MANOR HOUSE, SCROOBY, ENGLAND, AS IT IS TO-DAY

[See page 264]

VOL. LXXX

No. 4

THERE is no center of Christian activity in London to-day better known than the West London Mission in its superb home on Kingsway, one of the great new thoroughfares which give dignity to old London at the expense of picturesqueness. The buildings probably the finest mission premises in Great Britain-comprise Kingsway Hall, which seats 2,100 and can boast ideal acoustic properties; a smaller hall; a quiet chapel for devotional purposes; Wesley House, in which the institutional life of the Church finds expression; and a goodly block of shops and offices, whose rents go to solve the financial problem. When that lambent and explosive genius, Hugh Price Hughes, died, and St. James' Hall, the old home of the West London Mission, was demolished, gloomy prophets declared the cause. moribund, and the years that immediately followed seemed to prove them right. But, as Mrs. Hugh Price Hughes constantly reminded the deprest workers, a deathless spirit resided in the Mission-"a spirit that would rise again were it buried in fathomless depths"-and only awaited its hour. When that hour came, it brought the man. In 1907, when prospects were at their darkest, Rev. J. Ernest Rattenbury was appointed superintendent of the Mission. With characteristic audacity he engaged the Lyceum Theatre-a building as famous in its way as St. Paul's or the British Museum-for Sunday nights,

and his preaching filled that great auditorium Sunday after Sunday. Five years later the Mission took possession of its present premises, and once more fronted a golden future.

What is the secret of the man at the helm? Briefly, Mr. Rattenbury is a pragmatist, by temperament even more than by intellectual conviction. He has a sure instinct for the thing that goes; knows how to get surprizingly good work out of rough and imperfect tools; possesses a shrewd knowledge of popular needs (needs, let it be noted, not whims and fancies), and a competent mastery of what will effectively meet them. As a preacher he grips. There is a driving power behind his words. He is out to plead, to convince, to win. As he warms to his theme, his speech comes pelting at top speed and his appeal is tipt with fire.

But if he is a pragmatist, he is that rare and superficially illogical being, a mystical pragmatist. He thinks deeply, tho he has a horror of pure thought as to doctrinaire, and most of his thinking is a brooding upon the unseen and eternal. An almost omnivorous reader, he has a special affinity for genuinely mystical literature, and is at home in classic sources of Christian devotion. It was his passionate insistence upon the primacy of the spiritual, devotional, and sacramental aspects of Church lifea conviction which materialized in the "Little Chapel" as a quiet sanctuary

amid the institutional bustle of the Mission-that involved him recently in a controversy with that champion of ultra-Protestantism, Mr. Kensit, who accused him of Romanizing tendencies.

"It was one of the great surprizes of my life,' said Mr. Rattenbury, referring to Mr. Kensit's attack. Indeed, the whole thing was so extraordinary that it may perhaps interest the readers of the HOMILETIC REVIEW.'

"It really began with a series of conferences on Christian union which we held in the spring of 1919. They were Sunday afternoon conferences, and among the speakers were the bishop of London, Lord Hugh Cecil, and Dr. Orchard. As a result, one of our Wesleyan ministers, Rev. Harold Morton, wrote a letter to the Methodist Recorder in which he objected to 'these Romanizers' being allowed to discuss Christian union on a Wesleyan platform. In my reply, I recalled that in the eighteenth century the term 'Romanizer' had been applied to John Wesley himself, one zealous Protestant having actually written a pamphlet to prove that the devil had raised up John Wesley to lead the Church of England back to Rome. Mr. Morton followed up his letter with an extraordinary speech at the May meeting of the Protestant Truth Society, in which he declared that Methodism had already (with a few exceptions) apostolized to modernism, and now sacerdotalism would give it the coup de grace. This set the ball rolling. Soon letters began to arrive from supporters of the Mission accusing me of being a Romanist in disguise, etc.-you know the wording of such missives: almost every public man receives them. The whole attack upon me really clustered round two quite harmless thingsthe Little Chapel at Kingsway, and my pamphlet on Holy Communion.

"To take the pamphlet first, it repudiates transubstantiation; declares the mass to be erroneous; arrests the priesthood of all believers, and suggests administration by laymen. It is supposed to contain teaching 'hardly distinguishable from that of Rome'!"

I asked Mr. Rattenbury to outline the genesis of the Little Chapel, one of the most peaceful and inspiring sanctuaries in London.

"As you know," he replied, "Kingsway Hall is dependent for income from lettings; it is, therefore, to all practical intents and purposes, a secular hall used on Sundays for religious services. I naturally felt it desirable that we should have some sanctuary in the midst of all our mundane activity some simple and beautiful symbol of the soul, where we could have a week-day cele

bration of holy communion, solemnize marriages, hold small devotional meetings and provide a place for quiet prayer and meditation. A gentleman and his wife gave us our communion table, which was chosen because it had side curtains and a curtain behind it, and would thus lend a finished appearance to the bare-looking room-originally a committee room. These innocent curtains have been declared by Mr. Kensit to exhale the deadly aroma of Romanism, turning the table into an 'altar.'

"But an even more blatant offense (in Mr. Kensit's eyes) are our pictures, the gift of another devoted Methodist. Our purpose being to supply both color and devotional inspiration, I chose for one of the pictures Perugino's "Crucifixion." My first sight of that picture in Florence marks an epoch in my own spiritual life, and I had always longed to give some of my people here the opportunity of entering into that vision of the Magdalene at the feet of Jesus which meant so much to me, and was also so fitting a symbol of our own rescue work. This was described by Mr. Kensit as 'A picture of a crucifix, with Mary (!) upon bended knee before it.' A second picture we chose was Fra Angelico's representation of two disciples welcoming a poor stranger who turns out to be the Savior-a picture taken by Mr. Kensit to signify "Christ's approbation of monasticism.' The third picture is the central panel of Van Eyck's 'Adoration of the Lamb,' aglow with brilliant color and depicting, with a somewhat confusing wealth of symbolism, the representatives of the world-wide Church crowding to adore the Lamb. According to Mr. Kensit, this is 'a picture of the Agnus Dei, showing twentythree popish bishops and ten monks in adoration around the altar.

"When Mr. Kensit published his protest, I felt that I owed it to the mission to repudiate so utterly groundless a charge. I therefore decided to preach a series of Sunday evening sermons on 'Roman Errors and Protestant Truths,' followed by questions and open discussion. Needless to say, the hall was crowded to its utmost limits, a goodly number of Roman Catholics being among the audience and taking part in the discussions. These sermons, I need not say, were definitely anti-Roman, but they advocated a more enlightened and worthy polemic than that still too much in vogue on Protestant platforms. I tried to show that Protestant truth can be effectively asserted without intolerance, not to say truculence.

"As a result Mr. Kensit, whom I found to be courteous and reasonable, withdrew his charges. The whole affair was, in fact, a mare's nest."

"Where would you say," I asked, "lies Rome's most powerful attraction. for the present generation?"

"In its response to the human love of

beauty," was Mr. Rattenbury's unhesitating reply. "And to meet that love of beauty by demanding that every human soul shall be limited by the drabness of traditional Puritanism is surely an extraordinary notion. And one can be as ritualistic in one's insistence on a bare nonconformist service of five hymns, a long prayer, and a sermon, as in insisting upon having candles on the altar. And what a tyrannous ritualism the nonconformist tradition can breed! I thank God for every effort that is being made to enrich and beautify our worship. We should neglect no avenue to the soul, neither the eye for beauty nor the ear for music. I make bold to say that if Protestants want to save their children from the perils of Rome, they must do everything they can to make their churches appeal to every side of their children's nature to their love of beauty, their instinct for dignity, their sense of awe and wonder."

"You specially emphasize dignity at your service, I believe?"

"I do, even at our popular Sunday evening services. It is a mistake to imagine that people appreciate the slipshod or vulgar in a religious service. And that reminds me, I have been charged with opposing the lay administration of holy communion on sacerdotal grounds. Nothing could be further from the truth; my only reason for hesitating is because I am jealous for the dignity and reverence of our communion services. As you know, it is with reference to the proposed Methodist Union that the question of lay administration has been brought up. I have no objection in principle to lay administration, but as practised within the smaller Methodist bodies with which it is proposed we should unite, it does not always make for reverence, and would tend to hurt and alienate Wesleyan Methodists, with whom a solemn liturgical communion service is a tradition."

Our talk now turned to the West London Mission.

"It should be borne in mind," said Mr. Rattenbury, "that, unlike the great Central Hall at Westminster, we are not only a mission in the strict sense, but a church also. We have now over a thousand members, and our institutional and public activities are more varied and extensive than that of any other church in London. Of institutions housed under this roof let me mention only our crèche, which a journalist has described as 'the Hotel Ritz among daynurseries.' Through our Sisters of the People, who sit on local municipal bodies and are otherwise actively interested in moral and social reforms, we touch most of the great problems of the day. And back of it all is the spiritual impulse given by our class meetings. Yes, we follow the time-honored Methodist Society-meeting tra

dition as far as possible under present-day conditions. The success of the classes depends, of course, upon competent and inspired leadership; wherever you find the right leader there the class becomes a genuine source of spiritual strength."

"My next question related to Mr. Rattenbury's conception of preaching. His views are clear-cut and individual; few preachers, perhaps, know with such sharpedged exactitude what they are out for.

"In my view of it,' he said, 'preaching must be, above all things, direct and dynamic. The preacher must get into quick rapport with his hearers. The reason why I do not advocate expository preaching in the strict sense is that it needs too much 'introduction.' There is no direct and immediate contact. This applies, of course, especially to the Old Testament. The language of, say, prophetic symbolism is alien to the thought of the average man of to-day. It takes a great deal of explaining; the mere translating of it into the vernacular of the market place takes a quarter of an hour. But one's time in preaching is severely limited; no sermon, to be really effective, should exceed half an hour in length. Think of it-half an hour to raise the dead in! That is why I prefer Francis Thompson's 'Hound of Heaven' as a theme to, say, the prophecies of Zechariah. The man in the pew understands it so much better.'

"Of course to feel like that one must believe that the object of preaching is really to raise the dead. To my mind, the preacher's central appeal must be neither to the intellect nor to the will, tho both are involved, but to the emotions. We want to build up, to quicken, to kindle, to make the hearts of men to burn within them. It is out of the flaming heart, the great spiritual emotions that creative thought and action are born. The fathers of the Evangelical Revival were right in insisting upon emotion, in a church which idolized conduct on the one hand, and mere intellectual 'notions' on the other. I do not separate feeling from thought and will, but emotion-by which I mean something very different from sentiment-is the spring of a man's being, and unless it is quickened, thought and conduct remain barren.

"In my evening sermons I throw my net wide, and sometimes choose subjects that are being discust in the press; but whatever my theme, my appeal is fundamentally to the heart."

"Do you ever touch upon spiritualism?" I asked, thinking of the prominence given to certain "spirit-revelations" in a Sunday paper.

"I feel that the vogue of spiritualism is a distinct challenge to the preacher which can not be ignored. It is a difficult subject, but it must be tackled. The only real