DEAN STANLEY.
THE death of the Dean of Westminster is not so much the loss of an ecclesiastic, as the disappearance of a whole region of life, which none but himself is likely ever to supply, —the region, we mean, in which all that is really beauti- ful and noble in the world received a generous and delicate spiritual appreciation, without the smallest regard to any of those strait ecclesiastical or dogmatic conditions usually re- quired for spiritual appreciation. In Dean Stanley the human sympathies were very bright and deep, while the grasp of abstract truth was comparatively feeble. Long ago, in one of his earliest, and, as we think, one of his happiest, works, the
Sermons on the Apostolic Age," Dean Stanley, then Canon of Canterbury, wrote as follows concerning a kind of character and influence which divines are usually the very last to do justice to :—" How often are we obliged to acknowledge the great use- fulness of books which are yet without the tone and feel- ing which we generally expect from religious men. How often have we heard of persons who, having been by circumstances separated from the religions world, with hardly even a religious expression on their lips, have yet been so earnestly employed in works of honesty, or justice, or benevolence, that we cannot but think of them as having been engaged in the work of God." If one could lay down in one single sentence Dr. Stanley's one special function as an English divine, it would be contained in the assertion that he, with all his pure and delicate religious feeling, took care that the Church should never ignore, or forget to con- secrate by her spiritual reverence, the non-ecclesiastical aspects of good men's lives. No man had deeper religious feeling than Dr. Stanley, in spite of that almost singular indifference to specific symbols of faith which occasionally persuaded the world into the illusion that his own faith was rather nominal than real; and no man with so deep a religious feeling was so quick in seizing on those sterling qualities which had least of a religious air, and throwing upon them the illumination of his own religions spirit. Even when dealing with ecclesiastical subjects, Dean Stanley was sure to single out for special commemoration what was most remote from the theological associations with which it was bound up, and to let what Mr. Disraeli once happily termed his "picturesque sensibility" play specially on the least apparently religions aspects of the religious character. Notice how, even in the portrait of his father, he insists on that father's keen sympathy with what had the least of an
ecclesiastical air in it ; how he delights in the Bishop's sympathy with the life of the Navy ; how he insists on his father's delicate eye as a naturalist; how he exults in his father's indifference to clerical opinion, in his having subscribed to the publication of a worthy Unitarian's volume of sermons, and advocated a relaxation of clerical subscription in the House of Lords. It is the same in the Dean's sketch of his mother. Her thoughts, he says, "will not be deemed less instructive because, like her husband's activity, her own spiritual insight belonged to that larger sphere of religion which is above and beyond the passing controversies of the day." And notice, too, how carefully he sustains by her diary this criticism on his mother's character. One of the earliest extracts from her diary registers the following observation :—" I am tormented by a sort of involuntary sympathy with the opinions of the people I am with, so that their opinion, though it does not alter mine, positively makes it unsatisfactory to me." The Dean himself inherited this temperament from his mother as well as her swift glance into what was beautiful. He always wrote as if the opinions of the world at large, however little they altered his own, rendered his own unsatisfactory to him by the very fact of their deviation from his own. And what was true of opinions, was quite as true,—of course, within the limits of a very refined Christian feeling,—of modes of thought and life. The very fact that the great mass of men did not enter into the clerical attitude of mind, rendered that attitude of mind so un- satisfactory to him, that he can hardly be said to have known what, in any predominant sense, it was at all. His aims as a clergyman were directed chiefly to throwing an additional light and significance on the thoughts of men who are not clergymen, or, when clergymen, on that part of their lives which go beyond the professional sphere. Nonconformity, for instance, had a special attraction for him, just because it was Nonconformity, though he himself was no Nonconformist. Statesmen and men and women of literature attracted his religious sympathies more than divines. Poor men and children fascinated him more than his own brethren. In Convocation he always I spoke as representing the piety of the non-clerical world, and often astounded his audience by so speaking as much as his father had astounded the House of Lords by pleading the necessity for a relaxation of the dogmatic subscription required from the Clergy. Dean Stanley was one of the small number,—perhaps it is not desirable that that number should be very large,—who rather live their own lives in order that they may appreciate more truly the life of the age, than of those who enter into the life of the age in order that they may the more truly live their own. Perhaps the only kind of life with which the Dean had no great capacity of sympathy, certainly into which he had no greater insight than his keen historical sense gave him, was that of the theologian and the priest, as such. And this was just his chief value for the English Church,— that without any personal leaning to theology or the functions of the priest, he regarded theologians and priests, though looking at them from the position of a colleague, much as any accomplished lay historian, of equally strong religious feeling and "picturesque sensibility," would have regarded them. And yet, perfectly adapted as such a position might seem for making enemies of his own Order, he never made a personal enemy. In this, too, imitating the example of his father, he gained a special friend in him who was most offended by his appointment to the Deanery of Westminster, for he discerned fully the depth of human piety in the present Bishop of Lincoln through the semi-opaque medium of that excellent man's rather stiff and technical churchmanship. Dean Stanley, though no theologian, and heartily opposed to all strictly sacer- dotal theories of the Church, was so thoroughly Christian in the whole temper of his life and aims, that he never could fail to recognise,—sometimes even with genetous exaggeration,— what was good in a personal opponent, and to recognise it all the more vividly and keenly, on the very ground of his being an opponent. And so it happened that, though in a certain sense the whole sacerdotal caste, at least all those who insisted tenaciously on their sacerdotal character, were his antagonists, there was not one among them to whom he was not ready and eager to render, not merely the most hearty justice, but the most generous and fascinating kindness. What Mr. Arnold translates the "sweet reasonableness" of Christ was, perhaps, more perfectly embodied in the Dean of Westminster than in any other conspicuous man of our age.
We have said that Dean Stanley was no theologian, and, indeed, had no real hold at all of the significance of abstract thought—no grasp of what we may call the general anatomy of mental and moral creeds—though he could often appreciate finely the fruits which such creeds bore in actual life, without being aware that it was those systems which had borne them. Indeed, his true liberality of nature, his positive inability to ignore what was good in one whose general beliefs he either could not share, or positively condemned, was in some measure due to this comparative insignificance of all merely intellectual discussions in his mind. He could not, if he would, have merged the man in the thinker; he could not, if he would, have judged the tree of be- lief by anything but its fruits, and its fruits in the largest sense of the term. And amongst these fruits, he could not, for the life of him, help reckoning almost everything that added to the richness and variety of life,—so that when he came to estimate the value of institutions, he found himself according the most liberal sympathy to every institution which had ennobled the civilisation of any epoch, which had sheltered men of genius and power, which had given a more historic colour to the past, or which had transmitted to the present day germs of great vitality and promise. He had the keenest possible eye for historic effect, which was quite as much at the root of his great comprehensiveness, as his large sympathies with individual goodness And greatness. But what strikes one as a little strange in a man of such a temperament as this, is his gallantry as a champion. This, no doubt, was due in great measure to the influence impressed upon him by Dr. Arnold, who tried to make, and more or less made, Christian soldiers of all his favourite pupils. Dean Stanley had not much, we think, naturally of the instinct of battle in him. Few men of such large, vital sympathies as his, and such small power of caring for abstract principles, are natural warriors. But Dr. Arnold, who had far less in him than his pupil of the impulse to take history as he found it, and far more of the character of a champion of abstract prin- ciples, made more or less of a combatant of all those who received his influence in full,—and in Dr. Stanley that influence had the result of making him a most gallant cham- pion for every form of liberty in the Church, excepting only liberty to ritualise, which somehow the Dean never could get himself to advocate, though he took no active part, we believe, in the opposition to it. The consequence was, that as an ecclesiastical champion, he was almost always at the head of a mere forlorn-hope, a position that rather inspirited than depressed him. He was never rendered even uneasy by the hostility of the caste against whom he fought, unless by chance it happened that he was not distinctly fighting for comprehension, but for something which might by possibility be turned into a contracting influ- ence; otherwise, he regarded the clerical hosts against him as so many evidences of the excellence of his cause, and fought on with all the more cheery indifference. Seldom, indeed, has such a gallant knight-errant in ecclesiastical matters been so utterly without a dogmatic inspiration as Dean Stanley. There have been hundreds who, like Archdeacon Denison, would fight to the death for a dogma, to one who, like the late Dean of West- minster, would fight to the death in order to relax in all directions the binding force of dogmatic decisions. In truth, he discerned clearly enough how often dogmatic belief chokes religious life ; but he was nearly incapable of understanding the equally important truth, how often dogmatic belief strengthens and ennobles the life which is honestly lived by its guidance.
In the account of his mother, the late Dean of Westminster quotes more than one remark on herself which has a singular applicability to her son. When a girl of only twenty, though already for two years a wife, she writes of herself, "There is something quite bizarre in my pleasures. I cannot account for them to myself in the slightest degree ; they turn on such slender threads." And it was the same rapid power of seizing the gleaming threads of life, however transient, both past and present, which gave to the Dean of Westminster a great part of his singular literary charm. Probably he did not in any full sense enjoy the earlier and more studious part of his life, as he enjoyed the richer years which intervened between his marriage and his wife's death; but his literary sympathies were as bright and delicate, both at the opening, and in the rather sad close of his life, as they were during the years when his heart and life were fullest. It will, perhaps, alleviate some of the in-
evitable public sorrow for his death, to know with full certainty, as the beautiful verses which we elsewhere publish will assure us all, that for Dean Stanley death had become a change to be warmly desired, not one to be seriously feared. And the same lines will show how near was his delicate sensibility to the verge of genuine poetic power. It is not often that when the profes- sional life of a Church dignitary passes away, it leaves the public with the same sense of having lost something rare and sweet, rather than something good and venerable but also slightly formal.
With Dr. Stanley a charm has passed away from the great historic Abbey which not another man in the nation can supply. There may easily be greater divines and more thrilling preachers in the pulpit at Westminster, though no one ever heard the Dean without feeling the eloquence of his piety and the tenderness of his charity. But there will hardly be again that perfect combination of historic feeling for the past and delicate insight into the present, which made one almost regard Edward the Confessor himself as near to the heart of Dr. Stanley, even though you could never think of the latter without thinking also of numberless men, women, and children among "the toiling millions of men" of the present generation, on whose lives his delicate kindness had cast many a gleam of beauty, blended almost equally of human and of spiritual joy.
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