FROM PHILISTIA.
FROM PHILISTIA
ESSAYS ON
CHUECH AND WOELD.
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
La Verit^ tant un sommet, tout cliemin qui monte, y conduit.
JAMES CLAEKE & CO., 13 & U, FLEET STREET.
1893.
PREFACE.
THE essayist, of whatsoever degree or pre-
tension, may claim his privileges. One of these,
if regard be had to the best known precedents,
is a happy independence of either historical
or logical sequence in the arrangement of
his topics. Nobody criticises Montaigne, the
father of the tribe, for making a disquisition
on Odours to precede his treatise on Raimond
of Sebonde, or asks why Lord Bacon should
choose that the essay on <f Unity in Religion "
be followed by one on the subject of Revenge.
The rule, in fact, in this Bohemian region of
literature, seems to be that the dwellers therein
are free, at a given moment, to think to any
one of the thirty-two points of the compass,
provided only that their thinking be to pur-
pose.
The present writer has availed himself to the
full of the liberty thus accorded to the forth-
IV PREFACE.
putters of obiter dicta of all ranks. What
follows in this volume is a collection of scattered
studies, the result of varying moods, circum-
stances, and mental preoccupations, whose only
link of connection may be said to be their
individuality of standpoint and general drift of
purpose.
From a literary point of view, they will
possibly, with a not uninfluential class of
critics, be regarded as suffering from two
serious disqualifications. The first is the
possession, on the part of the writer, of a
positive religious faith, which he does not, in-
deed, dogmatically obtrude, but is nevertheless
at no pains to conceal. In criticism, especially
where it touches theology, nothing better fits
the fashion of the hour than that attitude of
religious detachment of which, in our day,
Renan and Edmond Scherer have given such
brilliant examples. The assumption of it
enables the writer to treat the differing faiths
somewhat as imperial Rome dealt with the
religions brought under her sway, with the
toleration, namely, and patronage which a
superior and governing class feels it can afford
to extend to inferior and subject races. It is a
literary manner full of possibilities for effective
PREFACE. V
posing. Its capabilities must, however, be
sought elsewhere than in these pages.
That is not the worst. What is here written
will be found, not only definitely related to
religious faith, but to a form of it which polite
society has, with impressive unanimity, pro-
nounced upon. These essays are dated from
the heart of Philistia. In other words, their
author belongs to that region of esprits bornes,
and of intellectual density, connoted by the
terms Protestant Nonconformist. To enter
here will be doubtless^, to many cultured
persons, an adventure as serious and unwonted
as to traverse the realm of
Antres vast and deserts idle,
Of anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
If any such make the venture we can only wish
them a safe and happy issue out of it. Should
they emerge alive it may, perhaps, be with the
tidings that the tales of intellectual savagery
in vogue concerning its inhabitants owe, like
some of Othello's stories, a good deal to the
imagination of their authors.
It remains to be said that the acknowledg-
ments of the author are due to Mr. John
VI PREFACE.
Murray, to the Editor of the " Sun " Magazine,
to the Eev. J. G. Bogers, and to Messrs. James
Clarke and Co., for permission to make use, in
this volume, of articles that have previously
appeared in publications with which they are,
or have been, connected.
London, May, 1893.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Eabelais 1
The New Hellenism 20
St. Augustine in Literature ... ... ... ... 30
The Dangerous Years 37
Modern Realism ... ... ... ... 45
A French Priest 52
On Method in Brain Work 61
On Eetiring from Business 68
Young England and Culture ... ... ... ... 75
How Preachers are Made ... ... ... 83
Life's Unknown Quantities ... ... ... ... 91
The Church's Song 97
Insurance Against Dulness 104
The Motive for Missions Ill
Woman in Excelsis ... ... ... ... 117
Types of Eeligious Life 124
Charles Haddon Spurgeon ... ... ... ... ... 131
Good Friday and Easter Day 139
Voltaire 146
Bunyan as a Classic ... ... ... 154
The Eeligious Eogue 160
Lucian ... ... ... ... ... 167
Montaigne 190
Boethius 196
Our National Literature . 205
CHURCH AND WORLD.
KABELAIS.
IN the debt which the nineteenth century owes
to the sixteenth there are some outstanding
accounts which do not seem as yet to have been
precisely stated. And assuredly one of the
largest of these is that under the name of
Francis Rabelais. He is one of a trio of men
who, born within a year or two of each other,
not only moulded their own century, but live
in every pulse of ours. With two of these we
have no great difficulty as to the appraisement.
Luther stands in our minds for Protestantism
and all that it contains. Ignatius Loyola
represents the genius of Catholicism and the
reassertion of the principle of authority in
religion. But the third of our trio, the French-
man, can we fit him into a formula as easily
as the German and the Spaniard ? And yet he
is to be reckoned with. He is one of the
1
2 CHURCH AND WOKLD.
creators of the modern spirit, and his force, so
far from being spent, is a tide steadily rising.
Any one who considers the present free-trade
in literature and ideas, the way in which the
inner life and thought of different peoples is
mingling and inter-penetrating, and who then
studies the influence which Rabelais has
exerted on one of the most important of these
peoples and literatures, will recognise in him a
power for good or ill not inferior to that of the
commanding spirits whose names we have
placed beside his own. No man, it is safe to
affirm, is more distinctly responsible for the
France of to-day. Not only may we say, with
Chateaubriand, that he is the father of French
literature, but that he is, in a way, the father
of the French character. For the makers of
France who have come after him, both the
thinkers and the actors, have all worked with
the consciousness of this man behind them. It
is not the extent to which succeeding writers
have quoted him or drawn on his materials.
It is that he created for his countrymen an
atmosphere, a medium through which they saw
things. At a critical period in the history of
civilisation, when men's views and feelings on
the most vital subjects were in a state of fusion
waiting for fresh moulds in which to run,
Rabelais struck in and made one. It was not
Calvin's or Luther's or Loyola's. That it was
RABELAIS.
so far away from theirs lias made all the differ-
ence to the modern world. We propose in this
sketch to try and find out what kind of a mould
it was in other words, to trace out some of the
bearings of Rabelais' influence on the life of
to-day.
It is here, however, that our difficulties begin.
Rabelais is, par excellence,, the stone of stum-
bling for hasty generalisers. How tempting,
for instance, for the phrase-monger to sum
him up as representing the pagan side of the
Renaissance ! The definition will do, provided
you keep your eye turned steadily away from
one whole half of the man. He has been
compared with Lucian ; and it is easy, if we
want to, to multiply resemblances between
them. Like the great second-century writer,
Rabelais had absorbed all the learning of his
time. Like him he made the object of his
raillery not only the established religion, but
also the philosophies most in vogue. And the
dubious attitude of Lucian towards Christianity,
the new religion which was replacing the official
paganism of the empire, might be compared
with Rabelais' relation to the reformed faith.
But we should utterly mistake the author of
Pantagruel if we simply made him a second
edition of the old world Pyrrhonist who wrote
the "Hermotimus" and "Dialogues of the
Gods." A still greater blunder would be to
4 CHURCH AND WORLD.
take him, as some of the older commentators
have done, altogether au serieux : to regard him
as " a man with a mission," who had set him-
self definitely to destroy certain things in the
world, and to build up others, whose contes
gras and wild buffooneries concealed grave
meanings which it behoved the critic to search
out and expound. It is, in fact, no use approach-
ing him with hypotheses or endeavouring to fit
him into definitions. He is his own definition :
Rabelais is Rabelais. He has put his whole
self into his work, and that self is a marvellously
mixed one. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are both
there. " He will be the enigma of posterity,'*
wrote Pierre Boulanger of him after his death,
and the prediction has been verified. A book
could be filled with the contradictory opinions
formed of him by the ablest men from Mon-
taigne downwards. Victor Hugo's line is hardly
an exaggeration :
" Rabelais qui nul ne comprit."
Instead, then, of beginning by labelling him
with a phrase, let us rather study some of his
many sides and allow our theory of him, if
theory there must be, to grow instead of being
made.
First, what does he count for in the purely
intellectual side of the sixteenth-century move-
ment?
RABELAIS. 5
There is one thing in which all who have
studied him are agreed, and that is the encyclo-
paedic character of his attainments. When
Panurge was first encountered by Pantagruel
he replied to his inquiries in thirteen different
languages. They were all of them tongues
with which the author was conversant. He
was a master of Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin,
Italian, Spanish, German. The Greek and
Latin literatures were at his fingers' ends. He
was profoundly versed in law and in philosophy.
Though he despised astrology and the black
arts, no man was more familiar with their lore.
He was acknowledged as one of the first
authorities of his day in medicine and in
botany. In his quotations and allusions,
whether it be a question of the Hebrew
casuists, or of some obscure commentator on
Aristotle, of Arab doctors, of Neoplatonist
speculation, or of the disputed questions of the
Schools, he is never caught tripping.
Perhaps one of the most striking signs of his
presence in the sixteenth century as an intel-
lectual force is the mark he has left on the
French language. He may be said to have
presided at the birth of his native tongue as ail
instrument of literature. Up to his day the
learned world everywhere regarded Latin as the
only respectable medium of ideas. Rabelais
showed to Europe what could be done with his
6 CHURCH AND WOKLD.
native French. But he dealt with it not as its
servant, but as its master. In order that its
previously somewhat thin stream might carry
the deeply laden bark of his learning and
imagination, he found he must both broaden
and deepen it. And he plies his task like one
of those steam navvies which nowadays cut
through isthmuses and hew out ship-canals.
We doubt if a writer could be named in any
literature who wrought such structural changes
and introduced such quantities of new elements
into a language as did he.
Coming from the language to the matter of
his works, it is impossible to pass their threshold
without noticing the extraordinary licence
he permits himself, a licence frequently
amounting to an obscenity which repels and
disgusts. " You may wash him," says
Thackeray somewhere, " and scrub him to your
heart's content, but you will never get him
clean." It is true. His work is certainly not
virginibus puerisque. A Bowdlerised Rabelais
would be no Kabelais at all. That he had any
idea himself of outraging decency or morality
in this is not in the least probable. It was the
manner of his age. * It was a time which saw
no irregularity in a Margaret of Navarre writing
books of mystical devotion and the Heptameron.
Hutten's " Litters Obscurorum Virorum," the
book which has been called the egg out of
EABELAI8. 7
which. Luther hatched the Reformation, contains
stories as gross as any which Panurge recounts.
The fiercest opponents of Rabelais in his own
day did not fasten on these things as the
objectionable matter. Had he not attacked the
Sorbonne and the Papacy, his Catholic readers
would have found here no ground of offence.
Calvin only began to denounce him when his
earlier leanings to Protestantism had dis-
appeared.
To reach the summit to which the Rabelaisian
pathway leads means, then, a good deal of
wading through the mire. We have, as Saint-
Beuve says, to take long leaps if we would
avoid the muddy places. But when there, the
outlook is marvellously extensive, and across
some of the richest tracts of country. Let us
take a glance or two.
No question touches the modern world more
closely than that of education. We are eager
for light not only in schools and colleges, but
also as to private culture. We have lists drawn
out of " The hundred best books," and we read
eagerly what distinguished men have to say on
" Books that have influenced me."
Our author had his ideas on culture, which
the nineteenth century may still have something
to learn from. Let us see what he regarded as
the true idea of a liberal education. We get a
good specimen of it in the letter of Gargantua
8 CHURCH AND WORLD.
to his L.OII Pantagruel, in Book 2: "I desire
that you learn the languages perfectly. First
the Greek, as Quintilian advises, and then the
Latin. After that, Hebrew, for the Holy
Scripture, as well as Chaldee and Arabic. In
Greek, form your style on Plato ; in Latin, on
Cicero. Of the liberal arts, as geometry,
arithmetic, and music, I gave you some taste
while you were young, five or six years ago.
Follow them up, and especially astronomy. Let
astrology alone, as vain and useless. Of civil
law I want you to learn by heart the best texts,
and to compare them with philosophy. I want
you also to give yourself specially to the study of
the facts of nature, so that there be no sea,
river, fountain, of which you do not know the
fishes, and that you may know also the birds of
the air, all trees. ... all the metals and
precious stones. Study carefully the medical
works of the Greeks, Eomans, and Arabs, with-
out despising the Talmudists and Cabalists ;
and by frequent anatomical practice acquire
knowledge of that other world viz., man.
And for a certain time each day study
the Holy Scriptures, first, in Greek, the
New Testament and epistles of the Apostles,
and then, in Hebrew, the Old Testament."
This programme represents, we imagine,
pretty accurately the line of study pursued
by Rabelais himself in the fifteen years
RABELAIS.
he spent as a Cordelier at Fontenoy. Lest,
however, we should suppose that our philosopher
regarded a limitless course of reading as com-
prehending the whole of education, we may
turn to his history of Grargantua in Book 1, and
study the plan laid down for him by his tutor
Ponocrates. We find there seven pages out of
ten taken up with a description of his gymnastic
exercises, and the general training and care of
the body. It is singular that his countrymen
have in this respect so egregiously failed to
catch the spirit of their master. The French
youth at school and college knows next to
nothing of outdoor sports as we understand
them. Education with him is a constant drive
of the brain. What exercise he gets is
grudgingly allowed in just sufficient quantity to
keep his body going. If in this respect they
had taken to heart the lessons of their mentor,
and had taught their young people, as
Gargantua was taught, to swim, to run, to
ride, to hunt, to handle arms, and to live in the
open, we should not now be hearing so many
complaints of their physical degeneracy. But
Rabelais has not finished when he has drilled
body and brain. At the end of the letter from
Grargantua, from which we have already quoted,
we have his view of the moral side of the
question. " But since, as Solomon says, wisdom
enters not into an evil mind, and knowledge
10 CHURCH AND WOELD.
without conscience is only the ruin of the soul ;
therefore serve, love, and fear God, and in Him
place all thy thoughts and all thy hope ; and be
joined to Him by faith which works by love.
. . . Give not thy heart to vanity, for this
life is transitory, but the Word of God abideth
for ever. Be serviceable to thy neighbours, and
love them as thyself. Revere thy teachers, flee
the company of men whom you do not wish to
resemble, and receive not the grace of God in
vain."
After three centuries of theory and experi-
ment in education it is to be doubted if we have
got hold of anything better than this.
If these were his intellectual ideals, what
were his political and social ones ?
His theory of government was evidently that
which Lord Beaconsfield more than once hinted
at that of a sage and capable monarch who
sums up in himself, and gives expression to, the
collective opinion and feeling of his people.
His three giants, Grandgousier, Gargantua, and
Pantagruel, are all model kings wise, affable,
peaceful, detesting war for its own sake, but
capable when attacked of defending themselves
and their subjects.
Could anything be more admirable as a pic-
ture of the attitude of a true governor under
difficult circumstances than that of Grand-
gousier when attacked by the fire-eating Picro-
RABELAIS.
11
chole ? Though conscious of vastly superior
strength, jet, hating the ravages of war, he
sends embassy after embassy to his hostile
neighbour in order to bring him to reason and
to keep the peace. He drops sentences here
worthy to be written in letters of gold in the
cabinets of kings : " We call that brigandage
and wickedness which the Saracens and bar-
barians of former days called prowess." " The
imitation of the Alexanders, the Hercules, the
Hannibals, the Scipios, the Csesars, and such
like, we regard as contrary to the profession of
the Gospel, by which we are commanded to
keep, rule and administer each one his country
and territory, and not hostilely to invade those
of others."
It is impossible, in fact, to study Rabelais
anywhere in his views on government and
political policy without recognising a spirit
truly generous and humane, a man who hated
oppression, and who believed that power was a
trust to be employed in making one's fellow-
men happier and better.
At the same time his instincts were aristo-
cratic. He believed in an aristos of position
and ability. On the subject of a representative
government he makes Pantagruel express him-
self thus. It is in his adjudication on the
famous case of Baisecul v. Homvesne. " In all
companies there are more fools than wise men,
12 CHURCH AND WOBLD.
and it is the majority usually that carries the
day." The sentence itself is a quotation from
Livy, but it would have been beautifully appro-
priate in the mouth of Thomas Carlyle. The
Cure" of Meudon and the Sage of Chelsea were
very much at one, methinks, on the subject of
the democracy.
It is impossible in a study of Rabelais to pass
by his treatment of women. His want of
respect for the sex is a radical defect of his
work. He is false here to the Renaissance
spirit. In Italy it had idolised woman. Dante
and Petrarch consecrated to her their loftiest
poetry, while Raphael and Michel Angelo made
her features shine with a mystic, celestial
beauty. In the sphere of Protestantism, Luther,
in his public teaching and in his own home,
treated woman with serious and Christian
respect : a sentiment echoed by Erasmus in his
treatise on Christian marriage. Rabelais*
heresy in this respect must be ascribed to his
early associations and to his monkish training.
We never hear of his mother, and she probably
had died before exercising any influence over
him. To the monkish orders, with their vows
of celibacy and chastity, woman represented
the greatest of temptations, the shortest road,
in fact, to the bottomless pit. And when, as
in the time of Rabelais, these strict rules had
produced a reaction in favour of unbridled
BABELAIS.
licence, the conception of woman remained the
same. The demoralised monk in pursuit of
sensual enjoyment thought of his partner only
as an instrument of his pleasures, and, when
conscience pricked him, as the occasion of his
downfall.
To one who, like Rabelais, had passed
through such a training it would have been
like jumping off his own shadow to have
thought of woman as a teacher and an inspirer,
as one who could be intellectually or spiritually
a helper to man. Hence all through his work,
knowledge, virtue, nobleness of character, are
embodied in his men. Woman is the butt of
his ridicule, the object of his coarsest stories.
It is a capital fault, the influence of which has
been disastrous on his countrymen. Had
France possessed from the beginning of her
literature, instead of the Rabelaisian idea, the
image of a noble womanhood, helping man
towards his loftiest ideals, the history of her
literature and of her people might have been
different.
The attitude of Rabelais towards the great
religious questions of his day is an interesting
study. We see clearly that his differences with
the leaders in the mighty strife that was then
being waged were not so much an affair of
doctrines as of temperament. And his tem-
perament was one which, while sufficiently
14 CHURCH AND WORLD.
comprehensible to the nineteenth century, was
absolutely unintelligible to the sixteenth. The
chiefs of the Reformation as well as the
Catholic doctors of the Sorbonne, alike regarded
him as a deadly enemy. Neither party could
understand a man who refused to take sides ;
who, while merciless to the abuses and weak
points of Romanist theory and practice, waa
equally unsparing to the party of Geneva.
Both, in their fierce resentment and despair of
making the man out, took refuge in what
seemed to them the only remaining hypothesis
viz., that he was an atheist and an enemy of
all religion.
No conclusion could be more absurd. It
would be difficult to point to any works of our
own time in the department of imaginative
literature so saturated as are those of Rabelais
with religious principle, so definitely recog-
nising the presence of the living God in human
affairs.
Much of his work showed what seemed a
distinctly Protestant leaning. To abuse the
Pope, to trounce the monks, to pour ridicule on
the Sorbonne and all its works, while at the
same time testifying everywhere, as he does, to
a hearty belief in God, to a reverence for Scrip-
ture and especially for the New Testament and
the writings of St. Paul, all this one would
think would be enough to stamp him as on this
RABELAIS. 15
side of the great controversy. And yet he was
no Protestant. Between him and the Kef orma-
tion leaders was a great gulf fixed. Calvin and
he were at open war. In his fourth Book he
denounces the " demoniacal Calvin" "the
impostor of Geneva " ; while, on his side,
the Reformer expressed himself with equal
bitterness.
It was impossible for two men so profoundly
different in temper to appreciate or even under-
stand each other. Calvin was a man who knew
nothing of compromises, who believed that
truth, purity, salvation were on the side he
fought for, and that on the other were only
superstition, errors, and corruption.
It is the heroic temper which makes history ;
but the equilibrium of things seems to demand
also spirits of a different mould. Rabelais had
in him nothing of the partisan. He was gifted
with the embarrassing faculty of seeing two
sides of a question. For one thing, the austerity
of Geneva revolted his joyous temper ; and for
another, he had no desire to share the fate of
his friend Etienne Dolet, and get burned as a
heretic. But that is not all. When we talk of
the Reformation we must never forget the
great Reform movement which took place in
Catholicism itself in the sixteenth century.
In fact, from the beginning of the Renais-
sance, up to and beyond Luther's time, the
16 CHUECH AND WORLD.
abuses of Rome had been as fiercely attacked
by Catholics who lived and died within her pale
as by the leaders of Protestantism. That party
of Reform had Dante as its poet, Erasmus for
its scholar, Gerson for its theologian and
mystic, Michel Angelo for its artist, and
Catherine of Sienna for its saint. The
Cardinals who surrounded Paul HE., such as
Contarini and Caraffa, had elaborated a
doctine of justification by faith which it is
difficult to distinguish from that of Luther,
and which was preached with passionate
fervour throughout the length and breadth
of Italy. Rabelais defies classification ; but
if he is to be put anywhere in the matter of
ecclesiastical relations, it is by the side of this
party. His contention, so far as he entered
into controversy, was not so much against the
Catholic Church as against Ultramontanism.
He was in this respect an ancestor of Bossuet
and one of the founders of Gallicanism.
But we should not understand Rabelais or
his influence if we discussed him simply in
relation to controversies of this kind. It is as
a great humanist, with an outlook and a
philosophy of life all his own, that he counts
as so unique a force in literature and in the
evolution of modern life. No man, at least, no
modern man, has been so startlingly frank. He
has no concealments, no reserves. He has no
RABELAIS. 17
closet in which to lock up his skeletons. He
lets all his nature speak. The animal in him
was strong and masterful. All through his
pages rings the note of a rude physical force
which has no notion of being repressed or put
down. His characteristic may, in fact, be said
to be an enormous appetite in all directions.
His intellect was voracious, and so was his
stomach. To feed his mind the whole world of
knowledge was not too much. But he wanted
a larder and a wine-cellar on the same scale as
the library. To the ascetic doctrine he replied
by a <f no " so mighty that its echoes have been
ringing through literature ever since.
His ultimate views of life may perhaps be
described as a fusion of the Greek idea with
Christianity. To understand him we need
certainly to take note of the pagan side of the
Renaissance. In Italy especially, with which
Rabelais was so well acquainted, it had pro-
duced as its first effect a profound scepticism
and an utter licence of manners, Not only had
Scholasticism been cast aside, but practically
Christianity also. Aristophanes and Anacreon,
rather than Paul and the Fathers, supplied the
Italy of the latter half of the fifteenth century
with its views of life. It was beyond the Alps,
with Reuchlin, Melancthon and Luther, that
the Revival of letters resulted in a purified
Christianity.
18 CHURCH AND WORLD.
The peculiarity of Rabelais' position is that
he drank deeply of the two streams, and that
his temperament tended to assimilate them
both. His was a nature gifted with a " rire
enonne," to use Victor Hugo's phrase, and his
whole conception of the universe had to fit in
to that. He could not understand Christianity
as the Reformers understood it, simply because
he had no capacity for the serious or the awful.
That side of religion which appealed to his
sense of justice, to his sympathy, to his gener-
osity, he freely accepted. The rest passed over
him. God was to him a benevolent and gracious
Providence, to whom he owed the blessings he
enjoyed. He bowed reverently before Christ
as the expression of suffering and self-sacrificing
love.
But he must have room for his laugh. What
could Geneva do with a man who treated hell,
in the manner of Lucian, as a place where the
actors play parts as ridiculous as those of a
Christmas pantomime ?
His summing up of life is that all is vanity,
but that the mistake is to groan about it. Life
is a burlesque. We are all fools and the solemn
fool is the biggest of all. Pantagruelism is a
" certaine gayete d'esprit conficte en mepris des
choses fortuites." The sentence he puts into
the mouth of his ideal character Pantagruel
expresses perhaps better than any other his
RABELAIS. 19
habitual attitude of mind : " For all the goods
which the sky covers and that earth contains.
. . . are not worthy to move our affections or
to trouble our mind and spirit."
This bold eclecticism of culture, this easy
mixture of inspiration from Palestine and from
Greece is the special note of Babelais, and it
has become the note of a large portion of the
modern world.
THE NEW HELLENISM.
IN these easy-going days we experience no
great astonishment in witnessing the appear-
ance among us of the most fantastic cults.
We hear of an English barrister who has
become an enthusiastic follower of Mohammed,
and of an American Colonel who proposes to
convert us to Buddhism. Both will be
tolerated, but we doubt if either will succeed
in attracting much of a following amongst
the English public. There is another religion,
however, which is much more likely to become
fashionable, and which has indeed already
considerable vogue in certain circles. It is the
cult which places before us the old Greek idea
of life as the only true one, and moans over the
last eighteen hundred years of Western history
as a long and grievous aberration from it.
The idea, to be sure, is not new, though, as
we shall see directly, it has in our day taken a
more definite and dogmatically assertive form.
It is not new, we say. The Renaissance, on
one side of it, at least, was a move towards
THE NEW HELLENISM. 21
Hellenism. If, in art, we compare the pictures
of Bubens, of Titien, of Paul Veronese with,
those of distinctly Catholic painters like
Van Ejck or Fra Angelico, we see into what a
different, into what a Pagan world we have
come. Even their so-called sacred paintings
have no really religious inspiration, while the
bulk of their works are pagan in subject. In
literature, JRabelais, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, to
say nothing of writers like Aretino, are frankly
at issue with the Catholic dogma and morality.
The French Revolution witnessed another re-
vival of the Hellenic idea. Its republicanism,
its theory both of public and private life,
boasted of being Greek and classic. In the
early part of this century, Byron and Keats, on
the one hand, were strongly tinctured with this
spirit, and Mr. Swinburne is to-day its fervid
representative. It is in France again, how-
ever, that the cult has received its latest and
most striking development. Victor Hugo has
chanted its praise in the " Legende des Siecles,"
while M. Sully Prudhomme, one of the most
original and profound of French contemporary
poets, gives us the line
Bienheureuse la destinee
D'un enfant grec du monde ancien.
The full development of the idea, however,
has been reserved for a woman. Mme. Adam,
22 CHURCH AND WORLD.
in a series of interesting romances, of which
" Paienne," " Grecque," and " Laide," are the
best known, has with passionate fervour and
without the slightest reserve, preached the new
religion. Her creed is the love and the follow-
ing of nature, the full enjoyment of the seen
and the present, the complete deliverance from
" other-worldliness," the only law recognised
being the preservation of all the passions and
faculties in their mutual harmony. This she
imagines to have been the Greek idea, which
Christianity has done so much to spoil. The
Western world has suffered for nigh 2,000
years from the injection into it of the Semitic
virus, and is only beginning to recover from it.
She believes in the South, in its bright sun-
shine and its warmth of passion. The North is to
be distrusted. It is the region of cold-blooded-
ness, of mysticism, of gloomy theologies. When
Mme. Adam discusses the relation of Christi-
anity to woman, she becomes almost lyric in
her passion. " Would you have," says she in
" Jean et Pascal," " my entire opinion ? The
irreconcilable enemy of Christianity ought to
be woman. All the suspicions, all the insults,
all the hatreds of its doctrine are levelled
against her. Woman is the great temptation,
the principal aid of the devil. The love she
inspires is the crowning iniquity. We shall
only be happy when we have got rid of this
THE NEW HELLENISM. 23
nightmare, and have returned to that line of
development which man, 2,300 years ago, was
pursuing by the shores of the -ZEgean Sea."
All this is very interesting, and would be
important, if it were true. Indeed, we must,
any way, confess to its importance, since it is
the note of a school which has many disciples,
and is exercising an ever-widening influence on
the mind of to-day. But will these ideas bear
examination ? We strongly suspect, to begin
with, that the New Grsecism will turn out, as a
French critic has put it, to be a great deal more
new than Greek. It is astonishing how people,
when possessed by an idea, will allow it to
carry them in a direction clean contrary to the
facts of the case. When so distinguished a
writer, for instance, as M. Renan finds in the
Athenian populace " a people of aristocrats, an
entire public composed of connoisseurs, a demo-
cracy which had seized the requirements of art
in a manner which the most cultured among
us fail to do," is he not giving us a fancy
picture ? The Athenian populace, as drawn for
us from the life by Aristophanes, suggests to
us anything but this idea. But even if it were
true, there is one element of the situation
omitted from M. Renan' s account, but which
we cannot afford to ignore. The Greek citizen-
ship was based upon slavery. Aristotle frankly
tells us that in an ideal republic no one who
24 CHURCH AND WORLD.
works with his hands can be admitted as a
citizen.
But is this system that of a privileged
order which shall win ease and luxury by
laying all its burdens upon an inferior and
enslaved caste that which our Hellenists pro-
pose for us in the nineteenth century ?
What, too, should we make of the " patriot-
ism," so called, of the Greek republic, con-
sisting, as it did, of a religious hatred of all
outside their own city, a few square miles of
territory ? " Let the citizens," says JEschylus
in the Choephori, " be full of love to each other,
and of a common hatred towards the enemy.'*
We have imagined that the modern spirit
which is breaking down the barriers between
races, and proclaiming the solidarity and
brotherhood of mankind, was really an advance
upon this. But we may have been mistaken.
What a strange notion, too, to one who has
a real acquaintance with Greek literature, to
suppose that its inner life, as compared with
the life of Christendom, was marked by special
joyousness and felicity ! When we listen to-
the authorised exponents of that life, what do
we find? Was the Agamemnon of ^Eschylus
or the (Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, or the
Medea of Euripides, the outcome of minds
which possessed a sunnier view of life than our
own ? On the contrary, can anything be more
THE NEW HELLENISM. 25
sombre than the conceptions which run through
all of them, of a fate which pushes men to
their ruin, of fierce passions which hurry them
into the commission of terrible crimes crimes
which bring upon them the avenging furies to
dog hereafter their flying steps ?
What provision had the Greeks in the way
of consolation for old age and the prospect of
death ? Let us hear Anacreon, the poet who
celebrated every form of sensuous enjoyment.
" My temples are blanched already. My hair
is white. I am no longer young. It is on this
account I groan, for I fear Tartarus, and the
abyss of Hades is horrible. The descent to it
is frightful, and once there, there is no return."
This is not particularly cheering. Let us
add to it the words of the chorus in (Edipus at
Colona : " The best thing is never to be born.
The next best, to die as soon as possible. For
hardly has youth brought its follies, but what
pains, what misfortunes fall upon us ! And at
the end comes old age, chagrined, powerless,
unsociable, exacting, in which all evils are
united."
Where are we to look for the Greek joyous-
ness ? Be it remembered, too, that a return to
this ideal time would mean a crippling of our
intellectual liberty. Tastes differ, but the
majority of us would hardly care to go back to
a condition in which, if we spoke our exact
26 CHURCH AND WORLD.
mind, we should run the risk of sharing
Socrates' bowl of hemlock.
But woman, we are told, is the martyr of the
Christian system, and it is she acccordingly
who ought to lead the revolt against it in
favour of Greek Naturalism. The indictment
we have quoted from Mme. Adam is a heavy
one, and at first sight there may be something
to bear it out.
There have been Christian teachers and
Christian systems of theology, that have dealt
with woman in very much the fashion which
our lady Hellenist stigmatises. But this teach-
ing was not of the essence of Christianity. It
was the teaching of Monasticism, and of those
Latin fathers who so largely misrepresented the
primitive church doctrine. Woman in modern
civilisation does not come out so badly as a
product of the Christian system, when we see
her taking her place in the van of every move-
ment, and sharing to the full in the latest
developments of life and thought. Supposing
that, in exchange for all this, she went back to
her position in the Greek republics. She
would find it one in which the idea of love
was reduced to its coarsest elements, in which
the union of the sexes, instead of being one
which comprehended the whole nature, and gave
fullest scope to her faculty of moral inspira-
tion, was regarded purely on its animal side.
THE HEW HELLENISM. 27
As to the amount of respect she might look
for, let us judge of it from the treatment she
receives in the literature which represents
Hellenic life and thought at its highest level.
Let any one read the Seven against Thebes of
^Eschylus, or the Ajax of Sophocles, or any one
of the comedies of Aristophanes, simply for
their teaching on this point. It is evident
they are written by men to whom the intellec-
tual and moral rank now enjoyed by women in
Christendom were impossible ideas. In the
Seven against Thebes, for example, Eteocles
speaks of woman as the " Sex detested of the
wise " ; as a being " insupportable from her
pride after a victory, but whose terror during a
battle brings disaster to the family and to the
state." Farther on, he breaks out with, " The
women ! What a race ! "
In the Ajax, when Tecmessa seeks to console
her lord in his misfortunes, and lead him to
abandon his desperate projects, he treats her
with the haughtiest disdain, as one whose words
are unworthy of serious notice. Would Mme.
Adam and her feminine admirers care to become
Greek at this price ?
Moreover, to the loss of public and private re-
spect would be added that of the modern woman's
notion of comfort. She would have no home in
our sense of the word. The Greek life did not
contain the idea. It was an out-of-door exist-
28
CHURCH AND \VOXLD.
ence, splendid enough on its public side, but
from which our domestic pleasures were en-
tirely absent.
The truth is, the school of the new Hellenism
has been nourishing itself on dreams. The
world it paints for us has never existed. It is
as far from the actual fact as was Rousseau's
dream of savagery as the ideal human exist-
ence. It is easy to understand how it has
arisen. Man's quarrel with the actual takes
ever and anon the form of a reversion to earlier
types of life as more perfect than the existing
one. In this case, a wealthy, luxurious, and
highly sceptical society, in search of a respect-
able title for its philosophy of life, has hit upon
this of Greek naturalism. In its revolt against
Christianity, and in its anxiety to obtain some
sanction for its sensuous tendencies, it labours
to show that the system which at present re-
strains its licence is inferior. To this end it
paints for us the picture of a people and an age
outside of Christianity, whom it represents as
enjoying a higher and happier existence than
our own. We have seen what value there is in
this contention.
When stripped of its present Greek orna-
ments, and reduced to its own proper merits,
the new cult does not somehow greatly inspire
us. We are not likely, so long as our minds
keep healthy, to prefer a creed which offers.
THE NEW HELLENISM. 29
luxury to the few at the expense of the many,
to that which sets us to work for the good of
all.
And were we even of the favoured few to
whom its offered enjoyments would be possible,
we know we should not be satisfied with them.
In a world where, no matter what our social
position, we are in presence of such realities as
physical pain and inward anguish, where our
social circle is ever liable to be torn by bereave-
ment, and where, across our own pathway,
death digs his yawning trench, we need some-
thing more for our inward strengthening than
a cult of aesthetic beauty or of sensuous
pleasure.
Christianity can very easily assimilate all
that is really valuable in the Greek idea. But
we cannot afford that it shall abdicate in favour
of it. ~Not till we are prepared to give up the
highest in thought and feeling that the human
race has yet come into possession of, till we
have cast out the idea of duty, and the grace of
service, till we have become blunted to the
exquisite joy which faith brings, can we admit
that the Christian religion has been other than
the most potent instrument of human progress,
or be anxious to desert its standard for that of
other leaders.
ST. AUGUSTINE IN LITERATURE.
IN this year of grace our title seems almost
an anachronism. For what, in 1893, does
Augustine count for in literature ? In an age
in which people expect to have everything
boiled down for them to a three or four line
paragraph, what chance has a man of being
listened to who comes to us with more than a
hundred volumes, written in the Latin tongue,
on subjects the most abstruse ; and who, more-
over, speaks across the distance of fourteen
centuries? As a matter of fact, to most of
us Augustine is a name and nothing more.
The average English Christian has some vague
notions about the " Confessions " and the
" City of God " as the works of the African
bishop ; and he has learned to associate him
with certain theological dogmas at present
largely discredited. But how little does this
represent of the real man ! He was a theo-
logian, it is true, but he was so much more.
A personality like his is like a vast mountain,
whose far-stretching slopes present every
ST. AUGUSTINE IN LITERATURE. 81
variety of scenery. He is a man about whose
work and influence a hundred things may be-
said without apparently diminishing the-
number of things still left to be said. We will
content ourselves in this article with getting a
glimpse here and there of aspects of his work
the less generally known.
To understand what he has been to the
world we need to go back to the Middle Ages.
We find him there ruling in all departments as
the intellectual king. In philosophy he had
left no subject uninvestigated. As a publicist
his dicta regulated the government of states
and of societies. In morals he had the same
supremacy, and in general literature his utter-
ances on a thousand topics affecting the mani-
fold sides of human life were accepted as
models of what was most cogent in argument,
lofty in inspiration, and moving in eloquence.
And there is this other attraction in his
writings. They present us with an almost
complete picture of the opinions on all the
the great subjects of thought of the ancient
world. There is hardly a religious or philo-
sophical idea of antiquity which does not come
under his review. The poets and philosophers
of Greece and of Some, the Neoplatonists of
Alexandria, the Gnostic sects and Oriental
religionists, and thinkers of all shades, as well
as the Greek and Latin fathers of the Church
32 CHURCH AND WORLD.
who preceded him, are constantly before us in
his pages. He is a kind of lens, concentrating
in its focus all the scattered rays of the past.
We have spoken of his undisputed reign
through long centuries. We wish we could
give our readers an idea of how complete that
was. To do so we should need to dip into the
literature of each separate century as it rolls,
and show what he counted for in it. A glance
or two in this direction must content us. It
is interesting, for instance, in the fifth century
to find Cassiodorus, the Emperor Theodoric's
great minister, in his retirement in Calabria,
making his one occupation the study of our
author, and in the eighth to see Alcuin,
Charlemagne's literary right - hand man,
causing the father's logical treatises to be
copied and spread abroad throughout the
schools of the Empire. The ninth century
shows us J. Scot Erigena, the father of Middle
Age Mysticism, whose profound study of the
psychological problems of the spiritual life
become the basis of the systems of Bernard,
of Bonaventura, and of Gerson, first saturating
himself with Augustine. As to Bonaventura,
it is enough to open his "Itinerary of the
Soul Towards God," or his " Seven Roads of
Eternity," to recognise everywhere in it the
African bishop. And the same may be said of
the writings of Anselm and of Bernard.
ST. AUGUSTINE IN LITERATURE. 33
While thus puissant amongst the schoolmen,
lie bulks no less largely with the great spirits
who prepared and inaugurated the Renaissance.
Dante nourished his soul on the " City of
God." Petrarch in writing his treatise on the
" Contempt of the World " imagines Augustine
as his interlocutor. When Boccaccio sent him
Augustine's exposition of the Psalms he
thanked him for it as for " a magnificent
and most splendid present." When the
Reformation came, we have another remark-
able illustration of the predominance of
Augustine over two bitterly opposed parties.
All the world knows how the name which
is the corner-stone of Catholic theology is
that also which the founders of Protestantism
most frequently invoked. Luther's work
*<De Arbitrio Servo," in which he breaks
a lance with Erasmus is, as he himself
confesses, of the great father's inspiration.
And Calvinism is, of course, Augustinianism
revised.
We could easily push this review of authority
and influence to later times. We could point
out, for instance, what in the seventeenth century
Bossuet and Fenelon, Pascal and the Port
Royalists, Descartes and Malebranche, owed to
him. One could devote an article to illustrate
the way in which philosophers, who have been
specially lauded for the perfect originality of
3
34 CHURCH AND WORLD.
their ideas, have been, in fact, anticipated in
them by Augustine.
Descartes, for instance, has received un-
measured homage for his doctrine of intellectual
certitude, as summed up in his famous formula,
"Cogito Ergo Sum" ("I think, therefore I
am"). But we turn to the "Soliloquies" of
Augustine, and we find the very argument,
expressed almost in the same words. But a
more striking example remains. Schlegel has
received much praise for working out, in his
"Philosophy of History," the idea of the
development of the human race as a whole,
presenting the same features, and following
the same stages as that of a single individual
in his progress from infancy to manhood.
This idea, by the way, is again copied by
Bishop Temple in his once famous but now
almost forgotten contribution to " Essays and
Reviews." But we get all this in full detail
and with amplest illustration in the " City of
God." So difficult is it to find, in the region
of ideas, any new thing under the sun.
To attempt to measure the good and the evil
in the influence of this great personality would
be a difficult task. For it was a mixed
influence. The dark shadows of the age in
which he lived were in some degree reflected in
him, and hence we find his support lent to
abuses which the power of his name helped to
ST. AUGUSTINE IN LITERATURE. 35
keep alive for many centuries. Thus, though
pleading always for the individual rights of
slaves, he gave a kind of support to the institu-
tion; he preached the divine right of kings,
and what is more deplorable, justified religious
persecution by the State. But, turning from
these blots on his name, let us think rather on
the good he wrought. He worked with all his
might to re-establish that idea of the family
which Paganism and the corruptions of the
later empire had done so much to destroy. He
insisted on the rights of children and of women.
He proclaims the equality of the wife in
relation to her husband. He served the
democracy in upholding the dignity of labour
as against the contempt which had been cast
upon it by antiquity. He protested against
torture as an instrument of criminal procedure.
If he admits the necessity of war, he declares
that its end should be to procure peace, and
not conquest. His immortal work, (( The City
of God," renders him the father of the
philosophy of history. It was worthy of this
great and unworldly spirit, at a time when all
order and justice seemed banished from the
world, to offer to men a theory of history which
regarded the human movement as under a
Divine order, which linked all events in a
continuous and disciplined progress, which
discerned in its seeming confusions a concealed
36 CHURCH AND WORLD.
but all-wise purpose, and which predicted the
ultimate and glorious triumph of good.
The throne which Augustine for so long
occupied must now be said to be vacant.
Neither as theologian, philosopher, or publicist
can he be any longer said to be a dictator.
The world is not likely in the future again to
speak or think pure Augustinianism. The
intellectual stream from which we now drink
comes from many and widely-divergent sources.
But it will for a long time yet retain some of
the flavour which he has imparted, and be the
better for it. And the world could hardly
desire a nobler gift than the work and influence
in it of a man who should be to our age what
Augustine was to his, one who, supreme among
thinkers, and master of all the science of his
time, should apply his powers and his acquire-
ments in absolute devotion to the service of
faith and to the development of his fellows on
their noblest side.
THE DANGEROUS TEARS.
THE risks of life on its physical side have
been made the subject of exhaustive analyses,
whose results appear in the tables of insurance
companies. Those results are, as we know, all
in favour of youth. A man's chances of sur-
viving an accident, or an epidemic, or a severe
winter, are many times more per cent, at 20
than they are at 50. Prudent men are aware
of this, and take precautions accordingly.
What, however, we do not possess is a study,
carried out with the same scientific accuracy,
of life's moral risks. We have no actuaries in
this department to calculate for us the chances
of a breakdown in character between 40 and
50, as compared with those between 20 and 30.
That some such analysis is needed is evident,
when we examine the curious blunders which
are fallen into on this subject by moralists and
preachers.
In the average modern pulpit, it is the
" young man " who is perpetually being gone
for in sermons and lectures. The dangers
38 CHURCH AND WORLD.
which beset the third decade of human exist-
ence are set forth with an iteration which
becomes almost wearisome. This decade is, it
seems, like the mauvais pas in an Alpine ascent.
Once across that, without a tumble, and our
guides assure us the rest will be plain sailing.
Let a young man be safely landed in the region
of wedlock and home, and be definitely con-
nected with the religious society to which his
forbears belonged, and he ceases to be a subject
of serious anxiety to his spiritual counsellors.
And so it comes to pass that the " sermon to
young men " is an essential and familiar part
of a preacher's repertory, while the " sermon to
men of forty-five " is the one we never hear of.
It is the assumption contained in all this that
I venture now to call in question. When the
thing has been looked into, I believe it will be
found that what the actuary finds with refer-
ence to man's physical life is precisely what is
true of his moral life. There is danger enough
for youth and young manhood in its passage
through this difficult world. But the most
slippery places are further on.
When in support of this contention we set
ourselves to examine history and literature, we
find it rendering a testimony with which the
most careless observer can hardly fail to be
struck. To begin with, it testifies that the
period of great crimes and odious vices is that,
THE DANGEROUS YEARS. 39
not of the earlier, but of the later years.
Solomon's after life, when he gave himself up
to heathen women and their idolatries, belied
the promise of his youth. If Tiberius or
Domitian had died after the first half-dozen
years of their public career, their names would
have gone down to history as those of virtuous
and amiable rulers. It was their latter days
that were stained with cruelty and lust. Pre-
cisely the same is true of our own Henry VIII.
Had he died at thirty his memory would have
been cherished as that of perhaps the most
popular of English monarchs. In this subject,
as everywhere, Shakespeare shows his unerring
insight. His criminals, his villains, are not to
be found amongst the young. Macbeth and his
wife are no fledglings. lago, his most detest-
able character, is a man of middle age.
To-day, if any one will carefully examine the
newspapers, he will find that the domestic
tragedies, the business defalcations, the breaches
of trust that cause widespread ruin, are the
work mainly of life's later periods. And what
<3omes to the surface in newspaper history
represents the merest fraction of what is taking
place daily and hourly in the world around. It
reveals nothing of the breakdowns in men's
faith and hope, of the cynicism that has too
often succeeded to the early enthusiasms, of
the exchange of lofty ideals for lower and
40 CHURCH AND WORLD.
material aims. These things are always hap-
pening, and it is in middle life that they do
happen. George Eliot, one of the surest-eyed
of our modern observers, has again and again
in her works evidenced her recognition of this
fact. In "Adam Bede," Dinah Morris, the
woman preacher, so ethereal and unworldly in
the beginning, settles down later to human love
and marriage, like ordinary mortals. In "Middle-
march," one of the principal characters, the
young doctor, the devotee of science, who,
spurning the vulgar pursuit of gain which
seems to him the disgrace of his profession, has
vowed himself to researches which should
assuage the sufferings of mankind, ends as a
fashionable practitioner, who extorts big fees
from gouty patients.
And if from observations of this kind we
penetrate to the causes of things, and examine
what is really at work in the mind and heart of
man, we realise how natural, one may say in-
evitable, is all this. We see at once how much
youth has in its favour, from the moral point
of view, as compared with the later time.
Granted that then the passions are hot, and
the desires eager, and that the judgment is not
as yet fully formed nor fortified by experience.
But what advantages there are to counter-
balance this ! In the first place, there is the
safeguard youth possesses in the actual pres-
THE DANGEROUS YEARS. 41
ence and influence of parents and friends of
mature age. Whatever these may be in their
actual character, they always and instinctively
show their best side, and give the best coun-
sels to their young people. For the man of
middle-age this wall of defence has been taken
away. After forty, there are few people about
him whose claims he would recognise to
authority over his conduct or character.
But that is not all. While youth is the time
of noble enthusiasms, when the recital of great
deeds, the history of devoted lives, stir the
blood and set the soul on fire, the later period
is the time of cooling down, of disillusions,
when the spirit droops discouraged, as it per-
ceives life's limitations as compared with the
boundless possibilities of its earlier visions. It
is the time when the seamy side of things is
revealed, when the heroes youth worshipped
are discovered to be made, many of them, of
very common clay, when hopes deceived and
promises broken have brought bitterness to the
spirit. It is the time when the mind, having
passed in review the different systems of belief
which clash and storm at each other in this
distracted age, is tempted, with Lucian, to
count religion as a deceit and philosophy as a
vain thing. It is then men fall into the kind of
cynicism expressed once in our hearing by
an able man who, when projects of moral
42 CHURCH AND WOKU).
! reform were being discussed, exclaimed, " Let
the young fellows try and do something ; it is
no use coming to us old ones who believe in
nothing and nobody."
It is the time when, if ever, men become
gourmands and libertines. At a city banquet
a magnate was overhead to say to his neigh-
bour, " At our time of life what is there left
\ but the pleasures of the table ? " It is the
period when, with no one in authority to
restrain them, with earlier convictions blunted,
possessed of pecuniary resources such as were
denied in earlier years, they are most likely to
yield to sensual gratification. Those who have
paid any attention to the statistics of immo-
rality know what facts could be adduced in
Isupport of this. By whom are houses of
debauch chiefly maintained? The answer
, which comes from the Continent as well as
/ from our own land is that it is not by the
i purses of the young so much as by those better
filled of men of middle-age.
These are also the dangerous years in the
history of domestic relationships. In Tolstoi's
terrible novel, " The Kreutzer Sonata," he
depicts with grim and naked realism the
history of a married couple who are ill-suited
to each other. In the first years of their
wedded life the elements, of discord are kept
under, partly from the fact that each one is as
THE DANGEROUS YEARS. 43
jet under an illusion as to the real character of
the other, and partly from the passional attrac-
tion which youth and beauty mutually create.
But later, when character on both sides has
been laid bare to the roots, when youthful ardour
has cooled, and when the germs of disagree-
ment have had time to fully develop, a condition
of things which before was difficult has become
intolerable, and all ends in terrible tragedy.
The stern Russian moralist declares that in
writing the story he has been delineating the
features of innumerable domestic interiors. He
would have us believe that, barring the tragedy
and the blood, this is almost the normal condi-
tion. We would fain hope things are not
so bad. But this much may certainly be said :
that where a marriage is ill-assorted, and the
germs of disunion do exist, it will be precisely
in these after years that the position will be-
come most strained, and an open scandal most
to be dreaded. With such an ill-starred pair,
the forces which hitherto have worked towards
keeping down the discord the passional at-
traction, the mingling of the ideal in their
estimate of each other, and the sense of delicacy
and mutual self-respect will have steadily
diminished in their efficacy, while the spirit
of antagonism and the reasons for its exercise
will have grown in a corresponding ratio.
Is this the language of pessimism ? Say
44 CHURCH AND WORLD.
rather of precaution. Pessimism is impossible
for those who believe the world has been
; redeemed by Christ. None the less is it wise
for us to realise the difficulties of the track we
follow, and to prepare ourselves for its most
slippery places.
Our subject has its lesson for preachers.
While they do their duty by young men, let
them not forget the need that others have of
counsel and warning. Founding their appeals
on a closer analysis of nature and life, they will
be the more likely to find them strike home.
And let those of us who are advancing
towards "the dangerous years," or who are
already in the midst of them, understand that
there is absolutely no safety for us, apart from
a daily application to those sources of strength
which our fathers found sufficient for their
need, and which we shall in our day, as did they
in theirs, prove to be unfailing.
MODERN REALISM.
THE word Realism is just now a good deal in
request. It is astonishing the work that is got
out of it in literary and artistic coteries. The
reckless way, indeed, in which it is bandied
about in criticism makes one sometimes doubt
whether there is too clear an idea in the
general mind as to what it actually stands for ;
for it really represents a capital distinction.
Realism has a definite philosophy and a definite
aim, an aim and a philosophy bearing closely
upon the highest religious and social interests
It is, therefore, eminently worth our while to
understand it and to make up our minds upon
its pretensions.
It is curious to note, for one thing, how
completely the word itself, of late years, has
changed its meaning. The student recognises
it as the great watchword of middle- age
Platonism in its battles with Nominalism.
To-day it is the symbol of the party which
abjures Plato and all his works, which holds
to the visible, the material, the objective,
46 CHTJBCH AND WORLD.
as distinguished from the absolute and the
ideal.
It is in France that the school has its
principal seat, and in French literature and art
that its characteristics are most strikingly
manifested. But fashions are contagious in
literature as elsewhere, and the new method is
showing itself more or less over the whole
European field.
The distinction between it and the opposite
school will come out best if we compare their
procedure in typical works. The Idealist in
literature has his hero ; or if not that, there is
at least behind all his work an absolute ethical
standard by which everything and everybody
is judged.
Realism, on the contrary, rejects absolute
standards of character. Its moral portrait
painting is simply a natural history of tempera-
ments and of passions. In Flaubert's great
work " Salammbo," which may be taken as a
type, there is not, from beginning to end, a
single gleam of moral sentiment. The author
awards neither praise nor blame. He simply
describes. And this method is adopted deliber-
ately and of set purpose. We are told it is the
only true one. The Idealists have been leading
man along a false track, teaching him to dream
with his head in the clouds, instead of to open
his eyes upon the fact before him.
MODERN REALISM. 47
M. Zola, whom English, readers will, perhaps,
have a difficulty in recognising in the garb of
a prophet, regards himself and his co-workers
as having a serious mission. They are, he
says, the literary exponents of Positivism. In
his apologetic work, ee Le Roman Experi-
mental," he lays down the canons of the new
school. " Our quarrel with the Idealists," says
he, ' ' is mainly in the fact that we start from
observation and experience, while they start
from the absolute." We may have a word on
this presently. Meanwhile, we may note some
of the characteristics of the method which first
strikes the student.
It may be safely admitted that, as a school
of observation, modern Realism has toiled
indefatigably at what it conceives to be its
mission. It has made the novel a mass of
information on all kinds of out-of-the-way
subjects. Obscure nervous diseases are de-
lineated in the manner of a pathological
lecture. The miner and the weaver are
followed into pit and workroom, and their
metier described with a minuteness which it
requires a technical dictionary to follow. Not
a discovery in science, nor an eccentricity of
manner, nor a complication of motive, but is
pressed into the service. Realism proposes to
be a universal instructor, and it certainly has
laboured hard to teach the public something.
48 CHURCH AND WORLD.
The next thing that strikes us in the
Realism of to-day is the absence of all reserves.
There are sides of man's life, functions of his
nature, which hitherto have been recognised as
inferior, and over which proper feeling required
that a veil should be drawn. The new school
knows nothing of this reticence. It regards
everything which belongs to animal sensation
as in its sphere to describe ; and it shrinks at
no detail. Connected with this is its preference
for characters where the animal elements are
most in evidence.
But these two features, the accumulation of
external detail and the delineation of the life
of sense and of animal appetite, rest upon one
and the same basis, namely, the philosophy of
life, of which modern Realism is the exponent.
The old teaching placed man above nature.
External details were made use of only to throw
into relief the working of the great entity, the
human mind and soul. The new teaching, on
the contrary, regards man as simply a sensitive
part of nature. His mind is a function of the
brain. Instead of being the raison d'etre of the
world, he is only a detail of it. Being thus
confounded with universal matter, the Realist
describes him as such. He and the objects by
which he is surrounded are part of the totality
of things, and worthy of the same attention,
neither more nor less.
MODERN REALISM. 49
One could add much to this description. But
it is time, perhaps, to submit the pretensions
of this school to a little examination. To begin
with, What is the value of the statement that
Realism brings us, as Idealism does not, into
contact with the actual fact of things? It
bases itself, we are told, upon " observation and
experience." But what, after all, are the
Realist's observations? They are simply im-
pressions from without, plus the mould which
his own mind, his previous education, his fixed
ideas, give them. He has no more got rid of
subjectivity than his rival. Neither of them
has given us, or can give us, the outside fact in
its naked simplicity.
And here comes another inquiry. Is it, after
all, the business of art or literature to give us
an exact reproduction of Nature ? For if so,
we might well ask, Why art at all ? Why any
paintings or any literature? What our own
eyes present to us will be surely nearer the fact
than anything on canvas or in print. Or, if we
must have something, then a waxwork figure,
flesh-tinted, will give us a nearer approxima-
tion than a statue of Phidias, a photograph
will be more valuable than one of Raphael's
Madonnas.
Here, then, are two grounds of quarrel with
the Realists. The first is, they do not, after
all, give us the reality ; and the second, that in
4
50 CHURCH AND WORLD.
seeking to do so as their one end, they follow a
false method. For the mission of art and
literature is not fulfilled by what they repro-
duce so much as by what they create. It is not
here as in science. We do not look for subjec-
tivity in a work on trigonometry. But in
literature, properly so called, the value, the
interest lie precisely in what we taste of th&
man himself. Is the poet a mere reproducer of
Nature ? Does he not rather create Nature for
us? Is not Yarrow something more to us
because we have Wordsworth's sonnets, and
are not the Highlands a new region since Scott
threw over them his magic wand ? And in art,
what is it that makes a picture great, if it is
not that it is suffused with the artist's own
soul, that we see there the aspiration, the
struggle, the inner life, which have made him
a man apart ? Realism would never have given
us " The Transfiguration," nor Michael Angelo's
" Last Judgment." Could we afford to be with-
out them ?
In contradiction to the Realist dogma we are
affirm that the mission of art and litera-
ture, instead of being fulfilled by the setting
forth of what is, consists rather in helping
to create what is not. And for this supreme
reason : man is not simply the thing he is to-
day; he is a perpetual becoming; there is
going on in his nature a continuous evolution ;
MODERN REALISM. 51
he carries in him the embryo of a being higher"\
than his present self. In that fact is the per-
petual justification of Idealism. The highest \
excellence may perhaps exist as yet only in the \
poet's dream ; but let him not, for all that,
cease to give us his dream ; for as we study it,
we are on the road to realise it. The poetry of
to-day will become the prose fact of to-morrow. ^J
A FRENCH PRIEST.
CHRISTIANITY loses much in every way by the
great chasms in doctrine and church order
which yawn between its different communions.
The worst of it is that we know so little of each
other. Saintly lives, careers full of the loftiest
inspiration, are to be found in all the churches,
if we could only cross these crevasses in search
of them. But that is what most of us are
unable to do. Who, for instance, of our
English Protestant readers have ever heard of
the French Catholic priest, Jean Baptiste
Vianney ? Yet we venture to say that in this
century, in which science meets us every day
with a new marvel, there has been nothing
more astonishing than this man's life and
ministry. It is thirty years since he died, but
his biography, a bulky volume by the Abbe
Monnin, is still running through edition after
edition in the Catholic world, and the subject
of it, being dead, yet speaketh.
Our clerical readers who are considering
whether there are any new features which they
A FRENCH PRIEST. 53
may profitably introduce into their work, would
do well to study the type of ministry here pre-
sented. It is a type entirely different from
their own, one surrounded by beliefs and
methods with which they will have little sym-
pathy, but which, nevertheless, has in it features
which no earnest man can study without much
pondering, and some searching of heart.
M. Vianney was ordained in 1815, and soon
after was appointed Cure of Ars, the village
which, by his unparalleled labours, became,
before his career was over, a centre of Catholic-
ism in one sense more real than the Vatican
itself. He entered it when it presented few
features calculated to inspire or encourage.
It was a little out-of-the-way parish near
Lyons, whose people were religiously indiffer-
ent, weighed down with poverty, and possessed
of the fierce, hard greed characteristic of the
French peasant. Virtue was at a discount.
On Sundays the people assembled on the green
or in the cabarets for dances and diversions of
all kinds, with results disastrous to morality.
The young cure set to work. His ministry was
of the pulpit, of the street, of the fireside, and
of the sick chamber. Step by step he led the
people along the path of reform until the
parish, to judge from the description given of
it, resembled nothing so much as Kidderminster
in the days of Eichard Baxter. Peace and
54 CHURCH AND WORLD.
prosperity reigned in the place. It became an
abode of faith and love.
The church, which on his arrival was in a
ruinous condition, was enlarged, renovated,
and beautified. Here are some of his ideas
about the place which the House of God and its
services should occupy amongst a population.
They are worthy the attention of Protestants.
" Man," says he, " must have his holidays, his
fetes. The Church knows it, and provides
them, and it is the only institution which pro-
vides such as gladden him and, at the same time,
elevate him ; they cost the people nothing ; the
church is open to all ; lights gleam in its noble
interior ; thrilling music thrills its vaults, and
penetrates the heart. All the splendours re-
served for princes in their palaces are here
offered the people as their own in the house
which is theirs and God's ; in the church, and
there only, the humble are treated as the nobly
born offspring of God."
These were his thoughts for his people.
What were his thoughts for himself? We are
in a region strange to modern Protestantism
when we speak of his ascetic discipline. It is
an instructive chapter if only as a study in
psychology. Let us grant that he carried his
ideas to an extreme. There seems not the
slighest danger that people will rush too quickly
to an imitation of them. His domestic affairs
A FRENCH PRIEST. 55
were looked after by a pious widow, who, how-
ever, did not live in the house. She had to
watch for opportunities of getting in and
putting things in order. There were struggles
on this point between her and the cure, which
would be amusing if they were not so pathetic.
The good soul was bent on securing him some
comfort, which he was equally determined not
to allow himself. What was her despair at find-
ing one article after another of his furniture
disappearing in gifts to the poor, till there was
almost nothing left ! Well-cooked dishes were
sent in to him, but mendicants feasted on them
and not he. A meal with him would consist of
a couple of potatoes, or of a few mouldy crusts.
" I am happy," said he, ' ' to eat the bread of
the poor. They are the friends of Jesus Christ.
It seems to me, when I do so I am at the table
of our Lord."
It is time we gave some inkling of the
labours our cure got through on a diet like
this. We have spoken of the transformation
effected in his parish. But his work there
represented only a very small fraction of his
actual ministry. What will our readers say to
a pastorate to strangers flocking to him for
spiritual help, whose numbers during a long
course of years amounted to an average of some
eighty thousand per annum ?
The origin of these pilgrimages, for anything
56 CHURCH AND WORLD.
parallel to which we have to go back to the-
times of Peter the Hermit, or of Francis of
Assisi, was quite simple and natural. At first
it was the elect souls, those who thirsted after
God and yearned for a higher life, who were
drawn to a man who seemed to breathe a
diviner air, and to know the secret of the
spiritual world. The poor also began to flock
to the philanthropist who, having nothing,
seemed jet to be ever giving. Later on
tidings of miraculous cures brought to the
parish crowds of persons afflcted with every
species of bodily ailment. Then the sorrowful,
the stricken, those who had lost heart and hope,
began to discover that Ars contained a man
with a heart of gold, with a sympathy all-
embracing, and with a measureless faculty of
consolation.
But even these crowds did not represent the
measure of his influence or of his toil. Every
morning his table was covered with a pile of
letters, all repeating, with infinite variety of
detail, the same story of doubts, difficulties,
sorrows, sins ; and entreating his advice and his
prayers. Mothers wrote about erring sons,
wives about faithless husbands, bishops and
heads of great religious societies sought his aid
on questions connected with their charge.
Men distinguished in letters, or occupying
brilliant positions in society, sick of the world,
A FRENCH PRIEST. 57
but unable to believe in religion, asked for his
secret of faith. This priest was indeed drink-
ing of the cup his Master drank of. He seemed
to be bearing, with Him, the sorrows of
humanity.
Let us give a sketch of his average workday.
It is surely unparalleled in the annals of any
ministry. From the time he entered his humble
abode in the evening, which was at nine in the
summer and seven in the winter, the crowd of
strangers of all classes and conditions, anxious
for an interview, began to gather in the vesti-
bule of the church facing the parsonage. Each
one kept his place during the night, until the
opening of the doors, which took place ordi-
narily at one or two in the morning. This was
the hour at which the cure commenced his task.
The work of interviewing went on without
interruption till seven, when he said the morn-
ing Office. After this he entered his house and
took a little milk by way of breakfast. He
then continued until ten, when, shutting himself
up in his sacristy, he gave himself to private
prayer. On coming out he had a reception for
the infirm, and for those who were unable to
prolong their stay at Ars. Ordinarily the crush
at this time was immense, such that the cure
was in danger of being carried bodily away. At
eleven o'clock he preached. On coming down
from the pulpit he was more surrounded than
58 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ever. People forced letters into his hands,
money for charitable objects, relics that he
might bless them. Mothers presented their
children for benediction, the infirm on their
knees before him barred his passage. The
hour of his midday meal was the time when he
ran through his immense correspondence.
Afterwards he paid his daily visit to his orphan-
iige an institution conducted on similar lines
to that of Mr. Miiller again having to pass
through a crowd of suppliants. He then said
vespers, and continued the work of confessing
till five o'clock. His day finished by a series of
brief interviews to people who were not able to
remain longer. Between seven and nine he re-
tired for his few hours of silence and repose.
It seems incredible, but his biography declares
that this routine was continued without a
holiday for well nigh forty years !
We have hinted at supposed miraculous
cures. The subject of faith-healing is a large
one, which it is impossible to discuss here. At
Ars, however, it is certain that during the
long years of M. Vianney's ministry cases were
constantly occurring in which either the deaf
heard, the blind saw, and the lame walked ; or
else a vast number of people were deceived
into believing as much. If every one of them
were proved false, there would, however, remain
this one miracle, that of the man himself,
A FRENCH PRIEST. 59
exercising during these decades of years his
prodigious ministry, existing, one might say,
almost without food, rest, or sleep a man who,
though followed by an amount of homage
reaching almost to adoration, never swerved
from the line of humility and self-abnegation
to which he had committed himself.
A word may be said as to the homilies which
formed part of the cure's daily instruction.
They were, in his later years, entirely un-
studied, his sole and sufficient preparation
being the constant occupation of his soul with
God. His eye would range over the crowded
ranks of his auditory, frequently fixing itself
on some one, as though he were reading into
his soul, and was about to take its secrets for
the text of his discourse. The absence of self-
consciousness was absolute. People did not
think of criticising him. His words made
them criticise themselves. Men, saturated
with the sceptical spirit of the nineteenth
century, as they listened, found themselves
transported into another region. He spoke
of Christ, of heaven, of the spiritual world,
and the Christian life, as one to whom they
were the sole realities.
M. Viamiey died at his post. After an ex-
hausting day, during the heat of the July of
1859, he tottered into his room, saying, f( I can
do no more." The eager crowd at the doors
60 CHURCH AND WORLD.
next morning were disappointed in their expec-
tation of seeing him. Two days afterwards, in
his seventy-fourth year, the faithful servant of
God had yielded up his soul.
Why have we written of this man ? Certainly
not because he was Romanist, but because he
was Christian. Surely there is a lesson here,
and an encouragement for the ministry of every
Church. Who shall say, with a. career like
this before them, wrought out in the midst of
the brilliant and mocking France of the nine-
teenth century, that a Christian ministry, what-
ever outer form it may take, provided there be
given to it the full devotion of a life, can ever
be other than one of the supreme forces of the
world ? And there is a message from the story
wider even than this. It is that the eternal
laws of the spiritual kingdom work themselves
out apart from our artificial distinctions. Not
that principles are to be lightly esteemed. Only
we are to remember that the first principle is to
love our God with all our heart and our neigh-
bour as ourselves.
ON METHOD IN BRAIN WORK.
THE tendency of modern civilisation is to
throw ever more work on the brain. The army
of public servants who live by toil which is
mainly mental is an exceeding great army, and
is constantly on the increase. In the category
come journalists, literary men, ministers of all
denominations, and a multitude of others less
distinctly classed.
The brain worker has his privileges, but, on
the other hand, he is in certain respects at a
great disadvantage as compared with other
members of the community. The peculiarity
of his position is that as a toiler he stands
alone. The merchant and the tradesman can,
for the furtherance of their enterprises, employ
an indefinitely large number of helpers. The
manufacturer increases his income-earning
capacity by adding to the number of his
machines. He may be ill, or be taking holiday,
but they go on weaving his cotton or forging
his iron. And if they get injured, or become
old and worn out, they can be replaced by new
62 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and improved ones. The literary man or the
preacher, on the contrary, carries his whole
stock of machinery under his hat. He cannot
add to it. Its outfit is subject to rigid limita-
tions. The machine itself is eminently delicate
and susceptible to injury. When it grows old,
or when by illness or accident its work is inter-
rupted, it cannot be replaced. The worker's
earning capacity is brought to a temporary or
to a final end.
If, then, we consider the brain simply as a
wage-earning instrument, without taking note
of the higher aspects of the question, we see
here the immense importance for the worker,
of a knowledge of the best methods of managing
it. What is vital for him to know is, how to
get the best from it, both in quantity and
quality, without impairing its force.
In what follows it will be, not so much to
old hands, as to those who have this experience
to gain, that we address ourselves. Seasoned
brain workers get to know the conditions, and
also the vagaries of their own particular instru-
ment, as no one else can. There are also, it is
to be remembered, amongst successful toilers in
this line, enormous differences of mental
constitution, which make the task of framing a
general prescription which shall fit all indi-
vidual cases a difficult if not an impossible one.
But some principles may nevertheless be
ON METHOD IN BEAIN WOKK. 63"
laid down, which are of universal applica-
tion, and which, while of the first importance
to the beginner, are such as the most experienced
veteran may do well at times to remind
himself of.
The main point to remember is that mental
work is a species of agriculture, and that here,,
as in actual farming, the secret of success lies
in a good system of rotation of crops. The
farmer knows that if he goes on raising barley
from the same field for successive years, the
crop will constantly degenerate, and the soil be
impoverished. By varying the crop a fresh set
of elements in the soil is drawn upon, and so
the process of exhaustion is retarded. But
rotation of itself is not enough. The elements
that have been taken out of the land will have
to be replaced. And in addition, the ground at
times will require a period of rest. It must lie
fallow.
Precisely the same obtains in mental produc-
tion. Every student, for instance, knows the
relief obtained by varying his task. Wearied
with mathematical problems, the mind will
feel a renewal of vigour in turning, say, to the
study of history. But there is another thing
which is not so clearly seen. In each day
the moment comes, with some earlier, with
some later, when the brain can no longer, with
any advantage, continue to absorb facts and
64 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ideas. To toil on then, as so many do, in the
same line of effort, is a grave blunder. What
the mind picks up in its weariness from such
toil it will not retain. And serious risks to its
own soundness are being run. But the rest it
is now calling for need not be inaction. What
is wanted is simply to totally reverse the mental
process. Instead of continuing to receive and
to absorb, let the student, throwing his books
aside, set in motion his creative faculties. It
will be a positive and delicious rest now to let
the mind dream its way along some line of its
own, to sketch a character, to project an article,
to lay the foundations of a sermon. The ex-
perience here is as when one takes a relay of
fresh horses on a long journey. It is only one
side of the brain that is tired. Another set of
faculties, those of imagination, of suggestion,
of invention, have been all the time resting,
and are now, at our bidding, ready to spring
forward, like high mettled coursers, eager for
the race.
But on this, the creative side of the mind,
again, there are departments and sub-divisions
of faculty, the laws of which the trained
observer comes to recognise and to make the
most of. In the department of suggestion, for
instance, there are times when the brain is
specially fertile, teeming with crude concep-
tions, which it does not, however, seem disposed
ON METHOD IN BRAIN WORK. 65
to follow out. The experienced worker will
not force the mind here. He will jot down
in his note-book these germs of ideas, in all
their crudity, and leave them there. They are,
he knows, all grist for his mill, and will be
ground into fine flour by-and-by.
In connection with these bare suggestions,
again, an important law is to be noted, that
which physiologists term " unconscious cere-
bration." It is a familiar experience to writers
to find a subject which, at their first dealing
with it, refuses obstinately to open up. But,
knowing the mind's waj'S, they are not thereby
discouraged. Instead, they leave the topic, as
it were, in soak, and coming to it afterwards,
without having made any direct conscious effort
towards its manipulation, they find that by
simply letting it lie in the mind it has softened
and become malleable, and that they can now
deal with it entirely at their ease. The brain,
in such instances, seems to have been working,
as the heart works, involuntarily and uncon-
sciously, but not the less effectively.
But the brain -worker, however much he may
economise force by methods such as these, can-
not for ever remain at his desk. His nature
will, in the end, call out for movement, for
exercise, for the open air, and it will be at his
peril if he disregard the call. But here, also,
while giving himself entirely to the business of
5
66 CHURCH AND WORLD.
recuperating, and enjoying the process to the
full, as he takes his row on the river, or strides
across the moorland, or saunters down the
crowded street, he will not lose his time.
Another part of his nature will now be brought
into play, a part which performs one of the
most important functions connected with his
daily task. We speak of his faculty of observa-
tion. He carries with him the open eye which
gathers material from every glance. What this
means to the preacher or to the literary artist
any one may understand who takes the trouble
to analyse a good modern sermon or a first-rate
work of fiction. The essence of both will be
found to be in accurate observation of men and
things. The preacher holds his hearers and the
writer his readers by making them see what he
has seen, as he has looked into the face of
nature, or at the ways of his fellow men.
Countless thousands, before Dickens's day, had
traversed London, South of the Thames, to find
there only the common place and the dingy.
But the author of "Pickwick," as he strolled
through the Borough, and cast his eye down
Lant Street, saw there pictures which, trans-
ferred to the pages of his immortal work, have
made these quarters for ever memorable.
Sam Weller and Mr. Bob Sawyer have here, we
feel, the framework which exactly fits them.
The artist saw for us, and we live for ever after
ON METHOD IN BRAIN WORK. 67
in the light of his vision. These were studies
in the city. It is the same when we come to
the country. With what delight does a lover
of nature and of human nature read such a bit
of description as the walk to church of Mr. and
Mrs. Poyser in " Adam Bede " ! Was there
ever anything more perfect as a study of men
and things as they exist in our English Mid-
lands? We have here the work of an artist
whose country walks and talks were, in the first
place, relaxations from indoor toil, but, in the
second place, golden opportunities for obtain-
ing living pictures of nature and of man.
The subject might be indefinitely prolonged,
but we have said enough, perhaps, for our
purpose, which was to show, as the result of
experience, what can be done by care and
method in the way of economising that most
precious of all motor forces our brain power.
The human mind is a tree of life, growing 1
by the side of the river of God and bearing all 1
manner of fruits. To guard it sedulously, to
study the laws impressed on it by its Creator,
to enrich the soil around it, and so to develop it
to its fullest stature, and to the limits of its
producing capacity, are not only plain duties j
which a share of our own interest should-7
dictate, but the most fitting acknowledgment /
we can make to Him who has thus so richly
endowed us.
ON RETIRING FROM BUSINESS.
THERE is, perhaps, no idea which the average
middle-class Briton finds it more pleasant
to caress than that of rewarding himself, a
certain number of years hence, for the daily
grind he is now undergoing at the treadmill of
affairs, by a pleasant villa outside his native
town, where he will be able to wake up morn-
ing after morning with the consciousness of an
adequate balance at his bankers, and at the
same time with no business worries to disturb
his repose. How often has he gone over the
calculation, as to the time that will be required
at the rate his business is now developing,
before this consummation is reached ! The
risky speculations in which he occasionally
hazards, and at times engulphs, his spare
capital is due to his anxiety to abridge this
period.
We are not going to say that the step he
proposes to take in the dreamed-of future is a
false one, but it may very easily be so. To
retire from business is, in many cases, to retire
ON RETIRING FROM BUSINESS. 69
from one's manhood, to retire from the exercise
of the qualities which make an individual of
any value either to society or to himself.
To consider this question as being one simply
of pounds sterling is an evidence of a want of
realistic foresight, so gross that it is difficult to
understand how it can exist amongst men of
ability enough to push their way in the world.
That it does exist, however, is shown by the
number of retirements that are effected on this
sole basis. And men do not seem to be
deterred by the lamentable results which so
often follow.
A moment's consideration of what is in-
volved will show to any moderately observant
person that to take a step of this kind is to put
much of what is best in a man's life at risk.
A man's business has been a large factor in the
making of his character. In the earlier and
struggling days it was the daily necessities of
the position that developed his ready wit, his
patience, his power of enduring long strains of
labour. And later, when things were on a
larger scale, it was the business that gave him
the faculty of insight, of quick and sure
decision, that taught him how to manage men.
It gave him authority and responsibility, and
made him the centre of a little world, which in
its turn contributed its quota of influence and
activity to the larger one outside.
70 CHURCH AND WORLD.
There are men who, at a stroke, will cut
themselves off from all this, and step into
absolute nothingness, under the idea that, at
last, they are going to enjoy themselves !
From being persons of influence they drivel
into melancholy loungers, carrying wearily day
by day the heavy burden of their discontent.
They have retired with the idea of being
masters of their own time. They find now
that instead time is their master, and that they
are serving under a tyrant. It is an appalling
position for a grown man, accustomed to some-
thing better, to find himself putting on his
clothes of a morning, with not the slightest
idea of what he is going to do with his day,
knowing only that his doings will be of interest
or utility to no single human being. He may
as well go to bed again. He could reply with
Goldsmith, if questioned on the subject, that
he finds nothing in life which makes it worth
while to get up.
Failures of this kind happen because men
have not grasped the principle which can alone
make such a step a safe one. The principle is
that our life should be in all its parts a
continual progress. A retirement from busi-
ness is wise, and then only, when it can be
proved to be a stage in that progress. To give
up an active employment is a death. The point
to be sure about is that the death will be
ON RETIRING FROM BUSINESS. 71
followed by a resurrection to a yet higher form
of life. This is entirely possible, and is often
happily realised. It is so in cases where a man
has powers and aptitudes for which his business
life has furnished no proper outlet. To give
up the old occupation is in these instances to
set free a part of him, and that the best part,
which has been hitherto chafing in inaction.
The giving up is, in fact, the actual entering
upon the real business of his life. That was
the giving up effected by John Woolman, the
American Quaker, whose autobiography, with
Whittier's introduction, forms so delicious and
at the same time so inspiring a bit of reading.
Woolman tells us that finding himself in a
lucrative and constantly-increasing business, he
got rid of the greater portion of it, because,
firstly, he felt that riches would harm both
himself and his children; and, secondly,
because he felt it his duty, as that of every
Christian in a world where so much ignorance
and misery existed, to devote a large proportion
of his time upon this earth to direct personal
effort for the good of his fellows, and the
promoting of the interests of the heavenly
kingdom. An idea this, like many another
from the same source, which it were well for
our modern religious world to take to its inner-
most heart and ponder.
What makes the giving up, at a stroke, of an
72 CHURCH AND WOULD.
occupation which has been not simply a means
of livelihood, but a school of character, a thing
of so much risk, is the fact that nine men out
of ten do not know how to usefully occupy
themselves, except under certain conditions.
They need the pressure of circumstances a
friendly necessity to keep them at it. Let
this be withdrawn, and they sink by their own
weight to that condition of listless vacuity out
of which open a hundred short cuts to the
devil.
A man who does not wish to make a failure
of his closing years, needs, before taking the
leap, to ask himself this question, Have I some
object in life, apart from the money-making
which I am now renouncing, capable of
possessing my mind and soul, and of filling
each day with ennobling interest and occu-
pation ?
What complicates the problem is the habit
people have of regarding a certain age, and that
a long way off from life's natural term, as one
in which some of the great possibilities are over.
Propose, for instance, to the average British
bourgeois, who at fifty is building his villa with
the view of retiring to it from the city, that he
should now pursue the personal culture which
his earlier years denied him. Suggest to him
that there are worlds of thought and knowledge
which up to the present have been closed to him,
ON RETIRING FROM BUSINESS. 73
and to enter upon which will double the range
of his consciousness. Ask him, for instance, to
open acquaintance with the great Continental
languages and literatures, and so to discover
what other first-class peoples, outside the
English circle, are saying and thinking, and he
will ask himself to what madman he is talking.
Put himself to school at his age? Begin to learn
languages at fifty? Preposterous. It is not
preposterous at all. Let our bourgeois bring to
this new occupation the methods and qualities
which made of him a prospero us business man ;
let him bestow on it the same attention, regu-
larity, and care of detail, and success will be
certain and the rewards great. He will find
himself upon a path which slopes steadily
upward, where at every step of the ascent the
prospect widens beneath his feet, and where his
spirit, as it takes in the invigorating breath
of the upper air, is filled with the intoxicating
sense of a new life.
But if a man is not sure of himself outside
his business, let him by all means keep in it.
He cannot here follow a better example than
that given by a Northern manufacturer, who
having in middle life achieved a competency,
determined to run his mill henceforth not for
his own personal gain, but in the interests, as
he conceived them, of the kingdom of God. In
the present stage of Christian enlightenment
74 CHURCH AND WORLD.
there ought to be hundreds of such mills and
mill-owners at work in England to-day.
The thing to beware of in this matter is, we
repeat, the retiring in any sense from the fullest
exercise of our mental and moral faculties.
The examples of a Gladstone, a Beaconsfield, a
Bismarck, a Moltke, as well as of multitudes of
men of lesser note in all departments of affairs,
show how, with proper care, a long career full
of overflowing life may be continued up to the
very end. There can be no better thing for a
man than that death, when it comes, shall find
him in his working dress, toiling with all his
faculties for the progress of the world.
YOUNG ENGLAND AND CULTURE.
THE conflict of races is entering on a new
phase. Europe is still an armed camp, but it
is evident that the forces which make against
war are constantly increasing, and are causing
the resort to arms to become more and more
difficult. The struggle for national supremacy
is as keen as ever, but it is on a different arena,
and with other weapons than of old. The
question now is, as to who shall lead the world
in commerce and science, in art and moral
force ; and that, again, resolves itself into this
other, as to what nation is at this moment
producing the best specimens of human nature,
in the points of body, of brain, and of inner
character.
It is a battle of culture. In what follows I
propose, as the result of an experience which
has brought me into contact with both young
England and the young Continental of various
nationalities, to try and point out how in
these matters the account stands between
them.
76 CHURCH AND WORLD.
We begin with physique. That comes
naturally first, for it is the basis of all else that
is in a man. Herbert Spencer has put it with
an almost rude emphasis when he says that the
first condition of success in life is to be a good
animal. If a man is to go far, he will need
not only to have a good head on his shoulders,
but a stomach underneath that understands its
duties. The secret of the intellectual supremacy
of Greece lay not simply in the training of the
porch and the academy, but in its Olympic
games.
When we ask how the English youth com-
pares in this respect with the foreigner, the
answer is, on the whole, distinctly in his favour.
The Duke of Wellington said the battle of
Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of
Eton. The English lad still believes in his
playing-fields, and it is well that it is so. His
instinctive love of the open air and of hardy
sports is a strong point. It counts for him in
the international race that, while the young
Frenchman or German spends his leisure in
the cafe, over dice and billiards, or worse, he
prefers to seek the open on his bicycle or to
stretch his limbs in the cricket-field.
It is interesting to observe how generally our
superiority in this respect is conceded on the
Continent. Last summer, while making an
Alpine ascent, I asked the guide who in his
YOUNG ENGLAND AND CULTURE. 77
opinion were the best climbers. Without
hesitation he replied, " Your countrymen,
monsieur. They have no equals for courage
and endurance." The response coincided
curiously with the remark I had met with the
day before in a Swiss novel. A traveller had
just accomplished a difficult ascent. His guide
observes, " You are English, monsieur ? "
" No." " No ! I am astonished. I thought
that none but English could have climbed at
that pace ! "
This is a reputation we shall surely do well
to maintain. There are dangers in modern
England which gravely menace it. The chief
of them undoubtedly is the overgrowth of our
great cities. Plato knew what he was about
when^ in his""" Republic," he ordained that
when a community had reached the limit of
4,000 families, the overplus should swarm off
and found a new settlement. If we do not kill
London, London, with its fogs and its de-
oxygenated air, will kill us. Nothing is
clearer than that unless we mean to dwindle
into a bloodless and muscleless race, we shall
have to find some means of depopulating our
monstrous cities and of repeopling the deserted
country.
But in man the physical exists, we may say,
for the intellectual, as that, in its turn, exists
for something still higher. Let us now, 011
78 CHURCH AND WORLD.
this intellectual side of culture, draw attention
to our English young manhood, as compared
with its foreign competitors. It would be
pleasant to be able to record, in a department
so important, the same verdict as in that just
noticed. But we fear the facts are against
us. Take, for instance, our standing with
reference to modern languages. France, it is
true, is not in this respect a strong competitor,
for the French notoriously are indifferent
linguists. But where are we? A short time
ago, at a popular Continental resort, I over-
heard a gentleman, whom I took to be English,
speaking very good French. I complimented
him on the fact, remarking that it was so rare
to hear good French spoken by an Englishman.
" Pardon me," he replied, " I am not English,
I am American. It is well known," he added,
laughing, "that your countrymen are the
worst linguists in the world." I was fain to
acknowledge there was truth in the allegation.
Compare our young men in this respect with
those of Germany, of Holland, of Switzerland,
or Greece. In any of these countries it is the
exception rather than the rule for the young
members of respectable families to speak less
than two languages . besides their mother
tongue, while frequently they will have a know-
ledge of three or four. How many of ours can
speak one ? And yet both in commerce and in
YOUNG ENGLAND AND CULTURE. 79
the polite world proficiency in this matter is
now admitted everywhere to be of the first
importance.
There are other departments of study in
which our average English youth would hardly,
we fear, fare better in the contest. What, for
instance, does he know of mathematics ?
When Miss Fawcett achieved her triumph at
Cambridge a story was told of a professor who,
not long before, had declared his conviction
that there was not a woman in England who
understood the principle on which the rule of
three was based. The ladies have certainly
had their revenge for that sarcasm. It would
be curious to know, however, what proportion
of our young men in business who have left
school for two or three years could stand an
examination on this one point.
It would be easy to add to this indictment,
and to point out in a score of other directions
the mental nakedness of the land. Be it under-
stood I am not here speaking of those who go
to our universities, but of the sons of the middle
classes who have received the ordinary
commercial education. It is a fact that their
Continental competitors of the same rank are
working much harder and going much
further than they in the intellectual pre-
paration for life. The training of our
middle-class schools has been weak in the
80 CHURCH AND WORLD.
points where it ought to have been strong. It
is improving, but there is enormous leeway to
make up. Meanwhile, if in these pages I have
the ear of any young men whose schooling is
over, let me counsel them at all costs to
continue their education. Let them be satisfied
with nothing less than a speaking knowledge
of at least one of the great European languages,
and a working acquaintance with some branches
of mathematics, the science par excellence of pure
reasoning. It is fatally easy to get a glib news-
paper acquaintance with things. But the
young Englishman must have something more
than that if in the present day he is to hold
his own.
There remains one other department of cul-
ture to be considered, and it is the highest of
all that of the inner character. After all, the
physical and mental powers are but the agents
and underlings of the really central part of
us. These last, indeed, may be compared to the
mercenary troops of the Middle Ages. They
will fight on either side. A knowledge of lan-
guages may be used to disseminate moral poison.
A familiarity with the principles of mechanics
may be utilised to fabricate infernal machines.
The moral part of culture is, then, evidently its
vital part. And the nation which on this side
of its training possesses at once the best
system and the most solid material on which
YOUNG ENGLAND AND CULTURE. 81
to work will, we believe, whatever its other
drawbacks, come out first in the end.
Taking once more our comparative view, we
ask, how stands Young England as related to
other lands in its culture of the inner life?
We here call to mind the remark of an eminent
French critic who laments the disadvantages
under which his young countrymen labour in
this respect as compared with the English, in
that while the former universally reject the
religion they have been taught in childhood,
and are thus cast on the world without a
faith, the latter are brought up in a reli-
gious and moral system in which they continue
to believe.
There is truth in this, and it means a gain
on our side which it is impossible to over-
estimate, for its faith in Christianity has saved
England before, and will save it again. Therein
has it found the true system of moral culture.
The method of Christianity is simple. It is that
of completing our nature by its union with
a higher. As the bodily nature exists for the
intellectual, and the intellectual is the basis
of the moral, so the moral seeks its com-
pleteness in that Divine nature which over-
shadows it, and of which it is the imperfect
reflection.
There is no more urgent business for Eng-
land to-day than to see to it that its young
G
82 CHURCH AND WORLD.
people of every class get a training for body,
mind, and inner life which shall develop their
nature to its fullest strength and on all its sides.
There is no other way of keeping the place won
for us by our fathers in the van of the world's
progress.
HOW PREACHERS ARE MADE.
A HOMILY FOR THE FREE CHURCHES.
THOSE who would forecast the future of the Free
Churches need, for one thing, to take account
of what is passing in the common rooms of
their colleges. There are to be found our
preachers in the making. The ideals they
are setting up will determine to a large
extent the kind of leaders the Church is to have
in the coming generation. What are those
ideals? Any one acquainted with the inner
life of the colleges finds himself in contact
with two contrasted theories, which now, as in
former days, divide student opinion. The one
is, that the time spent at college should be,
above all other things, devoted to the acquire-
ment of exact and varied scholarship. The
other, that the study of books and of sciences
is secondary to the acquirement of the art of
effective preaching. The latter idea will, it is
safe to say, have its advocates in every class of
theological students. Their way of expressing
84 CHURCH AND WORLD.
it is somewhat as follows : " We are not here
to be turned into spectacled pedants. What is
the use of stuffing ourselves with the forgotten
metaphysics of dead and buried ages ? The
Churches don't want Dryasdusts. They need
live men who know how to put the Gospel into
Queen's English. They want speakers. Effec-
tive oratory is a great and difficult art, and what
we are here for mainly is to learn it." This
theory determines a certain line of conduct in
him who holds it. Greek and Latin are skipped.
Mathematics are treated as of small importance.
Instead, our budding orator reads the sermons
of popular preachers. He fills his evenings, as
far as college regulations will allow, with
engagements at tea meetings, Temperance
societies, and debating clubs, where he neglects
no opportunity of making his voice heard. By
this means he gains a fluency which he regards
as a veritable gift of oratory, and a guarantee
of his success in the future.
The theory and method thus sketched are
specially agreeable to a class of young men in
our colleges, in many ways estimable, and who
are worth winning to a truer ideal. They have
become students for the ministry fresh from
the excitement and emotion of some great
religious movement in which their spiritual
life has been commenced and developed. With
a soul all aflame they have turned aside from
HOW PKEACHERS ARE MADE. 85
secular pursuits to devote themselves entirely
to the service of the Church. They have been
hitherto conspicuous in prayer meetings, in
Sunday-school work, in cottage services, and
have found their delight in pouring out there
the fresh experiences of their new life. But
they enter college to find themselves confronted
with tasks to which they are unfamiliar, and
which appear to have no relation at all to the
spiritual life. What is there in Latin declen-
sions and in Greek particles to kindle their
fervour? What spiritual nutriment is to be
found in a proposition of Euclid ?
Their first feeling under these circumstances
is one of despair. Later, they compromise
matters. The (( secular " studies are gone
through as a necessary evil, while all the time
that can be won, and all the energy of the soul,
are put into pursuits which to them are so much
more congenial. We have said these young
men are worth winning to a truer ideal. It
will not be difficult, we think, to show that
their present one is wholly false. We may
look at it first from an historical point of view.
One of the advantages of living in this late age
of the world lies in the great space of time and
the vast range of facts which it offers us on
which to base our inductions. Regarding, then,
the question of preachers and preaching from
this standpoint, we ask what kind of men have
86 CHTTRCH AND WORLD.
they been who in ancient or modern times
made their mark as potent spiritual forces ?
What has been their training? Have they
been such as have thought lightly of that severe
drill of the intellect which our best college
curriculums impose ? Were they men who
thought religious emotion, spiritual excitement
and ecstacy, sufficient as a preparation for their
work ? As our mind travels back to the past
in quest of an answer a multitude of pictures
present themselves. One stands out with
special vividness. It is that of Ignatius Loyola,
the founder of the Society of Jesus, sitting as a
humble learner on the rude benches of a school
at Barcelona, and tugging there at the rudi-
ments of the Latin grammar. He who was to
be the chief of one of the most powerful
religious organisations the world has ever seen,
up to his conversion one of the gayest of
courtiers and most gallant of warriors, now,
with a determination to impress upon his fellow-
men the religious convictions which had changed
his life, realised his ignorance and felt that
at all costs it must be overcome. He tells us
what a trial this was to him, how the tearing
himself away from his spiritual rhapsodies for
the dull round of the scholar's toil was like
exchanging Paradise for purgatory. But he
kept to his task, following up the school with
the university, because, with the rare sagacity
HOW PREACHERS ARE MADE. 87
which characterised all his career, he under-
stood that in order to make any permanent mark
upon the world his religious fervour must have
behind it a disciplined and well-fed brain.
And what he enjoined on himself he made a
condition for his associates and followers.
This society became, in his lifetime, one of the
ruling forces of Europe, because his fellow-
workers, Lainez, Xavier, Bobadilla, and the
rest, joined to a passionate spiritual fervour
the most complete intellectual drill.
We have fallen here on an example in the
sixteenth century. Whether we go backwards
or forwards from that date in quest of facts
the result is the same. If we mount the stream
till we reach the early ages of the Church, we
find the great Christian leaders there, the
Augustines, the Basils, the Origens, were men
filled with all the learning of their time. They
commanded the respect of their own and after
ages, not simply because they spoke with
fervour, but because they had something to say.
In this matter also modern history is in strict
accord with ancient.
As we cross again the sixteenth century on
the way back to our own times, and ask how
the mighty Protestant teachers of that age,
how the Luthers, the Calvins, the Zwinglis and
Farels were trained, we discover that it was
not on tea-meeting speeches and debating
88 CHURCH AND WORLD.
society rhetoric. They were students first and
speakers afterwards. And they became such
mighty speakers because they had been such
mighty students. In our own land, a century
later, we come upon the grand, unearthly
figure of Baxter, the greatest spiritual force of
his time. Where could the advocates of
celestial fervour, as a qualification for the
Christian ministry, find a more shining
example of it than here? But was it his
fervour only that gave him his power? Baxter
led both ministry and laity because he was a
saint who was also a scholar. Here was a man
who wrote Latin as easily as his mother
tongue, who was familiar with every phase
of philosophy, and who knew the fathers and
the schoolmen as the modern minister knows
his newspaper. What Baxter was to the
seventeenth Wesley was to the eighteenth
century, exerting upon it and the time that
was to follow an influence even more intense
and far wider in range. His followers for a
long time had almost the monopoly of
enthusiasm in religion ; but their leader was
enthusiasm his one and sufficient qualification ?
This man, the evangelist of Cornish miners and
of Kingswood colliers, the field preacher who
wrestled with the brutality of eighteenth
century mobs, was also the Oxford don, the
elegant and accurate classical scholar, the
HOW PREACHERS ARE MADE. 89
accomplished linguist who, with a mastery of
English which makes his style matchless for
nervous force and limpid clearness, could
preach also in two or three Continental tongues.
But we need not prolong this side of the
discussion. Otherwise in the last generation
we should have to point to Robert Hall in
England and to Chalmers in Scotland, both
prophets of their time and to their countrymen,
whose severe intellectual discipline points once
more the lesson we are teaching. In a time such
as ours, so intellectually acute and at the same
so profoundly disturbed, in which the reasons
for faith are being everywhere probed to the
bottom, in which every social institution is
called in question, and in which existing church
systems are melting down before our eyes to
give way to a new and larger order, what kind
of figure will men cut whose qualifications as
spiritual leaders consist simply of emotional
fervour, expressed in tea-meeting rhetoric?
Certain it is that, delivered up to such teachers,
the Church would cease to be a factor in the
coming evolution.
The idea that a severe academical course
tends to make a man a Dryasdust is a chimera.
If a man has the speaking, preaching faculty
in him, the repression of it for a time will be
an unmixed good. It will surge up again when
wanted, developed and purified, to serve now as
90 CHURCH AND WORLD.
an instrument for expressing ideas of genuine
value.
Nor is it true that a discipline of this kind
militates necessarily against the spirit of earnest
piety. The ardent enthusiast whom, in this
article, we have specially in mind is apt to
confound piety with its excited expression in
public meetings. He has not yet learned that
an even better exercise for it is in the severe
self-repression which keeps him silent for
years a self-repression in which he is closely
imitating his Master, the carpenter of Naza-
reth, who up to His thirtieth year kept Himself
hidden from men. Let this hard and secret
toil be taken up, as Loyola used to say, ' ( ad
major em gloriam Dei," and it will be found to
be a means of grace. And if, moreover, he
desires a present sphere of direct spiritual
influence, let him, as did Wesley at Oxford,
seek to lift the college life around him to the
level of his highest aspirations ; let him help
his fellow-students to be more spiritual, more
unselfish, more complete in their self-dedica-
tion, and in this double process of giving and
receiving he will find soul and mind to be
expanding together, and his preparation going
prosperously forward towards a ministry worthy
of the name.
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES.
EMERSON has, in one of his essays, a striking;
passage in which he speaks of the way in which
the machinery of society adapts itself almost
automatically to the varying fortunes of the
individual. A man in the heat of passion
commits some crime which, in his earlier years,
would have seemed to him impossible. When
he comes to himself it appears incredible that
he should have done such a thing. He finds,
however, society, with its police, its magistrate,
its dock, its criminal procedure, calmly and
methodically dealing with this phase of his
career as though it had been waiting for it
through all his years. It is a somewhat grue-
some reflection, but there is an idea underlying
it which may be carried further. The varied
apparatus of civilisation, and its startling rela-
tion to us under certain contingencies, suggests
an even more complex structure and its rela-
tions that, namely, of our own organism and
inner consciousness. It would be a bewildering
calculation to endeavour to total up the sum of
CHURCH AND WORLD.
all the phases and shades of thought aiid feeling
passed through by a fully-developed modern
man in the course of a lifetime. But the cal-
culation would, after all, be simple when com-
pared with another that of the experiences
which, through that lif etime, have been possible
to such a nature, but into which it has never
entered. There is something eerie in the
thought of the pictures which our inner
machinery is prepared to throw at any moment
upon the screen of our consciousness, but which
will never come there. The precise sensation
realised by a person when threatened by a
terrible catastrophe, such as death by burning
or by murder ; or that, on the other hand, felt
on the news of the com ing to us of a great
fortune, is what few among us will ever know.
None the less the registering apparatus for the
production of that sensation is already within
us, and would, on occasion, produce it there
with infallible accuracy. Poets have often
ohosen psychological themes as the subject
of their muse. They have written on Hope,
on Memory, on Imagination. There is
clearly a field open for another great poem
the Unrealised Possibilities of Conscious-
ness.
But the subject of life's unknown quantities
is not exhausted by this class of consideration.
Another side of it emerges when we come to
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 95
study, not simply the existing capabilities which
are never called into action, but the possible
further development of the capacities them-
selves. We are ridiculously ignorant, most of
us, about our own powers. There are stops in
our organ which we have never tried, and
which perhaps contain our finest tones. Sir
William Hamilton's story of the servant-girl
who, in the delirium of fever, repeated the
Psalms of David in Hebrew, from having over-
heard her clerical master daily read them aloud
a feat quite impossible while in health and in
her ordinary mental condition shows the latent
capacities of an untrained memory when raised
a little above its normal state. What is true of
the memory is, we may suppose, equally true of
all our powers. Evolution suggests that every
faculty we possess is as yet in a rudimentary
condition. Some of those destined in the future
to play the most important roles in the human
drama are hardly, as yet, above the horizon.
The faculty of second sight, for instance, so
abundantly testified to as existing amongst the
Celtic races ; and the mysterious powers, baffling
completely our Western science, shown by
Eastern yogis, we may well believe are part of
our common heritage, if we knew only where to
find and how to train them. It is curious to
reflect what a revolution might come in our
view of the universe by the development in us
94 CHURCH AND WORLD.
of a new organ of perception. A fresh window
let in to the wall of our consciousness might
make our knowledge of the spiritual world as
certain as that of the planetary system, and
cause Agnosticism, Pessimism, and Materialism
to be tenable only in Bedlam. And no sound
Evolutionist will say that such an organic
development is impossible. The outside uni-
verse contains innumerable unknown quantities ;
and that man has, in his microcosm, the ele-
ments which answer to them all, may be far
more than a poetic conceit. What Goethe said
of the Divine immanence has its meaning also
for man
Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen
Natur in sich, sich in Natur xu hegen.
The unknown about ourselves presents itself
also very vividly when we consider our daily
changing relation to environment. We do not
need to have read Kant to discover that our
consciousness from moment to moment is a
compound of the action of our internal
perceptive organs and of the play upon them
of the external world. How far the variations
in the second of the conditions is capable of
influencing our subjective states is what none of
us is sure about. Glycerine by itself seems the
most innocent of substances, but one of its
combinations forms the most terrific of
LIFE'S UNKNOWN QUANTITIES. 95
explosives. In like manner natures that
for years have seemed to themselves and to
their neighbours born to simplicity and to
quietness have, by combination with new
circumstances or new personalities, developed
into tremendous forces of revolution or of
crime. The devout gentleman - farmer of
Huntingdon never in his earlier years
imagined that he would one day make the
name of Cromwell so feared, hated, and
admired. Had not his uncle, the reigning
Pontiff, insisted on his joining, as a young
man, and against his own will, the Papal Court
at Rome, Alexander VI. would probably have
led a peaceful and unnoted career, instead of
making the name of Borgia the symbol for
everything execrable in cruelty, hypocrisy, and
vice. Of humbler men the same is true. As
Ruskin says : " The virtues of the inhabitants
of many country districts are apparent, not
real ; it is only the monotony of circumstances
and the absence of temptation which prevent
the exhibition of passions not less real because
often dormant." Considerations of this kind
may well bring charity into our judgments of
others, and destroy overweening confidence in
our estimate of ourselves. The result of the
study of the unknown quantities in our own
character, and in the environments to which it
has yet to relate itself, should make us realise,
96 CHURCH AND WORLD.
as each new day begins, our absolute depen-
dence for spiritual upholding and progress
on Him whose knowledge is perfect and
whose promised aid is adequate to our utmost
need.
THE CHURCH'S SONG.
IT is a fact worth noting that the number of
hymns extant is computed at not less than
400,000, distributed over 200 languages. The
stream of Christian song, rising out of the
faith and love of the first ages, has, with the
growing centuries, widened and deepened, fed
from a thousand different sources, until it has
now the breadth of an ocean, and a voice as
the sound of many waters. It may be perhaps
said that in a great hymn, set to noble music,
and sung by a multitude whom its thought
fully possesses, the soul reaches its highest
intensity of religious feeling. It gets above
preaching, for preaching is mainly plain prose,
while this is beyond either prose or poetry.
Prose is thought wedded to appropriate
language. Poetry is prose carved and sculp-
tured. Sacred poetry is this sculptured prose
relating itself to the most exalted of all possible
themes. But Christian song climbs higher
than this, for it is sacred poetry caught up on
the wings of divine music, and bearing upwards
7
98 CHURCH AND WORLD.
to its own realm the souls whom it has touched
and fired. In such moments men get a glimpse
of what Handel felt in writing the " Hallelujah
Chorus," when, as he himself described it, " I
did seem to see the heavens opened and the
great God Himself."
And so it comes about that the maker of one
true hymn may live longer in the Church's
memory than the preacher of a thousand
eloquent sermons. Newman's sermons are in
many volumes on our book-shelves, and are
held in great estimation by those who read
them. But the masses of Christendom know
Newman and love him chiefly for the one
plaintive strain which, sick in body and
distressed in mind, he threw off when afar
on the blue waters of the Mediterranean. It
is not the Cardinal, nor the author of Tract 90,
with whom they sympathise, but with the man
who wrote
Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead thou me on.
The memory of Mr. Binney will long live as
a preacher who, perhaps more than any other
of this generation, represented the English
robust common-sense as applied to religion.
But we are not sure whether the memory of the
writer of " Eternal Light, Eternal Light," may
not survive that of the preacher at the Weigh
House.
THE CHURCH'S SONG. 99
One could write volumes on the part which
has been played by hymns in the history of
religion. Their mark is on every age of the
Christian Church. There come to the mind, as
it muses on this subject, "the hymns and
spiritual songs " of which Paul speaks to the
Colossians, and " the praises " which he and
his companion Silas sang together in the
Philippian dungeon ; the " Nunc Pimittis "
and the " Gloria in Excelsis," which, in their
Greek and Latin forms, were sung by the
Church in the earlier ages ; the solemn strains
of the " Dies Irse," in which mediaeval religion
expressed its awe and dread in thought of death
and the Judgment ; and then the mighty burst
of song in which the Church of the Reformation
expressed its new faith and its new life. We
remember how Luther used to say to his friends
in times of depression, " Come, cheer up, and
let us sing together the 46th Psalm." And the
il Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott " into which he
rendered it has been since to uncounted multi-
tudes of other friends, whom he knew not in
the flesh, a great word of cheer.
From Luther to Frederick the Great is a far
cry, in character more than in time, and yet, in
thinking of German hymnody, the two join
themselves in the mind in a pathetic little story
which readers of Carlyle will remember. On
the night preceding one of his decisive battles,
100 CHURCH AND WORLD.
there came thrilling through the air from
corner of the camp the solemn melody of this
same hymn of Luther's, which some of the
King's old veterans, as pious as they were
brave, were singing together in an extemporised
service of devotion. As he listened, tears
streamed down the face of the warrior monarch
Voltairean and sceptic as he was while he
said to one of his generals, "That means
victory on the morrow." And it did. In truth,
hymns have had a great part in battle-fields. On
the night before Hastings the Normans sang
hymns while Harold's Saxons spent the hours in
carousing. In the seventeenth-century fight
of King and Parliament the Roundheads sang
psalms while the Cavaliers trolled love-ditties.
When it came to fighting, the psalm-singers
proved the trustier metal. When John Hamp-
den fell at Chalgrove, Macaulay tells us how the
corpse of their leader was borne by his sorrow-
ing soldiery to its rest to the lofty but mournful
strains of the Ninetieth Psalm. And if Re-
formation and Puritan times have their
histories all interwoven with sacred song, so
is it in yet more marked degree with what may
be called the later Evangelical period. The
great revival of the eighteenth century was a
time of new birth to hymnody. Dr. Watts has
been called by Lord Selborne the father of
English hymnology. Doddridge stands out in
THE CHURCH'S SONG. 101
this period not only as a sound and excellent
divine, but as a sweet singer of Israel. It was
in Methodism, however, that religious feeling
rose to that height of exaltation, to that intense
and fervid glow of faith, needful to the pro-
duction of song-devotion in its highest form.
Methodism may well be pardoned for account-
ing it a direct providence which placed by the
side of Wesley a poet such as his brother
Charles, the bard who sang while he preached,
who gave the people spiritual songs while he
gave them laws. The first glow of that mighty
movement has passed away. We need to know
what it was in its early intensity to understand
the effect of those wonderful hymns. We need
to have been at the Foundery, or in the great
open-air gatherings at Bristol or in Cornwall,
when the multitude, stirred already to its
depths by prayer and speech full of solemn and
searching truth, gives vent to its feeling in one
of these mighty lyrics of the soul. And not
in public worship only was the power of these
hymns felt. Pitmen sang them as they plied
their calling in the depths of the earth ; the
weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire softened
with their cadence the clash of their looms ;
housewives and maidens in the busy round of
domestic duties kept time to their stirring
music.
It requires more idealism than belongs to
102 CHURCH AND WORLD.
the composition of most in this materialistic
generation to entirely understand the feeling
which prompted the Methodist backwoods
preacher to return the title-deeds of a large
farm which had been presented to him by a
friend, after a few months' possession, on the
ground that he was miserable from being
now no longer able to sing this verse of a
hymn, which for years had been one of his
favourites :
No foot of land do I possess, no cottage in this
wilderness,
A poor wayfaring man.
Awhile I dwell in tents below, and gladly wander to
and fro
Till I my Canaan gain.
Who can say that man is wholly of this
earth when we have here a brother soul
putting millions of tons of it, reaching from
its surface down to its centre, against one
verse of a Christian hymn, and finding the
ponderous mass, in the scale against these few
words of trust and hope, to kick the beam t
Good hymns, wedded to noble music, may be
potent elements in home training. A family
group on Sunday evening, with mother or sister
at the piano, while the clear treble of childhood
blends with the deeper voice of father and
elder brother in rendering one and another of
the treasures of the Church's song, is a gladsome
spectacle, which becomes in after years a sacred
THE CHURCH'S SONG. 103
memory. The strains we hear then weave
themselves into the life. Held in the leash
of remembrance, they accompany us in the
march through the wilderness and give cheer
when the spirit faints. " Sing me a bairns'
hymn," said Guthrie, as he lay a-dying. The
great Christian orator, world-worn and weary,
desired nothing better in the closing moments
than to have the faith and hope of his life put
into accents which fitted his lips when a little
child.
It speaks well for a man's career when all
through it up to the end he finds his soul
stirred, as in the earliest years, by the music
of the Church's song and his life keeping time
to its holy strain.
INSURANCE AGAINST DULNESS.
THE editor of an American religious news-
paper conceived, some time ago, the idea of
*' ( drawing " his clerical subscribers on the
subject of illustrations in sermons. He sent
a circular letter to a number of representative
ministers, asking for their views as to the
value of illustrations, and of the best method
of obtaining and of using them. The topic
here suggested is a wide one, and of immediate
personal moment to preachers and to churches.
Sermon makers and sermon hearers alike be-
lieve in illustrations, though many of them
would be somewhat puzzled to give a strictly
philosophical reason why. There is a general
feeling that they light up a discourse. They
are, in fact, an insurance against dulness.
Young preachers have a fixed belief in their
efficacy. We remember an experienced divinity
professor who used to excuse the floweriness of
many of the deliverances in his homiletical
class with the remark that the authors of
these poetic effusions would probably be dry
INSURANCE AGAINST DTTLNESS. 105
enough by the time they reached middle life.
He preferred, he said, a little gaudiness to
barren sand. A congregation we heard of was
apparently of the same opinion, whose secretary,
in asking for a second visit from a student in a
Free Church college who had favourably im-
pressed them, wrote thus : " We wish to hear
again a young gentleman whose name we have
forgotten, but who deals largely in stars,
flowers, and sunsets." There is an instinct in
favour of illustration, especially as a mode of
setting forth religious truth. "We find it in
every language and literature. That fact in
itself is an argument in favour of its eventual
soundness as a form of spiritual teaching.
But what is illustration ? When we examine
the matter we find that, whatever form it takes,
whether of metaphor, analogy, simile, fable or
parable, its essence consists in the setting
forth of spiritual truth in terms of matter.
It is the using of some lower and more familiar
form of experience to explain one that is
higher and less known. With the Christian
teacher, however, the symbol and the parable
drawn from nature are used, not simply as an
explanation, but also as an argument. And
the argument has, we believe, a strictly logical
basis, though it does not seem always to have
been clearly apprehended by those who use it.
That logical basis may be stated in different
106 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ways. One is Professor Huxley's affirmation
that matter has two sides a physical and a
spiritual. In this view the sermonic illus-
tration is simply a taking hold of both these
two sides and showing their mutual relation.
But there is a better statement of the truth
than that. It is that the higher forms of life
are simply the completion and fulfilment of the
lower. The lower and physical is full of
prophecy of the higher and spiritual, being
linked to it, not simply by likeness, but by
essence, the higher containing all the lower in
a sublimated form. The business of illustration
is to read and accurately interpret the voice of
the lower creation as it strains to utter its
message about the higher spheres which
contain the meaning of its own existence.
This sense of the interlocking of all life
spheres, of the unity and essential spirituality
of the universe, is the finding of our deepest
philosophy, and the burden of our noblest
poetry. Hegel and Malebranche and Augustine
have argued it to the brain ; Goethe and
Wordsworth and Tennyson have sung it to the
heart. Spiritual men in this way always
think double. When Thomas Jones, the poet-
preacher, as he lay dying, murmured to him-
self, " My little rill draws near the sea," every
word there was two-sided, one pointing matter-
wards the other spiritwards. He saw two
INSURANCE AGAINST DTTLNESS. 107
things at the same time the stream dropping
into the ocean, and the soul that had completed
its earthly course letting itself go into the
infinite deep of endless life.
Having got this view of what lies at the
basis of illustration as a valid form of religious
teaching, we are free for one or two practical
comments as to the use of it. And, first, illus-
tration, to be effective, must take its place as
part of the natural growth of the discourse. It
is this which condemns the frequent use of
encyclopaedias of illustration. The illustrations
taken there have not grown in the man's own
mind. They are slop goods, not made to
measure. However good the material may be,
the article will be a misfit. A true sermon is
an evolution, which follows very closely that
sketched for us in Genesis. First, there is
mere chaos, then the glimmering of light, then
the marking of boundary lines. Later on the
creation becomes green with tree and plant and
populous with life. The illustrations will come
at the right part of this evolutionary process.
They will leap forth from the treasures of the
man's own observation and of his own reading.
What will give them their special flavour will
be the mixing of his own personality with them.
Bichter says a new universe is created every
time a child is born. That is a strong way of
saying that every man's consciousness is an
108 CHURCH AKD WORLD.
instrument which reflects the universe at its
own special angle. This personal equation will
be found, not only in his first hand observations,
but in his reading in science, history, and
general literature. The facts which are common
to all the world will have their own special
message for him, and through him for
the people. He will never obtrude his indi-
viduality, but the flavour of it in all his think-
ing will be his greatest charm.
This leads to the observation that perhaps
the finest field of illustration is one which a
large class of preachers habitually neglect. It
is that of human nature as studied from the
life. A minister should be a pastor in order
that he may be a preacher. A preacher should
choose some poor neighbourhood as a hunting
ground, not only for souls, but for sermons. A
representative journalist once said, " There is
copy in every man you meet in Fleet Street, if
only you could get him to tell his story." And
if there is copy for the press there is certainly
matter for the pulpit. Any one who has heard
Mr. Moody will recognise that here in the
telling presentation of facts about human life
in its multitudinous forms, the humours of it,
the pathos, the tragedy, the triumph of it lies
perhaps the greatest element of his power. In
coming close to the life of the people, by actual
visitation and sympathetic intercourse, a high-
INSURANCE AGAINST DTTLNESS.
minded Christian teacher will confer priceless
boons upon a neighbourhood. But we doubt
whether what he gives will be more valuable
than what he takes away. Such a man can
never run dry and never become dry. It is said
that Newman sometimes wrote a sermon that it
might give him the opportunity of saying one
single sentence which he embedded in it. If
one sentence can suggest a sermon, a human
life carefully studied should suggest many.
There are some five millions of these sermon
subjects in London alone.
Illustrations serve sometimes to give the
hearer a holiday. A great preacher will not
hesitate now and then to put his hearers
through a bit of hard work, but then, for a
reward, he will let them into the playground.
They have had five minutes of stiff reasoning.
A. minute more and they would be looking out
of the window. But they will not get that
minute. Their leader knows his " psycho-
logical moment." At the right point he lets
them go. His style has changed. He has
flung open the door, and they find themselves
in the open field of some quaint personal
reminiscence, or of some restful scene in nature
where one gets the glint of waters and feels
the breezes blowing. How the people enjoy it !
They are in the hands of a master who knew
that the difficult bit of travelling through
110 CHURCH AND WORLD.
which he has brought them was not only good
to be traversed in itself, but would vastly
enhance the surprise that awaited them at the
other end. The pulpiteer who is not a master
but only a servant, would be afraid of such a
procedure. He is nervously anxious to secure
his little effect at the end of every one of his
oiled and scented sentences, and as a result
produces a sense of dead level and pretty
feebleness.
The pulpit should insure heavily against
dulness. The Church, in the present day,
cannot afford that the phrase " as dull as a
sermon" should circulate as a proverb. Sir
Wilfrid Lawson's prescription against drunken-
ness is, not to drink. In like manner our
recommendation to men whose distinguishing
characteristic as preachers is neither their
orthodoxy nor their heterodoxy, but the fact
that they are hopelessly dull, would be to ensure
against dulness in the pulpit by keeping out of
it.
THE MOTIVE FOR MISSIONS.
THE missionary movement is, like a good
many other things in the Church just now, in
a transition state. The arguments for it have
got to be restated. Many of the considerations
that moved our fathers to zeal in this direction
have lost their power. New horizons have
opened before our generation, and with them a
wholly new class of questions has arisen with
reference to the non-Christian world. If we
examine what is really in men's minds about
missions we find, for one thing, that the modern
science of comparative religion has had upon
them what, for the moment, is a damaging
effect. It is a new revelation to multitudes to
discover that in the Zend-Avesta, in Brahmin-
ism, in the maxims of Confucius, and above all
in Buddhism, there is so much that is excellent.
From this discovery the transition is easy to the
idea that the people among whom these systems
have grown up are well enough off religiously,
without our interference. Let this notion get
firm root in the popular mind, and it will go
112 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ill with missionary enterprise. But it ought
not to be difficult to show how utterly unrea-
sonable the idea is. If people will only take
the trouble to read their Bibles they will find
that all they are arguing for about the worth
of outside religions is fully conceded there.
The early Christian Church could see inspira-
tion in other systems besides its own. Did it
not, to begin with, recognise Judaism, with the
whole Old Testament literature, as inspired?
And yet Paul and his fellow apostles and
evangelists did not find in this anything which
made it superfluous for them to carry to the
Jewish people the message of Christ ! We find,,
later, such writers as Origen and Clement of
Alexandria loud in declaring their belief that
the Greek philosophy was, much of it, a
revelation of the Divine wisdom. But it
seems never to have occurred to them that the
mission of the Christian Church to Greek
as well as barbarian became thereby
annulled. They were too logical to accept
the argument that the possession of what was
in itself good formed a reason for keeping
people out of the enjoyment of what was im-
measurably better.
But this is not the only idea that has of late
played havoc with the spirit of missionary enthu-
siasm. Another, very widely spread, is that de-
rived from the supposed unsatisfactory results on
THE MOTIVE FOE MISSIONS. 113
native races of missionary effort. "We have all
met the superior person who assures us from
his own observation, or from that of another
superior person he knows, that the native who
has been missionised is infinitely more intoler-
able than the untouched specimen. This kind
of talk goes round and does its work. What is
the reply ? One could easily rush to the mass
of evidence on the other side such, for in-
stance, as that of Dr. Darwin about the Terra
del Fuegans, or that contained in the changed
condition of South Sea islands, where ship-
wrecked mariners, who would in the old days
have been killed or eaten, are now sure of
hospitality and kindness. But there is no need.
The missionary advocate can afford to be
generous. Let him concede everything with a
grain of truth in it that is said to the dis-
paragement of the evangelised native. Let
him admit that he is often enough a grotesque
specimen of humanity, that his morality is
sometimes grievously at fault, that he can be a
hypocrite, and that he has been known, in
common with professors nearer home, to under-
stand the art of making orthodoxy pay. What,
after all, does this amount to ? Simply to what
we knew before, that first steps are apt to be
awkward ones, and that beginnings at improve-
ment often produce effects the reverse of allur-
ing. The log hut and corn patch of the pioneer
8
114 CHURCH AND WORLD.
settler may easily be condemned as a blot on
the wild beauty of primitive nature. A wiser
criticism recognises in them the commencement
of civilisation. Our unchristianised native may
walk in his old rut with a certain grace, per-
haps. But it leads nowhere. To get him out
involves very likely much stumbling and
sprawling. But once out he is free to stretch
himself, and to scale all the heights of progress.
And, moreover, the talk about letting heathen
nations and races alone comes all too late. We
have not let them alone. We are, and have
been, in contact with them at all points, and
the question for serious people is by what
methods, and on what principles, shall that
contact continue to be regulated. We in
England have an enormous responsibility in
this matter. To take India. We have not let
the native alone there. We have, on the con-
trary, shaken down his government, his political
system, his religious belief. What are we
going to put in their place ? In China we have
not let the native alone. We have burst open
his forts with our cannon, and demoralised him
by millions with our opium. This is a tolerably
heavy account on one side of the balance-sheet,
and it is surely not going beyond the merest
justice to demand that what we have of
philanthropy, of love, and of truth should be
offered these peoples if only in the way of
THE MOTIVE FOE MISSIONS. 115
redress. They have received much, of our
worst it is only fair that they should get
also of our best.
These are arguments which need to be put
boldly before the country, because they rest on
solid fact and common-sense, and as such appeal
to the wide average of minds. And yet, after
all, they do not, and never will, constitute the
real motor force of missions, for in the last
result it will be found that if Christianity is to
spread it is because it is a live thing, and that
it is the property of live things to propagate
themselves. When the Church ceases to grow
it has begun to die. But wherein lies the
Church's vitality ? Here it is we pass from the
practical to the transcendental, to that mystic
realm, hidden from the material gaze, where
life processes have their beginning. For the
Church's life is in the individual contact of its
members with Him who is the Life. The men
who are the soul of missions, whether in the
field abroad or in the heart of the Church at
home, are those who have felt within them the
mysterious double force of spiritual attraction
its force centripetal and centrifugal. Two
voices have spoken to them, one saying " Come "
and the other " Go." There has been felt, first,
a sense of need and emptiness, drawing the
soul to Him who alone can satisfy and enrich
it; then, when the heart is filled with a
116 CHUKCH AND WORLD.
feeling of what life can become, in enjoyment
and in possibility of growth, under the touch of
Christ, an immense desire comes that men
everywhere should share the boon. There is
the missionary spirit in its genesis and develop-
ment.
WOMAN IN EXCELSIS.
(NOT TO BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY J
SCENE : After dinner at a " Ministers' Fraternal"
The assembled brethren are discussing coffee and
cigars. Amongst the tobacco clouds are dimly dis-
cernible our friends the Rev. CLEMENT OLDWAYS
(host), and the Revs. HUGH HIGHSPRYTE, ERASMUS
BLACKBYLE, WILBEBFOECE WITTYER, and EUSTACE
TWITTERLEY.
TWITTEKLEY : I went to hear Mrs. Besant
the other night. It was a prodigious draw.
The place was crammed. We don't get crowds
like that to hear us.
WITTYEK: Evidently it takes a woman to
make a boom nowadays. If the " Georgia
Magnet " were a man, there would not be
half the power in his magnetism, I'll wager.
HIGHSPKYTE: Here's to the health of "The
Coming Woman." She is going to make us
all " sit up," you may depend.
BLACKBYLE : Then may the coming woman
be a very long while in coming !
118 CHURCH AND WORLD.
WITTYER : Don't make any mistake, Black-
byle. She is already at the doors, and I for
one hail her advent. Man has been prome-
nading long enough on the page of history,
and has, I am bound to say, made himself
quite sufficiently ridiculous. It is time the
other side had an innings.
BLACKBYLE : With us as spectators and
critics ! Very well. It will be amusing, at
any rate. But 1 think it is we who will have
the fun.
WITTYER: There is more in all this than
you think, Blackbyle. We are in a new
situation, and woman is the dark horse in it.
Man has been in full training for centuries,
and we know pretty well where to place him ;
whereas woman is as yet an undeveloped
force.
HIGHSPRYTE : Yes. She is going to upset lots
of things. Her first business will probably be
to revolutionise the Church.
OLDWAYS : Good heavens ! I hope not.
What do you mean?
HIGHSPRYTE : Well, don't you see, for one
thing, that she is already halfway up the
pulpit stairs, and that before you are much
older she will be inside the door in full
possession ?
OLDWAYS : I trust that will not come in
my day. I consider it quite unscriptural.
WOMAN IN EXCELSIS. 119
HIGHSPEYTE : It will, unless your day is a
very short one. She is there already in
America, and fashions of this sort are very
catching.
BLACKBYLE : The first thing they will do, I
suppose, when they get there, will be to put St.
Paul's Epistles into the Apocrypha. The
Apostle is too heterodox on their question.
HIGHSPEYTE : Not a bit of it. They will
be on excellent terms with St. Paul. They will
explain in the sweetest manner that the
nineteenth century has outgrown his prescrip-
tions about woman, as it has outgrown those
about meats offered to idols.
TWITTEELEY : I don't like the prospect alto-
gether. There are so many things to be con-
sidered. For instance, I agree with the saying
that " a soft voice is an excellent thing in
woman." Now it seems to me if they take to
oratory they will ruin their voices. They will
get a habit of mouthing and shrieking which
will be dreadful.
WITTYEE : What nonsense you are talking,
Twitterley ! Don't you think women know how
to manage their voices in public as well as men ?
Patti makes more money out of her voice than
any man can out of his. I have heard Mrs.
Josephine Butler talk to a crowded audience in
St. James's Hall. Every word went home, but
she didn't either strain or scream.
120 CHUECH AND WOULD.
OLDWAYS : But that is only a small part of
the objection. I am convinced that for woman
to take a leading part in Church teaching or
administration would be disastrous.
WITTYEB : Not too loud, Oldways, or Mrs.
O. may hear you !
OLDWAYS (with dignity) : My wife, sir, knows
my sentiments on these points. I am of opinion
that woman, lacking as she is in the logical and
philosophical faculty, and with her emotional,
and I may say, hysterical tendencies, would, if
she were in authority, carry the Church into all
manner of wild extravagances both of thinking
and of practice.
WITTYER: There would be always a suffi-
ciently strong counterbalancing influence.
OLDWAYS : Where ?
WITTYER : In the deadly dulness of the
average man.
HIGHSPRYTE : That's letting man off too
easily, Wittyer. I was going to answer Old-
ways by asking him a question.
OLDWAYS : What's that ?
HIGHSPRYTE : My question is, whether it
would be possible for woman in her wildest
moods to show us greater absurdities than have
been perpetrated by ecclesiastical man P
BLACKBYLE : I don't know what tomfooleries
are to be put down to your individual account,
Highspryte ; but I am not going to accept your
WOMAN IN EXCELSIS. 121
general indictment. Man has a very respectable
record in ecclesiastical history.
HIGHSPETTE : True ; and so has woman. But
we are talking about absurdities. Could she
invent anything more outrageous in the way of
doctrine than some of the Gnostic theories, or
than the tenets, say, of the Miinster Anabap-
tists ? Could she beat man's record in the way
of sect-making ? What do you say of that one
which founded itself on the act of contemplating
the navel as an aid to devotion, or that of the
Taskodrungites, who separated themselves from
the rest of the world by the habit of praying
with the forefinger on the nose !
TWITTEKLET : You are putting things pretty
strong, Highspryte, as usual. What I plead
for is the preservation of woman's womanliness.
What I am disposed to concede to you is that
woman's advent as a teacher in the Church
would tend to bring out the tenderer side of
spiritual truth, and in that way be a gain.
BLACKBYLE : Stuff and nonsense ! Man
thinks woman tender. That is simply his
stupid idealism. She isn't tender a bit. In
Church history she has been a good deal more
savage than man where she has had the
chance. It was a woman who demanded
John the Baptist's head. The bloodiest reli-
gious persecution in English history was under
a woman's rule. In France it was Catherine
122 CHURCH AND WORLD.
*V
de Medicis who planned the St. Bartholomew
massacre.
HIGHSPRTTE : Really, Blackbyle, you ought
to consult your doctor. I am afraid he will tell
you sad things about your liver ; but I am going
to tell you how this pulpit contention can be
beautifully compromised. Don't look incredu-
lous, Blackbyle.
BLACKBYLE : On the contrary, I am all atten-
tion. To watch you riding your very latest
hobby will do me more good than any amount
of doctoring.
HIGHSPRYTE : I am delighted to think that it
is likely to be so useful. But you have made it
rather difficult for me to state my idea. What
I was going to say was something like this : In
the existing condition of things the ministers'
wives are regarded as belonging almost as much
to the church as to the minister. You have
only to carry that a little further. Let colleges
be founded for the special education of minis-
ters' wives. Let it be understood that the first
qualification for admission is a capacity for
public work in the Church. Then, in
due time, let each marry a minister and
share his pulpit as well as his domicile. Don't
laugh, Wittyer. You remember in Plato's
Republic marriages are made by the State,
and Plato was no fool. In the Moravian
Mission Society my plan is how they actually
WOMAN IN EXCELSIS. 123
do things. And I understand it works very
well.
WITTYER: If I were on that College Com-
mittee I should insist that the candidates were
at least good-looking.
HIGHSPRYTE : We might allow a large dis-
cretion, Madame de Stael was no beauty, but
she boasted she could win any man to whom
she was allowed to talk for five minutes.
TWITTERLEY : I can't follow you in this,
Highspryte. You are cutting at the root of one
of my dearest privileges.
HIGHSPRYTE : How so ?
TWITTERLEY : My dear fellow, it is in this way.
When I am in the pulpit, and my wife in her
pew before me, I get a sweet revenge for a
week's private lecturing. I hold forth there
for a whole half -hour without her being able to
open her lips to contradict me. But if she gets
the floor in the evening . . . !
At this point in the conversation our informant
was, unhappily, obliged to leave. We are left,
therefore, to conjecture what, in Twitterley's view,
would happen if his wife took the floor in the evening.
He adds, however, that to judge by the faces of the
other members of the party, a considerable amount
of alarm had been created in the minds of the
fraternity by the last speaker's view of the new con-
jugal terrors that might await them in the future.
TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE.
A TRAVELLER, passing through one of our
great English manufacturing towns, would find
his eye drawn by the varieties of structure of
its mills and factories. Some he would see to
be massive pieces of masonry, with a certain
pretension to architecture, while others would
be mere sheds. To the merchant, however,
whose interest in the town is in the goods he
purchases there, this question of its buildings,
whether well or badly situated, whether impos-
ing or otherwise, is one of no importance. The
point with him is the quality of the products.
In like manner, as we survey the various
structures, of different age and pretension,
which crowd the ecclesiastical horizon of to-day,
we may take either of these ways of regarding
them. We may, for instance, if we choose, pay
exclusive attention to their form. Dealing with
them thus, we can speak of Anglicanism as an
Episcopal form of Protestantism, with its
doctrine and discipline contained in the Thirty-
nine Articles and in the Book of Common
TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. 125
Prayer ; of Methodism as a form of Evangelical
Arminianism, with, an itinerant ministry ; of
Congregationalism as a system based on the
principle of the autonomy of churches ; and
so on.
But what, after all, have we learned from
this ? When we have mastered all the differ-
ences in creed and in ecclesiastical order which
separate these communions, we are still ignorant
of what, if we would really understand their
significance, it is most important for us to
know, viz., the quality of their products. The
kind of inquiry which this age is beginning to
get most interested in is, not as to the theo-
retical peculiarities of this or that system, but
as to what kind of men Episcopalians are as
distinguished from Methodists, and Congrega-
tionalists as compared, say, with Catholics.
Do these different bodies produce broadly-
marked types of men, and, if so, what judg-
ment may we come to about these types ?
As soon as we open an inquiry of this kind
we come upon some interesting results. We
discover, for instance, that some communions
have been much richer in the number and
variety of their types than others. And we
are taking it for granted here that this richness
is in itself a good thing. A dead level of
sameness is not admirable anywhere. An age
or a spiritual condition which has produced
126 CHURCH AND WOKLD.
in abundance boldly-marked individualities
gives evidence of a fruitful soil, and con-
tributes to the enlargement of life on all
its sides. Is not, for instance, the Christian
tradition and ancestry the more valuable to
us in that it contains, not simply the direct
progenitors of the average British Christian
of to-day, but such men as the prophet-
evangelists of the sub-apostolic age, the un-
worldly figures of a Francis of Assisi, of a
Bernard, of a George Fox, and of a multitude
of others whose habits and life-theories have
been so strangely different from our own ?
We have just said that some churches strike
us as much richer than others in their variety
of type. And this, indeed, is what we should
naturally expect. Who could be surprised to
find a system like the .Roman Catholic, whose
sway has extended across such vast spaces of
time, and over such immense and diversified
populations, to be much more fertile in this
respect than, say, one of our English Non-
conformist sects, with an existence of one or
two centuries, and an influence restricted to
people of the same nationality, and largely of
the same social position ?
But when this has been granted it is not
enough to satisfactorily account for what
strikes us, as we survey certain fields of
English religious life, as a curious dearth in
TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. 127
this respect. Take, for instance, our English
Congregationalism. It has its one type of
minister and its one type of layman. One,
and not more than one. Their characteristics
are sufficiently familiar. Its minister is a
man well - informed rather than learned,
married, or if celibate never so from re-
ligious principle, progressive in his views
both of politics and theology, practical, good-
humoured, sincere in his religion and his
philanthropy, but without a trace of mysti-
cism, believing in a good dinner, and holding
on to this world with both his hands. And
the Congregational layman, allowing for differ-
ences of position and pursuit, answers
accurately to this pattern. He is the English
bourgeois par excellence, a pushing man of
business, respected in his township, prominent
in local politics, keenly alive, as well as his
wife and daughters, to social advantages, with
just now a certain vagueness unknown to
his fathers in some of his religious ideas, but
making up for this by the vividness of his
appreciation of mundane things.
Here, again, of mysticism, of idealism, of a
world-forgetting devotion to the spiritual side of
things, there is no trace. Altogether, the two
characters are strong ones, and they form
admirable and, we will say, indispensable
ingredients of our English life. But they are
128 CHTTKCH AND WORLD.
not enough, and that Congregationalism seems
unable to produce other types is distinctly to be
quoted against it.
In this respect a much younger body than
the Congregational has been far richer.
Methodism, in its ministry and laity, offers
innumerable reproductions of the type just
sketched. But within living memory it has
had others of a very different mould. The
older generation has vivid recollections of men
in its ministry of the Bramwell and Stoner
genus ; men who would spend whole nights
in prayer, before whose preaching men were
stricken down as with shocks of electricity,
who, with fast and vigil and hardship volun-
tarily endured, habitually mortified the flesh,
and who, wherever they went, became centres
of great spiritual movements, the result of
their labours. And the laity of that genera-
tion contained such men as William Dawson,
the Yorkshire yeoman, who farmed his land
for a living, but spent his Sundays and many
weekdays in proclaiming, with irresistible and
overwhelming eloquence, the principles of that
religion by which his whole soul was possessed.
And let us not forget that that most daring
and original of modern religious movements,
the Salvation Army, has had its origin in
Methodism. Why could not Congregationalism
have produced it ? The question ought to set
TYPES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE. 129
some of us pondering. A wider question, indeed,
may be asked : Why is it that never, by any
chance, Congregationalism produces an original
shall we say an extreme type of religious life ?
To conceive of a Father Ignatius, or such a
man as the Cure of Ars, appearing in its ranks,
is beyond the range of the imaginative faculties.
There are in the present day men and women
born into the world to whom the ascetic life
still presents irresistible attractions. Brother-
hoods and sisterhoods are springing up to meet
the craving of such natures. But these are all
outside the Congregational boundary. Within
its enclosure one plant grows, and only one.
Will it always be so, or will the composite
influences of earlier ages, or the study, by some
of its younger minds, of other aspects of the
inward life than the one to which it at present
exclusively holds, avail to break in upon its
present monotony ?
Keeping to the present, we may, however,
from considerations of the kind just advanced,
deduce with tolerable confidence certain con-
clusions. One is, that a body like the Congre-
gational (to keep to the one instance we have
selected for illustration) would never, as it at
present exists, suffice for the religious needs
and instincts of a whole people. Another is,
that the present division of the Church into
differing sects serves a purpose entirely separate
9
130 CHURCH AND WORLD.
from that contemplated by their founders, and
perhaps more useful. They were established
to propagate and defend certain sets of doctrines
and form of Church order. What they have
done is to enrich the world with new indi-
vidualities.
The Society of Friends has taught the world
some excellent things, but it has put it under
perhaps deeper obligation by producing the
Quaker man and the Quaker woman whom
Charles Lamb has sketched for us so tenderly.
On the whole it is well for us, as we stand
each at our post, doing our best with what we
have of truth to defend and of work to do, to
realise that the Church as a whole is greater
than our part of it, and that outside of our own
struggle and the ends we seek to gain by it,
great laws are operating towards results beyond
our present ken.
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON.
(Oi*r THE NEWS OP HIS DEATH.)
" THERE is more love in the hearts of Chris-
tian people than they know of themselves. We
mistake our divergencies of judgment for
differences of heart; but they are far from
being the same thing. For my part, I believe
that all spiritual persons are already one." To
these words, which we take from Mr. Spur-
geon's last message to his fellows, the sorrowing
sympathy of countless hearts, who now mourn
his loss, has set its seal. For Mr. Spurgeon
was a power, not only over all the English-
speaking world vast as is the constituency
which that phrase represents but throughout
the boundaries of Protestantism. His writings,
translated into different languages, have been
spread broadcast in Europe, and to the English
worshipper in the Protestant churches of
France, Switzerland, Holland, or Germany, it
has been quite a familiar experience to hear
quotations from the sermons of their eminent
132 CHURCH AND WORLD.
compatriot in the religious exhortations
there given. At home his presence and work
had become a recognised part of English life,
and Christian people had learned to look on him
as not only a foremost but an almost indispens-
able religious force. The great career is now
consummated, and we can survey it from end to
end. "Call no man happy till he dies/' said
the classic proverb. Mr. Spurgeon is happy in
his death, crowning, as it does, a life lived in
the full blaze of publicity, but against which
no man's finger can point a reproach, and
which, beginning with predictions of failure
from numberless critics, ends amid the universal
esteem of his countrymen and of Christendom.
Middle-aged men send back their thoughts to-
day from the death scene by the Mediterranean
to the beginning of this career, when an
astonished congregation, in an all but deserted
London chapel, woke up to the consciousness
that in the raw country lad before them a new
religious power had appeared, and then on
through the years in which the splendid com-
bination of physical, mental, and spiritual
energy stored there was unfolding itself,
cutting ever broader and deeper channels for
its movement, until by spoken voice, by sermon,
book, and magazine, by religious and philan-
thropic institution, as well as by the nameless
influence which flowed from so distinct and
CHARLES HADDON SPUKGEON. 133
original a personality, the Baptist preacher was
touching his age at every point. It is all over
now ; but the generation which has travelled
over so large a portion of the life- journey with
him in its ranks will not easily forget their
fellow-traveller.
In attempting an estimate of his character
and work the mind recurs instinctively to that
other prominent figure in the religious world
who has so recently gone from among us. We
refer, of course, to Cardinal Manning. And
the association is by no means one entirely of
contrast. At opposite ecclesiastical poles in
position and opinion, they were alike, not only
in being the centre of a vast religious and
philanthropic work which bore largely the
stamp of their own individuality, but also in
some of their mental qualities. They were
both marked in a striking degree amongst
modern Englishmen by the absoluteness of their
convictions. The authority enjoyed by both in
the different sections of the Church to which
they belonged, and in a large measure outside
those limits, was in no small degree owing to
the air of finality with which these two entirely
sincere men uttered themselves on the subjects
of faith. No one could listen to Mr. Spurgeon
without feeling that the authority with which
he spoke was born of intense conviction. His
power lay in realising, as few men do, the
134 CHURCH AND WORLD.
things of the spiritual world. To get this in
such measure as to make a man in a supreme
degree a prophet to his generation seems to
demand the working of heredity through many
generations. The religious force and insight
which made John Wesley the seer of the
eighteenth century came to maturity in him,
after working through both lines of his
ancestors from far back in the family record.
The like was true of Mr. Spurgeon. In the
family which fled from the Low Countries
during Alva's bloody persecution, one of whose
members was in Chelmsford gaol in Charles
n.'s reign for conscience' sake, and which con-
tained afterwards a goodly line of preachers of
the Word, we see the elements slowly forming
which were to culminate in this unique religious
personality.
We repeat, it was his spiritual force which
drew men. Many who did not accept his
opinions on more than one outlying religious
question, and on some which he regarded as
vital, thankfully reckoned him as their teacher
because of this. Said Dr. Pusey once : " I love
the evangelicals because of their great love for
Christ." And multitudes of educated Christian
men loved Charles Spurgeon, spite of intellec-
tual differences, for that reason. From the
days when Samuel Rutherford so preached his
Master as to compel the Duke of Argyll once
CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON. 135
to cry out, " Oh ! man, keep on in that strain/*
no one, we may safely say, has set forth the
claims of Christ to men's love and service with
such winning sweetness, with such melting-
pathos, with such eloquence of the inmost soul
as Charles Spurgeon. It may be that the dark
background of his theology, to which the mind
of this age could not by any effort accommodate
itself, threw into greater relief this side of his
teaching. The outside darkness of unbelief
and irreligion was indeed made very terrible.
But the inner world of spiritual experience was
wondrous fair. And no human computation
will be able to reckon the number of weary
toilers in the working and lower middle classes
whose narrow surroundings have been bright-
ened and idealised by the glow from the realm
of faith to which he introduced them. It was
a great thing which this man achieved, to con-
vince multitudes of struggling people, in the
midst of a life which everything outward
tended to belittle, that their character and
career were a matter of infinite concern to the
Power who made them, that they could not
afford to treat sin lightly, or to throw them-
selves away as though they were of no account.
The Anglo-Saxon race is not oratorical by
temperament ; but it has produced orators, and
Mr. Spurgeon was in their foremost rank.
Preachers of all denominations have found in
186 < iiIKCH AND WORLD.
him a model of what utterance should be, to
produce the maximum of popular effect. We
are not sure if the greatest profiter by this
form of his example has not been the Anglican
Establishment. It is easy to recognise, in the
free and impassioned utterance, without assist-
ance from manuscript, which has made the
reputation of some Episcopalian preachers, the
leader whom, remote enough from them in
ecclesiastical affinities, they have in this
respect, to their own great advantage, elected
to follow.
And yet at this moment the reflection forces
itself, whether Mr. Spurgeon did not limit his
influence by too great a devotion to the pulpit.
He might have lived longer and worked over
wider areas had he preached less and organised
more. He has died at fifty-eight. Wesley
saw his eightieth year. And to-day the in-
fluence of the Methodist leader, a century
after his death, works more effectively than
ever. Great preacher that he was, he under-
stood that to create machinery is better than to
be oneself the sole machine. The founder of
institutions survives the orator. The effective
Torce of a Chrysostom is surpassed by a Loyola,
and a General Booth may have proved wiser
in his generation than the pastor of the
Tabernacle. It is true that he did organise,
and effectively. But he was too lavish of
CHARLES HADDON SPUEGEON. 137
himself. He did prodigies with his individual
bow and spear, but great leaders are better
employed in creating armies and filling them
with their spirit than by exhibiting wonders
of individual strength and prowess.
The death of Mr. Spurgeon may be said to
close an epoch. The last quarter of a century
has seen the forms of religious thinking under-
going profound modification a process against
which he threw the whole weight of his
influence. That he was in this respect
conscious of fighting a losing battle added
something of sadness, and at times of extreme
bitterness, to his later utterances. In his
fight against the results of Biblical criticism
he was seconded by no name of real authority.
And there is no one left to whom the world
listens to carry on the war. It will not, how-
ever, be his attitude in the so-called Down-
Grade controversy that will be remembered,
any more than Mr. Bright will be thought of
in connection with his position on the Irish
question. It will be as the preacher who, with
unequalled power and success, delivered the
Gospel to his generation ; as the honest
Englishman, whose character, during forty
years of unexampled popularity, never swerved
from its simplicity and integrity ; as the lover
of his kind, who opened his heart to the cry
of the widow and the orphan, and gave
138 CHTTECH AND WORLD.
lavishly of his substance to every good work ;
as the orator who, before such masses of men
as no other speaker could statedly command,
displayed the strength, the richness, and the
persuasive power of the English tongue; as
the genuine Christian who, in a materialistic
age, set his fellows the example of a piety
without ostentation, of a faith without
fanaticism, and of an inner life intense
without being morbid, that the memory of
Charles Haddon Spurgeon will be cherished
by his fellow-countrymen.
GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTEE DAY.
(A PASSION WEEK MEDITATION.)
SAID Carlyle to Emerson, as once they sat
together watching a prospect which included a
distant church spire, " Strange, is it not, that
Christ's death at Jerusalem built yonder church? "
That event in far-off A.D. 30 will this week
occupy the thoughts of millions of minds. The
heart of the best part of the world is still in
Jerusalem. As an actual city of to-day it has
few attractions. Its streets are narrower and
dirtier even than those of the average Eastern
town. The spectacle of the jostling crowds
which, on the great religious anniversaries,
represent their rival and bitterly-opposed creeds,,
is not inspiring. It may be that, before long,
the screech of the locomotive and the complete
modernisation of the place will profane it more
effectually than did the Greek Antiochus when
he stood in the holy of holies of its Temple.
But there is a Jerusalem other than the one
which stands on the Judsean hills, and which
140 CHUKCH AND WORLD.
can never be touched by the defiler. It is the
city which lies in the hearts of Christians as the
place of deathless memories. " The Jerusalem
which is from above is free, which is the mother
of us all." When Newman saw Rome he felt
that Oxford was eclipsed. The City of the
Tombs of the Apostles, of the Appian way
along which St. Paul had walked, and of the
Catacombs, overmastered, in the force of reli-
gious association, any English shrine. But in
this respect Jerusalem is greater than Rome.
The seven hills yield to Mount Zion and to
Olivet. For the event there consummated, which
Christendom this week commemorates, is still
making the history of the world. After eighteen
centuries of inquiry and speculation men's gaze
is turned upon it with an interest keener than
ver, and with an emotion as deep and fresh as
that which filled the hearts of the first witnesses.
The science of criticism and the philosophy
of history, changing so greatly, as they have
done, our attitude towards the ancient litera-
tures, have turned their fiercest light upon the
records containing the history of Passion Week
and Eastertide, but without altering substan-
tially the Church's sense of their significance.
It is felt now, as of old, that they are, for one
thing, the story of the gaining a new position
in man's perpetual battle against Death. Pre-
viously, the world had made a poor show in the
GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER DAY. 141
presence of the dread enemy. The utmost
level it had reached was that of resignation,
and it did not often gain that. The best con-
solation the philosophy both of the earlier or
later ages has offered was, perhaps, that con-
tained in the saying of La Bruyere, that the
universality of Death was its greatest mitiga-
tion. " Had some been permitted to live while
others died, the bitterness of dying would have
been tenfold augmented."
The average feeling of antiquity reflects
itself in the despair of Cicero at the grave of
his daughter ; and in the wail of Anacreon, the
poet of amours and of revelry, who, at the end
of life, bemoans himself thus in his last ode :
" I am no longer young. It is on this account
I groan, for I fear Tartarus, and the abyss of
Hades is horrible." And in modern times, in
the circles where the Christian tradition has
lost its power, the shadow of death falls with
all its melancholy gloom. Pierre Loti, the
new French Academician, has just published a
book called " The Book of Pity and of Death."
It is an unspeakably mournful dirge, whose
burden is the inevitable passing away of all that
one loves, devoured one after another by the
remorseless destroyer who preys on man. Its
picture of gloom is unrelieved by a ray of hope.
But there is another Book of Pity and of
Death to wit, the New Testament whose
142 CHURCH AND WORLD.
finding is very different. It gives us the record
of infinite Pity stooping unto death, and then
places over against that a wonderful history and
doctrine of Resurrection. That history and
doctrine have taught men how to die. The his-
toric saying of Wesley concerning his followers,
" Our people die well," has been true of every
age of Christian faith. From the holy triumph
of Polycarp, amid the torments of martyrdom,
to the beautiful trust of a Catherine Tait, when
she and her husband, the future Archbishop,
in their fever-stricken home at Carlisle, yielded
to God, one after another, five lovely children,
without one doubt as to their Lord's goodness
or the blessedness of their loved ones being
permitted to enter their bleeding hearts, the light
that was kindled in Christ's tomb has not failed.
The import of the death at Jerusalem as a
sacrifice is also fully recognised by the Church
of to-day. That death was marvellously timed.
Outsiders may call it a coincidence, or a plain
sequence of perfectly natural events, which
made the drama of the Crucifixion to fall in
Passover week, the week in which the Jewish
system of sacrifice had its great and crowning
celebration. But the Christian instinct, which
found in this fact a profound and world-wide
significance, which held this death as an illus-
tration for all time of sacrifice in its highest
form, and saw in the victim " the Lamb slain
GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER DAY. 143
from the foundation of the world," is one
which no subsequent findings, either of science,
of philosophy, or of criticism, have availed to
shake. And the death was followed by a
resurrection. Of its mode, of what may be
called its natural history, we know nothing 1 .
But as a power, the resurrection is operating
to-day as distinctly and as evidently as any
force in Nature. As certainly as the inscrutable
force around us in this glad Springtime is
making a new world of life and beauty, so
the resurrection power of the Crucified made,
and is making, a new world in the sphere of
morals and of the spiritual order.
To Goethe the proof of the divineness of
Christianity lay in its treatment of the weak,
the lowly, and the downtrodden. Heine ex-
pressed a similar thought when he said Chris-
tianity was the religion of sorrow. The world
needs such a religion, for it is full of the weak,
and very full of sorrow. The sun rises every
day upon multitudes whose inner gloom its
brightest rays can neither penetrate nor chase
away. Growth is ever through suffering. No
great cause comes to birth without pangs of
travail. No nation has struggled to its feet with-
out shedding of patriot blood ; no house has been
without its skeleton, and no heart without its
bitterness. This great army of the suffering
has been drawn to the Cross as to a magnet,
144 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and they have found in it a marvellous power
of healing. The Divine pity that has looked
upon them from it has drawn the sting from
their wounds. The Great Sufferer has proved
the Great Healer. Calvary has ever been the
refuge of great souls with lost causes.
Athanasius, wandering in the Thebaid, pursued
by an Emperor's wrath; Chrysostom, exiled
from Church and work, dying in the wintry
snows of Pontus ; Savonarola, his life-work a
wreck, and his body in the hands of the exe-
cutioners; Mazzini, a fugitive, his country
enslaved, and a price set upon his head, turned
instinctively in thought to Him who from His
Cross looked seemingly also upon a lost cause.
They felt, as all fighters for the right have a
right to feel, that that mighty " stoop to
conquer," which by death opened a kingdom of
heaven to man, is the eternal illustration of the
dynamic truth, that as in nature no atom of
matter or moment of force is ever lost, so no
pain of sacrifice, no moment of endurance for
the truth's sake, but shall find, here or some-
where, its equivalent in high result.
Good Friday is followed by Easter Day.
Hard by the Cross is the open tomb. The
Church is built, not upon death, but upon life.
It could no more subsist upon dead tradition
than spring could be made with the leaves of
last autumn. As to the ultimate fact lying
GOOD FRIDAY A5TO EASTER DAY. 145
behind the phenomena of life, whether in a
microbe or in the highest development of
spiritual consciousness, we have as yet almost
everything to learn. The Christian Church
cannot explain the mysteries behind its own
existence. Sufficient that it still throbs with
life, and that it still accounts for that life in
the salutation with which the Russian peasant
greets his neighbour on Easter Day : " Christ is
risen ! "
10
VOLTAIRE.*
IN his " Horse Sabbaticse " Sir James Stephen
says of Voltaire that he " has perhaps earned a
greater amount of fame amongst those who
have never read a line of his works than any
author of modern times." The truth of this
criticism is probably understated. For his
fame extends not only amongst those who have
never read a line of his works, but who know
next to nothing of his real character and of
the facts of his career. This is especially the
case with the English public, who, as a rule,
have very pronounced sentiments on the subject
of fhia work, without possessing about him
the veriest minimum of actual information.
Not that English literature has neglected
Voltaire. Translations of his principal works
have appeared at intervals, from the time of
Smollett downwards. And the last twenty
years have seen the publication of Sir E.
Hamley's "Voltaire," of Parton's "Life" in
* Life of Voltaire. By Francis Espinasse. The
" Great Writers " Series.
VOLTAIRE.
147
two volumes, and of the elaborate and brilliant
study of Mr. John Morley. That, despite these
endeavours to enlighten the English people,
there remains room for further effort appears
from the fact that we heard quite recently a
popular preacher quote the phrase " Ecrasez
I'Infame," on the supposition that the " In-
fame " referred to by Voltaire was Jesus Christ.
The present work is confined within certain
well-defined limits. The author sets himself to
tell the story of his hero's life. He makes no
attempt to analyse or to pass a critical judg-
ment upon his literary work. Indeed, in a book
of 200 pages, which has for its principal busi-
ness to trace a most remarkable and varied
career, stretching over eighty-three years, to
have endeavoured, besides, to discuss from a
critical standpoint the works of an author who
published over one hundred and fifty volumes
in prose and verse, dealing with almost every
conceivable subject of human thought, would
have been only to court failure. Without any
philosophical endeavours to account for Vol-
taire, to trace the previous evolution of life and
thought which made him possible, M. Espinasse
plunges at once into his story, which he tells in
an eminently bright and readable manner. The
successive phases of the poet's strange career,
which, beginning six years before the close of
the seventeenth century, lasted to the seventy-
148 CHURCH AND WORLD.
eighth year of the eighteenth, his Jesuit educa-
tion, the development of the dangerous talent
for satire which, exercised in lampooning the
Regent, gave him at twenty-three an acquaint-
ance with the interior of the Bastille ; the well-
known quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan,
when the satirist received a caning at the hands
of the aristocrat ; his three years in England,
and the profound impression produced on him
by Locke, Bolingbroke, and Pope ; his success-
ful financial operations, which made him prob-
ably the wealthiest man of letters who ever
lived ; his connection with Madame du Chatelet,
the three years at Berlin with Frederick the
Great, his Ferney life, the apotheosis of the
poet when the Paris population at the Comedie
Frangaise crowned him with laurel and paid
him royal, almost divine, honours, and the
actual as opposed to the apocryphal story of
his death, are told here in a manner which
holds the attention to the end.
When from the modern standpoint we come
to the study of this man and his work, it is
difficult to comprehend the notion which for so
long has ruled concerning Voltaire, that he was
a purely destructive force in the sphere of
morals and religion. It is much easier to
understand the criticism passed on him by an
atheistic reviewer of one of his works " C'est
un bigot. II est deiste."
VOLTAIRE. 149
It is true that lie attacked Christianity, that
he attacked it vehemently, and sometimes with
execrable taste. But we have to remember the
kind of Christianity he had before his eyes. It
was a system which, in his native land, allowed
profligates of family, who had spent a youth in
debauchery, to be advanced to bishoprics by the
intrigues of their mistresses, which ground the
faces of the poor, which permitted the infamies
of the corvee and of the Cl droit du Seigneur,"
which repressed all freedom of opinion, and
which in his own lifetime had broken men on
the wheel for supposed heterodoxy. No great
wonder is there that a soul in love with liberty
and hating oppression of every kind, should
find itself in fierce revolt against a system which
seemed identified with all this, and that the
wrath which had been aroused in it should have
failed to discern between the corruptions of the
Gospel and its essence.
That he entirely missed the real significance
of Christianity, and that his views of its origin,
its early successes and final establishment in
the world are to the last degree unphilosophical
and impossible, is now recognised by all compe-
tent students. It is equally true that in the
war he waged against what he regarded as
superstition he stooped to ribaldries unworthy
of his genius. And yet Voltaire had his religion,
which he stoutly maintained and sincerely
150 CHURCH AND WORLD.
believed. The church which he built at Ferney,
with the inscription, "Deo Erexit Voltaire,"
was by no means a monument of hypocrisy. He
was a convinced Theist, believing in a righteous
God and in a life to come. His poem on " The
Earthquake at Lisbon " is the utterance of a
modern Job, with a spirit overwhelmed by the
mysteries of life, and yet refusing to let go of
faith and resignation. The spirit of true piety
breathes in these lines :
La nature eat muette, on 1'interroge en vain ;
On a besoin d'un Dieu qui parle au genre humain :
H n'appartient qu' a lui d'expliquer son ouvrage
De consoler le faible et d'eclairer le sage.
*****
Humble dans mes soupirs, soumis dan ma souffrance
Je ne m'eleve point centre la Providence.
That he was able to appreciate a reasonable
religion when he met with it is shown by the
impression made on him by the religious life of
England. He thus describes an interview with
a well-known Quaker at Hampstead. "He
received me with his hat on, and came towards
me without the slightest inclination of the
body; but there was more politeness in his
frank and benevolent countenance than in our
fashion of drawing one leg behind the other,
and carrying in the hand what was made to
cover the head."
VOLTAIKE. 151
Speaking of the religious toleration charac-
teristic of England he observes : " One goes
to have himself baptized in the name of the
Father, through the Son, and to the Holy
Ghost ; another to have his son circumcised,
and some words in Hebrew which he does not
understand muttered over the infant ; while a
third betakes himself to his meeting-house, to
wait for the inspiration of God, with his hat
on his head and all are content. If in Eng-
land there were only one religion, its despotism
would be to be dreaded ; if there were only two
their followers would cut each other's throats ;
but there are thirty of them, and they live in
peace and happiness." The last sentence of
this curious passage may well be studied by the
ecclesiastics who are so desirous to-day of
welding the religious life of England into one
organic union.
A phase of Voltaire's work which our
countrymen in their estimate of him are apt to
leave out of sight is that in which he acted as
interpreter, to France and the Continent, of
English philosophy, literature, and scientific
discovery. In philosophy he was a disciple of
Locke and Bolingbroke. He was a great
admirer of Pope, whose " Essay on Man " in-
spired his own " Discours en vers sur 1'Homme."
It was he who made Milton and Shakespeare
known to his countrymen, and who expounded
152 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and defended, in the teeth of strong prejudices,
the system of Sir Isaac Newton.
The charge of indecency is brought against
him as a writer of comedy, and undoubtedly
works like La Pucelle, to say nothing of his
way sometimes of treating religious questions,
form an outrage on propriety. But he is not
so gross as his contemporary, Dean Swift, and
it is he who, writing of our Wycherley, declares
that "he is too indecent for the French." It
must never be omitted from our view of him
that throughout his life he declaimed with
tongue and pen against every species of tyranny
and oppression, and was ever ready to sacrifice
time, money, and energy in the cause of help-
less people whom he believed to be wronged-
His conduct in the affair of the Galas family,
whose head, a Protestant of blameless character,
was done judicially to death at the instigation
of a Catholic mob, and in which Voltaire
laboured unceasingly, and lavished money, until
the innocence of the family was proved and
restitution made, gave him the gratitude of the
Protestant world. His humanitarian instincts
as well as his business capacity were shown in
the refugee colony he established at Ferney,
where watch-making and silk weaving were
carried on with a success which made it one of
the most prosperous industrial centres in
Europe.
VOLTAIRE. 153
In this article we have followed the example
of the biography before us, and have dealt with
the man rather than his writings. But the
author who, in history, produced the Charles
the Twelfth and " Peter the Great," in criticism
gave us " The Essay on European Epic Poetry,"
in tragedy (Edipe and Zaire, the Henriade in
heroic poetry, and in philosophy the Diction-
naire Philosophique, to say nothing of the
innumerable other works on all subjects which
flowed from that tireless pen, revealed therein
an intellect whose versatility, level of perform-
ance, and influence over all the contemporary
spheres of thought and life, secure it against
all detraction as one of the prime forces of the
eighteenth century.
BUNYAN AS A CLASSIC.
THAT the Baptist tinker, who suffered years
of imprisonment at the hands of the Established
Church for unlicensed preaching and the hold-
ing of conventicles, should now have his works
published at the Clarendon Press of that Oxford
University which has been always regarded as
the centre of Anglican authority and chief
opponent of all ecclesiastical irregularities, may
be taken as a measure, not only of Bunyan's
literary claims, but also of the distance in the
matter of literary and theological judgments
which lies between his age and ours. It took a
long time for Bunyan to be recognised as an
English classic. His first audiences were
mainly of the kitchen, and it needed more than
one generation to enable society to make up its
mind that he was possible in the drawing-room.
The common people had long recognised him as
the great dramatist of their religious life before
Macaulay's brilliant essay, by putting upon him
the hall-mark of critical appreciation, made
fashionable people willing to avow themselves
BUNYAN AS A CLASSIC. 155
amongst his admirers. To-day no one disputes
his right to share with Milton the title of the
prophet-poet of Puritanism. The one has
thrown its religious system into an epic, in
which the loftiest imaginative genius is allied
to encyclopaedic learning. The other has made
the soul's inner life the theme of a series of
dramatic presentations which, unaided as they
are by any study of classic models or by any
considerable acquaintance with general litera-
ture, remain, for their freshness, their actuality,
their vivid bodying forth of inner spiritual
conditions in terms of external life, unique in
the history of religious teaching, while occupy-
ing a place apart in the domain of imaginative
literature.
The use of allegory as a vehicle for convey-
ing religious ideas is, of course, as old almost as
religion itself. Seneca and Cicero apologise for
the fables of their classic mythology as forms in
which religious truths are at once outlined and
veiled. The Brahmans of India make a similar
claim for the stories about Vishnu and Siva.
In Christian literature, one of the earliest works
extant after the apostolic age, the " Shepherd
of Hennas," is a curious, though it must be
admitted a somewhat weak, specimen of the
allegoric style. The notion of the inner life as
a pilgrimage has been present in various forms
to ecclesiastical writers of every age. Bona-
156 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ventura suggests it in his " Seven Roads of
Eternity." Outside the Church, Lucian uses
the idea in the famous sceptical allegory, in
which he sets forth the kingdom of truth as
inaccessible because of the multitude of cross
roads, and of guides who offer contradictory
directions.
The mystery plays of the Middle Ages, in
which hell and heaven were represented, the
one by a big hole at the back of the scaffold,
down which the personators of devils and of the
wicked were somewhat roughly precipitated, and
the other by a raised platform on which men
and boys in white robes stood for saints and
angels, may be said to have been an antici-
pation, in a ruder and more concrete form, of
Bunyan's Christian dramas. Nothing, how-
ever, that had been done in this department
previously detracts in the slightest degree from
the prodigious originality and marvellous
creative power displayed in these works. It is
improbable that in writing them the author
consulted any authorities except his Bible, his
own heart, and the daily life about him. That
life was a very strenuous one all round, and
it is here vividly reflected. " The Pilgrim's
Progress," as well as " The Holy War," is
a book of combats. The journey it describes
is one in which the hero meets a foe at
every other corner, and in which shrewd
BUNT AN AS A CLASSIC. 157
blows are being exchanged on every possible
occasion.
The Englishman, it may be said, is a born
fighter, and rather likes taking his religion in
this fashion. Bunyan, moreover, had been
through the Parliamentary wars, and had
handled a pike himself. To a contemporary of
the Ironsides it was natural that theological
ideas should shape themselves in martial forms.
But it was surely of the inspired genius that
was in him that, while fascinating youth and
age alike by his stirring battle-pieces, he should
teach the world that the most real history of
all that is transacted on this planet is that in
which the combats delivered are not with blare
of trumpet and roar of cannon, but silent, in
the viewless realms within, where the soul of
man struggles against the brute in him, where
the victories are of faith against doubt, of spirit
against flesh, of conscience and the sense of
duty against self-indulgence.
Of his two principal works, " The Holy
War " is as far inferior to " The Pilgrim's
Progress " as is " Paradise Regained " to
tf Paradise Lost," or Goethe's continuation of
Faust to the original drama. The theme itself
does not offer the possibilities of its great
rival. The journey of the " Progress " carries
us over new ground at every step, abounds in
incident, and ends in a consummation worthy
158 CHURCH AND WORLD.
of what has gone before. The War is, on the
contrary, confined to one spot, and has a
denouement which lacks finality. The characters
in the latter work are unsubstantial. We find
it impossible to fall in love with Captain
Boanerges, or Mr. Conscience, as we do with
Christian, Faithful, Mr. Greatheart, or old Mr.
Honest. The teaching, too, is, a good deal of
it, entirely unpalatable to the modern mind.
Shaddai is, one feels, a very arbitrary monarch,
who fails, somehow, to commend his sayings
and doings to our sense of right ; and some of
the answers to the arguments of Diabolus are,
alas ! by no means satisfactory. " Mansoul,"
in the nineteenth century, would not be dis-
posed to capitulate to the assault of Captain
Boanerges, whose "scutcheon was the three
burning Thunderbolts," or to Ensign Terror,
who " bare the red colours, and his scutcheon
was a burning fiery furnace."
Nevertheless, the work is a wonderful
one, and had the " Pilgrim's Progress "
never been written, would doubtless have
been regarded as a masterpiece of allego-
rising. It analyses with marvellous acuteness
the twists and turns of human thought and
desire, and there are hits at the then existing
state of society as caustic in their satire
as anything in Juvenal. The English is that
of our Bible, having the same sinewy Saxon
BUNYAN AS A CLASSIC. 159
strength^ the same fresh aroma of the olden
time.
One of the things which the spiritual
consciousness of the age may be expected
before long to evolve will be a nineteenth or
twentieth century Bunyan, with a new allegory,
in which the elements of thought, feeling, and
external environment which enter into the
modern religious position will, as in that of
the tinker, be clothed for us in forms of living
reality. An immense literary success is within
reach of the man who could do for the inner
life of to-day what the dreamer of two centuries
ago did for that of his generation. If Mr.
Stead ever gets committed to prison again, his
good genius ought to put him into a trance
where he may dream a Pilgrim's Progress for
our time.
THE RELIGIOUS ROGUE.
"THE City is full of cheating," said once,
from, a metropolitan pulpit, a distinguished
preacher since dead. To the lips of many pro-
fane persons, if they had heard this attack,
would have leaped the rejoinder, " Yes, and the
biggest cheats of all are your religious men."
The sentiment expressed here is unquestionably
a widely-spread one, and some recent events in
the world of finance have caused its repetition
in many circles with an added accent of cyni-
cism. It is worth while to inquire into the
feeling, and to ascertain, if possible, what
amount of truth lies at the bottom of it. The
religious rogue undoubtedly exists, and what
we are greatly in need of is an accurate natural
history of him. He has figured in history, and
very prominently in literature. But we do not
know of any really successful attempt to account
for him as a human phenomenon. We meet
him early. He appears in the New Testament
as the gentleman who makes long prayers and
who varies these exercises by devouring widows'
THE RELIGIOUS ROGUE. 161
houses. Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the author of
<( Litterae Obscurorum Virorum," whoever he
was, have painted him for us as the rascally,
libidinous monk who used his profession as a
cloak for all manner of villainies. Moliere has
given us Tartuffe, and Dickens has made the
character odious as Pecksniff and ridiculous as
Chadband. We have laughed at the religious
rogue in fiction, and loathed him in history
and actual life, without, perhaps, having
carefully analysed the elements in his com-
position, or examined, with any approach to
philosophy, his actual significance as related
to religion.
The character we are studying may be roughly
defined as a person who, while making an active
religious profession, outrages morality in some
one or other of its forms. In applying this
definition, however, we find ourselves at the
outset compelled to make an important distinc-
tion. When we talk about outraging morality
we are reminded that the moral standard has
been a variable quantity in different ages. Any
one, for instance, who spoke of the patriarchs
as religious rogues would show an utter lack of
fairness and of historical sense. Yet, accord-
ing to the Biblical record, these pioneers of
faith and religion conducted themselves in a
manner which, in the England of the nine-
teenth century, would assuredly have landed
11
162 CHURCH AND WORLD.
them in gaol at an early date. The seeming
anomaly is explained by the primitive social
code of the time they lived in.
This relation of character to the current
standard of morality must never be forgotten
in our judgment of individuals. To take an
illustration nearer our own day, it would be
absurd to question the religious sincerity or the
general character of George Whitfield or of
John Newton. Yet the one purchased slaves in
Georgia, and the other, for a time after his
conversion, was the captain of a slave ship.
Phenomena of this kind are all over the field
of history, and the explanation is that the
religious consciousness had not, in these cases,
reached its present clearness of vision and of
affirmation on special points of social morality.
When we come to the character which
genuinely answers to our definition, to the
commonly recognised religious rogue, we find his
presence in society resulting from two main
causes, which may be taken as, in their opera-
tion, dividing the genus we are studying into
two different species. The first of these is the
conjunction of a real religious feeling with a
meagre or undeveloped moral sense. We
have all of us laughed at the man in the mul-
berry suit whom Mr. Sam Weller found
shedding copious tears over his hymn-book, and
who succeeded in completely taking in that
THE RELIGIOUS ROGUE. 163
usually astute individual. What Dickens, how-
ever, fails to note is that this worthy's predilec-
tion for hymns and hymn-books might have been
real, without in any way interfering with his
essential rascality. He would be a very super-
ficial student of human nature who should
assert that because Henry VIII. developed into
a monster of blood and lust, his position as a
defender of theological orthodoxy was a mere
pretence. He would be equally so who denied
real fervour to the religious exercises of those
Sicilian bandits who practise all the rites of
their Church, but who pillage and, on occasion,
assassinate the travellers who fall into their
hands. There are, too, in our present-day
western communities, men of imaginative tem-
perament who can be excited to the highest
pitch by emotional religious worship, but who
are not to be trusted in matters of conduct. In
all these cases we are in contact, not with pre-
tence or hypocrisy, but with a want of assimila-
tion of the moral ideas which religion holds in
solution. These people find in religion affinities
with their imaginative and sentimental side,
but have little or no response to its ethical
teaching. When this class is numerous in a
so-called Christian community, it points to the
fact that the institutions and services of the
Church have been used there rather for the
excitement of feeling than for the enlighten-
164 CHURCH AND WORLD.
inent of the conscience and for the definite
training of character.
There are, however, as we have already con-
tended, religious rogues with a different history
from this behind them, and a different set of
causes operating towards their production.
These are men who began life with a genuine
spiritual enthusiasm, accepting Christianity
not only as an emotional inspiration, but as an
ethical discipline. For years they could be
counted on as sound, not only in the faith, but
also in character. All was well with them until
they found themselves crossing that part of the
life-journey which in a previous chapter
we have designated as "the Dangerous Years."
It was when well on in middle life, when
religious exhortations, by their very frequency,
had lost force; when an increasing position
had awakened an appetite for self-indulgence
and for the wealth which secures it, while
weakening the desire for spiritual satisfactions ;
when an ever-widening contact with the world
had made them familiar with, and tolerant of,
moral standards which in earlier days would
have shocked and repelled them; when other
men's defalcations and dishonesties towards
themselves had filled them with cynicism and
bitterness, that they arrived at a moral crisis
which many, thank God, come victoriously
through, but which in some cases eventuates
THE RELIGIOUS ROGUE. 165
in the production of our second class of religious
rogue.
It is a strange and terrible irony of circum-
stance that often in these histories the earlier
religious career comes to be, in a sense, the
instrument of downfall. While the ethical
steadfastness of men of this kind has been
declining, their reputation as persons of stand-
ing- in the Church has been widening, and has
secured for them and their enterprises a public
confidence which could not otherwise have been
reckoned upon. People trust them unlimitedly
with their money, with their goods, with the
conduct of their affairs. They awake some
morning to discover that the reputation on
which they had staked so much is entirely
unsupported by character, while the outside
world finds a new text on which to discourse
concerning the hollowness of religious profession
in general.
And yet these men are not like Bulstrode,
whom George Eliot depicted in " Middlemarch,"
who was a fraud from the beginning. They
were genuine once. But their ethical nature
had no " deepness of earth," and so, under the
scorching heat of the later life surroundings,
" it withered away." The history is humilia-
ting, but the lesson from it is salutary. Obsta
Principiis (".Resist the beginnings"), the motto
of one of our Oxford Colleges, is a precept for
166 CHURCH AND WORLD.
more than undergraduates. If we would escape
the precipice, we must learn to recognise at
sight the point where the level ceases and the
incline begins. And we must, in the fulness
and complexities of our mid-career, still com-
mence each day with the prayer we learned in
childhood at our mother's knee, " Lead us not
into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
LTJCIAN :
A STUDY OF THE SECOND CENTURY.
LUCIAN is sometimes spoken of as one of the
early opponents of Christianity. Whether he
may be with correctness thus designated is a
matter of some controversy, about which we
shall have something to say later. But apart
from his relation to the Christian Church, there
is to the student something peculiarly interest-
ing in the career and in the utterance of this
great heathen writer of the second century.
The manifold genius of the man, his immense
erudition, the Attic grace of his style, which
recalls the golden age of Greek literature, his
versatility, now in his reckless gaiety and mer-
ciless satire reminding us of Aristophanes, and
again, by his penetrating analysis of the most
complicated philosophical problems, seeming
to make Socrates speak again all this draws
us to him. But what, after all, most enchains
us is the vivid picture his writings give of the
life and manners of that strange time. We
168 CHURCH AND WORLD.
have brought before us, as though an electrie
light had been turned on the picture, the whole
phantasmagoria of that Greek-Roman civilisa-
tion in its period of decay. We see there the
morbid symptoms of it, the utter bewilderment
of opinion, with the old beliefs gone and no
new ones to take their place, the shameless
profligacy, the intolerable airs of the wealthy,
and the ridiculous antics of the social parasites
who surrounded them, the contemptible hypo-
crisy of the swarms of sophists who, themselves
utterly vicious, made a market of their
professions of virtue, and here and there the
pathetic struggles of some nobler spirit, a
Nigrerius or a Demonax striving amid the pre-
vailing corruption to carve out for himself some
semblance of a nobler life. It may be worth
our while to try and place ourselves, if only
for a moment, at the mental standpoint of
Lucian, this man who, with a luminous intellect,,
versed in all the literature of his time, seeking
for himself to penetrate the mystery of life,
finds nothing in the accepted religion of his
country but a collection of childish superstitions,
in philosophy only the clash of warring sects,,
and pretensions which disappear at the first
touch of criticism, and to whom Christianity
meant only the faint rumour about a bizarre cult
of some obscure people not worthy the attention
of a thinker. The interest with which we
LUCIAN.
169
study such a mental interior is not simply his-
torical. For we see in what passed in this
man's mind the reflection of very much that is
found in the educated intellect of to-day. It
is, in fact, from the close resemblance of many
of the phenomena, intellectual and moral, of
the second century, as revealed in Lucian's
pages, with those of the nineteenth, and the
message of warning which these phenomena of
the earlier age bring to us of the later, that
such a study as this seems to us to derive its
value.
Lucien was a native of Samosata, a town on
the Euphrates. His birth, the exact date of
which is not known with precision, is supposed
to have taken place at the end of the reign of
Adrian, or at the beginning of that of Antoninus
Pius from 137 to 140 A.D. After leaving
school, as he tells us in ' ' The Dream " a work
from which we get some interesting biogra-
phical details he was placed first with an
uncle who was a sculptor. He gives us a
lively account of this first attempt to establish
him. Having had the misfortune to break the
tablet of marble which had been given him for
the purpose of making his first essay, his new
master caught up a strap and inflicted on him
a severe chastisement. Smarting from his
wounds, he fled home and told to his indignant
mother the story of his ill-treatment. That
170
CHURCH AND WORLD.
night, he says, he had a dreain which decided
his destiny. Two female figures stood before
him, the one representing Sculpture, and the
other Knowledge. The first, who had a rough
exterior with the drees and manner of the
working class, told Tn'm if he would give himself
to her, he should do work as great as that of
Phidias or Praxiteles, and that men should
worship as gods the offspring of his skill. The
other figure, who was beautifully dressed and
had a noble and engaging air, then spoke in a
way which gives us a curious idea of the social
estimation in which a sculptor was at that time
held. " Follow Sculpture," says she, " and you
will be after all only a workman, receiving a
trifling emolument, isolated from all, a man
lost in the crowd, on your knees before the
great. Though you should become a Phidias
and produce a thousand chefs d'ceuvre it will be
your art and not you that men will praise." She
then proceeds to enlarge on the fortune and
renown that await him if he follows herself.
He will be loaded with honours, ranked among
the noblest; every one who meets him will
point him out to his neighbour and say,
" That is he." After this he bade adieu to
sculpture and, as an introduction to letters,
entered on the career of an advocate in the
tribunals of Antioch. But he had not yet
found his true vocation. The " gentlemen of
LUCIAN. 171
the long robe," who in most times appear to
have had a somewhat sinister reputation,
receive anything but a flattering character
from Lucian. According to him, knavery,
lying, impudence, brawling, and bawling were
amongst the regular tools and stock-in-trade of
the profession. He left it to become a profes-
sional rhetorician. It was in this line of things
that his genius immediately declared itself. In
those days the orator was in immense vogue.
The Empire seems to have been an even better
hunting-ground for the travelling lecturer than
America is to-day. The rhetor, or sophist,
arriving at a town in Gaul or Italy or Syria,
announced an oration, and, if he had any
reputation, he was sure of a crowd who paid
handsomely for the treat he had given them.
Lucian followed this career for some time with
splendid success, traversing Ionia, Achaia,
Macedonia, Italy, and Gaul. During this
period he took up his abode for a time at Athens,
in order to perfect himself in his Greek studies.
From there he proceeded to Rome, where he
made the acquaintance of the philosopher
Nigrerius, whom he has immortalised in his
work of that name. Having now become rich,
he made a second sojourn at Athens, enjoying
the society of Demonax, of whom he has given
us a striking eulogium, and whose life of lofty
simplicity stands out in striking contrast to that
172 CHUKCH AND WOULD.
of the horde of greedy adventurers who usurped
and disgraced the name of philosophy. It was
now, having reached his fortieth year, and when
his mind was at the height of its analytic and
creative force, that, applying himself to the
serious study of philosophy, he began to pro*
duce the works which have immortalised him.
He had previously gained the ear of his
contemporaries. He now spoke to all time.
Become one of the most illustrious men of the
age, he made a visit to his native town of
Samosata, where he had a splendid reception.
Some time after this he obtained an important
post in the imperial administration in Egypt.
He lived to an advanced age, dying, it is stated,
of an attack of gout.
Let us now see some of the things this man
had to say to the world. In the necessarily
meagre and imperfect sketch, which is all we
can give here, we will endeavour briefly to
indicate his attitude to the paganism of the
time, to its philosophy, to its social conditions,
and finally, his position with reference to
Christianity.
As to the first point, no better evidence
could be adduced of the universal decay of faith
in the gods of Olympus than the writings of our
author. That a man who used such licence of
language with reference to the national religion
should have enjoyed, as he did, the highest
LUCIAN. 173
consideration with, both rulers and people,
shows the striking change which had come over
the minds of men with reference to the ancient
divinities. At an earlier period such utter-
ances would infallibly have brought upon him
the fate of Socrates. In his " Dialogues of the
Gods " he brings on to his stage, one after
another, the whole Olympian troupe, and
exhibits them in roles as absurd as that of the
traditional policeman in a Christmas panto-
mime. In " Jupiter Confounded " he delivers
a more serious attack. Taking up the received
mythology, he proves that, on its own showing,
the gods, with Jupiter at their head, are im-
potent and insignificant, seeing it is by the
Parcse, the fateful sisters who spin or cut the
thread of destiny, that all affairs in heaven
and earth are, in the long run, decided. In his
work on " Sacrifices," after holding up to
ridicule the methods adopted in different
countries for propitiating their deities, he thus
concludes : " All this superstition accepted by
the vulgar mind has, in my view, less need of a
censor than of a Democritus or an Heraclitus,
the one to laugh at the folly of men, the other
to weep over their ignorance."
But if this keen intellect can find no path to
truth along the line of the old traditions, what
has he to say of the philosophy in vogue
amongst the learned? His verdict here is
174 CHURCH AND WORLD.
not a whit more favourable. Perhaps his most
important and suggestive deliverance on this
subject is found in his " Hermotimus or the
Sects." In this famous dialogue he introduces
a devoted adherent of the Stoic school, who
has for many years devoted all his time and
energy and fortune to the business of gaining
the (( sovereign good " by philosophy. A
friend, Lycernis, enters into controversy with
him, and, using the Socratic method, begins to
push him with embarrassing questions. In
answering them he is obliged to confess that
he has not yet attained what he seeks, and that
to do so will take him many years at his
present rate of progress. " But has his
favourite teacher attained it himself? If so,
how comes it that one who should be free from
avarice, from anger, from the grosser appetites,
is one about whom proofs to the contrary are
so numerous ? Then why is he sure that the
Stoic philosophy is the true one ? Are there
not many other systems the Peripatetic, the
Platonist, the Epicurean, the Pythagorean?
Do not these differ in vital points ? In order
to pronounce as to which of these is true it
will be necessary, will it not, to study them
thoroughly; and as to become a proficient in
any one of them requires, according to their
own account, at least twenty years, how long
must a man live before he has found out which
LUCIAN. 175>
way to follow ? If it be said that at the outset
he must make a choice of guides, the question
comes, How is he to know who are the true
guides ? Who is to direct his choice ? If he
take the testimony of others, will he not
require testimony about these others, and so
ad infinitum ?" In a striking passage our
author then pictures Virtue as a kind of
celestial city, to which men need to make a
sort of pilgrim's progress. The inhabitants
are none of them born in the city, but are
immigrants from other lands. The conditions
of entrance are that a man have intelligence^
the love of goodness, the scorn of low delights,
a soul which shows no yielding to the difficulties
to be encountered on the way thither. In
reading this one might imagine we had before
us a page of Bunyan. But in what follows
there creeps out our author's scepticism a
scepticism which is the more mournful since it
seems forced upon him, spite of his yearning
for the higher life. " Alas ! " says he, " in
setting out for this city one encounters a crowd
of men who profess to be guides. But the
roads by which they propose to conduct you are
not the same. They run in opposite directions.
Some lead East and some West, some take you
through deserts and wildernesses, and others
through gardens of delight. But each com-
petitor declares that he is the proper guide,
176 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and his way the right one." The bewildered
Stoic is thus pushed from point to point till
all his ideas and arguments are shown, one by
one, to be worthless. He weeps in his despair,
exclaiming, " Oh, what have you done to me,
Lycernis ? You have reduced my treasure to
ashes. I have lost, I see it too clearly, all my
years and my painful endeavours." In the
end Lycernis, the questioner, recommends him
to ( ' determine henceforth to live like the rest
of the world, instead of pursuing foolish hopes
and ambitious ideas." And Hermotimus goes
away with the determination to give up every-
thing the special garb he had worn, his
studies, his severity of life ; " and as for
philosophers, if, by chance, and spite of my
precautions, I encounter any of them, I will
get out of their way as though I were running
from a mad dog." From this, at first sight,
we might imagine that Lucian's attitude was
one of universal scepticism, that with him
truth was to be found nowhere, that it was no
use troubling ourselves about the higher
questions of life, and that the true wisdom
was to let everything go, and live as we list.
That, however, would, we believe, be a mis-
conception of his meaning. His hand, it is
true, is against the professed exponents of
truth, but not against the true and good in.
itself, or the quest of it. One sentence from
LUCIAN. 177
the work we nave been quoting gives us,
perhaps, the best idea of what he is really
driving at:
Evidently you have never reflected that virtue con-
sists principally in acts, in the practice of justice, of
wisdom, and of courage. You, on the contrary, and by
you I mean the chiefs of the philosophic sects, neglect
this practical business, in order to exercise yourselves
in syllogisms, in embarrassing questions, in a miserable
play upon words, and in these puerilities you take up
the greater part of your lives.
What, after all, is this but, in substance,
Matthew Arnold's dictum, that conduct is
three-fourths of life? That he had a real
admiration for goodness when fortunate enough
to meet with it, is sufficiently shown by his
biographical sketches of Nigrerius and of
Demonax, two philosophers with whom
successively he had lived on the most intimate
terms, with the one at Rome and the other
at Athens, and whom he paints as filled with
the loftiest ideal of life, scorning riches and all
that the world ran after, and occupying them-
selves with the pursuit of truth and the practice
of virtue. And no one can read his noble
eulogy of Demosthenes without feeling that his
nature had in it quick response to true greatness.
But, unquestionably, the role of Lucian
amongst the schools of philosophy was not so
much to ascertain and declare what is true as
12
178 CHURCH AND WORLD.
to unveil error and lash hypocrisy. Never was
there a more biting satirist, and never had
satirist a richer field for his powers. With the
unbridled licence of an Aristophanes, he has
also hits so full of the modern spirit that one
might fancy we had a Voltaire or a Thackeray
talking to us through a telephone across
sixteen centuries. Here is a photograph of
the Sophists of his day :
There has arisen of late to the surface of society a set
of people, idle, quarrelsome, greedy, swollen with inso-
lence " a useless burden to the earth," as Homer says.
These men, having formed themselves into different
groups, have invented I know not how many laby-
rinths of words, and call themselves Stoics,
Academicians, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and other
names still more ridiculous. Dressing themselves in
the respectable garb of virtue, with solemn look and
long beard they go about, disguising the infamy of
their morals under this taking exterior, like the
" supers " at a theatre, all mask and gold-broidered
robe, showing, when these are taken off, nothing but
a miserable half-sized abortion who gets five shillings
for a representation. Getting around them a number
of easily duped young men, they declaim to them with
a tragic air the commonplaces of morals. In presence of
their disciples they laud to the skies temperance and
courage, disparaging riches and pleasure, but when
left to themselves who can describe their gormandising,
their lubricity, their money-grubbing ?
Scathing words these, which have been true
before now of Christian ecclesiastics as well as
LTTCIAN. 179
of heathen sophists. In such portraits of the
moral teachers of the age, of which we have
innumerable similar specimens, we are con-
tinually reminded of the pictures of the monks
of the Middle Ages given in that book which
has been described as the egg out of which
Luther hatched the Reformation, the " Litterse
Obscurorum Yirorum." To be the professional
exponent of morality is a perilous business,
whether the morality be that of the Bible or of
the Schools. Woe be to society when the work
falls into the hands of the insincere and the
ignoble !
But if at times, as in the passage above
quoted, Lucian pours hot indignation over
these hypocritical teachers, his usual vein is
one of mocking irony. In one of his "Dia-
logues of the Dead," for instance, he sketches
a company of passengers whom Charon, assisted
as usual by Mercury, is about to ferry across
the Styx. Amongst them is one of our
philosophers. Charon complains that his boat
is old and crazy, and says that to lighten it the
passengers must strip themselves of everything
superfluous. When it comes to the turn of
the philosopher to be examined an amusing
scene commences. Says Mercury, " But who
is this man with the grave demeanour, the
lofty air, and the long beard ? " One replies,
"It is a sophist, Mercury. Strip him, and
180 CHURCH AND WORLD.
you will find some laughable things under his
robe." Mercury: "Now, then, take off first
this demeanour of yours, and then the other
things. By Jupiter, what an amount of brag
he has got upon him ! What a quantity of
ignorance, of chicanery, of captious questions,
of thorny discourses, of twisted ideas ! But,
lo and behold ! here are also gold, the taste for
illicit pleasures, impudence, anger, luxury,
licence. Nothing of all that escapes me, spite of
all your efforts to conceal it. Leave here also
your lies, your pride, and that idea that you
are worth so much more than everybody else.
If you get into the boat with all that baggage,
what vessel of fifty rowers would be sufficient
to receive you ? "
Parenthetically it may here be said that in
these " Dialogues of the Dead " we get a
curious glimpse into the mental interior of our
author on the subject of the future state. The
idea is with him absolutely emptied of every
element of the serious or the awful. The
personages who people the lower world are
made to figure as burlesque actors in the
comedy of existence. Cerberus, Pluto, Charon,
Mercury, and the shades committed to their
charge, laugh, crack jokes, and exhibit them-
selves in absurd situations. The groans even
of the rich who find themselves in these gloomy
realms despoiled of all, are made to take a
LTJCIAN. 181
comical turn. With this reckless jester life
is an extravaganza which is kept up with
unabated spirit on both sides the grave.
But, as we have before said, the thing which,
perhaps, above all others makes Lucian so in-
teresting to us, is the vivid picture he gives us
of the manners of his age. As we read his page
the dead and buried century in the midst of
which he stood throbs again with life. Under
his guidance we find ourselves now at the ban-
queting table of a Roman noble, with its endless
profusion, its crowds of attendant slaves, the
haughty airs of the wealthier guests, the forced
jests of the social parasite ; or we are strolling
down the Ceramicus with the Parthenon at our
backs, one of a group of gossiping Greeks
who, on their way to the Piraeus, are discussing
the politics of the hour or chuckling over some
choice scandal. We are laughing spite of
ourselves at the stupendous effrontery of an
-Alexander of Abotonichos who, in the art of
humbugging a credulous people, could give
points to any Cagliostro or Barnum that modern
times have produced. We note in these pictures
of society the brilliancy of the varnish that is
on the surface of things. We shudder as we
gaze into the gulfs of corruption that yawn
beneath. What a curious glimpse, for instance,
is that given of the morning 1 promenade of a
p . *
Koman noble who amongst his crowd of
-_^M^MMMttM>P*MMMMW*MM
182 CHURCH AND WORLD. '
attendants has one whose function it is t<>
nod for him to passing acquaintances, and
another to inform, him when the road goes
down hill and when up !
And could the force of absurdity go further
than in the parasite who, having exhausted
every possible eulogy on his patron, at last,
seeing the latter is troubled with a cough, falls
back on the remark that he spits with a remark-
ably good grace !
One of the most striking of his social
sketches is that in which he depicts the miseries
of those philosophers who consent to enter the
private service of the great. As we read his
description of the position of these unhappy
mortals in noble households, the slights they
received from both master and servants, passed
over at table when the best wines and the most
dainty meats were being served, made to wait
on every whim and caprice of the mistress of
the house, their slender purse exhausted by
gifts to insolent domestics a blackmail which
they were compelled to pay if they would
receive the smallest service from them we
seem to forget the lapse of centuries and to
imagine we are listening to the complaint of
some " poor devil " author of the eighteenth
century reciting the humiliations he had to
put up with from his patron, or the shrill tones
of Jean Jacques Kousseau as he exclaims
LUCIAN.
183
against the almost precisely similar treatment
he met with in the households of the French
grandees.
With Lucian the rich meet with almost as
severe a handling as the sophists. He is fond
of showing what poor creatures they are, how
absolutely dependent. ee Of what use would be
their pomp and magnificence if the poor chose
to withhold the tribute of their admiration
and envy?" He again and again urges the
lesson, which is worth repeating in our own
day, that the poor man, if he will only preserve
the dignity and simplicity of his position, keep-
ing free from envy and being satisfied with
what he has, will have the rich man in his
power, inasmuch as it is only by the admiration
expressed for his magnificence by others that
the latter derives from it any satisfaction or
importance. He is never weary, either, of
painting the disabilities of the rich. Their
splendid banquets bring on a train of diseases,
their possessions make them afraid of every
rumour of war or violence, their heir wishes for
their death, and often helps it forward. Here
is the soliloquy of a wealthy man who is dis-
covered in his house at night with a pale^
anxious face, counting his treasures.
" There, I have seventy talents put in a place of
safety. I have hid them in the ground under my bed
without anybody seeing me. But I am afraid that
184 CHURCH AND WORLD.
rascally groom of mine must have noticed the sixteen
talents hid in the stable. Evidently that is why he is
now so continually pottering about amongst the horses
there, for he is neither careful nor industrious natu-
rally. Unless he has been pilfering, how is it he has
been able to lay in all those provisions P And I am
told he has just bought his wife a collar of five
drachmas. I am a lost man ; these scoundrels will ruin
me completely. Apropos, my plate is not well con-
cealed, and it is plate of no ordinary kind. Well, the
best way is to keep a stout guard. Let us go the
round of the house. "Who goes there? By Jupiter,
I see you, you rascal, trying to get over the wall there !
The gods be praised, it is only a pillar ! "
Hardly an enviable state of things this,
surely ! The millionaires of to-day, with their
banking facilities and the possibility of solid
investments, have certainly a better time of it
than their brother of the second century.
It is time, however, to deal with that which,
to the Christian thinker, is of critical import-
ance in the writings of Lucian his relation to
the Church. Leaving untouched, as we are
compelled to do, much of his most brilliant work,
his fine art criticisms, his masterly critical
treatise, " How History should be Written,"
than which surely nothing 1 better on the
subject has been or can be said, his works of
t'nncifiil imagination, which exhibit him as the
Defoe or Jules Verne of his age, let us come
now to his attitude to that new religion which,
185
across all the distractions, the scepticisms, the
vices of the time, was steadily making its
way, destined to swallow up this old order and
to create a new one. He has been quoted often
as a professed enemy of the Gospel, and has
been, in fact, spoken of as an apostate from
Christianity. For this latter supposition there
is not a shadow of foundation, and that he
was a professed opponent of the Church is
perhaps more than a cautious writer would be
inclined to say. In one direction it is certain
that his influence told in favour of it. His
merciless ridicule of the old paganism and his
keen exposure of the deficiencies of the
current philosophy helped to bring on the
downfall of both, and so prepared the way for
the new faith. There is evidence, in fact, in
the writings of both the Greek and the Latin
fathers that in their arguments against
paganism they borrowed weapons from his
arsenal. His personal relation to the Gospel
we had best gather from his own utterances.
Of the three writings attributed to him which
contain direct references to Christianity, the
one which takes the form of an open attack,
the " Philopatris," is now generally recognised
as spurious. It is a stupid and clumsy attempt
to pour ridicule on the doctrine of the Trinity
and other Christian beliefs, and is evidently
the work of a later hand. It has in it some
186 CHURCH AND WORLD.
curious and interesting references. Thus twice
over we have an oath by " the Unknown God
who is adored at Athens." And this passage :
" I met a bald-headed Galilean with a hooked
nose who has been in the third heaven, where
he heard astonishing things. He renews us
by water ; he makes us march in the footsteps
of the blessed, and redeems us from the abode
of the wicked." There is here evidently a
jumble of ideas relating to Paul and to Christ.
The Christians are also sneered at as people
who live in the clouds, expecting nothing but
evil to happen to the world and all who are
in it.
In " Alexander, or the False Prophet," which
is undoubtedly from Lucian's pen, there is a
brief reference to the Christians, where
Alexander complains that Pontus is filled with
Atheists and Christians an indirect testimony
to the fact that the new doctrine was already
widely spread in Asia Minor. It is, however,
in his account of the death of Peregrinus
that we have the most definite declaration
of our author on the subject of Chris-
tianity. Here he has been understood, though
without sufficient foundation, as writing dis-
paragingly of Christian martyrdom. He pours
scorn indeed on Peregrinus and on his death,
which was, in fact, a showy suicide. But
Peregrinus was not a professing Christian at
LUCIAN. 187
the time of his death. He had been an
adherent of the Church, but had left it to
join the cynic sect of philosophers, by members
of whom he was surrounded when he mounted
the funeral pyre and made his theatrical exit
from life. The different references in the
Peregrinus to Christ and His followers we give
here word for word. Speaking of Peregrinus
he says, " Many regarded him as a god, a
legislator, a pontiff, equal to him who is
honoured in Galilee, where he was crucified for
having introduced this new cult among men."
Of the Christians he says :
Nothing equals their eagerness to help unfortunate
brethren. . . . These poor people think they will
live eternally. In consequence they scorn punishment,
and deliver themselves freely to death. . . . Their
first legislator has persuaded them they are all
brethren. From the time they change their religion
they renounce the gods of Greece and adore the
Crucified Sophist whose laws they follow. They
despise equally all earthly goods, and live in common,
in the complete faith they have in his words. So that
if a rascal presents himself among them he can enrich
himself quickly, laughing in his sleeve at their
simplicity.
It is easy from these words to gather what his
attitude was to the new religion. It was not
that of active opposition so much as philo-
sophic indifference. He had evidently never
deeply inquired into it. Vague rumours had
188 CHURCH AND WORLD.
reached him of this faith at a time, probably,
when his mind had become hardened by the
habitual lashing of roguery and superstition
into the idea that every new movement was
only another illustration of the old wearisome
story of man's folly or hypocrisy. And that
such a man should have assumed such an
attitude as the habitual one of his thinking is,
to us, one of the most powerful testimonies to
the human need for the Gospel. Lucian had
looked into his age to find nothing in it but
emptiness and vanity. The spectacle had made
him a mocker and a railer. But man cannot
live by scorn alone. Human nature can never
develop healthily unless, in addition to the
lateral look around it, and the downward look
on what is beneath it, it has also the upward
look to what is above. In other words, human
nature must have its ideal, its hero, its object
of adoration and of love. What possibilities
would have opened in this man's life had he
known Christ as Paul knew Him !
And if that is the lesson we draw from the
study of Lucian himself, the one which comes
from the contemplation of his age is like unto
it. In our own day men are proposing to us to
give up revealed religion and to rely on
philosophy and culture as adequate supports
of morality. The age of Lucian gives us, we
think, a tolerably clear idea of what would be
jLTTCIAN. 189
the results of an experiment of that kind.
That age had in its memory the utterances of all
the great philosophies. In the fine arts its eye
was trained to the nicest appreciation of colour
and form. The boasted Greek civilisation had
spread all over the empire. But in no time in
the history of man has there been, probably, a
greater moral turpitude, a more complete
bewilderment in face of the enigmas of life, a
more utter absence of that moral idea which
creates great characters and lifts human nature
towards its true destiny. Nowhere than to the
writer we have been studying can we go for a
better illustration of the truth that man,
whether in the individual or collectively as a
race, cannot climb to the highest by himself.
He must be lifted from above.
MONTAIGNE.
THERE are few writers of the first class about
whom more diverse judgments have been formed
than Montaigne. A modern critic has declared
that his principal characteristic is boundless
garrulity, and that he is the father of the race
of penny-a-liners. By others he has been
extolled as reaching the limits of the possible
in human reason. Many, with Pascal, have
pronounced him the most dangerous of heretics.
Pope Gregory XIII., on the contrary, whom he
visited in Rome, warmly commended him for
the devotion he had shown to the Church.
Whatever opinion we may form as to his merits
or demerits, either as a man or as a writer, two
things may certainly be predicated of him. He
has been to every generation which has suc-
ceeded him prodigiously entertaining, and he
has exerted an influence of the most important
kind upon later European thinking. He and
his fellow-countryman, Rabelais, were fellow-
workers in the diffusion of this influence, and
they are a striking illustration of the truth that
MONTAIGNE. 191
men of genius affect the mind of their con-
temporaries and descendants, not so much by
the opinions they advance as by the atmosphere
they create. To a generation given up to the
fiercest religious controversy these two men
came with an entirely different message.
The note they struck was that of Pyrrhonism
and Humanism. To the philosophers and
theologians of the time they said in effect,
"What are you all wrangling about? You
and the rest of us know nothing as to ultimate
truth. But we perceive that sugar is sweet
and that good wine refresheth the palate.
Come and let us enjoy ourselves." Born in
the third decade of the sixteenth century, and
writing his essays in the midst of controversies
so fierce that assassinations, Wars of the
League, and Bartholomew massacres were the
expression of the passions excited, our author
chats to us about coaches, of smells, and
concerning the wearing of clothes, retailing
his good things with the air of one to whom
the throat-cutting and town-burning going on
around him, and the causes of all this, were
not worth the trouble even of description.
ff I am of a humour," says he, " that, life and
health excepted, there is nothing for which I
will bite my nails, and that I will purchase at
the price of torment of mind and constraint."
The esprit gaulois, whether appearing in the
192 CHURCH AND WORLD.
La Fontaine of the first century, the Voltaire
of a second, or the Renan of the third after
Montaigne, the spirit which concludes the
gravest argument with a jest, and hints that the
human drama is probably more of a farce than
anything else, is one for which our essayist,
in conjunction with the author of "Panta-
gruel," is very largely answerable.
But the essays have done much more than to
create a spirit. They will always be in season
for the information they contain on three inter-
esting subjects the author, his contempor-
aries, and the classical and mediaeval literature
of which he was a wholesale dealer and general
purveyor. They are, for one thing, a kind of
personal confession. It has been said there is
copy in every man's life, if it could be got at.
There was abundance of copy in Montaigne,
and he has done his best to make it accessible.
He has given us the minutest details of his
bodily appearance, his mental characteristics,
and his daily habits. We learn that he was,
much to his own annoyance, in statue below
the middle height ; that, like our Cromwell, he
had " an untuneable voice " ; that, as was
Macaulay, he was clumsy to a degree in
physical exercises j and that he wrote a hand
which he often could not himself decipher.
Though singularly daring in speculation, he
confesses, as did Samuel Johnson, to harbouring
MONTAIGNE. 193
a few superstitions in small matters. " I
think myself excusable if I prefer the odd
number ; Thursday rather than Friday ; if I
had rather be the twelfth or fourteenth than the
thirteenth at table." The man who seems in
his works to have the whole of classical litera-
ture at his fingers' ends assures us that he had
absolutely no memory. Like Sydney Smith,
he was in danger at times of forgetting his
own name. To remember anybody else's was
entirely beyond him.
In religious matters he expresses himself
ordinarily as a devout Catholic, but passages in
his essays here and there enable us to see what
this profession really amounted to. The sum
is that, as we really know nothing absolutely,
it is best to accept the existing religion as a
sufficient working hypothesis. Morality is an
affair of climate and custom, what one nation
abhors being held by another in high respect
and esteem. We are in this world like a man
pushing his way through a crowd, where his
course is determined not merely by his own
motion, but by that of the people around, who
push and press him this way and that. Mon-
taigne might, indeed, be called the father of
French Opportunism. Views of this kind may
seem largely flavoured with cynicism, but there
were many qualities in him which make him
estimable and in a way lovable. He abhorred
13
194 CHURCH AND WORLD.
lying and pretence of every kind. He was
eminently humane, both in theory and conduct.
His essay on the education of children reveals
not only the clearness of his insight, but a
capacity for genuine and warm affection. Few
better things have been said on the subject
before or since.
We go to Montaigne, however, not only for
the self-revelation of a singularly full and inte-
resting mind, but for the vivid light he casts on
some aspects of contemporary life and manners.
Ordinary history examines a past age through
a long-distance telescope. A book like this
plants us in the midst of it, showing us every-
thing in full detail and at life size. We
have here a moving picture of how
sixteenth century France dressed, ate and
drank, talked, journeyed, made love, fell
sick, died, and got buried. As a single illus-
tration, we may take what he says on drinking
in his day. His slap at the Teuton might be
quoted in the present day as his countrymen's
revenge for Sedan. "The Germans drink
almost indifferently of all wines with delight ;
their business is to pour down and not to taste ;
and it's so much the better for them; their
pleasure is so much the more plentiful and
nearer at hand." In France he notes a decided
abatement of drinking from the custom of the
previous generation. The six-bottle men seemed
MONTAIGNE. 195
dying out. ' f Is it," says he, " that we pretend
to a reformation ? Truly, no ; but it may be
we are more addicted to Venus than our
fathers were." In the essay on the " Art of
Conference," he, in a manner which strongly
reminds us of a similar passage in Lucian,
lashes into the pedantic humbugs of his time,
who chattered the jargon of the schools without
possessing a particle of common sense. His
attack on the medical tribe in " The Resemblance
of Children to their Parents," is an amusing
revelation of the methods of the Faculty in his
day. He ends it by an eulogium of their
personal character, but with a firm refusal
to swallow their prescriptions. Lastly, the
essays have been the favourite book for writers
and speakers from the fact that they are a
perfect Golconda of classical illustration.
Every page teems with apt quotations which
the modern world has requisitioned wholesale,
.and without acknowledgment, for its articles
.and speeches. Altogether Montaigne must be
pronounced indispensable. "We may abuse him
for his coarseness, for his scepticism, for his
.absence of ideal. It will nevertheless remain
that there are very few books in the world of
which it can be said with the same truth as of
this one that the study and mastery of it in
itself constitute a liberal education.
BOETHITJS.
OF the few names that shine upon the further
edge of the Dark Ages there are none, whether
in history or literature, more worthy of remem-
brance than that of Boethius. From the end
of the nineteenth century to the beginning of
the sixth is, it is true, " a far cry," and it is
possible that the average British Philistine
will aver that the problems of the former are
quite enough for him, without raking up those
of an age which might by this time be left
comfortably to its slumbers. Others, however,
will think differently ; and hold, as we do, that
the earlier time has a good many messages for
the later. That age was a great and stirring
one, critical in the history of the world. It
was the age of Justinian and of Theodoric, of
Belisarius and of Narses. It was the period
when society, affrighted, beheld the great
Roman Empire cracking to pieces before its
eyes ; when the imperial city had seen Alaric
the Goth in its Senate House ; when Europe
had become a cauldron seething with new
BOETHITIS. 197
forces and new races, which were finally to
shape themselves into the nations of the
modern world. Theodoric, the Ostro-Gcth,
had waded through blood to the sovereignty of
Italy. Once on its throne the barbarian chief,
by a government so vigorous and far-seeing as
to put him among the foremost rank of adminis-
trators, gave the land a long period of peace
and of marvellous prosperity.
Of his counsellors Boethius was for many
years a leading figure. Of an illustrious
Roman family he was by temperament a scholar
and a philosopher. In bim almost alone of his
contemporaries the ancient Greek learning still
survived. He was the translator of Pythagoras,
of Euclid, of Ptolemy, and above all, of
Aristotle.
But it is not upon these works that his fame
rests. He lives for after ages in the contribu-
tion which he made to the pathetic roll of
the literature of captivity. Literature is deeply
indebted to prison walls. From under their
shadow come some of St. Paul's noblest utter-
ances. The immortal dreamer of Bedford
wrote his " Pilgrim's Progress " as he lay " in
a certain den." And the work of Boethius,
which we always associate with his name, is
the cry of " a spirit in prison." How he came
there needs not much telling. A desire to
re-establish the dignity of the Senate, and to
198 CHURCH AND WORLD.
bring back some of the old Eoman indepen-
dence, excited the jealousy of his barbarian
master. On the testimony, as he avers and as
others also aftirm, of false witnesses, he was
condemned and cast into prison, and in the end
put to death. It was in those weary months
when, stripped of all his honours and dignities,
he waited for the end, that his mind sought
relief from its anguish in lofty philosophic
contemplation. The result was the " De Con-
solatione Philosophice " with which he is for
ever identified.
This remarkable work is divided into five
books, and is written partly in prose and partly
in verse. It takes the form of a dialogue
between himself and Philosophy, who appears
to him in a vision in the form of a beautiful
woman. She reproaches him for his gloom and
depression, and proposes to cure him of his
sorrows. As a beginning she seeks to console
him by the reflection that true happiness lies,
after all, in the man himself and not in the
gifts of fortune. She appraises the value of
what men ordinarily seek after. Wealth is
nothing in itself, only in what it can purchase.
What is the value of power, since it is con-
stantly being gained by the vilest ; or of fame,
when we consider the narrowness of its range,
and the shortness of its duration ? Fortune's
frown is often her best gift in leading us to the
BOETHITJS. 199
contemplation of the only Good. Then comes
a disquisition on the nature of the supreme
Good, which is found to reside only in God.
Boethius here asks a question which has tor-
mented the ages, and over which Mill stumbled
How can we believe in an all-powerful and
all-beneficent Deity, and yet admit the existence
of evil? We get in answer some arguments
more subtle than satisfying. The wicked, we
are told, are always powerless, even when seem-
ing to conquer, for they never obtain what they
seek. They seek the Good, but never get it
because they seek in the wrong way. They
cannot be said really to exist, for they have
violated the law of their nature, and become,
therefore, no longer men, but mere bodies.
There will come an end to evil by its natural
powerlessness.
Next are discussed the questions of Fate and
Providence, which are resolved into forms of
the Divine Will, which secures that nothing
happens by chance. The fifth book is taken
up with an elaborate discussion of Free Will
in its relation to the Divine Foreknowledge.
Does not the latter make the former impossible ?
We get here a distinction drawn which later
theologians, such as Maurice, have so much
insisted on, between the idea of eternity and
that of mere perpetuity. Eternity, as implying
the whole and complete possession of all exist-
200 CHURCH AND WORLD.
ence, can be predicated only of God. He
includes in one act of perception all that was,
is, and is to come. And as our seeing a man
walking does not constrain him to continue or
stop walking, so God's foreknowledge does not
necessitate the act it contemplates. Boethius
does not here touch the question so often dealt
with by later thinkers, of the possibility of God
limiting voluntarily His own omnipotence by
the creation of beings endowed with free will.
The book ends with the assurance that while
God is omniscient, man also is free. It is not
in vain that we lay our hopes and prayers before
God. Though free, a strong necessity binds us
to live uprightly, for otherwise we thwart our-
selves, seeing that all our actions take place
before the eyes of a Judge who seeth all things.
The book of which we offer this meagre
outline has given rise to a controversy which
has been the crux of scholars ever since. "What
was the relation of Boethius to Christianity ?
If it stood by itself the " De Consolatione "
would be classed with the " De Senectute" or
the " De Natura Deorum" rather than with
works of a definitely Christian inspiration. Its
doctrine of God, of Creation, of Sin, and of
the Soul savour rather of the Porch, or the
Academy, than of Palestine. Is Boethius to
be taken, then, not only as he has been often
called, " the last of the Komans," but also as
BOETHIUS. 201
* f the last of the Pagans " ? The question is sin-
gularly complicated by the existence of some
other writings, which tradition unanimously
ascribes to Boethius, and which are a direct
pronouncement in favour of the orthodox faith.
One of these, the " De Trinitate," follows the
lines of Augustine's famous work, and another,
" Contra Eutychen et Nestorium" refutes the
Eutychian and Nestorian heresies on the
person of Christ. Various have been the
hypotheses to account for the discrepancy
between the " De Consolatione " and the theo-
logical tracts. Some have roundly refused to
accept the latter as authentic. But these,
with the exception of the " De Fide Catholica,"
seem too firmly established by the consent of
antiquity to be thus set aside. Others have
adopted the device a favourite one of both
ancient and modern times of making our
author's book a Christian one by reading a
Christian meaning into it. As some divines
have found all the doctrines of St. Paul in
the Book of Ecclesiastes, so commentators on
the old Roman have proved that he was
preaching orthodox Christianity, only in an
emblematical way. Others, again, have
formed the idea that the five books we
possess are only an introduction to what
Boethius really meant to say. If he had
had time he would have advanced from
202 CHURCH AND WORLD.
philosophy to the higher consolations of
revealed religion. The objection to this is
that we get no satisfactory evidence of any
such intention from anything the writer
actually says.
To us the problem seems solvable by a very
simple hypothesis, but one which critics gene-
rally appear to have overlooked. It is that of
explaining Boethius on the supposition that,
while a Christian by profession, he was by tem-
perament and mental habitude mainly a philo-
sopher and a classicist. It is to be observed
that the tracts of Boethius, while dealing with
subjects of Christian theology, are, in style and
tone, purely philosophical. The topics were
such as gave scope to his skill in dialectic, and
it was natural that in a world which by this
time had become professedly Christian, he
should discuss subjects which were of such
general interest. At the same time he was
a man who, more than any other of his age,
had imbibed the spirit of the great Greek
and Roman poets and thinkers. His scholarly
tastes had made him live in their world. And
now that in his confinement and disgrace he is
thrown in upon himself, he falls back on the
line of thinking in which he is most at home.
His case is by no means without parallel. The
Renaissance shows us multitudes of men, in
Italy and France especially, ecclesiastics by pro-
BOETHIUS.
fession, who on occasion delivered themselves
duly in defence of orthodoxy, but whose tastes
and sympathies were essentially pagan. There
was, though, this difference between them and
Boethius. While the latter assimilated what
was best and noblest in the old world, too many
of the former revelled in the aspects of it which
were sensuous and base.
The influence of Boethius on after-literature
was very considerable, though not what some
of his admirers have been fond of asserting. As
a director of the course of thought during the
Middle Ages he is not, as a philosopher even, to
be for one moment compared with Augustine.
The great Churchman in all departments of
serious thinking reigned without a real rival for
a thousand years. Not a thinker of any note,
from Cassiodorus to Descartes, fails to show
his indebtedness to the Bishop of Hippo. It
would be absurd to contend that the same may
be said of Boethius. Not the less is he to be
regarded as a deeply-interesting figure, and his
great work to be had in remembrance. He
marks an epoch. He was almost the last on
the farther side of the Middle Ages in whom
shone the light of the old Greek civilisation.
He was a far nobler representative of it than
Lucian. Bather was he worthy to be named
with Hypatia. After his death the gloom of
the Dark Ages settled into deeper blackness,
204 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and many centuries were to roll away ere the
lamp of culture, once more held aloft, brought
again to light the treasures of the intellectual
aristocracy which had taught and sung by the
shores of the ^Egean.
OUR NATIONAL LITERATURE.*
MR. CHTJKTON COLLINS, in his new book, pre-
sents a very vigorous manifesto on the claims
of English Literature as a subject of University
teaching. He is anxious to secure three things :
first, the establishment of an English Literature
School at Oxford and Cambridge, capable of
conferring a degree in Honours of the same
value as one in Philosophy, Mathematics, or
Divinity ; secondly, that this study shall not,
as is now the case, be confounded with, or
made subordinate to, that of Philology ; and,
thirdly, that it shall, at the University, b&
vitally related to that of the Greek and Latin
classics, and to the literatures of France and
Italy, as necessary to its proper comprehension
and appreciation. Mr. Collins has contrived
very cleverly to ally his specialty to what some
are disposed to call the almost lost cause of the
dead languages. He is almost as great an
enthusiast for the literature of Greece and Eome
as for that of his own land, and in endeavouring
* The Study of English Literatm-e. By John
Churton Collins. Macrnillan and Co.
206 CHURCH AND WORLD.
to prove that we must know the former in order
to understand the latter he is neatly killing two
birds with one stone. We shall have a word to
say on this point presently. Meanwhile it is
to be observed that the question of the study
of our national literature may be discussed
from two points of view. The scheme which
Mr. Churton Collins is urging deals with the
supply and training of University teachers of
the subject. Bnt there is also the considera-
tion of this study on the part of the general
educated public. The manner in which the
English public of to-day regards its own litera-
ture is influenced by two considerations which
ought not to be overlooked.
The first is, that our national literature is
not, strictly speaking, our sacred literature.
With the Jews, the Greeks, and other early
peoples, the national writings were valued, and
were made the chief instrument of intellectual
and moral culture, for the reason that they
formed, not simply a literature, but the record
and embodiment of their religion. Their
literature was, at the same time, their theology.
It has been otherwise with us. Our purely
national literature, not being the authoritative
expression of our religious faith, has not secured
for its study, as did the Greek and the Jewish,
the front place ,in the list of intellectual and
moral duties. It is, at best, a parergon. Our
OUR NATIONAL LITERATURE. 207
drama, our history, our poetry, are something
to envy and to be proud of ; but they make no
claim to be religiously cultivated. A second
consideration is the competition of other litera-
tures. With the vast extension of possible
studies, an extension which has been accom-
panied with a corresponding growth of other
interests and pursuits, the tendency of the
modern mind is perforce towards an eclectic
and a cosmopolitan rather than to national
cultivation of literature. The educated English-
man of to-day finds himself in front of an
enormous mass of reading, the product of many
ages and of many countries. His time is
limited, and he must make a selection. Out of
the myriad of books that are offered, some, he
finds, are in the first rank, as being the very
highest product of human genius. Of these
his own country has produced a certain propor-
tion. For the rest he must go outside. For
the purposes of the highest possible culture he
feels it will be better for him to make his
principle of selection a search for the intrin-
sically best rather than a cult of the merely
national. In comedy he will very likely read
Moliere in preference to the minor dramatists
of the Restoration. In philosophy, if he has
to choose, he will perhaps prefer Descartes to
the Cambridge Platonists. In thus declaring
that he prefers what is first-rate, though it be
208 CHURCH AND WORLD.
foreign, to what is twelfth-rate, though it be
English, who is blame him ?
At this point, however, we find ourselves
grievously in need of a definition. What,
after all, is English literature ? Is the Bible
English literature? The majority of people
would say that the Authorised Version, repre-
senting as it does the strength, the majesty,
and the simplicity of the style of the Eliza-
bethan age, is as much an English classic as
are Hamlet or the " Canterbury Tales." If we
admit that, we at once open the whole question
of translations. Is Pope's " Homer " English
literature, in the same way as his " Rape of
the Lock " ? When the student has mastered
Jowett's " Plato," has he acquainted himself
with an English as well as a Greek classic ?
We are disposed to say " yes," and to add that,
if we can get the best minds of a generation to
stir themselves, not only to original production^
but to securing to their country works which,
as to their substance, shall be the masterpieces
of other languages, and as to their form master-
pieces of their own, we shall get by this means
for the general public a literature which will
be an adequate instrument of culture without
going outside.
We are not here, let it be well understood^
for a moment arguing that a man can get out
of the best translation all that he will find in
OTJR NATIONAL LITERATURE. 209
the original. To a classical scholar the charms
of Horace and of Homer lie as much in the
music of their syllables as in the sense of the
words. Is " Ocean's unreckonable laughter "
the same as Kvparwv dvript,0/j,ov 7^Xaoyia ? Are
we satisfied with " the many-sounding sea" as an
equivalent for iro\v$>\ot,<sl3ot(p OaA-ao-o-?;? 9 The
one says to us something about the sea; the
other makes us behold it rippling in the sunlight,
and then filling our ears with its roar upon the
beach. But the fact is that, of the actual
public which spends a good proportion of its
school-time in getting a smattering of Latin
and Greek, nine-tenths never obtain enough to
even understand, far less enjoy, an author who
writes in these languages. They are flounder-
ing in a mire of prepositions and particles
instead of communing joyfully with the mind
of their poet or historian. Their only chance
of a culture which shall comprehend the great
thinkers and singers of the past is in making
the study of English literature to include that
of translations of the masterpieces. And the
translations in their form ought to be not less
than masterpieces.
Admitting this, we are not the less decidedly
with Mr. Collins in his contention that no one
has any business to attempt the teaching or
profession of English literature in any serious
fashion who has not as a qualification a com-
14
210 CHURCH AND WORLD.
petent knowledge of the Greek and Latin
classics as well as of the great European litera-
tures. Hegel has taught us that to know a
thing we must know something else ; in other
words, we cannot comprehend anything apart
from its relations. Now the Classics are related
to English literature as the soil is to the tree
which grows in it. And that is true of our
literature all along the line. Our earlier
authors make it more manifest by the quota-
tions with which they crowd their pages. But
our later writers, though they have largely
dropped this habit, require not the less a
knowledge of the Classics to properly under-
stand and appreciate them. Chaucer is not
more intimately related to Boccaccio than is
Wordsworth to Plato ; or than Macaulay, as to
his form, to the Thucydides with whom he
cared only to be compared. And it is only by
this outside knowledge that a teacher could
secure to his pupils the intellectual pleasure
which comes from studying a great work in the
company of its intellectual kinsmen. For a man
to expound " Macbeth " without a knowledge
of the "Agamemnon" would be as meagre a
performance as to lecture on Modern Painters
without knowing anything of Van Eyck or Da
Vinci.
Not the less evident is it that an acquaint-
ance with the literature of the Continent is as
OUR NATIONAL LITERATURE. 211
necessary to a really thorough academical
knowledge of English as is a training in the
Classics. A French professor of literature
would be entirely at sea who should attempt to
explain the Romanticism of the first half of
this century in France apart from any study of
Sir Walter Scott. But so equally would an
English teacher who proposed to expound
Dryden or Pope apart from any reference to
French classicism. And if French is wanted,
so is Italian. The relation of the Renaissance
literature of Italy to our own the way in
which Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, and Boccaccio
wrought both on the spirit and form of our
writers in the great age which begins with
Chaucer and ends with Milton is too obvious
to require any dwelling upon .
It is evident then, from considerations of
this sort, that a school of English literature at
our Universities is needed, and that it should
have an adequate programme. Our teaching
of this subject needs to be properly organised,
and it is the business of the Universities to take
this in hand. We are badly in want of a
standard both of method and of qualification.
At present there is neither. A man may teach
anything : he may give a philological disquisi-
tion on Anglo-Saxon, or string together simply
a long list of names and dates, or offer
a general gaol delivery of all the pamphleteers
212 CHURCH AND WORLD.
and tenth-rate scribblers of some obscure and
limited period, and call this exercise a course
of English literature. The subject deserves a
better fate. We trust we shall not have much
longer to wait for an arrangement at our
Universities which shall secure the equipment,
for the purposes of pur national secondary
education, as well as in the interests of sound
criticism, of a race of teachers who will know
how to deal with both the genesis and the
genius of our literature, and to accurately
estimate the position it occupies in the intellec-
tual movement of the world.
W. Speaight < Sons, Printer*, Fetter Lane, E.G.
; --: Hlffi
