I

The Rev. S. J. Stone, M.A., was the author of two hymns that are known wherever the English tongue is spoken, one the beautiful Lenten litany of love, trust and repentance, “Weary of earth and laden with my sin”; the other that soul-stirring triumph-song, “The Church’s One Foundation,” which—set as it is to majestic battle-march music that fires the imagination—has become, as it were, the Marseillaise of the Church militant and victorious.

When Stone died, and where he wished to die, in the Charterhouse, the busy world learned that the Rector of a City Church, who had done memorable work in an East End parish, and was the author of some famous hymns, had passed away. Those who knew and loved him were aware that a great soul, a hero-heart, a rarely beautiful spirit, had gone to God.

In my little life, the years of which are fast approaching threescore, it has so happened that I have known, sometimes intimately, a number of so-called “eminent” women and men. I have known not a few who in intellectual power, in the brilliance of their gifts, their attainments and achievements, or in what is called “fame,” stood immeasurably higher than Stone. I have known none who, judged by the beauty, purity, and nobility of life and character, was half as great as he. I do not say this, be it noted, under the emotional stress which follows the death of a dearly-loved friend. In such an hour of bitter self-reproach when in retrospect we think of the kindly act which, had it been done (alas, that it was not done!) would have helped our friend through a time of trouble; the generous word which had it been spoken (alas, that it remained unspoken!) might have heartened him when we knew him to be most cast down—these and possibly our poignant sense of remorse, it may be for an actual wrong done, not infrequently cause us to lose our sense of proportion. For the time being at least we over-estimate what was good in him, and under-estimate what was indifferent, or worse.

It is not so that I write of S.J. Stone. Sixteen long years, in which life has never been, nor will be, quite the same, missing that loved presence, have passed away since he was laid to rest in Norwood Cemetery; and to-day with my own life’s end nearing I can say, not only for myself, but for many others who knew him, that so brave of heart was he as to make possible for us the courage of a Coeur de Lion, so knightly of nature as to make possible the honour of an Arthur or a Galahad, so nearly stainless in the standard he set himself, in the standard he attained, as to come, as near as human flesh and blood can come, almost to making possible the purity of the Christ.

I am not unaware what will be in the mind of many who read these words. Some will suspect me if not of insincerity, at least of the foolish use of superlative and hyperbole. Not a few will hold my last comparison as scarcely reverent. And all the while there will not be a single woman or man, with any intimate knowledge of Stone, who, reading what I have written, will not say, at least of what is wholly appreciative (many will resent what I have hereafter to say of his temperamental weaknesses and human defects), “All this is truth, sober and unexaggerated, and yet the man himself was in many respects infinitely greater than he is drawn.”

II

Ever since Stone died my intention has been, before laying down my own pen, some day and so far as I am able, to picture him as I knew him. It seemed to me a duty, no less than a trust, that some of us should put on record what manner of man it was who wrote these noble hymns, and how nobly he lived and died. My reason for delaying thus long about what to me is a labour of love, was the difficulty of picturing Stone as he was, without seeming to exaggerate. Fortunately it has not been left only to me to bear tribute, for the Rev. F.G. Ellerton, Vicar of Ellesmere, to whose father we owe the famous hymn, “Saviour, again to Thy dear Name we raise,” has written a Memoir of his former Vicar (I recollect Mr. Ellerton as Stone’s curate, more than a score of years ago), which was prefixed to a volume of “Selections” from Stone’s Poems and Hymns. Only one who had lived and worked with Stone could have drawn so true and sympathetic a picture of Stone the Christian, Stone the Churchman, Stone the hymn-writer, and Stone the man; and, except for the fact that Mr. Ellerton and I approach our subjects from different standpoints, his beautiful Appreciation will be found amply to confirm what I say in my briefer Silhouette.

It is to a sister of mine that I owe my first meeting with Stone. From her girlhood upward she had contributed poems, sketches and stories to the magazines, earning each year by her pen sums which to the rest of us—how wonderful it all was!—seemed princely, and very proud of her we all were.

Ill-health, and her determination never, after marriage, to let her writing interfere with her duties as wife and mother, have prevented her from following up, except very occasionally, the work in literature which she so loved, though two years ago she was able to publish, and with success, a first long novel.

But at that time she had made some girlish reputation as a writer of religious verse, and was commissioned to contribute “A Golden Song” each week to a well-known periodical. Stone’s attention was attracted by the sweet-briar simplicity and beauty of some of these “Golden Songs,” and when he and my sister chanced to meet, each was singularly drawn to the other, and so it was that first she and he, thereafter he and I, became friends and remained so to the end.

Now let me try to describe Stone as he was at the time of our first meeting, when he was in early middle life. Emerson said once that we take a man’s measure when first we meet him—and every time we meet him. One’s first comment at sight of Stone would inevitably have been: “A Man!” And one’s second: “An Englishman!”

Englishman was written, as the phrase runs, “all over him”—in appearance, in voice, as well as bearing—and I can conceive no disguise out of which the unmistakable Englishman would not have peeped. Unmistakably English as he was in appearance, yet, when one talked with him, and he became interested, enthusiastic, excited, when he spoke of his life’s work, his life’s hopes and dreams, but most of all when one could induce him to talk of England, Oxford, patriotism, loyalty, love, duty or poetry, and saw the flash in the eye, the throb at the temples, and heard the thrill in the voice, one’s next comment was, “Here surely is not part Anglo-Saxon, but all Celt!”

The Celt in him, for—though he never told us whence it came—the quicksilver of Celtic blood, there must have been in his veins, made mock continually of the Anglo-Saxon. Yet, either the Fairy Godmother, or the forgotten forbear who was responsible for this freakish intermingling of quick-running Celtic blood, all ardour and eagerness, with the slower, surer and steadier pulsing of an Anglo-Saxon strain, doled out to Stone none of the Celtic defects but only of the Celtic best. From the irritability, uncertainty, and the “impossibility” which make some Celts—at all events some of us Irishmen—an inscrutable problem and mystery of Providence, as well as an ever-present perplexity to our best friends, Stone was entirely free. In that respect he was inwardly, and in character, as truly English as he was truly English in the outer man.

He was of exceptional physique and presence. Only slightly above the middle height, but muscular of limb, broad and square-shouldered, and deep-chested as a lion, Stone was a fine specimen of virile manhood. Proud of his strength, for, though devoid of vanity, he had his full share of what I may call a seemly and proper pride, he carried himself well and erectly—head up, shoulders squared—walking with a step that was firm, steady and soldierly.

And here I may interpolate that, a soldier’s grandson as he was, all Stone’s boyhood longings were set on soldiering. Only the knowledge that it was the heart’s desire of the father and mother he so revered that he should follow his father by taking Holy Orders, and later the conviction that he was called of God to the ministry, kept him from a commission in the Army. His renunciation of his boyhood’s dream was the first great act of obedience in a life of consistent obedience and devotion to duty. The sacrifice—as it was—of his own wishes, was made manfully and uncomplainingly, and he threw himself whole-heartedly thereafter into his ministerial work. But the pang remained, and to the last, when he spoke of soldiering, there was that in his voice and in his eye which reminded one of an exile, looking across far waters to the land of his birth. To Stone, to have led a company, or a half-company, and for the first time, into action in the service of his Sovereign and of his country, would have been, in the words of George Meredith, the very “bend of passion’s rapids,” as supreme a moment as Rossetti’s “sacred hour for which the years did sigh.” That he would have made a gallant soldier, I am sure, but not a great one. Leading a charge, he would have been irresistible, but his was too highly-strung, too impulsive a temperament, calmly to plan out and to carry through the cold-blooded details of a campaign. He was to the last a soldier in heart, if not in looks, for, by the beard and a certain breezy bluffness of presence, he might very well have passed for a sailor. The head was finely moulded and on large leonine lines, the forehead broad, full and lofty, the nose strong, straight, purposeful and well-proportioned, and the set of the firm mouth, and the shaping of the determined chin, were in keeping with the forcefulness and the frankness of the eyes and of the whole face. The darkness—so dark as to be almost black—of the straight thick hair, which was brushed up and off the forehead, accentuated the Saxon ruddiness of his complexion and the glossy red-brown (like that of a newly-fallen chestnut) of his crisply curling moustache and beard, which in sunlight were almost auburn.

His eyes instantly challenged and held your own, for he invariably looked the person to whom he spoke fully and fearlessly, but never inquisitively (one cannot think of the word in connection with Stone), in the face; and it was his eyes that most remained in your memory when he was gone. “Intent,” set, and full of fire, the look in them was like the spoken word of command which calls soldiers to attention. Brown in colouring, they were not the hard, glittering and unrevealing brown which one sometimes sees in woman or in man, but eyes that, when he was reading poetry, could shine as if his soul were a lit taper, of which they were the flame. At other times, I have seen them as merry as a happy boy’s, as untroubled as cool clear agate stones at the bottom of a brook. His were eyes that recalled the love and devotion which look out at us from the eyes of some nobly-natured dog, yet eyes that when he was preaching, and the very soul within him was trembling under a terrible sense of responsibility to his people and to God, could burn fiercely red, like a fanned coal in a furnace, but always as true, brave and loyal eyes as ever looked out of human head.

III

In the fact that Stone was at heart intensely human lay the secret of his hold upon the hearts of others. I have claimed high place for him and have called him by high name, but a “saint” at least I have never called him nor claimed him to be. We have been told that it is impossible to be heroic in a high hat, nor is it easy to picture a “saint” in a very pepper of a temper (to say nothing of a boating sweater) at loggerheads, and more than half minded to knock down, a foul-mouthed bargee. Stone’s Homeric laughter would not have accorded ill with some Valhalla of the gods, but his rollicking sense of fun, his schoolboy high spirits, still remembered affectionately and joyfully as they are by some who were with him, first as a boy, and thereafter as more than a middle-aged man at Charterhouse, suggest neither a nimbus nor the Saints’ Calendar.

In later life, when the endless calls upon his time barred him from following, other than rarely, the field sports that he so loved, and even from the exercise which was so necessary for a man of his physique, Stone not only put on weight, as happens always with athletes out of training, but developed a tendency to stoutness—not, I gather, from some study of the Old Masters, in keeping with the character of Saints, who as a class do not appear to run to flesh.

Neither in looks nor in his life was there anything about Stone of the ascetic who, living aloof and apart, tells over to himself—the beads, as it were, in a rosary of self-mortification—the list of pleasures denied, until in the contemplation of his self-denials he comes at last to find a melancholy pleasure. Stone, on the contrary, was the most natural and normal of men, with a healthy appetite for the good things of this world. If he fasted, as was the case during such a season as Holy Week, none knew of it except himself. He held that the season, in which the Church bids us look back in awe and worship upon the agony of our Lord’s Passion, is not a time for bodily indulgence by Christ’s minister. But fasting in a monkish sense, or as followed by the Roman Catholic Church, he neither followed himself nor enjoined others to follow, and such fasting as he practised was more in the way of salutary discipline than anything else, and he imposed no fasting upon others.

None the less, though Stone was, as I have said, no saint, I doubt whether any saint who was ever canonised had half so child-pure a heart or lived half so stainless a life. His was not the negative purity of the cold-blooded, the anÆmic, or the passionless, to whom the temptations of the flesh made small appeal. He was a full-blooded, healthy and whole-natured man, a splendid “animal,” by whom the animal (which by God’s wisdom and grace is in us all) was not done violence to, stamped down, crushed out, and unnaturally suppressed, to his own physical and spiritual detriment and even danger. That is the unwisest of all courses to pursue. By mutilating and maiming the beautiful work and image of God in us, which since He made it must in itself be innocent and beautiful, we sin against our own human nature and against God. Human nature is like a tree. It must have space in which to fulfil the purpose for which it was intended, and in which to grow. Crush down, and seek to crush out, its natural expansion, and it takes distorted shapes (crippled limbs, as it were, on the tree of life) and hideous fungus-like boles and excrescences appear on what would otherwise have been a fair, straight, and shapely young growth. In Stone (to return to my original metaphor) the animal, which is in us all, was not a beast to be bludgeoned down, or to drag us to earth, but a beautiful wild and winged creature which brings strength and gladness to human life, and, wisely guided and controlled, may even bear us aloft and afar. In Stone it was so dominated by an iron will, so sublimated by knightly and noble ideals, and by his innate purity of soul, as to make impossible what was gross, sensual or base. And may I add, perhaps wickedly, that the animal in him was sometimes a joy as when by sheer brute force, if you like so to call it, he fell upon (so I was once told) three blackguards who, late one dark night, were foully assaulting a poor girl in what was then a lonely part of London Fields. Stone heard her screams, rushed to her help, and knocked out his first man with one blow. Then he closed with number two, and trouncing him so soundly that the fellow howled for mercy, flung him to the ground, and made off after number three, who had taken to his heels.

I can well imagine Stone’s sportsmanlike joy and the flash of his eyes when, as I am informed, he said, “Thank heaven I learned to use my fists at Charterhouse! and thank heaven for what rowing did for my biceps at Oxford. I think I’ve given those two scoundrels a lesson.” He shook his head reminiscently and mournfully. “I’d have given five pounds to have got my fists on that third rascal’s hide. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed pommelling those other two scoundrels more than anything that has happened since I came to Haggerston.”

Then, seeing, perhaps, a whimsical look in his companion’s eye, and perhaps already asking himself whether “taking on” three blackguards at fisticuffs, and badly punishing two out of the three in a fair fight, would by every one be considered decorous or becoming in a clergyman, he broke into infectious laughter that was directed entirely against himself.

No, apart from the question whether this story (I tell it as it was told me long ago) be true or not true, I do not claim for S.J. Stone that he was a saint. To some men the consciousness of what Stevenson called “a healthy dash of the brute” necessitates an ever watchful “on guard” lest one day the brute spring out to overpower the angel. To Stone—so wholly had he made honour, purity, and truth the very habit of his life—a lapse into anything false, impure, or dishonourable, into thinking or speaking, or even into allowing others, in his presence, to speak what was evil or slanderous, had become impossible. Had the proofs, or what seemed like the proofs, of some base act on Stone’s part been brought to the knowledge of any friend who knew him, as I knew him, that friend would not have stooped to examine them. His reply would have been, “I know this man, and though I am aware that he can be prejudiced, stubborn, overbearing, irritable, and that faults of temper, errors of judgment, and the like, may be laid to his charge, I know him well enough to be sure that of what is base he is incapable. Were all the facts before me, they would do no more than reveal him, possibly in a quixotic, but at least in a nobly chivalrous light.”

For all his quixotism, chivalry, and hot-headedness, Stone held so strongly that, as Christ’s minister, a clergyman must in certain matters be so entirely beyond even a shadow of reproach, that he was singularly wise and guarded in his dealings with the other sex. The foolish girls or women who go simpering to a clergyman, especially if a bachelor as Stone was, to ask advice on love-affairs and the like, he instantly if considerately dismissed to seek the advice of their mother or of some good woman known to him; and at all times, and upon all questions, he avoided seeing women-callers alone—not because he feared evil in them or in himself, but because he felt he owed it to his sacred office to avoid even the appearance of anything upon which evil-thinking folk might choose to put an evil construction.

He was not without experiences—what clergyman is?—of, in other respects, worthy and well-meaning women who, even in connection with Church work, contrive to set people by the ears, or otherwise to cause dissension and trouble. With these he was impatient. He did not hesitate to deal summarily with them, nor firmly, if considerately, to speak his mind; but Womanhood, I might almost say every woman, he held, if only for his own mother’s sake, if only because of a woman the Saviour of the world was born, in a reverence that no folly or sin could altogether break down. I have heard him speak to the poor harlot of the street—his “Sister” as he would not have hesitated to call her—with sorrowful courtliness, and with the pitifulness, the gentleness, and the consideration, which one uses to (as indeed not a few of such unhappy women are) an erring and ignorant child.

I remember, on another and very different occasion, a girl of the soft and silly type coming to the vicarage one day when I was with Stone—I think she came about a Confirmation Class. She had a certain innocence in her face; not the challenging, starry purity that one sees in some faces, but a negative, babyish innocence, which was pretty enough, and appealing in its way, but that meant no more, probably, than that the girl had not yet had to make choice for herself between good and evil.

“Did you notice the flower-like beauty of that child’s face?” Stone asked me, when she had gone. “In the presence of such exquisite purity and innocence,” he went on gravely, and with intense reverence in his voice, “one feels convicted of sin, as it were. One is so conscious of one’s own coarseness, grossness, and impurity as to feel unworthy to stand in such presence!”

And all the time, the white armour of purity in which he was clad, the armour and purity of his own soul’s—a strong man’s—forging, was compared with hers, as is the purity of fine gold tried in the furnace to metal mixed with base earth and newly brought all untested from a mine.

IV

His unfailing sense of humour, his boyish and buoyant love of fun, like the cork jacket by means of which a swimmer rides an incoming wave, carried Stone through difficulties which would have depressed another. Let me put one such instance on record. To brighten in any way the drab days of the poorest folks in his East End parish, he counted a privilege as well as a happiness, and he was constantly devising means for bringing some new gladness to their lives—the gift of a sorely needed bit of furniture, or a coveted ornament, a boating party with the children in Victoria Park, a magic-lantern entertainment—anything in fact which seemed to him likely to make them forget their many troubles and to call them out of themselves. Most of the women in his parish were poor, many pitifully so. Here was a wife toiling all day in a laundry, to keep the home together, while her husband was out of work, or worse still, while her husband was on the drink; and there, a widow, the sole support of several children.

One day when Stone received an unexpected cheque—I think it was for the sale of his book of poems—he unfolded to me, radiant himself with happiness at the thought, a plan for taking some score of the very poorest mothers of the parish for an outing to Southend.

The great day—as it was in the lives of these poor people—came, and was fortunately fine. The party caught an early train to Southend, spent a long summer day by the sea, gathered at the appointed time, happy if tired, at the railway station, to find that Stone had misread the time-table, and that the last train to London had just gone. Here were some twenty mothers—mostly with husbands who looked to them for the preparation and cooking of supper at night, and of breakfast next morning. To these husbands telegrams of explanation and appeasement must, if the worse came to the worst, and return that night were impossible, be despatched. Other mothers there were with children awaiting their mother’s home-coming for a last meal and to be put to bed; and all the twenty good women—if to London they could not get that night—themselves requiring supper, and some decent place in which to sleep. Stone’s face, brick-red with mortified self-anger at his own muddling, as the agitated mothers crowded and clamoured around him, two or three shrilly or tearfully expatiating on the terrible things that would await them at the hands of their lord and master, should that lord and master and the children go supperless to bed, and rise breakfastless next morning, was, I am told, a study in dismay and bewilderment, until he discovered that, by paying for it out of his own pocket, a special train could be run.

Relieved to find that no one except himself would have to suffer for his carelessness, and even while ruefully regarding the document by the signing of which he made himself responsible for the entire cost (no inconsiderable sum to a poor man as he was) of the special train, the Gilbertian side of the situation—that he, a bachelor, should have a score of wives and mothers upon his hands—dawned upon him. He broke, so my informant tells me, into bluff and hearty Berserker-like laughter, till his chestnut beard wagged, and his burly form rocked; and vowing that—though he must in consequence go short for many a day of every luxury—the lesson he had received, and the story which he would then be able to tell against himself, were cheap at the price, he signed the document, and made mock of himself and his own carelessness all the way home.

Another story was once told me of Stone, concerning the accuracy of which I have my doubts. What happened might well, I admit, have happened to him, but my impression is that it was a friend of his who was the guilty party. However, here is the story, as it was told me, of Stone.

He was to take an afternoon service at a church—I think in Hoxton. Like many poets and some clergymen he was not always punctual, and when he arrived he surmised, by the fact that the bell had stopped, and that there was no thin and dribbling stream of late-comers filing through the doors, that he was more than a little late. The congregation as he saw was on its knees, so diving into the vestry, which was empty, he hastily threw his surplice over his head, and hurrying to his place in the chancel, read out the opening words of the Evening Prayer.

“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive,” and thence passed on to the familiar “Dearly beloved brethren,” and so on to the end of the service—to discover when returning to the vestry, that he had inflicted upon the unfortunate congregation the penance of two Evensongs on the same afternoon. He had been under the impression that the service commenced at four o’clock, whereas the hour fixed was three. In Stone’s absence the curate-in-charge had felt that there was nothing for it but for him, the curate, to read the service himself, which he did, and in fact he had made an end of it, had pronounced the Benediction, and for some reason had left the church, not by the vestry, but by another door leading direct to the vicarage. It was the custom at the church in question for the congregation to stand while the clergy were passing out, and to return to their knees for a brief silent prayer, after the clergy had passed out. It was at this moment that Stone is supposed to have arrived and hurried in, to begin the service all over again.

V

At Oxford Stone had been an athlete, and an athlete and sportsman—oarsman, skater, fisherman and first-class shot—he remained almost to his life’s end. He was captain of the Pembroke boat, and stroked the college eight. Legend has it that he was chosen for his “Blue”—but did not have the honour of rowing against Cambridge for the following reason.

Between his merits as an oarsman and those of another candidate, there was absolutely nothing to choose. The other man was as good as, but no better than Stone, and Stone was as good as, but no better than, the other. As a way out of the difficulty it was thought best to decide the question by the spin of a coin, and Stone’s luck was uppermost. He was delighted, for no man would more eagerly have coveted his “Blue” than he, until he learned that it was a matter of “now or never” for his rival, who was shortly going down, and so would stand no other chance of rowing in the great race. As it could matter neither way for the boat’s success which had the seat, Stone, who was staying on at Pembroke and so would be eligible another year, pleaded that his rival be given this, his only chance—with the result that Stone’s own second chance never came.

So runs the legend of how Stone missed his “Blue.” As I never questioned him concerning its truth, and he was the last man to speak of such an incident himself, I relate it merely as it was related to me, and with no other comment than that such impulsive generosity is just what might have been expected from this clerical Don Quixote of lost causes, lost chances, forlorn hopes and self-forgetful chivalry.

To say of a man that all his geese were swans, as was often said of Stone, implies, indirectly, that he was something of a fool, if a generous one. It is true that Stone wished to think well of whatever a friend had done. If it were ill done he was not so blind as not to know it was ill done, and was too honest not to say so, if asked for an opinion, or to remain silent, if unasked. But if it were not ill done, then young and keen-visioned Joy, as well as dim-eyed Dame Pride alike clapped magnifying glasses on nose, to show him the thing not as it was, but as it appeared through the eyes of joy and pride in a friend’s work.

So, too, in regard to the friend himself. If Stone saw, or thought he saw, in his friend, some streak, no matter how rudimentary or infinitesimal of, let us say unselfishness, he saw it not as it was in his friend, but magnified to the scale in which it existed in himself. Hence his appreciation of a friend’s gifts or qualities and his own gratitude for some small service rendered were preposterously out of all proportion to the facts. For instance, I had been at some quite small trouble in reading, by his wish, the proofs of his Lays of Iona, and also, by his wish, in sending him my criticisms. Here is his letter (Oct. 23, 1897) in acknowledgment:

My dear Kernahan,

What thoroughness of friendship you have shown me from first to last in the matter of the Lays! Certainly I will alter the “no” to “not” in the Preface, if a second edition permits me. I had not noticed the error and jumped with a “How could I”! of exclamation when I read your note. You comforted me very much in the latter part of your note when you spoke of sundry passages you approved, especially by what you said of the humorous part of the work. I had specially feared about this, and indeed I had put in these two occasional pieces only to please my sister.

Good-bye, dear friend,

Ever yours gratefully and affectionately,
S. J. Stone.

Everyone who knew Stone intimately will bear me out in saying that the gratitude here expressed, and disproportionate as it may be, was absolutely sincere. He literally glowed with gratitude for any small service done, or trivial personal kindness, and said no word more than he meant in making his acknowledgment, for of “gush,” of what was effusive or insincere, he had something like horror, and was as incapable of it, as he was of falsehood or of craft. And in regard to men and women whom he loved, it was not so much that he mistook geese for swans, as that he remembered that, on land, a swan’s waddle is no less unlovely than a goose’s, whereas, on water or on wing, a goose, no less than a swan, is not without grace. He idealised his friends—he saw in his mind’s eyes, his geese a-wing in the heavens or a-sail on water, as well as waddling on land, and loved them for the possibilities, and for the hidden graces he saw within. He was by no means the merely credulous, if generous fool, that some thought him. On the contrary, for most human weaknesses, he had an uncommonly shrewd and sharp eye, but he appealed always to the best and noblest, never to the vain or selfish side of those with whom he came into contact, and so his own unwavering faith in God, in Christ, and in human nature, was not only the cause of, but seemed to create similar and sincere faith on the part of others, just as his own integrity made even the rascal or the infirm of purpose ashamed of rascality or of weakness. But tricked, betrayed and deceived, or confronted with evil, Stone’s wrath was terrible and consuming.

I remember the blaze in his eyes, the fury in his face, concerning a scoundrel who had boasted of the deliberate betrayal, and cowardly and calculated desertion of a trustful girl. Had the villain fallen at the moment, when Stone first heard the facts, into my friend’s hands, there would have been left upon the fellow’s body and face, and from Stone’s fist, marks which would have borne witness to the end of his life of the punishment he had received. His own bitterest enemy, Stone could freely forgive, but for the man or woman whom he held to be the enemy of God, he had small mercy. Even in matters not of great consequence, but upon which he felt strongly, he was inclined to override his opponent, and generally to carry things with a high hand. That he always spoke, wrote, or acted with judgment, I do not maintain. His motives none could question, but his judgment, even his best friend sometimes doubted.

When I speak of him as obstinate, I must not be understood as meaning the type of obstinacy which is more frequently associated with weakness than with strength. Obstinacy, however, of a sort—stubbornness if you so like to call it—was undoubtedly a temperamental defect. He was inflexibly convinced that his own beliefs in regard to God, to the Throne, to the State, to the Church, and even in regard to politics—inherited as some of these beliefs were, influenced as were others by class feeling, by education, and by environment—were the only possible beliefs for a Christian, a Churchman, an Englishman and a gentleman. Hence he could not understand the position of those who differed, and was impatient of opposition.

I once heard him described by some one who misunderstood him as a man with a grievance, and a man with too thin a skin. His sensitiveness I do not deny, but it was a sensitiveness which was all for others, never for himself. And so far from being one of those single-cuticle abnormalities whose skin “goose-fleshes” at the very thought of cold, who at the approach of a rough blast wince in anticipation as well as in reality, and suffer more perhaps from the imagined effects of the buffeting than from the buffeting itself, Stone not only never troubled to ask whether the blast was, or was not, coming his way, but enjoyed battling with it when it came. If things went badly with him, he took Fate’s blows unconcernedly, and blamed only himself. About his own ills and sorrows, or breakdown in health, he was the most cheerful of men, but he could and would concern himself about the sorrows or troubles of others, and would move heaven and earth in his efforts to right their wrongs, if wrongs to be righted there were. That is not the way of the man with a grievance. The man with a grievance growls but never fights. He wears his grievance as a badge in his buttonhole, that all may see, and you could do him no unkinder turn than to remove the cause of it.

Stone never had a grievance, but he was ready to make the grievances of his people, real grievances, their grievous wrongs, not fancied ones, his own; and more than one employer of sweated labour, more than one owner of an insanitary slum, and occasionally some Parish Council, or public body in which Bumbledom and vested interests were not unknown, had cause to think Stone too touchy, too sensitive, and too thin-skinned, where the lives of little children, and the bodily and spiritual welfare of his people were concerned.

VI

In politics Stone was the stoutest of old-fashioned Tories, and by every instinct and sympathy an aristocrat. Like a certain courtier of high birth who expressed pleasure at receiving the Garter because “there is no pretence of damned merit about it,” he believed whole-heartedly in the hereditary principle. I am not sure, indeed, that he would not have thought it well that spiritual as well as temporal rank should go by inheritance. An archbishop who came of a long line of archbishops and was trained from birth upwards for that high office, Stone would probably have held to be a more fitting Spiritual Head than one whose preferment was due to his politics, to his suavity, and to the certainty that he would act upon “safe” and conventional lines. He believed in Government at home and abroad, in Great Britain as well as in her Dominions and Colonies, by the “ruling orders,” by the class that he held to be born with the power to command. In himself he possessed the power to command in a remarkable degree. I have heard him sternly rebuke and even silence seditious or blasphemous Sunday afternoon speakers in Victoria or Hyde Park, and I do not remember one occasion when he was answered with other than a certain sullen and unwilling deference, for, in spite of his authoritative and even autocratic way, something there was about him that compelled respect. A Socialistic orator of my acquaintance once spoke of him—not to his face—as one whose politics were pig-headed and his loyalty pig-iron. I am not altogether sure what constitutes pig-iron, but if the Socialist meant that Stone’s loyalty was rigid and unbending I do not know that I should quarrel with the description. It was in his loyalty to the throne that all his intolerance came out. Even those who were at heart no less loyal than he laughed sometimes at the boyishness and the extravagance of his worship for the Queen. The Queen, since she reigned by divine right, could do no wrong, and had Stone lived in Stuart times he would have died upon the scaffold, or fallen upon the field, for his Sovereign’s sake; nor am I sure that even for a Richard the Third or a King John, had either been his Sovereign, he would not equally have drawn the sword.

In religious as in other matters, all Stone’s sympathies were with those who have an affirmation to make, as contrasted with those who have an objection to lodge. He detested iconoclasts, and was prejudiced beforehand against any belief that he classed with “negatives” as opposed to “positives.” Just as he disliked the name of Protestant, because he could not understand a Christian man electing to be known by a name which “protests” against another’s faith, instead of affirming his own, so he found it hard to understand a Church which by its name proclaimed itself as not being in “conformity” with or as “dissenting” from another Church.

Stone could not understand that anyone should prefer the Free Church to the Anglican Catholic Church, but since it was so (and that it was so he sincerely and deeply grieved) he felt it better, while friendly and cordial to all the Nonconformists with whom he was brought into contact, that each should go his own way and worship God in his own manner. Hence he was not of the school of Churchmen who busy themselves in bringing about a closer union between Anglicanism and the Free Churches, and are for the removal of landmarks and the interchange of pulpits.

On the other hand, he attacked the religion of no one who believed in the Fatherhood of God, the Divinity, Atonement, and Resurrection of our Lord, but reserved all his fighting power for what (a true Browning lover) he would have accounted “the arch fiend in visible form”—the enemies of God and His Christ. He had no sympathy whatever with Churchmen who occupy themselves in bickerings and controversies with Nonconformists, or in denouncing the Church of Rome. To him good Churchmanship—and never was there stronger Churchman than he—meant, not disapproval of, dislike to, or antagonism towards other Churches, be they Roman or Free, but active love, practical loyalty and devotion to his own beloved Mother Church. Hence he never proselytised. He never sought to turn a Nonconformist into a Churchman, or a Roman into an English Catholic, but he would have fought to the last to keep a member of the Church of England from forsaking that Communion for any other.

But there was no indefiniteness about his attitude to Rome. Writing to me in 1899 about some one he and I knew, who had gone over to Rome, he said:

“I am deeply sorry. Rome is a real branch of the Church of the Redemption, and has the creeds, the ministry, and the Sacraments. But to leave our august Mother for Rome! I do not mean to imply that to be a Roman, or to become a Roman, has necessarily anything to do with vital error. I speak strongly only on the point of comparison, and as a loyal, happy, and satisfied Catholic of the English branch. Certain defects I own to in our English Mother, but they are very small and few, as regards the accretions and superfluities, to say the least of them (of which the gravest is Mariolatry), of her Roman Sister. On the other hand they are sisters.” He loved the name of “Catholic,” and resented the somewhat arrogant claim to a monopoly in that beautiful word by the Church of Rome, and if one of his own congregation used it in this restricted sense, he never failed, gently but firmly, to make the correction “Roman Catholic.” His own Churchmanship he would probably have described as that of an Anglican Catholic to which, while agreeing, I may add that he was, at one and the same time, of the Sacerdotal and of the Evangelical Schools.

Stone’s sacerdotalism, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, was not of a “priestly” order, and “priest” was perhaps the last word which anyone who did not know him to be a clergyman would have used of him, or by which his personality would by a stranger have been described. A Sacerdotalist he undoubtedly was in the sense of holding firmly by apostolical succession; but to me he seemed a Sacerdotalist chiefly in the taking of his sacred office sacredly. Nor to this day, and for all his sacerdotalism, am I sure which of the two he placed the higher—the priesthood or the people. None could have held more firmly than he that a priest is consecrated of God. None could have been more entirely convinced that the priesthood is consecrated by, and exists only by, and for, the people. He was, if anything, more of a congregationalist—using the word apart from its purely denominational meaning—than are the majority of ministers of that denomination themselves. The congregational character of the service at his church was, next to reverence, the outstanding feature. The congregation were as much in evidence throughout as the clergy. They repeated aloud every prayer for which there was precedent, or authority for so doing, instead of the prayer being offered, as in most churches, only by one of the clergy.

So, too, with the musical service. There was no anthem, and so far from the burden of the singing resting upon the choir, Stone often announced a hymn thus: “The congregation alone singing all except the first and last verses.” More “hearty” congregational singing than at his church I have never heard outside the Metropolitan Tabernacle (unlovely name for a Christian Church!) when under that great preacher and true minister of God, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, five thousand voices unaccompanied by organ or any other musical instrument joined in singing the Old Hundredth. High Churchman as doctrinally Stone was, he was not a Ritualist. Incense and vestments were never used in any church of his, and though his people turned naturally to him for help and advice in trouble, “Confessions,” in the accepted sense of the word, were unknown. He was never in conflict with his Bishop, or the other ecclesiastical authorities, if only for the reason that his loyalty and his fine sense of discipline made him constitutionally incapable of breaking the law. He knelt reverently in prayer before and after Consecration, and at other times, but genuflexions and ceremonious and constant bowing to the altar on the part of the celebrant, his assistants and the choir, were absent from the service for which he was responsible.

On one slight but significant act of reverential ritual he, however, laid stress. Whenever, in church or out of church, Stone spoke or heard spoken the name of our Lord, he never failed, no matter where or with whom he was, reverently, even if unnoticeably, slightly to bow his head. “God the Father and God the Holy Ghost,” I once heard him say, “no man has ever seen. But God, the Son, for our sakes, stooped to become Man, and to be seen of men. For that reason, a reason surely which should make us more, not less loving and adoring, some have doubted or denied His Godhead. Hence when I hear that Holy Name, I incline my head in adoring worship, as a protest if you like against the base ingratitude which—because for our sakes He stooped to become Man—would deny that He is more than man, and in acknowledgment of Him as my Redeemer, my Lord and my God.” He was indeed so entirely a poet that no word or name, which stood for that which he revered, was ever by him lightly uttered or used. Between his mother and himself—his father died either just before, or soon after, I came to know the son, and I never saw the two together, though I know that their relationship was ideal—existed the most beautiful love and devotion, and if only for her sake, the very word “mother” was consecrate upon his lips. Four times only is the halo seen around the head of mortal. Around the head of a little soul newly come from God, there is seen the rainbow-hued halo of childhood; around the head of lad or maiden, man or woman, who, in love’s supreme and sacred season, is lifted nearest to God, there radiates the rose-coloured halo of love; around the head of those who have newly gone to God, glows the purple-royal halo of death; and around the head of a young mother, fondling her first-born, shines out the white and sacred halo of motherhood.

To Stone the halo of motherhood was visible, even around the head of those whom this world counts and calls “fallen.” Motherhood was to him, in itself, and apart from the attendant circumstances, so sacred and beautiful, that the very word “mother,” as he spoke it, seemed surrounded by the halo of his reverence. The widowed Queen whom he knew and loved, and by whom he was held in regard and esteem, was to him no less our Mother—the type and symbol of English Motherhood—than she was our Sovereign. Of the august and ancient Catholic Church of which he was so loyal a son he rarely used the simile “The Bride of Christ,” which one frequently hears in sermons, but spoke of her, and with eyes aglow, as the Mother of her people; and it was of England, our Mother, that he sang with passionate love in many of his poems. So, too, the words “Holy Communion” assumed, as he spoke them, a meaning that was sacramental. The reverent lowering of his voice was like the dipping of a battleship’s ensign.

Again, in that portion of the service, in which, preceding the reading of the Ten Commandments, the Celebrant says, “God spake these words, and said,” many clergymen lay no stress on any particular word, but speak or intone all six in one more or less monotonous voice. It was not so with Stone. He spoke the passage thus:

“God——” the Holy Name was uttered with intense reverence and solemnity, which recalled to the congregation how awful is the Source whence these ancient Commandments come. Then there was a pause that every hearer might attune his or her thought to reverent attention, and the Celebrant would continue—“spake these words, and said,” passing on thence to the First Commandment.

And, lastly, I would say that I never heard human voice thrill with such devotion, such worshipping and wondering adoration, as that with which he spoke the name of our Saviour. That Name, the Holy and adored Name of Jesus, was so linked with all that he held sacred that he never uttered it without pausing before and after the Holy Name, that no less hallowed a word should be neighbour to that Name on his lips.

VII

Upon one incident in my long friendship with Stone I look back with pain and sorrow. He came in late one night, just as the last post had brought me the news—I would not write of such things here except in so far as it bears upon my friend—that the whole edition of my first little book had been sold out.

To-day the writing of a book, if only because it may be the means of bringing influence to bear upon others, is, I am of opinion, an occupation to be followed diligently, conscientiously, and with pleasurable zest. None the less, as compared with what some men are doing in the way of direct personal service to God, to their King, their country and their fellow creatures, it seems to me an occupation too inactive to afford cause for congratulation that one is thus employed. But in those days I desired nothing more than to be a successful author, little imagining that success in authorship does not necessarily mean the making either of literature or of a man.

When Stone came in that night, so full was I of the great news, as I held it to be, about my book, that I must needs rush at him, as volubly and importantly to pour it all out, as if the fate of empires hung upon the issue. He had a genius for friendship, and heard me out patiently and gently to the end, to say: “I am so glad, so very glad, dear fellow, and congratulate you with all my heart,” or words to that effect. Then he broached the subject of his call, a matter of infinitely more importance than any news of mine. It did not concern himself, or I should, I hope, have acted differently, but a member of his congregation, unknown to me, whom Stone was trying to assist in a time of trouble and anxiety. So far as I remember I hastily promised the assistance for which he asked, but, when he essayed to speak further of the matter, I interrupted him rudely, once again and boastfully to speak of my book.

Stone so habitually suppressed it, that few suspected how great was his gift of satire. When he chose, or rather had he so chosen, he could so wing his satiric shaft as to pierce the thickest hide, and never was he more tempted to employ this “devil’s weapon” as he held it to be, than when irritated by vulgar boastfulness.

Looking back long years after upon this incident, I know that to no one could what happened that night be more irritating, and even objectionable, than to Stone. On the part of a friend, it was an affront to everything by which he held in our social code, a wound to his own pride of breeding and good manners. How sorely I must have tempted and irritated him, I now fully realise, yet his affection for the offender held back the stinging word, and neither then, nor at any other time in our long friendship, did I ever hear from him one reproachful or ungentle word. I recall his forbearance to me—a very young man when he was becoming middle-aged, and so might reasonably have spoken—on this particular occasion, an occasion which even now I cannot recall without shame. I recall a score of times when I grieved him by my apathy upon some question upon which he felt intensely, for Stone’s convictions were so positively held that he would readily have gone to the stake in defence of them, and that those he loved, and to whom he looked for sympathy, could be apathetic upon matters which he held to be of vital consequence, was to him a positive pain. I recall all these, and many other things in which I failed or wounded him by some indifference, some thoughtless act, or unconsidered word, and remembering that never once did he fail me by sympathy, interest, help or love withheld—I sicken at my own unworthiness, and at the thought of the sorry return I made for all his love and forbearance.

It is with relief that I turn to another incident in the early days of our friendship.

One night, in the eighties, when I was dining with Stone and his and my kind old friend, the Rev. Frederick Arnold, at St. Paul’s Vicarage, Haggerston, a maid brought in the last post. Stone asked permission to run through his letters, in case there was anything requiring an immediate answer. Over one he uttered an exclamation of glad and grateful surprise.

“Good news?” one of us asked.

“Very good,” said Stone, flushed and radiant. He hesitated a moment. Then, handing Mr. Arnold the letter, he said, “There is no reason why you two, one an old, and the other a young, but both true and dear friends of mine, should not see it.”

It was from the Bishop of London—I think Bishop Jackson, but of this I am not quite sure. In any case it was a very gracious letter. Upon Stone, the Bishop said, the mantle of John Keble had by virtue of his hymns, admittedly fallen. Thus far Stone had for some fifteen years given all his time, energies, and abilities to working among poor and uneducated folk in an East End parish, where practically the whole of the small stipend was swallowed up in church work and charities, and where Stone had no time or opportunity to do justice to his gifts as a writer. The Bishop was aware, he said, that Stone was fast wearing himself out, and could not go on much longer. Hence he had pleasure in putting before Stone the offer of preferment to a West End parish, where he would have an educated, intellectual, and appreciative congregation, as well as the leisure and the opportunity to devote his great gifts as poet and hymn-writer for the benefit of the church and the world. It was a tempting offer, for much as Stone loved sport and travel he had hitherto had neither the time nor the money for anything more extended than a few weeks in Switzerland or in “God’s Infirmary” (as quoting George MacDonald he often called the country), generally on a visit to his old friend the Rev. Donald Carr, of Woolstaston Rectory, Salop. Moreover, though Stone grudged no service given to God or to his own congregation, he grieved sometimes that he had so little time to devote to hymn-writing and to literature, concerning which he had many projects. In a letter dated June 15, 1892, he had written to me, “I am up to my ears in work and behindhand because, if you please, I am in the thick of writing a religious novel. I am not really joking!”

But grateful as he was for the Bishop’s kind and fatherly offer, Stone declined it as, later on, he declined similar offers, including a Colonial Bishopric.

“I am not and I do not expect to be the man I was,” he said to Mr. Arnold and me that night, “but I ought to be, and am, thankful that, nervously constituted as I am, I have gone through fifteen years in the East End, out of twenty-three in the Ministry. When health and strength give out, when for my people’s sake I must let the work pass into younger and stronger hands, I will go. Till then, in Haggerston, where my heart is, and where the people whom I love are living, I must remain.”

And in Haggerston he remained working early in the morning and late in the night until 1890, when the collapse, alike of nerve and physical strength, came, and he had to resign—to be appointed by the Lord Chancellor to the comparatively easy living of All Hallows, London Wall.

But Stone was not the man to spare himself in his new sphere of labour. What the wrench of parting and the strain necessitated by sweeping aside the cobwebs, and by trying to warm into life the dry bones, as he put it, of a long-neglected City church cost him, may be gathered from the one and only sad letter I ever had from him. It is written from the house of his sister, Mrs. Boyd.

Woodside Lodge,
South Norwood Hill, S.E.,
Nov. 28, 1891.

My dear Kernahan,

I have, in a very busy life, never passed through such a time of depression as in the last nine or ten months. In the Spring I left the old Parish of 21 years’ work and 31 years’ memories—and how I got through the next couple of months I scarcely know. Only by Grace of God. I went to Southend for a fortnight, but it was simply a ghastly time, I was ill in body and mind. Except for the faith which Tennyson describes in the case of Enoch Arden’s coming home, through which a man (believing in the Incarnation, and therefore in the Perfect Human Sympathy of God) cannot be “all unhappy,” I don’t know what would have become of me. I left behind me, you know how much—how many is represented by 537 communicants, nearly all of them my spiritual children, and I had before me, not a “howling wilderness” but a silent wilderness of the worst of the City churches. A howling wilderness would have stirred up the soldier’s blood that is in me—but the desolation which I felt so ill was like a winding sheet. You must come and see me at All Hallows, and while I show you the beautiful present, I will show you in actual fact some of the dry bones.

I need not tell you that I have had a great deal to do Haggerstonwards. And oh! my correspondence with my old children!

I hope this does not sound to you like complaint or self-pity. I only mean it as explanation—which would not be given in these terms, except to one very much (I know) of my own temperament. Indeed, there is no cause for anything but thankfulness. My nerves were too worn out for Haggerston any longer. My successor is one almost entirely after my own heart—my new parish is exactly one (nearest to Haggerston in the City) I wished for. The task of renovation, though it makes me a poor man for a year or two, has been very good by way of distraction and for the delight of making a garden out of such a wilderness of dry bones, and after another six or nine months I may be able to afford a curate, and, having no further special financial or parochial anxieties, be able to settle to some final literary work. Indeed, I am as I ought to be, very thankful.

So far most egotistically.

I am interested with my whole heart in what you tell me of yourself. Do come and see me, to tell more. I will promise to send you what I write, if you will undertake to do the same.

God bless you, dear friend.

Ever your most affectionate,
S. J. Stone.

The depression passed, and Stone recovered sufficiently to throw himself, heart and soul, and for some years, into his now memorable work among the “hands” employed in City warehouses, shops and factories. Once again it was for the poor, or for the comparatively poor that he toiled, and once again he spared himself in nothing. His letters (I have enough almost for a book) tell of the joy and contentment he found in the work, and of his thankfulness to God for what had been done.

But he had made the change from the heavier work at Haggerston too late, and even in the easier charge, which, in order that he might husband his failing strength and outworn energies had been found for him, he would not, or could not spare himself—with the result that, in the autumn of 1899, he had another breakdown. Meeting him unexpectedly one day on the Embankment, after not seeing him for some little time, I was inexpressibly shocked at the change. He told me that he had been feeling very ill for some weeks, and was then on his way to meet the friend who was accompanying him to see a specialist, and that I should, without delay, know the result of the examination which was to be made. Not many hours had passed before I had a letter. The malady, Stone said, was cancer, it was feared in a malignant form, and there must be an operation, and soon.

With all the old and infinite thought and tenderness for others, he gave me gently to understand that the case was not too hopeful—he was terribly run down, his heart was weak: he had overstrained it while at Oxford—and even should he survive the operation, there was small likelihood of recovery. Here is the conclusion of his letter:

Keep a quiet mind about me, dear friend. I have not so learned Christ that I make any real difference between life and death, but remember me before God.

Ever yours most affectionately,
S. J. Stone.

Scarcely a day of the months which followed was free from pain. Yet he wrote, “I live in a kind of thankful wonder that I should be so encompassed by the goodness of God and the lovingkindness of men.” To the end he retained all his old interests. He continued, in the brief respites from terrible bouts of pain, to attend the church of All Hallows, of which he was still rector, and to minister to his people, and even to follow, with intense patriotic interest, every event in the South African War.

The day preceding his death, Sunday, he was at All Hallows; and the very day of his passing he wrote, “I am in such pain that I can neither write nor dictate. At others I am just able to write ‘with mine own hand.’ But whether at the worst or at the best in a bodily state, spiritually I am not only in patience, but in joy of heart and soul.” Soon after came a brief space of unconsciousness and—the end.

So died one who was liker Christ than any other man or woman I have known. His love for his fellows was so passionate and so unselfish that, could he have taken upon himself, to save them from sin, sorrow, and suffering, a similar burden to that which his Lord and Master bore, he would not have hesitated—he would gladly have hastened—to make the sacrifice.

The mistakes he made were many, though I remember none that was not made from high motive, generous impulse, misplaced zeal, or childlike singleness of purpose, which to the last led him to credit others with truth, loyalty, honour, and sincerity, like to his own. In the beautiful hymn which he so loved, and with which he so often ended evensong, we read:

but if sin there was in Stone, as in all that is human, I can truly say that, in our twenty-five years’ intimate friendship, I saw in him no sign of anything approaching sin, other than—if sins they be—a noble anger and a lofty pride. To have loved, and to have been loved and trusted by him, was no less a high privilege than it was a high responsibility, for if any of us, who at some time of our lives, shared Stone’s interests and ideals, and were brought under the compelling power and inspiration of his personality, should hereafter come to forget what manner of man he was—should play false with, or altogether fall away, from those ideals, or be content to strive after any less noble standard of conduct and character than he set and attained—then heavy indeed must be our reckoning, in the day when for these, to whom much has been given, much will be required.

For Stone had something of the talismanic personality of his Master. Just as, without one spoken word—without more than a look—from the Christ the unclean were convicted of sin by the talisman of His purity, so all that was noblest, divinest and knightliest in man, all that was white-souled, selfless, tender, true, lofty, and lovely in womanhood, recognised something of itself in Stone, and in his presence all were at their highest and their best.

Nor was this due merely to what has been called a “magnetic personality.” That there are men and women who for good or for evil (it is just as likely to be for the latter as for the former) possess some magnetic or mesmeric power over others, I am, and from personal knowledge, aware. But Stone’s influence was neither mesmeric nor magnetic. It was by the unconscious spiritual alchemy of a soul so rare (I repeat and purposely near the end of this article what I said in the beginning) as to make possible the courage of a Coeur de Lion, the honour of a King Arthur or Sir Galahad—as to make possible even in a sense the sinlessness of Christ. To have known, if only once in a lifetime—and in spite of bitter disillusionments, of repeated betrayals on the part of some others—such a man as S.J. Stone, is in itself enough to keep sweet one’s faith in humanity, in immortality, and in God.

Some time before Stone’s death I had been much thrown into the company of a gifted and brilliant thinker and man of Science, who had very little belief—I will not say in the existence of a God, but at least in the existence of a God who takes thought for the welfare of mortals, and no belief whatever in existence after death. In our walks and conversations he had adduced many arguments in support of annihilation, which it was difficult to answer; and I remember that, when on the morning that Stone died, I stooped to press my lips to the forehead of the friend I loved and revered as I have loved and revered none other since nor shall again, it seemed for a moment as if the man of whom I have spoken as disbelieving in personal immortality, were, in spirit, at my elbow and whispering in my ear. “Look well upon your friend’s face!” the Voice seemed to say, “and you shall see written there: ‘Nobly done, bravely done, greatly done, if you will,’ but you shall also see written there, ‘Done and ended! done and ended—and for evermore!’” I remember, too, that it seemed as if some evil power, outside myself, were trying, by means of what hypnotists call “suggestion,” to compel me to see, upon the dead face, what that evil power wished me to see there.

For one moment, after the whispering of the words “Done and ended! done and ended—and for evermore,” I thought I saw something in the dead face that seemed dumbly to acquiesce in, and to endorse the tempter’s words, until another and very different voice (I have wondered sometimes whether it were not my friend’s) whispered to me, “If the friend whom you loved be indeed annihilated and has ceased to be—then the Eternal and Omnipotent God whom he, a man and a mortal, ever remembered has forgotten him, for annihilation means no more and no less than utterly to be forgotten of God. If that be so, if God can forget, if He can forget those who never forgot Him, then is that God less loving, less faithful, and less remembering than the mortal whom He has made. Can you, dare you, think this awful and unthinkable thing of the Living and Loving God in whom your friend so wholly trusted?”

And, looking upon the face of my friend, I saw written there, not only the august dignity, the lone and awful majesty of death, but also the rapture, the peace, the serenity, the triumph of one who staggers spent and bleeding but victorious from the battle, to hear himself acclaimed God’s soldier and Christ’s knight, and to kneel in wondering awe, in worshipping ecstasy, at the feet of his Saviour and his God.

And remembering what I saw written on the dead face of my friend, remembering the life he led and the God in whom he trusted, I have no fear that my own faith will fail me again in life or in death.

And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

THE END