AN INSUBORDINATE SAINT.
WE think that all who read the Rev. Charles E. Osborne's delightful biography of Father Dolling (London : E. Arnold ; 12s. 6d. net) will admit that he was a saint—an Anglo-Saxon saint, however—one who lacked the staple virtue of Roman sainthood, the virtue of obedience. "Between him and the Church of Rome there was an impassable gap of what may be called English instinct." These words were said of the celebrated High Churchman by an intimate friend at the time when he resigned his incumbency of St. Agatha's, Land- port, rather than follow the advice of his Bishop, sacrifice some of his Roman practices, and "bring his services into general harmony with the due order of the Church of Eng- land." The criticism by Mr. Osborne is wonderfully shrewd. Father Dolling had much in him of the priest, but nothing of the Roman priest. His mind was English in form and fibre. The Church of Rome may have been the logical goal of his teaching, yet be was never in danger of going to Rome, because he was not logical but practical, and because he bad that stubborn independence which Rome must dissolve before she can receive a convert.
He had what the early Evangelicals used to call a beautiful natural character. His moral force had little to do with training, and a good instinct rather than a good reason was at the bottom of most of his many good deeds. It has been said that his in- tellectual development was hindered by his intense realisation of the practical side of religion. All his life he had for learning a "thinly disguised contempt." His passion for work did not include books ; and one of the causes of friction between him and Archbishop Temple was the laudable desire of the Primate to make him read. Dolling replied to the episcopal advice in words which simply came to this : that he had something better to do. In that something better he succeeded. His teaching—or should we say his personal influence P—appealed to the roughest class of a town community, and inclined their hearts to keep the laws of God and man. His method, we think, can hardly be traced, and certainly cannot be imitated. In his saintliness lies the chief secret of his success. From Roman Catholicism he borrowed much, from Methodism something. His test of every system was its practical result ; and convinced sacramentarian though he was, he was always ready to pay a hearty tribute to the good work of the Free Churches. His theory of public worship he expounded in an article in the Pilot written only a short time before his death. "I hold," he wrote, "that what is needed are two opposite extremes of worship, the one rendering the other wholesome. We want a stately wor- ship, full of magnificence, that strikes the eye and enthrals it and, on the other band, a simple method of address- ing a living Father in prayer; praying about the things that
interest those who are praying praying in their own language."
Considering the extreme wide-mindedness, or at least wide- heartedness, of many of his utterances, it is amazing that Dolling got on so badly with the ecclesiastical authorities, and it is impossible for the candid reader of these pages not to admit that he was treated throughout by the various Bishops with whom be came into conflict with the utmost consideration and kindness. He did not appear to attach any undue importance to his peculiar practices, but nothing would induce him to give them up. He had a genius for exer- cising authority, and apparently an inability to submit to it. Of his own powers of ruling he was not unaware. He ex- pected obedience, and was certain of his own ability to direct. Yet he accepted the sacrifice of will so constantly made to him with a sort of gratitude which deprived his despotism of all arrogance. Writing of some of the least civilised of his Landport congregation, he says :—" I have seen the withstanding of temptation even to tears and blood; I have
seen agonies borne without a word for fear I should be vexed. I take them out of my heart, where some of them have lain for eight long years. I take them out one by one—thieves, felons, tramps, loafers, outcasts, of whom the world was not worthy, having no place for them. I read in their eyes a tenderness, in their hearts a compassion for me, a bearing with all my ill-temper ; a paying me back a hundredfold in the richest coin of the truest love."
Most cultivated men have for the "submerged tenth" an extreme and uncontrollable distaste ; but Dolling had no such feeling. As his biographer says, Shakespeare's words, "How beauteous mankind is ! 0 brave new world, that heat such people het!" seemed to be ever in his mind. Humanity appealed to him in whatever disguise. Even the half-witted, whose very existence most of us try to forget, found a place in his heart, and a poor boy who must have been very nearly an idiot, but in whom Dolling found or imagined a strange capacity for religious devotion, grew up at the parsonage house, together with several other handicapped persons only a little less for- lorn. One reason of his immense power of work was that he could take his recreation among his people. He could be supremely happy, we are told, smoking with common soldiers, and the badinage of a philanthropic club, so terribly weari- some to most of those responsible for order in such institutions, really delighted him. Perhaps his burly appearance, and his capacity to give not only a verbal but a physical blow, may have conduced to his peace of mind. Cant he abhorred. Out- ward respectability had very little charm for him. "The human are so ungodly, and the godly are so inhuman," he used to say with a sigh. "With stagnant tempers he was powerless." The crowded streets of a rough neighbourhood full of life and energy increased his sense of vitality. The very vices of the people afforded, his biographer tells us, a perpetual challenge to his indomitable combativeness. Confession he always advocated, and he had something like a genius for attracting confidence. Whatever we may think of confession as a moral agent, there can be no doubt that the man who hears confessions of simple people, especially if he has an intense interest in human nature, gets an insight into their minds which nothing else could give him, and much which was called "Dolling's mesmeric force" came from a knowledge of the hearts of his hearers. But whatever his doctrine and his system, however right or however mistaken, he altered the character of a whole neighbourhood. He effected a change in the roughest quarter of Portsmouth, a change which proves that religion has still the power—in spite of the sad statistics in Mr. Charles Booth's new book —to civilise not only the primitive savage who has never seen civilisation, but that more hopeless person, the sophisticated savage who, brought up in the midst of it, remains outside its bonds.
As we have said, the first factor in his success was his goodness,—that divine element in human character before which human nature bows if it can but recognise it. It was his Christianity, not his sacerdotalism, which moved the multitude ; his sympathy, not his ceremonial, his devotion to the cause of "the under dog," his faith, not his fancies, which drew men after him. As to his vestments, his incense, his processions, and his dramatic services, we do not believe they had any more to do with the work he accomplished than his clothes had to do with his personality, or his furniture with his hospitality. The question is how he made his Christianity effective. Men as good as Father Dolling fail to-day where he succeeded. We think there was something in the fact that, mentally speaking, he did not belong to the present day at all. He stood outside the thought of the hour, having never had a doubt, yet basing his faith on no system of argument, simple or elaborate. Faith is a gift, like eyesight, he used to say. Practically speaking, he might be said not to believe at all, but to know. In this respect he belonged certainly to the past, possibly to the future, anyhow not to the present. But how many thoughtless ministers of religion believe without doubt or reason? it may be asked.
Very many, we would reply; but Father Dolling was not thoughtless. His was a well-equipped mind, endowed with an astonishing capacity for organisation and for business, endowed also with certain primitive powers of perception. Religion was his greatest interest; but he did not want to read or to argue about it. It came to him, not through the intellect at all, but by some other channel little understood in the present day. Primitive people have perceptions which in the gradual education of the race they lose, painfully learning again by the help of science what once they knew by nature. It is said that the dark peoples are always conscious of the whereabouts of water, while we have to search for it To lament the apparent harshness of this discipline is to rebel against the education of God. To convince others of what one knows is a far easier task than to make them share a belief, a faith, a hope, or whatever name we give to our particular form of trust in the Christian Revelation.
The gulf between the cultivated and the uncultivated was never so wide as in the present day. Those who live on the two aides bore one another insufferably. For Dolling this gulf did not exist,—a fact which was, we believe, partly due to the primitive element in his nature which we have been trying to understand, and which gave him an insight into unreasoning minds. On his grave is written, "Robert Radelyffe Dolling—a Priest." According to his own words, a priest should have three qualifications : he should be the servant of God and the servant of the people, and he should be loyal to his Church. In the last particular we do not think that Dolling attained his own standard. A man who could put difficulties in the way of the responsible heads of his own Church, and say of that Church that it had been content with "a complacent failure," can scarcely be called loyal in the best sense. In this, however, we think he is in part excused by his inability to see the inevitable difficulties of his time. After all, we must not expect perfection. He had an exf._raor ai amount of religious fervour and an extraordinary gift of human sympathy, and to ask more than the keeping of the two great Commandments is to ask too much. Most of us have to be satisfied with a far lower ideal, especially those who know something of the human wreckage which Dolling contrived to love, and, to quote the words of a divine who lived two hundred years before him, aspire no further than to "fear God and forgive men."
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