THE Victorian ideal of Christian manliness — so alien in today’s world — was at its height in the last decade of John Buchan’s birth. The phrase had been brought into popular consciousness in a series of pamphlets published by the Religious Tract Society within the late 1860s; it found its fullest expression in an influential book published in 1879, The Manliness of Christ, by Thomas Hughes, perhaps probably the most famous and devoted pupil of Dr Arnold at Rugby School.
For Hughes (best known now because the creator of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, although in his day a number one lawyer, Liberal politician, and founding father of Christian Socialism), Jesus exemplified Christian manliness in his self-sacrifice and moral courage, living for others slightly than for himself.
In his seminal study of the topic (The Sinews of the Spirit, 1985), Norman Vance portrays Buchan as certainly one of the last great exemplars and exponents of Christian manliness, bracketing him along with his fellow Free Church Presbyterians Sir William Smith (founding father of the Boys’ Brigade) and Eric Liddell, of Chariots of Fire fame. For Vance, Buchan’s Christian manliness was expressed in “a way of the worth of physical hardihood, an uncomplicated patriotism, a firm conscience, and a straightforward unobtrusive piety”.
CHRISTIAN manliness is usually bracketed with Muscular Christianity, and the image of vigorous, fit, clean-limbed, and chivalrous men pursuing healthful and worthwhile lives with plenty of out of doors exercise. Buchan’s heroes do often conform to this stereotype — within the words of Benny Green, “like half the games masters of the Empire, Buchan thought that cold baths and long walks within the heather were higher calculated to spice up a fellow’s religiosity than a roll within the clover.” (How different they’re in that respect from James Bond, that other popular hero created by a Twentieth-century Scottish thriller-writer.)
But it could be mistaken to locate Buchan in the corporate of the slightly philistine public-school masters and arch-imperialists who were the most important apostles of Muscular Christianity, placing more emphasis on “muscular” than “Christian”. The advocates of Christian manliness were a more sensitive and a more spiritual and theologically informed company, including the novelist and Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley, the Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson, and the Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice.
IF A biblical text informs the thought of Christian manliness, it is definitely the opening verses of Hebrews 12: “Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and allow us to run with patience the race that is ready before us.” I can still vividly recall my prep-school headmaster saying those words greater than 65 years ago. They have stayed with me ever since.
I believe that it was a text that Buchan, too, heard early in his life, and that underpinned his belief that (within the words of his biographer, Ursula Buchan), “Each unforgiving minute have to be crammed with sixty seconds value of distance run, and that happiness is just not to be sought, but may be hoped for because the result of accomplishment, following self-denial.”
The idea of running with patience the race that is ready before us, with its Calvinist sense of Providence and even perhaps of Predestination, also brings to mind Eric Liddell, as does the closing verse of the passage: “Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; And make straight paths on your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the best way; but slightly be healed.”
There is greater than a touch of muscular Christianity here — of bucking up and pulling yourself together, lifting up your limp arms and your feeble knees — but this passage is rather more than an injunction to cultivate a healthy body and a spirit of athleticism. It is important that the next verse reads: “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” It is as much about determinedly pursuing the ways of peace — and justice — because it is about being fleet of foot and robust of arm.
VANCE suggests that “John Buchan indulged within the fantasy that easy manliness could preserve for righteousness a world order threatened by ever-present anarchy and recessive primitivism.”
Yes, there’s a naïvety to his idealism: could a reincarnation of the Gorbals Die-Hards — those resourceful ragamuffins brought together under the benign Christian patronage of the retired grocer Dickson McCunn, recruited from the identical depressed area wherein William Smith began the Boys’ Brigade — really turn the tables on the drug- and alcohol-fuelled gangland crime of contemporary Glasgow? Can our increasingly violent and extremist culture be turned around by the activities of latter-day Richard Hannays and Sandy Arbuthnotts, with their chivalrous behaviour and dashingly gung-ho, can-do attitudes?
Of course, it’s not so simple as that. But there continues to be a component for good men and ladies (we must always keep in mind that Christian manliness was not in its essence a sexist construction) to play. We can do our bit, individually and with others, to champion order against chaos, to preserve civilised values within the face of anarchy and barbarism, and to face for what’s decent and honourable.
We can all point from our own experience to the impact that a display of altruism, a gesture of kindness, and even only a smile can have in cutting through and combating what often looks like the prevailing and increasing disease and brutality of latest culture and society.
WE WILL often fail — we’re frail, and we rely wholly on God’s grace and forgiveness. But we will at the very least resolve to run with patience the race that is ready before us, nonetheless long and tortuous and difficult it’s. And we can even heed those words about pursuing peace with all, and cultivating holiness — perhaps by being more inclined to feel gratitude slightly than discontent, acceptance slightly than grievance, and tranquility slightly than agitation; perhaps just by attending to what Buchan himself described because the two most comfortable words within the English language: peace, and joy.
Recalling his time as a young member of Milner’s Kindergarten in South Africa, he writes of recovering there an experience which he had not known since his childhood: moments, even hours, of intense exhilaration, “when one appeared to be a completely happy a part of a friendly universe”. The cause was partly physical, for the long treks had made him very slot in body — muscular Christianity at work again — but it surely was greater than this, because these moments got here back to him later in life when his health was removed from good.
They transcended human expression, even human thought; they were, slightly, glimpses of the peace of eternity: “Peace is that state wherein fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positive thing; in Joy one doesn’t only feel secure, but something goes out from oneself to the universe, a warm, possessive effluence of affection.
“There could also be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, however the two combined make Happiness. It was Happiness that I knew in those rare moments. The world was a spot of inexhaustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffable, and immortal, in very truth the garment of God.”
The Revd Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History on the University of St Andrews. This is an edited version of a sermon preached on the John Buchan A hundred and fiftieth-anniversary service at Lyne Kirk on 24 August.
