About this time Francis and Gervase, who had both done very well at Eton, got leaving scholarships into the Guards. It was not so much the financial side of this that appealed to me (the scholarships had the effect of reducing the premium to £500) as the consciousness that my boys were well thought of by their masters and were worthy grandsons of Herbert Blisworth. And now what was left for me but to retire into the background? And what is left for me, you will ask, but to retire into the background, and bring these inconsequent memoirs to a conclusion? Well, I confess that I have finished with public affairs; and if any of my readers goes beyond this point, he must do it on the clear understanding that he has let himself be betrayed into taking an interest in the private affairs of a talkative old woman who was not, after all, much of a personage even in her day. Her private affairs, nay, her very private affairs, for what is so personal to each of us as his or her attitude towards religion? And that is all I have left to speak of. It is what we older folk begin to worry about when the interests of youth desert us and the friends of youth are taken from our side, and we find ourselves no longer battling with the winds of circumstance, but volplaning steadily towards the drome that waits for all of us at the last.
I know I have figured in these pages as a careless sort of butterfly, untroubled by any thought of my last end. Perhaps my readers will be disappointed in me at finding such a reversal of my old ways of thought. But, be that as it may, old age and bereavement and the lack of absorbing occupations combined to drive me in upon myself, and make me think about my last landing. It was natural that in this position I should turn for guidance to one who from quite an early age had manifested an interest in my spiritual affairs, who, indeed, had laughingly described himself as my “father professor,” Canon Dives. Canon Dives I have written, for so I shall always remember him, but indeed by this time he had attained that preferment for which his exceptional qualities had long marked him out, as Episcopal Bishop of Norwich.[15] So long as the Established Church remained a single body (only weakened by the secession of the Feminists in ’46, and the Enthusiasts in ’53), the Westernizing party had still sufficient weight to hinder the advancement of one who had always been so outspoken a champion of “relativist” views. But, as those of my readers who are interested in such subjects will remember, in 1964, only five years after Disestablishment became an accomplished fact, the ecclesiastical map was yet further complicated by a schism within the old Church of England. The Westernizers succeeded in securing for themselves that recognition by the Orthodox Churches of the East which remained theirs till, on the outbreak of the Great War, they were solemnly anathematized and cut off from Communion. But they secured this advantage at the price of separating themselves from the whole relativist party, which contained within itself so much that was most striking in the intellect of contemporary Christianity. At West Mill, our parish church had remained Anglican (it was only in the towns that the old churches were divided up among the various denominations), and at the schism Mr. Rowlands, after much hesitation, pronounced in favour of the relativists—it would have cost him a divorce to do otherwise—so that, at least for his lifetime, the position of the parish was defined. I was not very much influenced by this fact; but old friendship and the outstanding personality of the new Bishop of Norwich made me, as I say, turn to him.