Man's weakness waiting upon God For men on earth no work can do Ride on, ride on, triumphantly, He always wins who sides with God, God's will is sweetest to him when Ill that He blesses is our good, And unblest good is ill; And all is right that seems most wrong. If it be His sweet Will! FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER. VIII. CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, We are next to consider three of the most gifted of recent English hymn-writers, men who have done much to enrich the hymnody of our Mother Church, of our own Church in America, and of the Church universal: Christopher Wordsworth, Frederick William Faber and William Walsham How. CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH, who wrote fifteen of the hymns contained in our hymnal, was born October 30, 1807, and died March 21, 1885. His father was a man of distinction. His uncle was the famous poet, William Wordsworth. His intellectual training was received at Winchester, and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was prominent in athletics as well as in scholarship. His career was one of pre-eminent success. So many prizes, in fact, had come to him that in 1829 his college tutors dissuaded him from again entering the lists, as hard upon other competitors. In 1827 the Duke of Wellington is reported to have said that Christopher Wordsworth, the elder, ought to be the happiest man in the kingdom, inasmuch as each of his three sons had carried off that year a University prize. He was soon chosen to a fellowship. In 1833 he was ordained to the sacred ministry. He was for eight years head master of Harrow. In 1844 he was appointed a Canon of Westminster. In 1850 he became a country clergyman. His parish had a unique name, "Stanford in the Vale, Cum Goosey." There he labored faithfully for nineteen years, going up, however, to London for four months each year for services in Westminster Abbey. In 1863 Arthur P. Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster. His orthodoxy, according to Canon Wordsworth's thought, was very shadowy, so he opposed the appointment and did what he could to defeat it. The matter, however, being settled, his relations with the new dean were not only loyal, but altogether friendly. So also, Bishop Temple did not please him in connection with his relation to the famous volume, "Essays and Reviews," and he said so, and tried to guide him to the position in the matter which he himself thought to be the right one. He was, of course, unsuccessful. That, notwithstanding, did not keep Temple afterwards from speaking of his conduct as "of wonderful gentleness and sweetness," and of him as "a singularly true and devout Christian." A brother bishop has well summed up his characteristic qualities in these three words-Learning, Humility, Saintliness -in elucidation of which he writes: "His store of knowledge upon every subject seemed to be inexhaustible, and yet so readily available that it used to flow from his lips without any apparent effort of recollection, or any apparent consciousness that it was more than ordinary information which his hearers shared equally with himself. "Decrees of Councils, writings of Fathers, events in remoter or nearer Church History, Proceedings of Convocations, Acts of Parliament, Canons, Rubrics, customs of our own or of other Churches, all seemed alike familiar to him as he cited them in their turn and brought them to bear aptly and forcibly upon the questions of the hour. He really seemed as if he had not merely lived, but was actually living in the far-away times he was referring to. He would talk to us of the doings at Nice and Ephesus, or at Hampton Court or the Savoy, as if he had just stepped in amongst us from those councils, and was telling us of yesterday's discussions there. And yet, with all this learning, he was so genuinely, so unaffectedly, humble. He used to defer to the opinions of the youngest and least experienced of his brethren with a sweet old-world courtesy and graciousness that could only have come from a lowliness of heart that esteemed others better than himself. "He was uniformly gentle, conciliatory, striving always |