The Squarson

On Whitsun Tuesday in 1865, the Sunday-school children of an English mill-town mission named Horbury Brig, in Devonshire, were scheduled to march to church to join the children of the nearby parish in worship. As the mission's curate later told it, "Mr. Fred Knowles [a church warden] came to me at the Vicarage and asked what they were to sing on the long walk. We discussed one thing and then another and I said I would write a processional. 'You must be sharp about it,' said Mr. Knowles, 'for this is Saturday and there will shortly be no printing done.' So I set to work and knocked off the hymn in about ten minutes."

The result: Onward, Christian Soldiers, which was to become one of the great hymns of all time (George Bernard Shaw even suggested that the early Christians anticipated it on their way to face the lions). The curate who wrote the famous words* in such a hurry was the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, an extraordinary squarson--one of the last of that strange amalgam of squire and parson bred by the 19th century Church of England. Now published in England is Baring-Gould's biography, Onward Christian Soldiers, by Anglican Clergyman William Purcell (no kin to 17th century Composer Henry Purcell). It is the story of a cleric who makes the busiest writing parson of the tape-recorder age seem like a sluggard.

Earnest Yearnings. Baring-Gould has more than 130 books to his credit. His sermons alone fill more than 20 volumes. He wrote a 16-volume Lives of the Saints and a weighty treatise on the Origin and Development of Religious Belief that moved Prime Minister Gladstone to award him a crown living (an ecclesiastical appointment at the dispensation of the government). He also wrote 30 novels plus stories and character sketches; he was an active archaeologist, and he busily searched out and transcribed old country songs and ballads, e.g., Widdecombe Fair. He was a staunch High-churchman; there is a legend that the Low-Church Archbishop of York on a visit to Baring-Gould's church objected to the carrying of a cross in the processional and Baring-Gould instructed the choir to sing:

Onward, Christian Soldiers, Marching as to war, -With the cross of Jesus Left behind the door.

Baring-Gould was past 30 when he fell in love with the 16-year-old daughter of a mill hand (she had gone to work in the mill herself at the age of ten). In his first novel, Baring-Gould described the experience: "He felt the peace of his mind was bound up with that little girl. How this had come about he could not tell. And now, his heart was full of strange cravings, his soul yearning with indescribable earnestness for one who was not his equal in station and education."

Parson Baring-Gould solved his real-life problem by packing Grace Taylor off for two years to live with a vicar's family and learn proper manners. Then he brought her back and married her. They lived happily together for 47 years, and had 15 children--such a family that once at a Christmas party, when he leaned down to ask a moppet, "And whose little girl are you, my dear?" she burst into tears and sobbed, "I'm yours, Daddy."

Despotism & Love. Baring-Gould spent the last 43 of his 90 years at Lew Tren-chard, a manorial estate on the western edge of Dartmoor, on which he inherited the position of squire from his father. The Trenchard vicarage was at the squire's disposal, and Baring-Gould nominated himself .for' the job. As squarson, he combined physical and spiritual responsibility for his tenants in a delicate balance of despotism and love. Most mornings he made calls on his parishioners, among whom, says Author Purcell. "there was not a house he did not know, nor one in which he was not loved . . . And then he would pass through the door of his study into that other private world of his writing. He wrote standing, all day long, in seclusion and silence."

When the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould died, the hymn they sang over his grave was one he wrote for children that may well outlast his Christian Soldiers:

Now the day is over, Night is drawing nigh. Shadows of the evening Steal across the sky.

* At first, to a melody by Joseph Haydn. A few years later the words were fitted to Sir Arthur Sullivan's now famous tune, St. Gertrude.

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