Pioneers and Founders

Ceylon was erected into an archdeaconry and attached to the Bishopric of Calcutta, and shortly after the same arrangement was made respecting Australia—an archdeaconry a great deal larger than the continent of Europe!  Thence Bishop Middleton received and attended to the petition of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, a devoted worker in the vineyard, of whom our next chapter will speak.

Distinct missionary labour was scarcely possible to a man overtasked like Bishop Middleton.  The district that kept St. Paul in continual “journeyings often” would have been but a quarter of that which depended on him for “the care of all the churches,” and the long journeys by sea and land were by far the least harassing part of his life; for he had to fight the battles, sometimes of his Church, sometimes of the whole Christian cause, with unfair and prejudiced officials, and a malignant newspaper press, by which the bitterest attacks were circulated against him and his doings.  And, “besides those things that were without,” there were the troubles of dealing with men used to do “that which was right in their own eyes,” and determined to oppose or neglect one whose powers could only thoroughly be defined by actual practice.  To go into these conflicts would be wearisome and vain.  They have lost their interest now; but it must be remembered that it is by manfully and firmly enduring vexations such as these, that systems are established which form the framework and foundation of more visible labours, which gain more praise for those who are allowed to carry them out.

The constant wearing effort, the daily vexation, the inability to gain support, the binding of his hands from free action by the machinery of State regulations only applicable to home ecclesiastics, the continual making beginnings that never were allowed to progress—or, as he himself called it, the continual rolling of the stone of Sisyphus—could not but exhaust his powers, above all in such a climate; and that same sickly summer of 1822 which proved fatal to Felix Carey was his last.  In July, one of his clergy, on whom he had been obliged to pass censure, instituted proceedings against him in the Supreme Court—a most improper and disloyal act, which much grieved and agitated him.  He had to spend eight hours in writing in preparation for this painful matter, and afterwards went out in the carriage with his wife, but too early in the evening, for the slanting rays of the sun, not yet down, fell full on him, and their force is always especially dreaded at that damp and sickly season.  He immediately said that the sun had struck him, and returned home; a most distressing fever, chiefly on the nerves, and accompanied by grievous restlessness and afterwards delirium, set in, and he died on the 8th of July, 1822, in his fifty-fourth year, absolutely worn out by toil and worry.  But his career had established both the needfulness and the position of a Bishop, and his successor was appointed without the same opposition, still to a path perhaps only less thorny because briefer.

Of a Yorkshire family, where the eldest son was always bred up as the country gentleman, the younger ones usually prepared to hold the family livings, Reginald Heber was born on the 21st of April, 1783, at Malpas, in Cheshire, a rectory held by his father, who was the clerical second son, but soon after became head of the house by the death of his squire-brother.  He was twice married, and had a son by his first wife, so that Reginald was born, as it were, to the prospect of taking Holy Orders; and this fact seems to have in a certain degree coloured his whole boyhood, and acted as a consecration, not saddening, but brightening his life.

A happy, eager, docile childhood seems to have been his; so obedient, that when an attack on the lungs necessitated the use of very painful remedies, the physician said that the chances of his recovery turned upon his being the most tractable of children; and with such a love and knowledge of the Bible that, when only five years old, his father could consult him like a little Concordance, and withal full of boyish mirth and daring.  When sent to school at Neasdon, he was so excited by the story of an African traveller overawing a wild bull by the calm defiance of the eye, as to attempt the like process upon one that he found grazing in a field, but without the like success; for he provoked so furious a charge that he was forced to escape ignominiously over a high paling, whence he descended into a muddy pond.

Neasdon was the place of education of his whole boyhood, among twelve other pupils.  Mr. John Thornton, the schoolfellow friend and correspondent of his life, describes him as having been much beloved there.  He had no scruple as to fighting rather than submitting to tyranny from a bigger boy, but his unfailing good nature and unselfishness generally prevented such collisions; he was full of fun, and excellent at games of all sorts; and though at one time evil talk was prevalent among the boys, his perfect purity of mind and power of creating innocent amusement destroyed the habit, without estranging the other lads from him.  He took many of his stories from books not read by them, for he was an omnivorous reader, taking special delight in poetry, loving nothing better than a solitary walk with Spenser’s “Faërie Queen” in his hand, and often himself composing verses above the average for so young a boy.

He was always thoughtful, and there is a letter of his to his friend Thornton, written when only seventeen, which shows that he had begun to think over Church questions, was deeply sensible of the sacredness of the apostolical commission to the ministry, and of the evils of State interference.  That same year, 1800, began his University education, at Brasenose College, Oxford.  His course there was alike blameless in life and brilliant in scholarship; his talents and industry could not fail to secure him honours in the schools.

Another young man was at the very same time at Oxford, whose course had been steered thither with more difficulties than Reginald Heber’s.  Daniel Wilson’s father was a wealthy silk manufacturer, at Spitalfields, where he was born in the year 1778.  He was educated at a private school at Hackney, kept by a clergyman named Eyre, who must have had a good deal of discernment of character, for he said, “There is no milk and water in that boy.  He will be either something very bad or very good.”  One day, when he was in an obstinate and impracticable state of idleness, Mr. Eyre said, “Daniel, you are not worth flogging, or I would flog you,” which so stung him that he never fell into similar disgrace again; nay, one morning when he had failed in his appointed task, he refused food saying, “No!  If my head will not work, my body shall not eat.”  He had considerable powers, and when his own theme on a given subject was finished, would find “sense” for all the dull boys—varying the matter but keeping to the point in all: but his education ceased at fourteen, when he was bound apprentice to his uncle, who followed the same trade as his father, and lived in Cheapside.  He was a widower with seven children, one of whom in after years became Daniel’s wife.  It was a strictly religious household, and whereas Daniel’s parents had been wont to attend church or meeting as suited them best, his uncle was a regular churchman, and took his whole family constantly with him, as decidedly as he kept up discipline in his warehouse, where the young men had so little liberty, that for weeks together they never had occasion to put on their hats except on Sunday.

Daniel was a thoughtless, irreverent lad, full of schoolboy restlessness when first he came; but though he was at first remarkable for his ill-behaviour in church, his attendance insensibly took effect upon him, as it brought his mind under the influence of the two chief powers for good then in London, John Newton and Richard Cecil.  The vehement struggle for conversion and sense of individual salvation that their teaching deemed the beginning of grace took place, and he turned for aid to them and to his old schoolmaster, Mr. Eyre.  It was from his hands in 1797, at the age of nineteen, that he received his first Communion, with so much emotion and such trembling, that he writes to his mother, “I have no doubt I appeared very foolish to those about me,” but he adds in another letter to a friend that it had been the happiest day of his life.  “And to you I confess it,” he says, “(though it ought perhaps to be a cause for shame,) that I have felt great desire to go or do anything for the love of Jesus, and that I have even wished, if it were the Lord’s will, to go as a missionary to foreign lands.”

It is very remarkable that this thought should have occurred at such a moment to one who only became a missionary thirty-five years later, at a summons from without, not from within.  The distinct mission impulse passed away, but a strong desire remained to devote himself to the ministry of the Church.  He tried to stifle it at first, lest it should be a form of conceit or pride; but it only grew upon him, and at last he spoke to Mr. Eyre, who promised to broach the subject to his parents.

His father was strongly averse to it, as an overthrow to all his plans, and Mr. Eyre, after hearing both sides, said that he should give no opinion for a year; it would not hurt Daniel to remain another year in the warehouse, to fulfil the term of his apprenticeship, and it would then be proper time to decide whether to press his father to change his mind.  It was a very sore trial to the young man, who had many reasons for deeming this sheer waste of time, though he owned he had not lost much of his school learning, having always loved it so much as to read as much Latin as he could in his leisure hours.  He submitted at first, but was uneasy under his submission, and asked counsel from all the clergymen he revered, who seem all to have advised him to be patient, but to have urged his father to yield, which he finally did before the year was out; so that Daniel Wilson was entered at St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, on the 1st of May, 1798.  He struggled with the eagerness of one whose desire had grown by meeting with obstacles.  In order to acquire a good Latin style, he translated all Cicero’s letters into English, and then back into Latin; and when he went up for his degree, he took, besides his Latin and Greek books, the whole Hebrew Bible, but was only examined in the Psalms.  He gained a triumphant first-class, and the next year, 1803, he carried off the English prose essay prize.  The theme was “Common Sense.”  He had not in the least expected to gain the prize, and had not even mentioned the competition to his friends, so that their delight and surprise were equal.  That same year, Reginald Heber was happy in the subject for Sir Roger Newdegate’s prize for English verse, namely, “Palestine,” which in this case had fallen to a poet too real to be crushed by the greatness of his subject.

Reginald Heber was used to society of high talent and cultivation.  His elder brother, Richard, was an elegant scholar and antiquary, and was intimate with Mr. Marriott, of Rokeby; with Mr. Surtees, the beauty of whose forged ballads almost makes us forgive him for having palmed them off as genuine; and with Walter Scott, then chiefly known as “the compiler of the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’” but who a few years later immortalized his friendship for Richard Heber by the sixth of his introductions to “Marmion,”—the best known, as it contains the description of the Christmas of the olden time.  It concludes with the wish—

“Adieu, dear Heber, life and health!And store of literary wealth.”

Just as Reginald was finishing his prize poem, Scott was on a tour through England, and breakfasted at Richard Heber’s rooms at Oxford, when on the way to lionize Blenheim.  The young brother’s poem was brought forward and read aloud, and Scott’s opinion was anxiously looked for.  It was thoroughly favourable, “but,” said Scott, “you have missed one striking circumstance in your account of the building of the Temple, that no tools were used in its erection.”

Before the party broke up the lines had been added:

“No workman’s steel, no ponderous axes rung;Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung;Majestic silence—”

The prose essay on “Common Sense” was first recited from the rostrum in the Sheldonian theatre, and Wilson always remembered the hearty applause of the young man who sat waiting his turn.  But the effect of the recitation of “Palestine” was entirely unrivalled on that as on any other occasion.  Reginald Heber,—a graceful, fine-looking, rather pale young man of twenty,—with his younger brother Thomas beside him as prompter, stood in the rostrum, and commenced in a clear, beautiful, melancholy voice, with perfect declamation, which overcame all the stir and tumultuous restlessness of the audience by the power and sweetness of words and action:

“Reft of thy sons, amid thy foes forlorn,Mourn, widow’d queen; forgotten Zion, mourn.Is this thy place, sad city, this thy throne,Where the wild desert rears its craggy stone;While suns unblest their angry lustre fling,And wayworn pilgrims seek the scanty spring?”

On flowed the harmonious lines, looking back to the call of the Chosen, the victory of Joshua, the glory of Solomon, the hidden glory of the Greater than Solomon, the crime of crimes, the destruction, the renewal by the Empress Helena, the Crusades, and after a tribute (excusable at the time of excitement) to Sir Sidney Smith’s defence of Acre, gradually rising to a magnificent description of the heavenly Jerusalem.

“Ten thousand harps attune the mystic throng,Ten thousand thousand saints the strain prolong.‘Worthy the Lamb, omnipotent to save!Who died, Who lives triumphant o’er the grave.”

The enthusiasm, the hush, the feeling, the acclamations have ever since been remembered at Oxford as unequalled.  Heber’s parents were both present, and his mother, repairing at once in her joy to his rooms, found him kneeling by his bedside, laying the burthen of honour and success upon his God.  His father, recently recovered from illness, was so overcome and shaken by the pressure of the throng and the thunder of applause as never entirely to recover the fatigue, and he died eight months later, early in 1804.

The two youths who were in juxtaposition at the rostrum were not to meet again.  Daniel Wilson was ordained to the curacy of Chobham, under Mr. Cecil, an excellent master for impressing hard study on his curates.  He writes: “What should a young minister do?  His office says, ‘Go to your books, go to retirement, go to prayer.’  ‘No,’ says the enthusiast, ‘go to preach, go and be a witness.’”

“‘A witness of what?’

“‘He don’t know!’”

While Wilson worked under Cecil, Heber, who was still too young for the family living of Hodnet, in Shropshire, after taking his bachelor’s degree, obtaining a fellowship at All Souls College, and gaining the prize for the prose essay, accompanied John Thornton on a tour through northern and eastern Europe, the only portions then accessible to the traveller; and, returning in 1806, was welcomed at home by his brother’s tenants with a banquet, for which three sheep were slaughtered, and at which he appeared in the red coat of the volunteer regiment in which he had taken an eager share during former years.

It was his last appearance in a military character, for in 1807 he was ordained, and entered on his duties as Rector of Hodnet.  Two years later he married Amelia Shipley, the daughter of the Dean of St. Asaph.  Floating thus easily into preferment, without a shoal or rock in his course, fairly wealthy, and belonging to a well-esteemed county family, connected through his brother with the very élite of literary society, it seemed as though, in the laxity of the early part of the century, Reginald Heber could hardly have helped falling into the indolence of learned ease, the peril of the well-beneficed clergy of his day, especially among those who had not accepted the peculiarities of the awakening school of the period.

But such was not the case.  He was at once an earnest parish priest, working hard to win his people, not only to attend at church, but to become regular communicants, and to give up their prevalent evil courses.  We find him in one letter mentioning the writing of an article on Pindar in the Quarterly Review, planning for a village-school on the Lancastrian principle, and endeavouring to improve the psalmody.  “At least,” he says, “I have a better reason to plead for silence than the Cambridge man who, on being asked in what pursuit he was then engaged, replied that he was diligently employed in suffering his hair to grow.”

These “endeavours to improve the psalmody” were a forestalling of the victory over the version of Tate and Brady.  The Olney Hymns, produced by Cowper, under the guidance of John Newton, had been introduced by Heber on his first arrival in the parish, but he felt the lack of something more thoroughly in accordance with the course of the Christian year, less personal and meditative, and more congregational.  Therefore he produced by degrees a series of hymns, which he described as designed to be sung between the Nicene Creed and the Sermon, and to be connected in some degree with the Collects and Gospels for the day.  Thus he was the real originator in England of the great system of appropriate hymnology, which has become almost universal, and many of his own are among the most beautiful voices of praise our Church possesses.  We would instance Nos. 135 and 263 in “Hymns Ancient and Modern,”—that for the 21st Sunday after Trinity, a magnificent Christian battle-song; and that for Innocents’ Day, an imitation of the old Latin hymn “Salvete flores Martyrum.”  They were put together, with others by Dean Milman and a few more, into a little volume, which Heber requested Dr. Howley, then Bishop of London, to lay before the Archbishop, that it might be recommended for use in churches, but the timidity of the time prevented this from being carried into effect.

A deep student of church history, his letters show him trying every practical question by the tests of ancient authority as well as instructive piety, and, on these principles, already deploring the undue elevation of the pulpit and debasement of the Altar to which exclusive preference of preaching had led.  Missions had, since the days of Carey’s first opening of the subject become so predominant a thought with the Nonconformist bodies, and were often conducted so irregularly, that there was certain dread and distrust of them among the sober-minded and orthodox; but Heber was one of the first English churchmen who perceived that to enlarge her borders and strengthen her stakes was the bounden duty of the living Church.  He was a fervent admirer of Henry Martyn, whose biography was published soon after the news of his death reached England, and his feeling found vent in that hymn so familiar to us all—“From Greenland’s icy mountains.”

He was meantime rising in influence and station,—Canon of St. Asaph, Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, Select Preacher before the University.  He was beloved by all ranks: by the poor for his boundless charity and sympathy; and by his equals, not only for these qualities, but for his sunny temper, bright wit, and playfulness, which showed in his conversation, his letters, and in many a droll, elegant, and scholarly jeu d’esprit, thrown off by a mind that could do nothing without gracefulness.  All this prosperity was alloyed only by such domestic sorrow as might be fitly termed gentle chastening.  The death of his next brother, Thomas, who had acted as his curate, was a severe loss to him; and in the desire to make every affliction a stepping-stone in Christian progress, he began, from that date, a custom of composing a short collect-like prayer, veiled in Latin, on every marked occurrence in his life.  The next occasion was, after several years of marriage, the birth of a little daughter, whom (in his own words) “he had the pleasure of seeing and caressing for six months,” ere she faded away, and died just before the Christmas of 1817.  He never could speak of her without tears, and (his wife tells us) ever after added to his private prayers a petition to be worthy to rejoin his “sinless child.”  His grief and his faith further found voice in the hymn, each verse of which begins with “Thou art gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee,” and which finishes—

“Thou art gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee,   Whose God was thy ransom, thy Guardian and Guide.He gave thee, He took thee, and He will restore thee,   And death has no sting, for the Saviour has died.”

Such had been the training of Reginald Heber, through the pleasant paths of successful scholarship and literature, and of well-beneficed country pastorship; a life perilous to spirituality and earnestness, but which he kept full of the salt of piety, charity and unwearied activity as parish priest, and as one of the voices of the Church.  Such had been his life up to 1822, when, on the tidings of the death of Dr. Middleton, Bishop of Calcutta, his friend Charles Williams Wynn, President of the Board of Commissioners for the affairs of India, offered him the appointment.

To a man of his present position, talents, and prospects at home, the preferment was not advantageous: the income, with the heavy attendant expenses, would very little increase his means; the promotion threw him out of the chances of the like at home; and the labour and toil of the half-constituted and enormous diocese, the needful struggles with English irreligion and native heathenism, and the perils of climate, offered a trying exchange for all that had made life delightful at Hodnet Rectory.  A second little daughter too, whom he could not of course look to educating in India, rendered the decision more trying.  But in his own peculiarly calm and simple way, he wrote: “I really should not think myself justified in declining a situation of so great usefulness, and for which, without vanity, I think myself not ill adapted, either from a love for the society and friendship of England, or from a hope, which may never be realized, of being some time or other in a situation of more importance at home.”  At first, however, the fear for the child’s health induced him to decline, but only if anyone else equally suitable could be found; and finally he accepted it, with apparent coolness, veiling the deep spirit of zeal and enthusiasm that glowed within.  It was not the ardent vehemence that enables some to follow their inward call, overcoming all obstacles, but it was calm obedience to a call from without.  “After all,” he wrote, “I hope I am not enthusiastic in thinking that a clergyman is, like a soldier or a sailor, bound to go on any service, however remote or undesirable, where the course of his duty leads him, and my destiny (though there are some circumstances attending it which make my heart ache) has many, very many, advantages in an extended sphere of professional activity, in the indulgence of literary curiosity, and, what to me has many charms, the opportunity of seeing nature in some of its wildest and most majestic features.”

In the spring of 1823, he took leave of Hodnet, amid the tears of his parishioners; and on the 18th of May preached his last sermon in Lincoln’s Inn chapel, on the Atonement.  On coming out, one of the most leading men among the Wesleyan Methodists could only express his feelings by exclaiming, “Thank God for that man!  Thank God for that man!”

It is striking to find him in the full pressure of business, while preparing in London for his consecration and his voyage, making time for a letter to one of the Hodnet farmers, to warn him against habits of drunkenness, hoping that it would dwell with him “as a voice from the dead.”  On the 1st of June, 1823, Reginald Heber was consecrated at Lambeth, and on the 10th sailed for India!  He made several sketches along the southern coast, under one of which he wrote:—

“And we must have danger, and fever, and pain,Ere we look on the white rocks of Albion again.”

A few days later, when passing the western coast of France on a Sunday, the sound of the bells suggested the following meditative verses:—

“Bounding along the obedient surges,   Cheerly on her onward way,Her course the gallant vessel urges   Across thy stormy gulf, Biscay.In the sun the bright waves glisten;   Rising slow with solemn swell,Hark, hark, what sound unwonted?  Listen—   Listen—’tis the Sabbath bell.It tells of ties which duties sever,   Of hearts so fondly knit to thee,Kind hands, kind looks, which, wanderer, never   Thy hand shall grasp, thine eye shall see.It tells of home and all its pleasures,   Of scenes where memory loves to dwell,And bids thee count thy heart’s best treasures   Far, far away, that Sabbath bell.Listen again!  Thy wounded spirit   Shall soar from earth and seek aboveThat kingdom which the blest inherit,   The mansions of eternal love.Earth and her lowly cares forsaking,   Bemoaned too keenly, loved too well,To faith and hope thy soul awaking,   Thou hear’st with joy that Sabbath bell.”

By the 28th of September, the vessel was in sight of the Temple of Jaghernauth, and on the 3rd of October was anchored close to the island of Saugor.