V
THE RELIGION THAT HE TAUGHT

MACKAY came of good Protestant stock, and there remained in him a strong Quaker vein. While his religion was fundamentally different from the religion of his fathers, he never failed to appreciate the fine qualities of the Protestantism from which he had journeyed. Thus he referred in a sermon called "The Rebuilding of the City" to "the great Protestant community with their cohorts of holy souls never fallen from baptismal grace, with their stern upholding of the natural virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude".

Mackay, too, like all good Catholics, was a Bible Christian, while realizing fully the wrong use to which the Bible has been put as the result of Puritan influence. He said in his The Religion of the Englishman:

"The Bible is the time-table in which the company of transformed men tells us the time, the way, the place, the plan. The fact is that our Bible teaching bores our children, because we have not used it to put them into the train. We have been reading them the time-table when they wanted change of air."

In his sermons he is as insistent as any Wesleyan revivalist on the necessity for repentance and conversion, if the good life is to be lived and eternal felicity is to be attained. And conversion meant in fact to him what it means to the Salvation Army captain, "finding Jesus". In a sermon on The Pilgrim's Progress he imagines Christian writing to his wife:

"We made one great mistake in our married life, my darling, which I have discovered out here. We left our Lord outside our home. I am afraid the sort of Christianity we had both picked up hid our Lord from us instead of showing Him to us. Well, I have found Him, and if this letter ever reaches you, I shall be with Him as you read it. My darling, this is my last word to you. Follow me and bring the boys."

Not to find Him is to lose oneself. There is no salvation except at His feet. This is surely sound Evangelical doctrine and Mackay realized that it was not popular in the cultured world inclined to regard a man as a good Christian if he has a modified regard for the Sermon on the Mount. He wrote in The Twelve Gates:

"We dose our children with Christian moral maxims and with Bible narratives, as we dose them with pyretic saline and hypophosphates, and if I told a British schoolmaster that his object must be to lead his pupils to the feet of Jesus, he would look down his nose and regard my remark as being in the worst possible taste."

Man must either ascend or descend. He must either be saved or be damned. There is no standing comfortably still. There is no pleasant halfway house. You must either climb up or slide down.

"Many men secretly believe in a sense that, after all, they are only animals, and they secretly wish to live like animals. But that is just what no man can possibly do. If a man sinks, he sinks by making wrong acts of will; in other words, he sinks into a devil. And a coarse, evil-tongued crowd is not a big animal; it is a big devil."

Good intentions will not avail. Even good deeds will not of themselves open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. Mackay, indeed, deplored the amount of goodness in the world "outside the cohort of the Lord", good will employed ineffectively in the war against the devil, lonely guerilla righting by untrained soldiers. "With so much evil present in the world it seems very sad that our Lord should not have all the goodness of the world at His disposal for His purposes: but He has not!" The Christian, Mackay insists, is not merely the good man, eager for service, ready for self-renunciation, consumed with desire for the service of his fellows. He has to be the definitely converted man. There is a passage in The Twelve Gates the first part of which might be another extract from Mr. Spurgeon:

"The moment of conviction of sin is therefore a milestone which everyone without exception must pass on the heavenly road--the experience of St. Peter on the lake, of St. Paul on the road, and of St. Augustine in the garden are only vivid examples of the operation of a law which is universal. To meet the crisis God the Holy Ghost has made all needful provision in the Church. He has decreed that the power of forgiveness of sins bequeathed by Christ to His Church should be dispensed in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. There it has stood for all ages--that Fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins. You either have arrived or will arrive travel-stained, footsore, dusty, thirsty at the inevitable milestone."

This is the summary of Evangelical Catholicism, the Catholic Sacraments evangelically interpreted.

Mackay was a theological Liberal, but he was scornfully impatient of the attempt to create undogmatic religion, a Christianity without creeds. "Society is wilting and withering in agnosticism, for creeds really held always mean movement, whether that movement be good or bad, and creedlessness always means paralysis." Death and judgment are beyond the shadow of a doubt. "For you and me and all of us, brethren, there are two certainties in the future; we shall either go to Purgatory or we shall go to Hell."

Of the Godhead of Christ, of the fact that He was something infinitely more than perfect Man, he was always emphatic. "The Godhead of Christ is the Gospel of Christ, and if an angel from Heaven preach unto us any other gospel let him be anathema."

In turning over the pages of his published sermons and in reading a very large number of letters addressed by him to his friends, I have been impressed by his reiteration of the two great assertions of the Christian revelation, that all that a man can know of the character of the Deity he must learn from the earthly life of Christ and that what he will learn is summarized in the sentence "God is Love". Nothing can be true of God which is not true of Christ, and there is always hope for the fallen sinner.

The Love of God is broader than the measures of man's mind;
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

"Doctrine is essential. The use of the divinely appointed Sacraments is essential. But the significance of the Christian revelation is altogether missed unless it is realized that the life of our Lord was the revelation of love, and that this is instinct in and behind all the ceremonies and the festivals of the Church.

"There is a feast in Japan called the Feast of the Cherry Blossom, when the people stream forth, a band of happy laughing children, to behold the beauty of the spring. That is not the feast of the botanical analysis of the cherry; it is the feast of the loveliness of the cherry. And so with Trinity Sunday. It is not the Feast of the formulas of the Christian doctrine of God; it is the Feast of the loveliness of the Christian knowledge of God."

Then Mackay arrives at another truth, the acceptance of which is sufficient to abase to the dust: "It was because God could not redeem us by His love that He came to redeem us by His Blood." In other words, and this is justified by human experience, love has to prove itself not by the easy pleasantness of everyday intercourse, not even by persistent consideration and charming good manners, but some time and somehow by some heroic act, an imitation however remote of the unspeakable heroism of Calvary. The Christian can only follow his Master by taking up his own cross.

"Christ our example did not save you and me in a spirit of self-forgetful good nature when He happened to meet us wounded by the wayside as He rode through the world. No. He fashioned the plan of complete self-sacrifice in order to save us, and if when He spoke to the Jewish theologian He pointed to the example of the Good Samaritan and said, 'Go, and do thou likewise,' it is to Himself that He points when He speaks to us.

"For to us He says: 'Take up your cross daily and follow after Me, and in so doing all the simple human duties of love and mercy will naturally be fulfilled.' "

The Christian is the man who has fallen in love with Christ as St. Francis fell in love with Him. The hatred of meanness and of selfishness is inspired by the fact that these things separate one from Christ and make one infinitely unlike Him. "There are many ugly things in the world," said Mackay, "but I think terrified vice is the ugliest--vice turning to God, not because it is repentant but because it is terrified." No man ever becomes a Christian because he is in terror of hell fire. He is a Christian because he wants to be like Christ, and it is impossible to be moved by the beauty of the life of Christ without becoming a little like Him:

"It is impossible to go on watching our Lord and trying to do what He bids us without catching some of His charm as well as His goodness, and the charm of Christ is the antithesis of venial sin."

The Christian life is not only worship and veneration. It is determined imitation. There is real danger in the perfection and beauty of worship. There is, so Mackay taught, the possibility of loss through the complete absorption in the practising of the Christian ethics. Imitation entails the mortification of the flesh. Discipleship is a hard business.

"We can be too much absorbed with the beauty and worship of the Catholic Religion. We can be too much interested in the spread of Christian ethics. We may be too much fascinated by the beauty of the Christian ideal. We can go on gathering bouquets of those excellences in the character of our Lord Himself which we specially fancy: His gentleness, His compassion, His unselfishness, His love of children, His appreciation of nature. By making our own Christ out of the real Christ we may waste a great deal of time in admiring it, while all the time but little of the spade work of conformity with the mind and purpose of our Lord is going on in ourselves.

"What the Lord wants of us is less 'Praise to the Holiest in the Height' and more mortification of the passions, affections, senses, through which we lay hold of creatures and creatures lay hold of us; less CI could not do without Thee, O Saviour of the lost' and more sorrow for sin, more hatred of evil, more self-denial, more self-sacrifice and consecration of the will."

The converse is equally true. Mackay brought Assisi into the Strand, but he thoroughly realized how easy it is to be enraptured by the joy of the preacher to the birds and the friend of the wolf and to forget the torture of the stigmata. The two are intimately associated--the first the consequence of the second and the second, by a paradox, the consequence of the first. I have already suggested that it is impossible to understand the laughing saint without knowing the laughing sinner. But it is the suffering and still laughing saint that matters most. Mackay says in his book, Difficulties in the Way of Discipleship:

"Of late years there has been a strange cultus of St. Francis of Assisi in England, but it has only venerated half the Saint. It has venerated him young, blithe, ingenuous, the sweet preacher of love and poverty, the friend of birds and beasts. It has tried to forget the night contests with the flesh and the devil. It has tried to forget the tears, the scourging and the stigmata, and the twisted, crippled and tortured body out of which the sweet soul passed in the sunset of that October evening when the larks wheeled in a circle above St. Mary of the Angels, making a crown of song."

The would-be imitator of Christ is continually faced by difficulty and disappointments, the worst disappointments being in himself. In a letter, written in 1903, to the Rev. G. Birchenough, who was with him at Pusey House and had temporarily abandoned the idea of ordination, Mackay said:

"After all there is no real difference between 'Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men' and 'Lord I am disgusted to find that I am as other men'. But if one can get grace to be very quiet and still and gentle during a time of checked action and deeper thought and more meditation, then all will be well. I do not think this is a time for prolonged self-scrutiny. Let it be admitted that you are not fit or ready. Until St. Peter was that, he could not get on a step, but after the 'Depart from me' it began to be possible to do things for Him. Surely it is a time for fixing the eyes unwaveringly on the figure of our Lord and pressing on into a more perfect union with Him."

The ascent of the celestial mountain is steep, the path is stony and many fall by the wayside, consequently, and inevitably perhaps, Christians are, as they always have been, the most powerful enemies of Christianity.

"It is no argument against Christ that He has bitter, unrelenting, plotting enemies. All strong personalities have. But it does seem to be an argument against Him that he has such a lot of rotten adherents."

So the embarking on the great adventure is a tremendously hazardous business. Every day there is the danger not only of stumbling but of causing "one of these little ones to stumble". The man who begins to climb Jacob's Ladder has got to go on. He cannot go down without also knocking down others who are following him. We are our brothers' keepers, whether we like it or not. The Christian life is in very truth a tremendous business:

"Am I one who because I pose as a Christian am hiding our Lord from men? I represent Christianity to many people. I profess its creed, communicate at its altars, assist devotional progress with my aims and my labours. How if my selfishness, my lack of sympathy, my angularity have come to stand to some people for an embodiment of the creed I profess? How if they have lost sight of the Christ behind my correctly posed and vested figure? Then against me goes forth this week the judgment, 'Woe unto you, for you shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men, you neither go in yourself neither suffer them that are entering to go in.' "

The best Christian sermon is the Christian life. Men only listen to a preacher when they know that he is living his faith. Goodness is infinitely more effective than eloquence. Mackay said of one of the Tractarians:

"When he spoke of the evils which lie beneath the surface of our civilization, men listened because all the while he was curing the ills around him and giving his life blood to the task."

The world, Mackay insists, can only be saved by vicarious atonement. The innocent expiate the sins of the guilty, and there is no other way by which these sins can be expiated. But the innocent cannot be the expiators unless they are instinct with perfect love and perfect sympathy. That perfect love and sympathy are only to be attained by intimate contact with the great figure of our Lord.

There is a sort of Christianity, Mackay teaches, that hides our Lord from us instead of showing Him to us, Christ to be real in the lives of ordinary men and women must be the Cricket on the Hearth. The vision must take human flesh, our Lord must be a familiar friend. This side of Mackay's teaching is suggestive and important because it is the constant assertion of the critics of the Catholic revival in the Church of England that the priest and sacramentalism tend to come between the created and the Creator and to prevent any sort of intimate contact between the individual and the Eternal. It is therefore of no little importance that the most distinguished of latter Anglo-Catholic preachers should so constantly, in his sermons, assert that the one objective of sacramental teaching is to establish this contact. Far from shutting away God in a Holy of Holies into which there is no entrance except for a few individuals, endowed with rare spiritual powers, the Catholic aim is to throw open the door of the Holy of Holies so that all men may be assured of a paternal welcome there.

Mackay concluded his study of St. Thomas of Canterbury with the words: "May his prayers aid us at the Throne of Grace to defend even to the death--the Crib, the Cross, the Church, the Altar and the Law of God." Symbols did not mean a great deal to Mackay, but he realized their immense significance to average men and women, the Crib reminding them of the Incarnation, the Cross of the Crucifixion, the Church being the instrument for carrying on the work of Redemption, the Altar the place of Communion and cleansing. The Law of God must be obeyed if life both here and hereafter is to be worth the living.

It was perhaps his Quaker descent that made Mackay suspicious of aesthetic enjoyment and superficial spiritual thrill to be derived from the mere practice of the Catholic religion, the practice of religious duties without the fulfilling of social obligation and the abnegation of wealth. On the other hand, there is in his teaching the insistence that good will without faith does not make a Christian and that faith without good will makes a very bad Christian.

With all his appreciation of the virtues of the Protestant and the masculine strength of the Puritan, Mackay continually insisted that there is something that they always miss, something only to be attained through the Catholic faith, something that is so intensely human that it becomes divine, in this, of course, arriving at the same enormously important conception instinct in the writings of G. K. Chesterton. In a sketch of Henry Bromby in The Function of the Church of England in Christendom, he says:

"Henry Bromby is not a Protestant Saint. He is a Catholic Saint. Nothing but Catholicism could have made him. In all my young days I lived among saintly Quakers, and they are some of the most excellent of people. But Henry Bromby was more than they were. How? Well, he had the Catholic sense of the awfulness of sin. He had the Catholic touch in dealing with the sinner. He faced evil and grappled with it in human nature as only the great Catholic can. And then he had the wide all-embracing charm, the intense sense of humour, which he showed so delightfully in his home circle; the intense love of beauty and of art which the great Catholic must have, because he has grasped the Sacramental principle, and indeed which only the great Catholic dares to have; and he was always face to face with God, and always conscious of our Lady and of all Saints, whom he knew to be with him, though on another plane."

This possible intimacy was to Mackay a delightful, I might say an essentially jolly fact. Writing after the death of an intimate friend he said:

"I am very glad for her that our Lord took her suddenly after a most merry evening. She was laughing merrily with me at 5.30 with no idea of the end at all or of having the Last Sacraments. But our Lord meant to dispense with the Last Sacraments in her case for she was as full of Him as she could possibly be. I expect she is already in Heaven, which is a most delightful thought, and in her case we must feel what Leo XIII said when Newman died: 'The holy Father believes that the Cardinal is already beyond the reach of his prayers, nevertheless he determines to give them to him.'"

He had a tremendous realization of the solemnity and the responsibility of the priestly office, and he had no sort of doubt of the powers that it conferred. "The grace of the priesthood is very positive and objective," he wrote to the Rev. Arthur Green. But his religion made Mackay the complete realist. No man was less affected by sentimentality, no man more thoroughly detested exaggeration. While, perhaps, he would have been ready to admit that all men and women are miserable sinners, he strongly objected to any over-statement of the misery or the sin. I find one very striking example of this in a letter which I am permitted to reproduce here. The penitent had gone to him on Maundy Thursday and to her horror had, as she thought, been refused absolution. In answer to a letter in which the disappointment and the sorrow had been expressed, Mackay wrote:

"I am sorry to find that you mistook what happened on Maundy Thursday. I did not refuse you absolution, a thing which very rarely happens. It was exactly the contrary to that. I could find nothing in your confession which required absolution, and absolution is only pronounced when there is something in the confession that seems to require it. This Easter I withheld absolution for some days from one person and I did not think it was needed in two instances--yourself and an old personal friend of mine, a man, and so did not pronounce it."

Believing as he did in the potentialities of the Sacraments, he was frequently moved to a very real anger at the constant failure of the English Church to emphasize, not only their solemnity and their significance, but also their everydayness. It seemed to him appalling that anyone should be uncomfortable at Holy Communion. He has expressed this in his usual facile way in the course of sermons on The Religion of an Englishman.

"It is extraordinarily pathetic that the best thing in the life of an English boy who is brought up as a moderate Anglican is that on the brink of the Holy Communion he hesitates and shivers. He does not understand exactly what the Holy Communion is. He only knows that it is not what the Roman Catholics say it is. Nevertheless, he knows that only clean hands should take that Bread and hold that Cup, and he is very humble and uncomfortable about it."

To Mackay the Church was Christ Himself, a thing of beauty and joy and satisfaction, the background and explanation of human life. Nowhere, I think, is this better expressed than in the following extracts from a series of letters written to a friend:

"Nobody knows the delightful interest and variety of the Catholic Year until he lives it. It is like a lovely landscape of mountains, woodland and sea, on which sun and shadow play. ...

"The sun sets in glory, it is the Glory of God; the moon rises in the stillness over the dark woods, it is the Peace of God; a leaf falls, it is the Touch of God; the scent of the roses comes up from the, garden, it is the fragrance of God; the nightingale sings, it is the Joy of God; a man sins, it is the Power of God abused by His creatures; the Precious Blood is shed on Calvary and anoints the sinner, and fills the Chalice of the Church, it is the Power of God restoring His creature.

"Catholicism must be the supreme Character Maker, if its claim is true, and that is what it is. The Catholic Religion is simply Jesus Christ Himself, extended in His Church, and communicating Himself to human nature at all points at which He deigns so to communicate Himself. In no other form of Christianity is the action of Christ upon human nature so full and wide."

He taught that the Church, if it merely remains the place of repose or indeed merely the place of inspiration, loses not only its savour, not only its power to leaven the world, but also the joy that it can supply to its adherents. The Church dies unless it is a definite fighting machine, and the fighting must not only be to defend that which has been won, but to extend the territory of the Lord. In his Pilgrim's Progress in the World To-day he wrote:

"The reason why modern religion has lost the note of joy is that it does not take the field in aggressive action. It regards itself as an army on the defence, and it awaits the enemy in its trenches. The pilgrims attacking Doubting Castle are the Church in its age-long war against error; but in such work the Church is the Happy Warrior, her creeds are battle-songs."

But Mackay never makes it quite clear what he understood as the aggressive action to which the Church is called. He writes:

"And so your business and mine in connection with this fresh vision for which the world waits, is to prepare a stock and create an environment. It is for us to form a praying, waiting circle, in the centre of which at last the vision will take human flesh."

This is indefinite, rather to me suggestive of "the pious slacker" for whom Mackay had a proper contempt. In this era of revolutionary change the Christian cannot afford to wait and see. He must go from the Sanctuary into the street. The fighter against social evil and individual beastliness must have firsthand knowledge of the social evils and he must also have some tendency himself to be beastly. This helps him to understand. The weakness of the Puritan is that he often succeeds in being both good and miserable, and he has no inclination to be a sinner, either jolly or gloomy. So he never understands the sinner.

The Puritan of the best type is pernickety. That is evident in the two outstanding Puritans of our time, Dr. Inge and Mr. Bernard Shaw. There is a type of man, entirely admirable, that dislikes dirt so much that he cannot bear a stain on his fingers even though it be a strawberry stain. Mackay was rather of that type. Evil to him was something disgusting, and it has to be recognized that evil is only disgusting to a man who has very little temptation to evil. The greater virtue is of the man who avoids evil even though he finds it infinitely attractive. I think that Mackay himself realized that his sensitive revolt against the ugly was rather a weakness. Social salvation, as taught by Kingsley and Morris and by Scott Holland and Gore was to an extent remote from Mackay's teaching, although he was tremendously conscious of the effect on the destiny of one individual that can be exerted by another. We are all, even the strongest of us, the victims of our fellows. Mackay was intent on individual conversion more than on the creation of a social environment calculated to encourage conversion and the living of the good life. He once made an interesting and revealing comparison between Simon the Zealot and John the Baptist.

"I suppose the difference between Simon the Zealot and John the Baptist was this: they both hated evil, but Simon hated the effects of evil as he saw them around him, and John hated evil itself as he saw it in human nature. Simon said, 'Let us sweep all this evil out of the country!' John said, 'By all means, and let us begin with ourselves!' Simon said, 'That will take too long--far longer than our lifetimes. If we give ourselves to that we shall die and leave our country undelivered. No, let us sweep the evil out of the country and then sit down to improve ourselves in the swept and garnished scene. The alternative is obviously not fair. Surely what Simon the Zealot said was: "Let us sweep the evil out of the country that our fellows may have the chance to improve themselves in the swept and garnished scene."

Mackay had no sort of doubt that the Church of England was the Catholic Church in England. I should not suppose that at any time of his life a change of allegiance ever occurred to him. His critical mind made him conscious of the Church of England's failings and limitations. He constantly deplored its failure to realize its Catholic traditions and character. But he remained its faithful son.

I recall that in one of the casual after-dinner talks that I had with him, Bishop Gore in one of his gruff good-humoured gibes said: "The differ-^ence between Mackay and me is that Mackay likes the Church of England and I do not." Mackay far more than liked the Church of England; he loved it, and while no contemporary priest more often paid tribute to Roman Pontiffs and Roman Saints, he was so completely English that the Roman Church was to him as foreign an institution as it remains to the Protestant sects. His view of the Church of England is set out in Some Studies in the Old Testament, and here I must quote a passage at some length:

"First, there are the antiquarians who, having realized that the Mediaeval Church was Catholic, proceed to insist that the Catholic Church must be mediaeval and that all our fittings and worship must be that of Salisbury Cathedral in the fifteenth century; while, on the other hand, stand the legal authorities who would still govern the Church in England in the twentieth century by a bit of that sixteenth-century coercive legislation which was the Anglican parallel to the Inquisition on the Continent.

"But Zechariah bids us lift our eyes and under the tutelage of his Angel Interpreter take a wider view of things. After all, God rules the Church, and He is no more baffled in the twentieth century by the legislation of the sixteenth than He is bound by precedent to the screens and colours and altars of the Church of Sarum. Our duty is plain. We must set up the great tradition before us, take what things are left to us in these poor provinces of Canterbury and York, and use them to the best of our ability--the succession from the Apostles, diocesan and parochial jurisdiction, the Creeds, the Bible, and the Sacraments, the continuous and universal pattern of worship--and taking and using them fully, faithfully and to the best of our power, we find ourselves as a matter of fact making God once more our defence and God our glory."

He loved the Church as a man loves a mistress whose shortcomings are as evident to him as is her beauty. He recalled once that Bishop Temple, while agreeing to ordain Dolling, declined to give him an independent sphere of work, and his mind went back to St. Francis.

"Our Francis had not found an Innocent III. Bishop Temple was a truly great man, but he was bound by the limitations of his position. Until the Church of England is liberated from State control it can never produce an Innocent III."

The Catholic religion is the universal religion, the means of salvation for Hun and Hottentot, Englishman and Esquimau. But the history of the centuries teaches that, while the Church is universal and its Creed and doctrine apply to all men, there are, for men of various races, traditions and cultures, various means of approach. To Mackay the Church of England was Jacob's Ladder set to Heaven from Charing Cross. How deep was this English feeling is shown in the extremely beautiful sketch of Dr. Johnson in his Saints and Leaders. He pictures the great man in the last year of his life:

"It is Easter Day, and he is in the crowd at Easter Communion, making his ponderous way--sadly deaf and sadly blind--from pew to pew towards the altar, and having regained his place he seats himself as is customary, but thinking the posture to be unfitting, rises and remains standing to the end--conspicuous but unconscious."

"Conspicuous but unconscious!" Could three words more completely summarize Christian detachment? There was very little affinity, perhaps, between Dr. Johnson and Canon Mackay, one ponderous and the other pernickety, but the English lexicographer aroused the enthusiasm of the English preacher. The religion that Mackay taught, if not the religion of all English men, is the religion for all Englishmen. There was in the man a detachment not exactly from realities, but from the more repulsive of realities. He connected sacramental teaching with a modified Puritan tradition; he connected the love of beauty and the love of rectitude; he found it possible to hold Andrew Marvell by one hand and John Milton by the other. By protesting both by direct phrase and by implication that not only is there nothing un-English in Catholicism, but that the Catholic religion is English as it is French or Italian, this priest, by his eloquence and sincerity, played his great part in the story of his day. He headed no crusade. That was not his metier. He did not arouse love as Stanton aroused it, and great crowds were not moved to sorrow when he died as they were moved when Dolling died. From his pulpit at All Saints' there flowed a constant stream of teaching and inspiration. He made men think, and attracted by his great gifts of artistry, men were drawn to listen to him who combined the artist with the teacher of the Gospel of our Lord.

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