BOOKS.
BISHOP STEERE.*
EDWARD STEERE was born in London in 1828, the son of a Chancery barrister. He was educated at a day-school at Hackney, and afterwards at University College School and at University College. He graduated at the University of London in 1847. He gained the Gold Medal in Law, took the degree of LL.D., and was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1850. But law seems to have had no hold on his affections. From boyhood he had been devoted to theology, philosophy, and archaeology, and he pursued these studies with an assiduity which must have seriously interfered with the claims of his profession. At the age of twenty-five he competed for the Burnett Prize with an essay on "The Being and Attributes of God," which, though it was held second to the dissertation sent in by Principal Tulloch, is still quoted (as, for instance, by the present Bishop of Salisbury in his " Bampton Lectures ") as a solid contribution to fundamental theology. He worked hard, though not, indeed, at his pro- fession ; and when holiday-time came, he applied himself with immense vigour to that kind of recreation which consists of new employment. Botany, conchology, ecclesiology, and the practical use of the printing-press, are objects which we find engaging his attention. He travelled much and rapidly, taking note of all that was historically interesting ; though, apparently, a little insensible to mere beauty, whether in Nature or Art. Thus, he hunts up traditions of Bishop Butler, some of whose minor writings he had unearthed from Lambeth Palace Library, and edited; investigates the traces of King Alfred on the Wiltshire Downs ; and writes a passionate letter to the Guardian about the disrepair of George Herbert's church at Bemerton. But he pronounces Salisbury Cathedral the most disappointing he ever saw, and' journeys through some of the prettiest country of England without a single remark on its natural aspects.
But all this time Edward Steere had not discovered his true vocation. There are no traces in his biography of precocious spirituality. But he seems to have grown up from boyhood to manhood in a simple, rational, and intensely practical religion. His views were strictly orthodox. He referred all questions of religious truth to the test of authority, and rigidly conformed his own life to the Church's rule and practice. But his theology was conspicuously anti-Roman ; and on some points of great importance, such as Eucharistic adoration and habitual confession, he held language which sometimes obscured his essentially dogmatic sacramentalism. He was ex- ceptionally charitable towards opinions which he did not share ; and his correspondence with his bosom-friend, Lord Justice • d Memoir of Edward Steers. D.D., LL.D., Third Musionary Bishop in Central .Africa. By lbe Her. R. M Heanley, Queen's College, Oxford. Rector of Wainfleet All Sainte% and Honorary Secretary of tl e Universities' Minim to Ceatral Africa. London : George Bell and Sons. 1885.
Fry, who naturally approaches theology from the Quaker point of view, is full of candid and reasonable argumentation for the faith which was in him. Violence, declamation, over- statement, and exaggeration seem to have been constitu- tionally distasteful to him ; and his strong sense of humour must have acted as a powerful safeguard against extravagances of thought and expression.
He was intensely in earnest about the moral and physical good of his fellow-men, and it was through and in his attempts to minister to others that the call came which showed him the true purpose of his life. In 1853, Edward Steere joined some young men belonging to the congregation of St- Matthews's, City Road, in an organisation which they called " The Brotherhood of St. Mary." They met together for purposes of united devotion, and for the performance of good works connected with the church. Later on, the Brotherhood was merged in the Guild of St. Alban; but Edward Steere continued to preside over it when it had become a branch of the Guild ; he edited its magazine, printed its publications with his own hands, and mainly compiled its manual of offices. Some admirable letters and addresses which, as " Steward " of the Guild, he addressed to his brother- members, are reproduced in this volume. In 1854, Edward Steere inherited a small fortune from an uncle, severed his connection with the Bar, and gave himself wholly to the work of the Church. In 1855, he attempted to found near Tamworth a small religions community of men ; but this- experiment, it seems, disappointed his expectations, though it furnished him with experience which in later years he turned to excellent account. The collapse of the community led its to seek Holy Orders. He had repeatedly been urge& to do so by those who knew his mind and saw his work ; nor, indeed, could any experienced eye have failed to discern his vocation. But he had hitherto held aloof, partly because of a modest sense of his own unfitness for the most august of partly because he was determined to try the experi- ment of reviving the Common Life for laymen in the Church of• England. The failure of this experiment left him free to follow his own bent, and he was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Exeter in 1856, and licensed to the curacy of Kings' Kerswell. Here the smallness of the parish left him much at leisure for study, and he produced an Account of the Religious Society in England in the Eighteenth Century, a history of Early Christian Persecutions, and an Introductory Preface to Butler's Analogy.
In 1858, he moved to Lincolnshire, where he became curate to his friend, the Rev. W. G. Tozer, at Burgh-cum-Winthorpe. He was ordained priest at Lincoln in the same year, and a few- weeks later he married a lady who belonged to his previous parish. They had no children, and before many years were over she became a hopeless invalid. He took sole charge of the parish of Skegness, now a popular seaside resort, then an uncivilised and desolate village. Then he threw himself into parochial work with characteristic energy, and won from the fishermen the delightful eulogy of " a downright shirt- sleeve man, and a real Bible parson ;" and though he urged the claims of his own Church with all the zeal of a whole- hearted priest, he continued to keep on the best of terms with his Wesleyan neighbours, one of whom said,—" We comes to- church in the morning to please you, Sir, and goes to chapel at night to save our souls."
In 1859, he accepted the rectory of Little Steeping, eight. miles inland from Skegness,—a place of which the savagery and immorality are described in his correspondence in the most unflattering terms. Here he was, in his own words, " schoolmaster, choirmaster, bell-ringer, sexton, architect, painter, and gardener." He built a rectory-house, set the churchyard in order, lighted, warmed, cleaned, painted, re- floored and re-seated the church, reconstructed the school, and organised a night-school. In this vigorous but solitary work, Edward Steere was really, though unconsciously, undergoing the discipline which fitted him to be one of the great pioneers of Christianity and civilisation. In 1862, the missionary bishopric in Central Africa was offered to his friend, neigh- bour, and late rector, the Rev. W. G. Tozer. Talking, over the offer one day at luncheon, Dr. Steere said that he should advise his friend to accept it. Mrs. Steere looked up and said, " You had better go too, Edward, to take care of him." " Do you wish me to go P" he replied. She answered that she did. " Very well, then, I will." And the momentous decision was taken. " It seemed to me," he said in later years,. " an unworthy thing to send one's best friend into the middle of Africa, and to stay comfortably at home oneself." He fully intended, however, that his sojourn in Africa should be only temporary, and that he would return after a year or two to his previous avocations.
Bishop Tozer was consecrated on the Feast of the Purifica- tion, 1863. He sailed immediately for Africa, and on April 20th, accompanied by Dr. Steere and the rest of the missionary party, he left Cape Town for the Zambesi River on board H.M.S. ' Orestes.' Hunted from place to place by fever and famine, the mission finally established itself at Zan- zibar, the capital of Eastern Africa, and the head-quarters of the slave-trade. Here Dr. Steere at once applied him- self to linguistic study. He mastered Swahili, constructed a handbook of the language, reduced the 1Jsambara dialect to writing, and produced a Shambala grammar. Thus equipped, he began his work by training and educating the slave-boys rescued from the dhows. His plan was " not to bring in such numbers as that we might be overwhelmed by a mass of heathenism, but to try and give a Christian tone to our first scholars, and then to bring in a few, time after time, so that they might catch the rising spirit."
In 1867, Dr. Steere felt that the time had come for an extension of his labours, and he established a branch of the mission at Yugo, on the mainland, returning next year to Zanzibar, and next month he set sail for England. He had gone out originally for two years, and stayed for six, working hard at the language, teaching. building, organising, but not personally engaging in directly evangelistic work. But though he now returned to his old home and old occupations, preach- ing, lecturing, addressing Church Congresses, and writing controversial essays, his heart was manifestly in Africa. By the end of 1871, he had finally decided that there, and not in England, his true vocation lay. The contemplated resignation of Bishop Tozer, illness and death among the missionary staff, and a combination of material misfortunes, had brought the mission into very great straits. Dr. Steere found himself on his return the only clergyman left in Zanzibar, and solely responsible for the mission. Meanwhile, Bishop Tozer defini- tively resigned his charge, and, after much hesitation and misgiving, Dr. Steere consented to succeed him. He came home to England, and was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, August 24th, 1874. After a tour of public speaking and preaching on behalf of his mission, he returned to Zanzibar in March, 1875 ; and, with his staff of assistants greatly enlarged, he was able to make a vigorous and successful attack on the inland districts of 1:3-Bambara and Nyassaland. There, as elsewhere, the Bishop's own work consisted rather of founding, organising, teaching, and fight- ing the slave-trade, than of preaching or proselytising. Summing up the results of this expedition, the Bishop wrote : —" The only opposition to be met with is the Mohammedan influence. The whole country, which may roughly be defined as that north and east of the Pangani river, seems quite ready to give a friendly hearing to all we have to say ; and, with good men, and enough of them, I see no reason why it should not all become Christian."
In 1876, the Bishop found his position in Zanzibar sufficiently well established to enable him to carry out a striking scheme which he had long had at heart. This was the establishment, on some convenient spot of the mainland, of a Christian community of freed slaves. On October 16th he left Zanzibar, accompanied by one of his clergy, a lay assistant, and fifty-five freed slaves, besides the necessary equipment of baggage, food, porters, and beasts of burden. He carried with him the portable altar which Bishop Mackenzie had taken out to Cape ToA, and which Bishop Tozer had taken on to Zanzibar. The whole caravan numbered some two hundred souls. At Masasi, on the road to Lake Nyassa, a suitable spot for the settlement was found, and there the Bishop deposited his community, built a house, and laid the foundations of a church. The fatigue and excite- ment connected with the journey told severely on the Bishop's health, ordinarily so robust, and after a severe attack of fever, the English physician at Zanzibar insisted on his returning for a while to England, which he reached on April 20th, 1877. Here he speedily regained strength, and all the summer was busily occupied in speaking, preaching, and writing on behalf of his mission. He preached at Cambridge the Ramade.n sermon on the extension of Christianity in the
Colonies, and at Oxford he received the degree of D.D. In November he returned to Zanzibar, and vigorously
resumed his old work, which now expanded with a rapidity which outran his resources. He had for some time been occupied in translating the Gospels and the daily offices into Swahili, and now he added the Acts of the Apostles, and the Athanasian Creed, and the office of Confirmation. On Christ- mas Day, 1879, the Bishop had the satisfaction of consecrating his first church in Zanzibar, built on the site of the old slave- market, with its altar occupying the spot where the old whipping-post had stood. From this time on,. the work developed apace. A special appeal to England had brought out fresh helpers. The first native deacon was ordained. The Swahili New Testament was completed. The boys' school was largely recruited by consignments of freed slaves. The work on the mainland, no longer superintended by the Bishop, but entrusted to skilled missionaries named by him, spread to Lake Nyassa. But the health of the founder and pioneer of all this enterprise now showed manifest signs of failure, and in 1882 the Bishop returned once more to England, partly to obtain medical advice for himself, and partly to attend the death-bed of Mrs. Steere. In June he took a last leave of his English friends, and by St. Bartholomew's Day he was once again at the post of duty. Three days later he died suddenly.
The results of his life may be thus summed up. When he first arrived in Zanzibar, he had one fellow-worker; when he died, he had a staff of thirty-four Europeans, and nearly as many natives, all of whom had been slaves. He had founded an indigenous Church in Central Africa. He had powerfully- contributed to substitute free labour for slavery. He had given the native tribes the Bible in their own language. He had begun his work with five little slave-boys, naked and starving, in a half-ruined house. Before he died, he had restored great numbers as Christians to their own home, he had founded three great centres of evangelisation on the mainland, and he left as his permanent memorial, where the last public slave-market had stood, a noble church, an in- firmary, a mission-house, crowded schools, and a busy printing- press, all formed by his own judgment, faith, and energy, and to a large extent by his own physical and mechanical labour.
Bishop Steere was in the habit of saying that he had no aptitude for purely missionary work. And though, in view of what we have written, this seems paradoxical, it is. we suspect, true, if by missionary work we mean the power of influencing the conscience and intellect of the individual heathen, and winning him from darkness to light, from heathenism to Christ. Of this aptitude we see no traces in the book before us. But as a founder, organiser, and ruler of men, Bishop Steere has had few equals in his apostolic vocation.
Previous page
