Something Beyond

One of the books I got for Christmas was Roy Tricker’s Anglicans On High, an account of the Catholic Revival as it affected the churches and clergy of Suffolk. What he said about the little parish of Stansfield intrigued me:

A later Rector here was the Revd Archie F Webling, who came to this - his first parish - from a curacy at St Matthew, Southsea, with great ideas of turning it into a centre of the advanced Catholicism to which he was used. In the end he did not attempt to do so … His autobiography Something Beyond sincerely and sensitively describes how he dealt with the ‘crises of faith’ and the ‘dark nights of the soul’ – things that were very real to him and to many Christians.

I decided to find a copy of Something Beyond. Published in 1933, it’s volume ten in the ‘Cambridge Miscellany’, whatever that was, a small brown-bound and closely-printed book, written in a slightly orotund manner which comes from Fr Webling’s Victorian education. Names and places are heavily disguised (the author refers to himself as ‘Wolfe’ throughout). Archie Webling was an unusual priest. Brought up by his uncle and aunt, he was raised as a Presbyterian but in his teens finds himself in an Anglo-Catholic church in the City of London:

I only knew that I felt helped and uplifted by the service … All combined to flood my soul with a sense of the wonder of holiness and beauty, and, thus far, to draw me nearer to God … This state of perfect tranquillity, combined with full consciousness, passed in a flash … But I learned at that moment just enough to feel that, while man remains man, retaining his mysterious intuitions of things that lie Beyond, so long will the Mass afford to hearts attuned to its significance the most precious link between earth and heaven.

'Wolfe' decides eventually, without any strong sense of internal call, that the life of a clergyman would be both pleasing to him in allowing him to follow the intellectual pursuits he values, and socially useful, and so he determines to be ordained. Weak though his sense of vocation is, this choice requires great sacrifice: he has intelligence but only basic education, and spends twelve years clerking to save the money to put himself through part-time courses which eventually lead to his being accepted for the priesthood.

One of his student friends ordained at the same time is a vigorous though not obviously saintly Anglo-Catholic. They are both accepted as curates in Southsea, though it’s not the easiest of experiences. ‘Wolfe’s’ friend Hallam has suggested they come here deliberately to be deprived of Catholic externals to test whether they are really meaningful, and find a dreary, run-down parish whose church is largely ignored by most of the people it’s supposed to look after. On a Sunday, ‘in the evening little streams of humanity trickled into various places of worship, one such diffusing itself in twos and threes throughout the wide spaces of the parish church’. After some years the Rector retires and Hallam, as senior curate, is appointed his successor by the new patron of the living, a young aristocrat who has become convinced of the claims of Anglo-Catholicism, and both set about transforming the church aesthetically and spiritually. This bears fruit: attendance at worship and involvement in the institutions of the parish rockets and the church starts to do real good for the community around it.

This zealous effort begins to change both the clergymen who are spearheading it. Wolfe discovers a depth of faith that was hardly present when he was ordained, and adds theological and emotional conviction to the affective sense of wonder that he found in Catholic Christianity in his teens. Hallam transforms into little short of a saint – that’s clearly how Wolfe sees him – a man of intense, passionate faith devoted to his work, with a warm heart.

With the Catholic faith secured in the parish and the congregation ten times the size it was when he became rector, Hallam decides God is calling him to missionary work, and resigns. He wants Wolfe to take over but his reticence and humility are hard to overcome; instead the patron turns elsewhere and Frs Hildebrand and Forsse arrive, two Anglo-Catholics of a very different stamp. For them the Catholic faith is hard, severe and clear, and the rules are there to be rigorously and inflexibly enforced. Wolfe realises that his days in the church are numbered, and applies for a parish in rural Suffolk (Stansfield, in reality). His colleagues are only too glad to see him go, viewing him as a relic of a lax regime, and as he leaves the church is contracting and retreating, which they mind not a bit.

Webling now sees how much of his Catholic piety and conviction were driven by the powerful personality of his friend – luckily, a benign personality. In the relative quiet of his new parish he begins to re-assess his beliefs and those of traditional Christianity, concluding that much of what he thinks he has believed has very little solid basis to it: neither Scripture nor the ‘tradition of the Church’, both of which he has tended to accept with little question, seem to have enough security to support the great edifice of Christian faith and practice.

He receives the news that the saintly Hallam is dead, killed in a ridiculous accident far away in Africa (surely the choice of the name ‘Hallam’ relates to that Arthur Hallam in response to whose death Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, that great Victorian exposition of faith and doubt). This and the funerals Fr Webling conducts prompt desperate reflections:

Was it for this, I thought, that man has been evolved throughout countless aeons? Was that amazing thing, the human body, painfully built up, through millions of years of preparation, from the formless amoeba to the glory of that cunningly compacted structure of nerve and muscle, of graceful limbs, the bloom of a maiden’s cheek, the brown soft hair, the laughing loving eyes, in order, at length, a mass of fetid corruption, to rot in this oozy bed? Is there indeed to be a glorious resurrection of this corruption? Paul … speaks impossibly of the magical evolution of a living body out of dead matter … Can I reckon on a miracle so unbelievable on the bare ipse dixit of an oriental visionary?

He maintains such faith as he can through the work of the parish, and meeting its people.

The fact that Old Master Rayner is in need of pastoral visitation brings me … into healthful contact with reality. … His theology consists of chance-gleaned fragments. “I trust in his precious Blood”, he says, “and I pray to him as well as I can. I don’t suppose he will be hard on me. He knows what I have had to put up with from her, poor dear.” He indicates his wife, paralysed and tearful, nodding on the other side of the fireplace … I pray with old Master Rayner before I go. He repeats with me the Lord’s Prayer and the Grace. We remain silent for a little while … He is still praying. “For ever and ever. For ever and ever”, he repeats … “Oh, ain’t that beautiful! I often think of that when I can’t sleep at nights.” … The ritual concludes with my presentation of the customary offering of tobacco.

I enter the cottage of old Widow Spareman. I find her poring over a tattered paper. It is, she tells me, a letter she received from her brother when he was serving in the Crimean War. … “I wish the Lord would take me home. Sometimes as I sit here all by myself I think I can hear them blessed angels a-singing.” But old Widow Spareman does not rashly charge God with the ills that flesh is heir to. By some subtle reasoning she can harmonise the omnipotence with the love of the Creator. “If it hadn’t been for him”, she says, “where would I have been? I know where to look for help.” I am thankful for that much of the grace of humility which has prevented me ever assuming the air of teacher in the presence of such folk. They are the teachers.

Fr Webling gradually comes to see some means of rescue for Christian belief in the evidence of the survival of the human personality afforded by psychic research – a very 1920s/30s way of looking at things. And thus the book ends.

I mention all this in such detail not to draw any grand conclusions, but because it’s such a fascinating example of somebody finding their way very honestly through Christian life generally and the Anglo-Catholic movement in particular. In so far as there is a lesson, it’s about the impossibility of ignoring doubt. ‘The doubter is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does’, says St James: ‘that man need not think he will receive anything from the Lord’ (James 1.6 & 7). True, if we are discussing praying the prayer of faith, but thoughts cannot be unthought, and if we are to develop faith it has to grow through what we do; a form which the heart takes on, not primarily through an act of will, but by the living of it. Faith must grow by moving through doubt, not through turning away from it.