Henry Scott Holland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Scott Holland (27 January 1847-17 March 1918) was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. He was also a canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
He was born at Ledbury and educated at Eton where he was a pupil of the influential Master William Johnson Cory, and University of Oxford where he took a first class degree in Greats. He had the Oxford degrees of DD, MA, and Honorary DLitt.
After graduation, he was elected as a Student (fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford.
In 1884, he left Oxford for St Paul's Cathedral where he was appointed canon.
He was keenly interested in social justice and formed PESEK (Politics, Economics, Socialism, Ethics and Christianity) which blamed capitalist exploitation for contemporary urban poverty. In 1889, he formed the Christian Social Union.
In 1910, he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, a post he held until his death.
Perhaps his best-known writing in modern times is Death is nothing at all which is often heard at funeral and memorial services in a more or less truncated form, despite being wrenched out of context, from a sermon in which these words represent how we'd like death to be, instead of something which wrecks and shatters lives:
| “ |
Death is nothing at all. It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you, and the old life
that we lived so fondly together is untouched,
unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes
that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort,
without the ghost of a shadow upon it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you,
for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.
All is well.
|
” |
Scott Holland intended to contrast the hopelessness of atheism at death with the illusion of the sort of sentiments of denial expressed above, and with the tentative hope of the Christian in God's redeeming and restoring power:
| “ |
Let the dead things go, and lay hold on life. Purify yourself as He bids you Who is pure. Then the old will drop away from you, and the new wonder will begin. You will find yourself already passed from death to life, and far ahead strange possibilities will open up beyond the power of your heart to conceive. |
” |
