Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Holland, Henry Scott
HOLLAND, HENRY SCOTT (1847–1918), theologian and preacher, born at Ledbury, Herefordshire, 27 January 1847, was the eldest son of George Henry Holland by his wife, the Hon. Charlotte Dorothea Gifford, eldest daughter of Robert, first Baron Gifford [q.v.], of St. Leonard, Devon. His father was the second son of Swinton Colthurst Holland, of Dumbleton, Gloucestershire. After four years at a private school at Allesley, near Coventry, he went to Eton in January 1860, where he had the good fortune to be the pupil of William Johnson (William Johnson Cory) [q.v.]. He left Eton rather early, in 1864, and, after a period under private tutors, entered Balliol College, Oxford, in January 1866. Here he made two of the most important friendships in his life—with Richard Lewis Nettleship [q.v.] and Thomas Hill Green [q.v.]—and displayed in the final school of literae humaniores signs of great intellectual power. In December 1870 Holland was elected by open examination to a senior studentship at Christ Church. Here he resided until 1884 when he was appointed canon of St. Paul's on Mr. Gladstone's recommendation.
The circumstances of Oxford life in that period appear to have been widely different from anything that has been common there in recent years. The letters between Holland and his friends Nettleship and Green, and the serious doubts whether their friendship could survive his ordination (1872) would not be written now. And it is probably due in no small measure to Holland's tendency to mediate between opposing points of view that this change has come about. The influence of his Balliol time had gone very deep, and was never lost: from the earliest days of his residence at Christ Church he began to be effective in the way of reconciliation. Canon Liddon, in a letter on Holland's appointment to St. Paul's, tells him that ‘issues are much simpler’ in London; ‘we live here [i.e. in London] on terms of easy intercourse with so many to whom Catholic doctrine and indeed the whole creed of Christianity go for nothing’ [Memoir, p. 112]. Holland could never have been a lonely scholar, researching by himself: he had an instinct for companionship, and he rapidly became the centre of a group of men who read and thought and discussed together, and at length (1899) addressed the world in Lux Mundi. His life at Oxford was full of varied interests and he supported many causes. He took a vigorous part in college life, and held the university office of proctor in 1882–1883, but he never allowed himself to be swept into the stream of university business.
When he passed on to London, he had already identified himself with such projects as the Oxford House in Bethnal Green and the Christ Church Mission in Poplar, and he was already studying the bearing of Christian principles upon economic questions. Nothing ever interfered with his devoted loyalty to St. Paul's and his work there, but his position was identified more and more clearly with social and economic problems. He took a large part in the founding of the Christian Social Union, and he edited for years (1895–1912) the Commonwealth, a paper devoted to the study of the various elements in social life in the light of Christianity. Some of his most characteristic writing is to be found in the pages of this journal. The Maurice Hostel at Hoxton—named after F. Denison Maurice [q.v.]—was founded (1898) and devotedly served by him as an embodiment of the principles and aims of the C.S.U.
Soon after he went to London, Holland began to be troubled with an illness affecting his head and eyes. He varied in health from time to time, but he was never again able to read or write for long at a time: he had to depend for both upon the help of others. It is difficult to imagine a more distressing or disabling malady. It is due to this misfortune that no comprehensive book ever came from his pen. It cut him off from much social intercourse, from concerts and other gatherings, and compelled him to live with the sole purpose of fulfilling, often under great strain and discomfort, the many and various engagements which formed his work.
In 1911 he returned to Oxford as regius professor of divinity. He had been out of residence for twenty-six years, and many generations had passed through Oxford in that time. To many he was a stranger. But he entered vigorously on his work: he raised the standard required for the divinity degrees, and he introduced in 1913, but without success, a statute to base the degrees upon theological study and get rid of the restrictions which limited them to priests of the Church of England. He was beginning again to draw round him many followers, when the university life was broken up by the European War. The anxiety and distress of the War, the long lists of the fallen, especially those of the junior members of the university, to whom he was always a devoted friend, pressed heavily upon him, and in 1917 his health began to give way. He never lost his varied interests or clearness of mind. He died in Oxford 17 March 1918. His body lies in the churchyard at Cuddesdon.
No account of Holland would be complete without a reference to his lifelong love of music. In early days he had the friendship of Otto Goldschmidt and his wife, Jenny Lind [q.v.]; in 1891 he joined with William Smith Rockstro [q.v.] in the production of a memoir of his friend, Jenny Lind, the Artist.Holland's published writings consist mainly of collected sermons and articles. Since his death Canon Wilfrid J. Richmond has edited a volume, The Fourth Gospel (1923), containing fragments illustrating his philosophical position and certain essays introductory to a commentary upon the fourth gospel which he undertook in his later years. The sermons and addresses are all written in a strongly individual and somewhat exuberant style. But the thought is neither obscure nor loose: the exuberance almost always results from the rapidity with which different aspects of his subject come before his mind: it is an exuberance of thought, and not merely of words. All his utterances, whether upon the mysteries of the Faith, the experiences of Christian life, or social rights and wrongs, are marked by a passionate sincerity and enthusiasm.
Owing to the constant disturbance of illness, Holland was not deeply read in all the controversial literature surrounding the subjects which he studied: his letters show how fully conscious he was of this. But in all his dealing with books or opinions he had an unusual power of penetrating to the mind of the man behind them. This was the most striking feature of his lectures at Christ Church on Plato's Republic, and is conspicuous in the notes above mentioned for the introduction to St. John's gospel. It is, perhaps, connected with this characteristic, that he was specially interested in studying, when possible, the portraits of authors. It was his power of penetrating minds other than his own that accounted for his attitude in theology and in politics. In both he must have departed widely from the lines on which he had been brought up. His early Oxford friendships, and his interest not merely in social and other questions but in the people who were raising them, made it inevitable that he should combine in his own mind and action lines of thought that to others often seemed incompatible. He was a strong and convinced liberal in politics and in theology—as his scheme for divinity degrees plainly showed in 1913—and at the same time a high churchman with a great delight in expressive ritual, a pride in the long history of the Church, and an extraordinarily penetrating perception of doctrinal truth and spiritual reality. But his interest in men did not blind him to bad work or bad arguments: at times—like Bishop Westcott—he was almost cynically clear-sighted and relentless. His written work unfortunately gives but a broken picture of his power and influence both in thought and action.
[Stephen Paget, Henry Scott Holland, Memoir and Letters, 1921 (portrait); personal knowledge. See also E. Lyttelton, The Mind and Character of Henry Scott Holland, 1926.]