Harold Begbie

“ Mysticism, he says, is the pursuit of ultimate, objective truth, or it is nothing.
Christianity demands the closest attention of the mind. It cannot be seen at a glance, understood in a moment, adopted by a gesture. It is a deep and profound philosophy of life. It proposes a transvaluation of values. It insists that the spiritual life is the only true life. It sets the invisible above the visible, and the eternal above the temporal. It tears up by the roots the lust of accumulation. It brings man face to face with a choice that is his destiny. ”

“ What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his interpreters can exclaim:
Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. ”

“ Every religion in history, from the worship of Osiris, Serapis, and Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the loyalty of its disciples. What logic, what magic of holiness, could destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation of the devil?
The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is "to resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is told, just as he is expected to do what he is told, not what comes natural to him." ”

“ In this able and courageous Doctor of Science, who came to theology from mathematics, a great virtue and a small fault combine to check his intellectual usefulness. His heart is as full of modesty as his mind of tentatives.
He is possessed by a gracious nature, and could no more think of raising his voice to shout down a Boanerges than he could dream of lifting an elbow to push his way through a press of people bound for the limelight. It is only a deep moral earnestness which brings him into public life at all, and he endeavours to treat that public life not as it is but as it ought to be. ”

“ I regard him as a man whose full worth will never be known till he is overtaken by a crisis. I can see him moving smoothly and usefully in times of comparative peace to the Primacy, holding that high office with dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade. But I cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of distrust one may feel in his strength—not of character—but of personality. ”

“ No one who encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of the English nation. ”

“ Why is the Church so powerless? Why is it she has so fatally lost the attention of mankind?
Is it not because she has nothing to give, nothing to teach? Morals are older than Christianity, and sacramental religions as well. Men feel that they cannot understand the immense paraphernalia of religion and its unnatural atmosphere of high mystery; it is so tremendous a fuss about so very small a result. If God is in the Church, why doesn't He do more for it, and so more for the world? The revenues of religion are still enormous. ”

“ Perhaps we shall best understand the position of Canon Barnes if we see him, neither on this side nor on that of the warring controversy, but rather among the entire host of Christianity, warning all schools of thought, all parties, all sects, that they must prepare themselves for the final strife which is yet to come, that great strife, foreseen by Newman, when the two contrary principles of human life, the Good and the Evil, shall rush upon each other contending for the soul of the world. Christianity must become united and strong at its centre, if it is to withstand this onslaught. ”

“ His intellect, I mean, is in charge of him from first to last. He feels deeply, not sharply. He loves truly, not passionately. With his thesis clear in his mind, he draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then, with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being, moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing. Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily, take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is perfectly sure of striking home. ”

“ I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view of philosophy. I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets to the soul of man—an immanent teleology, an invisible direction towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent movement towards greater understanding. And I have seen the demonstration by science that this visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and intangible—a phantasm of the senses. ”

“ This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of individual man to live in love and charity with his neighbour, justifies the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief mercy the teaching of a science of life—a way of existence which would bring the feet of unhappy man out of chaos, and finally make it possible for the human race to live intelligently, and so, beautifully. ”

“ To bring the Gospel into the common life, to carry the message and sympathies of Jesus into the factory, the street, the house, is an urgent necessity in our age.
He sees Christianity, not as an interesting school of philosophy, not as a charming subject for brilliant and amicable discussions, but as a force essential to the salvation of mankind; a force, however, which must first be disentangled from the accretions of ancient error before it can work its transforming miracles both in the heart of men and in the institutions of a materialistic civilisation. ”

“ It is an entirely good thing that there should be a minister of religion in London who attracts people of this order, particularly a minister whose moral notions are so eminently sane and so steadily uncompromising. London is stronger and less disreputable for Dr. Orchard's presence in its midst—no doubt a very vulgar, degrading, and trivial midst, but all the same a great congestion of little people, one where the solemn note of the old morality sounds all too seldom across the tinkle of bells in the caps of so many fools. ”

“ He has always struck me, in spite of his formidable intellect and a somewhat pedagogic front and the occasional accent of an ancient and scholarly ecclesiasticism, as one of the happiest and most boy-like of men—a man whose centre must be cloudlessly serene, and who finds life definitely good. His laughter indeed, is a noble witness to the truth of a rational and moral existence. His strength is as the strength of ten, not only because his heart is pure, but because he has formulated an intelligent thesis of existence. ”

“ I believe it is more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the Christian tradition. I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the documents of the Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present hour from the torch of science. ”

“ Like Lord Robert, too, he has a most pleasant voice, and a slow deliberate way of speaking, and a warm kindly smile which fades at the first movement of serious thought, leaving the whole pale face, even the dark eyes under their heavy brows, almost deathlike in immobility. One seems to see in such moments the spirit withdraw from the surface of things to take up its duty at the citadel of the intellect. ”

“ Selbie prepares his students, not only to meet the intellectual difficulties of the future, but to stand fast in the ancient faith of their forefathers that the moral law is a fact of the universe. He helps them to be fighters as well as teachers. They are to fight the complacency of men, the false optimism of the world, the delusive tolerance of materialism. There is no need for them to preach hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that just and inevitable word, Retribution. ”

“ They belong not to the fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.
His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging, the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it. It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution. ”

“ The Church of Rome has caught in him neither a Newman nor a Manning. It has caught either a Sydney Smith or a Tartar.
He has too much humour to be a bigot, and too much humanity to be satisfied with a cell. For the moment he seems to embrace Original Sin, to fling his arms round the idea of an offended God, and to shout at the top of his voice that there is no violence to his reason and to his common sense which he cannot contemplate and most gladly accomplish, in the name of Tradition ”

“ For him, God is the Universal Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution. And Jesus, so far as human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of God, the Revealer both of God's Personality and man's immortality, the great Teacher of liberty. ”

“ They begin at a point which the previous generation did not believe to exist—a visible world reduced by positive science to the invisible world of philosophy. They confront not a quantitative universe, but a qualitative. They almost begin at the very spirit of man; they cannot advance far before they find themselves groping in the unseen, and using, not the senses given to us by action, but the eyes and ears of the understanding by which alone the soul of man can apprehend reality. ”

“ Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and unworthy forces within his own breast—envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness—which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. ”

“ The world has got to understand religion before it can live religiously.
But all education stands in sore need of the trained teacher. Our teachers are not good enough. They may be very able men and women, but few of them are very able teachers. The first need in a teacher is to inspire in his students a love of knowledge, a hunger and thirst after wisdom. But, look at our schools, look at our great cities, look at the pleasures and recreations which satisfy the vast masses of the population! As a nation, we have no enthusiasm for education. ”