

“ Our collections are only taken at the doors. It seems to me that we turn people away from the Church more and more by the thought that they must give every time they come ; they regard it, in some cases, as a question of money, and not of religion, and the business men who deal with money six days a week do very much dislike having Sunday turned into a fresh money-dealing or money-begging day. I think, therefore, collections should only be taken from pew to pew on exceptional occasions ; those who wish can and do give at the church door and through other channels. ”

“ We believe that the fears entertained by the authorities are greatly exaggerated, that our policy is not one which the Arab himself either understands or respects, and that, as inconsistent with the will of our Lord, Who will have all men to be saved by coming to the knowledge of the truth, it is not a policy which can have the Divine favour. It is certainly not the policy adopted by the great statesmen and soldiers who added the Punjab to the British Empire. They had as fierce and fanatical Moslems to deal with as any in Egypt. ”

“ I think it may be said that the faithful earnest preaching of entire consecration to God and the demand for the whole life, leads to the abandonment of attend ance of all the half-hearted and the worldly- minded. My own experience has been that parents with large families of young people have in too many cases been led to give up their own habits of devotion and service for God in order to follow the bent and fashions of the younger folk, among whom there is a want of discipline. ”

“ These young soldiers, thus utterly unprepared, are gathered into large crowds in garrison towns. Solicitations to vice abound on every side. No man can escape from them. Freed from the observation of his home and friends, the man has but little sense of his responsibility, and there is freedom and license in the air around him. The environment of the soldier is against him; it is inimical to growth in purity and self-control. ”

“ As in all such cases, in the press at the time many names were put forward as fitting successors to a man of the greatest learning and highest attainments. For all that, by the sober-minded it was generally felt that Mr Gladstone might be relied on to appoint somebody who understood the Church in Wales, who knew its language, and who would be prepared to deal in a conciliatory rather than in a provocative spirit with the strong Nonconformist element, white firmly maintaining the just rights of his own Church. ”

“ A large proportion of the population is what is called bi-lingual—the people speak two languages—and the result is that in those parishes you require double machinery, as it were. Two churches and two clergy. I might mention that in colliery accidents like that which has just occurred we have had most noble instances of the self-sacrifice of the clergy in attending to the victims, and ministering to their comforts and the comfort of their families. There are men and men, but, take them as a body, our clergy are men most devoted to their work. ”

“ Of course, in so small a body, each Canon has a good deal of personal influence and has his own idiosyncrasies. My principal object has been two-fold: to preach the Gospel of Christ as applied to human life very directly and simply in the afternoon, and to work steadily for the national character of the Cathedral. Whenever any great man in Church or State has died, I have always had a special paragraph in my afternoon sermon. My desire has been that St Paul's should be known to sympathise with the joys and sorrows of the nation ”

“ So you see military men as well as doctors differ! The result to-day is that our medical missionaries have been able to reach some of the most bitterly hostile of our former enemies, and to repay them with the best revenge which a Christian knows—the kindness and love of a Christian heart. ”

“ Each chaplain has the freest scope for work. The methods of men differ in many walks in life; so with the Army chaplains. Each is encouraged to work in his own way, applying his own particular gifts as he thinks best. You will have gathered already that the door of the Army is open to ministers of all denominations, and that these ministers receive their appointments when the soldiers professing to belong to a denomination have reached a given number. No special favour has been extended to the Established Church; she enjoys no advantage except that which her numerical strength affords. ”

“ To-day the Church is a living and a welcome influence among the soldiers of the King and country—one of the greatest aids in the maintenance of military discipline, and assuredly the most ennobling force in the building up of the sturdy characters of the men. ”

“ My fear is that the supply of clergy cannot honestly be said to be keeping pace with the vast increase of population—at all events, in South Lancashire. There are, of course, a certain number of ordinary lay-readers connected with parishes in Manchester; but there is also a body of candidates for the ministry who undertake to work under parish priests and to attend lectures at the Scholæ Episcopi, established by the present Bishop for the purpose of preparing for Holy Orders those who have not been to the University, but who are under regular tuition by the tutors. ”

“ Whatever the ulterior advantage derived, then, the immediate results of war certainly do not make for peace, and, sad to behold, its disturbing influences extend even to within the pale of the Church that most valuable of all pacific agencies.
During the last century South Africa has be come a well-known theatre of organised warfare. Tribal risings, often due to incomprehensible causes, have counted for much, and frequently Great Britain has had to interpose to suppress with a firm hand the insurrection movements of uncivilised peoples. ”

“ The parade services I regard as the most fruitful agencies for efforts of good. These services, as you may know, are compulsory. Every soldier not on duty is bound to attend public worship on Sunday mornings. The Church of England has no special vantage ground, for there is the greatest possible liberty of conscience among the men. Naturally, as nearly seventy per cent. of the soldiers belong to her communion, our services are the largest and most imposing. ”

“ It is difficult to say exactly how the Church is growing. Since the war began the work has been unsettled in certain parts of the Diocese, and we have been unable to get into Swaziland. Every effort is being made to propagate scriptural knowledge. We have the Bible and the Prayer-book in the Zulu language, which would also be understood by the Swazis and by the Tonga men, though not by the Tonga women. The languages of the Zulus and Swazis are much the same in fact, there is not so much difference as between English as spoken in London and in Yorkshire. ”

“ In other matters Dean Maclure has taken an equally firm stand. Like the late Bishop of Durham (Dr Westcott) , he has exerted himself to deal with the labour problem, and in the midst of industries like those wrapped up with the welfare of a place like Manchester, his exertions are not lightly esteemed. In fact, wherever he has laboured in Lancashire he has employed his influence to establish and maintain a steady, systematic progress towards the realisation of better ideals in connection with labour. ”

“ His health, however, was not then equal to the strain, and the offer of work with the troops at Aldershot, with the probability of spells abroad, was accepted as a timely blessing. In the Army Mr Edghill may be said to have found his heart's desire—scope for plenty of work in healthy open surroundings, constant opportunities for intercourse with fellow-men discharging responsible duties in life, and a crying need for the reforming spirit which he—perhaps unconsciously—possessed. One of his first endeavours was by instrumental aid to infuse heartiness into the singing at the camp services. ”

“ Most of the individual clergy, particularly in London, are worthy of all respect and esteem; but, as a whole, the Church in the present day is wanting in cohesion and unity, and anyone who, in one direction or the other, disturbs the balance, incurs very grave responsibility. ”