The Works of Dr. Darwell Stone

Extract

The passing of Dr. Darwell Stone may seem to many of us like the end of an epoch. It is less difficult to believe that he has been taken away from us than to believe that he was, even though in retirement and with failing health, so recently among us. He was, in a sense, the last of the Tractarians. Not that a younger generation of Anglican divines may safely build on foundations other than those which they, and he, have laid—it will be a bad day for Anglican theology if that should ever come to pass. Yet he was the successor of the Oxford Movement in a directness of line which it is hardly possible for a newer generation to follow. And that, in part, by reason of the very completeness of his own work. He consolidated the foundations which the Tractarians had laid, surpassing them in his ability to synthesise, and to extract the essentials from, the patristic data to which the scholars of the Oxford Movement had recalled the Ecclesia anglicana.

Darwell Stone’s was not perhaps an adventurous mind, nor was his writing, though always lucid and free from jargon, exactly exhilarating. He was a conservative of the conservatives. The great spiritual and religious upheavals of his day seem (if we may judge from his writings) to have passed him by. The lectures which in igoi he delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and which were published under the title Christ and Modern Life, show that he had indeed devoted considerable attention to many of the questions which were tormenting his contemporaries—questions of comparative religion and of Christian apologetics confronted by ‘modern thought.’ But the very assurance and ease with which he treated of them tend to show that they did not present him with any serious challenge or any deep spiritual problem.