Edward King
1829--1910

from Margaret Cropper, Shining Lights.

WHERE can they be going these young men, groping along a garden path by dim lamp light in the precincts of Christchurch, Oxford, some time in the spring of 1876? It might be a meeting of a secret society, for there is no lecture-room at the end of the garden, only an uncouth building, wash-house, brewhouse . . . . What is the attraction? They push the door open, and crowd in, fill up the chairs and wait. There is light enough to see, a faldstool, a picture and a harmonium, at which one of them goes to officiate. But as the great clock in Tom Tower begins to strike eight, there is a familiar heavy tread, and there enters, clad in a rather crumpled surplice, the man who has attracted them to this unusual meeting-place. All eyes were focused on Edward King, at this time Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford. 'It was light', wrote Scott Holland, 'that he carried with him, light that flowed from him. The room was lit into which he entered ... those eyes of his were an illumination. Even to recall him for an instant in the bare memory was enough to set all the day alive and glittering.'

Edward King had made this 'little Bethel', when his hearers grew too many for any room in his house. 'Last term' (he wrote), 'I started a little Bethel in my garden, it was a wash-house, and we cleaned it out, and put coconut matting and chairs and a harmonium, very simple but very lovely. We had a sort of meditation every Friday night at eight p.m. I enjoyed it immensely . . . poor things they were so good, the place was crammed.' Edward King's genius for loving God, and loving men had a magnetic quality. That genius was lodged in an extraordinarily humble heart. Humbleness and love together produced a rare kind of entirely natural holiness, very strong, highly disciplined, but not in the least forced.

He had had rather a sheltered childhood; he was the third child in the big family of his parson father; he was delicate, and never went to school, and so perhaps some of the bloom of childhood stayed with him. But quite early he had made the acquaintance of suffering, watching by the bed of his invalid sister Anne, with whom he often sat up all night.

His father was a parson of a very old-fashioned type. Many people will remember the story of how, having asked Edward if he knew his Catechism, he sent him riding off to be confirmed in a nearby parish with no more ado, or preparation. His mother seems to have had some of that brightness and wisdom that characterized her son. I should like to know more about his tutor John Day who must have laid some pretty firm foundations of Tractarian teaching, and with whom Edward spent his terms till he went up to Oxford in 1848 to Oriel.

He was not at all effeminate, this strikingly beautiful young man; he was a superb horseman, fond of dancing, fishing, and swimming. 'A royal fellow', said his much-loved tutor Charles Marriott. But through his Oxford life runs the sharp steel of discipline. 'I observe, Mr King', said the austere Provost Hawkins of Oriel, 'that you have never missed a single chapel, morning or evening, during the whole term', and proceeded to give him a warning against formalism. He need not have troubled; no one's religion sprang so spontaneously*from the heart as King's, but he kept the vigils and fasts of the Church too, and absented himself from Hall on Fast days.

Charles Marriot was Oriel's best gift to King, who called him 'the most Gospel-minded man I ever knew.' Marriott who had been Newman's disciple till his going over to Rome, who with Keblc and Pusey had compiled the Library of the Fathers, had all the graciousness of the Oxford Movement, and all its staunch adherence in the glory of the Church to give to his young friend. What we know of King's Oriel period, does not show us that he had that overwhelming influence over young men there, that came to him later, though he was generally loved and esteemed in the college. He left Oxford in 1852, and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land which he felt all his life to have been of the greatest importance.

After a short time as a private tutor, he came to the time of his Ordination, and so came to be curate of Wheatley. Wheatley and Cuddesdon lie in the same district a little to the east of Oxford. They were both to be important in his story. Mr Elton, his first vicar at Wheatley, had just lost his wife, and felt that he could not go on struggling with a very tough and wild parish without someone to support and help him. Writing many years after, he said of King: 'He was everything to me.' King came to live at the vicarage with the vicar and his motherless children. Elton was surprised to find how much his curate knew about prayer, and the Bible, perhaps most of all how much he cared about the boys in the parish, whose reputation had not been encouraging, how ready he was for the fight with bad conditions and the unsavoury character of the place. And it was all done with such cheer and grace, with that same sort of radiance which was to fascinate people all his life long. The motherless children at the parsonage loved him, and he took them out bird-nesting and found them flowers, which he always loved. But it was the farm boys in that country parish who drew out of him his characteristic response to their need. 'These rough carter lads' (he wrote) 'need to be surrounded by a flame of love.'

A flame of love was what he gave to them; he surrounded them with this heavenly warmth of affection, and they took to dropping in to talk to him over the fire in his room, they would carry him almost up the steep hills when his heart was troubling him. They knew that there was nothing that he didn't know about their own job of caring for horses, and that he was a superb rider, and something that he was giving them made them feel that he could mount them too, and ride away with them into a country new to their wild young hearts. They discovered that suffering and death didn't daunt him when they saw him nursing the worst cases in a typhus epidemic that broke out in the ill-drained village. They followed him into Church because they could understand what he was talking about there, and could watch him as he prayed, and begin to worship too.

They must have felt how much he enjoyed being curate at Wheatley; indeed to the end of his life King had a sort of nostalgia for Wheatley. 'I don't know that I have ever been happier' (he wrote forty years later to one of his boys). 'I was thoroughly happy with you all at Wheatley. ... It was very nice, wasn't if? I hope you are able to keep the same spirit of simplicity and love round about you.'

Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, had launched an important experiment in his Theological College at Cuddesdon. It was under his own eye there, as his Bishop's Palace was nearby, and the Principal of the College was also vicar of the parish of Cuddesdon. But he found it a little worrying to get just the right staff. The College was rather suspect with the Low Church folk, and altogether as the Principal later told King they wanted 'a change of tone'. The Curate from Wheatley had been to preach at Cuddesdon once or twice, and it seemed to Wilberforce that he might be just the right man to be Chaplain at the Theological College. This was surely a man to give the students there the highest ideals for their vocation.

King hesitated to leave his beloved Wheatley, but after a decisive meeting with his Bishop, King leaning against a stile and the Bishop on horseback, the Bishop's final word, as he kicked his horse and rode off: 'Well, I think you ought to go', clinched the matter and he became Chaplain of Cuddesdon, to try his flame of love with quite a different type of man from his ploughboys at Wheatley. The magnetism of his love again had an extraordinary effect, and the bunch of letters from his young men that was handed to his first biographer, show that breaking down of barriers, that assurance of the Chaplain's care for all sides of their lives, their souls, their families, their homes, their cricket matches. . . . 'Everything', says Russell, 'breathes the most affectionate feeling for the Chaplain, the warmest gratitude for good gained at Cuddesdon, and a singularly keen sense of brotherhood'.

When the Principal died rather suddenly, King succeeded him, also becoming Vicar of Cuddesdon, and began ten years of remarkable work.

There never was anything else quite so full of thrill (wrote Scott Holland) as the old days on the blessed hill when King was Principal. The whole place was alive with him; his look, his voice, his gaiety, his beauty, his charm and his holiness filled it and possessed it. He grew happier and happier, his eyes twinkled with dauntless merriment, his presence beamed with joy.

But that was not to say that the flame of love did not light King into the darkest places of men's hearts.

'Our only course', wrote one of his men, 'was to submit our lives, our difficulties, our temptations and sins, hopes and fears, to one who seemed to know them all without needing to be told.' 'It was a new experience to find a man full of such affectionate interest in our individual spiritual welfare', wrote another. 'We were most tenderly, yet unflinchingly compelled to face our lives before God. Until now we had never understood ourselves.'

King himself wrote of those Cuddesdon years:

Cuddesdon was a place where I spent fourteen of the happiest years of my life, receiving kindnesses and blessings which I can never repay; and yet after all it was not the place, but the teaching, the life, that made Cuddesdon so dear to us. There we lived in the daily enjoyment of the friendship of English hearts, strengthened, softened, perfected by the full power of the whole Catholic Church. Cuddesdon has been and is one of our best defences against infidelity, and Rome. Her students have not sought money or patronage from the world; one thing they have desired . . . liberty to tell the poor 'the whole counsel of God'.

The Principal of Cuddesdon was also vicar of the parish, so that he did get there that contact with poor people which was always so precious to him. He used to keep Friday nights free for his people to come and visit him. One Friday night, going out late into his garden he discovered a young man who had been trying for three hours to summon up courage to come in to see him. He used to say of his farm labourers, 'They are very ignorant, have very little time, work very hard, and often with poor food. They require a great deal of loving watchful sympathy.'

One thing he had to give to them, a very simple way of talking of holy things. His sermons could be understood by all, and yet wise people found a real depth in them. The congregation at Evensong in Cuddesdon Church was a wonderful mixture: his own students, their friends out from Oxford, the Bishop and his guests at the Palace, his farmer friends (who, by the way, had all become communicants), and then the labourers and their wives. They loved to remember that he had something for them all.

His was a practical friendship too; he gave his own riding horse to a parishioner who had lost his horse, and when a smallpox epidemic broke out in the parish, he rushed back from his holidays to tend the worst cases, actually laying out the dead when no one else would touch them.

One of King's most dear friends at Cuddesdon was Stephen Gladstone, son of the Prime Minister, and it was he perhaps who suggested to his father, when the Chair of Pastoral Theology fell vacant at Oxford, that King would be the man to fill it. True, he had left Oxford without any particular academic distinction, as critics in Oxford were not slow to point out, but on the other hand who had proved himself to know more about Pastoral Theology? So the offer was made and accepted, to the agonizing grief of the Cuddesdon students who choked down their sobs when King announced his decision; and King went to live in Christchurch taking with him his mother, now a widow, who seemed to add her own brightness and grace to the atmosphere of the house. A chill had fallen on the Church at Oxford at that time; Pusey was old and very deaf and coming near to the end of his life. He and King had the most affectionate relationship, and King had in past years made his first Confession to Pusey; Jowett was brilliant but not warm. The flame of love was needed there as elsewhere, and King's vital conception of the meaning of Pastoral Theology affected many more young men than those reading Theology who were his first care. 'Hungry sheep looked up' and were fed. They came to his lectures, to his house, to Bethel. They flocked to hear him preach, and went away stirred and satisfied.

There were storms on the sea of religion nearly all the time that King was at Oxford, but King had a sort of serenity of heart · that rode them without dismay. He was, he confessed at first, very frightened of going to learned Oxford, but he soon knew why he was there. He didn't neglect the controversies of his time, and he spent a long vacation in Germany improving his German so that he could study German critical writing. When the Public Worship Regulation Act, which Disraeli tersely called 'a Bill to put down Ritualism' was passed, he wrote:

The speeches in Parliament and Convocation have been very trying and disappointing.... Evidently the people are not yet won to Church Principles. I confess I was longing for rest too soon. We must turn to again, and teach in the quiet early Tractarian way. That seems the thing to do. Not to lose heart, or get hard with disappointment; but to get a help in Humility, feeling that Parliament does not like us or want us and to set to work again with individuals in the clear and healthy atmosphere of Unpopularity.

So he set to work to make saints for his Church. Writing to his sister he said: 'I want to see English saints made in the old way, by suffering and labour, and diligence in little things, and the exercise of unselfish untiring Love. Do let us try to rear a few quiet English saints.'

1877 was a particularly turbulent year: Russo-Turkish War, the Public Worship Regulation Bill, strikes all over England, but King wrote to one of his old students working abroad:

In all this I have not myself suffered, nor yet been inwardly disturbed. There is nothing that I see to shake the principles of one's inner life. This last Confession panic will in the end do good; when people get quiet again they will see (ist) that there is such a thing as Absolution--(and) that the natural act of confession is not taken from them by the supernatural gift of pardon. Then they will use their liberty as they need. These disturbances are, I feel, bringing forward into view great truths which we have more or less neglected.

And he writes to one of the young men whom he had trained:

It is a very great pleasure to me to think of you all at work. There is a very great opportunity for you. I'm sure we must all be full of hope, brave, self-sacrificing, victorious hope. To me, thank God, all these troubles of the intellect, and all our ecclesiastical and social anxieties are full of life. They are but, I believe, the pain and labour which will issue in the birth of more truth, more true liberty, more true union between Man and Nature, and Man and God, a bringing us in all things nearer to Him. Only, dearest child, in all this we must keep quiet and steady in our personal unity with Him.

And again:

I do value so highly a natural growth in holiness, a humble grateful acceptance of the circumstances that God has provided for us, and I dread the unnatural, cramped, ecclesiastical holiness, which is so much more quickly produced, but is so human and poor.

It was Gladstone who offered the Bishopric of Lincoln to King in 1885; in doing this he enriched the office of a bishop by the choice of a man whose holiness was unquestioned, and whose love for God and man was at full flow. Since the day of Thomas Ken there had not been an English Diocesan who was so clearly a saint.

He said a touching farewell to his listeners in Bethel, first of all asking their pardon and God's pardon for all the ways in which he had failed them, and then thanking God for upholding his faith while he had been in Oxford. 'I leave Oxford restful, thankful, and as a believer.' Then he asked them to strive for Personal Communion with God both in faith and life, and he asked to aim high in their lives. 'It is quite possible to stay at the bottom on the smooth level ground; the timid one dares not to climb lest he fall. But it is the invitation of the Holy Spirit, 'Friend, come up higher'. It is not ambition. There is detach-r ment provided for you as you go on, if you will go on.'

Two final laws of the spiritual life he gave them: Remember the Law of Suffering, and remember the Law of Handing On to younger men lines of thought, footprints, etc., to step in.

'Brothers, dear brothers', he ended, 'I have had to speak roughly to you tonight, just as Joseph spoke roughly to his brothers--for fear of breaking down.'

Possibly his appointment as Bishop of Lincoln was in a way a release, and that Oxford had rather cramped his style.

Now I am to go back to the care of souls (he wrote) and be shepherd again of the sheep and lambs.

I have as you know no great gifts, he wrote to a fellow Canon of Christ Church, but by God's goodness, I have a real and great love of His poor. If it should please Him to let me be the Bishop of His poor, and enable them to see more what they are to Him, and what He is to them, I think I shall be very happy.

'It shall be a bishopric of love', wrote Scott Holland to him, discerning his real genius, and so indeed it was.

Lincoln was just the right Diocese for his particular gifts, with its multitude of little country parishes (plenty of ploughboys) suffering a good deal at that time from a period of agricultural depression, its clergy rather discouraged and very hard up, its county people staunch and loyal.

The magnetism of his love and simplicity and holiness worked once more. 'He is adored in Lincoln', wrote his contemporary, Archbishop Benson. Scott Holland remembered: 'Twice I went down with him to Lincoln Fair, all among the coconuts, and the gingerbread, and the fat women; it was a delicious experience to note the affection that followed him about. He drew out love, as the sun draws fragrance from flowers.' Indeed it is noteworthy that King not only gave love but made other people loving.

'From the porters at Lincoln Station', writes Lord Elton, 'who would whisper eagerly: 'The Bishop's here .. .', to the Master of Foxhounds who kept only two photographs on his table, one of his favourite hound, and the other of the Bishop, the Diocese was at his feet.'

And yet marvellously he kept his humility inviolate, and they noticed that too, these Lincolnshire people. 'I would mention first his intense humility', said one, and it certainly glints through his letters.

Do pray for better bishops. These people might be angels and archangels straight off, if we were only decent.

I think I have begun to see my way to the alphabet of morality, but I have hardly begun Christianity, and I was fifty-four last Saturday.

One cannot help feeling almost a desire to be hung or shot, instead of being buried as if one was good.

This, dear child, is what I want you to get--that you should increase in self-hating reverence for others, and grow in the general apprehension that others are a few million times better than oneself, and only to be interfered with with awe.

I am off to China by the first boat! Will you come? I've just come back from a meeting where a beautiful C.M.S. missionary straight from China has been preaching--at least what I call preaching--talking the Gospel with all the fervour of a living missionary. Most crushing! Eleven years and no results, and five deaths! Then three converts! Then another death! Then another year, and then 7000. And such beauties. My dear child, if ever you or I get just in, it will only be by holding on to the extremest tip of one of their pigtails-----

One of whom I felt quite unworthy who died a felon's death in goal.

This love which was poured out on him it was his great desire to offer to Christ. He wrote to one of his students: 'You must take care to draw him by your heart to God, and not to yourself. It is heartbreaking work, but God will help you if you give yourself to Him.'

In one of his pastoral Theology lectures he tells his hearers that their aim with their people must be 'not only to win them, but to guide them into holiness.' But people must see holiness before they want it, and what King presented to his Lincolnshire people was this very holiness, this sense of a man transfigured by his Communion with God. 'To see him pass down the aisle of the Church was a benediction. As soon as I saw him in the pulpit I felt I wanted to be good, and I knew I could be. I was confirmed by him just 62 years ago, and I still remember his lovely voice and beautiful face. Do they always send a saint from heaven to confirm you?' These were things that ordinary people in Lincolnshire said of him.

I am not very old yet, but I have seen enough of bodily and mental suffering', he said to his clergy when he came to the Diocese, and he was ready, as only a saint can be, to enter into the sufferings of others.

When he was still at Oxford he had written to one of his young men who was struggling in an ungrateful post:

I am sorry you are so squeezed, but it must be so more or less. Anyone who has a high ideal, and love of perfection must be prepared to suffer.

I am so sorry for you, and yet it must be-or you would not be worth your salt in such a place. Only by breaking your heart to pieces over and over again can you hope to make them begin to think of believing that there is such a thing as love.

And to another, later, at Lincoln: 'Any kind of public life must be self-sacrifice. "He saved others, himself he cannot save" is true of all who would try to follow Him. Smashing is in the bond, though it may not be exacted to the full.'

For his discouraged and lonely clergy he had the deepest care and affection, understanding, and suffering with them, and offering them some of the rare joys they had ever experienced. He invited them to come into Retreat once a year with him in the Cathedral, and the first of these Retreats, that he himself took in 1890, made a very deep impression, for to many it was the beginning of a new kind of Christian life. A parson who was there wrote: 'What renewal of hopes, what possibilities were before us! We had seen it all. We had a bishop and a friend, a father who knew and understood.' He cared also for their circumstances: and entered into the straits of the Agricultural depression with real costly sympathy.

We have suffered dreadfully here from agricultural distress (he wrote in 1888).... I have never been so distressed about money as I have been since I have been a bishop. The clergy cannot live. What are we to do?

'He came like a good angel of hope and encouragement', says George Russell, 'to the isolated parishes in the fens and the wolds, cheering disheartened clergymen, and preaching to the labourers in language they could understand. Though he taught in its fullness the Catholic interpretation of the Faith, he so phrased his teaching that the stiffer Church folk regarded him as 'nowt but an old Methody'; and an enthusiastic visitor from the Salvation Army declared: 'It might have been the General himself.'

Again his gift of understanding young boys made his Confirmation addresses memorable. There was one depressed parson who felt that his boys were not making a preparation for their Easter Communion, and complained to King that all his enquiries had got from one of them was that he had cleaned his best shoes, and put them under his bed. 'Well', said King, 'don't you think the angels must be very glad to see them there?'

There was one special kind of suffering which he embraced-with deep love and humility. A young Grimsby fisherman who had murdered his sweetheart was condemend to death at the Lincoln Assizes. The prison Chaplain felt that the burden of preparing him for death was more than he could carry, and King stepped in to help him. He found that the young man had no knowledge of the Christian Faith, had scarcely heard of God. There was only a short time, but King began to teach him about sin, death and forgiveness, using the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In those short weeks, the man was confirmed, made his confession, and before his death received the Holy Communion. King went with him to the scaffold, sustaining him to the end.

There were other times later when the Bishop visited those who were condemned to death. Of one of these he wrote to a friend: 'You will have seen I daresay that we arc in trouble here again. A poor dear Grimsby fisherman. It will be over, a fortnight tomorrow. Will you please remember him and ask that he may be forgiven and accepted, and for me that my sins may not hinder me from helping him.'

A little of the cost is revealed in the next sentence. 'I am just back from the gaol, so my hand shakes, but not for him.'

But if he was prepared to suffer, and knew that only by suffering could he get communion with the Lord, he was also an adept at rejoicing. All his life long he rejoiced in natural things, flowers, birds, and all growing things. Towards the end of his life he wrote: 'I go on in my simple superficial way, loving flowers, and birds, and the sunlight on the apples, and the sunset; and like to think more and more of that verse "With Thee is the well of life, and in Thy light shall we see light".'

And again: 'I hope to try and not let the wear of life rub off the bloom of a childlike happiness which I believe our Father would like to see us have.

'Nothing is so beautiful as the beauty of good people; it is most refreshing.'

He had always been one of the people to whom a holiday abroad brought the greatest delight. Switzerland was his paradise, but he loved also to be in Italy.

He could be a very lighthearted letter writer: 'By all means be my chaplain on the 22nd and save me from scandalizing all the little acolytes by not bowing and bending as they would wish. I shall feel safe in your hands, as I know there is no kind of degree of good or evil of that sort to which you are not equal--you naughty, wicked James.'

The big house at Riseholme had been sold, and the Old Palace, Lincoln, became his home. It lay under the Cathedral heights, and from it he could look out over the wide spaces of his diocese. Its chapel, so dear to so many people, had been furnished mainly by his friends, as a gift of love to him.

Something must be said about his hospitality at the Old Palace, which varied from retreats for his clergy and ordinands, to an annual dinner, to the jockeys riding in the Lincoln Handicap. Here is what one lay friend though about it.

For thirty years that priceless gift was ours; throughout that time it was a well spring of pure joy to us to be near him in Holy Week, or on his holidays abroad, to rejoice in his constant thought and care for those about him, from the lad who carried the coalscuttles to the most honoured of his guests. . . . From the first of these blessed visits to the last, it was ever the same bright welcome, the same tender thoughtfulness, the same helpful smile and word of encouragement and solace.

And what about the other people who lived in the Old Palace, his household, quite a large Victorian one? 'The Old Palace was a happy home for us', said his housekeeper, and she went on to say how appreciative the Bishop was of good work. Every Friday evening when he was at home he spoke to them in the chapel. He remembered to bring them each a present when he went on holiday. On his eightieth birthday he gave them each a framed photograph of himself, and they in return gave him a hat and gloves. Such were the terms that made the Old Palace a happy home. Once a year his butler presented him with all outstanding bills, and when these had been paid the balance was given away to those in need of help.

But goodness is always liable to attack, and perhaps the most bitter attacks come not from evil, but from near goodness.

When King was made Bishop of Lincoln there had been a certain amount of protest against what the protesters called the Romish tendency of the Bishop's thought. Did he not belong to the E.C.U.? Was there not a display of gaudy geegaws at his enthronement? Somehow this all fell rather flat in the Diocese which was beginning to understand the spiritual stature of its Bishop. 'Lincolnshire knew that it had got a saint, and was serenely indifferent to his garb, gestures and postures', wrote George Russell. But a society called the Church Association pursued the attack. It had caused quite a few priests to be imprisoned. Why not fly for higher game? Why not see if Archbishop Benson could be forced to cite and try the Bishop of Lincoln?

The Romish practices, the points on which the Bishop was attacked, were the Eastward Position during the prayer of Consecration, lights on the altar, the mixture of water and wine in the chalice, the Agnus Dei sung after the Consecration, the use of the sign of the Cross at the Absolution and Blessing, and the Ablution of the sacred vessels. It is hard to think ourselves back seventy years and to see how these things appeared to the Church Association as leading directly to Rome, knowing that now in most Anglican churches they are part of the order and very much part of the character of Anglican worship today.

King was not at all Romish in his beliefs, and always rather unhappy about the wild extremes to which some of the High Church parsons had allowed themselves to adopt; he used these practices for greater devotion and inspiration of his people. If we are looking to him for sanctity, we shall find it especially in his passionate desire that the Will of God may be done, as the outcome of this attack on himself, and a strange trustful serenity which came to him in all these troubles:

I cannot help thinking (he wrote to one of his Chapter) that the good Archbishop would have been supported, and saved great trouble if he had felt able to refuse to entertain the charges from the first. But God may have greater blessings for us than we see. Thank God, I have not been worried about the matter yet. My one anxiety and daily prayer is that I may do His Will.

To an old Cuddesdon friend he wrote: 'Just now the water is a little rough, but I trust all will end for the good of the Church.'

1888 was the Lambeth Conference year, and when one of the American bishops asked King to come to America for a visit in the next year he was astounded when King answered quite calmly that he might very likely be in prison at that time.

But there was a long time of tension to be lived through. After much questioning, the Archbishop decided that he could try the case himself at Lambeth, at a court held in his Library there. King and his supporters asked that like other Englishmen he should be tried by his peers, his fellow-bishops, but he nevertheless answered the summons under protest. There followed months of delay in which Benson with a good deal of integrity prepared his judgment, which was not given until two years after the attack began.

But one thing of real value did come to the Church during those months of waiting. There was a great wave of prayer, not that this or that should be decided, but, as King had longed, that God's will might be done. 'You may be sure', wrote Fr Benson, superior of the S.S.J.E., 'that any difficulties which you may have to meet are fully compensated for by the spirit of prayer aroused in so many throughout the land.'

And it was so. King was so beloved that in cathedrals and parish churches, ruridecanal chapters, convents, and groups of clergy not only in England, but wherever the Church of England was alive all over the world, came not only expressions of sympathy, but promises of prayer, asking for God's guidance to the Archbishop and for Peace for King himself. Evangelicals, and high churchmen alike were sending messages of prayer and understanding love. And King, whose first action was to pay a friendly visit to the man who had mainly instigated the attack, did attain to the Peace which passes understanding.

There were those who actually reviled him in letters and speeches, but he never answered them. He did feel the support of the prayers to be the most real help. He wrote to the subdean of Lincoln, Clements:

I am sure I owe you with others more than I can say for the support you have gained for me through prayer during this past year, for I have been most mercifully upheld, with hardly any suffering, though of course the special burden is a great and unexpected one.... Something of the sort, I think was probably necessary, and it is a wonderful mercy that it has come in a way which causes no ill-feeling towards anyone, and has not hindered the general work of the Dioceses.

It was in fact an enheartening example of how a time of tension and strain may be faced without bitterness and in expectation of a blessing.

For the judgment did bring some real gains to the Church apart from the main value of perceiving that these things could be faced without ill-feeling.

King's dignified letter to his clergy shows his own feeling of thankfulness.

The following points appear to me to demand especial thankfulness.

Ist: that the judgment is based on independent enquiry, and that it recognizes the continuity of the Church.

2nd: that the Primitive and all but universal custom of administering a mixed cup in the Holy Eucharist has been preserved.

3rd: that the remaining elements may be reverently consumed by the cleansing of the vessels immediately after the close of the service.

4th: that it is allowable by the use of two lights, and of singing during the Celebration of Holy Communion to assist the devotions of our people.

With regard to the Manual Acts I defer to the construction which His Grace has put upon the rubric.

Similarly with regard to the use of the sign of the Cross in pronouncing Absolution, and Benediction, I shall in deference to the ruling of His Grace no longer practice it.

While the points that have given in my favour are declared to be lawful, it is not intended that they should be obligatory. You, my Reverend Brethren, are well aware that I have never desired to enforce unaccustomed ritual upon any reluctant clergyman or congregation.

At the same time, I earnestly hope that this authoritative utterance of our revered and beloved Archbishop will tend to remove the suspicion of lawlessness, and unfaithfulness to the Church of England, which has unhappily arisen in some places with regard to points of ceremonial observance. My prayer is that this judgment may be for the greater glory of God, and for the edification of our souls in unity and peace.

So graciously he accepted the judgment, and the Church was enriched by his obedience.

But he did emerge from this tension a frailer man physically. He had very much disliked the publicity. 'Perhaps a better and a braver man' (he wrote to a friend), 'would have rejoiced at fighting so good a cause; but my little experience has taught me that suffering is a very disturbing thing, and requires more grace than most of us possess.'

He gave himself again quietly to his pastoral work which he loved so much. He had once said that what he wanted to do was 'to draw men to Christ, that they might be nearer to God and nearer to each other in the unity of the Church.' Some things in the Diocese were especially dear to him. As was to be expected from the ex-Principal of Cuddesdon, the 'Scholae Cancellarii', the Theological College at Lincoln, was his constant care; so were the two Rescue Homes at Boston and Lincoln. He had a special concern for the men who worked on the railway, whom he saw so often as he moved about his Diocese by train, as bishops did in those days. He would cast a keen eye round a station on the lookout for friends, porters, drivers, clerks and guards; he remembered the porters at the little junctions where he had to change and asked after their families. He found out cases of hardship or illness from Inspectors or Guards, and often sent help to them. He was never busy when a railway man wanted to see him. 'What a fine body of men the railway system has created', he said, 'men who all over the country stand for courage, intelligence, sobriety, and courtesy.' He started a little guild for them, with the Michaelmas collect as their own prayer, and he used to visit them on Michaelmas day.

From Oxford days he had cherished the St Barnabas Guild for Nurses belonging to the Church. He used to write them a yearly letter of appreciation and counsel and he held the highest ideals for them as the following passage shows: 'It is your great work to bring the likeness and Mind and Spirit of Christ into the sickroom, into every ward in the Hospital, and into the mind and heart of every sick person in the Ward. Let this be your New Year's thought: "I am to carry on the great work of the Incarnation".'

His letters of counsel and spiritual direction were very simple and clear. Here is one to a priest, troubled about his faith:

I am very sorry that you have been in anxiety about your faith, but that, I believe, is often one of God's own ways of giving us discipline to train us for His great service. The suffering for the faith, and the fear of losing it often lead us to value it more really than when it is taken for granted without cost. The fact that you desire to believe the Truth is of priceless value, and please God will lead you on to full belief. Faith is the gift of God, and requires a general self-surrender on our part. Sometimes there are stiff bits in us which we hardly recognize as sin, but they prevent the perfect self-surrender and humility which is necessary. A German bishop (Sailer) for whom I have a grateful regard, puts it:

1. Self-surrender.

2. Acceptance.

3. Faith.

I sincerely hope and trust that if you persevere in humble prayer that in His good time after you have suffered a while, God will give you the blessing of Peace in Believing.

His letters to those who had lost people whom they loved are full of quiet strength. Here is one to a friend whose daughter had died:

Thank you for your great kindness in allowing me so quickly to be with you in your great sorrow, for so it must be, even to the most Christian heart. I had hoped and prayed that if it pleased God you might all be spared this great pain, but He who did not withdraw the Cup in the Garden knows what is best. On this we may most surely rest, and in time or in eternity we shall know this. At present we may not be able to do more than accept and believe it, but such acceptance is surely most blessed in its fruits, for it is the union of our will and His will, and this is the central point of the restoration of the Divine likeness in us, and our especial preparation for our eternal Communion in Heaven. Through suffering we are perfected.

And this to another:

A new nearness to God, a purer intention, a more direct living for the world beyond, a new freedom and sense of independence to the world, its frowns and smiles, a firmer courage, these, dear friend, are some of the gifts and consolations I believe you will find in God's good time.

One letter to a child gives us a rare picture of his humility and love:

I am so very sorry you have not had the peacock's feathers. It was not all my fault, as I told my butler when I got home to be sure and send them by the carrier, but he forgot, and I'm afraid I never asked him, as I might have done, whether he had sent them. However, I have told him to send them off by post today, so I hope you and Baby will have them ready for your hats on Easter Sunday. I hope your daffodils will make haste and come out for Easter too. The Spring is like the Resurrection; all the Winter things look dead, then in Spring they all rise up to life again. You should look at the buds on the trees, and see how wonderfully they are all packed up, so snug and safe until "Winter is over, and then they just peep out, and then when the cold has gone, out they come, beautiful and wonderful! It shows us how great and how gentle God is. When you grow up to be a strong man you must remember always to be gentle . . .

I am, your affectionate old Bishop . . .

People came to trust his quiet unembittered judgment. When the Ritual troubles flared up again over incense and portable lights he guided his own Diocese to an almost unanimous obedience to the decisions of the two Archbishops. He felt more keenly about Reservation for the sick, and helped his own clergy to meet the need of invalids who had depended upon this. But like the early Tractarians he mistrusted mock-Romanism:

Some men (he wrote) have been adopting all kinds of medieval and modern Roman ways, for which there is really no sort of authority in the Church of England and in the Primitive Church. Now I hope we shall come back nearer to the true English Position of Holy Scripture and the Primitive Church. We need not be surprised if the zeal of the same young men carried them too far in the matter of Confession and Eucharistic Doctrine. I believe most of them will be willing to come back to the Church of England standard, and the young ones who are coming up can have the danger made plain to them. One loves the zeal and self-devotion of many of the men who have been led on too far: but some, I fear, are in danger of losing sight of the highest and most spiritual things, and becoming humanly Ecclesiastical.

Later he wrote to Archbishop Temple: 'As matters are going on, I believe in a few years the strength and weakness of Ritual will be better understood, and people better able to form a true judgment on the matter.'

In 1897 Temple asked him to conduct a quiet day for the Bishops assembled again for the Lambeth Conference. He pictured them simply coming as the Apostles came to Jesus, telling Him all things, 'both what they had done and what they had taught.'

This is a busy age, and bishops, thank God, are expected to work, and the danger perhaps, is of being over busy--doing too much, and forgetting the other account we have to render, of what we have taught. ... The question arises how far have we for our own sakes, or for the sake of others, borne the heat and the burden of the day?

How far, since being made a bishop, has the pressure of the secular part of one's work, the ceaseless letters, the routine of business, and much that is exhausting, and yet that has little in it that is spiritual, taken away one's mind from higher things? How far since we were made bishops have we taken out due share in the intellectual and spiritual troubles of our own people? We may humbly hope that He who knows all things will look mercifully on the confusion and lowness of our present lives.

He went back to Oriel memories, and quoted Marriott's words which had inspired him so much as an undergraduate. 'Meditation on Christ, prayer to Him, learning of Him, conformity to Him, partaking of Him are the chief business of the Christian life.'

Then in his own words: 'The new social forces have been gaining great strength in late years. My fear is that some of us have not grown proportionately in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Some of us have been so occupied in securing the reality of morals that, I fear, we do not give to Christ the place which as Christians we should ascribe to him.'

And so he brought the bishops to the crux of their religion: union with Christ.

He was unhappy about the trend of education in the primary schools. None of the four bills that had been put forward had satisfied him that Church children were going to get Church teaching.

During the last three years (he wrote) no less than four Education bills have failed ... why is it that these efforts have failed? I believe it is because they contained elements that were not right; so they have been stopped. If the Government desire our co-operation they must propose some educational plan which we can accept with a good conscience.

He was growing old, and wondering very much how long he should hold on to the work of the See. He still enjoyed a holiday abroad in 1908 in Italy:

This is a lovely little out-of-the-world place (he wrote from Abetone) 6,400 feet up in the Appenines most delicious air, and lovely restful scenery, not grand and terrible like Switzerland, but peaceful and suited for an old man of 78. ... I hope you are having a holiday somewhere. It does one so much good, besides being so nice.

A letter to an old friend who had lost his brother, a Missionary in Africa, shows his old simple use of words to convey his warmhearted love.

I have just seen that your dear brother is gone to his rest. Dear, lovely, brave, saintly fellow! Thank God, I have prayed for him every day for years. I shall miss him in that way, but I can remember him still. . . . Never, never was there a more unworldly, simpler, braver soul. He walked simply with God: beautiful, lovely, steady, quiet. I do thank God that I was permitted to know him. He has always been a bright star to me.

His last Ordination came 19 December, 1909, but he spoke to his candidates there with a hopefulness that was almost youthful: 'If you realize the promise of Christ to be with you, you not only will not be afraid, but you will cease to be surprised at the wonderful things that He will do through you.'

'I will trust and not be afraid', he wrote in his diary at the beginning of the year of his death, 1910. He knew that the end was coming but he was still wondering if he should resign, or if God would take him. With his old humility he wrote in response to the compiler of a symposium, who asked: 'What are the difficulties in your diocese?' 'Myself and my old age.' He struggled on with his confirmations through the spring, until he was really too weak to do anything but to go to his deathbed.

It was a quiet deathbed, full of loving care for many people. He said goodbye to each of his household, saying to his Housekeeper: 'My mother would be pleased to know that you are with me.'

Then his thoughts went to the Diocese; he could still dictate a letter to all his people:

My dear People,

I fear I am not able to write the letter I should, wish to write. I have for some time been praying to God to tell me when I should give up my work. Now He has sent me, in His loving wisdom, a clear answer. It is a very great comfort to me to be relieved from the responsibility of leaving you. All I have to do is to ask you to forgive the many faults and immeasurable shortcomings during the twenty-five years I have been with you and to ask you to pray God to perfect my repentance and strengthen my faith to the end. All has been done in perfect love and wisdom.

My great wish has been to lead you to be Christ-like Christians. In Christ is the only hope of Purity and Peace. In Him we may be united to God and to one another.

May God guide and bless you all, and refresh you with the increasing consciousness of His presence and His love.

I am, to the end,

Your friend and Bishop.

The next morning he had his last Celebration of Holy Communion. But his love went on; one of his last visitors was a cabman who often drove him to the station, and whom he had been persuading to be confirmed. He gave him his Prayerbook. A railway porter sent him love, and had love and blessing in return. He remembered an invalid to whom he was sending an extra ration of milk; he asked that the scarlet and ermine cloak he had worn in the House of Lords should be sent to his niece, and he advised her to have it made into an evening cloak. The undertone of his thought in these last days was the perfect Love and Wisdom of God, and his trust in that was complete; and so he went forward.

'God bless you', he had written to a friend also making his last journey, 'and keep you to the end which is really the great beginning.'

'We have buried our Saint', said one of the bishops who came to his funeral.

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