Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

THE POWERFUL ECCLESIASTIC. 193
designs for the unity and welfare of the realm, was the
thing for an able and upright chancellor to do. When
the
archbishopric was forced upon him he saw at a
4 glance that to be the King s man as Primate, would be :
to clothe himself with weakness, and cover himself with
shame. He had been an ecclesiastic, we must remember,
before he had been chancellor. He saw^the position
from the ecclesiastical point of view; he knew, as the
King could not know, what it
demanded, and in accepting
it he accepted, not a splendid position, a large income,
and unbounded adulation, but the part which it was
becoming that the Primate of all England at that time
should play. We may well believe that when this
flashed on him, his generous heart was touched by the
thought of all the sorrow that must grow out of his
appointment to the King; and there is evidence that
either in jest or earnest he warned him of it. None the
less did his hand close firmly on the crosier, when Henry,
taking no heed to his warning- forced it on his acceptance,
and in a moment he became a new man
; assumed, not a
new nature, for he was the same Becket all
through, & but
a new conception of duty, of the work which he had
do; and this conception he held with unflinching firmness
till
death.
There is no doubt that this power to throw himself
entirely into two so
opposite parts or schemes of life,
detracts a good deal from his moral grandeur; saint and
martyr though he was, there was a lack of that inner
simplicity and highmindedness which in St. Bernard or
St. Louis would have forbidden them to attempt anything
but the one thing which they believed they had been set
to do by a higher hand. These men who can play two
such different parts with such consummate power are
to
only in the second rank, never in the first; one thing