A PROTESTANT POOR FRIAR.*
Tam subject of this memoir was probably scarcely more widely known in England than any other private man of the middle class -of average abilities and strongly defined character. But as he repre- sented, to very many of those who knew him, the present re- viewer among the number, not indeed a more perfect type of 'Christian excellence, but a very high type far more perfectly realized, than they have ever elsewhere met with, and as it is -certainly a far rarer thing to find men who approach closely a high Christian standard than men with a yet more perfect standard to which they look up contentedly from a very humdrum and common-place level of achievement, Mr. Herford was fully justified in writing this excellent memoir, which will be read with profound interest by all who knew Travers Madge, and we hope with no slight int.!rest by many who never knew him. The latter,—those who never knew him,—may think it a sort of affectation of simplicity that Mr. Herford always speaks of his friend as Travers Madge, without any sort of prefix ; but the former will know that it would have, in fact, been an artificial -effort to speak of him in any other way, as he was from his -earliest youth so bitterly and, as we think, fanatically opposed to the formalities of life, so profoundly democratic in his social feelings, that none of his friends, from the most ragged of his Manchester disciples to the richest of his earlier acquaintances, probably ever either spoke of him or addressed him in any other form. The son of an eminent Unitarian minister, and himself intended for the Unitarian ministry, his mind was very early so possessed by intense reaction against the ideas of the world that he would not endure the notion of a " hired " ministry, though he appears to have felt no objection to receiving such support from others as the Apostles did,—between which and "hire or remuneration" he drew a somewhat intangible distinction ;- intangible, at least, if he had spent, as he certainly would have -done, the whole surplus of his hire or remuneration over and above his own bare necessities, on the wants of the poor. It was not -only, however, to the pecuniary notions of the world that he proved intractable. At college he rebelled against the system of examina- tions and degrees, which he thought adapted to stimulate the love -of appearances and ostentatious, rather than of real knowledge. He always steadily declined taking a degree, though he was both a great lover of mathematics and an able mathematician, and quite * Travers Madve: a Hamer. By Brooke Herford. London: Hamilton and Adams. up to the ordinary standard in other subjects. He resented the system of school and college prizes as a wilful appeal to the spirit of rivalry. In both diet and costume he was simple to quaint- ness, being for a long time a vegetarian, always, we believe, a teetotaller, and, though the seeds of consumption were in his consti- tution from the first, waving off the pressing offer of flannel waistcoats with a grotesque peremptoriness, on the ground that "it is a wicked thing to waste money extravagantly." Even at college at Manchester, he amused the factory boys by "carrying some book- shelves for the college" in the streets to earn sixpence, and he wanted to see whether he could not "holds horse now and then," or-other- wise gain his living, without taking money either from the College Exhibition or his father. When he left college, though con- sumed, as he was all his life, by the highest intensity of religious fervour, he preferred gaining his own living, like St. Paul, by secular work,—at one time by helping his most intimate friend, Mr. Withers Dowson, in a school at Norwich, at another time even apprenticing himself to a printer and bookseller, also a private friend, Mr. Rawson, of Manchester,—to receiving any equivalent for his religious services. Indeed, during the greater part of his life,—though he became a member of the Church of England before its close,—he steadily objected not only to a hired ministry, but to what he called the " one-man " system of a single minister, by which he thought the spiritual life of the many was ignored and stifled. In four words, the rule of his whole life was, Christian poverty, brotherhood, and independence. At the time of his apprenticeship to the Man- chester printer he used to rise at half-past four, afterwards at half-past three, wake up his poor pupils in their various miserable alleys, and teach early classes till breakfast time,—living himself on the austerest monk's fare, and carrying his dinner "in a little basin done up in a handkerchief" to the house of a poor friend, with whom he eat it in the hour allowed for dinner. In short, Travers Madge was all his life a sort of Protestant poor friar, not ascetic, for all his rigorous self-denials (except, perhaps, the boyish rejection of flannel waistcoats) were for the sake of helping others, not for the sake of the suffering itself. But except as regarded the " discipline " and the artificial humiliations before others, his self- denials were quite as severe, and even more homely and unambi- tious in kind, than those of Lacordaire and his Dominicans. In a late stage of consumption he struggled on in his mission at Man- chester against the appalling misery of the cotton famine of 1862-3, devoting every hour he could save from the utter exhaustion caused by bleeding of the lungs and a racking cough to alleviating the sufferings of the poor, and to giving them the still rarer spiritual help which they wanted to teach them how to bear it. There were times, too, as it appears to us, when he had much more to bear than he would have had to bear as a Roman Catholic poor friar,—when he would have been much the happier, though no doubt very far indeed from the better, for the power of leaning on the authority of such an ancient prestige and imperious spirit of command as is wielded by the Catholic Church, and for believing that obedience to her is the first of religious duties. That the peace and freedom from inward struggle which he would thus have gained would have been a ter- rible loss to him spiritually,•we do not doubt for a moment ; but it would have been a great, if not a vast gain, to the practical effi- ciency of his missionary labours, which were always in peril from his self-distrust, and the reiterated embarrassments of his inner mind when the cloud descended upon his spirit. With an earnest belief in a supernatural and visible authority to back his natural religious fervour, and to retreat upon in times of weakness, he might have accomplished far greater things as a missionary than he did. As it was, he was ever liable to doubt whether he were not arrogating to himself too much influence in his Manchester
schools and the ragged churches which he extemporized ; and on the least murmur of ignorant vanity he was accustomei at once to throw up the slight and solely permissive authority which, by force of superior education and a deeper religious nature, he neces- sarily exercised among his poor friends. In those times, too, when his own sickness and "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world" had oppressed his mind and tempo- rarily clouded his faith, the habit of implicit deference to a visible authority would have been no doubt a great stay. He accom-
plished much in a narrow sphere, as it was ; and what he did accomplish was of an infinitely higher kind, though probably far less in degree, than it would have been had he leaned on any arm more visible and intelligible to human intelligence than that of God himself.
The peculiarity of Travers Madge's: mind and career was its
curious and brilliant simplicity of moral and religious fervour.
• A man of exquisite refinement of feeling, and with a keen love of beauty, all the complex intellectual and scientific interests of the day seemed to fall off from him, except so far as they bore directly on the work of refining, educating, raising, purifying his wretched and degraded fellow-countrymen. There is scarcely a trace in this memoir of one keen intellectual interest that could be separated from -this work. Even theology on its intellectual side seemed to have little or nodeep interest for him. At one time he was deeply absorbed in the question of the scope of the sacrifice of Christ and the cha- racter of eternal retribution, and he then leaned apparently to the -view, afterwards much modified and liberalized, of vieariouspunish- .111ent. But even this question interested him only in relation to his own profound sense of individual weakness and sin. It was not in its larger (as distinguished from its deeper) bearings, not so much as a light upon the nature of God, as in the character of an anodyne to inward sufferings, that he craved to solve it. For a man of high culture, whose perfect refinement was impressed on every line of his face, his interest in any topic not directly and closely bound alp with moral beauty, and purity, or piety was singularly slight. He had the intense love of nature which often accompanies this -temperament, and for the poetry of nature as well as the poetry of religious feeling his love was profound. But latterly politics hardly arrested his attention, and during his changes of faith we find no trace of any attempt to grapple with the difficulties of evidence and of philosophy which stood in his way. These outposts of faith never gave him apparently any trouble ; if his mind was clouded, it was not from the oppressive form of any sceptical argument, but from temporary sterility and desolation of spirit, when he longed in vain for the sense of God's immediate presence. .Though brought up a Unitarian, and though he always clung faithfully to the protest which Unitarianism, more than any .other form of Christianity, has consistently made against the attempt to judge other men's consciences and enforce an anscriptural and inhuman ecclesiastical "discipline," Travers Madge accepted the Atonement, the Incarnation, and the Trinity, -without any trace, that we can see, of either an intellectual struggle or an intellectual want. It-was neither, as we read this .biography, because any part of the higher theology which he subsequently adopted clashed with his hereditary notions of -evidence and of natural religion, that the change was delayed, nor because any part of that theology seemed to give him a deeper philosophy and a broader basis of thought, that it came when it did. It was simply because the sense of sin and the -need for redemption seemed to him inadequately felt and expressed in the Unitarian Churches, that he was gradually repelled from them, and absorbed, almost without any genuinely theological conflict of mind, into a Church or Churches which seemed to him to feel and express that intense conviction more adequately. The sanguine simplicity which spoke in his brilliant eye, the ideal radiance, partly perhaps hectic, but in a great measure, too, one of visionary hope, which gave a constant flush to his face, were of a kind scarcely consistent with merely intellectual difficulties and " historic " doubts. It was an insuper- able difficulty to him if a certain line of thought seemed to take him further from God. It was an unanswerable argument, if, instead, it brought him a fresh glow of love and trust.
And he had his reward in a faith that grew steadily brighter, and latterly, too, steadily larger and more genial as well as brighter, through all his discouraging work and personal ex- haustion, and the repeated failures of his seemingly fragmentary, patchwork missions, to the last scene of his life, —he lived only to the age of forty-three,—which seems to have been less a farewell than a commencement of immortality. Mr:Herford tells us that he seemed to pass from a state of the most absolute prostra- tion, which had continued and increased for months, of enfeebled memory, of almost inaudible articulation, through a momentary flush of characteristic energy and ecstasy, both physical and spiritual, into the other world. He saw, then more clearly than -ever throughout life, the face of Him for whom he had toiled in the squalid alleys of Manchester and Norwich, and death was a rapture, not a pang. It might well be so. For it was to our minds at once the characteristic imperfection and the characteristic perfection of his life, that he found so few interests here except those exclusively,—perhaps with unjust exclusiveness,—termed moral and spiritual, and that he threw his whole soul into them with a singleness of heart which scarce one Englishman in a century achieves. We might wish for a larger ideal of life than his. We can scarcely even conceive one more perfectly attained.
Previous page
