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Archbishop Davidson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2024
Extract
Some few weeks before Archbishop Davidson died the present writer met him by his own gracious arrangement at the house of the late Lord Lovat in Bryanston Square. It was a wild rain-stormy afternoon sufficient to make younger men than the Archbishop find excuses for keeping indoors. Knowing his four score and two years, I awaited a telephone message telling me that the Archbishop dare not venture to leave home. But punctually almost to the minute of our prearranged time the old man arrived—with no complaints about the weather! His biographer was to let me into the secret of the old man’s contempt for our national weather at its worst. I was to learn that an old man’s fortitude which had instantly impressed me had been taught by a sport-loving father on the moors and hills of south-east Scotland.
I could not help feeling, and perhaps manifesting, that I was in the presence of one of the most noteworthy men of the day. Again his biographer by a sober presentation of the facts was to justify my feelings. Yet the prelate who had crowned an English king and had strengthened, as few of his predecessors had strengthened, the Church of England, became at once my fellow-wayfarer into the hill-country of the soul. Many a man of less note and position than he would have felt the need of condescending to a simple friar. Their condescending would have been of the nature of humility. But there was no condescension in the man whose words and attitude were all humility, yet whose humility was not an attitude but a quality of soul.
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- Copyright © 1936 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury. By G. K. A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester. (Oxford University Press; 2 vols.; pp. 1,428.)
2 The words of this Appeal from the Lambeth Conference of 1920 were: “Your Committee feels that it is impossible to make any Report on Reunion with Episcopal Churches without some reference to the Church of Rome, even though it has no Resolution to propose upon the subject. We cannot do better than make our own the words of the Report of 1908 which reminds us of the fact that there can be no fulfilment of the Divine purpose in any scheme of reunion which does not ultimately include the great Latin Church of the West, with which our history has been so closely associated in the past, and to which we are still bound by so many ties of common faith and tradition.
3 The Archbishop's contempt for timidity!
4 Was the young chaplain implicitly quoting Lord Macaulay's famous statement in his Essay on Gladstone on Church and State: “The Protestant doctrine touching the right of Private Judgment— that doctrine which is the common foundation of the Anglican, the Lutheran and the Calvanistic Churches—that doctrine by which every sect of Dissenters vindicates its separation—we conceive not to be this, that opposite opinions may both be true, nor this that truth and falsehood are both equally good; nor yet this that all speculative error is necessarily innocent; but this, that there is on the face of the earth no visible body to whose decrees men are bound to submit their judgment on points of faith.”