in great numbers
to listen to the beautiful music which distinguishes the chapel service,
the chapel itself already beautiful enough with windows by Burne-Jones.
On the altar-cloth of this chapel are embroidered the words, GOD IS
LOVE. No tables of stone flank that gentle altar, and no panelled creeds
on the walls challenge the visitor to define his definitions. The
atmosphere of the place is worship. The greatest of all Christ's
affirmations is reckoned enough. God is love. No need, then, to
add--Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the Company of
Heaven . . .
The Principal of Manchester College is Dr. L.P. Jacks, the Editor of
_The Hibbert Journal_, the biographer of Stopford Brooke and Charles
Hargrove, author of _Mad Shepherds_, _Legends of Smokeover_, and other
books which have won the affection of many readers and the praise of no
few scholars. He is a man of letters, a man of nature, and a mystic.
His face bears a strange resemblance to the unforgettable face of that
great Unitarian, James Martineau, whom Morley calls "the most brilliant
English apologist of our day"; it lacks the marvellous sweetness of
Martineau's expression, but has a greater strength; it does not bear
witness to so sure a triumph of serenity, but shows the marks of a
fiercer battle, and the scars of deeper wounds. It is the masculine of
the other's feminine.
Like Martineau's the head with its crown of white hair is nobly
sculptured, and like Martineau's the ivory coloured face is ploughed up
and furrowed by mental strife; but whereas Martineau's is eminently the
indoors face of a student, this is the face of a man who has lived out
of doors, a mountaineer and a seafarer. Under the dense bone of the
forehead which overhangs them like the eave of a roof, the pale blue
eyes look out at you with a deep inner radiance of the spirit, but from
the midst of a face which has been stricken and has winced.
Something of the resolution, the deliberateness, the stern power, and
the enduring strength of his spirit shows itself, I think, in the short
thickset body, with its heavy shoulders, its deep chest, its broad firm
upright neck, and its slow movements, the movements as it were of a
peasant. Always there is about him the feeling of the fields, the sense
of nature's presence in his life, the atmosphere of distances. Nothing
in his appearance suggests either the smear or the burnish of a town
existence.
It is not without significanc
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