“In this way, as I humbly venture to think,” Falconer answered. “He looks
upon the formulæ of the church as utterances of living truth—vital
embodiments—to be regarded as one ought to regard human faces. In
these human faces, others may see this or that inferior expression, may
find out the mean and the small and the incomplete: he looks for and finds
the ideal; the grand, sacred, God-meant meaning; and by that he holds as
the meaning of the human countenances, for it is the meaning of him who
made them. So with the confession of the Church of England: he believes
that not man only, but God also, and God first and chief, had to do with
the making of it; and therefore he looks in it for the Eternal and the
Divine, and he finds what he seeks. And as no words can avoid bearing in
them the possibility of a variety of interpretations, he would exclude
whatever the words might mean, or, regarded merely as words, do mean, in a
narrow exposition: he thinks it would be dishonest to take the low meaning
as the meaning. To return to the faces: he passes by moods and tempers,
and beholds the main character—that on whose surface the temporal
and transient floats. Both in faces and in formulæ he loves the divine
substance, with his true, manly, brave heart; and as for the faults in
both—for man, too, has his share in both—I believe he is ready
to die by them, if only in so doing he might die for them.—I had a
vision of him this morning as I sat and listened to his voice, which
always seems to me to come immediately from his heart, as if his heart
spoke with lips of its own. Shall I tell you my vision?—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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