Children of clergy -- Fiction; Clergy -- England -- Fiction
To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the
so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well, Father Rowley has
really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of
ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and
at the same time Catholic. These people are taught to make the
Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I
venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has
ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts,
because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which
is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures. I could fill a
book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls.
The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has
such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that
by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his
flock. Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly
that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not
believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any
use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of
Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed
Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service.
Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so
that the poor people may flock round Him. He does not go round
arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their
lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every
difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers
them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great
use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who
considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions
revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need,"
he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your
altar."
You can't go into the little church without finding fifty people
praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other day when the "King
Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar," the people here subscribed I
forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the
bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when
it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they
subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses
for the dead. And the old women living in Father Rowley's free
houses that were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that
the money spent on them might be added to the fund. When the Bishop
of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation he asked Father
Rowley what that altar was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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