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.
