Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health
and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of
the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is
visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad
state of weakness. For long weeks together--once it was for a whole
year--his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.
In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a
harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of
the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every
one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate
nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are
working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire.
He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to
relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has
cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so
moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness,
may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth,
the greatest of all the Christian Churches--greater, more catholic, than
Rome.
To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which
only those immediately about him can properly appraise.
Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take
a day off he spends it in bed.
His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ignoble
idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have
succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable,
have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who
encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the
good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes
in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of
civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising
for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a
secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the
goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and
his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of
the English nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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