When Mandell Creighton was Bishop of London it fell to him to admonish an earnest High Church Vicar, working in the East End, on the subject of incense. The Vicar, pleading hard for his point, appealed to his record as a parish priest. “Dr. Creighton,” he said solemnly, “for twenty-five years I have held here a cure of souls, and——” Before he could finish the sentence Creighton cut in with a joke. “Cure them, certainly,” he said, “but surely you need not smoke them.”

The jest was quite in Creighton’s way. It was easy. It was flippant. It was made at the expense of a rather humourless sincerity. It was impolitic; in fact, widely repeated, it caused much offence. But it came into the Bishop’s head, and it had to come out. Creighton might possess self-restraint in other ways, but the sacrifice of a good thing was beyond him. Moreover, while ready to make the largest allowances for great errors and even great crimes, he was incapable of respecting what he considered mere faddism in religious matters. He had, it seems certain, religious beliefs of his own, but no religious fancies, and he was contemptuous of fancies in others, still more contemptuous of fancies that were rather more than fancies. The priest in the present case was clearly a fool; who but a fool would remain a priest in Bethnal Green for twenty-five years? Why not, then, tell him so, if it could be done with due urbanity and wit? It was the sort of thing Creighton would have said as an undergraduate at Merton, and to a rather unusual degree he retained the undergraduate mind throughout life. In full maturity both his earnestness and his flippancy were less those of manhood than of very intelligent youth; at sixty he was mentally as fresh as at twenty, and (it may perhaps be said) as foppish. The foppishness was the more real because it was unconscious, like the undergraduate’s; Creighton disclaimed “superiority” in himself, and strongly resented it in others, but he never lost that combined simper and swagger of the mind which we are so often persuaded to call Oxford. There could have been no greater contrast to Temple. Temple said what he had to say, and cared very little what people thought as to the thing said or the manner of its saying. Creighton had always some of the eagerness and wistfulness of the clever young man who feels it incumbent on him to sparkle, and is troubled with just a doubt whether he has quite “come off.” His paradoxes are often strongly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s; they are not so witty, but have much the same superficial smartness, essential untruth, and light contempt of average humanity. Wilde would have given a more dexterous turn to “No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good,” but the spirit of the thing is quite his, and he might actually have described an Extension lecture as “a mission to enlightened greengrocers.” This, of course, was only one side of Creighton’s character; in other moods he said many wise things, and did things still more wise. Whether he was a fundamentally wise man is another question. Wise men have a habit of ceasing to be clever, and especially of ceasing to be exceptionally educated. Creighton could not help being always a wit and always a don. As a Christian he was always ready to admit the equality of men before God. He even erred on the side of minimising the moral differences between man and man, as in that very unphilosophical generalisation that “all are so infinitely far from the perfection of God that little differences do not matter,” which is equivalent to saying that the light of a lamp is so infinitely less than the light of the sun that it does not matter whether we have a smoky lamp or not. In this way, as a Christian, Creighton was fond of showing his indifference to externals. But as an Oxford scholar he did incline to think too much of certain small things and too little of certain big things.

There were no two subjects on which he was more prone to witty depreciation than the clerical mind and the national mind. Yet he was himself very English, and very Church-of-English. Only in England would such a man find himself in holy orders; only in England, especially, would such a man find himself a Bishop. The whole tone of his mind was secular and humanist; on indifferent things he spoke as an unembarrassed pagan; when, like an ecclesiastical Wegg, he “dropped” into theology, the effect was a little awkward. There was no suspicion of insincerity in Creighton talking about “keeping open the way to Jesus,” and “growing nearer to God,” but there was (to some at least) a sense of incongruity. It gave the sort of shock one would feel if Mr. Chesterton went out dressed like the Rev. R. J. Campbell, or if Mr. Massingham went to a fancy dress ball in a colourable imitation of a Field-Marshal’s uniform.

One was prepared for everything moral, kindly, and sensible from Creighton. But to find this very clever man—“for sheer cleverness Creighton beats any man I know,” said Temple once—really did regard himself first and foremost as a “pastor of souls,” and was so despite the neat epigrams, the equally neat gold cigarette case, and the social Àplomb, was not a little staggering. His countrymen, stupid as Creighton always loved to represent them, might at least partially understand him. It is safe to say no intelligent Italian or Frenchman would have done so. Such a foreigner would understand well enough a great Prince of the Church, who might or might not be a Christian. He would understand a poor saint. He would understand a humanist unbeliever full of noble sentiment. What he would hardly understand was how a man so very “broad” managed to confine himself in a “distinct branch of the Catholic Church.” Still less would he be able to comprehend how a scholar with a life-long ambition to write a great historical work should be the victim, in his own words, of a “conspiracy to prevent him from doing so.” But to the English, and also to Creighton, who loved to satirise the English, it seemed not unnatural that a man who cared little about any points of ritual should be constantly adjudicating between the Kensitites on the one hand and the extreme High Churchmen on the other, or that a man eminently qualified to write great history in which he was intensely interested should be set to compose small squabbles in which he was not interested at all.

Why Creighton took orders was much of a mystery to his set at Merton. The whole intellectual tendency of the day was towards agnosticism, and Creighton was very intellectual indeed. But, though Creighton had little sympathy with “external and mechanical orthodoxy,” and, in the words of his eulogist, “did not wear his spiritual heart on his sleeve,” but “reverted to paradox to conceal differences on which he did not care to insist,” he seems to have remained a convinced Churchman, and indeed considerably more of a High and less of a Broad Churchman than he afterwards became. His ambition to be a clergyman dated from early boyhood; but it would probably not be unjust to suggest that he was first attracted to the Church less by a spiritual urging than by the thought that the clerical career would afford him an opportunity for study and literary work. Creighton’s love for things of the mind was more Scottish than English; his family was a Scottish family, though settled in Cumberland; his father, trained as a joiner, had a furnishing and decorating business; on his mother’s side, he came of yeoman farmer stock. Healthy but short-sighted, the lad had no recreation but taking long walks—a habit which persisted and developed in later life (he once walked from Oxford to Durham in three days)—and his naturally studious bent was accentuated by this aloofness from the sports of his companions. The severity of the born student, however, was softened from a very early age by the taste of the born Æsthete; Creighton’s rooms at Oxford, the moment he got a little money, were beautifully set out with choice little pieces of old furniture, blue and white china, and flowers arranged on the most correct principles of the newest school of taste. After his marriage with Miss Louise von Glehn (who first attracted him by her youth, her yellow sash, and her interest in his lectures) he removed from his pleasant rooms to a house in Oxford equally charming in its way, and the centre of much quiet intellectual junketing. But, though he delighted in Oxford, he began, as years went on, to think of University as “like living in a house with the workmen always about,” and the pressure of his tutorial duties made him long for some less arduous environment in which to carry out his design of a History of the Papacy. An opportunity presented itself at the end of 1874. The richest and oldest living within the gift of Merton, that of Embleton, forty miles north of Newcastle, became vacant; Creighton made it known that he would be willing to accept, and the offer was made him. At Embleton, lying on a desolate part of the Northumbrian coast, Creighton made himself comfortable in the old fortified vicarage which used to afford shelter to the parishioners and their cattle during Scottish moss-trooper raids; and here, in the intervals of attending to not too arduous parish duties, he brought out the first two volumes of his history. The work at once placed him in the front rank of serious writers of the day; and the praise lavished on it was not undeserved. For though the effort to be impartial where impartiality is impossible gave coldness to the narrative, these volumes, as well as those which succeeded, showed great learning, a brilliant power of analysis and exposition, and a rare faculty of imaginative sympathy. It is a curious testimony to Creighton’s fairness to find Lord Acton at a later date accusing him of too much tenderness for certain Popes, while Protestants were complaining that Luther was treated with an undue lack of reverence.

By this time parochial duties, increasing with the years, began to irk Creighton as much as the pressure of his tutorial duties had done, and he was anxious for a change. In 1884 he accepted the offer of the appointment of Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge; shortly after he took from Mr. Gladstone a Canonry at Worcester; and in 1890 Lord Salisbury offered him the vacant See of Peterborough. Nearly ten years before he had been asked if he would like to be a Bishop. “No, I should not,” he replied, “but if I were offered a Bishopric I should no doubt take it, because I have got into the habit of doing what is asked of me.” He was anxious to get on with his history; to become a Bishop meant the definite sacrifice of further literary ambitions. But though he thought it “a terrible nuisance,” and his “natural self” abhorred it, and he considered himself “an object of compassion,” it is probable that the promotion was not quite so unpleasant as he represented it to many friends and probably himself believed it to be. For both his worldly and other-worldly sides the appointment had some compensations. He really did enjoy society, and he really did feel (singular as it might seem in a man of his temperament) his mission as a Christian priest. The sense was not strong enough to make him seek great activities, but it was strong enough to make him feel it an act of cowardice and self-indulgence to refuse a call when it came. But it was in the nature of the man to mix up almost comically his various feelings. At one time we find him lamenting that living in a Palace will be bad for his children, at another he speaks of regarding his individual life as simply an opportunity of offering himself to God, and then we have the following very characteristic remark: “A good lady said to me the other day, ‘After all, men are more interesting than books.’ Doubtless this is true, but you can choose your own books, and you must take your men as you find them.” “My peace of mind,” he said in the same letter, “is gone; my books will be shut up; my mind will go to seed; I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the rest of my life, and everybody will write letters in the newspapers about my iniquities.” The picture of such a man hesitating between a certain set of tastes and the call of conscience is perhaps best illustrated in a story which may or may not be new. One of Creighton’s children was asked what he was going to do. The reply was, “Father is still praying for guidance, but mother is packing our boxes.”

Whatever his real qualms, they seem to have been excessive. Once settled down to his new work, Creighton quite enjoyed himself at Peterborough, and certainly, by all reasonable standards of episcopal efficiency, was a success. But his translation to London in 1896 was the occasion of more complaints in the same key. London was “inhuman”; it required all his efforts to remain human in such a spot. There were not so many human beings in London as in Peterborough. He was in “the very centre of all that was worldly.” He was “exposed to the most deteriorating influences.” It was “a great nuisance” that he never saw anybody intimately. “Every ass was at liberty to bray in his study.” He never seemed to be free from interviewing candidates for ordination. There was no one to be “kind” to him. But as he became more used to the new conditions the complaints became less frequent. He felt himself making some impression, not only on his vast work, but on the vast town. The newspapers recognised the richness of his personality. The gossips retailed his good things. He began to feel at home, and within a year of his promotion we find him confessing that London is “immensely interesting” with its “abundant life,” which, however, “raises the question—Where is it going?”

If he found London bewildering as well as interesting, London—or that fraction that troubled about such matters—was also a little puzzled, as well as interested, in him. There was, indeed, something of the Sphinx about this long, gaunt figure, with the bearded, spectacled face, harsh in feature as only northern English faces can be, intrinsically stern, but generally lightened by a smile half genial and half quizzical. Rapidly becoming one of the best-known of public men, he was never quite understood. The man killed himself by hard work; a constitution good enough to have taken him to fourscore was worn out at less than sixty by too conscientious efforts to keep pace with the enormous demands made on his energies. His sermons and addresses breathed much of the purest spirit of Christian faith, as well as the very soul of Christian charity. Yet he who laboured so faithfully, and preached so admirably, often talked nonsense—sometimes good nonsense and sometimes bad—and showed a quality (some called it playfulness and others flippancy) which perturbed equally the faithful and the infidel. For orthodox people could not understand this levity in a serious man, and unorthodox people seemed to think that a man of his mentality and temperament had no right to be orthodox. There was in his very toleration something insulting to enthusiasts. To people who held strong views on some question he felt to be trivial he could not emit judicious platitudes; his judgment was generally barbed with a wit that rankled with both sides. One reference to incense has already been quoted; another was, “Personally I should say, if they want to make a smell, let them.” That sort of thing does not satisfy either those who would kindle the fires of Smithfield or those who would revive the sullen reign of the saints.

The Bishop’s attitude was held very generally to denote the kind of breadth which is so easy where there is no strong conviction. But this view was quite erroneous. Creighton’s contempt might be too lightly expressed, but it was not lightly entertained. He had a reason for every dislike, and even behind every prejudice. He managed somehow to reconcile the Catholic view of the English Church with pure Erastianism. In one place one finds him ridiculing the notion that truth varies with longitude and latitude; in another he holds that “the general trend of the Church must be regulated by their (the people’s) wishes,” and that “the Church cannot go too far from the main ideas of the people”—who might conceivably, of course, become polygamists and fire-worshippers fifty years hence. In truth, this great historian often thought as cloudily and locally as a country curate, and, far more than he was aware, was influenced by the insularity he so often derided. Where he did not take the English view he took the German, being soaked, like most Victorians, in Teutonism; and he really objected to “religious observances of an exotic kind” less because they were exotic than because they were Latin.

“The Church of Rome,” he said once, “is the Church of decadent peoples.” On another occasion he observed that the Roman communion is “a small body in England, which stands in no relation to the religious life of the nation.... To join that Church is simply to stand on one side and cut yourself off from your part in striving to do your duty for the religious future of your country.” I am not concerned in the sectarian question involved; I only quote the passages to show that Creighton, with all his learning and cleverness, could talk solemn nonsense as well as the lighter kind. Yet he would have been quick to see the logical lapse of some old barbarian who condemned Christianity as the religion of under-sized people, or of the Roman governor under Nero who sent saints to the lions because this new faith of “Chrestus” stood in no relation to the religious life of a polytheistic Empire, so that for a Roman citizen to join it was to “cut himself off from his past in striving to do his duty for the religious future of his country.”

The truth is, of course, that Creighton, disliking Rome and despising the “dying nations” in her communion, wished to say something nasty without too much trouble—a natural and perhaps commendable desire. The Ulster man, when he wants to gratify it, says simply, “To Hell with the Pope”; Creighton, instead of rising to bad language, sank to bad argument, and gave the weight of his personality to the once popular doctrine that a creed is to be honoured in proportion to the wealth and material prosperity of its professors. Yet on all indifferent matters he would have been the first to hold that truth is truth if only one man (and he a scrofulous cripple) believes it, and error error, even though approved by everybody as tall as Creighton and endowed with the particular code of good manners which he approved.