Soul of a Bishop | Page 7

his white face at the window, looking out upon the

great terrace and the park.

CHAPTER THE
SECOND - THE WEAR AND TEAR OF EPISCOPACY
(1)
IT was only in the last few years that the bishop had experienced these
nervous and mental crises. He was a belated doubter. Whatever
questionings had marked his intellectual adolescence had either been
very slight or had been too adequately answered to leave any serious
scars upon his convictions.
And even now he felt that he was afflicted physically rather than
mentally, that some protective padding of nerve-sheath or brain-case
had worn thin and weak, and left him a prey to strange disturbances,
rather than that any new process of thought was eating into his mind.
These doubts in his mind were still not really doubts; they were rather
alien and, for the first time, uncontrolled movements of his intelligence.
He had had a sheltered upbringing; he was the well-connected son of a
comfortable rectory, the only son and sole survivor of a family of three;
he had been carefully instructed and he had been a willing learner; it
had been easy and natural to take many things for granted. It had been
very easy and pleasant for him to take the world as he found it and God
as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood he had been
able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his carefully warmed
and prepared bottle --unquestioningly and beneficially.
And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops
began.
It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it will
stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography will
find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when
scarcely older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services
and--a pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from
a too inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world as

Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one
both of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy bishop," and those early
ceremonies of St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon
by the good bishop Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St.
Athanasius with perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a
number of his innocent playmates, and the bishop who "had paused to
contemplate the sports of the child remained to confirm the zeal of the
missionary.") And as with the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of
the future; the Rev. H. J. Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage,
has given us a pleasant picture of himself as a child stealing out into the
woods to build himself a little altar.
Such minds as these, settled as it were from the outset, are either
incapable of real scepticism or become sceptical only after catastrophic
changes. They understand the sceptical mind with difficulty, and their
beliefs are regarded by the sceptical mind with incredulity. They have
determined their forms of belief before their years of discretion, and
once those forms are determined they are not very easily changed.
Within the shell it has adopted the intelligence may be active and lively
enough, may indeed be extraordinarily active and lively, but only
within the shell.
There is an entire difference in the mental quality of those who are
converts to a faith and those who are brought up in it. The former know
it from outside as well as from within. They know not only that it is,
but also that it is not. The latter have a confidence in their creed that is
one with their apprehension of sky or air or gravitation. It is a primary
mental structure, and they not only do not doubt but they doubt the
good faith of those who do. They think that the Atheist and Agnostic
really believe but are impelled by a mysterious obstinacy to deny. So it
had been with the Bishop of Princhester; not of cunning or design but
in simple good faith he had accepted all the inherited assurances of his
native rectory, and held by Church, Crown, Empire, decorum,
respectability, solvency--and compulsory Greek at the Little Go--as his
father had done before him. If in his undergraduate days he had said a
thing or two in the modern vein, affected the socialism of