Remembering the life of H M Gwatkin and the British Empire
The name of Henry Melvill Gwatkin (1844–1916) has long been a familiar one through his standard examination of the Arian heresy, Studies of Arianism (1882), which remains a classical study of this ancient heresy.
Gwatkin was rendered deaf as a young boy by an attack of scarlet fever, but that does not seem to have curbed his intellectual development. He had a love for history from an early age and in time developed that requisite for good historical scholarship, accuracy, which, Glover recalls, was ‘always his passion’.
This concern for accuracy gave him a wonderful knowledge of original sources. But he also had a concern for relating the past to the present – always a good quality in an historian, so preventing him or her from becoming a mere antiquarian.
His great goal in life to become a Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University was realised in 1891 when he was appointed in this capacity as a Fellow at Emmanuel College – that one-time seedbed of Puritan preachers. Here he shone as a lecturer and tutor in church history – ‘clear, witty, stimulating, and (when he chose) eloquent’, as one biographical sketch put it. He also had the opportunity to provide spiritual counsel for many of the students that passed through Emmanuel’s halls. The last years of his life were spent during the terrible horrors of World War I, but he never lost a sense of the fact that ‘Eternal Love’ in Christ ‘is sovereign’, as he put it in a letter he wrote in August 1916. That very month he was knocked down by a car that he had not heard because of his deafness. He died three months later.
Ten years before his death a collection of his sermons was published, The Eye for Spiritual Things And Other Sermons. In one of them Gwatkin spoke on the famous text from Isaiah 6: ‘In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord.’ It was preached in Girton College on January 27, 1901, and entitled ‘The Death of Queen Victoria’. What powerful reverberations her death sent out to the four corners of that Empire that once ruled the waves. Gwatkin well knew, as he said, that England stood ‘at the parting of the ways. The Victorian age is ended’.
The sermon calls its hearers to rely upon the Lord, but it has a long section in which Gwatkin speaks in distinctly messianic tones of England’s vocation and that of her people:
‘England is as much God’s people as ever Israel was, and London just as much his dwelling as Jerusalem. Our land is as holy as Judah; our streets are as near him as the mercy-seat of old … As he chose Israel to do one great work for him, so has he chosen England now to do another … It is he who has made us as the stars of heaven for number, and given us western lands and southern seas for our inheritance. It is he who made peace on our soil, hardly broken by the tread of enemies for the best part of a thousand years– he, who gave the pride of the Spaniard to the winds before us, and scattered the fleets of France in the clash at Trafalgar’.
Gwatkin did note that God’s love for England is not because of ‘England’s righteousness’: it ‘was not our own right hand – our wooden walls and streak of silver sea – that wrought salvation for us, but the Lord himself has been a wall of fire about us. Our fathers cried to him, and he delivered them in many a day of trouble and rebuke – to set our rule in the sea, and our dominion at the world’s end’. And the task for which God had given England safety and succour? ‘God never gave Israel a nobler task than he has laid on England – to witness of truth and peace and mercy to every nation under heaven’.
So thought one Anglican clergyman at the height of the British Empire. Such a reading of history is not unique to the English Christians of that day. Christians in the late Roman Empire, after the Edict of Milan, also spoke in similar sacral tones of the so-called Christian Roman Empire. That God did greatly use the English to spread the gospel to the four corners of the earth in the ‘Protestant century’, namely the 19th century, is undisputed fact. But as that century wore on, far too much of English mission became increasingly intermeshed with the conscious dissemination of English culture and the importance of maintaining English hegemony over other cultures. It is noteworthy that Gwatkin makes nary a mention of the Welsh, the Scots, or the Irish, as if the English were able to build their empire alone and without the other peoples of this archipelago.
Well, this Anglocentric reading of history is now history itself. God, in his mercy, did secure England from the Spanish Armada and the despotism of Napoleon, but to what end? That Britannia might rule the waves? Or that English voices might proclaim the rule of King Jesus to the nations? Surely the latter. And as the 20th century would show, after Gwatkin’s death, that rule did not need English voices to continue its advance.
