LIFE AND LETTERS OF DEAN BUTLER.* IN an appendix to

the volume before us, an extract is given from a letter in which William Butler writes :—" I suppose that different people find comfort and help in different manners. To me nothing is more stirring than the lives of men who have nobly served our Lord,—e.g., Bishop Gray, or Patteson, or St. Charles Borromeo, or Gratry, or Montalem- bert. They help one, I think, to long and to try." Such memorials are, indeed, the most helpful reading for suc- ceeding generations. We find that the saints and martyrs, the self-renouncing priests and missionaries, were men of like passions with ourselves, and yet through faith they wrought righteousness and obtained promises. In all trades models and patterns are necessary aids to education ; they must be employed to teach beginners and to ensure good

• Life and Littera of William John Butler, late Dam of Lincoln and sometime Now of Wantage. London : Macmillan and Co. [12s. 6d. net.1

results, and in the building up of character, the force of example, " the contagion of a great mind," is one of the strongest factors that can be imagined. Therefore it is well that a record of such a man as William Butler, late Dean of Lincoln, but better known as " Butler of Wantage," should be written, a fitting harvest to the sowing and reaping of a. life spent in the service of God.

Though William Butler was a Cambridge man, he became a staunch disciple of the Oxford Movement, and a devoted friend and follower of Keble and Pusey, and so closely did he follow in their footsteps that one of his stock arguments against some practices that many of the clergy think harmless was, " Mr. Keble never did it." The austerity which marked the lives of the leaders of the Tractarian party had impressed itself on their younger disciple, as one of his curates writes :—

" I need hardly add that the moral severity, the appeal to the- Gospel pattern of life, which Dean Church tells us had so• much to do with the motive of the Oxford Movement, had laid its sacred mark upon William Butler and his home.' When he was offered his first living in 1846 he wrote to Keble, who had said that "Butler of Wantage" was a good omen, Wantage having been the birthplace of Bishop Butler, that he was afraid such a distinctive title was against him, it being

possible that Wantage would have exhausted itself in pro- ducing so great a man, and that "future B.'s would be the poorest of their species ; " bat in another letter, written about the same time, we are permitted an insight into his deeper feelings :-

" In this matter of Wantage it seems to me strange that you should not understand how very serious a thing it is for one like myself, only 28 years old, and very mush off the sort of study and preparation which a country town needs, to take upon myself the care of 3,000 souls, living souls to prepare for eternity. It certainly seems strange that you should not understand that a state of doubtfulness must come over me, fear for my own soul, and consideration for others. How am I to solve my doubts?' Could such considerations as position, income, and the like come for a moment into calculation ? First Death, then the Judgment. What have position in this miserable world, income, comforts, to do with such as these ? "

The record of William Butler's thirty-four years' work at Wantage is compiled partly from the pages of the Parish Journal (an institution of his own) and partly from letters.

and private sources. If work is to be judged merely by visible results, the monuments that endure—the restored and beautified church, the various school-buildings, St. Mary's Home, with its community of Sisters and its many ramifica- tion, the mission-rooms and chapels—speak for themselves;. but the daily teaching in the parish schools, the daily classes for men and women, girls and boys, that brought vicar and parishioners into close contact, the unceasing care for the "3,000 souls" entrusted to him, and not lightly undertaken, these are not "temples that are made with hands," but the

results of example and influence which endure when the worker has passed away ; and it is impossible to say how far the vicar's influence extended beyond the bounds of his own parish. As Liddon, a former curate, wrote of Mr. Butler in 1865: "Much of the benefit of contact with a good man cannot be reduced to writing : it is the insensible though real action of spirit and character of which we can only measure the drift and power after some considerable lapse of time." The dominant note of William Butler's life was incessant.

work. " However hard we worked," says one of his curates, "we always had before us the example of one who worked

harder." One of the vicar's favourite axioms was, "Prayer,. faith, and grind will carry most things through," and he was intolerant of slackness or want of energy. There is a tradition that the Bishop of Lincoln once spoke of Butler's. "ferocious goodness," and whether or not this was the Bishop's expression, it gives a good, though caricatured, idea of Butler's unbounded energy. The spread of education was one of the vicar's chief aims to which he spared neither time nor trouble, and when he resigned the charge of Wantage„ the schools which in 1847 had contained thirty-six children, had increased during the thirty-four years of his incumbency to an attendance of over seven hundred and fifty scholars,. varying in age from three to nineteen or twenty. It was the difficulty of obtaining efficient teachers, and also the vicar's. foresight in perceiving that the great strength of the Church must lie in her schools, that led to the formation of a sister- hood at Wantage. In the days that he was turning over the scheme in his mind there was but one other religions com-

annuity of the sort in the Church of England, and it was under the guidance of Manning (then Archdeacon of Chichester) in 1848 that the work began. The primary object was the formation of an educational Order,—the gathering together, in Butler's own words, of " those who would be content with a frugal life, patient toil, quiet appear-

ance,—content with yielding themselves in simple-hearted devotion to spend and be spent for their Master." But after a short time, Miss Lockhart, the first Mother-Superior of the little community, felt called upon to join in the new move- ment towards penitentiary work, and on February 2nd, 1850, a home for penitents was opened in Wantage with Miss Lockhart as its head, and Manning as spiritual director, the first penitentiary work undertaken by Sisters in the Church of England since the Reformation. The diver- sion of energy from the primary object of educa- tion was a blow to the vicar, but it was followed by a greater calamity that threatened the very existence of the little sisterhood. Before three months had elapsed Miss Lockhart and another Sister had joined the Roman Church. Yet, in spite of the difficulties that had to be sur- mounted, the work was continued, and at the time of Dean Butler's death the community had grown and spread in many directions, and of the thirty-four works conducted by the Sisters in Wantage and elsewhere, thirteen were schools and the remaining seventeen were in the nature of rescue and parochial work. Dean Butler has left in his own words, written shortly before his death, an account of the solid basis on which he sought to build his community :—" It may be well once more to state the principle on which the Community of St. Mary the Virgin is based. It is this,—simple, honest loyalty to the Church to which it belongs, that is, the Church of England, the Church of our native land. We believe that the -Church of England is a true branch of Christ's Catholic Church, and that she has a right to lay down for her children what they are to believe and to do. We believe that in her Prayer- book her teaching and will are found. We are not desirous to follow our own fancies, or to set forth doctrines and rituals which belong to the Church of Rome. We are satisfied with giving dignity and beauty to that which we have of our own." The vicar held a lofty ideal of women and their influence on those about them, and in his dealings with them he relied greatly on their co-operation and also spent much devoted labour in guiding and teaching them. The Rev. V. S. Coles, a former curate, writes :—" If the great work of his life was the foundation of the Community of St. Mary, I believe that his -encouragement largely helped Father Benson's venture upon the similar undertaking for men at Cowley St. John. The educated men whom he did influence certainly found that his .help was as unique as it was excellent. But it was on women that his best strength and most constant pains were spent, and .probably no man was ever more entirely the true pastor in all his strong, fatherly, reverent dealings with them." It is interesting to note William Butler's feelings in his later years regarding the position of equality with men claimed by the advanced section of the other sex, and we find the follow- ing passage in a letter written to Canon Liddon in 1884 :—" It is to my mind by far, and beyond all comparison, the saddest feature of this generation, that women are claiming, and are -encouraged to claim, a position which is not intended for them ; and that they do not perceive the inevitable conse- quence that while they can never emulate men in men's work, and can at best be but poor imitators, they will lose that most grand power and influence which are really and by God's .providence their own."

There was something of the " happy warrior " about William Butler; he was, as a friend writes of him, "a born ruler of men ; " but he could also submit his own will to what he considered lawfully constituted authority. In 1877 he wrote to Canon Carter that he should consider his work would be more prospered if he obeyed his Bishop in all but questions of doctrine, than if he upheld his own individual fancies against his Bishop's will. In his impatience with wilfulness and private fancies, we might apply to him what Carlyle wrote of Abbot Samson : " There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships ; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by 1 There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of what- ever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious. that is to say, chaotic, ungoverned." Although Dean Butler was decidedly a High Churchman, yet his dislike of "private fancies " led him to stand aloof from the Ritualists and their endeavour to " make out a new religion" as he wrote to Liddon in 1870, though he held strong views of his own on the subject of confession, holding it to be plainly enjoined by the teaching of the Church in her Prayer-book. This sympathy with discipline and obedience, added to a strong sense of patriotism, was probably the foundation of his in- terest in soldiers, and led him to co-operate heartily in the Volunteer movement, accepting the post of chaplain to the Berks Volunteers when that regiment was formed, and continuing to hold it until he left the corps on taking up his duties at Lincoln. The same military instinct led him to offer his services to the Red Cross Society during the Franco- Prussian War, and not the least interesting part of the volume are the letters that he wrote from Sedan and Saarbriicken when he was " storekeeper " in a " Uhlanen ()amine." Dean Butler's judgment on controverted questions was remark- ably sane. Though the " moral severity " that marked his own home-life was impressed on his teaching, it was never driven to extreme limits. He was not in favour of total abstinence, except as a " kill or cure " remedy in extreme cases, nor did be encourage temperance societies, holding it to be dangerous to isolate one sin in a special way, unless associations are also formed for the suppression of lying, or selfishness, or sins of the flesh. He had little sympathy with what he called the " fierce and dangerous enthusiasm" of the Salvation Army, or with any form of mere emotional religion, and there is a charac- teristic passage in one of his letters that exemplifies his mode of thought :—" See how well our Wantage lads do in London.

Why? Because they have learned the real Gospel— not the sham thing that people call the Gospel, all feelings and rubbish, but the Gospel which Christ taught, which com- mands men to use the means of grace, to accept the ministrations of God's ministers, and to obey the Church. All this is definite and clear, something that one can under- stand. But Come to Christ,'—what does that mean ? Or Have you found peace ? ' to which a very holy man, a friend of mine, replied, ` No, I have found war,' meaning that a Christian man has to fight to hold his own." We have left no space to speak of William Butler's life at Worcester or Lincoln, though in the comparatively short periods that he spent as Canon and Dean he consistently carried out the ideal of his earlier years, and brought his love of thoroughness and " grind " into his new duties. The unpretentious volume leaves on the mind the impress of a singularly strong character, sturdily independent and yet submissive to authority, with great confidence in himself happily tempered by good judgment, not necessarily a popular character, but one capable of showing unbounded sympathy with genuine suffering or weakness, impatient of lukewarmness in others, and steadily pursuing to the end that path of individual holiness that he preached from the early days of his ministry. His sense of humour showed itself in such axioms as " There are no patent recipes for getting rid of one's faults," or "Every one makes progress who means to do so." His cheerfully resolute disposition helped him to surmount many difficulties. Of him it might truly be said :- " Whose high endeavours are an inward light

That makes the path before him always bright."

The task of editing the letters and recollections furnished by various friends and fellow-workers has been carried out with excellent taste and discrimination by a member of the late Dean's family, aided by Canon Maddison of Lincoln. The fault of recent biographies has generally been their diffuseness, but in this case nothing has been incorporated that does not throw a light on some part of Dean Butler's character or record some interesting details of his life's work, while the letters to and from such men as Keble and Liddon are of peculiar interest. Dean Butler repre- sents the best outcome of the Tractarian Movement. In his long ministry at Wantage he exemplified the renewed spirit and vigour of definite Church leaching which dates from the days of Keble and Pusey ; from his early teachers be imbibed an independence of thought combined with the greatest reverence and breadth of spiritual insight; while his special gifts of perseverance and organisation have left their enduring testimony behind them.