When in 1884 Gladstone appointed Holland to a Canonry at St. Paul’s, the announcement was received with an amount of interest which is not often bestowed upon ecclesiastical promotions.  Everyone felt that it was a daring experiment to place this exuberant prophet of the good time coming at what Bishop Lightfoot called “the centre of the world’s concourse.”  Would his preaching attract or repel?  Would the “philosophy of religion,” which is the perennial interest of Oxford, appeal to the fashionable or business-like crowd which sits under the Dome?  Would his personal influence reach beyond the precincts of the Cathedral into the civil and social and domestic life of London?  Would the Mauritian gospel of human brotherhood and social service—­in short, the programme of the Christian Social Union—­win the workers to the side of orthodoxy?  These questions were answered according to the idiosyncrasy or bias of those to whom they were addressed, and they were not settled when, twenty-seven years later, Holland returned from St. Paul’s to Oxford.  Indeed, several answers were possible.  On one point only there was an absolute agreement among those who knew, and this was that the Church in London had been incalculably enriched by the presence of a genius and a saint.

In one respect, perhaps, Holland’s saintliness interfered with the free action of his genius.  His insight, unerring in a moral or intellectual problem, seemed to fail him when he came to estimate a human character.  His own life had always been lived on the highest plane, and he was in an extraordinary degree “unspotted from the world.”  His tendency was to think—­or at any rate to speak and act—­as if everyone were as simply good as himself, as transparent, as conscientious, as free from all taint of self-seeking.  This habit, it has been truly said, “disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice”; but it is pre-eminently characteristic of those elect and lovely souls

  “Who, through the world’s long day of strife,
      Still chant their morning song.”

III

LORD HALIFAX

There can scarcely be two more typically English names than Wood and Grey.  In Yorkshire and Northumberland respectively, they have for centuries been held in honour, and it was a happy conjunction which united them in 1829.  In that year, Charles Wood, elder son of Sir Francis Lindley Wood, married Lady Mary Grey, youngest daughter of Charles, second Earl Grey, the hero of the first Reform Bill.  Mr. Wood succeeded his father in the baronetcy, in 1846, sat in Parliament as a Liberal for forty years, filled some of the highest offices of State in the Administrations of Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone, and was raised to the peerage as Viscount Halifax in 1866.