To Cambridge generally Butler endeared himself by his eager interest in all good enterprises, by his stirring oratory and persuasive preaching, and by his lavish hospitality.  As Vice-Chancellor, in 1889 and 1890, he worthily maintained the most dignified traditions of academical office.  Those who knew him both on the religious and on the social side will appreciate the judgment said to have been pronounced by Canon Mason, then Master of Pembroke:  “Butler will be saved, like Rahab, by hospitality and faith.”

VIII

BASIL WILBERFORCE[*]

[Footnote *:  A Memorial Address delivered in St. John’s Church, Westminster.]

In the House of God the praise of man should always be restrained.  I, therefore, do not propose to obey the natural instinct which would prompt me to deliver a copious eulogy of the friend whom we commemorate—­an analysis of his character or a description of his gifts.

But, even in church, there is nothing out of place in an attempt to recall the particular aspects of truth which presented themselves with special force to a particular mind.  Rather, it is a dutiful endeavour to acknowledge the gifts, whether in the way of spiritual illumination or of practical guidance, which God gave us through His servant; and, it is on some of those aspects as they presented themselves to the mind of Basil Wilberforce that I propose to speak—­not, indeed, professing to treat them exhaustively, but bearing in mind that true saying of Jeremy Taylor:  “In this world we believe in part and prophesy in part; and this imperfection shall never be done away, till we be transplanted to a more glorious state.”

1.  I cannot doubt about the point which should be put most prominently.

Wilberforce’s most conspicuous characteristic was his vivid apprehension of the Spiritual World.  His eyes, like Elisha’s, were always open to see “the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire.”  Incorporeal presences were to him at least as real as those which are embodied in flesh and blood.  Material phenomena were the veils of spiritual realities; and “the powers of the world to come” were more actual and more momentous than those which operate in time and space.  Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of Materialism.

2.  Second only to his keen sense of the Unseen World was his conviction of God’s love.

Other aspects of the Divine Nature as it is revealed to us—­Almightiness, Justice, Awfulness (though, of course, he recognized them all)—­did not colour his heart and life as they were coloured by the sense of the Divine Love.  That Love seemed to him to explain all the mysteries of existence, to lift

    “the heavy and the weary weight
  Of all this unintelligible world”;

to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard things easy, even its saddest things endurable.  His Gospel was this:  God, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father; and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all is, and must be, well.