Chapter V: The Growth of Sanderson Shown in His Sermons and Scripture Lessons

§ 1

Before I go on to a discussion of the latest, broadest, and most interesting phase of Sanderson's mental life, I would like to give my readers as vivid a picture as I can of his personality and his methods of delivery. I have tried to convey an impression of his stout and ruddy presence, his glancing spectacles, his short, compact but allusive delivery, his general personal jolliness. I will give now a sketch of one of his Scripture lessons made by two of the boys in the school. Nothing I think could convey so well his rich discursiveness nor the affectionate humour he inspired throughout the school. Here it is.

'SCRIPTURE LESSON

'_Delivered by F. W. Sanderson on Sunday, 25th May 1919, and taken
down word for word by X and Y, and subsequently written up by
them._

'_Limitations of space and time have prevented them from including
all the lesson. Omissions have been indicated. They apologise for
the lapses of the speaker into inaudibility, which were not their
fault. They do not hold themselves in any way responsible for the
opinions expressed herein._

'ANALYSIS

'of the portions copied.

'Characteristic portions in the Gospel of St. Matthew.

'Obstinacy of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board.

'Character of the devil, according to some modern writers.

'First act of our Lord on beginning the Galilean Ministry.

'Empire Day.

'_Subject of the Scripture lesson:--St. Matthew, chaps. iv and v._

('The Temptations, the commencement of the Galilean Ministry, the
first portion of the Sermon on the Mount.')

'(The headmaster enters, worries his gown, sits down, adjusts his waistcoat, and coughs once.)

'The--um--er--I am taking you through the Gospel of St. Matthew. I think, as a matter of fact, we got to the end of the third chapter. We won't spend much time over the fourth. The fourth, I think, is the--er--er--Temptations, which I have already taken with you--a rather--er--very interesting--ah--very interesting--er--survival. That the Temptation Narrative should have survived shows that there is probably something of value in it or I do not think it would have survived. There are two incidents of very similar character of--er--very--er--similar character and--ah--different to a certain extent from everything else--er--ah-- There is a boy in that corner not listening to me. Who is that boy in the corner there? No, not you--two rows in front. I will come down to you later, my boy. There are two incidents in the Gospel Narrative which are similar in--er--character and which I have for the moment called "Survivals"--very characteristic, namely, the somewhat surprising narrative of the Temptation of our Lord, and the other the account of the Transfiguration. These are different in form and character from other narratives, just in the same way as the account of our Lord sending messages to the Baptist differs from others. Er--yes--that last one. I should put them together as coming from a similar source (lapse into inaudibility--bow wow wow. Unique in characteristic--bow wow wow--Somewhat subtle--bow wow). One remarks that the Temptations are always looked at from the personal point of view, which I have put down in my synopsis. Has anybody here got my synopsis? lend it to me a moment. I don't think the personal significance of the Gospel stories has importance nowadays. We needn't consider it. That's what I think about things in general. Personal importance giving place to universal needs. We are not so much concerned with whether boys do _evil_ or not. Of course it annoys me if I find a boy doing evil. Leading others astray. Shockingly annoying. Oughtn't to be. Like continuous mathematics not enabling a boy to pass in arithmetic--bow wow wow--screw loose. See what I mean, K----? Not referring to you, my boy (laughter). Hunt me up something in Plato about all these things. During the last generation--

'(Half a page omitted.)

'Just in the same way from another point of view shall we live for own advancement, which we are continually tempted to do? It's awfully annoying if you do certain things and people won't recognise them. I was pretty heftily annoyed myself at a meeting of the Oxford and Cambridge Board. Professor Barker--great man--I nearly always agree with him. Professor Barker. They had made science compulsory for the school certificate. Bow wow wow. I don't want boys turned aside from their main purpose to have to get up scraps and snippets of science. Literary pursuits and so on. I wouldn't have it at any price. Bow wow wow. Modern languages are compulsory too. By looking at a boy's French set I can tell whether he can pass or not. Bow wow. Professor Barker proposed that science should be voluntary. I seconded him, but I said that languages should be voluntary as well. He didn't see that at all. Isn't it enough to make a man angry?

'(Half a dozen lines omitted from our note as incomprehensible.)

'Now I am inclined to think that Satan in this Gospel is not intended to be the Satan of our minds--the prince of evil. He is intended to be more like the Satan in the book of Job. He is the devil's advocate. He argues for the other side. For the opposition. He is put up to create opposition. This may in itself be a valuable thing. I don't know that I need go further into it. I would just like to tell you this, boys. Some modern writers, especially Bernard Shaw, have a very high esteem for the devil. He[1] prefers hell to heaven. So he says. Of course he hasn't been there, so he can't tell. So he is voted a dangerous personage because, dear souls, they don't know what he means. What _he_ means is that heaven as it has been run down to and God as He has been run down to--everything placid and simple and inactive and non-creative and sleepy. People don't worship God. They worship (burble burble). They don't disturb their minds and think about things. That's what he means. Yes. Man and Superman. Activity of intellect. That's more or less what he has in mind. He prefers people doing something outrageously wrong than doing nothing at all. I don't know if it's true; it's all expressed in Greek thought.

'(Four pages omitted on running with the tide, Lloyd George, the importance of French in examinations, and the correct way of getting a true national spirit.)

'Well, our Lord now proceeded to found His Galilean Ministry. And what was the first thing He did, L----? It's quite obvious. What did He do? Obvious. Were you thinking of what I said just now? No, sir. My stream of words goes over you, not through you. Obvious. Now what was the first thing He did? What is obviously the first thing He did? Why, it's painfully obvious, even to L----. What was it? What? Where are we, L----? L---- has lost the place. Which paragraph do I mean, L----? Read the paragraph I mean. No. I have finished that. Next one. Obvious. What is it about? Yes, what is it about? What is it about? Two or four? Yes, four! Now what is obvious? Obvious! Now you've just got it, and you're ten minutes behind. Of course. The first obvious thing He had to do was to get a band of faithful disciples. Very first thing He did. What did He call them to be? To be what? Fishers of Men. Obvious.

'(Five pages omitted on Empire Day, Medical Study, and Cancer.)

'Now the--er--the Sermon on the Mount. You have heard this ever since you were on your mother's knee. At least I hope so. Beyond the historical times of your memory. For you, the Sermon on the Mount is as old as the ages. And yet I dare trespass on the Sermon on the Mount. "I've heard of it before," you say. "I'm tired of it. Do something fresh." Boys, you must go and read old things and breathe into them the new Spirit of Life. Now what is that chapter in Ezekiel, boys? Do you know the number of the page, and the paragraph, and the chapter? No. What am I talking about? Why, the valley of dry bones. Never heard of it! No. Is it in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or where, or Habakkuk? Is it in Ezekiel 1? No. 36? No. 37? Yes. Dry Bones. Bones. Yes. That's what. I am going to take you to a valley of dry bones. Dry Bones. Bones. It is your business to go into the dry bones of the past and cover them with flesh, and breathe into them the new Spirit. I often read the Sermon on the Mount. It never bores me. I have more excuse to be bored than you. I learned it, gracious goodness, how long ago! Beyond Historic times. I loved it as a boy. Dry Bones.

'(Three pages on the Sermon on the Mount.)

'Now yesterday was Empire Day. Why did you want me to put the flag up? Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves! Is not that it? (Yes, sir.) Dear boys! I wouldn't throw cold water on it for worlds. Well, you had your flag. It didn't fly. There was no wind behind it. There was no devil to blow it. Dear boys, you wanted that flag for a reason I think a shade wrong. It wouldn't be within the--what's the word I want?--suited for our modern gauges. The new world won't come until we give up the idea of Conquest and Extension of Empire--no new kingdom until its members are imbued with the principles that competition is wrong, that conquest is wrong, that co-operativeness is right, and sacrifice a law of nature. Now, how do the seven Beatitudes read with _Rule Britannia_? Now you say you believe in your Bibles. You say you are Christians. Pious Christians. You would be most annoyed if I called you heathens. Well, if so, you believe that these are right:--

'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Britannia rules the waves!

'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see all that is worth seeing and living for. Wave your flag! Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Rule Britannia!

'Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake. Rule Britannia! It is incongruous....

'Dear souls! My dear souls! I wouldn't lead you astray for anything. I can't explain it ... this national spirit of yours. Beneath it all there is a spirit of great righteousness. I wouldn't tamper with it for thousands of pounds. But you must just see the other side....

'(Starts on the Salt of the Earth, but is interrupted by time. Sets a heavy prep., and goes.)'

§ 2

Now that was the key in which Sanderson dealt with his boys and in which he gave his message to the world. And that is also the key in which they dealt with him. I want to clear out of the reader's mind any idea that this great teacher of men was a solemn and superior person, clear, exact, and exalted, and that his boys had any vague sentimental worship for him. They laughed at him, loved him, understood him, assimilated his ideas, and worked with him. He was much more like a sweating, panting, burly leader pushing a way for himself and others through a thorny thicket. And when I sat in his study and read over the notes of his sermons and scripture lessons I got the same impression of a sturdy fighter thrusting through a tangle.

Altogether there were several hundred of these sermon-memoranda. He would take a quire of manuscript paper and write down his notes, not headings merely but sentences, writing very fast, missing out halves of words, leaving phrases incomplete. The result would be a little book with perhaps a title and a date scribbled on the back page. The dozen specimen sermons in the official Life were mostly taken from these rough drafts. There was also a quantity of printed sermons dating from his earliest days at Oundle. So that it was possible to trace his development from the days when every heretical utterance was jealously noted, to the days of complete freedom of thought and expression.

He came into the interlaced briars and brakes of modern religious thought, a trained theological student, but already a very broad one, far from the trite materialistic superstitions of the narrowly orthodox. 'Of what is termed "definite religious teaching" his boys received little,' says one of his clerical assistants. 'The Head fought shy of anything which he felt might cramp a boy's tendency to think for himself and develop his own views.'

This is far from the old days of salvation by belief.

He took Christ as the central figure in his teaching. In his early days he had prepared a parallel arrangement of the gospels, and this developed into his _Synopsis of the Life of Christ_. He seems to have clung stoutly to the authenticity of the recorded sayings of Christ, but he held himself free to doubt whether we have as yet 'got to the bottom of many sayings of the Master.' And, says the same witness, at once rather vaguely and rather illuminatingly: 'He brushed aside impatiently doubts as to the feasibility of this miracle or that. To any who seemed to be worrying about the actual turning of water into wine at Cana he would urge that they were missing the whole point; cold, lifeless water was turned into warm, life-giving wine--and this was the work of the Master and His new teaching. Could they doubt that? He seemed to feel acutely that the passing of the centuries is liable to bring a distortion as well as an enrichment of the Christian revelation, and for that reason he was always trying to meditate himself, and to get others to meditate, on the true characteristics of the Master in the earliest portraits of Him handed down to us in the Gospels.'

Like all religious teachers he emphasised some aspects of the general doctrine in preference to others, but his accent was never on the sacramental or ceremonial side. The root ideas of orthodox Christianity, the ideas of sin and an atonement, never very prominent in his teaching, faded more and more from his discourses as the years went on. He never seems to have had much sense of sin, and he laid an increasing stress on action, on courage and experiment. One saying he repeated endlessly, 'Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, shall men give into your bosom.' Still more frequently he quoted, 'I came that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.' In his later days that had become a new motto for Oundle School; it ousted 'God grant Grace' from the boys' thoughts in much the same way that Faraday for all spiritual purposes ousted St. Anthony as the patron saint of the school. And in the later sermons one would find side by side with Gospel sayings, exhortations from quite another quarter. The boys were told to 'live dangerously.' The Christ of later Oundle became indeed a very Nietzschean Christ.

§ 3

Orthodox Christianity is built upon the doctrine of the Fall of Man and the damnation of mankind, but I could find only the rarest and remotest allusions to this ground beneath the Christian corner-stone of salvation in the bale of sermons I examined. There is no evidence that Sanderson ever denied the fallen state of man, but he never alluded to it, and the general effect of his teaching went far beyond a mere avoidance. As his teaching developed, another word, a word infrequent in the gospels, became dominant, the word 'creative.' For any mention of 'salvation' you will find twenty repetitions of 'creative.' So far as I can gather he took the word from a hitherto unrecognised Christian father, St. Bertrand Russell. And I should submit the following passage from a sermon on The Garden of Life, to any competent theological body with very grave doubts whether they would accept it as consistent with the teaching of any recognised Christian Church.

'God had created man, and had moulded and fashioned him, and had breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, possessed of the divine and eternal indestructible spirit, the God-like spirit which would fill him with the glorious and life-giving spirit of unrest, of unsatisfied longings and desire, of the instinctive natural urge to have more of life. A mighty power, a dynamic creative force, a daemonic increasing urge--against which the forces of hell, of destructiveness, of caprice, of lawlessness, of the jungle, cannot prevail. Under this power man and the races of man progress: but without this mental fight, this constant struggle, no life can come. I dwelt on this fact last time I spoke to you, having in mind the mental or intellectual aspect of it, especially for those of you who are working for some searching examinations: for without a persistent, painful, and often enough disappointing effort the understanding of things will not come to you, or to any of us.

'Be true to yourselves, suffer no artifice, or artificial understanding, to throw dust in your eyes. Do not struggle for a static victory. Be true to yourselves. Do not struggle for your own recognition, as it were, or for the mere appearance of knowledge--rather struggle to enter into the kingdom, the kingdom of service.

'And where can you find the inspiration and urge of life? The source is wonderfully drawn out for us in the illuminating and suggestive commentary on Genesis you have the advantage to study. A great human book is Canon Driver's _Commentary_, digging out for us the deep truths of life embedded in the ancient myths of Genesis. A study in the use of words; of what we can learn from words; a new form of text-book. Such a text-book as we should have for the new era. This picture of the coming and making of man tells us a story of the widest applicability. It is found in all the works of God; it is found in all our surroundings; it is found in all our work and toil; it is found most fully and actively in all our daily working life. God, we are told, made a garden for man, and there He placed him and gave him charge of it; and there the Lord God came and walked with man, and communed with man, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And there He gave him his chief aim of life, his one purpose. And the Lord God took man, and put him in the Garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it. And then with the memory and order of that garden in his mind He permitted him to receive knowledge, and then sent him out into the great wilderness to find his garden there.'

And here is another passage from a sermon entitled 'Creative.'

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was waste and void. The world was in chaos, darkness, and gloom. But it was not to be left in this state. All this condition of anarchy, this waste and void, was the material out of which a new world was to be created. Confused and impossible though everything appeared, yet there was something present that made steadfastly and incessantly for order. So we believe it is now, in the present state of things. All the conflicts and strifes of to-day are the breaking up of the fallow ground. They are the effort to create life. They are the messengers of the coming of the Son of Man. In storm and tempest cometh the Son of Man. Over all this lawless, shapeless, impossible material of chaos there brooded, we are told, the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God was brooding over the waters like a bird over its nest, and in due time, in the order of creation, a new life was to take shape, and a new world was to rise up. In stately, ordered, majestic manner with all the certainty and irresistible power of gravitation, step by step, stage by stage, out of the welter of anarchy, a life--a new life--was to come into the world. A new life came.

And at each stage we hear the words of the Lord God, "Let there be," and "there was." And then: "God saw that it was good." There was evening, and there was morning--darkness changed into light--and the day's work was done. And God saw that it was good.

So, too, it is and will be in the history of the human race. The uplifting of mankind, the coming of fuller life to nations, to man, to classes and sections of men, has come in epochs of change. Such stages in history are like the stages in the life history of a plant. There seem to be resting phases, epochs of apparent quiescence, the cessation of struggle.

The fact is that some new freedom, some new principle of life, some desire to grow, has for a long time been taking root in the minds and souls of men. The urge to become more creative--to gain more of life and give more of life--becomes at last intense. And there is an immense desire to satisfy the great urge of nature. The old order passes. The gathered forces seek release. The pangs of birth are upon us.'

The further one goes with Sanderson, the stronger is one's sense of new wine fermenting in the old bottle of orthodox Christian formulæ. In one of the late sermons he deliberately sets aside the Epistles of the New Testament as of less account than the gospels. He was still diverging when he died. In the last year or so of his life a new word crept into his talk and played an increasingly important part in it. That word was 'syncretism.' He spoke of it more and more plainly as an evil thing. And I cannot but believe, knowing his sources of knowledge and the angle at which he approached history, that he must have been aware that doctrinal Christianity--as detached from the personal teaching of Jesus--is, with its Mithraic blood sacrifice and Sabbath keeping, its Alexandrine trinity, its Egyptian priests, shaven and celibate, its Stella Maris and infant Horus, the completest example of a syncretic religion in the world. My impression is that if he had lived another two years he would have shed his last vestiges of theological paraphernalia and gone straight back to the teaching of the Nazarene, openly and plainly. And that would have created a very embarrassing situation for the members of the Grocers' Company, in the school at Oundle.

§ 4

And what creed was taking the place of the old theological tangle? What interpretation was Sanderson putting upon this ever-new teaching of Christ in the world, that he was stripping so steadily out of its irrelevant casings of dogma and superstition? I cannot do better in answer to that than quote from one of his latest sermons, a sermon delivered on the reassembly of the school at the opening of a new school year.

'The fundamental instinct of life is to create, to make, to discover, to grow, to progress. Every one in some form or other has experience of this joy of creating; the joy of seeing the growth, the building, the change, the coming. The instinct of those in authority has recognised--without perhaps knowing it--the love to create, when they devised punishment--the treadmill, prisons, routine, all thwarting that free creative impulse to the point of torture. Or on a minor scale the trivial school stupidities and idlenesses of 'lines'; detentions without labour or sacrifice or both; or even the cheap and easy physical punishment. Such punishment, if not all inflicted punishment, springs out of the distinctive protective aim of slavery. Creative life comes slowly.

Life, this beautiful, creative life, comes slowly through the ages, but it comes. Slowly mankind is emerging out of slavery into the beautiful freedom of creative life. Slowly mankind is realising the natural desire, the instinctive natural urge, the essential need for life--of each individual to be free. Free--_i.e._ free to strive, to endeavour, to reach onwards, to create, to make, to beget. The economic freedom of the individual has been slowly escaping throughout history. It burst into a new vigorous life through the hammering blows of the French Revolution. During the last century or more this principle of freedom has been changing our political relationships and values. This economic escape may be said to have reacted on science, and the modern developments of evolution have benefited by the spreading change in the temper of mind, and by the influx of workers and creative thinkers from the enslaved order.

And this raises a large question which I have in mind this morning. Every one can see to-day the immensity of the problems before the world. It does not need much reflection, or foresight, or knowledge, to see that the organisation of the intercourse of races is hurrying on to becoming a dangerous problem. As has been said, and as any one I think with powers of sight can see, it is in a large sense a race between education and catastrophe. And the question we in schools have to ask is, Can we in schools be outside all this? Can we confine our work, our play, our necessary work, our necessary play, to the recognised, traditional work or play of schools? We here think not. We believe that schools should move on towards becoming always a microcosm of the new world. A microcosm, and experiment, of the standards of value, of the commandments, the statutes and judgments, of the organisation, of the visions and aims of a coming world. We must not get into our heads that these are theoretical things, it may be pure idealistic sort of things, or, it may be new and dangerous things. They are none of these things--they can be expressed in very everyday, homely, matter-of-fact things and in the doing of our ordinary work. Of course they do mean thought, a tendency to believe, a faith in boys--and they do mean labour, and sacrifice--as they are called or thought of at first--until both pass on into the beautiful life.

Such aims and urges become terrific powers for prolonging the life of man; and as the stream of life goes on it becomes more and more like a vast river moving slowly forward with great power, receiving more and more of tributaries, slowly, strongly, surely flowing on "unto the estuary that enlarges, and spreads itself grandly as it pours its waters into the great ocean of sea."

But the beginnings are here: and here boys must find themselves in the great stream of true life. They must find themselves in the land of the great vision, of faith, of service. No beating or marking of time here. No easy static state. No satisfaction with conventional static comfort. Here they will join in this great world-life. They came from their homes to join the great world-life here. Even these tiny boys here will feel that something is before them that matters, something of true life and true intent. They will get the germs of life from some of those things we are perpetually trying to do, and never succeeding in doing. They will catch the contagion of effort. For learning is not our object here, but doing. They may learn things in a deadly static way, they may learn much in a static way and gain nothing of life. Not here, I hope. No, the germs of life come from the spirit; from the incessant travail of the soul; from high intent; they come from the burning desire to know of the things that are coming into the world....'

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Mr. Shaw.