Alfred J. Drake, PhD, has graciously shared with readers of the Victorian Web this chapter from Arnold's Culture and Anarchy from his website. He has produced this e-text from the first edition, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1869.
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y foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word
of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In
the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson
quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt,
familiar; but the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people
of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant
and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never
so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have
invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off
the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my
gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall [iii/iv] and
the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their
pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights
should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers
of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the
best that these preachers can do. And that they are in this case is
owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the Christian
Knowledge Society. In old times they used to print and spread abroad
Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity; the copy of this
work which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint,
and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made familiar to
our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of no copy
besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those printed and
circulated by the Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me
personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished
physicist already mentioned.
But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circulated as a religious book, not only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even by comparison with the other works of the same [iv/v] author. Over the far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they were prepared by him for his own private use, while the Sacra Privata were prepared by him for the use of the public. The Maxims were never meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of, doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them. Some of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra Privata; still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying a word against the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect; only the Maxims seem to me a better and a more edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct aim at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which, from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer suit him; enough [v/vi] will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps, which our nation and race can do in the way of religious writing. Monsieur Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in all the doubt as to the real author of the Imitation, no one has ever dreamed of ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is true, the Imitation could not well have been written by an Englishman; the religious delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are hardly in our nature. This would be more of a reproach to us if in poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception, our race had not done such great things; and if the Imitation, exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere remarked, belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in their form something not thoroughly sound. On a lower range than the Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far more solid. To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty [vii] and plain good sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine impossibilities of religion; by which it has brought religion so much into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God. But with ardour and unction religion, as we all know, may still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it may still be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held fanatically. Bishop Wilson's excellence lies in a balance of the four qualities, and in a fulness and perfection of them, which makes this untoward result impossible; his unction is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent charity; his good sense is so perfect and in such happy alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight. While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited in his Maxims is English, it is yet a type of a far higher kind than is in general reached by Bishop Wilson's countrymen; and yet, being English, it is possible and attainable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by saying that a work of this sort is one which the Society for Promoting Christian [vii/viii] Knowledge should not suffer to remain out of print or out of currency.
To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot use a word more perfectly free from all shadow of reproach. And yet, futile as are many bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who [viii/ix] use them, one must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find how much, in our present society, a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it. More and more he who examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations throughout it without reading at all; and whether or no, having read something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a matter for each man's private conscience and experience. If a man without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. He has got that for which we prize and recommend culture; he has got that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us. This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we conceive it.
Nevertheless, it is not easy so to frame one's discourse concerning the operation
of culture, as to avoid giving frequent occasion to a misunderstanding whereby
the essential inwardness of the [ix/x] operation is lost sight of. We are supposed,
when we criticise by the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have
in our eye some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and recommend.
Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the dangers and inconveniences
to which our literature is exposed in the absence of any centre of taste and
authority like the French Academy, it is constantly said that I want to introduce
here in England an institution like the French Academy. I have indeed expressly
declared that I wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is just our worship
of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this charge being brought;
and how the inwardness of culture makes us seize, for watching and cure, the
faults to which our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us from
trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans
say, — from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an Academy, in order
to help ourselves. For the very same culture and free inward play of thought
which shows us how the Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval
Language, are generated and strengthened in the absence of an [x/xi] Academy,
shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to get, would
cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, and
the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what
an English Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's
eye as distinctly as if it was already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop
of Oxford, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean
of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,-- everything which is influential,
accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction
of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian
leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not what
will do us good. The very same faults, — the want of sensitiveness of intellectual
conscience, the disbelief in right reason, the dislike of authority,--which
have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature,
would also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which
would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the faults, shows
us this also just as truly.
[xii] It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr. Oscar Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton, because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and supply of school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent authority. Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public, combine the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house; that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother of his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) engaged in preparing little boys for competitive examinations, and that the result, as tested at Eton, gives perfect satisfaction. And as to school-books he adds, finally, that Dr. William Smith, the learned and distinguished editor of the Quarterly Review, is, as we all know, [xii/xiii] the compiler of school-books meritorious and many. This is what Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand in the Quarterly Review, and it is impossible not to read with pleasure what he says. For what can give a finer example of that frankness and manly self- confidence which our great public schools, and none of them so much as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of that buoyant ease in holding up one's head, speaking out what is in one's mind, and flinging off all sheepishness and awkwardness, than to see an Eton assistant-master offering in fact himself as evidence that to combine boarding-house-keeping with teaching is a good thing, and his brother as evidence that to train and race little boys for competitive examinations is a good thing? Nay, and one sees that this frank-hearted Eton self-confidence is contagious; for has not Mr. Oscar Browning managed to fire Dr. William Smith (himself, no doubt, the modestest man alive, and never trained at Eton) with the same spirit, and made him insert in his own Review a puff, so to speak, of his own school-books, declaring that they are (as they are) meritorious and many? Nevertheless, Mr. Oscar Browning is wrong in [xiii/xiv] thinking that I wished to run down Eton; and his repetition on behalf of Eton, with this idea in his head, of the strains of his heroic ancestor, Malvina's Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is unnecessary. "The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not disturb their repose. They still love the sport of their youth, and mount the wind with joy." All I meant to say was, that there were unpleasantnesses in uniting the keeping a boarding-house with teaching, and dangers in cramming and racing little boys for competitive examinations, and charlatanism and extravagance in the manufacture and supply of our school-books. But when Mr. Oscar Browning tells us that all these have been happily got rid of in his case, and his brother's case, and Dr. William Smith's case, then I say that this is just what I wish, and I hope other people will follow their good example. All I seek is that such blemishes should not through any negligence, self-love, or want of due self-examination, be suffered to continue.
Natural, as we have said, the sort of misunderstanding just noticed is; yet our usefulness depends upon our being able to clear it away, and to convince [xiv/xv] those who mechanically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not culture's work or aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question. In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the two we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails; and until it is dissipated, culture can do no good work in the matter. When we criticise the present operation of disestablishing the Irish Church, not by the power of reason and justice, but by the power of the antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to establishments, we are charged with being dreamers of dreams, which the national will has rudely shattered, for endowing the religious sects all round; or we are called enemies of the Nonconformists, blind partisans of the Anglican Establishment. More than a few words we must give to showing how erroneous are these charges; because if they were true, we should be actually subverting our own design, and playing false to that culture which it is our very purpose to recommend.
Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists; [xv/xvi] for, on the contrary, what we aim at is their perfection. Culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us, as we in the following pages have shown, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there are that follow the true way of salvation the harder that way is to find. And while the Nonconformists, the successors and representatives of the Puritans, and like them staunchly walking by the best light they have, make a large part of what is strongest and most serious in this nation and therefore attract our respect and interest, yet all that, in what follows, is said about Hebraism and Hellenism, has for its main result to show how our Puritans, ancient and modern, have not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have, a care that that light be not darkness; how they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence. Thus falling short of harmonious [xvi/xvii] perfection, they fail to follow the true way of salvation. Therefore that way is made the harder for others to find, general perfection is put further off out of our reach, and the confusion and perplexity in which our society now labours is increased by the Nonconformists rather than diminished by them. So while we praise and esteem the zeal of the Nonconformists in walking staunchly by the best light they have, and desire to take no whit from it, we seek to add to this what we call sweetness and light, and develope their full humanity more perfectly; and to seek this is certainly not to be the enemy of the Nonconformists.
But now, with these ideas in our head, we come across the present
operation for disestablishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to religious establishments and endowments.
And we see Liberal statesmen, for whose purpose this antipathy
happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that
though they have no intention of laying hands on an Establishment
which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here
in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that
religion should [xvii/xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its
promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr.
Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the
refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never yet
been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal
embarrass him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical
politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream, like Mr.
Baxter or Mr. Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with the same
turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of grand
stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the
Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the
future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the
stream; and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way
to help Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of
Canterbury, in their labours at once philosophical and popular. But
we have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious
development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want,
that narrowness, one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most
suffer from; [xviii/xix] in a word, that in what we call provinciality they
abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short.
And they fall short more than the members of Establishments. The
great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science
generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested
its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by
which it stimulates and helps forward the world's general perfection,
come, not from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to
Establishments or have been trained in them. A Nonconformist
minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has lately written a temperate
and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments, says that
"the unendowed and unestablished communities of England exert full as
much moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as
that Church which is both established and endowed." That depends upon
what one means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in
machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates
or to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister is to exert a
moral and ennobling influence [xix/xx] upon Government. But a lover of
perfection, who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of
conduct, will surely think that as Shakspeare has done more for the
inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore,
done more to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has
produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and
ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which
have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English
Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale
of the Establishment, — Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two
outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national
mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national
mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the
same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European mark
are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but in Establishments.
Only two religious disciplines seem exempted; or comparatively
exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to forbid the
rearing, outside of national establishments, of men of the [xx/xxi]
highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic and
the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which,
though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and perhaps here, what
the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing,
the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.
What, now, can be the reason of this undeniable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which has two main types,--a bitter type and a smug type,--but which in both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our humanity? Men of genius and character are born and reared in this medium as in any other. From the faults of the mass such men will always be comparatively free, and they will always excite our interest; yet in this medium they seem to have a special difficulty in breaking through what bounds them, and in developing their totality. Surely the reason is, that the Nonconformist is not in contact with the main current of national life, like the member of an Establishment. In a matter of such deep and vital concern as religion, this separation from the main current of the national life has [xxi/xxii] peculiar importance. In the following essay we have discussed at length the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it; that is, to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen that it has dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection. But if we tend to Hebraise even in an Establishment, with the main current of national life flowing round us, and reminding us in all ways of the variety and fulness of human existence, — by a Church which is historical as the State itself is historical, and whose order, ceremonies, and monuments reach, like those of the State, far beyond any fancies and devisings of ours, and by institutions such as the Universities, formed to defend and advance that very culture and many-sided development which it is the danger of Hebraising to make us neglect, — how much more must we tend to Hebraise when we lack these preventives. One may say that to be reared a member of an Establishment is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards [xxii/xxiii] culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well.
But with the member of a Nonconforming or self-made religious community how different! The sectary's eigene grosse Erfindungen, as Goethe calls them,--the precious discoveries of himself and his friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has voluntarily chosen them, and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole mind. He is zealous to do battle for them and affirm them, for in affirming them he affirms himself, and that is what we all like. Other sides of his being are thus neglected, because the religious side, always tending in every serious man to predominance over our other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and tyrannous by [xxiii/xxiv] the condition of self-assertion and challenge which he has chosen for himself. And just what is not essential in religion he comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times the more readily because he has chosen it of himself; and religious activity he fancies to consist in battling for it. All this leaves him little leisure or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he has no great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities connected with the national Establishment, to invite him; but only such institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion, he may have invented for himself, and invented under the sway of the narrow and tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have seen. Thus, while a national Establishment of religion favours totality, hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive popular word) inevitably favour provincialism.
But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal friends along with them, have a plausible plan for getting rid of this provincialism, if, as they can hardly quite deny, it exists. "Let us all be in the same boat," they cry; "open the Universities to everybody, and let there be no establishment of [xxiv/xxv] religion at all!" Open the Universities by all means; but, as to the second point about establishment, let us sift the proposal a little. It does seem at first a little like that proposal of the fox, who had lost his own tail, to put all the other foxes in the same boat by a general cutting off of tails; and we know that moralists have decided that the right course here was, not to adopt this plausible suggestion, and cut off tails all round, but rather that the other foxes should keep their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one. And so we might be inclined to urge that, to cure the evil of the Nonconformists' provincialism, the right way can hardly be to provincialise us all round.
However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised. For the Rev. Edward
White says that probably, "when all good men alike are placed in a
condition of religious equality, and the whole complicated iniquity
of Government Church patronage is swept away, more of moral and
ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action
of statesmen." We already have an example of religious equality in
our colonies. "In the colonies," says The Times, "we see religious
communities unfettered by [xxvi] State-control, and the State
relieved from one of the most troublesome and irritating of
responsibilities." But America is the great example alleged by those
who are against establishments for religion. Our topic at this
moment is the influence of religious establishments on culture; and
it is remarkable that Mr. Bright, who has taken lately to
representing himself as, above all, a promoter of reason and of the
simple natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of the
growth of intelligence, — just the aims, as is well known, of culture
also, — Mr. Bright, in a speech at Birmingham about education, seized
on the very point which seems to concern our topic, when he said: "I
believe the people of the United States have offered to the world
more valuable information during the last forty years than all Europe
put together." So America, without religious establishments, seems to
get ahead of us all in culture and totality; and these are the cure
for provincialism.
On the other hand, another friend of reason and the simple natural truth of things, Monsieur Renan, says of America, in a book he has recently published, what seems to conflict violently with [xxvi/xxvii] what Mr. Bright says. Mr. Bright affirms that, not only have the United States thus informed Europe, but they have done it without a great apparatus of higher and scientific instruction, and by dint of all classes in America being "sufficiently educated to be able to read, and to comprehend, and to think; and that, I maintain, is the foundation of all subsequent progress." And then comes Monsieur Renan, and says: "The sound instruction of the people is an effect of the high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence." [Arnold's note: "Les pays qui comme les États-Unis ont créé un enseignement populaire considérable sans instruction supérieure sérieuse, expieront longtemps encore leur faute par leur médiocrité intellectuelle, leur grossièreté de moeurs, leur esprit superficiel, leur manque d'intelligence générale."] Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxvii/xxviii] because Mr. Bright always has in his eye what he calls "a commendable interest" in politics and political agitations. As he said only the other day at Birmingham: "At this moment,--in fact, I may say at every moment in the history of a free country,--there is nothing that is so much worth discussing as politics." And he keeps repeating, with all the powers of his noble oratory, the old story, how to the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the people of great towns we owe all our improvements in the last thirty years, and how these improvements have hitherto consisted in Parliamentary reform, and free trade, and abolition of Church rates, and so on; and how they are now about to consist in getting rid of minority-members, and in introducing a free breakfast- table, and in abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments, and much more of the same kind. And though our pauperism and ignorance, and all the questions which are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves upon his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the great towns, and the Liberals, and their operations for the last thirty years. It never [xxviii/xxix] seems to occur to him that the present troubled state of our social life has anything to do with the thirty years' blind worship of their nostrums by himself and our Liberal friends, or that it throws any doubts upon the sufficiency of this worship. But he thinks what is still amiss is due to the stupidity of the Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going on gloriously with their political operations as before; or that it will cure itself. So we see what Mr. Bright means by thoughtfulness and intelligence, and in what manner, according to him, we are to grow in them. And, no doubt, in America all classes read their newspaper and take a commendable interest in politics more than here or anywhere else in Europe.
But, in the following essay, we have been led to doubt the sufficiency of all this political operating of ours, pursued mechanically as we pursue it; and we found that general intelligence, as Monsieur Renan calls it, or, in our own words, a reference of all our operating to a firm intelligible law of things, was just what we were without, and that we were without it because we worshipped our machinery [xxix/xxx] so devoutly. Therefore, we conclude that Monsieur Renan, more than Mr. Bright, means by reason and intelligence the same thing as we do; and when he says that America, that chosen home of newspapers and politics, is without general intelligence, we think it likely, from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and that, in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all, falls short.
And,--to keep to our point of the influence of religious
establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,--
we can surely see reasons why, with all her energy and fine gifts,
America does not show more of this development, or more promise of
this. In the following essay it will be seen how our society
distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and
America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and
the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk
of the nation;--a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the
pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all
the more to himself and to have his full swing! And as we have found
that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was
the [xxx/xxxi] Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its
Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious
that the people of the United States issues from this class, and
reproduces its tendencies, --its narrow conception of man's spiritual
range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, and back
again, all America Hebraises. Difficult as it is to speak of a
people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may,
without much fear of contradiction say. I mean, when, in the United
States, any spiritual side in a man is wakened to activity, it is
generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way.
Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and
have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at
schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a
harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many
sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling
themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion,
which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American
revivalist, has lately, at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle, been refreshing
our memory with.
C. H. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, South London.
Now, if America thus [xxxi/xxxii] Hebraises more than either England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence of religious establishments has much to do with it? We have seen how establishments tend to give us a sense of a historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond our own fancies and feelings; how they thus tend to suggest new sides and sympathies in us to cultivate; how, further, by saving us from having to invent and fight for our own forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to steady our view of religion itself, — the most overpowering of objects, as it is the grandest, — and to enlarge our first crude notions of the one thing needful. But, in a serious people, where every one has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his mind, his first crude notions about the one thing needful do not get purged, and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then, making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace.I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town of the Midland counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago, the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent [xxxii/xxxiii] chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally divided, with sharp contests between them. I said, that seemed a pity. "A pity?" cried he; "not at all! Only think of all the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth!" "Ah, but, my dear friend," I answered, "only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!" The more serious the people, and the more prominent the religious side in it, the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out forms for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spreading till it swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts and absorbs all nutriment which should have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant in us and Hellenism stamped out.
Culture, and the harmonious perfection of our whole being, and what we call totality, then become secondary matters; and the institutions, which should develope these, take the same narrow and partial view of humanity and its wants as the free religious communities take. Just as the free churches of Mr. Beecher or Brother Noyes, with their provincialism [xxxiii/xxxiv] and want of centrality, make mere Hebraisers in religion, and not perfect men, so the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell, a really noble monument of his munificence, yet seems to rest on a provincial misconception of what culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce miners, or engineers, or architects, not sweetness and light.
And, therefore, when the Rev. Edward White asks the same kind of question about America that he has asked about England, and wants to know whether, without religious establishments, as much is not done in America for the higher national life as is done for that life here, we answer in the same way as we did before, that as much is not done. Because to enable and stir up people to read their Bible and the newspapers, and to get a practical knowledge of their business, does not serve to the higher spiritual life of a nation so much as culture, truly conceived, serves; and a true conception of culture is, as Monsieur Renan's words show, just what America fails in.
To the many who think that culture, and sweetness, and light, are all moonshine, this will not appear to matter much; but with us, who value [xxxiv/xxxv] them, and who think that we have traced much of our present discomfort to the want of them, it weighs a great deal. So not only do we say that the Nonconformists have got provincialism and lost totality by the want of a religious establishment, but we say that the very example which they bring forward to help their case makes against them; and that when they triumphantly show us America without religious establishments, they only show us a whole nation touched, amidst all its greatness and promise, with that provincialism which it is our aim to extirpate in the English Nonconformists.
But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture, as I have
said, teaches us. We have seen the narrowness generated in
Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and we propose to
cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main
current of national life. Here we are fully at one with the Dean of
Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school
to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he
and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a
character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible;
availing themselves for this [xxxv/xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of
tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the
Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans: "Come all
of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment." But to
say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course
of history, or of the strength of men's feelings in what concerns
religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach itself to
points of religious order and discipline merely. When the Rev.
Edward White talks of "sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity
of Government Church patronage," he uses language which has been
forced upon him by his position, but which is, as we have seen,
devoid of any real solidity. But when he talks of the religious
communities "which have for three hundred years contended for the
power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,"
then he talks history; and his language has behind it, in my opinion,
facts which make the latitudinarianism of our Broad Churchmen quite
illusory. Certainly, culture will never make us think it an
essential of religion whether we have in our Church discipline "a
popular authority of elders," as Hooker calls [xxxvi/xxxvii] it, or whether
we have Episcopal jurisdiction. Certainly, Hooker himself did not
think it an essential; for in the dedication of his Ecclesiastical
Polity, speaking of these questions of Church discipline which gave
occasion to his great work, he says they are "in truth, for the
greatest part, such silly things, that very easiness doth make them
hard to be disputed of in serious manner." Hooker's great work
against the impugners of the order and discipline of the Church of
England was written (and this is too indistinctly seized by many who
read it), not because Episcopalianism is essential, but because its
impugners maintained that Presbyterianism is essential, and that
Episcopalianism is sinful. Neither the one nor the other is either
essential or sinful, and much may be said on behalf of both. But
what is important to be remarked is that both were in the Church of
England at the Reformation, and that Presbyterianism was only
extruded gradually. We have mentioned Hooker, and nothing better
illustrates what has just been asserted than the following incident
in Hooker's own career, which every one has read, for it is related
in Isaac Walton's Life of Hooker, but of which, [xxxvii/xxxviii] probably,
the significance has been fully grasped by not one-half of those who
have read it.
Hooker was through the influence of Archbishop Whitgift appointed, in
1585, Master of the Temple; but a great effort had just been made to
obtain the place for a Mr. Walter Travers, well known in that day,
though now it is Hooker's name which alone preserves his. This
Travers was then afternoon-lecturer at the Temple. The Master whose
death made the vacancy, Alvey, recommended on his deathbed Travers
for his successor, the society was favourable to him, and he had the
support of the Lord Treasurer Burghley. After Hooker's appointment
to the Mastership, Travers remained afternoon-lecturer, and combated
in the afternoons the doctrine which Hooker preached in the mornings.
Now, this Travers, originally a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
afterwards afternoon-lecturer at the Temple, recommended for the
Mastership by the foregoing Master, whose opinions, it is said,
agreed with his, favoured by the society of the Temple, and supported
by the Prime Minister,--this Travers was not an Episcopally ordained
clergyman at all; he was a Presbyterian, [xxxviii/xxxix] a partisan of the
Geneva church-discipline, as it was then called, and "had taken
orders," says Walton, "by the Presbyters in Antwerp." In another
place Walton speaks of his orders yet more fully:--"He had
disowned," he says, "the English Established Church and Episcopacy,
and went to Geneva, and afterwards to Antwerp, to be ordained
minister, as he was by Villers and Cartwright and others the heads of
a congregation there; and so came back again more confirmed for the
discipline." Villers and Cartwright are in like manner examples of
Presbyterianism within the Church of England, which was common enough
at that time; but perhaps nothing can better give us a lively sense
of its presence there than this history of Travers, which is as if
Mr. Binney were now afternoon-reader at Lincoln's Inn or the Temple,
were to be a candidate, favoured by the benchers and by the Prime
Minister, for the Mastership, and were only kept out of the post by
the accident of the Archbishop of Canterbury's influence with the
Queen carrying a rival candidate.
Presbyterianism, with its popular principle of the power of the
congregation in the management of [xxxix/xl] their own affairs, was
extruded from the Church of England, and men like Travers can no
longer appear in her pulpits. Perhaps if a government like that of
Elizabeth, with secular statesmen like the Cecils, and ecclesiastical
statesmen like Whitgift, could have been prolonged, Presbyterianism
might, by a wise mixture of concession and firmness, have been
absorbed in the Establishment. Lord Bolingbroke, on a matter of this
kind a very clear-judging and impartial witness, says, in a work far
too little read, his Remarks on English History:--" The measures
pursued and the temper observed in Queen Elizabeth's time tended to
diminish the religious opposition by a slow, a gentle, and for that
very reason an effectual progression. There was even room to hope
that when the first fire of the Dissenters' zeal was passed,
reasonable terms of union with the Established Church might be
accepted by such of them as were not intoxicated with fanaticism.
These were friends to order, though they disputed about it. If these
friends of Calvin's discipline had been once incorporated with the
Established Church, the remaining sectaries would have been of little
moment, either for numbers or [xl/xli] reputation; and the very means
which were proper to gain these friends, were likewise the most
effectual to hinder the increase of them, and of the other sectaries
in the meantime." The temper and ill judgment of the Stuarts made
shipwreck of all policy of this kind. Yet speaking even of the time
of the Stuarts, but their early time, Clarendon says that if Bishop
Andrewes had succeeded Bancroft at Canterbury, the disaffection of
separatists might have been stayed and healed. This, however, was
not to be; and Presbyterianism, after exercising for some years the
law of the strongest, itself in Charles the Second's reign suffered
under this law, and was finally cast out from the Church of England.
Now the points of church discipline at issue between Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism are, as has been said, not essential. They might probably once have been settled in a sense altogether favourable to Episcopalianism. Hooker may have been right in thinking that there were in his time circumstances which made it essential that they should be settled in this sense, though the points in themselves were not essential. But by the very fact of the settlement not having then been effected, of the [xli/xlii] breach having gone on and widened, of the Nonconformists not having been amicably incorporated with the Establishment but violently cast out from it, the circumstances are now altogether altered. Isaac Walton, a fervent Churchman, complains that "the principles of the Nonconformists grew at last to such a height and were vented so daringly, that, beside the loss of life and limbs, the Church and State were both forced to use such other severities as will not admit of an excuse, if it had not been to prevent confusion and the perilous consequences of it." But those very severities have of themselves made union on an Episcopalian footing impossible. Besides, Presbyterianism, the popular authority of elders, the power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs, has that warrant given to it by Scripture and by the proceedings of the early Christian Churches, it is so consonant with the spirit of Protestantism which made the Reformation and which has such strength in this country, it is so predominant in the practice of other reformed churches, it was so strong in the original reformed Church of England, that one cannot help doubting whether any settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent, [xlii/xliii] and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again, and causing dissension.
Well, then, if culture is the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the Nonconformists, not by making Churchmen provincial along with them, but by letting their popular church discipline, formerly found in the National Church, and still found in the affections and practice of a good part of the nation, appear in the National Church once more; and thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again, as their greater fathers were, with the main stream of national life? Why should not a Presbyterian or Congregational Church, based on this considerable and important, though not essential principle, of the congregation's power in the church management, be established, — with equal rank for its chiefs with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of its ministers, under a revised system of patronage and preferment, to benefices, — side by side with the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist and Lutheran Churches are established side by side in France and Germany? Such a Congregational Church would unite the main bodies of Protestants who are now separatists; and [xliii/xliv] separation would cease to be the law of their religious order. Then, — through this concession on a really considerable point of difference, — that endless splitting into hole-and-corner churches on quite inconsiderable points of difference, which must prevail so long as separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist's religious existence, would be checked. Culture would then find a place among English followers of the popular authority of elders, as it has long found it among the followers of Episcopal jurisdiction; and this we should gain by merely recognising, regularising, and restoring an element which appeared once in the reformed National Church, and which is considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear there still.
So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to claim. It leads us, also, to respect what is solid and respectable in their convictions, while their latitudinarian friends make light of it. Not that the forms in which the human spirit tries to express the inexpressible, or the forms by which man tries to [xliii/xlv] worship, have or can have, as has been said, for the follower of perfection, anything necessary or eternal. If the New Testament and the practice of the primitive Christians sanctioned the popular form of church government a thousand times more expressly than they do, if the Church since Constantine were a thousand times more of a departure from the scheme of primitive Christianity than it can be shown to be, that does not at all make, as is supposed by men in bondage to the letter, the popular form of church government alone and always sacred and binding, or the work of Constantine a thing to be regretted. What is alone and always sacred and binding for man is the climbing towards his total perfection, and the machinery by which he does this varies in value according as it helps him to do it. The planters of Christianity had their roots in deep and rich grounds of human life and achievement, both Jewish and also Greek; and had thus a comparatively firm and wide basis amidst all the vehement inspiration of their mighty movement and change. By their strong inspiration they carried men off the old basis of life and culture, whether Jewish or Greek, and generations arose [xlv/xlvi] who had their roots in neither world, and were in contact therefore with no full and great stream of human life. Christianity might have lost herself, if it had not been for some such change as that of the fourth century, in a multitude of hole-and-corner churches like the churches of English Nonconformity after its founders departed; churches without great men, and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity. At a critical moment came Constantine, and placed Christianity,--or let us rather say, placed the human spirit, whose totality was endangered,-- in contact with the main current of human life. And his work was justified by its fruits, in men like Augustine and Dante, and indeed in all the great men of Christianity, Catholics or Protestants, ever since. And one may go beyond this. Monsieur Albert Reville, whose religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity and its founder, is probably destined to become the conception which Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond of saying the same thing about the Socinian conception of Christianity. Even if this were true, it would still have been [xlvi/xlvii] better for a man, through the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian, and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have been a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with the main stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion which he may hold or think he holds. Luther,--whom we have called a Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philistine, had a coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which have harmed his disciples, but who, because he was a genius, had splendid flashes of spiritual insight, — Luther says admirably in his Commentary on the Book of Daniel: "A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then the God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is illusory." In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the man is, depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a perfect and total man. [xlvii/xlviii]
All this is true; and yet culture, as we have seen, has more
tenderness for scruples of the Nonconformists than have their Broad
Church friends. That is because culture, disinterestedly trying, in
its aim at perfection, to see things as they really are, sees how
worthy and divine a thing is the religious side in man, though it is
not the whole of man. And when Mr. Greg, who differs from us about
edification, (and certainly we do not seem likely to agree with him
as to what edifies), finding himself moved by some extraneous
considerations or other to take a Church's part against its enemies,
calls taking a Church's part returning to base uses, culture teaches
us how out of place is this language, and that to use it shows an
inadequate conception of human nature, and that no Church will thank
a man for taking its part in this fashion, but will leave him with
indifference to the tender mercies of his Benthamite friends. But
avoiding Benthamism, or an inadequate conception of the religious
side in man, culture makes us also avoid Mialism, or an inadequate
conception of man's totality. Therefore to the worth and grandeur of
the religious side in man, culture is rejoiced and willing to pay any
tribute, [xlviii/xlix] except the tribute of man's totality. True, the
order and liturgy of the Church of England one may be well contented
to live and to die with, and they are such as to inspire an
affectionate and revering attachment. True, the reproaches of
Nonconformists against this order for "retaining badges of
Antichristian recognisance;" and for "corrupting the right form of
Church polity with manifold Popish rites and ceremonies;" true, their
assertion of the essentialness of their own supposed Scriptural
order, and their belief in its eternal fitness, are founded on
illusion. True, the whole attitude of horror and holy superiority
assumed by Puritanism towards the Church of Rome, is wrong and false,
and well merits Sir Henry Wotton's rebuke: — "Take heed of thinking
that the farther you go from the Church of Rome, the nearer you are
to God." True, one of the best wishes one could form for Mr.
Spurgeon or Father Jackson is, that they might be permitted to learn
on this side the grave (for if they do not, a considerable surprise
is certainly reserved for them on the other) that Whitfield and
Wesley were not at all better than St. Francis, and that they
themselves are not at all better than Lacordaire. Yet, [xlix/l] in spite
of all this, so noble and divine a thing is religion, so respectable
is that earnestness which desires a prayer-book with one strain of
doctrine, so attaching is the order and discipline by which we are
used to have our religion conveyed, so many claims on our regard has
that popular form of church government for which Nonconformists
contend, so perfectly compatible is it with all progress towards
perfection, that culture would make us shy even to propose to
Nonconformists the acceptance of the Anglican prayer-book and the
episcopal order; and would be forward to wish them a prayer-book of
their own approving, and the church discipline to which they are
attached and accustomed. Only not at the price of Mialism; that is,
of a doctrine which leaves the Nonconformists in holes and corners,
out of contact with the main current of national life. One can lay
one's finger, indeed, on the line by which this doctrine has grown
up, and see how the essential part of Nonconformity is a popular
church-discipline analogous to that of the other reformed churches,
and how its voluntaryism is an accident. It contended for the
establishment of its own church-discipline as the only true [l/li] one;
and beaten in this contention, and seeing its rival established, it
came down to the more plausible proposal "to place all good men alike
in a condition of religious equality;" and this plan of proceeding,
originally taken as a mere second-best, became, by long sticking to
it and preaching it up, first fair, then righteous, then the only
righteous, then at last necessary to salvation. This is the plan for
remedying the Nonconformists' divorce from contact with the national
life by divorcing churchmen too from contact with it; that is, as we
have familiarly before put it, the tailless foxes are for cutting off
tails all round. But this the other foxes could not wisely grant,
unless it were proved that tails are of no value. And so, too,
unless it is proved that contact with the main current of national
life is of no value (and we have shown that it is of the greatest
value), we cannot safely, even to please the Nonconformists in a
matter where we would please them as much as possible, admit Mialism.
But now, as we have shown the disinterestedness which culture enjoins, and its obedience not to likings or dislikings, but to the aim of perfection, let us show its flexibility, — its independence of machinery. That [li/lii] other and greater prophet of intelligence, and reason, and the simple natural truth of things,-- Mr. Bright, — means by these, as we have seen, a certain set of measures which suit the special ends of Liberal and Nonconformist partisans. For instance, reason and justice towards Ireland mean the abolishment of the iniquitous Protestant ascendency in such a particular way as to suit the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments. Reason and justice pursued in a different way, by distributing among the three main Churches of Ireland, — the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the Presbyterian, — the church property of Ireland, would immediately cease, for Mr. Bright and the Nonconformists, to be reason and justice at all, and would become, as Mr. Spurgeon says, "a setting up of the Roman image." Thus we see that the sort of intelligence reached by culture is more disinterested than the sort of intelligence reached by belonging to the Liberal party in the great towns, and taking a commendable interest in politics. But still more striking is the difference between the two views of intelligence, when we see that culture not only makes a quite disinterested choice of the machinery [lii/liii] proper to carry us towards sweetness and light, and to make reason and the will of God prevail, but by even this machinery does not hold stiffly and blindly, and easily passes on beyond it to that for the sake of which it chose it.
For instance: culture leads us to think that the ends of human
perfection might be best served by establishing,--that is, by
bringing into contact with the main current of the national life,--in
Ireland the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches along with
the Anglican Church; and, in England, a Presbyterian or
Congregational Church of like rank and status with our Episcopalian
one. It leads us to think that we should really, in this way, be
working to make reason and the will of God prevail; because we should
be making Roman Catholics better citizens, and Nonconformists, — nay,
and Churchmen along with them, — larger-minded and more complete
men. But undoubtedly there are great difficulties in such a plan as
this; and the plan is not one which looks very likely to be adopted.
It is a plan more for a time of creative statesmen, like the time of
Elizabeth, than for a time of instrumental [liii/liv] statesmen like the
present. The Churchman must rise above his ordinary self in order to
favour it; and the Nonconformist has worshipped his fetish of
separatism so long that he is likely to wish still to remain, like
Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by himself." The centre of power being
where it is, our instrumental statesmen have every temptation, as is
shown more at large in the following essay, in the first place, to
"relieve themselves," as The Times says, "of troublesome and
irritating responsibilities;" in the second place, when they must
act, to go along, as they do, with the ordinary self of those on
whose favour they depend, to adopt as their own its desires, and to
serve them with fidelity, and even, if possible, with impulsiveness.
This is the more easy for them, because there are not wanting,--and
there never will be wanting, — thinkers like Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles
Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, to swim with the stream, but to
swim with it philosophically; to call the desires of the ordinary
self of any great section of the community edicts of the national
mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a general, a
philosophic, and an imposing expression. A generous statesman may
[liv/lv] honestly, therefore, soon unlearn any disposition to put his
tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate
them with fervour and impulsiveness. Therefore a plan such as that
which we have indicated does not seem a plan so likely to find favour
as a plan for abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments.
But to tell us that our fond dreams are on that account shattered is inexact, and is the sort of language which ought to be addressed to the promoters of intelligence through public meetings and a commendable interest in politics, when they fail in their designs, and not to us. For we are fond stickers to no machinery, not even our own; and we have no doubt that perfection can be reached without it, — with free churches as with established churches, and with instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen. But it can never be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to this, therefore, and to no machinery in the world, that culture sticks fondly. It insists that men should not mistake, as they are prone to mistake, their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for the sublime; and if statesmen, either [lv/lvi] with their tongue in their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion on this point which is fatal, and against delusion on this point culture works. It is not fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for free trade, extension of the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates, instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, with our pauperism increasing more rapidly than our population, that they have performed a great, an heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums, and that the right and good course for them now is to go on occupying themselves with the like for the future. It is not fatal to Americans to have no religious establishments and no effective centres of high culture; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that they are the most intelligent people in the whole world, when of intelligence, in the true and fruitful sense of the word, they even singularly, as we have seen, come short. It is not [lvi/lvii] fatal to the Nonconformists to remain with their separated churches; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that theirs is the one pure and Christ-ordained way of worshipping God, that provincialism and loss of totality have not come to them from following it, or that provincialism and loss of totality are not evils. It is not fatal to the English nation to abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments; but it is fatal to it to be told by its flatterers, and to believe, that it is abolishing it through reason and justice, when it is really abolishing it through this power; or to expect the fruits of reason and justice from anything but the spirit of reason and justice themselves.
Now culture, because of its keen sense of what is really fatal, is all the more disposed to be pliant and easy about what is not fatal. And because machinery is the bane of politics, and an inward working, and not machinery, is what we most want, we keep advising our ardent young Liberal friends to think less of machinery, to stand more aloof from the arena of politics at present, and rather to try and promote, with us, an inward working. They do not listen [lvii/lviii] to us, and they rush into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed, seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they complain of the reformed constituencies, and call the new Parliament a Philistine Parliament. As if a nation, nourished and reared in Hebraising, could give us, just yet, anything better than a Philistine Parliament! — for would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a Populace Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley of Jehoshaphat before their final conversion, which will certainly come; but for this conversion we must not try to oust them from their places, and to contend for machinery with them, but we must work on them inwardly and cure them of Hebraising.
Yet the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its preferences and rejections of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, [lviii/lix] and have over-valued doing. But the habits and discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign them the second rank to-day, without being ready to restore them to the first rank to-morrow. To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,--this is the discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism. Sophocles and Plato knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that "without holiness no man shall see God," and their notion of what goes to make up holiness was larger than his. But the intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith,--the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,--this energy of faith in its ideal has [lix/lx] belonged to Hebraism alone. As our idea of holiness enlarges, and our scope of perfection widens beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has tended to confine it, we shall come again to Hebraism for that devout energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the happiness of doing what he knows. "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them!" — the last word for infirm humanity will always be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world lasts, return to Hebraism; and the Bible, which preaches this word, will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book, but the Book of the Nations. Again and again, after what seemed breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem will still be true:--Lo, thy sons come, whom thou sentest away; they come gathered from the west unto the east by the word of the Holy One, rejoicing in the remembrance of God.
Last updated December 2001