From the Record, March 2nd, 1888.

Among the deaths of last week our readers will have seen the name of the Rev. Francis Storr, Vicar of Brenchley, Kent. The news reached us only in time to record the bare fact, but we cannot pass over in silence a life, uneventful indeed, but none the less noteworthy. Mr. Storr was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of a remarkable band of men, linked together by common views and doctrines, but still more closely united by the apostolic zeal and devotedness to Christ’s service which animated one and all. He was the brother-in-law and intimate ally of Dean Champneys and Bishop Utterton, and the life-long friend of the Bishop of Norwich and the Bishop of Liverpool.

Born in 1808, he graduated at Oxford in 1833 (the year of the first appearance of Tracts for the Times), being awarded an honorary Fourth Class. With the Tractarian movement he felt no sympathy, and, though on terms of friendship with some of the leaders of that movement, from the very first he threw in his lot with the Evangelical party, never swerving in his allegiance to the end, though ripening years taught him more and more to see good in everything and to attach less importance to party distinctions. In the same year he was ordained by the Bishop of Chichester to the curacy of Up-Waltham, and two years after he took the curacy of Beckenham, Kent. Here he married his first wife, Caroline, daughter of Colonel Holland of Langley Farm, Beckenham, a true and constant helpmate during the twenty years that she was spared to share his labours. In 1837 he was presented to the living of Otley, in Suffolk, and in this small but neglected parish his energies found for a time full scope. When he came, there was no parsonage (no previous Rector had ever lived in the parish), the church was dilapidated, and the churchyard a neglected waste. A parsonage was built, the church restored, and the churchyard reclaimed. But the spiritual change wrought by his means in the parish was even more striking. The voice of one crying, not in a dissenting chapel, but from a Church of England pulpit, “Repent ye,” and appealing with all the fervour and some of the eloquence of a Whitfield, to the individual conscience was a strange sound in that sleepy hollow. Those who had never before set foot in a church came, first from curiosity, then from genuine interest, and then carried the good news to their neighbours, so that the little church could sometimes not contain the hearers who came from twenty parishes round. His sermons were wholly extempore; he never took a note with him into the pulpit. In the most literal sense of the words, “he preached unto them the Scriptures,” for having studied the text of the Bible as few clergymen are now wont in these days of multiplied expositions and commentaries, and being gifted with a strong memory, he would pour forth verse after verse in support of any point he was urging, giving in each case the exact reference. But it was even more by house-to-house visitation than in the pulpit that he made his influence felt. By his absolute unselfishness, his large-hearted sympathy, his deep personal humility, and his genial humour, he found his way sooner or later to every heart, and Dissenters who would denounce him in public as part and parcel of the hated and apostate Establishment, welcomed him in private as their truest counsellor and friend. Over children he exercised almost a fascination; they would follow him along the village street like the Pied Piper, and for each child he would have his sportive nickname or little private joke.

Leaving Otley for Acton was one of the greatest trials to his singularly affectionate nature, and to the end of his life Otley and its people were very dear to his heart. But, much as he loved his first parish, he felt that he could not resist the call to a wider sphere of duty. Of his work at Acton, his successful crusade against Sunday cheese-making, and his unflagging work and labour, both spiritual and sanitary, in the fatal cholera year, we have left ourselves no space to speak. We must pass to the last and longest chapter of his life at Brenchley, of which for thirty-four years he was the Vicar. Succeeding the Rev. Richard Davies, the faithful and devoted Secretary of the C.M.S., he accepted as a sacred legacy the furtherance of the claims of that Society. How successfully he pleaded its cause is shown by the fact that in 1886 Brenchley, a rural parish with no resident squire, sent up a larger contribution than the whole of Scotland. The chief proportion of this came from the coppers of missionary boxes, and the proceeds of a missionary basket to which an old servant of the family was “told off.” During his incumbency the growing district of Paddock Wood, and the off-lying hamlet of Matfield, were made into separate parishes. If all parishes had had an Incumbent like the Vicar of Brenchley, we may confidently say that the question of extraordinary tithe would never have arisen. Each defaulter was treated by him as a tenant in arrears with his rent would be treated by an indulgent landlord, and in bad years some remission of tithe was freely granted at a time when such indulgence was unknown, at least in Kent. Nor were the labourers less cared for than the farmers. No man or woman who could show a plausible case of distress was ever sent empty away from the Vicarage, and relief was always, if possible, given in kind or by providing employment. For the hop-pickers who swarmed each autumn from the slums of London one or more Scripture-readers from the London City Mission were always retained; field meetings, magic-lantern entertainments, &c., were got up; pressure was brought to bear on the farmers to supply more decent sleeping accommodation—in a word, they were treated for the time as members of the flock, and, as far as time and opportunity permitted, Christianised. Of his private life this is not the place to speak, but this much we may venture to state—no man since Dr. Primrose numbered so many poor relations, for the plea of poverty or distress was at once admitted by him as a claim of kinship. And he never lost sight of a friend. Curates who had worked with him forty years ago would still write to seek his counsel and help in any difficulty.

For the last ten years of his life it pleased God to afflict him with the hardest of human trials—the total loss of sight. Yet he found a way to turn his loss to gain, and his noble example of cheerful and almost joyous resignation to the will of his Father more than compensated for any diminution of his energy as a pastor. Not indeed that he relaxed or slackened his work to the very end. In his eightieth year it was his habit to take the Communion Service and Sermon in the Morning, and to read Prayers in the Afternoon; and, though he had necessarily to depend more on others for seeking information and carrying out his behests, no household in the parish was unknown or uncared for.

His last prayer, ?? f?e? ?a? ??ess??, was granted him, and he died in harness, quietly, almost painlessly, and with consciousness to the last. One minute only before he was taken, he asked one of his sons on what text he had preached the previous Sunday, and on being told, “Our Father, which art in heaven,” he whispered, “Our Father—in those two words, rightly understood, lies the whole of the Gospel.”