THE news of the unexpected death of the Bishop of Zanzibar struck thousands of English people with a sense of personal loss. It is not only of his bereaved diocese that we think, but of the whole Church of our communion, for he was a man who had come to stand as the very spear-head of the Catholic cause.
The struggle for that cause has been all along a soldiers’ battle, fought by little groups and misunderstood minorities feeling their way towards an ideal often only partly realized. Like all living movements it began from below in the half-articulate response to a demand. It was not imposed by any superior authority. Priests and laitv, not bishops, were, its leaders, and so it came to pass that a great body of devoted Catholics, with all their instinctive reverence for the episcopal office, could seldom look for more than toleration from their Fathers in God. They were, and are still, grateful for a little, but experience had taught them not to hope for much.
Then came the Congresses, in which so much that had hitherto been isolated and sporadic found greater cohesion and the sense of corporate enthusiasm; and Bishop Weston inevitably stepped into the place of leadership. In him men realized a new conception of what a Father in God might be. He always spoke as a bishop in the grace of his episcopate.
We felt that, in his words, the bishop ought to represent the love of God focussed and concentrated in the person of the chief pastor of his people. We have known great and holy priests, but Frank Zanzibar, by his life and example, has shown all who knew him what a Catholic Bishop ought to be.
Crowds of undemonstrative English people knelt in the street for his farewell blessing. It was to the Catholic Bishop rather than to the man that they paid this spontaneous tribute. If one did not forget the man in reverence for his office, one felt that to him the personal aspect of our relationship was swallowed up in the supernatural. At the same time no one could escape the power of his personality. In every sense of the word he was a great man.
His closing speech at the second Anglo-Catholic Congress in the Albert Hall revealed his character as nothing else has done. Speaker after speaker had come and gone. Often they had seemed tiny figures, straining to be heard, against the background of that huge assembly and the dim spaces of the crowded auditorium. But in a little time the Albert Hall seemed to contract to the dimensions of a room. The tall figure in the purple cassock dominated everything, and quietly, like one conversing to a small company of friends, he swept us all up to the very foot of the Cross. “Please don’t try to applaud. I am not making a point. I am talking to your souls.” Was there ever a piece of oratory like it? Yet it was not oratory.
There have, been great and beloved bishops who were not great men. They relied for their power upon the supernatural grace of their high office, and men reverenced and loved them for it. There have been bishops who were head and shoulders above the common stature of mankind, who seemed to be shy of claiming apostolic dignity. The Bishop of Zanzibar never forgot his supernatural credentials, and the sense of his office kept him natural and humble, but he was a man who would have achieved greatness in any walk of life. All his unusual powers, and he was built on the heroic scale, were disciplined and consecrated to the service of his Lord in the office of a Bishop.
We have alluded to his gifts as a speaker, rarely displayed but unsurpassed in our generation; he was also a theologian equipped not only with learning but also with the rarer quality of fresh and constructive thought. From any point of view his books are a permanent contribution to theology, and considering the circumstances of their production they are astonishing. He was a man with extraordinary powers of leadership. Witness his work as Honorary Major of the Zanzibar Carrying Corps in 1917, for which he was mentioned in despatches. His Africans would do anything for him. Finding himself at home in Brighton during the railway strike he addressed a great open-air meeting of strikers, and they listened to him gladly.
He had the courage of a lion and the spirit of the knight errant, at once tender and completely fearless. His influence in the counsels of the Lambeth Conference was marked.
But, above all, and essentially, he was a missionary, and undoubtedly the greatest missionary Bishop of our time. Nearly the whole of his ministry was spent in the same remote African diocese, in a climate which has taken such a heavy toll of lives. Here it was that he grew to be a Father in God to the flock committed to him, loving them whole-heartedly, shepherding them wisely, fighting fearlessly for justice for them, and laying strong foundations for the time to come.
Nothing was closer to his heart than their spiritual welfare. He was never so happy as when training and tending the first fruits of that native: ministry which, please God, shall one day make Central Africa a glory to the Church of Christ. So it came about that the Church of England gave one of the greatest of her sons to serve a remote and backward people, and learned from the example of a missionary Bishop what a true Bishop’s character may be.
We learned, too, and it is a significant lesson, that in the life and counsels of the Church at large the influence of a member of the sacred hierarchy does not depend upon the prestige of an ancient see, a Palace and a seat in the House of Lords, but upon the grace inherent in the ministry coupled with a life completely consecrated to the service of the Lord Christ in that sacred office. May his soul rest in peace, and may God grant us other like-minded men to carry on his work.
He left us a message last year, which, in politics, in everyday life, in the Church, we dare not forget. “You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.”
Read a centenary article by Professor David R. Law here