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Nevertheless, Miss Royden must be numbered among the socialists, the Christian socialists, and Individualism will be all the better for asking itself how it is that a lady so good, so gentle, so clear-headed, and so honest should be arrayed with its enemies. I should like to speak of one memorable experience in Miss Royden's later life.
Certainly Miss Royden does not resemble, in her attitude towards either God or the human race, that curious religieuse Mdme. de Maintenon, who having been told by her confessor in the floodtime of her beauty that "God wished her to become the King's mistress," at the end of that devout if somewhat painful experience, replied to a suggestion about writing her memoirs, "Only saints would find pleasure in its perusal."
She was at the heart of evolution. It became evident to Miss Royden that she had discovered for herself both a constituency and a church. Some years after making this discovery she abandoned all other work, and ever since, first at the City Temple and now at the Guildhouse in Eccleston Square, has been one of the most effective advocates in this country of personal religion.
Earnestness is hers of the highest and tenderest order, but also the convincing authority of one who has found the peace which passes understanding. She has spoken to me with sympathy of Mr. Studdert-Kennedy, whose trench-like methods in the pulpit are thoroughly distasteful to a great number of people. It is characteristic of Miss Royden that she should fasten on the real cause of this violence.
Miss Royden distinguished herself in the sphere of learning and in the sphere of sports. At Oxford the last vestiges of her religion, or rather her parents' religion, faded from her mind, without pain of any order, hardly with any consciousness. She devoted herself wholeheartedly to the schools. No longer did she imagine that God had sent her lameness. She ceased to think of Him.
The 28th of August we had sight of the Burlings, and being on the 29th athwart of Peniche, and having a favourable wind, we directed our course west for the Azores, without making any stay off the coast of Portugal. The 30th we met the Red Rose, Captain Royden, formerly called the Golden Dragon, which had separated from my lord in a storm.
A large audience heard one evening the Benefits of Woman Suffrage related by those who had been sent as official delegates from Governments that had given the vote to women, Mrs. Qvam, Miss Krog and Mrs. Spencer, and in supplementary speeches by Mrs. Jenny Forselius, member of Parliament from Finland; Miss A. Maude Royden, Great Britain; Mrs.
"You want to ride with a long rope," suggested Bob Royden, grinning openly at the others. "That's the way to work up in the cow business. Capital nothing! You don't get enough excitement buying cattle; you want to steal 'em. That's what I'd do if I had a brand of my own and all your ambitions to get rich." "And get sent up," Manley rounded out the situation. "No, thanks." He laughed.
This contention was challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud Royden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are forbidden, with one or two exceptions. Miss Royden, whose preaching was being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already had two women as its absolute head.
Pushkin said that Russia turned an Asian face towards Europe and a European face towards Asia. This acute saying may be applied to Miss Royden. To the prosperous and timid Christian she appears as a dangerous evangelist of socialism, and to the fiery socialist as a tame and sentimental apostle of Christianity.
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