BIRMINGHAM'S WITNESS
By J. R. GLORNEY BOLTON
PRIMATE, Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop: one day, when Bishop Griffin receives a Cardinal's hat, Birmingham will have provided this country with all three. The Primate was E. W. Benson. The Prime Minister was Neville Chamberlain, once, like his father before him, Birmingham's chief magistrate. Though for long a thriving town, Birmingham was not incorporated as a borough until 1838. Her anvils had helped England to defeat Napoleon on the field, but her administration was still manorial. Hard-headed com- mercial and industrial magnates of the Midlands deeply resented her lack of municipal status. But in the days when magistrates could enforce the Five Mile Acts and prevent any Dissenting Minister
from residing within five miles of a borough, Birmingham's lack of status was a distinct advantage. Here resided many Quakers and Unitarians, forerunners of the Cadburys and the Chamberlains. Common disabilities and afflictions brought together all who could not conscientiously conform with the Church of England, and when a group of Roman Catholic laymen decided, in 1774, to found a college, they chose a site in the village of Oscott, within easy reach of Birmingham.
There was, it is true, no lack of prejudice or bigotry in manorial Birmingham. An ugly mob, in the brief reign of King James the Second, burned down the Roman Catholic chapel in Birmingham's Masshouse Lane. An uglier mob, on the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, drove Joseph Priestley out of Birmingham and, for that matter, out of the British Isles. The people who moved about the Bull Ring were poor and sometimes barbarously ignorant. They found few true leaders until the Radical Joseph Chamberlain became their Mayor. But Birmingham's middle-class was outstand- ing. Nonconformists, whether Protestants or Catholics, often brought with them special gifts of character and intellect. They fostered a profound belief in education. Outcast from Oxford and Cambridge—and that for a while was the fate of the great Acton, an old pupil at Oscott—they made culture their battle-cry. They were at home in Athens. - King Edward's School, Anglican though it was, could not help attaining a high standard among the English Grammar Schools. In 1838, the year of Birmingham's incorpora- tion, Thomas Arnold reluctantly allowed James Prince Lee to for- sake Rugby for the headmastership of King Edward's. In Birming- ham, as in Rugby, Lee quietly instilled into his brighter pupils a love of the Greek language and a devotion to exact knowledge. Among his Birmingham pupils were Brooke Foss Westcott, Joseph Barber Lightfoot and Edward White Benson.
The influence of these three Old Edwardians upon the Church of England endures. It would endure if only because Westcott's son, at the age of eighty, still rules over the great Anglican See of Calcutta. Benson lives again in the pages which were written by his sons. His mind was capacious and imaginative, and unlike some of his brother-Bishops, he could favour a wide extension of the franchise because " the Church trusts the people." He looked far beyond the confines of his own country. In 1888, when Orthodox Russia was celebrating the ninth centenary of her conversion to Christianity, Benson sent a special envoy to Kiev to convey the good wishes of the Anglican Church. He was enraged when he heard that the B:shop of Madagascar had left his diocese as soon as it was occupied
by the French, and he ordered him to return within a fortnight. Canterbury's influence was not to be determined by the boundaries of the British Empire.
Benson's school-friend, Lightfoot, went to Trinity, to find Westcott his tutor. Another undergraduate at Trinity was F. J. A. Hort, one of Arnold's pupils at Rugby. The three men—Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort—understood each other perfectly, and entered with zeal into New Testament research. Lightfoot ended his days as Bishop of Durham. In that princely office Westcott, the older man, suc- ceeded him. Outwardly, his career had been less spectacular than Lightfoot's. For seventeen years he was a master at Harrow. From that suburban. hill he cast longing eyes at Cambridge, where eventu- ally he returned to be the Regius Professor of Divinity. He had no marked gifts as a form-master, but as a preacher in the school chapel he excelled. Among the boys whom he influenced were Randall Davidson and Charles Gore. Davidson, when Dean of Windsor, recommended that his old master should succeed Light- foot as Bishop of Durham. • He had to persuade Queen Victoria be- cause Salisbury, her Prime Minister, imagined that the office once held by Joseph Butler, van Mildert and Lightfoot himself was not really " a learned Bishopric."
In their Birmingham days Lightfoot and Benson eagerly read the Oxford Tracts for the Times. Together they secretly recited the Latin hours. They little guessed that within a few years Newman
himself would be living in Birmingham, Those who have been introduced to the Oxford Movement by the fine prose of Dean Church are apt to overlook the part which Nicholas Wiseman played in preparing the way for the Oxford converts. In 1840, after a long absence in Rome, Wiseman was back in England as Vicar- Apostolic in the Midlands and President of Oscott College. He watched the Oxford Movement with a lively sympathy. He was eager to yield " place and honour " to men " who have learnt to teach from St. Augustine, to preach from St. Chrysostom and to feel from St. Bernard." He established links inside Littlemore, and when Newman first appeared at dinner in a pair of grey trousers a convert rushed back to Oscott with the news that Newman now obviously regarded himself as a layman. After his conversion Newman lived in Oscott. He grew to like the college, which he called Maryvale. Eventually it was agreed that he should follow the example of St. Philip Neri and establish an oratory. Newman chose Birmingham for his oratory because it was near to Maryvale: " a sort of mother house, where novices might be trained, supposing that institution to spread to other towns besides Birmingham."
Though Wiseman had longed to meet Newman, their first encounter at Oscott was a chilly affair. Intimacy and understanding came later. There was another chilly interview in 1877, the year in which his old Oxford College made Newman an honorary Fellow.
Gladstone had arrived in Birmingham to stay with Joseph Chamber- lain and to deliver some political speeches. He was received by the people of Birmingham with the greatest enthusiasm, but he had one dominant desire—to call on Newman at the Oratory. It was true that three years beforehand Gladstone had written of Rome : "no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another." Newman himself had supplied a regal answer. Glad- stone, enmeshed in argument and debate, frequently forgot their sting. He was Acton's friend. By Anglican standards he was a very great Churchman. He set out with his Unitarian host in high spirits. But Newman's conversation was awkward and desultory. In a few minutes the three men were glad to bring their encounter to a close.
Newman's fault was shyness. But shyness is no barrier to influence. Few men were shier than Charles Gore, Westcott's pupil at Harrow, who was to become the first Bishop of Birmingham. Even after his translation to Oxford his heart seemed to remain with Birmingham, where he used to work wholeheartedly with Roman Catholic and Dissenter for the better ordering of men's affairs. Gore knew what he owed to others—to Newman and his co- religionists, to R. W. Dale, the Birmingham Congregationalist who helped to found Mansfield College. For their work lived on. The long list of Birmingham's famous teachers and preachers will not end with Dr. Barnes, her present Bishop, or with Canon Guy Rogers, her Rector. Birmingham has her unmistakable spirit. The words of many Birmingham men seemed to be echoed when the Arch- bishop-designate of Westminster announced that he would Work " for the Church in England and for the country."
Previous page
