Commentary Work
Apart from the translation and adaptation of hymns, this literary work centres round two Commentaries, one on the Epistle to the Philippians, which he himself translated into Tamil, the other on the Acts. The books belonged to a series of Commentaries planned by the Bishops in India at their annual synodical gathering in 1900. Their desire was to have a series prepared for the use of Indian and Anglo-Indian Christians:
“These Commentaries,” writes Dr. Eugene Stock in the Church Missionary Review,” were designed to ’ present a direct and scholarly interpretation of the New Testament based upon the work of the great English commentators,’ and at the same time to ’ contain such references to Eastern religious thought and life as might make them serviceable to both Christian and non-Christian.’ They were to be written and published in English in the first instance, and then, if funds permitted, to be translated into the leading Indian vernaculars.
“The carrying out of this admirable plan was committed to the Bishops of Lahore and Rangoon, Dr. Lefroy and Dr. Knight; but the latter having retired from his see, Bishop Lefroy has been chiefly responsible. Subsequently, the Rev. C. F. Andrews, of the Cambridge Brotherhood at Delhi, was appointed General Editor. The Bishop, however, wrote a general Preface to be printed in all the books produced; which explains the design, as quoted above, and adds these important words:
“‘It is inevitable that in the interpretation of the New Testament there will be differences of opinion, and it has seemed best to allow these differences to appear in the series, rather than to aim at a colourless uniformity. The final responsibility for the views taken of particular passages will rest with the individual contributors.’
“Five of these Commentaries have now been published, and it is interesting to find that four of them have been prepared by C.M.S. missionaries.”
37 <”
“What epistle shall I take? I have nearly the run of the whole to choose from,” he said one morning at breakfast. “Take the Joy Epistle,” was the first suggestion. “Just what I was thinking of!” and he took it. How he worked at it, off and on as best he could, has been told. Acts came next.
Thereafter this book absorbed him. If he had a Bible hero it must have been Paul the missionary. The prize poem of 1908, “Gallic,” by St. John Lucas, was a constant inspiration. He would read it aloud with special pleasure to anyone to whom it appealed, dwelling with delight upon the passage which describes the apostle before Gallio, who is supposed to be writing an account of the strange Jew to his brother Seneca in Rome:
“His face, his face, beneath whose light my soul
Saw herself judged, her philosophic robe
Shrivelled; her dismal weed of self-esteem
Burnt in the steady flame of those great eyes.
The man was fire, all fire!”
And again with as keen appreciation, later fine lines:
“Staunch as a rock
In some discordant sea; his lion’s head
Thrown backward, and in his unshifting eyes
Nor hate, nor fear, only a royal calm.”
This “Paul the Christian, this sword-blade man,” was his companion through many and various hours, between classes, on rare empty afternoons, late on in the evening sometimes. Every book of note bearing upon him and his times was, as far as possible, consulted; and Sir William Ramsay especially was often quoted. No point was too small for careful study. Perhaps he rather delighted in the minute, holding as he did that unexpected light often comes through small windows.
The feature of the books, naturally, is their Indian atmosphere. Dr. Stock counted two hundred and forty local touches of colour in the notes on Acts alone. For example, he instances a note on Acts xvii. 29, 30:” The Godhead: better, that which is divine (margin); almost exactly the same Greek word, in its Sanskrit form, is in use in the same sense in India to-day (devam — daivam); Times of ignorance: this very term in its Sanskrit form
CH. xxxvi.] COMMENTARY WORK 419
(agndnam) is represented in Hindu philosophy as the chief cause of man’s failure and bondage. Cf. also the Muhammadan use of the phrase, the days of ignorance, for the period before the preaching of Islam.”
But a thoughtful reader, whether his sympathies are Indian or not, will discover something rewarding in the study of either book. Especially if he be a teacher he will find much to help in the close-packed notes, for the writer had teachers in mind when he wrote. These notes, to quote Dr. Stock again, “combine in a quite unusual degree adequate scholarship with definite spirituality. The notes are so terse and to the point that at first sight one imagines them to be sketchy and scanty; but when one reads them carefully they prove to be full of good and substantial matter.” This last remark is singularly true. As writer and as preacher he had a simple way of saying things which sometimes put both reader and hearer rather off the track — till they stopped to think; when they probably found there was more to be had than they had imagined. For, all his life, he was adverse to cloudiness of language; and much as Browning at his best appealed to him, he could read Calverley’s The Cock and the Bull with the utmost satisfaction, holding that Calverley was seriously right in this matter and Browning as seriously wrong. “If you have anything to say, say it out and have done with it,” he would remark rather testily, if overmuch tried by the ambiguous. He could not understand why, if a thing were to be said at all, it could not be said plainly.
And yet there was nothing tiresomely prosaic about him. Instead of writing in a copy of his Acts given to the friend with whom he had fought through the battle in the Law Courts in 1910, some tame statement and a date, he wrote this: “In memory of the battle and the breeze” (a quotation from an inscription in St. Paul’s Cathedral). “which have not ceased with Apostolic times, but still go on, as also do the Spirit’s Acts.” And lower on the page, words from “Gallio “:
“In whose triumphant eyes
Burns calm the perfect knowledge, the great hope,
The love that heals the red wounds of the world.”
“Love feels no burden; thinks nothing a trouble; attempts what is above its strength; pleads no excuse of impossibility: for it thinks all things... possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, while he who does not love would faint and lie down.”
THOMAS A KBMPIS.
“One thing more,” he would say, “thank God, and now for the next?”
Charles Kingsley’s Life.
“What an emphasis gets on to kindness as life goes on 1”
BISHOP PAGET in a letter of 1894
1910-1911]