The Closed Door : Instructions and Meditations Given at Various
Retreats and Quiet Days. By William Waltham How, first Bishop of Wakefield. (Wells Gardner, Darton, and Co.)—This book is the kind of work that it above criticism. It aims at no literary effects and uses no rhetorical means, but by sheer earnestness, reality, and simplicity arrives at a force above eloquence. In short, it represents all the graces of natural and spiritual character for which the late Bishop of Wakefield was known and loved in life ; and the fact that it is printed and published after the Bishop's death, by his own express desire, gives it a peculiarly touching interest and value as his authentic legacy to the world. As the title-page states, it is a book made up of short instruc- tions and meditations given at various "retreats" and "quiet days." Many of the addresses were spoken especially to clergy- men,—three, among the most impressive in the series, to a meeting exclusively of Bishops, and it is in the opening words of the first of this little set of sermons on the "Life," the "Teaching," and the " Infirmities " of men in- vested with the fullest authority and responsibility of the Church, that one finds the most direct expression of the unaffected humility and sense of personal unworthiness which makes itself felt indirectly throughout the book as a holy fear inspiring and checking every utterance :—"I think I never had laid upon me before a task which so filled me with dismay, and all but despair, as that which in simple obedience I am undertaking to-day. At first I kept crying out in my secret heart, 0 Lord God, behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.' It seemed so impossible to put together one sentence of counsel, or to cast into words one thought, which I dare utter before those at whose feet I would so thankfully have sat to learn. Then I remembered to have read of Edward Irving, that his preaching seemed vain and fruitless, until he one day resolved that hence- forth he would set himself among his hearers, and preach only to his own soul. And then he began to help others. I must try this plan. In no other way could I open my lips. And if I do speak to my own soul to-day, it will be very simple things that I shall speak. I have nothing else I could speak. I know nothing but very simple things. But I do know that I need very simple things myself. Perhaps others do." From first to last, in this volume, one hears the voice of a man preaching to his own soul in the presence of God, and striving to deepen his own sense of the reality of the spiritual life and of the necessity for greater purity and holiness. It touches the simplest and also the most delicate springs of life and character, and must come home to every soul in the smallest degree awake to the truth about itself. But it derives also a more special value from being so largely addressed to men in holy orders. "Preaching to his own soul," the Bishop deals with unffinching sincerity with the sins, the shortcomings, and the temptations of his own order; preaching to his brothers, he touches these topics with the greatest tenderness and reverence. And the result is a book which, while it can hardly fail to do good to the individual soul—lay or clerical—of every one who reads it, can only suggest more, not less, charity to the lay conscience sitting in judgment on those whom God has set over it.
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