5 MARCH 1864, Page 15

BOOKS.

BISHOP MACKENZIE.*

IN a country with a free press and a large reading public the comparative popularity of biographies is a fair test of what kind of man the nation desires to honour at any particular period of its history. Setting aside the rare cases (such as " Boswell's Life of Johnson," " Southey's Life of Nelson," "Stanley's Life of Arnold") in which, from the special merit of the subject, or of the handling of it, biographies have taken their place as British classics, we think that the changing humour of the English nation in the matter of hero-worship might be readily traced by any curious and studious person who should give himself up ill the British Museum to the perusal of the memoirs of, say the last one hundred years. Just at present we think there can scarcely be a doubt as to our national taste. Mr. Smiles has struck the • Memoir of Bishop Mackenzie. B Harvey Goodwin, AD., Dean of Ely. Deighton and Bell; Cambridge ;Bell and IN*, London. 1864. right vein. The man whom this nation delights to honour just now is the "self-made" man, as the phrase goes—the man who, by sheer force of will and intellect has raised himself from an humble position, distancing the comrades of his youth, and using them as levers to land himself—the hero, the keen, cunning man, as Mr. Carlyle would call him—on a many-acred estate, with a " sir " tacked to the beginning of his name. Strong will and subtle intellect are noble gifts of God. We have no- thing whatever to say against broad acres, knighthoods, or baron- etcies. We are as ready as our neighbours to rejoice in seeing the ends of the earth brought together—in admiring the tunnels, and bridges, and rifled guns, and steam hammers, and all the other triumphs of mind over matter which our great engineers, and inventors, and contractors, are winning day by day. Far from wishing to deprive them of their reward, we would say, let them have it, heaped up and running over. But when it comes to worship—if we are to single out and hold up for the guidance of young England the sort of man whom it most behoves a nation to cherish—we must turn from the ranks of these " self- made men." After all, even in an age and country where success, and above all success in making money, is becoming more and more the object of men's hopes, and prayers, and efforts, it is good for us all to he reminded that if self-assertion is the first

law of nature, self-sacrifice is the first law of God. And such a reminder is this life of Bishop Mackenzie, a worthy brother in that band of whom the first and greatest has left us that memorable sketch, " as unknown, and yet well known ; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed ; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; as poor, yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things." The Dean of Ely has done his work well, not allowing his own love and ad- miration for his friend to blind his judgment, and giving us a picture from which we rise with a distinct notion of a living man—the one indispensable condition of a good biography. He lets us, it is true, artistically speaking, a little too much behind the screen. We see the Dean sitting at his work, and he confides to us his reasons for the methods he adopts ; how he might have told his story in this or that other way ; but that these did not seem to him so likely to give the most faithful picture of the Bishop to his readers; for example, see p. 313. The skilful work- man shows us only the finished work. But such small blots take nothing from the real value of the book, which will leave on the mind of any one who may read it a very definite image of a very noble man. We will try to produce it in miniature, hoping to load our readers to the book.

Charles Mackenzie was born in 1825, the youngest of a family of twelve, of whom the eldest was Lord Derby's Secretary to the Treasury, and the parent of the well-known " Forbes Mackenzie Act" for regulating the sale of spirits in Scotland. Charles was a sweet-tempered boy, with a strong turn for mathematics, but no other remarkable intellectual gift. Always a hard worker— studying Hebrew grammar, for instance, of his own accord as an extra, on the ground that "at present grammars are no drudgery to me. If I were to wait until I am obliged to learn it the taste for grammars may have worn off." He had little or no imagination or artistic feeling. "Only think of my stupidity," he says—" when I went to the top of one of the high hills near Inverie, I quite forgot to look at the view which I went on pur • pose to see ; but I just sat down a little, ate my cake, and came down again." He was fond of bathing and football, and one of the editors of a school magazine ; but a shy and quiet lad, working conscientiously, and much loved by the few companionswith whom ho was intimate. In 1844 he went to Cambridge, and here we find him, in his first year, applying to one of the fellows of his college (Caius), who hold a curacy in the town, for parish work. Mr. Hopkins sets him to read to old people in the Victoria Asylum, which work he performs faithfully, though at first he ." could not fancy that anything he could say would be of any use," and "got quite red in the face" when lie began to read. And so he worked on through a singularly pure and manly college career ; rowing, and playing chess, and working hard, but always with an eye to his future calling. He was second wrangler in 1848, in which year his college held their five-hundredth anniversary, and had nine wranglers out of thirty-eight. Of course he became a fellow of his college, and soon afterwards took orders. He re- mained at Cambridge lecturing and taking parish work in a neighbouring village, impressed strongly with the idea that an ordained fellow of a college has much work to do which is com- monly neglected. "I should like to live here as a clergyman," he writes to a sister, "with such of the undergraduates as I could influence as my parish, and to throw up private teaching alto-

gather." A few such fellows would do more for our Universities than an army of learned professors.

His influence at Cambridge grew and strengthened, and we do not wonder at the opposition of his biographer and his other friends to his first impulse to go out as a missionary to India. That opposition, founded on the good work which he was doing at Cambridge, prevailed at first, but the missionary spirit had laid a strong hold on him.

"'I think this is my path,' he says. ' I never could swallow the notion of voluntary self-denial as a discipline ; but self-denial in the service of God, and for an object, is what we ought to practise' (p. 73).

Christ needs servants in various places. The greatest want is abroad.' 'It is true we may serve Him in one place as well as in another, but no one else will go, so I will.' "

And so at last he went, as Archdeacon to Bishop Colenso, to Natal, in March, 18.55, on board the Jane Morice, which was

chartered to take out the mission, and made a most prosperous voyage, the Archdeacon keeping them all in good humour—" the life of the party, the sunshine of the steerage, and the director of everything, from the boxes in the hold to the preaching and teaching of all on board."

The Dean, with singular good taste, has avoided all allusion to Bishop Colenso's recent works, and the glimpse here given of him in his diocese should not be overlooked by Churchmen at the present time. We trust that this book may silence some of the charges which are only too rife against a man who has in his time done good work for the Church of his Master. Mackenzie's wish was to go at once to the natives, but there was no clergy- man at Durban, the second town in the colony, and here he was placed by the Bishop, he himself cheerfully submitting, and, as usual, taking the hopeful view of his lot. "Nothing can so inter- fere with missionary operations as the presence of a white popu- lation uninfluenced in heart by Christianity" (p. 115). So says the Archdeacon, and buckles to his work like a man, though " Two of our number, Dr. Bleck and Baugh, are at a Kaffir kraal, living among the natives to learn the language. That is the proper way. I wish I were with them" (p. 123).

His ministry at Durban was, on the whole, eminently suc- cessful, though interrupted by a struggle with a part of the congregation on the introduction, by the Bishop's desire, of the offertory, and other trifling changes in the direction of uniformity. In the course of these disputes the Dean received from him the one sorrowful letter in their long correspondence, In due course Mackenzie was transferred to an up-country station, in which his work may be judged by this specimen. On Sundays he had five services, one of them eighteen miles from another. A fine grazing country it was, in which " we have not much money, as our business is done a good deal by barter ; but if a church could be built of butter there would be no difficulty" (p. 149). There is a beautiful episode in this memoir. One sister accom- panied Mackenzie, and made him a home from the first—a cheerful, happy home, though, as she writes, "in honest truth these huts of ours are not to be compared to houses at home for poultry or pigs, far less for cows or horses" (141) ; but " I think, perhaps, my over-punctilious, fastidious nature is done good to and does good to Charles's perfect indifference to comfort and appearances." Another, his black sister, as he playfully calls her, from her love for and power with the natives, joined him after- wards. On the first night of her arrival they had a long ride is the dark to reach their temporary home, and her horse lagged behind in a river to drink :-

"' It was wonderfully pleasant,' writes the black sister, 'to be sitting alone in the dark in the middle of an African river, the reeds higher than myself on either side of the water, the sweet, soft air blowing gently round, full of the chirping of strange frogs, and the fire-flies glancing round in all directions."

The letters of these two faithful and loving women light up the book. We scarcely know where to turn for a more touching or beautiful scene than the last parting between this sister and her brother on the deck of the vessel in which be started from Natal for his last station in January, 1881 :—

" We went on board the tug and stood together high up on the captain's place ; we were washed again and again by the great waves. When he went, and I had his last kiss and blessing, his own bright beautiful spirit infected mine, and I could return his parting words without flinching. I saw him go without a tear dimming my eye, so that I could watch him to the last, looking after our little boat again crossing the bar till we could distinguish each other no more. In speaking to me of happiness, he said, 'I have given up looking for that altogether. Now till death my post is one of unrest and care. To be the sharer of every one's sorrow, the comforter of every one's griefs, the strengthener of every one's weaknesses—to do this as much as in me lies is now my aim and object, for you know when the members suffer the pain must always fly to the head.' He said this with a smile, and oh ! the peace in his face ! it seemed as U nothing could shake that."

But we are anticipating. Between our last extract and this parting Mackenzie had returned to England by his Bishop's wish. He arrived at the beginning of the great movement for an African mission started at the Universities_ by Dr. Livingstone. He was named as bishop-elect to head that mission, the first sent out by our National Church beyond the Queen's dominions. There was great enthusiasm at Oxford and Cambridge, which spread through the country, and Mackenzie worked side by side with Gladstone, the Bishop of Oxford, Lord Brougham, and other great people.

" I feel a little what you felt,' he writes to his sister, when you went to Fkukanyeni, expecting the time when people will find me out. But the work is for One from whom no secrets are hid, who has called me to it knowing that I am frail and foolish, and who expects, indeed. that we shall do all and give up all for Him, but does not expect more"' (p. 227).

He left England the centre of high hopes, was consecrated at Cepa Town, where the enthusiasm rose to fever pitch, and Bishop Colenso, then desirous himself of going to the interior, in the consecration sermon prophesied of "a chain of Bishops, missionary and colonial, extending from Cape Town to the Abyssinian Church iu North Africa." He and his staff were forwarded in men- of-war to the mouths of the Shire, touching at Natal on the way, where the parting with his sister took place. At the mouths of the Shire, after some delay, Livingstone met them, and they pro- ceeded in his vessel, the Pioneer, up the river to choose the spot for the first missionary settlement.

"We were a strange party—Livingstone tramping along with a steady, heavy tread, which kept one in mind that he had walked across Africa. We were all loaded. I had myself in my left hand a loaded gun, in my right the crozier they gave me at Cape Town, in front a can of oil, and behind a bag of seeds, together weighing about 25 pounds" (p. 323).

Early in 1861 they fixed on a site between the river and the lake Shirwa, a mistake, as it afterwards proved, as it was unhealthy, and too far from the river. They found the slave trade flourishing all round, and patronized by the Portuguese of the coast. Before

Livingstone left them they fell in with a slave convoy. These the great traveller liberated by force, setting Mackenzie the ex- ample which he afterwards followed, and which has raked so much discussion amongst the supporters of the University mission at home. We have no space hero to discuss the ques- tion, but must merely state our own belief that if a bishop and his clergy in these parts are not prepared to defend the natives who live with them against black or white men-stealers they had far better stay at home.

The Bishop's career was short, and beset with difficulties. War and fdmine were round him, but he bore up with rare constancy to the last, organizing his rapidly growing village ; planning missionary work in the country and on the river, a steamer plying up and down to keep the stations supplied, with a priest and deacon on board (as to which he wrote to the Presidents of the University boat clubs), and otherwise quitting himself like a true father in God. At Christmas, 1861, lie had an appointment to meet Livingstone on the Shire. On his way to keep it his boat was upset, and his medicines and supplies lost. Livingstone had passed, but would return shortly. The Bishop and his com- panion, Mr. Burrup, both of whom unfortunately had a most unfounded contempt for the African fever, determined to await his return. In a few days Mackenzie sickened, and died on January 31st, 1862, his companion only surviving him for a few weeks. Livingstone returned, and cleared a space round the Bishop's grave by the aide of the Shire, and planted a cross over it. The great traveller, there is but too much reason to fear, has gone to join the young missionary to whose worth he has borne such high testimony. His bones, too, are resting by the great river. The great work which they two promoted, and for which they have given their lives, is left to the Church and Universities of England—a precious bequest from two such men, which, if we know anything of our countrymen, will not he allowed to languish or fail. The credit of Church and Universities is pledged, we have no fear that the pledge will not be redeemed.