In this manner he regards all sensational excitement of every kind.  When people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop’s rather solemn and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile.  It is when people are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of Dr. Davidson hardens.  There is nothing he dreads more than apathy, nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia.  Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the gods, has the serpent for his effigy.  “The Devil tempts the busy man,” says a Turkish proverb, “but the idle man tempts the Devil.”

One of those who has worked with the Archbishop for many years, although his views are of a rather extreme order and his temperament altogether of the excessive kind, said to me the other day, “When Randall Davidson went to Canterbury, I told those who asked me what would be the result of his reign.  He will leave the Church as he found it.  I was wrong.  He has done much more than that.”  He went on to say that there was now a far greater charity between the different schools than existed at the beginning of the century, and that if unity had not been attained, at least disruption had been avoided.

One of the most eloquent and far-sighted of the Evangelicals puts the matter to me in this fashion:  “It is possible that fifty years hence men may ask whether he ought not to have been constructive; but for the present we, his contemporaries, must confess that it is wonderful how he keeps things together.”

“Pull yourself together!” was the admonition addressed to a somewhat hilarious undergraduate.  “But I haven’t got a together,” he made answer.

If it be true that a house divided against itself cannot stand, then we must admit that Dr. Randall Davidson is not merely one of the Church’s greatest statesmen, but a worker of miracles, a man whom we might expect to take up serpents and drink any deadly thing.

But it will be safe to keep the Archbishop’s reputation in the region of statesmanship.

The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the whole modern world, than this word statesmanship.  It is a word of which the antonym is drifting.  It signifies steersmanship, and implies control, guidance, direction, and, obviously, foresight.  Now, let us see how this word is used by those who are supposed to instruct public opinion.

The settlement of the Irish Question was hailed as a triumph of British statesmanship.  One of the Sunday newspapers of the higher order acclaimed Mr. Lloyd George as the greatest statesman in the history of England and perhaps the greatest man in the world.  But it needs only a little thought, only a moment’s reflection, to realise that this welcome settlement was a triumph, not of statesmanship, but of murderous brutality.  There would have been no paens if there had been no volleys, no triumph if there had been no violence.