I would like to offer you this text by Canon A. L. Lilley which is a part of the Preface to M. D. Petre, Von Hügel and Tyrrell, the story of a friendship, London 1937.

Some might wonder what this text is doing here. For me, it has everything to do with a forgotten aspect of faith and holiness which is kindness, love and beauty. Surely, such is the true sun in its orb, that giver of light, warmth and life.

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Here were minds [George Tyrrell and Friedrich von Hügel] through which the theological horizon was indefinitely enlarged! Theirs was a theology which carefully included, but included only to transcend, existing confessional differences. The Catholicism which was the foundation and support of their own religious life, the Catholicism of the Roman Church, had indeed, they believed, in its traditional theology provided both for the inclusion and the transcendence. For them the sectarian note in Catholicism was a betrayal of its deepest instincts and of the classical moments of their expression, a betrayal which must be steadfastly exposed and resisted. Religion was, in one of von Hügel’s favourite phrases, the ‘deepest kind of life’ reflecting the complexities and conflicts inherent in every phase of our human living. And the only theology which could be adequate to such a conception of religion was one which would first of all take careful and conscientious account of the complexities and conflicts involved, and only then proceed to a reconciliation of them which could never hope to be for the intellect completely satisfying. Faith still remained a venture of the total human spirit, every requirement and incident of which such a theology would record with a jealously faithful and loving insistence, but could never hope to enclose in an intellectually coercive system. It was a conception both of religion and of theology which made irresistible appeal to the characteristically English type of mind and its habitual outlook upon things of the spirit. Its influence upon English religious thinking was immediate and universal. It crystallized what had been hitherto but dispersed and fragmentary intuitions. And it persuaded theologians of different confessional groups of their essential kinship alike in the possession and in the quest of religious truth. These two strangers came among them, treating them all alike as in possession of the same implicit faith as themselves and seeking to explicate it in more or less the same manner as themselves.

But the methods and opportunities of these two unconscious, but very real, apostolates were not quite the same. Von Hügel’s action was the more personal and direct, its sphere more self-chosen. Before the publication of his Mystical Element of Religion, his influence was exerted either through letters, personal talks, or small group discussions. (…)

Tyrrell’s opportunities were different, as was his mode of action. First of all, he was a born writer, one of those really great masters of language, for whom thought seems to arise out of the underground depths of musing, like Aphrodite from the waves, in perfect and accomplished beauty of form. Among friends, but especially with a single friend, he was a brilliant though never an abundant talker. His speech was a lightning flash cutting through the brooding darkness, coruscating, illuminating for a moment vast horizons, and as suddenly ceasing to be. The rumble that followed was your own uneasy movement of thought ponderously awaiting the next flash. But the brilliant talker was really a silent man. He lived most vividly, most satisfyingly, in meditation; and out of that prolonged meditation upon the deepest things of the spirit were formed those pearls of spiritual wisdom which he afterwards strung upon a thread of purest gold. So long as men delight in beautiful and sensitive English speech, and so long as they can recognize skilled guidance in probing the deepest mysteries of their own being, will the writings of George Tyrrell be read with something of the wonder and delight with which they were hailed in the first years of this century, and certainly not least enthusiastically by men of other communions than his own. As a member of a religious order he had not the same opportunities of immediate personal contact with non-Catholics which easily and naturally presented themselves to a Catholic layman like von Hügel. And even after quitting his Order he did not go out of his road to seek such opportunities, though of course he never thought of refusing them where they came in his way. He did indeed rather shrink from making contact with Anglo-Catholics, whose interest in his own communion seemed to him unduly concerned with things he thought unimportant and even trivial. How often he used to say to me: ‘Please send us no more of your Gothic and Gregorian converts.’ He did not, alas! live to know how much he had influenced and would continue to influence the younger members of the Anglo-Catholic group, to correct throughout the whole movement the tendencies which he disliked and deplored, and to prepare many among them for taking an important, even leading, part in creating that inter-confessional English theology of which I have spoken. Without him the leading Anglo-Catholic theologians of to-day would not have been what they are, nor would they have accomplished the something more than they consciously aimed at which is at once the test and the seal of all fine human achievement.

I have spoken of just such an achievement of the two men whose correspondence over a critical period of the lives of both is the substance of this book. That achievement was a by-product, perhaps only one of the by-products, of their immense and fruitful activity. I record it as an act of commemorative gratitude for the close and affectionate friendship which they both bestowed upon me unworthy, and at the request of one whose friendship first came to me through them and has now so long survived them. Of them I think we both would say that ‘of all those of their time whom we have known they were the best and wisest and most righteous men.’