I
THE ARTIST

THE choir has sung the last bars of the Creed. The preacher comes from his stall into the pulpit. The lights in the nave are switched off, one solitary bulb outlining the preacher in the packed and murky church.

"In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen."

A spare, ascetic figure, pale-faced, with a sensitive and tilted nose, his hands resting on the pulpit cushions, his voice thin, his whole demeanour detached, his sentences rippling one after the other, conveying the impression that, though he is reading from manuscript, he is really talking to himself. The artist supremely successful in concealing his art.

The text announced and repeated: "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy." Then there is a pause, and the quiet incisive voice goes on, "There is not a man among us who, however vividly he sees his failings, does not consider himself to be a charitable man," and then quietly and with almost biting scorn there comes the denunciation of those who in practice change our Lord's Beatitude into "Blessed are the easy-going for they shall be let down easily".

As I look back over the last fifteen years, as I recall the many sermons that I have heard from Mackay of All Saints', in the church which will always be associated with his name, when I revive memories by reading again his printed sermons, I think of him primarily as an artist, that is to say I prize the self-revelation of an unusual and elur sive personality in the particular work to which he was called.

I am not suggesting that Mackay himself consciously used his pulpit as the means for self-expression. No artist has any such definite intent. But because Mackay was supremely and primarily an artist, when he preached his sermons, he told the world as much about himself as about St. Francis or about St. John or .about St. Chrysostom.

It is necessary to stress this point because I am conscious that, by my insistence at the outset of this sketch of my friend that he was above all things an artist, it may seem that I am minimizing his function as a Christian priest. But I can only be misunderstood by those who have no conception of the value and significance of art.

Whether he will or no, the artist is always a man of God. Whether he be painter or musician or poet, he is sent by God to encourage, to stimulate, to enthral. And the artist is obviously pre-eminently a man of God when his medium is the pulpit. To call Mackay of All Saints' an artist, therefore, is to claim for him a place of the highest possible distinction.

There is still a curious suspicion of the artist and his art among English Christians. This is one of the many bad things we have inherited from the Puritans. But there is nothing artful about art, and there is nothing admirable in being artless. C. T. Le Quesne says in his pamphlet A Layman's View of Preachers:

"It is true that there is no higher vocation than preaching: it is equally true that there is no more difficult art."

Preaching is a branch of oratory, but it is oratory with a high purpose. An orator may move a large assembly to enthusiasm and even to tears with an oration that may mean nothing and be nothing but sound and fury. A preacher may do the same thing, but if he does, he is a definitely bad preacher. The preacher is not concerned to talk for effect, he is intent to talk for influence, and in this again he is a true artist. If the painter of genius thinks at all of the people who will look at his canvas--and he is generally entirely indifferent to them--he will not be hungry for the appreciation of his technical skill, but he will desire that his creation of something that is perfect and beautiful may bring solace and inspiration. Cor ad cor loquitur was Newman's motto. But the preacher is not peculiar in this. The same thing is true of every artist. Every fine poem, every beautiful pattern, every perfect statue comes from the heart as well as from the imagination of their creators.

Sincerity is the quality of all genuine art and sincerity must most certainly be the characteristic of the artist-preacher.

Each art is capable of many variations. There have been men who have written delightful sonnets and have boggled at a lyric. There have been composers, triumphantly successful with concertos, who have hopelessly failed when they have written operas. So with the preacher. There are as many variations of sermons as Malvolio found there were variations of beards. The Word of God can be expounded in various ways, and the term "sermon" covers a multitude of methods and intentions as well as, alas, often a multitude of irritating cliches, false antitheses and clumsy expressions.

There is the philosophical and metaphorical sermon, subtle in thought, instinct with scholarship, perhaps written with literary distinction. Donne's sermons are among the most famous of this order, but Donne's sermons, as we know them, are not really good sermons because they were greatly elaborated before they were printed and because in them there is little of the characteristic artistry of the pulpit.

Then there is the theological sermon, intended to emphasize some aspect of Christian dogma or, may be, if the preacher is a modernist, to demonstrate the futility of all sorts of dogma. Then there is the partisan sermon extolling the virtues of Catholicism over Protestantism or of Protestantism over Catholicism, and exposing, with a wealth of rhetoric and sometimes with a frenzy of exaggeration, the shortcomings of the other side. These sermons, if they are to be effective, demand a large measure of artistry, of the art of the rhetorician and of the art of the actor.

Then finally there is the evangelistic sermon, the call to repentance which finds its most exalted, its most simple and its most beautiful expression in the discourses of our Lord. This type of sermon depends for its effectiveness on the personal experience of the preacher. He must be appealing to others to follow the path that he is himself treading. But even this is not enough. The preacher must have an acute sense of dramatic sequence. He must have learned how to get his message across and he must have learned to avoid the danger of merely supplying a Sunday morning entertainment. This is often the only result of such perfervid denunciation as made the late Father Bernard Vaughan famous. Exaggeration may amuse. It rarely edifies.

Mackay himself once said:

"One of the reasons for the popularity of St. John the Baptist is that he called his generation a generation of vipers. There is nothing that society likes better than to be scourged in general terms."

Mackay's sermons cannot be easily counted under any of these heads. They were certainly not philosophic discourses. They were only dogmatic by inference. He rarely criticized religious positions that were not his; he never denounced. He was not concerned to drive home conclusions. He preferred to let his subjects speak for themselves. Similarly, while he had the qualities that I suggest that the evangelical preacher must possess, with other qualities that were peculiarly his own, he made no clarion call to repentance. Above all other things he was an inspired storyteller, and when-he had told his stories it was left to his hearers to discover the moral for themselves.

"The mission of the preacher," says St. Augustine, "is to teach, delight and move." The method by which this end can be attained depends largely on the character of the congregation whom the preacher is addressing. For example, an admirable Convocation sermon would be entirely un-suited for Sunday morning at All Saints', Margaret Street, and an excellent sermon for Margaret Street would be over the heads of the congregation of St. Augustine's, Haggerston. The preacher is therefore far less essentially individualistic than any other artist except the actor. A book may be a good book even though its circulation may be extremely limited. A sermon is not a good sermon unless it reaches the hearts of the majority of the people to whom it is addressed, that is to say, the art of the pulpit, in common with the art of the stage, demands the collaboration of the audience if it is to have any more than academic value.

It was one of Mackay's virtues that he was always up to date. He lived in his own times and thought in his own times. It has been said of Latimer that while he had a profound knowledge of the Bible and of patristic literature, it was with the history of his own times that he was most concerned. The preacher, indeed, must bring the Eternal down to earth. Dr. Workman has said:

"One of the charms of St. Francis lay in the naturalness with which he used the incidents of daily life as texts for his sermons, in this following the Master. St. Dominic also, we are told in his life by Brother Jordan, made great use of anecdotes whereby the souls of his hearers might be swayed to the love of Christ or to contempt of the world."

Baxter asserted that sermons should be delivered in "the plainest dress".

Mackay always preferred plain dress and he had a veritable passion for being up to date. "The modern generation want to ring God up on the telephone," he once said, "but it doesn't know His number." Speaking of the consecration of St. Ambrose as Bishop of Milan he said:

"Imagine Lord Irwin going out, while a bachelor, to India as Viceroy; imagine him seized and forcibly made Metropolitan of India instead; imagine him feeling it his duty to lay aside all wealth and comfort in order to live an ascetical life like one of the Brahmin holy men; imagine him getting such a grip on India in consequence that it was necessary during all the rest of his life to call him in constantly in the administration of Indian state affairs, and you get a situation more or less parallel to the story of St. Ambrose."

There are preachers who, because they take their text from the Bible, feel that they should express their thoughts in archaic Bible sentences. That was not Mackay's way. The language of his sermons was the language of the fireside. In a sermon on the Raising of the Widow's Son he suggested that well-meaning people urged St. Mary to persuade Her Son to take a more modest course. "Don't you see that He is killing Himself? Don't you see that He can't get proper food? Don't you see how pale He looks? Why don't you stop it?"

A sermon may appeal to the intellect as well as to the emotions, but it will most certainly fail if it appeals only to the intellect. Dr. Workman dismisses Wycliff as an unsatisfactory preacher because while his appeal was always to "the higher light and life", there was never in his sermons "any realization of the value of the emotions and the imagination". Mackay certainly realized the value of them both.

I have found a curious resemblance between Mackay's sermons and Spurgeon's in the effective employment of the forceful and audacious phrase. How more clearly could the possible intimacy between the Creator and the created be expressed than in a sentence in one of Spurgeon's sermons: "They have talked with God as a man talketh with his friends: they have whispered in the ear of Jehovah." Compare with this two quotations from Mackay:

"It would be absurd to describe St. Peter or St. John, St. Francis or St. Vincent de Paul as dutiful men. That would be like saying that Dante was dutiful to Beatrice, or Elizabeth to Robert Browning."

Talking of conventional Christianity he said:

"Christ alone can cure the joylessness of the English Sunday. Happy Pagans cannot exist among the baptized. Touch Christ in contempt and you will go on suffering until He heals you. That is the meaning of the story of the Wandering Jew."

Mr. Kenneth Ingram has said of Mackay:

"No one else could have dared these contrasts and yet preserved the dignity of manner which was characteristic of his non-extempore discourse. How dramatic he could be, although he was reading every word from the notebook before him, was always surprising. One sermon of his ended with a description of a soldier who in the agony of death remembered his comrades and his friends and prayed for each of them. 'That was not Christianity,' he said. That was Christ.' "

The preacher must be a man with a message. His message must be definite and his sermons must therefore be dogmatic. Above all they must be conceived to be heard, just as a sonata must be conceived to be heard. Many good sermons, notably those of Father Stanton and Father Vernon in his Anglican days--I have not heard him since he went to Rome--would not "print". That is no criticism of their excellence. The preacher must use the terms and the imagery of his own day. His language must be picturesque, gracious and yet pungent. He must have the skill of the orator and must realize the supreme value of the pause and when and where to emphasize by raised voice and emphatic gesture.

In one of his essays, H. L. Mencken writes of the literary artist:

"He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying to arrest and challenge a sufficient body of readers to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him and he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a Katharsis attained such as Wagner achieved when he wrote Die Walküre."

What is true of the writer is true of the preacher. Mackay's message was convincing because all he said came from himself, from his own spiritual experience, from his heart, from his imagination, from his intelligence, from his hunger for self-expression. It is true to say of Mackay, as Froude said of Latimer, that "he was not an echo but a voice; and he drew his thoughts fresh from the fountain--from the facts of the era in which God had placed him".

The preacher has to deduce the eternal from the ephemeral, to demonstrate God in man. In a strikingly suggestive passage Emerson says:

"It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fullness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object,--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,--the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of the object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world."

There is in a striking degree in Mackay's sermons this "power to detach and to magnify by detaching". He retold old stories and he gave them new life in the retelling. He brought Jerusalem to Charing Cross. He knew that, in this modern world, the Incarnation, with all its implication, is little more than an interesting tale that is told, and the saints men whose lives were lived in so entirely different a set of circumstances that their interest is merely historical. Mackay saw the past in the present and the present in the past. It has been said that to-day the majority of Englishmen think of the saints as old gentlemen with long beards, who lived long ago in a remote country called Illyria, which can never be found on the map. Mackay made saints real by making them modern. His was the art of Epstein and Eric Gill. He pulled off the togas from the saints and put them into trousers.

He was perhaps most successful in the series of sermons on St. Francis. No one would suggest that St. Francis is easy to understand. Bishop Barnes, that man of supreme un-imagination, dismisses him, with the shudder of the middle-class don, as a verminous person quite unfit to be entertained in a Birmingham drawing-room. Havelock Ellis, more sceptical than Dr. Barnes, is infinitely more understanding. He points out that St. Francis is generally remembered only as "the emaciated saint already developing the stigmata of divine grace", and he insists that to understand the mature saint it is necessary to know something of the youthful sinner. This too was Mackay's conviction. So he begins by describing, in modern terms, the saint's comfortable bourgeois home in Assisi:

"Peter Bernadone was a typical Philistine, and belonged to Mr. Galsworthy's Forsyte family, and Mr. and Mrs. Bernadone are living at this moment in their thousands in Chislehurst, Surbiton, Wimbledon, and the suburbs of Birmingham and Manchester."

Galsworthy is roped in as a collaborator of Paul Sabatier. The Forsytes explain the Bernadones.

There is one very self-revealing passage in the St. Francis sermons. As I shall suggest when I come to consider Mackay the man, he loved gaiety if it were well lived and he could forgive a certain naughtiness if it were well born. Young Francis was rich, light-hearted and clever and Mackay loved him none the less for that. In due course Francis went to a university and Mackay at once thinks of Oxford, for Oxford was rarely out of his mind and never out of his heart.

"Let us see him in the terms of Oxford. He got his blue for cricket, hunted in the winter, and was a very promising polo player. He was a member, of course, of Vincent's and he belonged to Bullingdon. His rooms in college were charming, and he was a prince of entertainers, with an amazing power of doing music-hall sketches. His jokes and pranks were common property, and everybody loved him. Even the Proctors laughed when young Frenchy had paid his fine and been gated for a fortnight. He combined all this with first-rate ability and a great love of literature. He did not get his first in History because he did not read hard enough, but he won both the Chancellor and the Newdigate."

This is a jolly picture, painted with a relish, but Mackay knew it was only a half-picture. Francis was something more than a clever pleasure-loving undergraduate. He was a poet in the golden age of the troubadours. Poverty and suffering hurt him. He himself was no Forsyte, though he was the son of a Forsyte. There was no room for him in Chislehurst. His spiritual home was in Poplar. But not at the beginning. The value of his renunciation lay in the fact that he had so much to renounce. It was a long and a hard journey from the Bullingdon to the stigmata.

The story of the renunciation and the subsequent mission is told with an entire absence of sentimentality as if it were matter-of-fact modern history.

"And so it came to pass that one evening a hundred years later there knocked at the door of a lonely Franciscan dwelling in the Apennines a man, thin and worn, grey and bowed down with many sorrows. And the porter seeing a stranger standing in the sunset glow said, 'Sir, what is it you seek?' And the stranger answered, 'Peace.'--It was Dante."

He had broken off the narrative of the Saint's life and, with no excuse, except his own exuberant imagination, he linked together two of the greatest figures in the pageant of splendour that Italy has given to the world--Francis the saint, Dante the poet; the poet seeking peace, the Saint welcoming him into the Kingdom of Peace. Here are historical understanding and something like imaginative genius. To jump from Francis to Dante is to demonstrate an acute understanding of the spiritual history of Europe.

The orator can never avoid an attractive irrelevance. The rhetorician must have his occasional purple patch. I have just quoted an example of this truth in the St. Francis Sermons. Another example is the conclusion of the sermon on Pilate's wife:

"The weather had changed on Good Friday evening; there was a soft, calm sunset, and Pontius and Claudia dined together as usual. The Just Man had disappeared. But they will meet Him again, and till then, throughout the ages and throughout the lands which then formed the Empire Pilate served, from Emperor to pauper, every man, when he professes his faith, solemnly registers the fact 'crucified under Pontius Pilate'."

Another facet of Mackay's art, which, this time, suggests Arthur Wragg to me, is to be found in his description of St. Andrew:

"I imagine St. Andrew had a very charming personality. I imagine he was the person you would like to go and chat with, if you had nothing else to do. I imagine he was a great favourite with boys and girls, and that the youth who carried the provision for the Apostles' Supper, the youth with the five loaves and the two small fishes, was very fond of him. Consequently, when everyone was terrifically strung up and tense just before the feeding of the five thousand, Andrew comes shoving through the crowd, linked arm-in-arm with the youth, and takes the whole situation in the most light-hearted fashion."

What splendid audacity to describe an Apostle "shoving his way through a crowd"! How actual it makes him! The story loses its oppressive solemnity and becomes human. The feeding of the Five Thousand is a Bank Holiday bean-feast. False mystery is brushed aside, and the artist's intuition brings us, as it were, face to face with our Lord, delighted by St. Andrew's good humour and appreciative of his never-failing resource. The saints are put into trousers, but the trousers fit them. They are their own trousers, not somebody else's. The artist's eye is clear and his understanding complete.

Mackay could be fair even in descriptions of men for whom he had little affection. He could never caricature even a heretic. Here is his pen portrait of Arius:

"Arius was attractive too, a loose-limbed giant, handsome, pale, thin, ascetic, with downcast face and a fierce, eager way of speaking. He fascinated men, and still more women, as he stood before them swinging his arms violently and pouring out torrents of argument on behalf of what he insisted was Bible Christianity."

H. G. Wells once described St. Athanasius as a little red-headed man. The great theological contest becomes near if we can picture on the one hand a red-headed Athanasius, as painted by Wells, and Arius, a loose-limbed giant, as described by Mackay.

One of the most effective of Mackay's word portraits is that of the Woman of Samaria:

"When I read of the Woman of Samaria, I think of Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. You remember Mrs. Hauksbee? Mrs. Hauksbee is the Woman of Samaria."

Pernickety Bible commentaries may, for the ordinary reader, destroy Bible significance and kill Bible beauty. But to link the Bible with Kipling is to bring the Bible home.

Mackay was a great scene painter as well as a great portrait painter. In his Studies in the Ministry of our Lord there is this vivid description of the approach to Caesarea Philippi:

"This approach to Caesarea Philippi is deeply impressive. The traveller spends long hours in stifling heat skirting an immense marsh, the marsh surrounding the little lake which was then called the Waters of Merom, and which lies narrowly enclosed on east and west by lines of barren mountains. The dense papyrus growth which fills many miles of the marsh is the haunt of wild boar and an occasional leopard. The croaking of a myriad frogs fills the air. Humped buffaloes stand knee-deep in the swamp. On the steaming banks of black mud little emerald-green frogs hop and crawl. After many hours of this the ground changes its character, for at the end of the long trench-like valley an old glacial moraine descends into it from Hermon. Up this the traveller picks his way amid boulders and rough hillocks, until he stands upon the lower slopes of a great spur of the mountain which rises 1,200 feet, and is now crowned with the ruins of a vast castle of Saracen times. The slopes of this spur of Mount Hermon are another world. They are the slopes of an English park, its turf bestrewed with oaks and walnuts, and clumps of shrub draped with honeysuckle. From the crest of the rolling land they fall away again to rushing streams and terraces of cornland, and groves of fig and elder, amid which Caesarea Philippi lies in its luxuriant hollow under the sanctuary of the great god Pan."

The picture is complete. As one reads this description, one is actually standing on the slopes of Mount Hermon looking down at the waters of Merom. The Bible lands are no longer far-away lands. They become familiar lands, and the portentous events of which they were the scene are thus easier to appreciate and to understand. The characters are re-introduced to us. The setting is drawn and coloured with perfect skill.

There is a striking example of Mackay's quality of imaginative narration in his Assistants at the Passion, where he describes the reactions of the Crucifixion on the mind and soul of the Roman centurion:

"From that time I see him scrutinizing our Lord carefully, and getting all His words translated if he did not understand them. The first sound from the Gross revealed a conquest of resentment, like the conquest of pain; Christ seemed in some mysterious way to be suffering beyond all sufferers, and yet to be superior to all suffering. Then the robber spoke, and Jesus answered from the Cross in the tones of a king. Once more it grew upon the centurion that this extraordinary person occupied a position of authority in another sphere than this, and that all the while He was reigning invisibly while He hung visibly.

"Presently two figures came as near to Him as they could, and the bystanders said that one was His Mother. The centurion would watch this interview closely. Now the Man will break down. But no; again the King spoke: 'Lady, behold thy Son; behold thy Mother.' 'And these two,' muttered the centurion, 'are like Him; they are quite calm; He has imparted His curious powers of conquest to these people of His circle.' So, when the darkness gathered, and nature seemed to be veiling a mystery, and the nervous earthquake feeling was in the air, the centurion took up the position which the Evangelist describes as 'standing by over against the Cross', and he must have felt, for the time, what the sentry at Pompeii felt when he stood stationary under the cloud of death.

"We may be sure that during the three hours of darkness the centurion drew upon all the deepest influences in his life--the best he knew of God and the best he knew of human life, perhaps some farm in the Sabine mountains where the old folk were living still, in the beautiful simplicity of the earlier days of Rome. For it was a grave and awakened man who came, when the darkness lifted, to look once more up to the Sufferer's face. (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.' 'He is calling to comrades on that higher plane to which He has access.' 'It is finished.' 'Then I am right: some mystery has been enacted in this crucifixion, to which I have not got the clue.'

"He was standing now very near, and in a moment the light came. 'Father'--and the centurion, who was on foreign service, felt a pang of home-sickness pierce him at the word--'Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit.' Still the centurion stood looking, after the strong victorious spirit had gone home. 'He has drunk the Cup of Immortality,' thought the centurion. 'I have seen the Unconquered Comrade. Truly this was a Son of God!'"

Again the link! And how supreme is the art that, in the mind of the Centurion, watching a Jew dying on a hill outside Jerusalem, a death that it has been his military duty to supervise, links the dead Jew with his father's farm in the Sabine Hills, and how splendid is the courage, that never forsakes the artist, when he inserts into the Bible narrative the tribute, "I have seen the Unconquered Comrade." Christ hung on the Cross unconquered. That must have been evident to the people who had jeered at Him and to the soldiers who had divided His raiment among them. He had died game. To the Centurion He was more than unconquered. He was the Unconquered Comrade, and I suggest that our Lord has rarely been more splendidly described. One more example of the painter's skill. Our Lord and His disciples are on the shores of the Sea of Galilee:

"The sun is set and the boat is ready. Peter and John have arranged a couch in the stern, our Lord enters the boat and stretches Himself on the pillows; there is a grinding sound of gravel as the boat is shoved off; her sail catches the light breeze as the course is set south-east across the lake, and she soon fades away into the purple shadows of the night."

This is a homely picture, the picture of a Flemish artist, a domestic scene, fishermen going about their business, everything happening just as it happens every day in ten thousand places all over the world. One man holds the tiller, another trims the sail, while our Lord rests on a couch in the stern. Homeliness, reality!

There is hardly a page in the many volumes of Mackay's sermons that does not suggest two things, first understanding and then acute capacity for revealing. Mackay writes: "Con-stantine gave to our Lord everything except himself," and at once one understands how infinitely the Church lost when it made its first deal with the State. Then there is the description of St. Paul in his prison in Rome, which insists on the humanity of the Apostle of the Gentiles, who often seems to most of us so far less a man of like passions with ourselves than St. Peter or St. Thomas:

"St. Paul is in a dungeon and about to die, but he is as busy and practical as ever. He is also as sensitive, as human as ever, the childlike element is as strong in him as ever, and certainly he was no stoic."

As Mackay saw him, St. Paul did not want to die and he was about to die horribly. He was a practical man with a practical man's knowledge that the work to which he had set his hand was only half done and that there were a dozen problems in the young Church which he could tackle far better than any other man. Yet he was able to die content with the conviction that, whoever sowed and whoever watered, it would be the Lord who would reap the increase, and that there was no doubt whatever that there would be an increase to reap.

Great art is never produced without great effort. There is the long preliminary training, with its constant self-criticism. There are many things destroyed before one thing is finally produced. Mackay took infinite pains with his sermons. They were written, and sometimes re-written, and hours were spent in their production. He was a sensitive man with a highly critical mind, and of no one was he more critical than of himself.

I have said that the artist is compelled, whether he will or no, to reveal himself in his art. In the extracts that I have taken as examples, there is evident the power of observation, the power of sympathy, the power of description, the revelation of the man as he was known far more accurately to his Maker than to his fellows. And in this consideration of him as an artist, there would be something radically incomplete were I not to refer to the revelation of his tenderness, which the casual acquaintance perhaps rarely discovered, but which was the basis of the man's being, a tenderness which found its most appealing expression in the deep affection for children. He was preaching on the Widow's Mite, and he said:

"Do you remember the birthday, when your little girl gave you the first handkerchiefs she had ever hemmed, those very small handkerchiefs with the very big and straggling irregular stitches? You put them away carefully in a drawer, wrapt up in tissue paper. When you are dead, they will turn out your drawers and somebody will unfold the paper and find the handkerchiefs unused; unused not because they were too small and because the stitches were too big, but because they were far too valuable to use. Now that is the meaning of the story of the widow's mite. That such a passion of tenderness can exist between the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, and His human child is the supreme revelation of Jesus."

The handkerchief too sacred to be used, because it is too badly hemmed! Only from an artist could such a lovely thought have come.

Then in another place, writing of the persecution of the early Anglo-Catholic priests, Mackay said:

"In the great St. George's riots, when the Protestants were stoning Father Lowder and his friends, a ragged little girl used to wait for the clergy and trot silently by their side through the howling, blaspheming mob, to the shelter of their homes. She was the great strength, support and consolation of those strong men through those black days. They felt the child-heart was with them."

The child-heart was with them and they knew that they were safe. "Suffer little children to come unto Me", and the little children have always gone unto Him. To be childlike is to be Christ-like, and without the spirit of a child the world can never be saved.

So I come to one final example of Mackay's artistry. The end of the life of St. Francis had come, his travail was over:

"The Feast of the Holy Innocents was dawning, and it was the Holy Innocents and not any greater personages that those about him invoked to his aid; and so when the last silence fell I think of Francis as being pulled by a flock of cheering, laughing babies into the presence of our Lord."

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