A LIST OF WORKS 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "BENJAMIN JOWETT : A PERSONAL MEMOIR." 
 
 [Fourth Edition, Revised, with Portrait. 35. 6d. Edward Arnold] ; 
 
 " TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE," &c. 
 
 WITH TABLE OF CONTENTS, 
 AND SOME OPINIONS OF THE Pit ESS, ETC. 
 
 "One of the most stimulating writers of the day." TIMES. 
 " Mr. Tollemache is a born raconteur." EVENING STANDARD. 
 "Truly these are delightful tomes." Tff QUEEN. "A manner 
 unique among present-day writers." 5 T. JAMES'S GAZETTE. 
 " Since the death of Hay ward, we know of no English litterateur 
 who has, in the same degree as Mr. Tollemache, the happy knack of 
 recollecting or collecting the characteristic sayings and doings of a 
 distinguished man, and piecing them together in a finished mosaic." 
 DA1L Y CHRONICLE. " The recollections of personal friends are 
 so vividly realistic that the reader feels himself drawn into the inner 
 privileged circle of these lofty congenial spirits, and shares familiarly 
 their exalted fellowship and delightful interchange of thought and 
 feeling." PALL MALL GAZETTE. " Mr. Tollemache is one of 
 the wisest as well as most charming writers left to us." LIVERPOOL 
 DAIL Y POST. 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.G.
 
 NOTICE. -- These ESSAYS, RECOLLECTIONS, AND 
 CAUSERIES, by the HON. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE, 
 were collected in their original form [which, of 
 course, did not contain the Patt'son Recollections] 
 at Mark Pattison's request. 
 
 Seventh Edition. With Photogravure Portrait of Hon. Lionel A. 
 Tollemache. From Negative taken in 1890 by Melhuish & Gale 
 for the "British Museum of Portraits" [South Kensington Art 
 Library] ; and Photogravure Portrait of Hon. Mrs. L. A. Tolle- 
 mache. From Negative taken in 1899. Demy 8vo, pp. 460, cloth 
 elegant, gilt top, price 75. 6d. 
 
 SAFE STUDIES. 
 
 Contents : 
 
 HISTORICAL PREDICTION. Sir G. C. LEWIS and LONGEVITY. 
 
 LITERARY EGOTISM. CHARLES AUSTIN. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS of Mr. GROTE and Mr. BABBAGE. 
 
 Mr. TENNYSON'S SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 PHYSICAL and MORAL COURAGE. THE UPPER ENGADINE. 
 
 NOTES and RECOLLECTIONS of Sir CHARLES WHEATSTONE, 
 
 DEAN STANLEY, and CANON KINGSLEY. 
 
 THE EPICURIST'S LAMENT. 
 
 POEMS by B. L. T. (Hon. Mrs. L. A. TOLLEMACHE). INDEX to the 
 CLASSICAL and other QUOTATIONS, with ENGLISH RENDERINGS. 
 
 Fifth Edition, Demy 8vo, pp. 262, cloth elegant, gilt top, price 35. 6d. 
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 Contents : 
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. THE FEAR OF DEATH. 
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 
 
 Appendices : 
 RECOLLECTIONS of MARK PATTISON. Mr. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY and NEOCATHOLICISM : a Sequel. 
 
 I N UEX to the CLASSICAL and other QUOTATIONS, with ENGLISH 
 
 RENDERINGS. 
 
 These Books are issued at COST PRICE. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON, 
 
 One of the Appendices to " Stones of Stumbling," is also published 
 separately. Demy 8vo, cloth, One 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROAIUVAY, LUIXJATE HIM., E.G. 
 
 a 2
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 7 HE TIMES [October 25th, 1895] says of Mr. Lionel Tollemache : 
 
 " One of the most stimulating writers of the day, especially in the 
 sketch-portraits of the people who have influenced him. His essay on 
 Mark Pattison is not likely to be forgotten by any Oxford man, or, 
 indeed, by any student of modern letters who has chanced to read it, 
 and it is safe to foretell that the same will be the case with the 
 ' Personal Memoir ' in which he has enshrined his recollections of the 
 late Master of Balliol. "TIMES. 
 
 And in an earlier issue " Mr. Tollemache's essays seem to us to 
 possess literary merit of a rare and high order. He is not only pleasantly 
 anecdotic ; he is eminently sympathetic, ingenious, thoughtful, and 
 appreciative, and many of these qualities are also exhibited in his more 
 speculative and less personal papers. His recollections of Grote, Charles 
 Austin, and Pattison are full of interesting anecdote and suggestive com- 
 ment, while those of Babbage, Sir Charles Wheatstone, Dean Stanley, 
 and Canon Kingsley belong to the same order. We can best enforce our 
 favourable judgment of these remarkable volumes by quoting a passage 
 from a letter received from Pattison, to whom he had sent the privately 
 printed edition, which of course did not contain the paper on Pattison 
 himself: ' I should say that the papers on the whole show a union, 
 which is very uncommon, of two opposite qualities viz., a dominant 
 interest in speculation of a wide and human character, with vast re- 
 sources, in the memory, of single facts, incidents, or mots of famous 
 men. How, with your eyesight, you ever compassed such a range of 
 reading as is here brought to bear at all points of your argument must 
 l)e a matter of wonder. It seems as if you could draw at pleasure upon 
 all literature, from the classics down to Robert Montgomery and Swin- 
 burne.' In this judgment we cordially concur. It should be added 
 that the larger volume, entitled ' Safe Studies,' contains a series of 
 graceful poems by Mrs. Tollemache. . . . The ' Recollections of Patti- 
 son ' are very charming." 
 
 The PALL MALL GAZETTE of July 8th, 1896, in a lengthy 
 review of " Safe Studies" and " Stones of Stumbling," says : " Every 
 cultured reader will find in these [the articles of a literary and remi- 
 niscent character] much to inform, to stimulate, and^delight so varied 
 and comprehensive is Mr. Tollemache's reading, and so apt the anecdote 
 and striking and uncommon the quotation from ancient and modern 
 writers with which almost every page is lighted up. The recollections 
 of personal friends are so vividly realistic that the reader feels himself 
 drawn into the inner privileged circle of these lofty congenial spirits, 
 and shares familiarly their exalted fellowship and delightful interchan ^ 
 of thought and feeling. Were we to single out of this gallery of worthies 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.C.
 
 any particular characters for illustration, we should say that this is 
 experienced in a peculiar degree in looking upon the features as here 
 delineated, and listening to the talk reported, of Austin, Pattison, and 
 Tollemache himself." 
 
 The same review refers to the Poems with which " Safe Studies" con- 
 cludes as : " The tender and beautiful production of the author's wife." 
 
 The LITERARY WORLD of October i6th, 1896, in a review of 
 " Stones of Stumbling," says: "Mr. Lionel Tollemache's essays are 
 replete with interest. They deal with some of the profoundest subjects 
 which can engage the attention of a serious mind. He writes in such a 
 charming style that he seems almost to converse with his readers. The 
 titles of the essays undoubtedly claim attention from a certain class of 
 readers ' The Cure for Incurables,' ' The Fear of Death,' ' Fearless 
 Deaths,' ' Divine Economy of Truth.' This writer has not only allowed 
 his studies to undergo what he terms ' a long process of incubation, or 
 rather of domestic rearing,' but he has given to them the large benefits 
 of his refined wit, his wide reading, and his scholarly tastes. The 
 longest chapter in the present volume, which stands as an appendix to 
 the first edition, is very nearly a model of what such writing should be. 
 It comprises recollections of Mark Pattison, the brilliant Rector of 
 Lincoln College, Oxford, and is reprinted from the Journal of Educa- 
 tion for June, 1885. Mr. Tollemache and Mr. Pattison were personally 
 acquainted only during the last two years of the life of the latter. They 
 made one another's acquaintance at Biarritz, in March, 1882 ; in the 
 June of the following year they met for the last time ; and they bade 
 one another a touching farewell by letter in the early part of 1884. It 
 will not be surprising to any clear-minded reader of this and its com 
 panion essays that, in Pattison's final letter to his friend from Oxford, 
 he should have finished it with the following words : ' For my part I 
 cannot expect ever to see you again, and I must be content with here 
 recording my experience that your conversation was to me more stimu- 
 lating than that of any man I ever met. ' These essays must have a 
 striking resemblance to that conversation." 
 
 "The 'Safe Studies' are those to which it is impossible for any 
 human creature to raise the smallest objection on any ground whatever, 
 and they are about four times as long as the ' Stones of Stumbling. ' 
 These stumbling-blocks may possibly at some period or other have 
 given scandal to a part of the population by no means likely to read 
 them ; but in these days the public has swallowed so many camels that 
 we do not think Mr. Tollemache's gnats would even make any consider- 
 able portion of them cough. . . . We propose to make some observa- 
 tions on the most important of these charming essays. They are all 
 singularly well worth reading, and may be described as the works of a 
 most ingenious, accomplished, and cultivated man of leisure, who writes 
 in order to fix recollections and systematize speculations which interest 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.C.
 
 him, and not for the purpose of advocating particular views in the spirit 
 of a partisan or propagandist. . . . The only likelihood of Charles 
 Austin being remembered at all lies in the chance of the survival of the 
 touching and striking account given of him by his accomplished, grate- 
 ful, and most appreciative pupil." The late Mr. Justice Fitzjames 
 Stephen, in THE ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE. 
 
 " These very interesting and, in part, very amusing volumes. . . . 
 Altogether, we can give very hearty praise to the book, and that is 
 something in the case of matter which has not the charm of novelty to 
 the reviewer, and with a good deal of which he disagrees in opinion. 
 Mr. Tollemache can tell an excellent story (such as that of the young 
 lady who, having spoken enthusiastically about a clergyman, and being 
 asked if she referred to any sermon of his, said, ' No ; oh ! no. But he 
 hates mayonnaise, and so do I.'). He manages, though he himself is 
 very frequently in presence, and the subject of discussion, never to be 
 unpleasantly egotistic. His work has the literary flavour throughout, 
 without being merely bookish, and he can argue a thesis like a crafts 
 man and a master of his craft." SATURDA Y REVIEW. 
 
 " The essays are mainly biographical, and are full of wit and humour. 
 They abound in good stories of all kinds. Every page shows the 
 classical humanist, the man of taste and scholarly refinement ; but, like 
 the essays of Montaigne, of whom Mr. Tollemache is almost an English 
 counterpart, there is a richer vein of thought and of philosophy run- 
 ning through all this lighter matter." ANGLICAN CHURCH 
 MAGAZINE. 
 
 "Mr. Tollemache is one of a fortunate few with whom a certain 
 kind of memory may be said, as Rossetti said of beauty, to be a genius 
 itself. . . . Even the anecdotes, good as they are, have scarcely the 
 same literary value as his rare power of making men and women live 
 before us with all their human charm and weakness, the charm the 
 more real for the supplementary weakness, and the weakness itself 
 winning our attachment in the light of the charm. His truly marvellous 
 memory for details of speech and character may yet keep for us many 
 a little trait, or passing word, which will hereafter be precious. " 
 SPEAKER. 
 
 " The writer who, in one of the April magazines, laments the decay 
 of ihe art of classical quotation surely cannot be acquainted with the 
 works of the Hon. Lionel Tollemache, from whose pen apt illustrations 
 from the Greek and Latin classics flow as readily, and it is scarcely too 
 much to say as pleasantly, as they did from the pens of Montaigne and 
 Burton. A recently published fourth edition of Mr. Tollemache's 
 'Stones of Stumbling' has reached us, and we welcome it as reviving 
 recollections of essays brightened by a daring and sometimes whimsical 
 learning unusual in our times, but chiefly because it contains in an 
 appendix a reprint of a most admirable article upon Mark Pattison, 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.G.
 
 quite as delightful in its way as the Recollections of Dr. Jowett which 
 we had the privilege of reviewing some six months ago. Persons not 
 acquainted with Mr. Tollemache's views and methods would do well 
 to read the ' Stones of Stumbling ' before attacking the ' Recollections of 
 Pattison.' The phrase which Mr. Tollemache applies to Pattison, ' utt 
 homme serieux malgre /?',' may be attached with much appropriateness 
 to the biographer himself. He hides beneath a playful manner an 
 intense earnestness of purpose, which is allied with a determination to 
 see things as they are, more courageous and indomitable than that of 
 Matthew Arnold. The result, as might be expected, of this unusual 
 union of qualities is a philosophy of life shocking to the commonplace 
 mind, not always acceptable to the enlightened thinker, but invariably- 
 interesting, honest, and acutely reasoned. It is nearly a quarter of 
 a century since the plea for Euthanasia startled the readers of the 
 Fortnightly Review, and, re-read after such an interval, its arguments 
 appear still fresh and adroit, and its conclusions just as unsatisfactory. 
 We mention this remarkable effort of controversy that readers max 
 remember that the author of the ' Recollections of Pattison,' on which 
 we are about to comment, was also the author of the suggested ' Cure 
 for Incurables.' "LIVERPOOL DAILY POST. 
 
 "He [the author] jxjssesses in a high degree the first requisite of a 
 biographer, the culmiratio Boswelliana, and he combines with the exact 
 memory of Mr. Hayward some of the sympathetic appreciativeness of 
 Lord Houghton. . . . This [" Stones of Stumbling"] includes the ' Recol- 
 lections of [Mark] Pattison,' which attracted so much attention on their 
 first appearance in thejouma! of Education. Together with the notice 
 of Charles Austin (in ' Safe Studies'), it must also possess a permanent 
 value, as an unrivalled example of Boswellian portraiture with the 
 added interest that, in recording the traits of his friends, the author is 
 half-unconsciously revealing some of his own." ACADEMY. 
 
 "Since the death of Hayward, we know no English litterateur 
 who has, in the same degree as Mr. Tollemache, the happy knack of 
 recollecting or collecting the characteristic sayings and doings of a 
 distinguished man, and piecing them together in a finished mosaic.'' 
 DAILY CHRONICLE. 
 
 " Mr. Tollemache has at last overcome his dislike to publicity, an. 
 has given the world at large a series of delightful studies which might 
 otherwise have been well-nigh lost in the sombre and dissipated retire- 
 ment of a bound periodical. ... An atmosphere of soft melancholy 
 envelops his treatment ; and this melancholy is perhaps the can- 
 yet another charm. His studies are not only full of ' unfamiliar ((nota- 
 tions from familiar authors,' but abound in pleasant and witty di^io- 
 sions. n NA TIONAL OBSER VER. 
 
 " The Hon. Lionel Tollemache abounds in witty sentences, and exec > 
 in theart of stringing together good things." WHITEHALL RE VIE I! '. 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, F.C
 
 " The books, as a whole, give in an agreeable form an outline or 
 suggestion of all that has been most prominent and characteristic for 
 the past twenty or thirty years in the leading currents of speculative 
 thought in England. Though they deal with thorny problems, and 
 sometimes argue closely enough to be hard reading, the essays have the 
 charm which the judicious use of a wide learning gives, and the book 
 is attractive as well as thoughtful and suggestive." SCOTSMAN. 
 
 " That Mr. Tollemache has an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes is 
 not saying much ; but what is remarkable is the skill, the aptness, the 
 felicity with which he applies them. . . . Mrs. Tollemache' s poems 
 are penetrated with a love of nature truly Wordsworthian. ... It has 
 been long since we read anything so interesting, amusing, and delightful 
 as ' Safe Studies.'" GALIGNANPS MESSENGER. 
 
 " The essays include 'Mr. Tennyson's Social Philosophy,' 'Charles 
 Austin,' ' Physical and Moral Courage,' ' Recollections of Dean Stanley,' 
 and other papers, making one of the most interesting of books. Even 
 more interesting, if possible, are the ' Recollections of [Mark] Pattison,' 
 which form part of the companion volume. . . . There are enough good 
 stories in Mr. Tollemache's Recollections to fill half-a-dozen columns." 
 STAR. 
 
 " Both these volumes have been previously printed for private circula- 
 tion, and in this form have found their way to the British Museum and 
 other great libraries. They have now been reprinted and published ' at 
 cost price,' and may almost be said to mark an epoch in the history of 
 cheap books. ... In all these essays Mr. Tollemache shows himself to 
 be a worthy follower of Boswell, and is content for the most part to 
 allow his characters to reveal themselves by the anecdotes and frag- 
 ments of conversation which he is able to report. These are mostly 
 well told and to the point, and make the essays very pleasant reading." 
 GUARDIAN. 
 
 " The studies are intensely interesting, as all know who have at all 
 followed the movement of thought in the last twenty or twenty-five 
 years. [" Stones of Stumbling "] A dainty dish relished by intellectual 
 epicures." ANTI-JA CO BIN. 
 
 " Many years ago the Hon. Lionel Tollemache printed two volumes 
 of essays, entitled ' Safe Studies ' and ' Stones of Stumbling,' which he 
 gave away to his friends. When it was known that these volumes 
 contained pleasant recollections of Mark Pattison, Dean Stanley, 
 George Grote, and other well-known men, to say nothing of singularly 
 felicitous criticisms upon Tennyson, &c. , it was natural that even those 
 who were not personal friends should inquire about the books, and to 
 each and all of the inquirers, I believe, Mr. Tollemache presented the 
 pair of handsome volumes. The result was that almost every news- 
 paper reviewed the books, although they boasted no publisher and were 
 not on sale in the bookshops. Now, therefore, when the time seems 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, B.C.
 
 to have come for publication, Mr. William Rice, of Fleet Street, who 
 has the task in hand, is able to lead off with quite a chorus of acclama- 
 tions from the daily and weekly press, beginning with the Times, which 
 refers to the ' literary merit of a rare and high order ' which is to be 
 found in these essays, and ending with the New York Nation, which 
 tells us that the ' Recollections of Pattison ' are ' thoroughly delightful ' 
 as indeed they are. Mark Pattison has received rather brutal treat- 
 ment lately at the hands of Mr. Swinburne ; but it is pleasant to turn 
 to him here as a scholar in an age of superficiality, as a genuinely 
 learned bookman at a time when so many of us are merely veritable 
 butterflies, sipping a smattering of knowledge from every passing 
 volume. Then Mr. Tollemache's anecdotes are so good. One can 
 never forget the dying Pattison asking for some of his favourite volumes, 
 stroking them lovingly, and pondering whether he will have his books 
 in heaven. And then there is the story of the young lady who, having 
 spoken enthusiastically of a certain clergyman, and being asked if she 
 referred to any sermon of his, said : ' No ; oh, no. But he hates 
 mayonnaise, and so do I.' Truly these are delightful tomes." 
 THE QUEEN. 
 
 " Two admirable volumes. . . . Mr. Tollemache is a most accom- 
 plished and attractive writer. He is a man of philosophic insight and 
 culture, his information is large and various, and his imaginative and 
 humorous powers are considerable, and are frequently displayed with 
 effect. ... It is a misfortune for English literature in its higher and 
 more serious departments that bad health should have prevented Mr. 
 Tollemache from contributing to it with greater constancy and copious- 
 ness than he has been able to do. The opinion which was evidently 
 entertained of him by many men of extraordinary mental power and 
 consummate learning would then undoubtedly have been more gener- 
 ally shared." THE WORLD. 
 
 " [" Mr. Tennyson's Social Philosophy"] in an admirable volume of 
 Essays I have just read, 'Safe Studies.'" TRUTH. 
 
 " A volume of essays that is remarkable, as in each case the person- 
 ality of the writer is ever before us, and one can but recognize in him a 
 gentleman of experience. The anecdotes of and concerning great men 
 are told in a fascinating way and are always apropos. Throughout tht- 
 book is interspersed with quotations, those from Kenan predominating. 
 We are especially pleased with the notes and recollections of Dean 
 Stanley, Canon Kingsley, and Sir Charles Wheatstone ; while the 
 essay on Charles Austin is replete with interest. The article on ' Sii 
 G. C. Lewis and Longevity ' is one which has already attracted a great 
 amount of attention." VANITY FAIR. 
 
 "It is well that they should be put in the way of a wide circulation 
 for they contain much of unquestionable interest and value. . . . 
 Mr. Tollemache's range of subject is toleiably large. His method of 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.G.
 
 10 
 
 treatment is agreeably individual honest, frank, and direct to the 
 point." THE GLOBE. 
 
 " We know of no book in the English language more interesting 
 when considered from the point of view from which it is written. As a 
 story-teller Mr. Tollemache is unrivalled, and his knowledge of men 
 and things is almost marvellous. He has also the happy knack of 
 gathering into a beautiful mosaic the sayings and doings of distinguished 
 men." THE CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 " One of the most delightful papers in these fruity books is that on 
 Mark Pattison, but all of the writing impresses one as the overheard 
 talk of a delightful conversationalist, whose memory is stored with 
 riches, and who knows the best society in men and books." - 
 ATLANTIC MONTHLY. 
 
 " The volumes are witty and interesting, and besprinkled throughout 
 with the dew of wide and unusual reading. Particularly in his resort to 
 apt classical quotation does Mr. Tollemache preserve an honourable 
 literary tradition in a way which now seems a little old-fashioned, though 
 agreeable from its very quaintness as well as its frequent pungency. . . . 
 The ' Recollections of Pattison ' are thoroughly delightful. Based upon 
 a long friendship, and upon a certain affinity, they are altogether 
 charming in their mingled analysis and reminiscence, narrative and 
 anecdote. . . . We take pleasure in commending these books for their 
 biographical interest, which in parts is of the greatest, as well as for 
 the refinement and learning that pervade them throughout." THE 
 NATION (New York). 
 
 " These books contain biographical papers that, in form and impor- 
 tance, rank with the best work of their class in the English language. 
 The author has the rare gift of being able to paint portraits instead of 
 making photographs, and he has cultivated this now almost lost art 
 until it has reached perfection. . . . The vein of deep philosophy that 
 runs through these essays is made most attractive by the wit that 
 sparkles in every line." BOOK CHA T (New York). 
 
 "The special quality in these essays which makes them worthy of 
 preservation and continuance is the quality which Mr. Matthew Arnold 
 used to call 'sweet reasonableness.' Here is an Englishman without 
 insularity, a writer on theological topics without prejudices, a gentle- 
 man without undue exclusiveness,' a classicist without over-punctilious- 
 ness. . . . The most abiding impression 4 that one receives from the 
 reading of all these delightful personal sketches is that of the personality 
 of the author himself. He has made his characters live before us, and 
 his own figure is among them long to be remembered." THE 
 OUTLOOK, or CHRISTIAN UNION (New York). 
 
 "I find your article [Fortnightly Review, July, 1892] charming, and 
 your Whiggism mild. Neither epithet is, I think, exaggerated." 
 Letter from Mr. GLADSTONE. 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM RICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, E.G.
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING.
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 " Jerusalem eet eortie plus brillante et plus telle du travail en ap- 
 parence destructeur de la science moderne. Les pieux recits dont on 
 berc,a notre enfance eont devenus, grace a une eaine interpretation, de 
 hautes verites ; et c'est a nous qui voyons Ifrael dans Fa reelle beaute. 
 c'est a nous autres critiques qu'il appartient vraimtnt de dire : Stante* 
 erant pedes nostri in atriis tttis, Jerusalem.'" EENAN. 
 
 FIFTH EDITION, 
 WITH TWO APPENDICES. 
 
 LONDON : 
 WILLIAM KICE, 3 BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL, B.C. 
 
 1902.
 
 PREFACE 
 TO THE FIRST PUBLISHED EDITION. 
 
 \6yos. SOPHOCLES. 
 (" A short account suffices.") 
 
 IN the Preface to the Published Edition of "Safe Studies," I have 
 alluded to the conditions under which my two volumes, after a 
 long process of incuhation, or rather of domestic rearing, have 
 been suddenly left to make shift for themselves. Readers of 
 this volume are referred, to that Preface, which contains some 
 needful explanations, and is, in fact, an Apologia pro scriptis 
 meis. 
 
 LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 ATHEN.EUM CLUB, 
 
 PALL MALL, S.W. 
 1891. 
 
 PREFACE 
 TO THE SECOND PUBLISHED EDITION. 
 
 " In poetry, a certain faith in the impossible, and in religion, a like 
 faith in the unknowable, must have a place." GOBTHE. 
 
 IN the Preface to the First Published Edition of this volume, it is 
 stated that the Preface to Safe Studies " contains some needful 
 explanations, and is, in fact, an Apologia pro scriptis meis." 
 As, however, I find that many persons who have read Stones of 
 Stumbling have not seen Safe Studies, or at least have not 
 sought out the " needful explanations," I subjoin, with a few 
 
 b
 
 11 PREFACE. 
 
 corrections and additions, the passage in Safe Studies to which 
 I chiefly refer : 
 
 " The last time that Mr. Matthew Arnold wrote to me was after his 
 perusal of my Mr. Romanes's Catechism. His letter contains these words: 
 ' I consider myself, to adopt your very good expression, a Liberal 
 Anglican ; and I think the times are in favour of our being allowed so 
 to call ourselves.' On the other hand, Mr. Hamerton, in his French and 
 English, has expressed some friendly surprise at my calling myself an 
 Anglican of any sort. His surprise will doubtless be shared by many 
 readers of Stones of Stumbling. Let me, therefore, explain that my 
 Divine Economy of Truth was written before the reaction from my Evan- 
 gelical education had subsided, and before the Anglican Gospel had 
 suddenly and, as it were, unwittingly changed from tidings of unspeak- 
 able sadness to tidings of unspeakable joy, inasmuch h,j that ghastly 
 nightmare, the belief in unending torments, then weighed on the English 
 Church, as it still weighs on the Roman Church. The result is that this 
 Essay contains several expressions which I should not use now, and is 
 marked by a combativeness and even a bitterness which are, I hope, laid 
 aside in my somewhat similar Essay written ten years later under the 
 title of Neochristianity and Neocatholicism. It should, however, be noted 
 that the main contention of those articles has now been practically 
 admitted by Canon Cheyne in his Bampton Lectures, by the Principal of 
 Pusey House in Lux Mundi, and, more recently, by those official repre- 
 sentatives of orthodox learning in our two Universities, Canon Driver 
 and Canon Kirkpatrick. 
 
 " To me certainly it seems that one who accepts and assimilates the 
 results of criticism is more and more disposed to give a response to the 
 grand utterances of the Hebrew Scriptures to that amazing confidence 
 which has been so abundantly justified, and to those more amazing 
 prophecies which have been almost literally fulfilled. Thus we are in a 
 manner led to share the confidence shown in such texts as : ' pray for 
 the peace of Jerusalem ; they shall prosper that love thee. The Lord hath 
 chosen Zion to be an habitation for himself; he hath lonyed for her." 1 And 
 we can, at least, put our own construction perhaps a wider and deeper 
 Jne than was originally intended on the prophecies: ' The Gentiles shall 
 come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. In those days 
 it shall come to pass that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the 
 nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying : We 
 will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.' 
 
 " To the pessimism of Schopenhauer I feel each year a stronger aver- 
 sion. My views on this matter may be least egotistically shown by means 
 of a literary criticism, or, rather, conjecture. An eminent writer [Walter
 
 PREFACE. 11! 
 
 Pater] has lately suggested that Lucretius may have written the by-no- 
 means Lucretian exordium of his poem before he meditated his attack 
 on the Roman Pantheon. It may be BO ; but at any rate, after adopting 
 his later opinions, he published that seemingly devout Address to Venus, 
 who is there represented as the source of all life, virtue, and happiness. 
 Can some religious need in the poet, some craving for the ideal, have 
 found satisfaction in those verses ? Can their publication have arisen 
 from the undefined and unacknowledged hope which lurks often in the 
 minds even of the most sceptical, the hope that, though Nature is red 
 in tooth and claw with ravin (tantd stat prcedita culpd), yet Supreme 
 Goodness directs and sustains the Cosmos, and (in the language of 
 theology) God is Love ? " 
 
 If I were now to rewrite my article on the Divine Economy of 
 Truth, I should leave its main scope and argument as they stand, 
 but should profoundly modify its tone, and, in particular, 1 
 should omit certain passages which may have had their use 
 when Neochristianity was still militant, or rather when it was 
 regarded as a sort of rebel with no claim to belligerent rights, 
 but which would now be wholly superfluous ; and, having made 
 these alterations, I should be disposed to call the volume, not 
 Stones of Stumbling, but Bulwarks of Belief . 
 
 Charles Austin was fond of quoting the passage in Absalom 
 and Achitophel in which Dryden adverts to the change wrought 
 by the Reformation in the relative position of Catholics and 
 Protestants, whom he respectively designates as Jebusites and 
 Israelites : 
 
 " The inhabitants of old Jerusalem 
 Were Jebusites ; the town so called from them ; 
 
 And theirs the ancient right. 
 But, when the chosen people grew more strong, 
 The rightful cause at length became the wrong." 
 
 May not the new and greater Reformation have now proceeded 
 so far that the wrongful cause, as it was but lately thought, is 
 fast becoming the right one ? In illustration of the gradual but 
 complete change that has been coming over men's minds 
 during the last two centuries, I will quote Hark Pattison's 
 comment on the theology of Paradise Lost : " It would have
 
 IV PEEFAOE. 
 
 been a thing incredible to Milton that the hold of the Jewish 
 Scriptures over the imagination of English men and women 
 could ever be weakened. This process, however, has already 
 commenced. The demonology of the poem has already, with 
 educated readers, passed from the region of fact into that of 
 fiction. Not so universally, but with a large number of readers, 
 the angelology can be no more than what the critics call 
 machinery." 
 
 Well might Sophocles exclaim : 
 
 a.Tra.v& < o fjiaKpos Ka.vapiOfJ.'rjTOs xpdvos 
 <f>vfi T' aSr]Xa KOI (fravtma icp&rrerat. 
 
 "Vast and measureless time brings to light all that is hidden, and 
 hides all that has heen brought to light." 
 
 But, if Imply we are oppressed with the sense of the universal 
 flux of things spiritual as of things physical with something 
 of Tennyson's foreboding that our religious systems " have their 
 day and cease to be " let us fortify ourselves by recalling 
 Matthew Arnold's paraphrase of Monica's last prayer, his 
 rendering of that prayer into its modern equivalent : 
 
 " Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole. 
 Yet we her memory, as she prayed, will keep, 
 Keep by this : Life in God, and union there." 
 
 LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 March, 1893. 
 
 NOTE TO FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 As non-classical readers have often complained of being 
 baffled by my classical quotations, I have thought it better in 
 bringing out a new edition of my volumes to subjoin an Index, 
 with translations, of those quotations. 
 
 L. A. T. 
 
 1895.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO FIRST EDITION. 
 TeAeiW <rru' rj crrc/xa rpo^ny. Heb. V. 14. 
 
 ALL these articles are reprinted from the Fort- 
 nightly Review. It is with some hesitation that I 
 include in the volume the plea which, eleven 
 years ago (caliddjuventd), I set up on behalf of 
 Euthanasia. In the additions which are now 
 made to the article, and especially in the Note at 
 the end of it, I endeavour to explain that I am 
 merely expounding and defending against logical 
 objections Sir Thomas More's summary proposal 
 for the Relief of Incurables in Utopia. He 
 assuredly sought not to naturalize his scheme 
 among the subjects of Henry VIII. ; and I, too, 
 am in nowise ambitious of introducing it among 
 the subjects of Queen Victoria ! The reform, if 
 
 ever it is to be, 
 
 " lies so far away, 
 
 Not in our time, nor in our children's time, 
 "Pis like the second world to us that live." 
 
 Let it therefore be understood, once for all, that
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 my article is philosophical discussion it is not a 
 revolutionary propaganda. 
 
 The article on Physical Courage in my other 
 series, and those on The Fear of Death and Fear- 
 less Deaths in this one, together made up in their 
 original form the single article on Courage and 
 Death (Jan. 1876) ; they are, however, reprinted 
 
 with considerable additions. 
 
 L. A. T. 
 
 1884. 
 
 The Second Edition is a reprint of the First, 
 with the Recollections of Pattison added as an 
 Appendix. 
 
 1885. 
 
 Mr. Romanes's Catechism and Neochristianity 
 and Neo Catholicism have been added more recently. 
 
 1887,
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES 1 
 
 THE FEAR OP DEATH 32 
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS... ... ... ... ... ... 51 
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH 66 
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON 119 
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM ... ... ... .. 207 
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM : A SEQUEL ... 228 
 
 TRANSLATIONS OF GREEK, LATIN, AND GERMAN QUOTA- 
 TIONS rx THE TEXT.. 238
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 THE CURB FOR INCURABLES.* 
 
 /cpcurcrov yap eicra7ra Oavelv 
 17 ras cbra(ras i^iepas Tratr^eiv 
 
 AESCHYLUS. 
 
 ALL persons who feel a lively interest in the 
 mitigation of human suffering, should rejoice that 
 the very interesting essay on Euthanasia, f which 
 originally appeared among the Birmingham 
 Essays, has been published in a separate form. 
 Even those who do not altogether agree with Mr. 
 Williams, should at least wish that the plan he 
 suggests should be brought under discussion. 
 His proposal is, that in cases of incurable and 
 painful illness the doctors should be allowed, with 
 the patient's consent, and after taking all neces- 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1873. 
 
 f Euthanasia. By S. D. Williams, jun. ; with preface by 
 Rose Mary Crawshay. Williams & Norgate. 1872. Third 
 edition. 
 
 B
 
 2 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 sary safeguards, to administer so strong an anaes- 
 thetic as to render all future anaesthetics super- 
 fluous ; in short, that there should be a sort of 
 legalized suicide by proxy. The advantages that 
 would follow such a system are so obvious, that 
 it is unnecessary to read the horrible instance 
 given by Mrs. Crawshay in her preface, to be 
 reminded of them. Any of us may one day have 
 to bear many of us will certainly have to witness 
 either cancer, creeping paralysis, or something 
 equally unpleasant ; some may even have to endure 
 the hardest fate of all the fate of a mortally- 
 wounded soldier, who wishes to die, but whose 
 wounds are laboriously tended ; so that, by an in- 
 genious cruelty, he is kept suffering, against nature, 
 and against his own will.* Hence, even from the 
 most selfish point of view, we all have an interest 
 that this question should be speedily discussed ; so 
 that, in case any change should be thought possible 
 
 * It is probably from surgical cases that the strongest 
 arguments for Euthanasia may be drawn. One of the highest 
 authorities respecting such cases, Sir Benjamin Brodie, said 
 that a very moderate amount of pain, if continued for a long 
 time, would make one heartily tired of life. He remarked 
 also, that during his whole life he had "known only two 
 dying persons who showed any fear of death ; and that both 
 those died of bleeding. One cause of this singular circum- 
 stance probably was, that in these two cases there was hardly 
 any pain to distract the mind ; and the fact is curious as 
 showing how rare, in Sir Benjamin's experience, such painless 
 deaths must have been.
 
 THE CURE FOE INCURABLES. 3 
 
 and right, some foreshadowing of that change 
 may appear in our lifetime.* 
 
 Still, though one fully acknowledges the ability 
 of the essay, there are certain portions of it to which 
 one may give only a partial assent. There will, 
 however, probably be some readers of these pages 
 who have not seen the original pamphlet ; while 
 with the popular arguments on the other side all 
 are sure to be familiar. And it may therefore be 
 advisable that I should, so to say, hold a brief on 
 behalf of Euthanasia,^ and state Mr. Williams' s 
 case as strongly as I can, including one or two 
 points to which, I may venture to think, he has not 
 paid sufficient attention. 
 
 The evils arising from the present method, or 
 want of method, are forcibly stated by Mr. 
 Williams. It is needless for me to repeat his 
 painfully graphic account of what I cannot but 
 hope is an exceptional death-bed scene, of the 
 
 * See Note at the end of the article. 
 
 f [I call attention to these words, because some of my 
 critics are mistaken as to the manner and degree in which I 
 uphold Euthanasia (see the Preface to this volume). In 
 dealing with so unfamiliar a topic, it was above all things 
 needful to be plain and incisive ; and I was therefore glad 
 when the Spectator described the style of the article as 
 " defiantly clear." Had I been stating my views judicially 
 instead of holding a brief, some of my general propositions 
 would have been qualified. My language would then have 
 been less defiant ; but would it have been as clear ? (1833.) 
 
 B2
 
 4 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 agony which grows daily worse and worse, and 
 which may " possibly culminate in almost un- 
 imaginable horror." If a summary remedy could 
 be applied to this suffering, there would be the 
 further advantage that persons of a morbid and 
 brooding nature might gain confidence through 
 life, and that, knowing that death would be 
 deprived of its sting, they would have a sort of 
 negative stimulus, or (if I may so say) an anti- 
 preventive to exertion. Then, again, we must 
 consider the friends who, besides the immediate 
 suffering of nursing the sick man, often per- 
 manently impair their constitutions and nervous 
 systems, and who, moreover, are thus exposed to 
 a sort of moral suicide ; I mean, they curtail their 
 own powers of usefulness far more than a dose of 
 laudanum would curtail those of their dying 
 friend. It should also be observed that if, on 
 these accounts, the legalizing of a modified Hari- 
 kari in England be reckoned a good, the good 
 would in each case be much increased by the 
 force of example ; each person who availed him- 
 self of the new method of giving relief to himself 
 and his friends, would be doing what in him lay 
 to break down the old prejudice, and to make the 
 proceedings, so to say, fashionable, and would 
 thus be a public as well as a private benefactor. 
 On the whole, it cannot be doubted that the
 
 THE CUBE FOB INCURABLES. D 
 
 benefits resulting from a change in the law 
 would be simply enormous ; so that, unless a yet 
 more enormous advantage can be shown to follow 
 from obliging the sufferers to die in agony, the 
 Euthanasiasts must be admitted to have gained 
 the day. The onus probandi clearly rests with 
 the opponents of the scheme. Those opponents 
 may be roughly divided into two classes the 
 theological or sentimental opponents, and the 
 more rational opponents. It is with the former 
 class (whose objections, after all, possibly lie at 
 the root of the other objections) that !Mr. 
 Williams deals almost exclusively ; and to these 
 his answer is overwhelming. 
 
 It is urged that Providence ordains the day of 
 our death, and that to hasten that day is an act 
 of rebellion against the Divine will. In truth, 
 however, as God is a good being, his will must be 
 to promote the happiness of his creature's ; and, 
 therefore, to say that Euthanasia, though tending 
 to human happiness, is against the Divine will, is 
 like saying that it both does tend to happiness 
 and does not. But the fact is, that, when people 
 thus speak of the Divine will, they conceive it to 
 be embodied and represented in the order of 
 nature ; just as, in like manner, a line of conduct, 
 otherwise expedient, is so constantly objected to 
 as not being natural. The truth, however, is
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 that, since many portentous evils exist in nature, 
 whenever we remedy those evils, we, as it were, 
 mend nature. It is natural and, on the hypo- 
 thesis, in obedience to the Divine ordinance, that 
 when we walk in the rain, we should get wet ; and 
 yet we do that most unnatural and impious thing 
 we hold up umbrellas. As Mr. Williams epi- 
 grammatically puts it, " Man's whole existence, so 
 far as it is not blindly passive, .... consists, if 
 the phrase quoted have any real meaning, in 
 systematic opposition to the will of God." In- 
 deed, St. Paul's celebrated defence of passive 
 obedience might be almost literally paraphrased 
 thus : " Things which be, are ordained of God ; 
 whoso, therefore, alters things which be, alters 
 the ordinance of God ; and they that alter shall 
 receive to themselves damnation." It is from 
 this theological optimism that the opposition 
 spoken of by Comte has arisen between the 
 theological and the industrial spirit;* and it is 
 
 * Nequicquam dens abscidit 
 Prudens Oceano dissociabili 
 
 Terras, si tamen impise 
 Non tangenda rates transiliunt rada. 
 
 Herodotus mentions a Greek colony living on an isthmus, who 
 wished to protect themselves against the Persians by turning 
 their isthmus into an island ; but the oracle forbad them, 
 " for Zeus would have made it an island if he wished." In a 
 similar spirit, watches, according to Mr. Baden Powell, were 
 at first denounced as unchristian, for telling the time more
 
 THE CUBE FOR INCURABLES. 7 
 
 enough for our present purpose to say that the 
 arguments which would forbid the prevention of 
 the suffering incident to death, would forbid the 
 prevention of any suffering whatever. But, it is 
 said, the pain of death ought to be endured, as 
 we are told in the Bible that death is the penalty 
 of sin. I reply, in the first place, that this argu- 
 ment, if worth anything, would forbid, not merely 
 the extinction of such pain, but its partial mitiga- 
 tion (as by opiates). Also, as Mr. Williams 
 argues, all suffering is represented as the effect 
 of sin, and especially the suffering of childbirth. 
 And the Evangelicals were quite consistent in the 
 opposition that they raised to the use of chloro- 
 form in confinements, until, fortunately, public 
 opinion became too strong for them. May not 
 their own logic be turned against them, if it 
 should one day appear that the uses of the 
 sedative in childbirth and before death involve the 
 same principle, and must stand and fall together ? 
 Allied to these objections is the sentimental 
 remark that suicide is cowardly. Mr. Williams 
 answers that a man of sound mind, who has 
 nerve to destroy himself, whatever he may be, is 
 certainly not a coward. But I would chiefly lay 
 
 accurately than the son. It is well-known that some early 
 Christians objected to shaving, as defacing the image of God. 
 What do orthodox shavers make of this objection ?
 
 8 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 stress on the fact that here again there is no 
 difference in kind between the suffering of a 
 lingering death and other suffering. If it is 
 cowardly to avoid the former, it is equally 
 cowardly to avoid the latter. So that, according 
 to these reasons, the mother who has taken chloro- 
 form is a double coward : * she has shirked the 
 divinely appointed pain, and has not braved the 
 " ills that she knows not of." 
 
 Much is also said about .the saoredness of life- 
 just as men used to talk about the divine right of 
 kings. It is now generally admitted that the 
 authority of kings is divine only in the sense in 
 which all authority is divine ; and, as the essayist 
 truly says, "it may well be doubted if life have 
 any sacredness about it, apart from the use to be 
 made of it by its possessor." Indeed, life is the 
 mere framework or shell of what Juvenal calls the 
 vivendi causas. Yet all the high ends of life all 
 our means of general usefulness we are willing 
 to sacrifice for some special mode of bettering the 
 condition of our species. And he who would 
 devote all that makes life worth Laving to the 
 
 * Unless, as has been often asserted, there is almost always 
 a slight risk in giving chloroform (so recently as during the 
 late war, both French and German surgeons were said to be 
 very chary in giving it). If the risk is increased by chloroform 
 in ever so slight a degree, whoever incurs the increased risk 
 is morally guilty of euthanasia.
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. 9 
 
 common good (including his own), and yet has 
 scruples about sacrificing for the same object a 
 few days of agonized existence, is like a man who 
 lavishes his grain, but treasures up the worthless 
 husks. 
 
 But this is not all. Among the talents which 
 men thus devote to the public good are included 
 health and strength ; and these, it need hardly be 
 said, are potentialities of life. Statistics seem to 
 show that the best chance of reaching old age is 
 by living, as it were, in cotton-wool, and by exert- 
 ing one's brain only just so much as may be 
 necessary either to earn one's bread, or to keep 
 the mind from preying on itself. Every one who 
 does more than this diminishes the value of his 
 life, and is what I may call a slow suicide. 
 Indeed, it would be easy to make a goodly series 
 of classes and conditions of men, from sportsmen 
 to martyrs, who have acted in a way which would 
 be regarded by any insurer as opposed to long 
 life, and who, therefore, if the hackneyed, but 
 most inexact phrase has any meaning, have taken 
 measures " to quit their post without awaiting 
 their commander's bidding." Of course, it may 
 be said that the martyrs, when they die, are obey- 
 ing a Divine summons, as they have hastened 
 their end from noble motives ; but it may fairly 
 be asked whether we have a right to censure the
 
 10 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 motives of a man who declines to prolong 
 wantonly the suffering of himself and his family ; 
 in other words, who provideth for his own, and 
 also for those of his own house. 
 
 NOT is it only in dealing with their individual 
 selves that men are disposed to neglect the 
 sacredness of life. They certainly are not more 
 scrupulous about the lives of their neighbours. 
 " Hitherto," as the essayist observes, " man has 
 shown as little sense of the value of man's life as 
 Nature herself, whenever his passions, or lusts, or 
 interests have been thwarted by his brother man, 
 or have seemed likely to be forwarded by his 
 brother man's destruction." 
 
 There are, moreover, other instances more 
 closely resembling Euthanasia,* in which the 
 medical attendant of a dying man, from however 
 kindly motives, seems to touch the sacred thing, 
 and should beware of the fate of Uzzah. Mr. 
 "Williams supposes an ingeniously extreme case of 
 the sort, which shall be given in his own words : 
 
 " Suppose, for instance, that a given patient were certain to 
 drag on through a whole month of hideous suffering, if left 
 to himself and nature, but that the intensity of his sufferings 
 could be allayed by drugs, which, nevertheless, would hasten 
 the known inevitable end by a week ; there are few, if any, 
 
 * Here, as elsewhere, I use this term with special reference 
 to the case of incurables, and I so distinguish it from the 
 more general term, Suicide.
 
 THE CURE FOE tS'CTJBABLES. 11 
 
 medical men who would hesitate to give the drugs ; few, if 
 any, patients, or patients' relations or friends, who would 
 hesitate to ask that they should be given. And if this be so, 
 what becomes of the sacredness of life ? .... Is it not clear 
 that, if you once break in upon life's sacredness, if you curtail 
 its duration by never so little, the same reasoning that justifies 
 a minute's shortening of it, will justify an hour's, a day's, a 
 week's, a month's, a year's ; and that all subsequent appeal 
 to the inviolability of life is vain ? " 
 
 I can, from my own knowledge, give an instance 
 not unlike this. Not many years ago, in one of 
 the eastern counties, a country gentleman died, 
 who had long been almost hopelessly ill. As soon 
 as his case was given up, his doctors gave him a 
 sedative, which they refused to give him before, 
 and which much relieved his suffering. Now, so 
 striking are the recoveries of persons whose cases 
 have been despaired of, that the saying, " While 
 there is life there is hope," has passed into a pro- 
 verb ; and, just as Hallam speaks of that extreme 
 form of expediency which we call necessity, so in- 
 medical matters it is an inappreciable amount of 
 hope which is really denoted by the word " hope- 
 less." And, therefore, when in the present case 
 the sedative, which had before been refused as 
 likely to extinguish all chance of recovery, was at 
 last given, a course was adopted which made the 
 assurance of death doubly sure. In confirmation 
 of instances such as the foregoing, it may be 
 added, that I am told on medical authority that in
 
 12 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 the last stages of cancer, and still more in hope- 
 less cases of burning and of contusions of the 
 lower parts of the body, it is now not uncommon 
 to give strong narcotics, which, while they much 
 mitigate the final agony, by no means tend to 
 prolong it.* 
 
 I have now endeavoured to dispose of the chief 
 theological objections to the principle of eutha- 
 nasia; but two such objections remain, which 
 relate to matters of detail ; and I glance at these 
 arguments, not from any sense of their intrinsic 
 merits, but because the prejudice on this subject 
 is so inveterate, that the air must be well cleared 
 of its influence before the various aspects of 
 suicide can be properly discussed. One of the 
 objections was raised in a quarter which, I own, 
 a little surprised me : 
 
 " Imagine the horror of the situation, if by some accident 
 and such an accident would not surely be impossible the 
 sufferer should not lose consciousness at once, and finding 
 
 * More than one Englishman when, travelling in hot or 
 plague-stricken countries, where burial follows as soon as 
 possible after death, has been known to beg, that in case any- 
 thing should happen to him, his friends would apply a 
 " bare bodkin " to his body before his interment. Weed I add 
 that any one who has entertained such a wish has committed 
 euthanasia already in his heart ? What business has he to 
 rob himself of the few moments of smothering in his coffin, 
 which a merciful Providence might vouchsafe to him for 
 repentance, and to rush, with suicide in his right hand, into 
 the presence of his offended Maker ?
 
 THE CUKE FOR INCURABLES. 13 
 
 his courage fail, as the courage of suicides often does fail, at 
 the felt approach of death, were vainly to beg for the life 
 which it would be then impossible to restore !"* 
 
 I apprehend that after any decisive step in 
 one's life marriage, for example it is a very 
 sad thing if one repents when it is too late. But 
 a wise man will first determine what seems to 
 him best, and then will not much trouble himself 
 about the possibility of future repentance cer- 
 tainly not of a repentance which may be caused 
 by the nervous prostration of disease. Also, be- 
 tween marriage and euthanasia there is this diffe- 
 rence : the husband of a scold may have to 
 bemoan his lot through many long years ; while, 
 in the other case, if chloroform is the remedy 
 chosen, the time available for inopportune regrets 
 is somewhat limited. The other objection is 
 mentioned, or forestalled, by Mr. Williams. Some 
 persons, according to him, object, or will object, 
 to his scheme because it would deprive us of the 
 purifying influence of ministering at a bed of 
 sickness ; and his answer is, in effect, that there 
 will still be sick beds at which to minister. An 
 opponent might, however, suggest that, if the 
 new system were carried out to its possible conse- 
 quences, some of us, at any rate, might lose this 
 hallowing privilege. I should, therefore, prefer 
 
 * Spectator, March 18th, 1871.
 
 14 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 giving the more general answer that this objec- 
 tion, like so many of the preceding ones, would 
 apply, not to mortal sickness only, but to all 
 suffering. If pain is sent by God's ordinance as 
 a schooling either to its victims or to its witnesses, 
 is it not blasphemous presumption ever to 
 try to relieve it ? Much danger, according to 
 this theory, is to be apprehended from the ever- 
 lasting painlessness of heaven. And, even on 
 earth, might it not be prudent in the Government 
 to torture for our benefit a few clergymen at 
 stated intervals, that they may not merely excite 
 our sympathy by their sufferings, but also set us 
 an example of Christian resignation? 
 
 To sum up this part of the case. Either 
 we are bound, in all possible ways, to stretch to 
 the utmost the elastic thread of life, or we are 
 not. If we are so bound, nearly all of us are 
 guilty of great wickedness. But, if there are any 
 limits to this duty, human reason must be the 
 judge of those limits, and human welfare must be 
 their test. In other words, the question of 
 euthanasia should not be theologically prejudged, 
 but should be discussed on purely social grounds. 
 In case this important point should not even yet 
 be clear to all readers, I will try to illustrate it 
 yet further as I go on. 
 
 One of the most interesting parts of Mr. Lecky's
 
 THE CUBE FOB INCUKABLES. 15 
 
 work on European Morals,* is that in which he 
 exhibits the contrast between the extreme indif- 
 ference to suicide which prevailed in the first 
 century of our era, and the utter abhorrence of it 
 which was introduced by the Christian Church. 
 Possibly, in this matter, modern Liberalism is 
 tending, as Aristotle would have said, to a mean, 
 but inclines towards the former of the two ex- 
 tremes. Some one has said that the course of 
 history, though it does not go in circles, goes in 
 a sort of spiral ; and it may be that in regard to 
 suicide, as in regard to sundry other points, we 
 are now coming to a curve which brings us nearer 
 to the ancient point of view, than to the point of 
 view of modern Catholicism. The Catholic point 
 of view is briefly this : that suicide, essentially, 
 is as sinful as ordinary murder ; while, acciden- 
 tally, it has the further little drawback that since, 
 unless the act is clumsily done, it leaves scarce a 
 moment for repentance, it almost certainly involves 
 everlasting perdition.! This Catholic dogma is 
 
 * Mr. Lecky speaks approvingly of a saying of Bacon's, to 
 the effect that physicians should regard euthanasia (the 
 word, of course, being used in an extended sense) as the 
 great end of their art. To attain this desirable object, do 
 we require new anaesthetics, or merely a more thorough 
 application of those now in use ? 
 
 f The true Christian spirit is surely not opposed to 
 euthanasia. If that spirit is expressed in the Golden Rule, 
 and exemplified in the conduct of the good Samaritan, it
 
 16 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 clearly connected with the excessive importance 
 which many have attached to a man's state of 
 mind on his death-bed, and which has found ex- 
 pression in the sacrament of " extreme unction." 
 But with so horrible a superstition, and even 
 with the prayer against sudden death which is 
 contained in our own Litany, few thoughtful 
 persons now really sympathize. There are also 
 other signs that the popular opinion about suicide 
 is undergoing a rapid change. One of the most 
 curious of those signs is, that a writer so little 
 addicted to new ideas as Archbishop Whately 
 should have said that suicide is merely an exag- 
 gerated form of wasting time, in so far as it is a kind 
 of idleness which cannot be made up for by extra 
 work afterwards. But, on the other hand, a suicide 
 is far less culpable than a prolonged idler : the 
 suicide's fault is, at worst, a negative one ; while 
 the idler is a living burden on society ; for he is 
 an unproductive consumer, or, as a distinguished 
 writer expresses it, a do-nothing-eat-all. With 
 this reservation, then, Whately 's dictum may be 
 taken as fairly expressing the opinion of the 
 wisest of the ancients concerning suicide, namely, 
 that the man is to blame who wantonly deprives 
 
 enjoins us to relieve suffering, and not to leave it alone. NOT 
 can the promise of heaven fail to offer to the dying Christian 
 an inducement to use all lawful means to hasten his entrance 
 thither.
 
 THE CUEE FOE INCUEABLES. 17 
 
 his country of his services. But it is clear that 
 this censure can have no reference to a dying 
 man, who can no longer benefit anybody, and can 
 only make his friends suffer with himself. While, 
 therefore, we utterly repudiate the saying of 
 Madame de Stae'l (in one of her earlier and less 
 matured writings), that suicide is an " acte sub- 
 lime," and while we may consider that such men 
 as Clive, Condorcet, and Prevost-Paradol incurred 
 a grave responsibility in extinguishing talents 
 which belonged to mankind, we may yet think 
 that nothing but good could follow from the 
 permission of euthanasia. There is another point 
 which the Archbishop's saying suggests. Mr. 
 Williams has striven to defend the morality of a 
 certain form of suicide. It would, I conceive, 
 much strengthen his case, and give, so to say, a 
 second string to his bow, if proof could be forth- 
 coming of what I would term the legalisability of 
 suicide in general. Now, suicide, however im- 
 moral in most cases, seems to be one of those 
 acts which relate primarily to their authors, and 
 which the State has no power to check. Will it 
 be said that suicide, if permitted, would extend 
 its effects beyond the individual, since it would 
 propagate itself by example ? Of course it would, 
 and so would idleness, and every vice under the 
 sun. But the idle or frivolous man or woman is 
 
 c
 
 18 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 allowed to spread the infection of idleness and 
 frivolity all around. The drunkard wears out 
 his own constitution, and is of but doubtful profit 
 to his neighbours ; yet even he (so long as he 
 only tipples at home) is unrestrained either by 
 the Legislature, or by private individuals with 
 the Legislature's sanction. Who then has a right 
 to coerce that less objectionable member of 
 society, the would-be suicide? If we may not 
 interfere with the do-nothing-eat-all (or even 
 drink-all), how can we meddle with the do- 
 nothing-eat-nothing ? 
 
 But it will be said that we are, at any rate, 
 bound to restrain, not only " delirious " persons, 
 but also such as are in an extreme " state of ex- 
 citement or absorption," and that under one or 
 other of these heads nearly all suicides will fall. 
 I am aware that the amiable perjuries by which 
 juries have sought to evade the provisions of a 
 monstrous law, together with the natural wish of 
 the suicide's friends that he may not even now be 
 partaking of the hapless lot of impenitent sinners, 
 have led many persons to "the convenient con- 
 clusion that nearly all suicides are mad; but 
 there is, unfortunately, only too much evidence 
 the other way. Of course, a large proportion of 
 suicides consists of persons who have suffered 
 from great mental depression, and between de-
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. 19 
 
 t 
 
 pression and madness it is not always easy to 
 draw a line. Still, for practical purposes, such 
 a line has to be drawn constantly ; and, under the 
 new system, it would probably be recognised that 
 a man who was sane enough to make his will, 
 was sane enough to decide how soon the will 
 should begin to take effect. A man, however 
 much out of health, so long as he is not under 
 restraint, should be regarded as the best judge of 
 his own happiness ; just as, if his friends wished 
 him to occupy himself, they could not, even for 
 what they deemed his good, make him work 
 against his will. In any such case, the old say- 
 ing about the gods may be paraphrased thus : 
 invalidi felicitas invalido cura. Indeed, it may 
 perhaps be doubted whether, when a man has 
 seriously determined to commit suicide, his 
 friends, even if able to stop him, always benefit 
 him by doing so ; for, to a man who has once 
 fallen into this unhappy state, length of days is 
 often an increase of sorrow. On this last point 
 Mr. Williams is explicit with a vengeance. He 
 declares emphatically, in language which makes 
 part of his essay as doleful as a Scotch sermon, 
 that suffering is the almost constant rule in 
 nature ; and he seems to apply the rule to every 
 animal, rational or irrational, sick or in health, 
 past, present, or to come. In assuming this 
 
 o2
 
 20 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 | 
 
 principle, he employs an instrument quite sharp 
 enough to cut the knot about euthanasia. But, 
 unluckily, it will cut other knots equally well. 
 If pain is always in excess of pleasure, was not 
 Tamerlane one of the greatest of human bene- 
 factors ? And, even if a general massacre is not 
 the only consistent end of utilitarianism, is it not 
 in all cases most immoral to bring children into 
 the world?* I think, however, that it may be 
 assumed and the existence of society must in- 
 volve the assumption that the prospects of most 
 healthy men are rather happy than the reverse ; 
 or, at any rate, that they will be so when the 
 poor are better cared for. But it by no means 
 follows that the balance is likely to be favourable 
 in the case of men who wish to destroy them- 
 selves. There is yet another point to be con- 
 sidered. Lucretius exhorts old men to welcome 
 
 * Unless we resort to the rather fantastic hypothesis that 
 our children are likely to deduct from the mass of human 
 misery a greater amount than they will themselves feel. It 
 is certainly remarkable that Mr. Williams's lugubrious 
 opinion is in some measure supported by such writers as 
 Herodotus, Plato, Cicero, Shakspeare (if, as M. Taine thinks, 
 the poet is expressing his own sentiments in Hamlet's soli- 
 loquy), Milton, Bishop Butler, Byron, and Shelley. In like 
 manner, Sydney Smith, shortly before his death, told Charles 
 Austin that life seemed to him " a very middling affair." It is 
 also singular that, if you ask a number of persons whether 
 they would live their lives exactly over again, the majority 
 will almost always reply in the negative : this probably is so,
 
 THE CURE FOE INCURABLES. 21 
 
 death philanthropically, on the ground that 
 nature wants the matter of their worn-out bodies, 
 in order to make of it young and healthy bodies. 
 And, in a somewhat similar spirit, modern science 
 informs us that in an overcrowded population 
 there is a sharp struggle for existence : so that 
 an unhealthy, unhappy, and useless man is in a 
 manner hustling out of being, or at least out of 
 the means of enjoyment, some one who would 
 probably be happier, healthier, and more useful 
 than himself. Perhaps it will be thought that I 
 am now on dangerous ground, since arguments 
 not unlike the foregoing might be urged in de- 
 fence of the Spartan custom of destroying weakly 
 children. Yet, in truth, the two cases differ 
 widely. The great and crushing objection to so 
 atrocious a usage as infanticide is to be found 
 in its extreme liability to abuse, and in the anti- 
 
 partly because many are misled by contrasting too strongly 
 the shortcomings of their past life with what that life might 
 have been, and partly because the recollection of pain is so 
 intensely vivid that people cannot realise that they are 
 supposed to enter on their renewed life, fresh, vigorous, and 
 foreknowing nothing. The oddest case that I know on the 
 other side is that of a kindly old Indian officer of past eighty, 
 whom I asked whether he would like to live his life over 
 again. " Live it over again !" he answered ; with an en- 
 thusiasm of which I had thought him incapable, " I would 
 live it five times over again. There is not a single day that 
 I regret." As the Frenchman said, Q'est lafa^on dont le sang 
 circule.
 
 22 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 social consequences that might follow it. It is 
 possible that, under such a system, full-grown 
 sons might sometimes turn the tables on their 
 aged parents, and inquire concerning them what, 
 not long ago, a young child asked an elderly 
 relative, namely, whether " it would not soon be 
 time for her to go to heaven." Occasionally, 
 even, an impatient kinsman or heir might adopt 
 a summary method similar to that which was so 
 frankly avowed by Porphyria's lover : 
 
 " All her hair 
 
 In one long yellow string I wound 
 Three times her little throat around. 
 And strangled her. No pain felt she ; 
 I am quite sure she felt no pain." 
 
 But there is, in fact, the same sort of difference 
 between infanticide and suicide as between wast- 
 ing one's neighbour's goods and wasting one's own. 
 Either form of wastefulness is immoral; but 
 bystanders would regard the one form as the 
 waster's own concern, while with the other they 
 would feel bound to interfere. 
 
 "Would, however (it is asked), the Spartan 
 father be alone, if euthanasia were permitted, in 
 holding a power liable to abuse ? Would not the 
 authority which it is proposed to grant to the 
 doctor be almost equally intolerable, though 
 exercised over a willing subject? Without dwell- 
 ing on the power over life and death which is
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. 23 
 
 exercised by home secretaries and commanders- 
 in-cliief, I may remark that even now the issues 
 that depend on a physician's fallible judgment 
 are often most formidable. For example, in the 
 performance of the painful duty of rejecting as 
 incurable applicants for admission into a hospital, 
 the slightest error of judgment will take from 
 those that have not, whatever chance of getting 
 better they might seem to have. In the case of 
 euthanasia, the doctor would merely have to say 
 whether the sufferer was in such a state that, 
 had he wished to enter a hospital, the request 
 would have been refused. If further precautions 
 were required, the concurrence of two or three 
 medical men might be held necessary for granting 
 the sick man a release from his sufferings. 
 Something of this sort might be done if Mr. 
 Williams's demand, and nothing more, were con- 
 ceded. But, if the legal right of suicide were 
 once fully recognised, the matter would become 
 much simpler ; for then the entire responsibility 
 would lie with the sick man. This would be 
 especially valuable in cases where there was a 
 certainty of long and acute pain, and a proba- 
 bility, just short of certainty, that the pain would 
 end in death. 
 
 " But, at any rate, would it not be the height 
 of cruelty to quit one's sorrowing friends ? And
 
 24 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 is not the State bound to protect them from such 
 a base desertion ?" When conviction for suicide 
 involves loss of property when social incon- 
 veniences attach to the suicide's relatives when 
 it is popularly held that all sane suicides will be 
 damned, when any of these conditions, having 
 but lately ceased to exist, have left an after-glow of 
 sentiment about the sacredness of life, in all 
 such cases (as also when the sufferer has insured 
 his life) the friends are most careful to prevent 
 him relieving his misery by a coup de grace of 
 any sort. Yet nothing is more certain than that 
 it is not by the mere fact of the sick man's dying 
 that so much sympathy is aroused; for, after 
 prolonged suffering, the friends will nearly always 
 speak of death as a merciful release. And I 
 suspect that among the poorer classes, unless the 
 sick man happens to be a pensioner, the equi- 
 vocal affection which would wish him to linger 
 on in agony would give way yet sooner before 
 the labour of nursing him.* But, be this as it 
 may, we may cut the matter short by repeating 
 the substance of our former question : Has the 
 
 * This may be illustrated by an anecdote concerning a 
 well-disposed husband in that class. His wife, dying of 
 asthma, had been troubling him, in the intervals when she 
 could speak, with directions of all sorts. He struggled hard 
 with his impatience, and at last said quietly, " Dinna fash 
 yourself, my good woman, but get on with the deeing."
 
 THE CUBE FOB INCURABLES. 25 
 
 State any right to forbid the sick man to choose 
 his own way of severing himself from his friends, 
 when it cannot possibly prevent him ordering (as 
 in Middlemarch) even his nearest relations to keep 
 out of his sight ? 
 
 I will conclude my duties, as self-chosen counsel 
 for euthanasia, by adverting to two objections 
 which have been urged by a very able, and by no 
 means unfriendly, critic.* As I repeat the first of 
 these objections from memory, I will give it 
 entirely in my own words. " Granting that such 
 a principle as that of the absolute sacredness of 
 life cannot be logically defended, it is certain that 
 the opinions and actions of most men are very 
 little determined by logic. Men are often de- 
 terred from committing atrocious crimes by 
 traditional sentiments, which are the result of 
 very complex associations ; and with these senti- 
 ments and associations it is dangerous to meddle. 
 Thus, the duty of respecting one's own life, even 
 in extreme cases, is a sort of outwork, by 
 surrendering which we should much imperil 
 men's respect for each other's lives ; at any rate, 
 it is safe policy to insist on the less 'obvious duty, 
 for by doing so we obey the proverb, and take 
 care of the pence." I have already touched on 
 this subject in what I have said about infan- 
 * Saturday Review.
 
 26 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 ticide ; but, as the objection is by far the most 
 serious that can be urged against euthanasia, 
 I will now consider it more fully. In trying to 
 meet this difficulty, the first point that strikes 
 one is, that we can see but a short distance into 
 the future of history, and that, therefore, if we 
 rejected all reforms which might lead to contin- 
 gent and remote evils, no reform whatever would 
 be passed, and we should be in a state of Chinese 
 stagnation. If Luther had foreseen all the con- 
 sequences of the right of private judgment, he 
 would, perhaps, never have quitted Rome. Nor 
 is it merely ungenerous and cowardly to refuse 
 reasonable concessions, lest they should be fol- 
 lowed by unreasonable demands ; it is often, also, 
 unsafe. To revert to the two illustrations that I 
 have just employed there is sometimes a danger 
 to the fortress in seeking to defend too long an 
 indefensible outwork ; just as there is a danger in 
 being penny-wise. And, in the present instance, 
 if the masses are taught to regard a proper re- 
 spect for human life as involving a wanton pro- 
 longation of the death-agony, the logic may one 
 day prove to be two-edged, and the association of 
 the ideas to be a perilous one. Once more : sol- 
 diers, after a long and bloody campaign, come 
 home, not perhaps with their moral sentiments 
 much quickened or ennobled, but still without
 
 THE CURE FOE INCURABLES. 27 
 
 any propensity to pillage or shoot their peaceful 
 neighbours. Why is all this bloodshed so little 
 demoralizing? Undoubtedly because it has oc- 
 curred in the name, and under the protection, of 
 the law. Now, under the proposed scheme, the 
 case of doctors, so far as it would differ from the 
 case of soldiers, would differ from it for the 
 better. For the doctors would be acting under 
 legal sanction ; their conduct in each case would 
 be liable to public criticism ; while, on the other 
 hand, it would be comparatively seldom that they 
 would have to shorten life, and, when they did 
 shorten it, their motives would be the very 
 kindest. Indeed, it may well be doubted whether 
 less harm would not be done both to the doctors 
 and to the public by the former being allowed to 
 grant the incurable sufferer a willing release, 
 than by their looking passively on, and often 
 even using their skill to lengthen his pain. Will 
 it be said that they also use their skill to relieve 
 his pain, especially at the last stage ? They do 
 so, often by giving strong narcotics; but, as I 
 have said, when narcotics, withheld before, are 
 given when there is no longer any hope, it may 
 be surmised that their probable effect will be that 
 of, to say the least, not adding to the dying 
 man's few remaining hours. Need I say, that 
 if a doctor, even at an agonized patient's entreaty,
 
 28 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 takes a course likely to hasten death, lie is doing 
 that for which, tinder the present law, he might 
 be severely taken to task ; nay, that he is hovering 
 on the brink of manslaughter, if not of something 
 worse ? And, granting that human life would be 
 much more and much oftener curtailed, if eutha- 
 nasia were allowed, than is now the case, is it not 
 yet possible that there may be less danger in a 
 considerable curtailment, when legalised and 
 exposed to public scrutiny, than in a far smaller 
 curtailment, when brought about irregularly, and, 
 as it were, by stealth ? 
 
 The other objection urged by the same critic is 
 of less consequence. Speaking of euthanasia, he 
 says : 
 
 " The only answer which could be made from the point of 
 view of practical convenience was the extreme liability to 
 abuse of such a power. Dead men tell no tales ; and it would 
 be unpleasantly easy for a wife who wanted to get rid of her 
 husband, to put an end to the unfortunate person's existence, 
 and to set up the theory that she had acted only by the express 
 desire of the invalid. There can, however, be no doubt that, 
 if such a system could be introduced with sufficient safe- 
 guards, it would put an end to a great quantity of suffering." 
 
 While agreeing cordially with this last sentence, 
 I would venture to suggest that safeguards could 
 be multiplied ad libitum. "Why should not pre- 
 cautions be taken similar to those which are re- 
 quired in order to put a lunatic under restraint ?
 
 THE CUBE FOE INCURABLES. 29 
 
 It might be held requisite that the doctor should 
 always be present at the final scene ; and, if that 
 was not a sufficient safeguard, the law might pro- 
 vide that a given number of respectable persons 
 (say householders) should be witnesses, including, 
 perhaps, some policeman or magistrate. Why 
 should it not be part of the recognised duty of the 
 incumbent of the parish to be present ? The 
 notion may seem whimsical ; but Sir Thomas 
 More suggests, in sober earnest, that the priests, 
 instead of merely witnessing such acts, should 
 actively encourage them. I see that Mrs. 
 Crawshay refers to the passage ; but it certainly 
 deserves to be quoted, representing as it does the 
 opinion of one of the ablest of men and most 
 devout of Christians : 
 
 "When any [Utopian] is taken with a torturing and 
 lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or 
 ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that 
 since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, 
 and are become a burden to themselves and to all about them, 
 so that they have really outlived themselves, they would no 
 longer nourish such a rooted distemper, but would choose 
 rather to die, since they cannot live but in much misery ; 
 being assured that, if they either deliver themselves from 
 their prison and torture, or are willing that others should do 
 it, they shall be happy after their deaths ; and, since by their 
 dying thus they lose none of the pleasures, but only the 
 troubles of life, they think they act not only reasonably in 
 BO doing, but religiously and piously, because they follow the 
 advices that are given them by the priests, who are the ex- 
 pounders of the will of Grod to them. They that be thus per-
 
 30 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 suaded, finish their lives willingly, either with hunger, or else 
 die in their sleep without any feeling of death. But they 
 cause none such to die against his will, and they use no less 
 diligence and attendance about him, believing this to be an 
 honourable death. Else he that killeth himself before that 
 the priests and the council have allowed the cause of his death, 
 him as unworthy either to be buried, or with fire to be con- 
 sumed, they cast unburied into some stinking marsh." 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 In reprinting my article on Euthanasia, I am anxious to 
 guard against one of the many misconceptions to which I 
 have been exposed. Some excellent persons seem verily to 
 imagine that I wish nay, expect Sir Thomas More's project 
 to be proposed during the next session, and straightway 
 carried through Parliament. Such is assuredly not my ex- 
 pectation; nor is it my desire. Mr. Mai'k Pattison has 
 hinted at the possibility that the despised Comtist may, two 
 centuries hence, be more formidable than the dreaded 
 Catholic ; and, in like manner, my main object is to suggest 
 that, after the lapse of an equally long period, the Euthanasian 
 pioneers may have defeated their Athanasian antagonists. It 
 will, peradventure, be objected, that neither the Editor of the 
 Spectator nor myself (unless, indeed, some news of this 
 wretched little world is sent to disquiet us in the Elysian 
 fields) can ever satisfy our curiosity as to the Euthanasian 
 proclivities of posterity ; and that, therefore, my speculation 
 is an idle one. I think not. Those of us who are convinced 
 that the ultimate triunfph of democracy is bestimmt in 
 Gottes Bath, find that the conviction changes the attitude 
 which we assume towards the democracy of to-day ; and, in 
 the same sort of way, if the " stream of tendency "is making for 
 Euthanasia, or, at least, for an increased indulgence to suicide 
 in general, we may hope that at no distant date public opinion 
 will be modified in regard to suicide in extremis. Such a hope 
 was entertained by so cautious a thinker as the late Mr. W.
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES. 31 
 
 B. Greg, who represented himself as " wild about Euthanasia," 
 and who (so far as I could judge from a single conversation) 
 was both a more sanguine and a more vehement champion of 
 the cause than I ever was. A similar hope or wish is ex- 
 pressed in the following extract from the memoirs of the 
 great musical composer, Berlioz, to which a friend has called 
 my attention : 
 
 " J'ai perdu ma sceur ainee. Elle est morte d'un cancer 
 au sein, aprds six mois d'horribles souff ranees qui lui arrach- 
 aient nuit et jour des cris dechirants. Mon autre scaur qui 
 s'etait rendue a Grenoble pour la soigner et qui ne 1'a pas 
 quittee jusqu'a la derniere heure, a failli succomber aux 
 fatigues et aux cruelles impressions que lui a cause cette lente 
 agonie. Et pas un medecin n'a ose avoir 1'humanite de 
 mettre fin a ce martyre en faisant respirer a ma SOBUT un 
 flacon de chloroforme. On fait cela pour eviter a un patient 
 la douleur d'une operation chirurgicale qui dure un quart de 
 minute, et on s'abstient d'y recourir pour le delivrer d'une 
 torture de six mois. Qnand il est prouve, certain, que nul 
 remede, rien, pas meme le temps, ne peut guerir un mal 
 affreux ; quand la mort est evidemment le bien supreme, la 
 delivrance, la joie, le bonheur ! . . . . Mais les lois sont la 
 qui le defendent, et les idees religieuses qui s'y opposent non 
 moins f ormellement. Et ma sceur, sans doute, n'eut pas con- 
 senti a se delivrer ainsi si on le lui eut propose. ' II faut que 
 la volonte de Dieu soit faite.' Comme si tout ce qui arrive 
 
 n'arrivait pas par la volonte de Dieu et comme si la 
 
 delivrance de la patiente par une mort douce et prompte, 
 n'eut pas ete aussi bien la volonte de Dieu que son execrable 
 
 et inutile torture Quel nonsens que ces questions de 
 
 fatalite, de divinite, de libre arbitre, &c. ! ! C'est 1'absurde 
 intini, 1'entendement humain y tournoie et ne peut que s'y 
 perdre. En tout cas, la plus horrible chose de ce monde pour 
 nous, etres vivants et sensibles, c'est la sonffrance inexorable, 
 ce sont les douleurs sans compensation possible arrivees a ce 
 degre d'intensite ; et il faut etre ou barbare ou stupide, ou 
 1'un et 1'autre a la fois, pour ne pas employer lemoyen sur et 
 doux dont on dispose aujourd'hui pour y mettre un terme. 
 Lea gauvages sont plus intelligents, et plus humains."
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 
 
 " ! genus infelix humanum, talia divis 
 Cum tribuit facta atque iras adjunxit acerbas ! 
 Quantos turn gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis 
 Volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris !" 
 
 LUCRETIUS. 
 
 Is the fear of death less or greater in modern 
 than in ancient times ? In seeking to answer this 
 question, we may say roughly that the physical 
 terrors of death are constant, while the moral 
 terrors are variable. Not, indeed, that the mere 
 physical terrors have been, strictly speaking, un- 
 changed. For it is probable that the ancients, 
 being used to hardship and suffering, were less 
 sensitive to the sting of death than we are. On 
 the other hand, it is certain that the progress of 
 medicine, including the use of anaesthetics, has 
 done something towards extracting that sting, 
 and will in time do much more. No doubt, our 
 medical improvements often increase the im- 
 mediate fear of death which is felt by the dying : 
 if the dying suffered more, their minds would be 
 distracted, and they would shrink less from the 
 final relief. But, at any rate, those medical im- 
 provements tend to mitigate the apprehension
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 33 
 
 which the mere pain of dying excites in the world 
 at large. And it is enough for my purpose that 
 this pain of dying can hardly be worse with us 
 than it was with our forefathers ; the balance, if 
 balance there is, is probably in our favour. 
 
 Yet, strange to say, the entire terrors of death 
 seem to be greater in our time than in that of the 
 great classical writers. To prove this assertion 
 would not be easy ; but scholars will hardly 
 dispute it. It is remarkable that Bacon, when 
 maintaining the paradox that the fear of death is 
 the weakest of emotions, chooses all his examples 
 from among pagans. He mentions, among other 
 instances, the dying jest of Vespasian : Ut puto, 
 Deus fio. It would be unfair to judge of the 
 ancient indifference to death from this exceptional 
 utterance ; just as, on the other hand, it would be 
 unfair to judge of the modern alarm at death 
 from the case of Johnson, who, when the surgeon 
 made slight scarifications in his swollen leg, ex- 
 claimed, " Deeper ; deeper ! I want length of life ; 
 and you are afraid of giving me pain, which I do 
 not value." Yet it is hard not to think that these 
 opposite frames of mind exhibit the ancient and 
 modern tendencies in regard to death, though 
 they exhibit them " writ large." The best of the 
 ancients knew, as we do not know, how to obey 
 the maxim of the great poet of Stoicism, and to 
 
 D
 
 34 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 take a negative view of death as the mere end of 
 life, the goal in the course of nature ; if infirm or 
 suffering, they could even go the length of 
 Juvenal's maxim, as rendered by Dryden 
 " And count it nature's privilege to die." 
 
 Hence they managed to take death easily, through 
 thinking of it as a matter of course, and thinking 
 but little of it even thus ; while with us, on the 
 other hand, death is just what Byron called it 
 "the doom we dread, yet dwell upon" ; and it is 
 life which now dwindles into being the accident 
 of our existence I' anticliambre de la mort,* or 
 rather, de I'eternite. In truth, the ancients (or, 
 more properly, the Greek and Roman free citizens), 
 in seeking/ortfem animum, mortis terrors carentem, 
 acted by anticipation on Charles Austin's rule, not 
 to regret the inevitable ; and to this unregret- 
 fulness, this dislike of breaking their wings 
 against the bars of their cage, they owed much of 
 that light-hearted joyousness which formed a real 
 side of their character, though a less important 
 side than we are apt to think, f 
 
 It is observed by Lessing that, in comparing 
 
 * Dumas. 
 
 f No passage in Herodotus strikes me as more impressive 
 than the one (vi. 98) in which he says, that in the three 
 generations which had just elapsed, more evils befel Greece 
 than in the twenty generations before. He is speaking of 
 the age of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pericles the very
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 35 
 
 the views entertained by different ages or races 
 concerning death, their art proves a safer guide 
 than their literature. Perhaps we may explain 
 the grounds of this judgment by saying that 
 literature is able, and is therefore expected, to 
 give a diorama of what it depicts, while art can 
 give only a panorama. Thus, in describing death, 
 writers, especially poets, have to ring the changes 
 of ever- varying, yet monotonous, details concern- 
 ing the " groans and convulsions, the blacks and 
 obsequies that shew Death terrible." On the 
 other hand, a painter or sculptor is in the strictest 
 manner bound to the unities of space and time. 
 Thus, if he seeks to represent death in the ab- 
 stract, he can only give a momentary and concen- 
 trated view of it. His representation must (so 
 far as it goes) include everything, and yet must 
 include nothing that needs to be explained ; so 
 that he must confine himself to the essential and 
 
 
 
 greatest, and, one would have thought, happiest age in the 
 annals of the greatest and happiest nation of antiquity. Also 
 he himself seems to have been a happy man ; happy certainly 
 in this, that he was born and died just at the right time : he 
 was a child when Greece became safe from Persia, and his 
 long life closed before the fall of Athens. Yet this great and 
 happy man, speaking of this great and seemingly happy age, 
 could only describe it as eminently miserable. The fact is, 
 that he had a near view of the age, while we only see it 
 " foreshorten'd in the tract of time." What is this historical 
 perspective worth ? 
 
 1) 2
 
 36 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 constant features of death, as distinguished from 
 those which are accidental, and which vary in in- 
 dividual cases. What, then, are the essential ideas 
 of death that are embodied in ancient and in 
 modern art ? To this Lessing replies, that ancient 
 art generally symbolizes death by emblems of 
 repose and insensibility modern art by a 
 skeleton. It is true that he deprecates and 
 denounces this tendency of modern art. Being 
 himself on the side of the angels, he would have 
 agreed with Coleridge that a good man's surest 
 friends should be " himself, his Maker, and the 
 angel Death." And as an angel, rather than as a 
 skeleton, he would fain have seen death typified. 
 Still, in dealing with things, not as he wished 
 them to be, but as they are, he emphatically 
 declares that ancient art and ancient thought re- 
 presented death more favourably than modern art 
 or modern thought. Hence it appears that his 
 authority in this matter, baing given with reluct- 
 ance, should carry all the more weight, and that 
 this authority is distinctly on the side of the view 
 for which we have been contending. 
 
 Assuming, then, that the entire terrors of death 
 have increased, while its physical terrors have, if 
 anything, diminished, what has increased must be 
 the aggregate of its non-physical, or, as we call 
 them, its moral terrors ? What, let us ask, is the
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 37 
 
 nature of these moral terrors ? Some of them are 
 of minor importance, being indeed little more than 
 a reflection of the physical terrors. Thus, Mr. Mill 
 at one time condemned capital punishments on 
 the ground that, by connecting death with crimes, 
 they add an imaginary to the natural horror of 
 it; much as King John, apologising to Hubert 
 for unflattering comments, improved matters by 
 explaining that a suspicion of murder had 
 " presented thee more hideous than thou art." 
 Probably, however, we should be on our guard 
 against expecting (in later life Mr. Mill would 
 hardly have expected) men's nerves to be much 
 strengthened by any mere mechanical reform like 
 the one I have mentioned. Yet there is at least 
 one such reform which might do some good in 
 this direction : the aspect of death might be a 
 little softened, if cemeteries gave place to cre- 
 matories, and our minds were relieved from the 
 revolting associations of the grave. If cremation 
 has such a tendency, some of the ancients had, in 
 this respect, less inducement to fear death than 
 we have. Also, it may be contended that, if the 
 ancients had little fear of the end of life, this may 
 have been partly because they set little value on the 
 beginning or middle of it,^-the difference between 
 them and us being, not that they dreaded death 
 less, but that we love life more. This remark
 
 38 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 may have some application to Orientals, both 
 present and past : as, for instance, we may gather 
 from the gloomy view of life expressed in the 
 Dravidian hymns of India. But the explanation 
 can scarcely be extended to the free citizens of 
 the great classical nations ; for, granting that, in 
 spite of appearances, our life is happier and 
 brighter than theirs was, it certainly cannot be so 
 much happier and brighter as to set in appreciably 
 greater contrast the dark colours of death. More- 
 over, some Orientals must have had a special 
 reason to fear dying, particularly the Buddhists, 
 whose posthumous ideal for the best of us is, that 
 we must, through much tribulation and many 
 transmigrations, enter into the land of nothing- 
 ness. Yet Buddhism is not the only or the chief 
 religion which, through the post mortem mystery, 
 has the effect of attaching men to life. Christian 
 charity, it is true, has done much to make the 
 domestic ties tender and sacred ; and this is one 
 reason why we shrink so much from dying, and 
 leaving those who will grieve for us. But 
 Christian charity is not the only cause of our 
 so recoiling from the separation. It might have 
 been thought that the Christian faith, by declaring 
 the parting not to be final, would do as much to 
 mitigate its pang as Christian charity could do to 
 embitter that pang ; yet, in fact, Christian faith
 
 THE FEAB OP DEATH. 39 
 
 and Christian charity seem to combine to embitter 
 it. The pain of the final parting, as felt by 
 Christians, is partly due to the deep solemnity 
 which Christian sentiment attaches to death ; and 
 this solemnity is not unconnected with a vague 
 sense of dismay at the tremendous uncertainty as 
 to what our dying friends will see and feel when 
 their eyes are closed. In short, there is reason 
 to think that it is " the dread of something 
 after death " which now makes cowards of us all ; 
 and that, St. Paul notwithstanding, Christian 
 mourners, as a rule, have sorrowed, not less than 
 others who have no hope, but more than others 
 who have no fear.* 
 
 Let us consider those beliefs further. Children, 
 says Mr. Max Miiller, help to correct the irregu- 
 larities of language. They also set in a strong 
 light, and so help to correct, the more flagrant 
 
 * Probably, also, the modern development of the primitive 
 belief that, without shedding of blood, there is no remission, 
 and the momentous results attributed to the death on 
 Calvary, have helped to give a direction and an intensity to 
 the Christian sentiment about death. Observe, too, that a 
 moderately good Pagan might hope to be moderately happy 
 hereafter ; whereas a moderately good Christian, or rather 
 Protestant, is tottering between infinite extremes, without 
 even purgatory to serve as a mean. The paths of two men, 
 whose degrees of sinfulness differ by a hair's breath, may 
 diverge into torment and glory : Hie crucem pretium tulii, hie 
 diadema.
 
 40 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 anomalies of belief ; and therefore it is interesting 
 to observe the impression which the popular creed 
 produces on their unsophisticated minds. Some 
 time ago, a relative of tender years startled me 
 by the question whether I should dislike going to 
 hell. On my expressing displeasure at so singular 
 an inquiry, the child explained, with equal sim- 
 plicity and point, that, as most people would go 
 to hell, surely he or I, or one of his parents, or 
 of his brothers and sisters, must be of the num- 
 ber.* As to the condition in which the poor 
 child expected some of his kinsfolk to spend 
 eternity, I may refer to a hymn which used to be 
 sung in a parish church, and which was taught to 
 me in my boyhood. The following verse remains 
 in my memory, after the lapse of twenty years ; 
 for it most happily illustrates the orthodox doc- 
 trine which, more than any other, took possession 
 of my youthful mind : 
 
 " When I hear the wicked call 
 On the rocks and hills to fall ; 
 When I see them start and shrink 
 On the fiery deluge brink ; 
 
 * The fear of hell takes various, and sometimes grotesque, 
 forms ; as was shown in the story of the dying Scotchman, 
 who asked his minister whether he could save himself from 
 the wrath to come by leaving 10,000 to his kirk. " I canna 
 promise that," said the shrewd theologian, " but it's worth 
 trying"
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 41 
 
 Then, Lord, shall I fully know, 
 Not till then, how mnch I owe." 
 
 This ghastly thanksgiving falls little short of a 
 saying attributed to some noted Evangelical : 
 " Mr. Maurice doesn't believe in the eternity of 
 punishment, but we hope for better things." In 
 the following lines from another hymn, the senti- 
 ment is peradventure less encouraging, because it 
 replaces gratitude with fear : 
 
 *' Satan is glad when I am bad, 
 And hopes that I with him shall lie 
 In fire and chains and dreadful pains." 
 
 Some centuries ago a learned divine pronounced 
 that " Beati in regno ccelesti videbunt poenas 
 damnatorum ut beatitude illis magis complaceat." 
 In a like spirit, a rigid Covenanter said that " the 
 greatest delight of the saints in heaven will be to 
 look down into hell and see the damned folks 
 grill " ; and, so recently as 1839, the sentiment 
 found a feeble echo in the statement that " the 
 beholding of the smoke of their torments is a 
 surpassing delectation."* One of Lord Palmer- 
 ston's bishops discoursed on the supposed diffi- 
 culty of people being happy in heaven, while 
 knowing that their deceased kinsfolk were else- 
 
 See Pall Mall Budget, March 24, 1877.
 
 42 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 where. In heaven, he explained, sympathy with 
 the will of God will be indefinitely strengthened; 
 at the same time, ties of family will be weakened : 
 so that, instead of pitying our doomed relatives, 
 we shall actually take part with the divine justice 
 which dooms them. Perhaps it will be contended 
 that the authority of a mere Palmerstonian pre- 
 late is worth little or nothing; so my next 
 extract shall be from a prelate of real weight, the 
 author of Ductor Dubitantium and of Holy Living 
 and Dying : 
 
 " We are amazed to think of the inhumanity of Phalaris, 
 who roasted men alive in his brazen bull : this was a joy in 
 respect of that fire of hell, which penetrates the very entrails 
 
 of the body without consuming them Such are the 
 
 torments and miseries of hell, that if all the trees of the 
 world were put in one heap and set on fire, I would rather 
 barn there till the day of judgment, than suffer, only for the 
 
 space of one hour, that fire of hell Who would not 
 
 esteem it a hideous torment, if he were to be burnt alive a 
 hundred times, and his torment was to last every time 
 for the space of an hour ? with what compassionate eyes 
 would all the world look upon such a miserable wretch ! 
 Nevertheless . . . what comparison is there betwixt a hun- 
 dred hours' burning, with some space of time betwixt every 
 hour, and to burn a hundred years of continual torment ! 
 and what comparison will there be betwixi burning for a 
 hundred years' space, and to be burning without interrup- 
 tion as long as God is God !" 
 
 Observe that Jeremy Taylor here understands 
 the texts about the fire of hell in their plain and
 
 THE FEAE OF DEATH. 43 
 
 literal sense. His example was followed by a 
 Calvinistic clergyman who, some years ago, was 
 guardian to an unconverted young lady. The 
 late Sir Benjamin Brodie assured me that this 
 too zealous pastor and master, after deliberating 
 how he could best give his ward some slight 
 foretaste of the posthumous discomforts that 
 were in store for her, came to the conclusion that 
 feeling is believing, and held her finger in the 
 candle ! On hearing of this argumentum igneum, 
 one is tempted to think that either the guardian 
 was mad, or else the story is exaggerated. I 
 will, therefore, follow it up with another story, 
 which reached me on equally good authority, and 
 which is in itself less improbable. Quite recently, 
 an orthodox parson was asked by one of the 
 farmers in his parish whether he really believed 
 that hell-fire would last for ever. He shrugged 
 his shoulders, and quoted some of the texts which 
 support the popular belief. " But, Sir," said the 
 perplexed rustic, " I don't see how any constitu- 
 tion could stand it." This physical objection 
 may recall one that occurred to a very old woman 
 who, being admonished to beware of the place 
 where there will be gnashing of teeth, drew com- 
 fort from the reflection that she had no teeth to 
 guash. Baden Powell has somewhere recorded 
 three views which were taken by great Catholic
 
 44 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 authorities as to the existence of Antipodes. St. 
 Augustin declared the belief to be unscriptural ; 
 Lactantius pronounced it to be absurd; while 
 Boniface said that there might indeed be Anti- 
 podes, but that they would all without exception 
 be damned. 
 
 Alas ! how often one has thought that, on the 
 first day of Creation, if benevolence had really 
 been armed with omnipotence, the fiat would 
 have been, not " Let there be light," but " Let 
 an infinite number of sentient beings be perfectly 
 happy for ever." 
 
 Of course it is not meant that these dismal 
 doctrines have ever been fully realised by a large 
 number of persons ; otherwise the case put by 
 Bishop Butler might occur, and whole districts 
 might go mad. Yet, in all probability, the " dark- 
 ness visible" has really been more visible than 
 we are apt to think ; and especially it has been 
 seen by the thoughtful and inquiring. The 
 Puritans, with their glimmering light, were more 
 disturbed by it than the Catholics were ; and, if 
 orthodoxy stands still while investigation goes 
 forward, the evil is likely to be an increasing 
 one. The bracing intellectual air that we now 
 breathe will bring the latent diseases of our 
 religion out. It will become more and more 
 difficult for reflecting persons to hold the^ popular
 
 THE FEAR OF DEATH. 45 
 
 creed without partly realising it, and -without the 
 realisation making them miserable.* 
 
 Indeed, it is no mere supposition, but an his- 
 torical fact, that the " glad tidings " of orthodoxy 
 are tidings the most appalling that ever exercised 
 a great influence ; under no other system has 
 there been so intense and widespread a belief in 
 future torments, themselves so intense, general, 
 and prolonged. But from this historical fact 
 some of the earlier Utilitarians, including more 
 than one eminent historian, drew a hasty gene- 
 ralisation ; for they would have given the his- 
 torian of Greece, with his classical sympathies, 
 would especially have given an echo to 
 Beranger's prophecy or prayer that the sceptre 
 would depart from the creed which deposed 
 Hellenism, and that the God of Olympus would 
 be avenged on the God of Zion : 
 
 * This opinion, as well as some others that I have ex- 
 pressed, is confirmed by Mr. Mill, at the end of the essay on 
 the Utility of Religion (pp. 115-122), which I did not see till 
 the text of my article was finished. I venture to think that, 
 in other parts of that essay, he makes too little of the distress 
 arising from the popular belief. It is true that pious rela- 
 tives, whose son or brother has died either in immorality or 
 in unbelief, seldom think it probable that he will be damned. 
 But I am certain that they often find it hard to drive away 
 the thought that the unpleasant contingency is possible. 
 Indeed, unless their nerves are in a much better condition 
 than their heads, or else than their hearts, this could scarcely 
 be otherwise.
 
 46 STONES OF STUMBLING* 
 
 " Deja meurt 1'ecole nouvelle ; 
 
 Deja Satan bailie et s'en va ; 
 Viens, Jupin, du haut de 1'echelle 
 Voir degringoler Jehovah."* 
 
 Indeed, that grave and admirable historian (as 
 reported by Charles Austin) maintained that "the 
 success of Christianity was one of the greatest 
 calamities that ever befell the human race"; the 
 reason assigned being that the belief in hell, by 
 embittering the fear of death, has " cast a gloom 
 over modern life." It may serve to set forth our 
 own view of the limits and results of the fear of 
 death, if we offer in conclusion two remarks on 
 this more extreme view, and on the antichristian 
 iconoclasm which some followers of the great 
 Bentham founded upon it. In the first place, one 
 may regard the belief in hell as having embittered 
 the fear of death, and yet be, in no sense, an 
 iconoclast. For, through long usage, the moral 
 conduct of most men is at present so dependent 
 on theological dogmas, that those dogmas may be 
 
 * This unedifying stanza may be instructively compared 
 with language which is sometimes used by sound divines 
 with reference to orthodox opinions which they themselves 
 do not happen to hold. Thus, Dr. Arnold, when asked 
 whether he believed in a doctrine which the majority of 
 Christians regard as an essential part of Christianity, an- 
 swered that ho had rather, worship Jupiter. After all, would 
 it not be a less evil to worship Jupiter than to worship the 
 God of Calvin ?
 
 THE FEAE OP DEATH. 47 
 
 likened to the supports of a lame man, and should 
 only be withdrawn by slow degrees, here a little 
 and there a little ; otherwise, the national morality, 
 stripped too suddenly of its religious bandages, 
 might realise Mr. Greg's forebodings, and fall; 
 and great would be the fall of it. It would , indeed, 
 be an odd application of my remarks on moral 
 courage,* if I concluded with a panegyric on our 
 British cowardice in expressing, nay, in holding, 
 unpopular opinions. Assuredly, we should be 
 better off in many ways if we could put a speedy 
 end to our intellectual anarchy and illogical com- 
 promises. Yet a comparison of the present state 
 of the different European countries may reconcile 
 us to the thought that our divines play the part 
 of a spiritual House of Lords, and ratify, however 
 slowly and ungraciously, the changes which "the 
 common-sense of most " forces upon them. That 
 they will act thus in regard to the belief in hell, 
 we may infer from their concessions in other 
 directions. In divers departments of knowledge, 
 a reformer, by this time, knows what to expect. 
 The first generation of theologians will execrate 
 him ; a later generation will try to ignore him ; 
 while a third will stand aghast at the judicial 
 
 * This article should be read in connection with Physical 
 and Moral Courage (in Safe Studies), of which it was 
 originally the sequel.
 
 48 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 blindness which so long overlooked the scriptural 
 foreshadowings of the new discovery.* This is 
 not very pleasant for the reformer ; and, if he 
 does not say in his haste that all clergymen are 
 untruthful, he will at least be tempted to rail 
 at their vicarious penitence in " building the 
 sepulchres" of the philosophers, whom their 
 fathers persecuted. Yet, when his railing fit is 
 over, he will probably think that we should con- 
 gratulate ourselves on the elasticity of modern 
 dogmas, and especially on what I lately heard a 
 Catholic priest denounce as la souplesse du Pro- 
 testantisme. Many evils, such as the theological 
 disunion of the sexes, are mitigated by the fact 
 that divines follow lay inquirers, though at a 
 respectful distance, and that science, as it were, 
 
 * To give an instance : I have heard a highly instructed 
 clergyman argue from the Bible in favour of the antiquity of 
 man, and of the original plurality of human races. For, with 
 whose aid, and for whom, did Cain build a city ? Also, 
 whom did he marry, being an outcast before the birth of his 
 sisters ? My friend omitted to state whether it was by means 
 of swimming that the non- Adamites survived the Deluge ; 
 which of us, not being sprung from Adam, are free from 
 original sin ; and how little pain women, that are not daugh- 
 ters of Eve, have in childbirth. In like manner, the Pauline 
 epistles contain, at least, two Universalist texts, which, 
 however much opposed to other texts, are quite enough for 
 liberal theologians. I may add that there is a text sanction- 
 ing the principle of Euthanasia (at least for persons of good 
 family) : 2 Maccabees xiv. 42, d seg. Not only " doth the
 
 THE FEAR OP DEATH. 49 
 
 takes religion in tow. Therefore, the wiser 
 among us are seeking to drop hell out of the 
 Bible as quietly, and about as logically, as we 
 already contrive to disregard the plain texts for- 
 bidding Christians to go to law, and Christian 
 women to plait their hair. And thus we may 
 hope that, without any cataclysm in the theological 
 strata, but by a gradual process of subsidence and 
 upheaval, a change will come over those too con- 
 sistent Puritans who, through fear of death, are 
 all their life subject to bondage. 
 
 Our other comment on the Benthamite position 
 is of a wholly different kind. It is by no means 
 clear that the modern strepitus Acherontis aiiari, 
 however silly and distracting, has on the whole 
 been injurious. The teaching of the clergy, 
 though in itself not good, may yet, as the clergy 
 would express it, have been overruled for good. 
 It would, no doubt, be far better that the path of 
 life should be a mere cul de sac, than that it 
 should lie on the brink of an unseen precipice. 
 But it is not, on that account, an evil that man 
 should at one time have believed in this precipice. 
 The error may have been the only means of 
 
 Church read " this book " for example of life and instruction 
 of manners," but (as Alford admits) it is recognised as an 
 authority in the Epistle to the Hebrews. How long will 
 Euthanasia be thought unchristian ?
 
 50 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 inducing him to set the example of treading 
 warily, and to smooth the path for his successors 
 by taking stumbling-blocks out of their way. In 
 other words, Christianity has made the human 
 race less imperfect through suffering. If men at 
 first became sadder, they became also wiser ; and 
 they showed their wisdom in trying to lessen 
 sadness. They that are whole, says the Scrip- 
 ture, have no need of a physician ; and, without 
 an exaggerated view of human depravity and 
 misery, our forefathers might have lacked the 
 stimulus for repentance and reformation. At any 
 rate, having the stimulus, they repented and re- 
 formed in a way in which the pagans, not having 
 the stimulus, did not repent and reform. Hence, 
 looking to the past, we may rejoice that, not 
 L 'Allegro, but II Penseroso is the man whom 
 Christianity delight eth to honour ; and that, in- 
 stead of the pagan Carpe diem, her watchword is 
 Memento mori.
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 
 
 M II faut vonloir vivre et savoir mourir." 
 
 NAPOLEON. 
 
 IN our last paper we endeavoured to show that 
 Christianity has tended, not to mitigate, but to 
 increase the terrors of death. An objection to 
 this view may be drawn from the depressing 
 stories that are current about philosophers' death- 
 beds. In order to meet this objection, it seems 
 necessary to give some examples of philosophers 
 whose dying moments were conspicuously without 
 fear. We give these examples with reluctance, 
 because of the affectation with which some of 
 them are disfigured. Yet even from this affecta- 
 tion something may be learnt. By its very exag- 
 geration it sets in a stronger light the painful, yet 
 withal playful, acquiescence the horrible joie, as 
 Edmond Scherer has called it with which some 
 dying men have contrasted the permanence of 
 natural forces with the decay of everything that 
 lives, and have concluded that human life, with 
 all its strength and beauty, is a tragi-comedy 
 ending in a bathos. The nearest approach to such 
 a sentiment that we have ourselves experienced 
 E 2
 
 52 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 was when the Spectator proclaimed that, accord- 
 ing to Mr. Proctor, a comet seemed to meditate 
 striking the sun, and that it was in nowise im- 
 possible that in fifteen years (the exact term of 
 prolonged life assigned to Hezekiah) all life on 
 our planet might be destroyed. However im- 
 probable it appeared that so overwhelming a 
 calamity would be thus casually announced for the 
 first time, it came sufficiently home to us to enable 
 us to form an estimate of the manner in which 
 such a catastrophe, if really impending, would 
 affect us. And we own that what most impressed 
 us was a sense of the irony of the universe : we 
 thought we should feel (if the fatal concussion 
 were imminent) that we had all been serving our 
 fellows and Art and Science and Mammon for 
 naught; that Charles Austin's great wish was 
 about to be realized ; and that, not by an act of 
 destructive vengeance, but by the agency of 
 natural laws, we should attain a speedy Euthanasia. 
 In short, we were thrown into sympathy with 
 Shelley's couplet : 
 
 " The world is wear y of the past : 
 Oh ! let it die and rest at last ; " 
 
 but we were yet more disposed to exclaim, Siforet 
 in terris, rideret Democritus. Perhaps, after all, 
 this sentiment is not wholly unlike that of Charles 
 Lamb, who with grim humour professed to lament
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 53 
 
 that Guy Fawkes had not succeeded in blowing up 
 the House of Lords it would have made such a 
 sensation in history ! 
 
 Having premised thus much, we can now 
 address ourselves to the question : How far are 
 philosophical death-beds exceptionally marked by 
 fear? In dealing with this subject, two con- 
 siderations suggest themselves. We may remark, 
 in the first place, that a modern freethinker, who, 
 with great suffering, has " obtained this freedom," 
 is not like a thinker who is " free-born." Those 
 who (as Tennyson puts it), " after toil and storm, 
 may seem to have reached a purer air," seldom 
 shake off the effects of the less pure air and the 
 fatigue ; and they are apt, especially in their last 
 hours, to be haunted by the impressions of their 
 youth, and the beliefs of those around them. 
 This tendency of dying persons was well indicated 
 by Patru, when Bossuet visited him on his death- 
 bed. " Monsieur," said Bossuet, " on vous a 
 regard^ jusqu'ici comme un esprit fort. Songez 
 a ddtromper le public par des discours sinceres et 
 religieux." " II est plus a propos," replied the 
 dying man, " que je me taise ; on ne parle en ses 
 derniers moments que par faiblesse ou par vaniteV' 
 The enervating effects of training up a child in 
 the fear of hell are especially visible in the pupils 
 of those austere Calvinists, from whose early in-
 
 54 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 fluence it is so hard to release oneself, and who 
 expect the kingdom of heaven to be about as 
 populous as the princedom of Monaco. Secondly, 
 the true account of a heretic's death-bed is often 
 hard to obtain. Sometimes, as in the case of 
 Voltaire, his enemies persuade others, and perhaps 
 themselves, that he actually felt what they ex- 
 pected him to feel, and his remorse is evolved out 
 of their own consciousness ; sometimes, on the 
 other -hand, they give a flippant version of his 
 courage, and distort it in a cynical caricature. 
 The latter cause may have helped to produce the 
 stories about Rabelais. It said that, when dying, 
 he sent for his domino, with the words, " Beati 
 qui in Domino moriuntur." "When Cardinal du 
 JBellay sent his page to inquire after him, the dying 
 man replied : " Tell your master the state you find 
 me in ; I am going in quest of a Great Perhaps. 
 He is up in the jay's nest. Bid him keep 
 where he is ; and, for you, you will never be any- 
 thing but a fool. Draw the curtain ; the farce is 
 ended." 
 
 In an old work by Deslandes, several instances 
 are related which bear on this subject, and some 
 of which closely resemble the anecdotes just given. 
 It is there stated that Grassendi, in his last illness, 
 exclaimed : " I know neither who placed me in the 
 world nor why I was placed in it, nor why I am
 
 FEAELESS DEATHS. 55 
 
 taken from it." This uncertainty recalls the stanza 
 of Omar Khayyam : 
 
 " Into this Universe, and Why not knowing, 
 Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing ; 
 
 And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
 I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing." 
 
 There is more of hopefulness, or rather of playful 
 fearlessness, in the answer of Heine, who at the 
 close of his long agony was asked whether he 
 shrunk from death : Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son 
 metier. A similar calm was shown by Landor, 
 who in extreme old age wrote the lines : 
 
 " Death stands above me, whispering low 
 
 I know not what into my ear : 
 
 Of his strange language all I know 
 
 Is, the^e is not a word of fear." 
 
 Some years before, he wrote on his seventy-fifth 
 birthday the following more famous stanza : 
 
 " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife, 
 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 Chateaubriand, when dying, at the age of eighty, 
 during the lamentable revolution which over- 
 turned Louis Philippe, used words in which Mr. 
 Arnold discovers the note of a rich and powerful 
 nature : " Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quand done, 
 quand done serai- je delivre de tout ce monde, ce
 
 56 STOKES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 bruit; quand done, quand done celafinira-t-il?" One 
 used to be taught at school that, if the proportion of 
 oxygen in the ail were much increased, we should 
 all die from excess of joy. Something approach- 
 ing to this condition seems to have fallen to the 
 lot of W. Hunter, who gave death a hearty (we 
 had almost said a swanliJce) welcome. His dying 
 exclamation was : " If I had strength enough to 
 hold a pen, I would write how easy and pleasant a 
 thing it is to die." It is said that the last words 
 of Hobbes were : " I am going to take a great leap 
 in the dark." Shortly before dying, the English 
 sage exhibited his wit ; after rejecting various 
 epitaphs suggested by his friends, he said he 
 should prefer the inscription, " This is the philo- 
 sopher's stone." He thus almost realised before- 
 hand the important part of the ideal of Charles 
 Lamb, who hoped that his own last breath would 
 be inhaled through a pipe, and exhaled in a pun. 
 Sometimes a more or less witty flash of indigna- 
 tion is struck out of a dying man by the obtrusive- 
 ness of theological busybodies. A Frenchman in 
 his last illness, being thus wearied, by a priest, 
 silenced his ghostly importuner with the promise : 
 " Vous serez paye, mais laissez-moi en repos." 
 The famous Grammont, shortly before he expired, 
 received a visit from the Marquis de Dangeau, 
 who was sent by the King to try and convert him.
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 57 
 
 The dying man, though in agony, could not for- 
 bear twitting his sorrowing wife, who was devote, 
 with the suggestion that the Marquis might 
 succeed in doing what she had long sought to do 
 in vain : " Comtesse, si vous n'y prenez garde, 
 Dangeau vous escamotera ma conversion."* 
 Bourdelot, being troubled in his last moments by 
 a priest who used great plainness of speech, im- 
 plored him to veil his coarse exhortation in Latin. 
 In compliance with this whim, the astonished cure 
 proceeded to quote St. Augustine " Quoi ! 
 monsieur,*' interrupted the penitent, " pouvez- 
 
 * One is a little, but only a little, less shocked by this flip- 
 pancy when one reflects on the quaint protests sometimes 
 made by pious Catholics whose prayers have been (so to say) 
 overanswered. At Capri there is a saintly old woman who is 
 believed to have great influence with the Powers above. After 
 a long drought, she was persuaded to offer up a petition for 
 rain. Her " effectual fervent prayer " availed overmuch ; and 
 the result or sequel was a deluge. When the next drought 
 occurred, she was again requested to pray, but this time to 
 pray less earnestly ! The request showed a childlike desire 
 to limit the bounty of the Di faciles. The same desire may 
 be illustrated by an anecdote of a wholly different kind. 
 An English lady informs me that, when she was a young 
 girl, she went into the Madeleine under the escort of an 
 elderly duenna. In the church she observed that a French- 
 man who was in love with her was saying his prayers. She 
 is convinced that he had no thought of being irreverent when 
 he presently came up and said to her : " J'ai bien prie de 
 vous voir a 1'eglise, Mademoiselle, et vous voici. Mais H 
 parait que le bon Dieu m'a mal couipris, puisgue je nai point 
 demande la vieille."
 
 58 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 vous approuver un pareil langage ? Mon oreille 
 est choquee des expressions rudes d'un Africain." 
 Some French. Pyrrhonist, when making his will, is 
 said to have begun it thus : " At my death, if I 
 am now alive, I leave my soul, if I have one, to 
 God, if there is one." Yanini, when about to be 
 burnt at Toulouse on the charge of atheism, 
 exclaimed in a clear voice: "Jesus-Christ a, dit- 
 on, craint la mort; et moi, je suis intrepide en ces 
 derniers moments."* It must be owned that this 
 not very modest or conciliatory comparison 
 savours somewhat of sensational display. A 
 characteristic form of such love of display has been 
 shown by certain French purists, whose gram- 
 matical pedantry haunted them through life, and 
 who split hairs at their dying gasp. Malherbe 
 to whose influence over French poetry Boileau has 
 paid a superb compliment, when on his death- 
 bed, rallied his last remains of strength to correct 
 a bystander for an inelegance of diction ; being 
 
 * Some examples of callousness on the part of condemned 
 criminals are recorded by Montaigne : ' ' One that they were 
 leading to the gallows told them they must not carry him 
 through such a street, lest a merchant, that lived there, should 
 arrest him by the way for an old debt. Another said to the 
 hangman, he must not touch his neck for fear of making him 
 laugh outright, he was so ticklish. Another answered his 
 confessor, who promised him that he should that day sup 
 with our Lord, " Do you go then," said he, " in niy room, lor 
 I, for my part, keep fast to-day." Book I. ch. 40.
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 59 
 
 rebuked by his confessor for this levity, he declared 
 that he could not help himself, for he felt bound 
 " defendre jusqu'a la mort la purete de la langue 
 Frangaise." This may recall the story of the 
 Academician whose life had been occupied with 
 verbal subtleties, and whose dying words were 
 " Je vais ou je m'envais ; car 1'Academie n'a pas 
 encore decide." We need hardly observe that this 
 jocularity of moribunds nearly always rings hollow, 
 and that it has little in common with genuine 
 courage like that of the Normans, who (according 
 to Gibbon) sighed in the laziness of peace, and 
 smiled in the agonies of death. Indeed, in the 
 two instances last given, the affectation is as evi- 
 dent, if not quite as offensive, as in the case of 
 those who deliberately act a part in the last scene 
 of their lives, and dress up for dying. Thus, 
 when about to expire, Augustus Cassar, after 
 sending for a mirror and arranging his hair, asked 
 jestingly whether he was not a good comedian ; 
 and, with a like bravado, Buchanan, though 
 strictly forbidden in his fatal illness to drink wine, 
 died nevertheless theatrically holding a glass in his 
 hand and reciting verses of Propertius. Some of 
 these details concerning philosophical death-beds 
 may, we repeat, be doubtful. But, at any rate, 
 there can be no doubt that death was met with 
 ostentatious indifference by that not very philo-
 
 60 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 sophical patroness of philosophers, Madame de 
 Pompadour. She put on a silk dress, and painted 
 her face (like Pope's Narcissa) ; and, when her 
 confessor was leaving her, she stopped him ; " At- 
 tendez un instant, M. le cure ; nous nous en irons 
 ensemble." Her levity had a fit counterpart in 
 the cynicism of her royal lover, who, on seeing 
 her funeral procession, shed no tear (he had not 
 the don des larmes), but merely exclaimed : 
 " Madame la Marquise aura aujourd'hui un mau- 
 vais temps pour sou voyage."* Such cases of 
 apathy, whether on the part of the dying persons 
 themselves or of their friends, may be given for 
 what they are worth ; but assuredly they ill con- 
 trast with the dignified fortitude which was shown 
 by so many of the ancients, and which the ancient 
 poet of annihilation has finely indicated : 
 
 " What horror seest thou in that quiet state, 
 What bugbear dreams to fright thee after fate ? 
 No ghost, no goblins, that still passage keep ; 
 But all is there serene, in that eternal sleep, "f 
 
 * In a like spirit, Butler alludes to the storms which accom- 
 panied the death of Cromwell : 
 
 " Toss'd in a furious hurricane" 
 Did Oliver give up his reign." 
 
 Dean Ramsay, in his tales of Scottish humour, relates that a 
 pious Miss Johnstone, without a thought of irreverence, com- 
 plained of the weather when she was dying " Ech, what a 
 nicht for me to be fleeing through the air I " 
 f Lucretius translated by Dryden.
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 61 
 
 This paean over death has a special interest as 
 exhibiting the pagan tendency even in one who, 
 though in paganism, was not of it who was what 
 may be termed a pagan infidel. How strangely 
 does his confident and defiant tone differ from the 
 melancholy beauty of the following stanza by 
 another infidel poet an infidel, however, who was 
 penetrated with modern sentiment, and on whom 
 Christianity had left its mark : 
 
 " This world is the nurse of all we know, 
 
 This world is the mother of all we feel, 
 And the coming of death is a fearful blow 
 
 To a brain unencompassed with nerves of steel : 
 When all that we know, or feel, or see, 
 Shall pass like an unreal mystery." 
 
 It is true that the same pathetic uneasiness had been 
 shown long before by pagan writers. Adrian, for 
 example, in his celebrated lines, reveals a similar 
 disquietude. But, when he composed those lines, 
 the world had already half gone over from Western 
 strength, one may say, to Eastern tenderness ; 
 paganism was being undermined, not indeed 
 by Christianity, but by those more general 
 causes which predisposed men's minds to receive 
 Christianity. Hence in Adrian possibly, as un- 
 doubtedly in Marcus Aurelius, the new spiritual 
 forces are apparent which have wrought so power- 
 fully on modern beliefs.
 
 UZ STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 The view of the " glad tidings " of orthodoxy, 
 and their results, which we have sought to 
 establish in this article and the preceding one 
 can scarcely be better summed up than by short 
 extracts from three of the most distinguished 
 writers of our day writers whose authority is 
 especially valuable, as two of them are Christians 
 in sympathy, and as all three are, if not Conser- 
 vatives, at least opposed to iconoclasm. In the 
 Life of Bunyan, Mr. Froude writes : " Given 
 Christianity as an unquestionably true account of 
 the situation and future prospects of man, the 
 feature of it most appalling to the imagination is 
 that hell-fire a torment exceeding the most 
 horrible which fancy can conceive, and extending 
 into eternity awaits the enormous majority of 
 the human race." Well may Mr. Lecky observe 
 that, " of these doctrines it is not too much to say, 
 that in the form in which they have often been 
 stated [by the most famous divines], they surpass 
 in atrocity any tenets that have ever been 
 
 admitted into any pagan creed Such 
 
 teaching is, in fact, d^emonism, and dsemonism in 
 its most extreme form." George Eliot is equally 
 explicit : 
 
 " Wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting 
 torments is believed in believed in so that it becomes a 
 motive determining the life ; not only persecution, but every
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. f>3 
 
 other form of severity and gloom are the legitimate conse- 
 quences. There is much ready declamation in these days 
 against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal 
 conversion ; but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis,- 
 the fierce denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and 
 prayerful wrestlings of the Puritan who seasoned his bread 
 with tears and made all pleasurable sensation sin, are more 
 in keeping with the contemplation of unending anguish as 
 the destiny of a vast multitude whose nature we share, than 
 the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who pro- 
 fess to unite a smiling Liberalism with a well-bred and tacit, 
 but unshaken confidence in the reality of the bottomless pit." 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 It must be owned that Lucretius represents an intense fear 
 of death as prevailing among his countrymen. But Macaulay 
 thought, probably with reason, that his statements are exag- 
 gerated. The exaggeration (if such it was) was no doubt 
 designed as an excuse for the arguments with which he 
 assailed his national theology, and which are so unfortunately 
 applicable to other theologies that (in the delicioiis phrase 
 lately used in Parliament) his poetry is " only less objection- 
 able than Mr. Bradlaugh's writings." 
 
 The only classical writing, so far as I am aware, which 
 represents the modern aspect of the fear of death, is the 
 pseudo-Platonic dialogue called Axiochus. This dialogue, 
 though written in late Greek, is undoubtedly pagan ; it pro- 
 bably belongs to the time of which we have spoken, when 
 paganism was giving way by reason, not of Christianity, but 
 of " those more general causes which predispose men's minds 
 to receive Christianity." The argument is briefly as follows : 
 Axiochus, an old man on his death-bed, loses his nerve and 
 sends for Socrates to comfort him, just as a dying Christian 
 would now send for a clergyman. Socrates tries to console him
 
 54 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 with dialectical quibbles, such as that death has to do neither 
 with the dead nor with the living. The poor old man com- 
 plains that these subtleties are all very well for young men, but 
 they are cold comfort in the hour of death. Thereupon, 
 Socrates changes his theme, and assures Axiochus that his 
 soul is merely escaping out of prison into a land where sorrow 
 and old age will be replaced by a philosophic calm ; and he adds 
 a sort of apocalyptic myth, to the effect that after death the 
 righteous will be received into Elysium, while the wicked will 
 be removed to a place of torment where their devouring wild- 
 beast dieth not and their fire is not quenched (XdfjLTramv 
 cTTi/zovws -n-vpovfjicvoi, dt'Stois Ti/Awpiais Tpv^ovTai) . On hearing these 
 gladdest of glad tidings, the old man straightway casts asidehis 
 fear, and has even a desire to depart. It may be worth while to 
 compare this singular dialogue, so far as it reveals the future 
 of the righteous, with the famous epitaph in the Greek 
 anthology, of which the subjoined hexameters are but a free 
 and feeble paraphrase : 
 
 QVK Waves, Tlpwnrj, yucre/S^s S' es d/xaVova 
 Kal vaiets //.a/capon/ vrj(Tov<s BoXi-fl Ivi iroXXfj 
 "Ev$a KO.T' 'HAucrtwv ireSiu>v crKipTc 
 "AvOecrw ev /xaXaKoicrt KOLKWV tKroo-dev a 
 Ov ^eifjiwv XvTret, cr' ov /caiyx' ov voOcros 
 Ov Treats, ov Su/'os e^ci cr'- dXX' oiiSe 
 'Av^pwTTwv en crot ;StOTOS' we<.s yap d 
 Auyats ev Ka^apatcriv 'OXu/xTrov TrXr/crtov 
 
 Dying, thou art not dead ! thou art gone to a happier country, 
 And in the Isles of the Blest thou rejoicest in weal and abun- 
 
 dance. 
 
 There, Prote, is thy home in the peace of Elysian meadows, 
 Meadows with asphodel strewn, and peace unblighted with 
 
 sorrow. 
 Winter molests thee no longer, nor heat nor disease ; and thou 
 
 shalt not 
 Hunger or thirst any more ; but, unholpen of Man and un- 
 
 heedful.
 
 FEARLESS DEATHS. 65 
 
 Spotless and fearless of sin, thouexultest in view of Olympus; 
 Yea, and thy Gods are thy light, and their glory is ever upon 
 thee." 
 
 May ifc not be said of these lines and of Aziochus, that 
 they are (as it were) missing links between Paganism and 
 Catholicism, and that their creed is Christianity without 
 Christ?
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH,* 
 
 os, oi> 
 SOPHOCLES, 0. T. 296. 
 
 " SUPPOSE," says Mr. Mill, " that certain un- 
 known attributes are ascribed to the Deity in a 
 religion, the external evidences of which are so 
 conclusive to my mind as effectually to convince 
 me that it comes from God. Unless I believe 
 God to possess the same moral attributes which 
 I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good 
 man, what ground of assurance have I of God's 
 veracity ?"f In other words, if God's justice 
 and mercy are not as our justice and mercy, what 
 guarantee have we that his truth is as our truth ? 
 And, conversely, are not orthodox reasoners, who 
 start with the assumption that God's truth is 
 as our truth, likewise bound to assume that his 
 justice and mercy are as our justice and mercy r 
 We propose to discuss this question at some 
 length ; for it seems to suggest the most easily 
 stated and, so to say, handiest reply to the 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, Dec., 1877. 
 
 f Professor Newman, I think, has said to the same effect : 
 " If God may be what we should call cruel and unjust, why 
 may He not be what we should call a liar ?"
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 67 
 
 familiar platitude, that the only legitimate exer- 
 cise of reason in these matters is to convince 
 us of the reality of the Christian miracles, and 
 that, being once convinced, we ought straightway 
 to accept any doctrines, however seemingly im- 
 moral, which the recorders of those miracles 
 have preached. 
 
 This subject has lately been brought under my 
 notice by Father Oxenham's work on " Catholic 
 Eschatology and Universalism." In that work 
 the doctrine of eternal punishment is upheld ; 
 and it is not thought blasphemous to represent 
 God as the author of hell. Yet the same work, 
 referring to some one who has suggested that the 
 accounts of eternal punishment in the Gospels 
 may have been exaggerated for a moral end, pro- 
 nounces that suggestion to be " little short of 
 blasphemous." In short, God is too good to 
 deceive, but not too good to damn. Now, if Mr. 
 Oxenham were alone in maintaining this paradox, 
 I should not be at the pains to controvert it ; for, 
 differing from him toto caelo (totdque, let me add, 
 gehennd), I feel that between him and me, except 
 on some minor topics, there is no common ground 
 for argument. 
 
 But, unfortunately, there are many Protestants 
 and even nibblers at Liberalism who hold vaguely 
 and perhaps unwittingly what this able writer 
 
 F 2
 
 68 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 lias stated clearly and forcibly : it is mainly with 
 these, and wholly for their sake, that my present 
 discussion is set on foot. In fact, my article is a 
 plea for that generally valuable yet generally 
 unvalued body, the Neochristians those trans- 
 formed and regenerate Ishmaels, whose hand is 
 against no man, though every man's hand is 
 against them. And the motive of this plea is an 
 earnest desire that the religious reform which is 
 inevitable, should be kept as far as possible within 
 the Christian lines. Still, a measure of reform 
 which is to avail against revolution has often to 
 be somewhat drastic ; and the first advice which 
 should be offered to our JSTeochristian friends is, 
 that they should at once give up the old founda- 
 tion, for which their modest structure is unfitted, 
 and on which Pandemonium may so easily be 
 built. But, before entering on their defence, a 
 word of personal explanation is required. Mr. 
 Mill certainly held that a Being who could create 
 hell would be, strictly speaking, not a " Grod," 
 but the very reverse. Yet, in the chapter by him 
 from which I have quoted, the popular language 
 is repeatedly adopted for the sake of clearness ; 
 and to the supposed author of hell the name 
 " God " is applied. In the present article that 
 example will be followed. It will also be found 
 convenient to assume, unless when the contrary
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 69 
 
 is specified, that the Church is right in pro- 
 nouncing certain writings to be genuine and 
 certain marvels to be historical. But it must be 
 understood that I am not bound by these assump- 
 tions. It should, moreover, be explained that, 
 zealous though I am on behalf of the Neochris- 
 tians, I in nowise commit myself to either of the 
 recognised forms of Neochristianity, either to 
 Mr. Tennyson's Christianity without hell, or to 
 Mr. Arnold's view, which, as Comtism *has been 
 called " Catholicism minus Christianity," may not 
 unfairly be entitled " Christianity minus Theism." 
 My position will be rendered yet clearer by my 
 adding that I expect the various orthodox sects, 
 with their chronic civil war, to continue in a state 
 of heedlessness not wholly unlike that which the 
 Gospel attributes to the antediluvian world : they 
 will preach, they will write, they will cavil, they 
 will give in to cavils, till science comes and de- 
 stroys them all. Wherefore, of the Catholic and 
 the orthodox Protestant it may be said, as of 
 Lausus and Pallas, that neither is destined to 
 overwhelm the other, but that mox illos sua fata 
 manent majore sub hoste. 
 
 Doubtless, to satisfy Mr. Oxenham personally, 
 the foregoing explanation was not needed ; for he 
 clearly thinks me an honest (if somewhat rave- 
 nous) wolf in wolf's clothing, and has even singled
 
 70 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 me out as the representative of the common 
 enemy into whose hand timid or treacherous 
 friends (seemingly Broad Churchmen) are playing. 
 It is possible that the simplest way of opening our 
 inquiry will be to quote and expand, from a former 
 article, a passage from which he has made an ex- 
 tract. " The wiser among us," I said, " are seek- 
 ing to drop hell out of the Bible as quietly, and 
 about as logically, as we already contrive to dis- 
 regard the plain texts forbidding Christians to go 
 to law, and Christian women to plait their hair," : 
 or, it might have been added, to be unveiled in 
 Church; bidding all Christians work miracles on 
 pain of damnation ;f bidding them choose psalms 
 and spiritual songs as a vent for their mirth ; 
 
 * P. 49. 
 
 f Mark xvi. 1618. Nothing can be more arbitrary than 
 the way in which orthodox Christians, especially Protestants, 
 make v. 16 refer to all believers, v. 17-18 only to some. The 
 plain sense is this : " Who will be saved ? Only believers. 
 How are believers to be recognised ? By their miracles." 
 Compare the reproachful tone of Matt. xvii. 1721, where it 
 is clearly implied that the miraculous power was to be per- 
 petual. In Acts ii. 17-20, St. Peter (misquoting Joel) ex- 
 pressly states that this power was to be abundant " in the 
 last days." " Bunyan," says Macaulay, " was disturbed 
 by a strange dilemma. ' If I have not faith, I am lost ; 
 if I have faith, I can work miracles.' He was tempted 
 to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, ' Be 
 ye dry,' and to stake his eternal hopes on the event." Of 
 a not dissimilar state of mind some of us have had ex- 
 perience,
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 71 
 
 forbidding them to jest ;* to take judicial oaths ; 
 to hope for exemption from " persecution "f (in 
 the plain sense which the early Christians at- 
 tached to that word) ; to receive interest for 
 loans, or even to receive back the principal ;J to 
 be rich, or to ask rich people to dinner ; to re- 
 ceive an unorthodox person into their house, or 
 even to wish him " God speed." That this last 
 prohibition was meant literally is proved by the 
 tradition about St. John and Cerinthus ; and I 
 have heard an Evangelical divine, only too plau- 
 sibly, adduce the passage to prove the sinfulness 
 of entertaining Catholics. That some of the 
 other texts I have referred to were not meant 
 literally, is commonly and conveniently assumed. 
 Personally, I could never take this view not 
 even in my orthodox boyhood, when such texts 
 made life a burden to me ; so that my judgment 
 was then vehemently biassed, not against, but in 
 favour of, the traditional interpretation of them. 
 That the literal meaning of each of those passages 
 is the true one, still seems to me probable. At 
 any rate, it is certain that, taken collectively, they 
 
 * Eph. v. 4. Cf. Matt. xii. 36. 
 
 f 2 Tim. iii. 12. 
 
 J Luke vi. 34, 35. These and the other texts against 
 usury were taken literally, until the needs of civilisation 
 refuted them. 
 
 Luke xiv. 12, 13.
 
 72 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 breathe an ascetic spirit which is in glaring con- 
 trast to the smooth and polished Christianity of 
 our day. A popular preacher, complaining of 
 Rationalists that they had no moral standard, 
 once said to me, " When I am in doubt, I refer 
 to my Bible " : almost as if his Bible was unlike 
 other Bibles ; certainly as if the Bible was a lucid 
 Encyclopaedia of doctrine and morals. Nor did 
 my friend herein go far beyond what is held by 
 most orthodox Protestants. They have forged 
 a vast shield of texts, which they use to their 
 own satisfaction against Romanists (Ingentem 
 clipeum informant, unum omnia contra Tela Lati- 
 norum) ;* and wherewith they hope to quench the 
 fiery darts of the combined wicked of Romanists 
 and Rationalists together. Our object, on the 
 other hand, has been to show that the Bible is not 
 such a handbook as they suppose ; and that, in 
 fact, if the way of doctrinal transgressors is hard, 
 that of Bibliolaters is not easy. And if, con- 
 sciously or unconciously, orthodox Christians 
 exercise the right of " dropping " inconvenient 
 texts " out of the Bible," they should not be 
 wroth with their Liberal brethren who do like- 
 wise ; for the game, in very truth, is one at which 
 two can play. Here, then, is our point : If the 
 Bible contains plain commands which we have a 
 
 . viii. 447,
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 73 
 
 right to disobey, may it not contain plain asser- 
 tions which we have a right to disbelieve?* Thus 
 the Neochristian would be in no lack of orthodox 
 precedents if he contended that the statements 
 about hell were Oriental hyberboles ; or that they 
 were an extra deterrent mercifully given to the 
 Jews in their low state of piety, or rather of cul- 
 ture and civilisation an adaptation to the hard- 
 ness of their hearts, or perhaps to the softness of 
 their brains ; or that they were a needful conces- 
 sion to a prevailing superstition: for the Bible 
 was written a Judceis, ad Judceos, apud Judceos ; 
 and superstition, like nature, non nisi parendo 
 vincitur. Nay, further : the Neochristian may 
 express his view by a phrase which has lately 
 bsen invented, or rather revived, by orthodox 
 divines ; for he may maintain that such an ac- 
 commodation to human ignorance as I have just 
 indicated is not, strictly speaking, deceit; it is 
 merely a judicious husbanding (oucovo/ua) or 
 " economy of truth." 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, it will be objected that our 
 
 * Mr. Justice Stephen says (Liberty, Equality, and Fra- 
 ternity, p. 315) that some scriptural commands are " under- 
 stood by those who believe in the supernatural authority 
 of Christ as a pathetic overstatement of duties .... pecu- 
 liarly liable to be neglected." Every argument that can be 
 used to justify such a " pathetic overstatement " of duties, 
 will serve to justify a pathetic overstatement of the penalties 
 whereby those duties were enforced.
 
 74 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 analogy between disobeying Divine commands 
 and disbelieving Divine assertions does not hold. 
 Let us, then, give an example of each kind. It 
 is plainly declared that the observance of the 
 Sabbath an observance binding in regard to the 
 day, the obligations, and the penalties was to be 
 "perpetual," and "for ever."* And this per- 
 petual ordinance, originally imposed on Israel, 
 extends to all who have adopted Israel's law.f 
 It is also affirmed that the " house," " kingdom," 
 and " throne " of David should be " established 
 for ever." Compare these two statements with 
 the statement that hell is to be perpetual. If, 
 by a prophetic license, perpetual means transitory 
 in regard to the Sabbath and the House of David, 
 why not in regard to hell ? Or (what is much 
 the same thing), if we may give a non-natural 
 interpretation to two of these propositions, $ why 
 not to the third ? 
 
 Impartial readers will probably think that I 
 
 * Ex. xxxi. 16, 17. f Matt. v. 18. Of. Matt. xxiv. 20. 
 
 J Thus, it is commonly maintained that the throne of 
 David spiritually survives in Christianity^. To test this 
 interpretation, let us put a parallel case, which we can con- 
 sider impartially. One was told at school that Virgil's 
 Imperium sine fine dedi is a signal instance of an uninspired 
 prophecy failing. Yet it might be at least as plausibly urged 
 that the Roman dominion survives in the Papacy, as that 
 the Davidic throne survives in Christianity. But, to any 
 such pitiful misinterpretation of Virgil's words, a sufficient
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 75 
 
 have already made out my case; but, as the 
 subject is very important, and as the prejudice 
 about it is inveterate, I will carry the inquiry 
 somewhat deeper. To reasonings like the above 
 it is commonly objected that (according to the 
 Bible) God can neither " lie " nor " repent." 
 Now, it is obvious that this objection is at once 
 refuted by the fact that it proves the biblical 
 veracity from the Bible, making the Bible arbiter 
 in its own cause. But I will let this pass, as I 
 wish as far as possible to meet orthodoxy on 
 
 its own ground : t'/c rou aropaToq <rov Kpivtt) at. 
 
 The Bible, then, asserts that God neither lies nor 
 repents. But, in the very same chapter,* God is 
 described as repenting : hence it might be argued 
 that the biblical statement on this head, so far 
 from proving that there are no biblical mis-state- 
 ments, adds to their list one mis-statement the 
 more. But this difficulty also I will not press. 
 An orthodox person would probably meet it by 
 
 answer would be that, before the Roman Empire ceased, no 
 one dreamt of so explaining the poet's meaning. Even so 
 we may ask, Did the Jews, before the time of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar, dream of spiritually evaporating the plain prediction 
 about David ? 
 
 * 1 Sam. xv. 11, 29. In this singular chapter a still more 
 startling contrast occurs : Samuel (u. 22) expresses the noble 
 sentiment that " to obey is better than sacrifice " ; yet, at that 
 very moment, he was meditating the most hideous of all 
 sacrifices a human sacrifice (v. 33).
 
 76 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 saying that the Divine word, like nature, half 
 reveals and half conceals the soul within ; we can 
 see God only through a glass darkly, or rather 
 through a pseudoscope, immortalia mortali ser- 
 mone notamus; hence there is no inconsistency 
 in supposing that God does not really repent, but 
 that to our finite reason He can only be revealed 
 as repenting. Well, let this explanation stand ; 
 only let us observe that in the Hebrew verse that 
 rime de pensees, as M. Eenan calls it " lying " 
 and " repenting " are coupled together. The 
 Divine incapacity of misrepresentation is an- 
 nounced in the same breath, and placed in the 
 same category, with the Divine incapacity of 
 repentance. And yet, humanly speaking, God 
 does repent. Is it, then, impious to inquire 
 whether, humanly speaking, God may not mis- 
 represent ? Nay, further : according to the only 
 notion that we can form of repentance, a 
 repentant man must either err when he repents, 
 or have erred in doing that for which he repents. 
 Surely this reasoning, mutatis mutandis, applies 
 to a repentant deity. Perhaps an illustration will 
 best set forth our meaning. We are told that God 
 repented of the good work of creating man. There- 
 fore, his beneficent decrees do not resemble the laws 
 of the Medes and Persians. Why, then, must we 
 assume that his maleficent decrees resemble those
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 77 
 
 laws ? If it repented God of creation, may it 
 not repent Him of the intention of damnation? 
 
 But it is not only out of the Bible that eternal 
 punishment is defended. The burden of proof 
 is attempted to be thrown on the assailants of 
 that doctrine. The doctrine, it is said, is ren- 
 dered antecedently probable by the analogy of 
 nature. In nature the wages of sin accumulate 
 till death ; a sinful act never ceases injuriously 
 to affect the sinner; but whatever occurs in 
 nature must be permitted, if not ordained, by 
 God ; and the presumption is that his super- 
 natural government bears some analogy to his 
 natural ; and, therefore, that the punishment of 
 sin, which has no end in this world, will likewise 
 have no end in the next. Now this reasoning, 
 which is substantially that of Butler, could not be 
 fully examined without discussing the argument 
 of the first chapter of the "Analogy," and even 
 the fundamental assumption on which the 
 " Analogy " rests. This is not the place for such 
 a discussion : so I will merely remark that natural 
 forces are in themselves neither moral nor im- 
 moral, but outside morality ; but, when they are 
 personified and judged by a moral standard, they 
 are found to be recklessly immoral.* Hence, if 
 
 * " La Nature," says Renan, " est d'une immoralite tran- 
 scendante."
 
 78 STONES OF STUMBUNG. 
 
 we start with, the assumption that the course of 
 nature is in harmony with (rod's direct and 
 deliberate action, we may go on to defend the 
 foulest superstition that ever cursed mankind. If 
 whatever exists (including Nero's government*) 
 is " ordained of God," theft and adultery must be 
 so ordained. If, then, God's natural procedure is 
 a sample of his supernatural, what right have 
 Christians to condemn the actions attributed to 
 Jupiter, which were, humanly speaking, immoral? 
 Nor is it only civilised Jupiters, ancient or 
 modern, that may claim the benefit of such a plea. 
 The plea is equally applicable to those "puny 
 godlings of inferior race " f whom savages 
 worship, nay, even to Bhowanee, the goddess of 
 murder. Hence, when Shelley indignantly denied 
 that 
 
 " The God of nature and benevolence had given 
 A special sanction to the trade of blood," 
 
 his indignation was partly reasonable, partly not. 
 That the God of benevolence should have 
 sanctioned such a trade, is, of course, impossible ; 
 but that the God of nature, the ordainer of all the 
 abominations that occur in nature, should have 
 done so, is in nowise impossible, but just what we 
 might have expected. Nor, again, are we left to 
 
 * Bom. xiii. 1. f Dry den's Persiits.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TEUTH. 79 
 
 conjecture as to the employment of the analogical 
 aid to faith in support of religious systems which 
 we now justly condemn. On the contrary, we 
 know that, when pagan orthodoxy was giving 
 way, such pagans as Plutarch and some of 
 Lucian's interlocutors propped it up with argu- 
 ments not unlike those wherewith the disciples of 
 Butler now prop up Christian orthodoxy. So 
 that, after all, Butler's and ManselTs sanctuary is 
 a too Catholic Pantheon a veritable " shrine of 
 all saints and temple of all gods " where 
 mutually destructive theologies seek a common 
 refuge.* It is, however, with such attributes as 
 those of Hermes Dolios that we are specially con- 
 cerned. If it was God who hardened Pharaoh's 
 heart, we may assume that it is often, if not 
 always, God who hardens the liar's heart ; in 
 every such case Deus fallit per alium ; analogy, 
 therefore, points to the presumption that some- 
 
 * If we first realise the undoubted fact that the competing 
 religions, certificated as they all are with prophecies and 
 miracles, stand, as regards external evidence, practically on a 
 par, if we then carry out Mansell's argument to the extent 
 of disabling human reason from criticizing, and therefore 
 from distinguishing between, the relative strength of their 
 internal evidence, all external and internal evidences will be 
 eliminated, and all the systems will be reduced to a dead 
 level. Why, then, should we choose one rather than 
 another ? Should we not have to exclaim with Celsus 
 Oi&v olofjiai BuKfrtpciv Aia [i.e. Qtov] "Y^wrrov xaXeiv, rj ZTJVO, ij 
 "ASwvaiov, 17
 
 80 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 times Deus fallit per se. But this is not all. 
 That the sun travels from east to west, that the 
 earth is approximately a flat surface, that the 
 blue sky is a solid vault (aTiptwua) these are 
 delusions which the plan of the universe has done 
 its very best to foster, which are common to 
 primitive races, and which primitive writers, 
 inspired as well as uninspired, have emphatically 
 shared.* In the face of these delusions, will the 
 paradox that the course of nature is a represen- 
 tation, however imperfect, of the Deity a not 
 inglorious " mirror where the Almighty's form 
 glasses itself in " moral "tempests," be seriously 
 maintained ? If so, we are driven to the 
 monstrous conclusion that there are qualities in 
 the First Cause little akin to those of Nathaniel, 
 
 * In a curious passage of Herodotus (iv. 158), the Lybians, 
 describing a place with a great rainfall, say that IvraWa. 6 
 ovpavos To-p^rai, almost as if the firmament leaked and needed 
 a plumber. In Baehr's note this expression is compared to 
 Gen. vii. 11 ; it might have been compared to a yet more im- 
 portant text, Matt. iii. 16. The plurality of the "heavens" is 
 affirmed in the first clause of the Lord's Prayer (comp. 
 2 Cor. xii. 2). The word is correctly translated in the Vul- 
 gate (caeUs). May not the progress of scientific knowledge be 
 discerned in the passage as translated in the A. V. ? May 
 not that progress be also discerned in our Authorized 
 rendering of Ezek. v. 5, a passage cited by Ewald as shewing 
 that the Jews (like the Greeks) regarded their own country as 
 the centre of that circular plain, the world (Hie est Jerusalem, 
 in medio gentium posui earn et in circuitu ejus terras Yulg.) ?
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. . 81 
 
 that (if I must needs be plain) the heavens declare 
 the mendacity of God and the firmament sheweth 
 his unfaithfulness. And hence would arise the 
 analogical presumption that, in revelation, God 
 (according to St. Paul's happy euphemism) 
 " calleth those things that be not as though they 
 were." 
 
 Xenophanes blames Homer for attributing to 
 the gods 
 
 ocrcra Trap' avOpwirounv o vet Sea KCU i/royos eortv . . . 
 KAeVreiv /xoi^eueiv re Kal a\Xrj\ovs aTrareauv. 
 
 In this strikingly modern passage two things may 
 be noted. First, divine deceit is not put in a 
 class by itself; it is merely ranked with other 
 forms of divine guilt. Secondly, the various 
 forms of divine guilt are pronounced to be such, 
 only on the assumption that the Gods are bound 
 by human morality ; the acts are condemned 
 because they would be deemed " wrong and dis- 
 graceful among men." Now, it must be owned 
 that to create millions of sentient beings, fore- 
 knowing that most of them were doomed to 
 eternal tortures, compared with which the per- 
 petual extraction of a sensitive tooth would be 
 hailed as a relief* such an act is unlike those 
 which are thought praiseworthy among men. Are 
 
 * I give this realistic comparison in order to bring home 
 to my readers what the popular doctrine is. People who talk 
 glibly about glad tidings should read (in Wall's History oj 
 
 O
 
 82 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 we not, then, bound to blame this act when im- 
 puted to G-od? For, in truth, there are two 
 standards, and only two, whereby acts so imputed 
 can be judged : there is the standard of human 
 morality, and there is the immoral standard of 
 natural analogy. Almost always, in weighing 
 Christian and non-Christian theologies, we play 
 fast and loose with these two standards. Will it 
 be said that Christianity is in itself superior to 
 the best non-Christian theology ? It is ; but we 
 vastly exaggerate the superiority by applying to 
 the different theologies different tables of weights 
 and measures. The divergence between these 
 tables far exceeds what is commonly supposed. 
 Weighed in the balance of natural analogy, no 
 historic gods are found wanting ; weighed in the 
 balance of human morality, all.* The like may 
 be said of the comparison between damning and 
 
 Infant Baptism) Augustine's and Fulgentius's expressions 
 about the fate of unbaptized (including stillborn) infants. 
 It is, however, satisfactory to know that, although Augustine 
 (once at least) explicitly declared that all unbaptized children 
 would be damned, yet he trusted that " this fire would be to 
 them the most moderate of all " (Wall). 
 Likewise from Jonathan Edwards we learn that 
 
 "in bliss 
 
 They may not hope to dwell ; 
 Still unto them Thou wilt allow 
 The easiest room in Hell." 
 
 * I use the phrase " historic gods " so as to exclude such 
 deities as the Ormuzd of Plato, of Mr. Mill, and of those
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 83 
 
 deceiving. If God is wholly beyond the pale of 
 human morality, we cannot guess whether He 
 ought to damn or not to damn to deceive or not 
 to deceive. If, however, He is within that pale, 
 we may conclude that (if omnipotent) He ought 
 neither to damn nor to deceive ; but that the 
 guilt of deceiving is as dust in the balance when 
 compared with the guilt of damning. I say "if 
 omnipotent," for the following reason : That a 
 good spirit of limited powers might, in extreme 
 cases, have to deceive his creatures, is just con- 
 ceivable. In those extreme cases we might agree 
 with ^EschyluS that avdrift ciKaiag OVK atroaTaTtl 
 fltoc. But that such a spirit should be one 
 
 " Wha, as it pleases best hissel, 
 Sends ane to heaven, and ten to hell, 
 A' for his glory," * 
 
 is utterly inconceivable and revolting.! The 
 
 Christians (including one of Mr. Oxenham's critics) who 
 hold that God permits no evil which He can possibly prevent. 
 But it must be born in mind that every such Ormuzd has a 
 supplementary Ahriman, and that, at bottom, every such 
 system is Bitheism. 
 
 * Burns. 
 
 f If Ahriman had made Hell a necessary condition of 
 creation, Ormuzd would not have created. " It had been 
 better not to have given the earth unto Adam ; or else, when 
 it was given him, to have restrained him from sinning. For 
 what profit is it for men now in this present time to live in 
 heaviness, and after death to look for punishment ? " (2 
 Esdras vii. 46, 47.) 
 
 o2
 
 84 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 orthodox, however, take a view the opposite of 
 ours ; they virtually assume that the text, " Let 
 God be true, but every man a liar," is itself true 
 in a more literal sense than the text, " God is 
 love." Indeed, to their apotheosis of veracity 
 may be due some of the exaggerated common- 
 places that are current as to the absolute 
 universality of the duty of truth-telling.* 
 remember, when a boy, being told that it was 
 sinful in Napoleon to encourage the Guard at 
 Waterloo with the misstatement that their 
 comrades, having crushed Blucher, were in sight 
 coming to help them. Yet it certainly seemed 
 that to tell the Guard a lie for which, if it had 
 succeeded, they would have been grateful, was, at 
 worst, what Sophocles would have called oaia 
 Travovpytiv, and Shakespeare would have called 
 "a virtuous sin"; and that, at all events in 
 judging of that long crime, Napoleon's career 
 
 * This tendency probably reached its height in the philo- 
 sopher who, as represented by Bentham, " says there is no 
 harm in anything in the world but in telling a lie ; and that if, 
 for example, you were to murder your own father^ this would 
 only be a particular way of saying he was not your father." 
 This erratic view of parricide may be incidentally compared 
 with the one ascribed by Herodotus to the Persians. " They 
 maintain that no one ever killed his father or mother ; but 
 that, whenever such an act was reported, it would inevitably 
 be found on inquiry that the child was either supposititious or 
 illegitimate ; for (they say) it is not likely that one who was 
 rightfully a parent would die by the hand of his own son."
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 85 
 
 to single out this peccadillo for reprobation, 
 showed a want of moral perspective. But what 
 should I have answered if my teacher had gone 
 
 on to ask whether it was not uncharitable to 
 
 i 
 
 suspect a man like Napoleon of telling such a lie ? 
 My answer would, or should, have been in the 
 words of CEdipus. When (Edipus had adjured the 
 unknown murderer of Laius to give himself up, the 
 Chorus was so sanguine as to suggest that further 
 efforts at detection would be needless; without 
 doubt, the criminal, on hearing the imprecation, 
 would make haste to confess his guilt. Where- 
 unto the king rejoined : " Not he who dared the 
 deed will shrink at words." We have prefixed 
 this reply as motto to our article ; for it happily 
 exposes the delusion which prevails about the 
 Divine morality. Whoever, in conceiving of that 
 morality, strains at the gnat of even beneficent 
 misrepresentation, while he swallows the camel of 
 eternal punishment, should bind the motto about 
 his neck, and write it on the table of his heart. 
 But our popular teachers are deaf to such advice. 
 They scorn to depict God as an idealized Edward 
 III., pardoning those whom he had doomed to 
 destruction ; but they scruple not to depict Him 
 as a Torquemada in excelsis. Indeed, it is not 
 too much to say that, according to the popular 
 estimate, the splendide mendax Hypermnestra is
 
 86 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 the only one of the Danaid.se whom God cannot 
 be like. To show the justice of this last com- 
 parison, let us sum up the foregoing argument in 
 theological language, after premising that, pur- 
 suing the Christian method of interpretation, we 
 assume the sixth commandment to forbid all 
 wanton cruelty, and the ninth to forbid all 
 wanton deceit. Does, then, the moral law, as a 
 whole, apply to God, or does it not ? Or, if it be 
 maintained that only part of it extends to God, 
 how can we even guess which part so extends ? 
 If the ninth commandment, why not the sixth ? 
 If not the sixth, why the ninth ? Nay, is it not 
 more antecedently unlikely that a good being 
 would break the sixth commandment than the 
 ninth ? How, then, can our finite reason presume 
 to assert that, as regards the Infinite, quod non 
 probat minus probat majus that the lesser of 
 these commandments is precisely the one that 
 binds God, while from observing the greater of 
 them He is dispensed ? 
 
 But, after all, it is superfluous to show that, 
 assuming orthodoxy, Divine deceptions may 
 occur ; Orthodoxy herself practically admits that 
 they have occurred. How does she account for 
 the scientific statements in the Bible, which are, 
 to say the least, calculated to mislead ? She 
 affirms that those statements were needful accom-
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 87 
 
 modations : which being interpreted is, that God, 
 to teach a great truth, had to teach a little error. 
 But there are graver forms of Divine deception to 
 which the Bible directly bears witness. Lucian 
 justly complains that Zeus, in the Iliad, " deceived 
 Agamemnon by sending him a lying dream, so as 
 to cause the death of many Greeks." In exactly 
 the same way, Jehovah, in the book of Kings, 
 deceived Ahab by sending him a lying spirit, so 
 as to cause the death of many Hebrews (Deus 
 fallit per alium). At another time, He " gave 
 them also statutes that were not good, and judg- 
 ments whereby they should not live " ; and " if 
 the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a 
 thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet " 
 (Deus fallit per se).* 
 
 Nor is it only in the Old Testament that such 
 deceptions are mentioned : they are attested also 
 in the New,t I am careful to notice this latter 
 testimony, inasmuch as it is on the earliest 
 Christian traditions and sentiments those 
 recorded in the Synoptical writings and the 
 Apocalypse that the case for eternal torture 
 chiefly rests. St. Paul, on the other hand, 
 inclined towards Universalism ; J and it does not 
 lie with the Church to neglect his authority : for 
 
 * Comp. Dcut. xiii. 3 ; Jer, xx. 7. 
 
 f 2 Thess. ii. 11. J Rom. xi. 32.
 
 88 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 ecclesiastical Christianity is based far more on the 
 Pauline Epistles and the Fourth Gospel than on the 
 genuine sayings of Jesus.* But St. Paul himself 
 would have been the first to disclaim any such 
 pre-eminence, and to admit that the servant is 
 less than his Lord. Numquid Paulus crucifixus 
 est pro vobis ? Aut in nomine Pauli baptizati 
 estis? It is, therefore, with especial interest that 
 we inquire whether a strong case for eternal 
 torture can be made out of the language of the 
 Synoptical records. To me, their expressions 
 seem very strong : insomuch that, when Mr. 
 Oxenham holds up their damnatory phraseology 
 and virtually asks with Hubert de Burgh, " Can 
 you not read it ? Is it not fair writ ? " I most 
 reluctantly echo Prince Arthur's answer : 
 " Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect." 
 Not only is this concession in itself painful : it 
 also involves a painful inquiry. For it behoves 
 us to prove, not merely that there are errors in 
 the Bible thus much all rational Christians now 
 admit, but that there are errors even in the words 
 
 * It may be worth noting that St. Paul has exercised the 
 same sort of nominally subordinate, but really paramount, 
 influence over Christianity, as Chrysippus (himself, like St. 
 Paul, a Cilician) exercised over the not wholly dissimilar 
 system of the Stoics ; insomuch that, just as it used to be 
 said that " But for Chrysippus the Porch would never have 
 been," so we may add, "Neither, but for St. Paul, the 
 Church."
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TBUTH. 89 
 
 ascribed to the Master. Yet, in this thankless 
 demonstration, it is a comfort to feel that we are 
 only affirming a principle which all Neochristians 
 practically assume, and which is indeed the corner- 
 stone of their system ; for it is certain that what 
 may be termed the nou-populousness* and the 
 non- eternity of hell are staked on the fallibility 
 of Christ. From this point of view, then, all 
 Christians, even those who believe our conclusions 
 to be false, ought to wish them to be true. If a 
 great physician told us that we were going to die 
 of a lingering and loathsome disease, we should 
 wish he would expect us to wish, and would 
 himself wish that he might be mistaken ; and so, 
 when the Object of our deepest reverence has 
 proclaimed sad tidings of great sorrow which are 
 
 * It is only fair to say, that Mr. Oxenham inclines to think 
 that most men will not be lost. This question, of course, 
 lies beyond the compass of a note. Bat I may remark that 
 the words in Matt. vii. 13, 14, are as plain as words can be. 
 If, then, it is " little short of blasphemous " to suppose that 
 the Master used words calculated to mislead in regard to the 
 duration of hell, is it much short of blasphemous to suppose 
 that He used words calculated to mislead in regard to its 
 populousness ? And, on the other hand, if an orthodox 
 Christian may virtually assume that in Matt. vii. 13, " broad " 
 stands for " narrow," and " many " for " few," why may not 
 a liberal Christian assume that in Matt. xxv. 46, auavtov 
 stands for oXiyo^poviov, or haply for ou8/u'av ? To me it seems 
 that the populonsness and the eternity of hell rest on the 
 same footing ; and in this article they are classed together.
 
 90 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 unto all people, common humanity bids us hope 
 that even He was liable to error. 
 
 Before proceeding farther, I must guard against 
 a misconception. Some readers may be estranged 
 from this enquiry, through supposing that I am 
 about to assail the doctrine of the Incarnation. 
 Such, however, is not my intention ; for, having 
 a clear case before me, I mean to avoid all dis- 
 putable matter. I will, therefore, remark that 
 those who deny the infallibility of Christ do not 
 necessarily deny his Divinity ; they need only 
 subject that Divinity to limitations which, in 
 theory, are hardly greater than those to which it 
 is subjected already. To make my meaning clear, 
 I will first observe that in different ages the word 
 " God" has been held to connote very different sets 
 of attributes. Thus, Mr. Oxenham assumes that 
 God is infallible ; and, as we have seen, he thinks 
 it blasphemous to suggest that the Incarnate 
 God could deceive. Xenophanes, on the other 
 hand, deemed it " blasphemous " to suppose that 
 God could be incarnate at all;* whereas Hesiod 
 saw nothing amiss in saying that the heavenly 
 Muses " are skilled to tell many lies."f But it is 
 not only in pagan authors that such representa- 
 
 * 'O/Aotws ao-ffiovcriv ol yevevOai ^ao-KOvres TOUS 0eous rots 
 diroBavelv Aeyowiv. 
 
 f "18/j.ev (//uSea TroAAa Ae'yetv.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 91 
 
 tions as this last are to be found. The Bible, we 
 have shown, speaks of God as deceiving. In 
 another place, God declares himself to be fallible, 
 and even provides against the contingency of his 
 having been misinformed.* Either this Divine 
 statement is true, or it is not. If it is, cadit 
 quaestio : if it is not, God is convicted of misre- 
 presentation in this case, and capable of it in 
 others. Of course, it may be contended that God 
 is infallible in himself, but that, when speaking 
 down to our faculties, He has to depict himself as 
 fallible. I do not mean to contest this explana- 
 tion ; for, in conceding that God as revealed to us 
 is fallible, it concedes all that my argument re- 
 quires. 
 
 A different class of objectors may urge that 
 God did not declare himself to be fallible, but was 
 misrepresented by the author of Genesis. This 
 solution, however, only throws the difficulty 
 farther back : for the Founders of Christianity 
 asserted, or rather assumed, the Divine authority 
 of the Pentateuch ;f so that, if the author of 
 Genesis was mistaken, they were mistaken also. 
 And this brings us to a remark about verbal in- 
 
 * Gen. xviii. 21. In 1 Kings xxii. 20-22, God is repre- 
 sented as at a loss for an expedient and as seeking counsel 
 in the art of deception. 
 
 f See Mark xii. 26. It is clear that the general state of 
 opinion the suppressed major premiss, as we may call it
 
 92 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 spiration. St. Paul believed in the verbal inspira- 
 tion of the Old Testament.* Nor can there be 
 any reasonable doubt that Jesus held the same 
 view. Also, He promised his disciples that his 
 teaching should be supernaturally brought to 
 their remembrance ; and that, when taken before 
 judges, they should be verbally inspired, t These 
 and similar passages serve to explain the de- 
 sperate efforts that were made to defend verbal 
 inspiration. In a work whose perfect accuracy 
 is divinely guaranteed, even a minute error in fact 
 involves a grave error in doctrine ; for it proves 
 that inspiration did not know its own limits. 
 Extremes in theology sometimes meet ; and I am 
 glad to find that the views here enunciated may 
 be confirmed by a quotation from Dr. Wordsworth. 
 After rightly premising that the promise of verbal 
 inspiration must be regarded as extending to 
 St. Stephen, he goes on to comment on allega- 
 tions that the proto-martyr's speech contains 
 errors : " The allegations in question, when re- 
 
 which is involved in the assumption that the Divine words 
 spoken in the burning bush were genuine, will cover the 
 assumption that the Divine words confessing fallibility were 
 genuine. 
 
 * Gal. iii. 16. 
 
 f Mark xiii. 11. How is this to be reconciled with Acts 
 xxiii. 5 ? What would be thought of a modern witness 
 who was affirmed to be infallible, but who, on entering the 
 Court, failed to distinguish between judge and jury ?
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 93 
 
 duced to their plain meaning, involve, the assump- 
 tion, that the Holy Ghost speaking by St. Stephen 
 (who was * full of the Holy Spirit ') forgot what 
 He himself had written in the book of Genesis, 
 and that his memory is to be refreshed by Biblical 
 commentators of the nineteenth century." This 
 trenchant logic may be fitly coupled with Cow- 
 per's sneer at geologists, who 
 
 " drill and bore 
 
 The solid earth, and from the strata there 
 Extract a register, by which we learn 
 That He who made it, and revealed its date 
 To Moses, was mistaken in its age !" 
 
 One has only to confront Dr. Wordsworth's logic 
 with Alford's correct statement that St. Stephen's 
 speech contains " at least two demonstrable his- 
 torical inaccuracies " ; and to confront Cowper's 
 ' sneer with the first principles of modern geology ; 
 and one perceives what an edged tool every such 
 reductio ad anti-Christianum is. But what con- 
 cerns us is to note that, as we have said, rational 
 Christians now-a-days admit that the Scriptures 
 contain mistakes. Whence it follows that the 
 Founders, who believed that the Scriptures (or 
 large portions of them) were free from mistakes, 
 were in that very belief themselves mistaken. 
 
 Moreover, the fallibility of Christ may be dis- 
 tinctly inferred from the Gospels. He is repre- 
 sented " as growing " (and therefore as at one
 
 94 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 time deficient) " in wisdom." He sought theolo- 
 gical instruction from the Jewish doctors. Unless 
 this instruction was a mere farce, He was then, 
 if not fallible, at least inferior in knowledge to 
 his fallible teachers. Also, in mature manhood, 
 He knew not the day or the hour of his coming.* 
 Hence his knowledge on some subjects was im- 
 perfect. And from imperfect knowledge to falli- 
 bility the step is a slight one ; for, when a Being 
 has imperfect knowledge, how can we be sure 
 that his knowledge is perfect as to the limits of 
 its own imperfection ? But, as regards the falli- 
 bility of Christ, we are not left to mere conjec- 
 ture. He " marvelled at the centurion's faith." 
 Now, it is obvious that an infallible being could 
 not marvel. When we say that a man marvels, 
 we imply that his expectation fell short of the- 
 
 * Mark xiii. 32. This and similar passages are explained 
 away by some Catholics. Tims Pius IX. (quoted by Mr. 
 Gladstone) has pronounced that Christ's increase in wisdom 
 was " only apparent ": whereunto a Neochristian might re- 
 spond that future punishment will be " only apparent." 
 So, again, the Dublin Review (September, 1865) says 
 that "the Church imperatively, requires her children to 
 understand Mark xiii. 32 in some very unobvious sense." 
 If the Church may take this liberty with plain texts 
 in the New Testament, the Scribes and Pharisees (who 
 sat in Moses' seat") must have had a like authority 
 over plain texts in the Old Testament. Why, then, were 
 the Jews blamed for giving a " very unobvious sense " to the 
 Fifth Commandment (Mark vii. 9-J3) ?
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 95 
 
 reality, and was therefore erroneous. And thus, 
 when we are told that Jesus marvelled at the 
 centurion's faith, we infer that his previous 
 estimate of that faith had been unduly low. 
 Again : a Being conscious of infallibility would be 
 free from doubt and misgiving. Yet Jesus was 
 uncertain respecting his death ; and, when dying, 
 He feared that God had forsaken him.* In case 
 this demonstration (for such it is) should be pain- 
 ful to any reader, I would fain offer a word of 
 comfort. The great Catholic commentary of 
 Cornelius a Lapide states that, " esto Christus non 
 creverit sapientia et gratia habituali, crevit tamen 
 actuali et practica." This reasoning is just as 
 applicable to Christ's fallibility as to his youthful 
 deficiency in knowledge ; and hence a liberal Chris- 
 tian who clings to the belief in his Lord's Divinity, 
 may plausibly urge that the Saviour (as was 
 inevitable) held some errors of his time, but that 
 in respect of those errors it was only his " actual 
 and practical wisdom," not his " habitual wisdom," 
 that failed him. 
 
 Having thus sought to disarm prejudice, we can 
 more freely comment on a few out of the many 
 erroneous statements reported in the Gospels 
 statements that may, as it were, keep in coun- 
 
 Matt. xxvi. 39 ; xxvii. 46. See the Note at the end of the 
 article.
 
 96 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 tenance the reported statements about hell ; and, 
 in making the selection, we will mainly confine 
 our view to errors that have been practically 
 acknowledged by Christians of note. "We will 
 begin with an example that perplexed Mr. Maurice. 
 The Master is said to have prophesied that He 
 would " be three days and three nights in the 
 heart of the earth." Now, the interval from 
 Friday evening to Sunday morning is only one 
 day and two nights. Hence, in the prophecy, as 
 reported by St. Matthew, there is as open a 
 breach with arithmetic as in the three f ourteens in 
 the same Evangelist's genealogy ; and, we may 
 add, as in his strange narrative (evolved out of a 
 misunderstood prophecy) concerning the ass and 
 the colt, on both of which (aurwv) Jesus rode into 
 Jerusalem.* Again, Jesus said that David ate 
 the shewbread " in the high priesthood of 
 Abiathar" :f the event really occurred in the high 
 priesthood of Ahimelech. Once more : an excel- 
 lent religious journal has courageously proposed 
 " to explain, once for all, that the theological and 
 
 * By the other three Evangelists, the supernumerary ass 
 is suppressed. St. Matthew and the fourth Evangelist quote 
 Zech. ix. 9 differently, so as to make it support their differ- 
 ing accounts. The fourth Gospel elsewhere furnishes a 
 striking example of a myth deposited from a misunderstood 
 text (xix. 23, 24). 
 
 f Mark ii. 26. I adopt Alford's translation, as the dim-
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 97 
 
 historical library popularly called the * Bible' 
 contains some errors."* Now, the "error" that 
 is chiefly referred to occurs in the Fourth Com- 
 mandment. Did God give the Ten Command- 
 ments, or did he not? If he did, the "error" 
 was a Divine one, and the thunders on Sinai were 
 so many seals to that error. If he did not, the 
 Master, who clearly believed the Decalogue to be 
 from God, was himself in error on a fundamental 
 point. The gravity of such an error may be best 
 shown by an illustration. In the parable of 
 Dives and Lazarus that tremendous parable, as 
 Charles Austin called it, which implies that all 
 who receive their " good things " on earth, all 
 whom a Jew of the Christian era would have 
 counted rich, will be " tormented/'f greater 
 value is attached to the testimony of Moses and the 
 Prophets than to that of one risen from the dead.J 
 
 culty is slurred over in the authorised version. Alford com- 
 ments on the instructive fact that a good and learned divine 
 has persuaded himself that this text "rather suggests that 
 he (Abiathar) was not the High Priest then " : nanum Atlanta 
 vocavit, JEthiopem cygnum. As for me, I forbear to waste 
 words on the ingenious disingenuousness of harmonists : for 
 I cannot even understand the notion that it is honest to apply 
 to the Bible a mode of interpretation which would be dis- 
 honest if applied to any other book ; and that orthodoxy, like 
 Sigismund, is supra grammatimm. 
 
 * Spectator, August 28, 1875, p. 1091. f Luke xvi. 25. 
 
 J In like manner the writer calling himself St. Peter 
 attributes greater probative force to the enigmatical pro- 
 
 H
 
 98 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 Now, if one of the bystanders had suggested that 
 one risen from the dead would appeal directly to 
 the senses, whereas the passages in Moses and 
 the Prophets (even assuming those passages to 
 be genuine and rightly interpreted) might figure 
 among the " errors " in " the theological and his- 
 torical library popularly called the ' Bible,' ' if 
 one of the bystanders (say the virtuous and en- 
 lightened St. Thomas) had suggested this, would 
 riot the remonstrance, " Be not faithless, but 
 believing," have been the very mildest that would 
 have been addressed to him? Again, not only 
 did Jesus accept the entire narrative of the Pen- 
 tateuch, but on the details of that narrative he 
 founded important rules of conduct. In treating 
 of the right of divorce, he appealed to the insti- 
 tution that was " from the beginning " ; primitive 
 institutions he assumed to be ideally the best. 
 His reasoning suggests two reflections. First, 
 "Whatever the primitive form of marriage was, 
 strict monogamy it was not. Secondly, The 
 question as to primitive marriage, though in- 
 directly full of instruction, has no direct bearing 
 on conduct. As soon as science shall have de- 
 termined how far primitive societies were endoga- 
 
 phecies of the Old Testament than to the evidence of St. 
 Peter's own eyes and ears. (2 Peter i. 18, 19.) This ten- 
 dency of the early Christian mind is suggestive.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 99 
 
 mous or exogamous, modern communities will not 
 be constrained to adapt their marriage laws to 
 the primitive model : any more than those of us 
 who believe slavery and cannibalism to have been 
 primitive institutions, are therewithal bound to 
 become slaveholders and cannibals. 
 
 These illustrations are given in no captious 
 spirit, but in order to show how hollow is the 
 truce that has been patched up between ortho- 
 doxy and modern research. Especially hollow is 
 the truce between orthodoxy and Biblical criticism. 
 For example: Jesus ascribed the 110th Psalm to 
 David;* and the context shows that, in so as- 
 cribing it, he was not adapting himself to con- 
 ventional phraseology, but that he thought that 
 it was verily and indeed spoken by David. On 
 the other hand, the " Four Friends " deny that 
 it was by David ; indeed, it was manifestly spoken 
 not by, but to, a Hebrew ruler .f The " Four 
 Friends," who write in a thoroughly Christian 
 spirit, forbear to point the moral of their state- 
 ment ; but they can hardly have been ignorant 
 
 * Matt. xxii. 43, 44 ; coinp. Acts 11. 34, 35. 
 
 t I say " ruler " (not " king") since there is a great diffe- 
 rence of opinion as to when this psalm was written. It is 
 stated in the Psalms by " Four Friends," that it was written 
 during the monarchy ; while our best Biblical critic, Dr. 
 Davidson, is inclined to relegate it to the time of the 
 Maccabees. 
 
 n 2
 
 TOO STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 that, in making the statement at all, they were 
 charging their Master with error. It is yet more 
 obvious that their interpretation of the contemp- 
 tuous apostrophe, " Ye are gods," is at variance 
 with the amazing interpretation reported in the 
 Fourth Gospel. Indeed, according to modern 
 criticism, hardly one of the texts quoted from the 
 Old Testament is rightly interpreted in the New. 
 " Of prophecies in the sense of prognostication," 
 says Coleridge, " I utterly deny that there is 
 any instance delivered by one of the illustrious 
 Diadoche whom the Jewish Church comprised in 
 the name Prophets and I shall regard Cyrus 
 as an exception, when I believe the 137th Psalm 
 to have been composed by David." In effect, 
 this remarkable passage denies that the so-called 
 Hebrew prophecies were predictions. On the 
 other hand, Jesus believed them to be, not merely 
 predictions, but predictions so plain that the 
 Jewish nation was held guilty for not discerning 
 their fulfilment. Thus, on so vital a question as 
 prophecy, the opinion of the chief Christian philo- 
 sopher of our century was diametrically opposed 
 to the opinion of Christ. Other Christian writers 
 follow Coleridge's lead. For instance : the Mas- 
 ter is alleged to have foretold that -a prophecy of 
 Daniel was about to be fulfilled in the fall of 
 Jerusalem, which was to be "immediately" fol-
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 101 
 
 lowed by the end of the world.* Yet, not only 
 has a certain interval already elapsed between 
 the destruction of Jerusalem and that of the 
 world ; but we learn, even from Christian autho- 
 rities, that the passage attributed to Daniel had 
 no reference to the sack of Jerusalem by Titus 
 that it was not by Daniel that it was not a pro- 
 phecy, but a forgery. Hence, the book of Daniel 
 furnishes a crucial test of rationalism. Laodicean 
 liberals sometimes boast that they have given up 
 their orthodoxy concerning the Old Testament, 
 but that their orthodoxy concerning the New 
 remains unimpaired. Now, if there is a point 
 whereon rational critics from Porphyry to Zeller 
 are agreed, it is that the prophecy in Daniel is un- 
 authentic. If there is a point which lukewarm 
 liberals are loth to give up, it is that every word of 
 Christ came from God. To what, then, does their 
 theory amount? Even to this shocking conclusion : 
 that God professed to have inspired the pseudo- 
 Daniel ; and thus became accessory after the fact 
 to a forgery. A similar mode of reasoning applies 
 yet more directly to the theory of " inspired per- 
 sonation," a tneory which seems to find favour 
 with the accomplished divine who has written the 
 article " Bible" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 
 Matt. xxiv. 15, 29.
 
 102 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 and who lias justly been described in a religious 
 journal as the most orthodox of Biblical critics. 
 That theory practically is, that the author of 
 Deuteronomy, who was not Moses, was inspired 
 to say that he was Moses (Deo per mendacium 
 gratificari) . Yet, peradventure, for this theory 
 something may be said. We have seen that, on 
 the orthodox hypothesis, St. Stephen's speech was 
 verbally inspired. Yet, when professing to give 
 the very words of Amos, he quietly substituted 
 " Babylon " for " Damascus " ; in fact, he mani- 
 pulated the prophecy, so as to make it seem to 
 have been fulfilled by the captivity.* It follows, 
 then, that he was verbally inspired to misquote. 
 If St. Stephen was inspired to misquote, why may 
 not the Deuteronomist have been inspired to mis- 
 report ? 
 
 But this is not all. A distinguished living 
 clergyman told me that he considered the 
 strongest passage in the Bible to be one where 
 God, by the mouth of Jeremiah, disowned the 
 entire ceremonial law.f The explanation of this 
 
 * Acts vii. 43. This practice was after the manner of the 
 age. In Isaiah ix. 12, the LXX did not scruple to render 
 "Philistines" by "EAA^i/es: their object being, according 
 to a high authority, to make the prophecy refer to the 
 Ptolemies and Seleucidse. See MACKAY'S Progress of the 
 Intellect. 
 
 t Jer. vii. 22.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 103 
 
 passage probably is, that Jeremiah, like Ezekiel, 
 felt that the Mosaic law contained statutes which, 
 according to the moral standard of his own age, 
 " were not good " ; but that, whereas Ezekiel 
 concluded that those unworthy statutes were 
 given by God penally, Jeremiah more rationally 
 concluded that they were not given by God at all. 
 At any rate, Jeremiah's statement is incompatible 
 with the divine authorship of the Pentateuch. 
 How, then, is it to be reconciled with Christ's 
 observance of the Passover, and his injunction to 
 " offer the gift that Moses commanded " ? But I 
 refrain from pressing this difficulty. Enough has 
 been said to explain why it is that, on the 
 approach of sound criticism, the orthodox land- 
 marks, which but lately seemed so steadfast, are 
 one by one being removed : just as oftentimes, 
 when air and light are admitted into the abode of 
 the dead, the form which had been, and at first 
 sight appeared still destined to be, long preserved, 
 crumbles speedily away. 
 
 A Greek sage once laid down three rather 
 sweeping propositions. (1) Nothing exists. (2) If 
 anything exists, it may not be known. (3) If 
 anything exists and may be known, the knowledge 
 may not be communicated. Now, if in these pro- 
 positions for "thing" be substituted "good argu- 
 ment against orthodoxy," they will be found to
 
 104 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 correspond to three objections commonly urged 
 against inquiries like the present. With the first 
 class of objectors those who deny the existence 
 of plausible arguments for rationalism we have 
 already dealt. There remain the other two sets 
 of objectors. There are those who maintain that 
 such plausible arguments exist indeed, but exist 
 only to try our faith ; the fruit of this tree of 
 knowledge should be eschewed on pain of 
 death. And there are those who complain that, 
 in imparting to them this fruit, we have made 
 them unhappy, and have driven them, as it were, 
 out of Paradise : we have taken away their Lord, 
 and they know not where we have laid him. This 
 last objection shall be discussed first, and very 
 briefly. That the popular creed is in itself not a 
 happy one, we have shown. Indeed, the applica- 
 tion of the name " Gospel " to a system contain- 
 ing such doctrines as the imputation of Adam's 
 guilt "th' enormous faith of many" damned 
 " for one " may be called the Trpwrov i//uog 
 of orthodoxy ; insomuch that it is the Christian 
 Universalists who are on the side of the angels; 
 and this time it is the popular theology which, in 
 representing itself as having received from the 
 angels the glaring misnomer of " good tidings of 
 great joy," suggests what is " little short of 
 blasphemous." Still, although that theology is in
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 105 
 
 itself a very Kakangel, there is no doubt that 
 by many the /ca/ca'-yyEXroc a^n is unfelt. Our 
 " sister while she prays " is generally able to 
 enjoy " her early heaven, her happy views," and 
 blissfully to ignore her early hell and most 
 depressing views. And this is a reason against 
 heedlessly airing modern opinions in general con- 
 versation, when one's hearer is almost at one's 
 mercy. But it is not a reason against putting 
 forth those opinions in writings, which no one is 
 compelled to read. Moreover, the orthodox, who 
 practise self-deception as to the unsound portions 
 of their creed, will find their task daily more dif- 
 ficult, and therefore more demoralising. As we said 
 in a former article, " the bracing intellectual air 
 that we now breathe will bring the latent diseases 
 of our religion out "; and perchance, if we limit 
 overmuch the action of that bracing air, it will 
 work unmixed harm it will have time to bring 
 the diseases out, but not time to cure them. It 
 is on this account that too mild a treatment of 
 those diseases may be perilous to the entire body 
 of Christian sentiment and practice not merely 
 to the letter that killeth, but to the spirit that 
 giveth life : if thine hand or thy foot offend thee, 
 says the Scripture, cut it off. And thus, when 
 we exhorted Christians manfully to renounce the 
 devil and all his angels, and to drop hell out of
 
 106 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 the Bible, we acted under a Conservative impulse : 
 for we doubted whether to Christianity itself the 
 presence of those nether flames, if they were 
 suffered to go on smouldering, would be wholly free 
 from risk. Behold, how great a matter a little fire 
 Jcindleth. 
 
 The other objection is, in effect, that " man is 
 not made to question, but adore ": it is safer to 
 accept undoubtingly whatever our Bible or 
 Church tells us of God, even if the evidence for 
 those statements be inconclusive ; nay, had the 
 evidence been conclusive, where would be the 
 room for our faith ? Of this faith unfaithful we 
 might summarily dispose, by observing that its 
 possessors are liable to Coleridge's censure they 
 prefer Christianity to truth. They might, in a 
 word, be designated by saying that Malunt err are 
 cum, Ghristo quam nobiscum vera sentire. And 
 they might be encountered with the reverent, yet 
 conclusive, answer, Amicus Christus, magis arnica 
 veritas. But it will serve our purpose to meet 
 these objectors on their own ground, and to fight 
 them with their own weapons. Is it, then, quite 
 certain that a good Being, who on one or more 
 occasions affirmed himself to have ordained 
 Tophet, would wish his affirmation to be always 
 believed? The answer to this question may be 
 sought in human analogies. Malcolm in order to
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 107 
 
 test the fidelity of Macduff, charged himself with 
 grievous faults. It was with hearty satisfaction 
 that Macduff at length discovered that Malcolm 
 had been deceiving him. Nor can we doubt that, 
 when the discovery was made, his satisfaction 
 was shared by Malcolm himself; for the latter 
 would prefer that his friend should regard him as 
 an occasional liar, rather than as a perpetual 
 villain.* A yet closer parallel may be drawn 
 from classical mythology. Mr. Syrnonds has well 
 observed that an enlightened Pagan would feel 
 about the cannibal repasts attributed to his gods, 
 much as an enlightened Christian feels about 
 eternal punishment. This parallel (Mr. Symonds's 
 critics notwithstanding) holds perfectly ; for the 
 analogical device which is used to defend, and the 
 allegorical device which is used to explain away, 
 the belief in a divine torture-house, may just as 
 
 * Perhaps a similar lesson may be gathered from the 
 Gospels. We may be sure that the father whose son refused 
 to go into the vineyard, but afterwards repented and went, 
 was better pleased than if the son had kept his word and 
 not gone had been more truthful, but less obedient. The 
 moral of Jephthah's story is less satisfactory ; and the frantic 
 efforts that are now-a-days made to explain away this simple 
 narrative to make believe that Jephthah broke his vow and 
 did not commit murder are among the many proofs that 
 the religious instinct of modern times is in some respects 
 healthier than that of the Old, and seemingly of the New, 
 Testament. (Heb. xi. 32.)
 
 108 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 readily be applied to the belief in divine cannibal- 
 ism. It is, therefore, worth while to consider the 
 sort of language which devout but enlightened 
 Pagans Pagan Broad Churchmen, in fact held 
 concerning this unsavoury dogma of Pagan 
 orthodoxy. In a passage translated and justly 
 praised by Bacon, Plutarch observes : " Surely, I 
 had rather a great deal men should say, there was 
 no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they 
 should say that there was one Plutarch that 
 would eat his children as soon as they were born ; 
 as the poets speak of Saturn ; " the gods, he 
 infers, have a similar preference, and hate super- 
 stition worse than Atheism. This principle is 
 fruitful of consequences. Let us suppose that 
 Plutarch would have accepted them: in that case, 
 if Kronos or Zeus could have been shown to have 
 pleaded guilty to revolting cruelty, Plutarch 
 would have judged it right to disbelieve the 
 Divine confession. And he might fairly have 
 hoped that such a judgment would find an echo 
 amid the peaks of Olympus ; for, would not the 
 Olympian father more bitterly resent the charge 
 of murdering his own children, than that of, 
 humanly speaking, either deceiving, or being 
 
 deceived (/CJOEITTOV S'tXtVOat T//euSoc rj d\r)0ec /ca/cov) ? 
 
 Nay, further, Zeus was the father " of men " as 
 well as " of gods," the father " whose offspring
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 109 
 
 we are ";* and the foregoing argument would as 
 clearly apply to his treatment of his human, as to 
 his treatment of his divine, children. Wherefore 
 Plutarch might have thought it, not merely un- 
 scientific, but irreligious, to doubt that, 
 
 " As for the dog, the furies, and their snakes, 
 The gloomy caverns and the burning lakes, 
 And all the vain infernal trumpery, 
 They neither are, nor were, nor e'er can be."f 
 
 In other words, he might have clung to his belief 
 in the divine mercy, even though the divine 
 mercy had to be upheld at the cost of lesser 
 divine attributes ; even though, with the voracity 
 of Tartarus, he gave up the veracity of Zeus. 
 
 Another Neopagan has dealt with divine 
 cannibalism in a manner whereon Neochristians 
 would do well to meditate. To Pindar it seemed 
 hardly credible that the gods should have eaten 
 up Pelops. He granted, indeed, that very 
 strange things sometimes happened; and he 
 thought that, in this particular case, the final 
 
 * See Acts xvii. 28. Epictetus says, " If a man could 
 fully realise this doctrine, that we are all in a special manner 
 born of God, and that God is the father, both of men and of 
 gods, I suppose that he would never have any ignoble or 
 mean thoughts about himself. If Caesar adopted you, your 
 arrogance would be insufferable ; and, when you know that 
 you are the son of Zeus, will you not be elated ? " 
 
 t Lucretius, translated by Dryden
 
 110 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 decision might be reserved for posterity; but, 
 provisionally, he deemed it safer to reject the 
 story.* It is remarkable that here the poet uses 
 the same sort of prudential weapon that orthodox 
 Christians use ; but he uses it on the opposite 
 side he employs it in defence, not of faith, but 
 of scepticism. And this should show us what a 
 two-edged weapon it is. Pindar, indeed, probably 
 regarded the gods as having been misrepresented, 
 not as misrepresenting themselves. Piut we have 
 shown that, for practical purposes, these two 
 forms of misrepresentation differ less than at first 
 sight appears ; and, indeed, that the distinction 
 between gods who misreport themselves, and 
 gods who are misreported by verbally inspired 
 reporters, is a distinction without a difference. 
 But Pindar haply did not regard the misreporters 
 as verbally inspired.! If so, his view exactly 
 
 /xepat 
 
 tori 8'dvSpl <j>dfjiv eoi/cos dyu,<t Saifjiovwv KaXd. fiei<av yap atria. 
 f Yet both Homer and Hesiod (evtirvevaav Se pot av8rjv 6e!.av 
 
 4.VO. K\LOLfJ.L TO. T'TO-O/AVa TTpO T' OVTa) claimed what WOUld HOW 
 
 be called verbal inspiration ; so that Neopaganism may have 
 had the same sort of difficulty in attributing to them any 
 inspiration short of verbal, that ISTeochristianity has in 
 attributing such partial inspiration to the Bible. It may be 
 worth mentioning that Plutarch expressed his belief in the 
 partial inspiration of oracles ; the prophecies came from God 
 the bad Greek from the Pythoness.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TEUTH. Ill 
 
 foreshadowed that of the Neochristians : and the 
 state of mind common to both bears so closely on 
 our inquiry that we propose to consider it 
 further, and for that purpose to resort, yet once 
 again, to a classical illustration. The Kyrna9ans 
 being commanded by an oracle to deliver up a 
 suppliant, one of their citizens, Aristodikus, 
 suspected that the divine words had been 
 tampered with,* and consulted the oracle 
 himself. The god, however, gave the same 
 answer as before. Thereupon Aristodikus 
 bethought him of a device : he robbed the 
 nests of the sacred birds that were in the 
 precincts of the temple. Presently he heard a 
 voice from the sanctuary, saying, " Wretch, how 
 hire you strip the temple of my suppliants?" 
 ; ' King," replied he, nothing abashed, " you 
 indeed protect your suppliants ; and do you 
 bid the Kymasans deliver up theirs ? "f " Yea, 
 verily," said the god, " that for such impiety ye 
 may perish speedily ; and may never again ask 
 the oracle about giving up suppliants." Thus, 
 then, was Aristodikus rewarded for disregarding 
 
 * AoiceW TOUS OcoTrpoTTOVs ov Xe'yciv oA^t'tos. Hdt. i. 158. 
 
 t These words are closely parallel to passages in the 
 Gospel : Matt. vi. 14, 15. ; xviii. 33. Observe- that, in all such 
 passages, the identity of the divine and the human morality 
 is assumed.
 
 112 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 an injunction strikingly analogous to Jehovah's 
 " statutes that were not good." His bearing in 
 face of such an injunction differed from that of 
 Abraham and Hosea,* just as Hellenism differed 
 from Hebraism. It is therefore important that 
 his precise moral attitude should be noted. He 
 first cherished the hope that the wicked command 
 was not from God ; and afterwards, when con- 
 vinced that it was from God, he still held that 
 God was less dishonoured by its breach than by 
 its observance ; for it seemed less incredible that, 
 for some inscrutable reason, God should have 
 deceived his worshippers, than that he should 
 have sanctioned what was unjust and cruel. 
 
 Aristodikus, in so judging, was a model of 
 pious discrimination. He deserves our respect 
 both for regarding the divine untruthfulness as 
 one of the solutions of the problem that lay before 
 him, and also for regarding it as an unsatisfac- 
 tory solution a solution not to be adopted till a 
 happier one had failed. And, in thus expressing 
 our concurrence with his estimate of divine decep- 
 tions, we have shown what we think of Mr. Oxen- 
 ham's estimate. It is in a certain sense true that 
 the belief in such deceptions is "little short of 
 blasphemous." But this is a one-sided truth, 
 unless supplemented by the more obvious and 
 * Gen. xxii. Hosea i.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OP TRUTH. 113 
 
 momentous truth, that the belief in hell is, in 
 the words of the first of living bishops, " blas- 
 phemous and revolting." Orthodoxy, therefore, 
 is in a strait betwixt two blasphemies ; and of 
 those blasphemies she should choose the less. 
 
 Briefly, then, we concede to Suarez and Pro- 
 fessor Huxley* that " Incredibile est, Deum illis 
 verbis ad populum fuisse locutum quibus decipe- 
 retur." But we guard this concession by adding, 
 " Incredibilius est, Deum illis paenis in populum 
 esse usurum quibus crucietur." We should hate, 
 not the belief in divine un truthfulness less, but 
 the belief in divine cruelty more. Only, in hold- 
 ing our brief for Neochristianity, we assumed 
 that it was between these two beliefs that the 
 alternative lay. And, starting with this assump- 
 tion, we maintained that those who hang the 
 belief in hell on the divine veracity, represent the 
 chain of evidence for hell as stronger than its 
 weakest link ; or, to employ a yet bolder meta- 
 phor, they make the burning lake rise above its 
 own level. To prove this has been the design of 
 our article. We have been endeavouring to show 
 the universal application of a plain rule of human 
 jurisprudence, by establishing a proposition which 
 may be called a counterpart, if not a corollary, 
 of Hume's famous proposition about miracles. 
 
 * "Mr. Dai-win and his Critics."
 
 114 STONES OP STUMBLING. 
 
 Our proposition is : That no Person (whether in 
 heaven or on earth) should stand convicted, on 
 his own testimony, of an immoral or unlikely act, 
 unless it be less antecedently unlikely that he 
 should do the act than that his testimony should 
 be false ; " and " (to apply Hume's very words) 
 " even in that case there is a mutual destruction 
 of arguments, and the superior only gives us an 
 assurance suitable to that degree of force which 
 remains after deducting the inferior." 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 Since writing the article, I have had several proofs that 
 the divinity and the fallibility of Christ are sometimes held 
 together.* For instance : Robertson, in his sermon on " The 
 Last Utterances of Christ," thus comments on the words, 
 "Why hast thou forsaken me?": "It is plain from this 
 expression that the Son of God felt as if He had been de- 
 serted by his Father. We know that He was not deserted 
 by Him. . . . And they who maintain that this was real 
 desertion, attribute that to the Lord of Love which can alone 
 belong to Judas the desertion of innocence, therefore we 
 conclude that it arose from the infirmities of our Master's 
 innocent human nature. It was the darkening of his human 
 soul, not the hiding of God's countenance. He was worn, 
 faint, and exhausted ; his body was hanging from four 
 lacerated wounds ; and, more than that, there was much to 
 perplex the Redeemer's human feelings, for He was suffer- 
 ing there, the innocent for the guilty." One may fairly ask : 
 If the Redeemer, in the very act of redeeming, was "per- 
 
 * See " Safe Studies," page 376.
 
 DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH. 115 
 
 plexed " by the theory of redemption nay, if He could at 
 that awful moment attribute to his Father conduct which 
 can alone belong to Judas when, and on what, was He 
 infallible ? 
 
 I am assured that Lectures (answering more or less to the 
 Bampton Lectures) have lately been delivered in Scotland, start- 
 ing from the Christian standpoint, and advocating opinions not 
 unlike those of the foregoing article. They are called Eenosis, 
 from Phil. ii. 7, where it is said that Christ " made himself 
 of no reputation," or (more literally) "emptied himself." 
 These words might be taken as the text of my article, which 
 is designed to show that the kenosis involved in the Incar- 
 nation may be a complete one, inasmuch as, even from the 
 orthodox point of view, the doctrine itself is beset with seem- 
 ing contradictions. 
 
 " Quid enim diversius esse putandum est 
 Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque, 
 Quam mortale quod est immortali atque perenni ?" 
 
 In a word, Divinity unalloyed with Humanity implies 
 Omniscience as well as Infallibility : if, in becoming Man, 
 Christ pro tempore emptied himself of Omniscience (Mark 
 xiii. 32), may He not also have emptied himself of Infalli- 
 bility ?
 
 APPENDIX L 
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 (Reprinted from the " Journal of Education" of June, 2883.)
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISOK 
 
 '* Spectateur dans 1'nnivers, le penseur sait que le monde 
 ne lui appartient que comme sujet d'etude, et que le role de 
 reformateur suppose presque toujours en ceux qui se le 
 donnent des defants et des qualites qu'il n'a pas." RENAX. 
 
 IT was at Biarritz, in March, 1882, that I made 
 Pattison's acquaintance.* I saw much of him 
 then, and again, six months later, when he came 
 to join me in Switzerland. In June, 1883, we 
 met for the last time. He took most kindly to 
 me from the first, and in our conversations he 
 spoke with an absence of reserve which I under- 
 stand to have been unusual with him. It will, 
 however, be seen that my personal intercourse 
 with him was confined to a short period. I have 
 been fortunate in obtaining the help of several of 
 his oldest friends, who have enabled me to make 
 my portrait of him less imperfect. In the follow- 
 ing sketch I propose to discuss fully one aspect 
 of his character, which seems to me to be mis- 
 understood; in other matters, I shall as far as 
 
 * Mr. Althaus, in his very interesting and appreciative 
 Essay on Pattison, refers to this visit, and to the 
 philosophical dialogues of which Biarritz was the scene. 
 
 K
 
 120 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 possible restrict myself to a record of some of his 
 opinions and characteristic sayings, so as to let 
 him be his own interpreter. 
 
 One more personal detail by way of preface. 
 The Kector took an unmerited interest in my 
 Essays (contributed chiefly to the Fortnightly 
 Review] ; and he insisted that I should publish 
 them in a collected form, or else print them for 
 private circulation, or at any rate that I should 
 inform him of the names and dates of the articles, 
 so that he might procure copies. For private 
 reasons I chose the second alternative : my two 
 volumes, Safe Studies and Stones of Stumbling, 
 are at present unpublished ; but copies of them 
 (besides being thrown broadcast among friends) 
 have been presented to the chief public libraries, 
 and are thus made accessible to readers. I am 
 obliged to mention these facts, since a few of the 
 Hector's sayings, which will be quoted, relate to 
 passages in those volumes.* 
 
 "Wishing to learn the present state of Oxford, 
 I observed to Pattison that in my time (1856-60) 
 most of the able undergraduates were strong 
 
 * The foregoing sentences aro left in their original form, 
 although, as the volume is now published, they are clearly 
 out of date. But, bearing in mind that hardness and cynicism 
 are often regarded as the Rector's chief characteristics, and 
 having myself to record some of his cynical sayings, I cannot 
 let slip the opportunity of showing how kind an interest he 
 took in one whom he had known only for a few days, and 
 who was young enough to be his son.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 121 
 
 Liberals, both in politics and in theology, and 
 I asked whether the same could be said of the 
 present generation of undergraduates. In reply, 
 he told me, doubtless with some exaggeration, 
 that the opinions of the undergraduates are in 
 chronic opposition to those of their tutors. It 
 takes about twenty years for a budding student 
 to grow into a full-blown don. Whence it follows 
 that there are cycles of about forty years, during 
 half of which the University rises in Liberalism, 
 while during the other half it falls ; or rather, the 
 dons and the undergraduates are at the opposite 
 ends of an intellectual seesaw, so that while the 
 former are rising the latter are falling, and vice 
 versa. " When you were at Oxford," he said to 
 me, " all the good men were Liberals ; they couldn't 
 help it. But now it is all changed. Many of the 
 able undergraduates are Conservative ; and those 
 of an original turn take up JEstheticism " ! 
 One who was his pupil in 1850 writes : 
 
 *' In my own case, the greatest piece of intellectual insight 
 he showed \vas in persuading me to give tip Natural Science 
 a my main pursuit. ' You care for the literature of science, 
 and for the results of science ; you don't really care for 
 science itself. You read Bacon and Herschel's Introduction. 
 and the Vestiges, and Humboldt's Cosmos; but you don't 
 come into chapel with the mud of Shotover and the railway 
 cuttings sticking to your knees.' " 
 
 The same pupil told Pattison, rather apologeti- 
 
 K2
 
 122 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 cally, that, having been bought up in Scotland, 
 he had never learnt the Greek Grammar, but had 
 only used it as a book of reference. " I am de- 
 lighted to hear it," was the unexpected reply ; " far 
 too much time is wasted on the Greek grammar." 
 This view of Pattison's was all the more remark- 
 able, because it was expressed thirty-five years ago. 
 
 I learn from the same source that Pattison 
 (then sub-Rector) said to some of his most hard- 
 working pupils, " I will let you off my lectures on 
 Thursdays, on condition that you promise to make 
 the day a complete holiday." He evidently 
 thought that more intellectual good, or less phy- 
 sical harm, would follow from hard work for (say) 
 six hours a day for five days in the week, than 
 from hard work for five hours a day for six days. 
 
 A more recent pupil, intending to write for a 
 Prize Essay, was urged by the Rector to begin at 
 once : " No amount of hurried reading at the end 
 will take the place of the process 4 of slow gesta- 
 tion." Pattison might have said (employing Mr. 
 Galton's metaphor) that a writer's thoughts ought 
 to be long kept within call in " the antechamber 
 of consciousness," before they are summoned to 
 the presence chamber. The principle involved in 
 the above advice was a favourite one with him. 
 He always insisted that any one engaged in 
 literary work ought, for the time being, to give
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 123 
 
 up all practical avocations. He, of course, did 
 not forget that Bacon, Macaulay, and countless 
 others attained great literary success amid the 
 distractions of public life ; but he would probably 
 have contended that those giants, had they been 
 able to devote themselves exclusively to literature, 
 might have attained a yet greater success, and 
 that ordinary mortals, if they do not so devote 
 themselves, will attain no success at all. 
 
 Certainly his standard of the requirements of a 
 literary life was rigid to the verge of pedantry. A 
 very able (and far too penitent) friend of his writes: 
 
 "He suggested that I should edit Selden's Table Talk. 
 The preparation -was to be, first to get the contents practi- 
 cally by heart, then to read the whole printed literature of 
 Selden's day, and of the generation before him. In twenty 
 years he promised me that I should be prepared for the 
 work. He put the thing before me in so unattractive a 
 way that I never did it or anything else worth doing. I con- 
 sider the ruin of my misspent life very largely due to that 
 conversation." 
 
 That this severe judgment on the Rector may 
 not be taken too literally, I will quote from the 
 same letter, " He was one of the best friends 
 I ever had. . He was not in the least donnish 
 when one came to know him." 
 
 One learns without surprise that, in the words 
 of a near relation, " he had a quite human fond- 
 ness for his books ; nothing annoyed him so
 
 124 KECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 much as to hear one of them fall; and dusting 
 them, which he reduced to a science, seemed to 
 give him real pleasure. In his last illness the 
 sight of any of his favourites depressed him 
 greatly. ' Ah ! ' he would say, * I am to leave my 
 books,' and sometimes, ' They have been more to 
 me than my friends.' He would ask for them 
 one after the other, till he was literally covered 
 almost to his shoulders as he lay, and the floor 
 around him was strewn with them. He used to 
 say that the sight of books was necessary to him 
 at his work; and, once reading how Schiller 
 always kept ' rotten apples ' in his study because 
 their scent was beneficial to him, he pointed to 
 some shelves above his head, where he kept his 
 oldest and most prized editions, and said : ' There 
 are my rotten apples.' ' 
 
 Such severe comments are often passed on 
 clergymen who accept the dogmas of their church 
 in a spiritual, not a literal, sense, that I feel some 
 scruple in recording Pattison's comments on the 
 orthodox theology. But one circumstance re- 
 assures me. Some of us can remember only too 
 well the consternation with which, thirteen years 
 ago, members of London Society learnt that one 
 of their own body, the Duke of Somerset, was in 
 the enemy's camp, and with what refreshing ease 
 they let themselves be convinced that Archbishop
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. J 25 
 
 Thomson had put the Sadducees to silence. No 
 one at all familiar with the Rector's later writings 
 can doubt that his judgment on this controversy 
 might have been conveyed in Henry YI.'s words : 
 
 " I more incline to Somerset than York." 
 
 As Pattison himself has spoken so plainly,* 
 I need not mind speaking plainly also. Never- 
 theless, " Haud ignota loquor " is not my only 
 apology for publishing what he said to me ; I have 
 obtained an assurance from those authorized to 
 speak on his behalf that they in no wise object to 
 the publication. 
 
 I asked him how it was that, being so verv 
 
 / 
 
 outspoken in his writings, he yet seemed never to 
 burn his fingers, as other Broad Church clergy- 
 men did. He answered that, as a matter of fact, 
 he had burnt his fingers, but that he would have 
 burnt them much worse if the outspoken passages 
 had occurred in theological writings : editors en- 
 trusted such books as the Life of Milton to the 
 
 * I have elsewhere (Stones of Stumbling, p. 46) quoted 
 Grote's opinion that the success of Christianity was one of 
 the greatest calamities that ever befell the human race. Did 
 he mean much more by this than Pattison (Memoirs, p. 96) 
 meant by saying that " the triumph of the Church organiza- 
 tion over the wisdom and philosophy of the Hellenic world 
 .... is, to the Humanist, the saddest moment in history 
 the ruin of the painfully constructed fabric of civilization to 
 the profit of the Church " ?
 
 126 KECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 tender mercies of lay critics such books as 
 Mr. Jowett's Commentary on St. Paul to the 
 untender mercies of clerical ones. He told me 
 that at one period he had been on the point of 
 turning Catholic, and that he had been deterred 
 chiefly by observing that on political and scientific 
 questions the only questions which admit of 
 being directly tested the Catholic Church had 
 been time after time in the wrong. He admitted 
 that he had become much more Liberal even than 
 he was when he sent his contribution to Essays 
 and Reviews, 
 
 He was asked whether he did not think that 
 the attempts made by Archdeacon Farrar and 
 others to show that the eternity of punishment 
 cannot be demonstrated from the Gospels, are 
 utterly futile. He expressed his assent by saying, 
 " If they can explain away the word auovios, there 
 are perfectly clear expressions to the same effect 
 in other texts." He was therefore of opinion 
 that the belief in the non-eternity of punishment 
 involves the postulate that the Master's words, as 
 reported in the Gospels, contain errors. I had 
 adopted the same view in an article in the Fort- 
 nightly Review (December, 1877). I begged him 
 to read the article carefully through, and to tell 
 me whether it contained anything to which rational 
 objection could be taken. After reading it over,
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON 127 
 
 he found only one trifling matter to which he at 
 all demurred.* 
 
 He used the term " economy " (that is, hus- 
 banding, menagement) " of truth " to denote the 
 practice of answering fools according to their 
 folly, and of speaking parables to them that are 
 without. I was so struck with the phrase that, 
 in reprinting my article, mentioned in the last 
 paragraph, I rechristened it "Divine Economy of 
 Truth " ; but I first wrote to ask the Rector what 
 authority there was for the phrase which he so 
 often employed. He answered : 
 
 " I almost think a tract of Keble in Tracts for the Times 
 was the first in our day to bring up the word ' Economy ' in 
 the sense you mean. But this was a revival, not an original 
 invention. The Greek fathers not seldom speak of the 
 oocovo/uas (ronrjpLov as we say, the Christian ' dispensation.' 
 The idea is, that revelation itself is only a veil, half revealing, 
 half concealing, and so a test or touchstone of earnest minds, 
 only such being willing to wait and learn. And, as God 
 
 * He thought that perhaps I made too much of Jer. vii. 22 
 (Stones of Stumbling, p. 102). 1 was glad to be informed by 
 so comparatively orthodox a divine as Dr. Baldwin Brown 
 that he had read my article with sympathy, and that he 
 thought that the next step taken by the Broad Church party 
 will perhaps be to impugn the infallibility of the words 
 reported in the Gospels. Tillotson suggests, in Sermon xxxv., 
 that God may have represented future punishment as more 
 horrible than it really is to be, the exaggeration being the 
 only possible way of deterring men from sin. Compare 
 Selden's Table Talk, s.v. Damnation.
 
 128 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 dispenses crumbs of truth to the chosen, so in the visible 
 Church the clergy are dispensers to their flock of so much 
 truth as they think good for them. Keble's tract is entitled, 
 ' On reserve in communicating religious knowledge.' ' God 
 punishes with mental blindness those who approach religions 
 questions with a speculative mind ' is his dictum the text 
 about casting pearls before swine is dwelt upon." 
 
 A Catholic nobleman, who lived near Holywell, 
 once gave me an extraordinary account of a man, 
 to all appearance blind for many years, who re- 
 covered his sight after resorting to that sacred 
 spring. On my mentioning this incident, Patti- 
 son said, "It is seldom possible to sift the 
 evidence in such cases. There is only one real 
 test. Give the Holywell water to the inmates of 
 a blind-asylum, and see whether it cures them." 
 A Catholic would, of course, object that the appli- 
 cation of such a test would imply want of faith, 
 and that God would punish this want of faith by 
 refusing to work the miracle.* Pattison would 
 have declared, and I certainly should not deny, 
 that this objection is irrational. I merely insist 
 that, in pronouncing it to be irrational, we are 
 claiming the right of transferring, not this ques- 
 tion only, but every similar one, from the Theo- 
 
 * Orthodox Protestants made a similar objection to Sir 
 Henry Thompson's proposed method of testing the objective 
 efficacy of prayer. I would commend to their notice two 
 experimental fidei sanctioned in the Bible : Judges vi. 36 40 ; 
 1 Kings xviii. 2339.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 129 
 
 logical to the Scientific Court of Appeal ; we are 
 making the assumption that a knowledge of 
 natural laws is our mainstay, just as reliance on 
 supernatural aid was the mainstay of our fathers 
 in a word, that " our valours are our best gods," 
 and that Prudence is Providence writ small. 
 
 The Rector's attention was called to the start- 
 ling amount of evidence which Herodotus brings 
 forward on behalf of portents which we now 
 reject as a matter of course ; and he was asked 
 whether, after pondering on that evidence, he did 
 not doubt the conclusiveness of the testimony, 
 even of the " 500 brethren at once," which is 
 adduced by a more famous writer in support of a 
 far greater miracle. " What weight," asked he, 
 " can you attach to such testimony? It rests on 
 the ipse dixit of a single reporter, who places his 
 own vision on the same level with the rest of the 
 evidence." In reference to the prophetic, I mean 
 predictive, power which is claimed for the Founders 
 of Christianity, he made the remark : Of all the 
 momentous events that have occurred since the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, not one was foretold in 
 the New Testament. He defined orthodoxy as 
 " Stoicism plus a legend." 
 
 It will be convenient to speak of his political 
 forebodings further on. At present I will merely 
 mention that he considered political pessimism to
 
 130 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 be on the increase, and that he attributed the 
 increase to two causes. The first cause is, the* 
 disappointment which was felt by Liberals after 
 1848. He exclaimed with exaggerative vehe- 
 mence : " Before 1848 men expected to get every- 
 thing by revolutions ; they soon learnt that they 
 were not a bit better off than before." The 
 second cause is an indirect and negative one. 
 Men are apt to infer from the Divine Goodness 
 that good must be the final goal of ill, and that an 
 increasing purpose must run through all the ages. 
 And, as a matter of fact, men commonly hold that 
 the nineteenth century fares (so to say) better 
 than the eighteenth, and the eighteenth than the 
 seventeenth; therefore, the twentieth will fare 
 better than the nineteenth, and for evermore each 
 % + 1 th will fare better than each w th . But, alas, 
 this vision of an earthly Paradise men of science 
 are ruthlessly consigning to dreamland. Either 
 freezing or frying, they tell us, is to be the lot 
 of our remote descendants; and this unpleasing 
 catastrophe is likely to be ushered in by long ages 
 of decline : during those ages each w + l th century 
 will fare worse than each n ih . Of course, this 
 does not prove that the twentieth will fare worse 
 than the nineteenth. But it breaks the spell of the 
 a priori reasoning on which, according to Patti- 
 son, the belief in progress mainly rests ; and thus
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 131 
 
 it infuses into philosophers a restless unfaith a 
 sentiment akin to that of o7vo? fBaa-ikevet rbv Ai' 
 or at least to that of 
 
 Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita qusedam 
 Obterit. 
 
 A few of the Rector's literary criticisms may 
 find a place here. Some interest may be felt in 
 the miscellaneous intellectual diet which he pre- 
 scribed to me in a letter (14th October, 1883) : 
 
 "You will read Spielhagen's Quisiaana, and Trollope's 
 Autobiography. I myself find much fireside sympathy in 
 Twining's Reminiscences but it is mild tobacco, and has a 
 special flavour of eighteenth century about it, which may 
 not be to everyone's taste. Have you ever read A. Gellius' 
 Nodes Atticce ? You will find some curious matters there, 
 though perhaps Jevons' Social Essays may be more to your 
 liking. Above all, read the speeches of the clericals at the 
 Reading Congress quite time for some one to rap them on 
 the head." 
 
 He also urged me, and many other friends, to 
 read Amiel's Journal Intime. May not his relish 
 for Amiel's moral self -dissection have been due to 
 his sympathy with one who suffered from great 
 mental depression depression aggravated by con- 
 sidering how much had been expected from him, 
 and how little he had performed ?* 
 
 To a friend who complained of not caring for 
 the character of ^Eneas, Pattison observed that 
 the interest of the ./Eneid is derived neither from 
 * See the Note at the end of this essay.
 
 132 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 its characters nor from its plot, but merely from 
 its being a Handbook of Roman Antiquities.^ 
 This conversation probably occurred some years 
 before he spoke to me on the same subject in 
 very different terms. I understood him to say 
 that the charm of Yirgil lies in his power of 
 exciting "successive waves of emotion" in the 
 reader's mind. He read with very great interest 
 Mr. Myers's Essay on the poet, which he described 
 as something quite out of the common. He went 
 the length of saying that, in the beauty of occa- 
 sional passages, Yirgil is unsurpassed by any poet, 
 ancient or modern; and he gave as an instance 
 the encomium on Italy (Georg. II. 136 176), 
 which reaches its climax in the line, 
 
 " Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, 
 Magna virum." 
 
 He told me that he thought he should never 
 like Dante, and he knew he should never like 
 Carry le. His aversion to Carlyle is referred to in 
 a letter which I received from a member of his 
 family : 
 
 " I don't think that he cared at all about Carlyle ; he used 
 to call him a juggler with words, and to speak contemp- 
 tuously of anything infected with his style. He belonged to 
 the Browning Society, and even took the chair at one of its 
 meetings, but he would not allow that Mr. Browning is a 
 poet ; he never read his works for pleasure, but merely to 
 see what it was that people talked about. Wordsworth
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 133 
 
 seemed to give him more pleasure than any English poet, 
 and he loved to read Schiller's Gedichte. He was glad of an 
 excuse for turning up Pope, and, if we met with a quotation 
 from him in our reading, he would insist on finding the 
 context, and reading it aloud with a peculiar swing and tone 
 of voice which he always used for Pope. His delight over 
 his favourite epigrams was most amusing. The couplet 
 
 ' On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore, 
 Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.' 
 
 he was never tired of declaring to be inimitable." 
 
 He told me that, in order to enjoy "Wordsworth 
 thoroughly, I ought to be familiar with the Lake 
 district. Indeed, he seems to have thought it 
 extremely important to take poets (in this literal 
 sense) on their own ground. Miss Swanwick has 
 kindly authorized me to mention that she was 
 somewhat amused by the persistence with which 
 he urged her to go all the way to Sicily in order 
 to be able to appreciate Theocritus, " an acquaint- 
 ance with Sicilian scenery, and with the Sicilian 
 people, being, in his opinion, essential for the full 
 enjoyment of the Idylls." She also informs me 
 that, on their first meeting, he opened fire by 
 asking, " Which do you think the finest poem in 
 the world ? " She replied that the question 
 needed deliberation, and asked which he thought 
 the finest poem. He at once answered, " The 
 Agamemnon." She suggested that in such a com- 
 parison, other things being equal, the length of a
 
 134 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 poem must count for something, and that, there- 
 fore, the Iliad might have a prior claim. He, 
 however, stuck to his opinion that the Agamemnon 
 is " the grandest work of creative genius in the 
 whole range of literature," and added that, the 
 oftener he read it, the more he admired it. 
 
 Others of his friends besides Miss Swanwick 
 had experience of his attempts to break the social 
 ice by plunging headlong into a discussion. A 
 very shy young lady, paying him a first visit, was 
 startled by the question : " Which is your favourite 
 English sonnet ? " He himself was especially 
 fond of Wordsworth's sonnet on Westminster 
 Bridge, and of Blanco White's only sonnet. I 
 am told that he sometimes asked ladies what they 
 thought of this last sonnet, as a sure test of their 
 literary judgment. He cared little for John 
 Inglesant. To a lady who inquired whether he 
 liked it, he gave what in the Art of Pluck is called 
 the answer indirect : " You are asking me what 
 everybody asks me everywhere." I am now 
 bordering on a province of my subject which I 
 enter with some trepidation. 
 
 " Like ail good men," says Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 " [Samuel] Johnson loved good women, and liked 
 to have on hand a flirtation or two, as warm as 
 might be within the bounds of due decorum." It 
 is undeniable that this somewhat exclusive test of
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 135 
 
 goodness would not exclude Pattison, who at 
 times seemed to agree with the hero of Amours de 
 Voyage, that Vir sum, nihil foeminei a me alienum 
 piitn. To speak more seriously, he sought and 
 obtained what has been called the one compensa- 
 tion of growing old. The praise which Words- 
 worth bestowed on Nature, may more truly be 
 applied to a good woman she never yet betrayed 
 the heart that loved' her ; and Pattison stood in 
 special need of that restful sympathy which women 
 know how to give, which good women will give 
 when they feel that it is valued, but which men 
 can neither give nor take away. Yet he learnt 
 by experience that even this rose is not thornless. 
 In particular, he found that the art of instructing 
 and correcting women without affronting them is 
 not easily acquired. The mode of its acquisition, 
 like everything else in which he took an interest, 
 he subjected to critical analysis. "The art of 
 pleasing," I heard him say, " consists in entire 
 self-effacement." This opinion is sanctioned by 
 the high authority of Rochefoucauld (Maximes, 
 139) ; yet, for all that, it represents only a 
 half-truth. Those who are always taking their 
 own line whose individuality asserts itself in 
 their own despite often make the deepest im- 
 pression on the world. This quality is noticed by 
 Goethe as the chief characteristic of Englishmen :
 
 136 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 " Their deportment in society is as full of confidence, and 
 as easy as if they were lords everywhere and the whole world 
 belonged to them. Thit it is which pleases our women. . . . 
 They [Englishmen] have the courage to be that for which 
 nature made them. There is nothing vitiated or spoilt about 
 them, there is nothing half-way or crooked ; but, such as they 
 are, they are complete men. That they are also sometimes 
 complete fools, I allow with all my heart ; but that is still 
 something, and has still always some weight in the scale of 
 nature."* 
 
 The Hector, however, might fairly have re- 
 joined that, now at any rate, the ordinary John 
 Bull is not a favourite with Germans, and that a few 
 lessons in self-effacement would do him no harm. 
 
 I drew Pattison's attention to a statement 
 which he had made in an article in the Academy, 
 that " it is difficult to be loved too much by one 
 sex and enough by the other " ; and I asked how 
 he explained the anomaly. He answered that it is 
 not so much that a lady's man (in the best sense 
 of the term) excites jealousy in other men, but 
 rather that there is something in his temperament 
 by which they are repelled. May not the fact be that 
 all women, except the very best, like " more self- 
 effacement " in men, than men like in each other ? 
 Goethe has noted how hard and important it is in 
 friendship to avoid being either too confidential or 
 
 * Eckermann's Conversations (Oxenford's translation). 
 Compare Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Character Versailles
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 137 
 
 too reserved. The difficulty is closely allied to 
 one pointed out by Horace to that of hitting the 
 exact mean between Scurrantis species and Aspe- 
 ritas agrestis et inconcinna, the mean between 
 being hypocritical and hypercritical, or rather be- 
 tween an excessive desire to please and a blunt- 
 ness which degenerates into brutality. Unfortu- 
 nately, women, as a rule, like the mean to incline 
 towards the former of these extremes, while men 
 like it to incline towards the latter. In support 
 of this view, I will remark that women are pleased 
 by a man who keeps conversation going, whereas 
 men prefer one who seldom speaks unless he has 
 something to say. 
 
 The Eector once reminded me what a different 
 thing it is to understand a subject and to be able 
 to teach it. He said this with special reference to 
 the difficulty of teaching women unofficially. The 
 social superiority of their sex has, as he expressed 
 it, " passe dans les moeurs." And this superiority 
 is wont to clash with the instructor's superiority 
 in age and in knowledge. Female pupils do not 
 receive the moral tonic which is given to male 
 pupils. If they are silly or obstinate, their 
 teacher seldom contradicts them sharply, and 
 never ridicules them. The anomaly of this rela- 
 tion was felt by Pattison all the more, because he 
 had rather strong views as to the intellectual 
 
 L2
 
 138 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 inferiority of the average woman to the average 
 man. Indeed, his love of paradox led him to 
 speak as if he imagined Ens rationale to be the 
 definition, not of Homo, but of Vir. I asked 
 him what he thought of the unchivalrous remark 
 attributed to Disraeli, that all women require 
 flattery : did the author of this remark merely use 
 the word flattery as a satirical equivalent to 
 egards ? did he merely mean that women receive 
 and expect, in compensation for their weakness, a 
 deferential homage from men not wholly unlike 
 that which a Prime Minister pays to a constitu- 
 tional Sovereign? "What Disraeli calls flattery," 
 replied Pattison, " I call economy of truth. I 
 feel that, when I, an old man of seventy, am 
 talking on intellectual subjects to a young girl of 
 seventeen, she and I are on quite different planes 
 of thought ; and it is necessary to translate my 
 ideas into her language. If she talks nonsense, I 
 take refuge in flight. I always agree ; but, when 
 she thinks that her prejudices are quite secure, I 
 slowly try to undermine them." (He emphasized 
 the word undermine by moving his out-stretched 
 hand diagonally downwards.) Of his tendency to 
 self-caricature of his seeming to take the in- 
 verted motto, Video pejora prorogue, without 
 adding, Sed meliora sequor more will be said 
 presently. I will now merely observe that such
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 139 
 
 utterances of his as the above are to be taken 
 cum grano salis, or rather cumpleno salino. The 
 truth which probably underlies his exaggeration is 
 that, in arguing with women (always excepting 
 the very best), it is hard for men to maintain the 
 same perfect frankness, or rather directness, which 
 they maintain in arguing with each other. The 
 Rector, so far from being a dissembler or even a 
 self-effacer, was in reality somewhat over-frank. 
 He was visited by a young lady who wrote 
 well, but who in his opinion talked less well. He 
 resolved to admonish her of this defect; but, 
 instead of trying in any of the thousand-and-one 
 possible ways to hint, while commending her 
 writings, that more was now expected of her dis- 
 course laudando prcscipere, as Bacon would have 
 said, he embarrassed her by the blunt rebuke : 
 " Your conversational utterances are feeble." 
 
 The following abridgment of an account which 
 he gave of his meeting an American young lady 
 at a foreign table d'hote, reproduces his character- 
 istic sayings almost, if not quite, verbatim : " She 
 was only nineteen, but she knew everything. She 
 told me the exact amount of affection which the 
 Princess C. has for her future husband; and she 
 gave me a full account of the divorce laws in all 
 the States of America. She appealed to me some- 
 times ; of course I agreed. At last, she asked
 
 140 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 whether I did not think she could write a book ; 
 and I told her that she was the most ignorant girl 
 I ever met ! But I took care to say so in such a 
 way that she couldn't mind it." I doubt not that 
 in this description the Rector was jocularly over- 
 stating both the parts which he acted the part of 
 assenfator and the part of candid friend. Still, 
 after making allowance for such exaggeration, I 
 wonder whether in the latter character he was quite 
 as agreeable to the young lady as he imagined. 
 
 I asked him whether he agreed with Sainte-Beuve 
 in thinking that the advice contained in Lord Ches- 
 terfield's Letters was such as Horace might have 
 given to his son, if he had had one. The only 
 answer which I could get from him was, " Horace 
 would have thought a son a great bore." Yet he 
 regarded Chesterfield's Letters as a repertory of 
 maxims which might be useful to the social tac- 
 tician. Indeed, he himself (as we have seen) was 
 theoretically an adept in gyncecology the science 
 of womankind. But I doubt his being equally 
 successful in the practical application of that 
 science. A lady once complained, " The Rector 
 treats me like an intellectual machine." And 
 I suspect that in general, when he had but just 
 removed the scales from a female pupil's eyes, he 
 was too apt to shed on her a dry (or rather an 
 achromatic) light thought uncoloured by feeling.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 141 
 
 On the whole, I am less disposed to think that he 
 was much liked by all, or by most women, than 
 that he was very much liked by a few. 
 
 Biography is sometimes autobiography in dis- 
 guise. The following extract from the Life oj 
 Milton is obviously founded indeed, its author 
 admitted that it is founded more or less on per- 
 sonal experience : 
 
 " Milton longed to be loved that lie might love again. But 
 he had to pay the penalty of all who believe in their own 
 ideas, in that their ideas come between them and the persons 
 that approach them, and constitute a mental barrier which 
 can only be broken down by sympathy. And sympathy for 
 ideas is hard to find, just in proportion as those ideas are 
 profound, far reaching, the fruit of long study and medita- 
 tion. Hence it was that Milton did not associate readily 
 with his contemporaries, but was affable and instructive in 
 conversation with young persons, and those who would 
 approach him in the attitude of disciples." 
 
 More than once, when " disciples " were staying 
 with the Rector, he and they together concocted a 
 translation which was sent in for the Prize offered 
 by the Journal of Education. I was startled when 
 he told me that one of these joint productions ob- 
 tained only a 4th Class. At first I conjectured that 
 this was a practical illustration of the maxim OVK 
 wyadbv 7ro\vKoipavtr) a mishap, such as often befalls 
 a plurality of generals in the waging of war or a 
 plurality of cooks in the making of broth. But
 
 142 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 I found that this explanation would not serve : 
 the Rector assured me that he revised the transla- 
 tion so thoroughly as to make it virtually his own. 
 I was therefore still more amazed when I heard 
 from a sleeping partner, so to say, in the transla- 
 tors' firm, that one of their compositions fell as 
 low as the 7th Class. But my surprise was les- 
 sened when my informant added that Pattison's 
 translation was a very free one so free, indeed, 
 that, finding sentiments or metaphors in the 
 original which were not to his liking, he took 
 upon himself to be wise above that which was 
 written, and to idealise instead of reproducing ! * 
 This masterful mode of translating tallies well 
 with his strong desire that his pupils and friends 
 should always use the best phrases and forms of 
 speech. He protested even against the common 
 error of calling a sarcastic smile a sardonic one. 
 He and I once talked over the old tradition a 
 tradition mentioned, I think, by a Scholiast on 
 Homer from which the word " sardonic " is said 
 to have sprung. In very early times the natives 
 of Sardinia were wont to eat such of their country- 
 men as were worn out by age. But, as manners 
 grew milder, it was not thought seemly that a 
 patriarch should be thus doomed without his own 
 
 * Pattison would doubtless have endorsed Moritz Haupt's 
 paradox, " Translation is the death of understanding."
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 143 
 
 consent ; and, in proof that his consent was freely 
 given, he was himself chosen to bid the gnests. 
 Such, however, was, the force of public opinion 
 (opponents of euthanasia should make a note of 
 this) that the veteran always issued the invita- 
 tions to the supper where, in Hamlet's phraseo- 
 logy, he would not eat but be eaten. The courteous 
 smile which beamed on the old gentleman's coun- 
 tenance as he was doing this last act of hospi- 
 tality etcwv deicovri 76 dv^a is the prototype of all 
 sardonic smiles. For the truth of this ghastly 
 story the Rector would not vouch ; but he insisted 
 that the word " sardonic " should be used in the 
 sense which the story indicates. In short, he 
 wished his pupils to remember that a sardonic 
 laugh is a laugh at one's own expense, and on the 
 wrong side of one's mouth. From the following 
 remarks, it will appear that he himself laughed 
 sardonically at the world. 
 
 The passage chosen as motto for this article 
 has been severely condemned by Mazzini, and to 
 many it may appear cynical. But I have chosen 
 it as putting into a clear light the point of view 
 from which Pattison should be judged. He once 
 remarked to me emphatically, " There has only 
 been one Goethe." Yet, on another occasion, he 
 protested against the attempts that are often made
 
 144 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 to exalt Goethe into a moral hero, and even 
 described him as stamping morality under his 
 feet. This censure is doubtless exaggerated, and 
 indeed was probably not meant to be taken lite- 
 rally. Yet the Rector's judgment of Goethe, both 
 on its favourable and on its unfavourable side, 
 has much in common with the following extract 
 from a famous writer : 
 
 " Chaque ordre de grandeur a sa maitrise a part et ne doit 
 point etre compare a d'autres. Un philanthrope qui, ayant a 
 j uger Goethe, le mettrait en parallele avec Vincent de Paule, 
 se trouverait amene a ne voir dans le plus grand genie des 
 temps modernes qu'un egoiste qui n'a rien fait pour le bon- 
 heur et 1'amelioration morale de ses contemporains."* 
 
 I quote this passage because Pattison, as well 
 as Goethe, has been accused of moral insensibility. 
 The charge against the Rector is unjust, but not 
 wholly inexplicable. He was, at least in his later 
 years, essentially a scholar, valuing the spread of 
 knowledge more 
 
 " Than aught, divine or holy, else enjoyed 
 In vision beatifie." 
 
 The French employ their barely translatable 
 term I'ideal to include le vrai, le beau, and le Hen. 
 It would seem that many persons who devote 
 
 * A similar sentiment is expressed by Mommsen when 
 contrasting the merits of the Romans with those of the 
 Greeks. The passage is quoted in Safe Studies, p. 278, Note.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 145 
 
 themselves to seeking V ideal through le beau or 
 through le vrai, have a special difficulty in seeking 
 it through what in the narrower sense may be 
 called le bien : in other words, scholars and philo- 
 sophers often lack the enthusiasm of humanity. 
 This is one reason why saints and sages so seldom 
 quite understand one another. Dean Church can 
 as little do justice to Bacon as Bacon could have 
 written the Life of St. Ansehn. 
 
 In order to illustrate further our view of Patti- 
 son's ethical languor, it will be needful to dwell at 
 some length on his scepticism and cynicism. He 
 told me that he objected to auricular confession 
 chiefly because it made people examine themselves 
 too closely. He expressed this opinion in reply to 
 a question as to what he thought of the following 
 sentiment of Goethe : 
 
 "It has at all times been said and repeated that man 
 should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisi- 
 tion, with which no one complies, or indeed ever will 
 comply. ... I know not myself, and God forbid I should." 
 
 How was it that, whereas the greatest moral 
 teacher of antiquity took as his motto, " Know 
 thyself," this great modern teacher virtually said, 
 "Know not thyself"? Are the two maxims as 
 much opposed to one another as at first sight 
 appears ? The answer probably is that they are 
 not; for, while Socrates addressed his exhorta-
 
 146 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 tion to the mass of men, Goethe limited his admo- 
 nition to the few who are possessed with the 
 demon of self-consciousness. Our meaning will 
 be made clearer by an illustration. Aurora Leigh 
 says, of one whom she elsewhere calls a " good " 
 man, that 
 
 " He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf, 
 To keep them at the grand millennial height, 
 He has to mount a stool to get at them ; 
 And, meantime, lives on quite the common way, 
 With everybody's morals." 
 
 Now, it is plain that, when this " good " man 
 acquiesced (as almost everyone acquiesces) in the 
 moral code of those around him, more qualms 
 would be felt by him than by men whose ideal 
 was less exalted ; and also that, if he was given 
 to honest introspection, those qualms might become 
 very inconvenient. It is indeed possible that, by 
 fostering this introspection, he would be converted 
 into a hero. But it is quite as j likely that he 
 would be unfitted for action, would become power- 
 less to prevent the pale cast of his thoughts from 
 discolouring resolution and enthusiasm 0tXo- 
 vofalv avev paXa/cias. The fact seems to be that, 
 while most good men require the brightest ideals of 
 character and conduct to light them on the road 
 to virtue, the too clear sight of some philosophers 
 is dazzled by the contrast between the brightness
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 14? 
 
 of those ideals and the dark shade of the actual. 
 Cynicism is, as it were, the smoked glass which 
 these latter employ to prevent being dazzled over- 
 much. 
 
 "We never, says Goethe, feel so much at ease 
 with our own consciences as when we are dwelling 
 complacently on the faults of others. And it is 
 by reason of the restlessness of the intellectual 
 conscience that the intellectual man of the world 
 is tempted to use cynical language, which shocks 
 and startles unintellectual men who are not a bit 
 less worldly than himself.* We thus understand 
 why Talleyrand, being informed of two faults of 
 a lady of his acquaintance, exclaimed, " Elle est 
 detestable, elle n'a que ces deux fautes-la " ; why 
 Disraeli, if rightly reported, censured a Liberal 
 statesman as not having even " a redeeming vice " ; 
 why Goethe maintained that Spinozism, when 
 manipulated by reflection, becomes Machiavellism ; 
 and why Gibbon seems happier when discovering 
 the sins of the good and the follies of the wise, 
 even than when relating the murder of a priest. 
 
 It is probable that one cause of the strange 
 
 * It is my experience that, while most intellectual men 
 prefer Thackeray to Dickens, nearly all women prefer 
 Dickens to Thackeray. If this is so, is it not because 
 women, being rarely troubled with self-knowledge, have no 
 relish for cynicism ?
 
 143 KECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 repugnance which such men as these feel for 
 heroic virtue, is to be found in their sympathy 
 with those whose welfare has been more or less 
 directly, more or less completely, sacrificed with 
 the sons of Brutus and the brother of Timoleon. 
 But a more important cause is, that a degree of 
 disinterestedness, of which introspective minds are 
 even too apt to think themselves incapable, is 
 contemplated in others only with pain. 
 
 These considerations are meant to explain, not 
 to justify, the ordinary type of cynicism. They 
 must be pushed somewhat further to cover the 
 case of Pattison. A distinguished pupil of his 
 assures me that, at the time of the Tractarian 
 movement, he had a high spiritual ideal, that he 
 lost that ideal when he changed his views, and 
 that he keenly felt the loss of it.* At this crisis 
 of his life, he had much in common with the 
 exiled Psalmist, whose affections would not take 
 root in a strange country, and wlio looked wist- 
 fully back on the days when Stantes erant pedes 
 
 * This paragraph had been written before I had read the 
 Memoirs ; I leave it in its original form as an independent 
 testimony. To Pattison may be applied some of Macaulay's 
 remarks about Shrewsbury, who, after a long and painful 
 struggle, shook off the yoke of his early Catholic training : 
 " The shock which had overturned his early prejudices had 
 at the same time unfixed all his opinions " [and some of his 
 principles]. History, Vol. n., p. 128, ed. 1866.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 149 
 
 nostri in atriis tuis, Jerusalem. To the typical 
 scholar of our generation may be applied the 
 words of its typical poet : 
 
 " Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope, 
 We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
 And most beliefless, that had most believed." 
 
 It is not impossible that the line preceding these, 
 " Eat, drink, or die, for we are souls bereaved," 
 
 would express the despairing state into which he 
 fell. A great writer has remarked that we feel 
 what our ancestors thought, and that posterity 
 will feel what we think. May not much of the 
 spiritual anguish of our generation be due to the 
 fact that many of us think with philosophers, 
 while feeling with theologians ? It was perhaps 
 through being in this condition that Pattison con- 
 tinued long in the Slough of Despond. There is 
 even reason to fear that, for some years, the loss 
 of the ideal had on him a natural but melancholy 
 effect, similar to that which (in the fable) the loss 
 of the tail had on the fox. It is, however, right 
 to mention that his mental struggles affected his 
 nerves, and that these reacted on his mental con- 
 dition. Speaking of his state at this time, my 
 friend writes : 
 
 " What his physical condition was then, without being 
 ill, may be judged from one fact. He most kindly gave
 
 10 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 me a private lecture in Magna Charta ; we both adopted the 
 position of seekers. During an animated discussion of 
 Hallam's views, I turned aside to collate some reading. On 
 looking round, Pattison was fast asleep ; and this is how he 
 often seemed in those years, wearied out with vexations, and 
 as if he might sink into an exhausted sleep at any moment." 
 
 It should also be stated that my informant was 
 intimate with Pattison chiefly when he was smart- 
 ing under a sense of grievous injustice after the 
 failure of his first candidature for the Rectorship ; 
 and it is thought that haply, for some years, the 
 loss of his ideal and the loss of his election com- 
 bined to give bitterness to his conversation. 
 This is important as throwing light both on the 
 origin and on the original form of his cynicism. 
 But, when I knew him, his state of mind was 
 different. I never detected in him the least re- 
 semblance to the esprit fort (or faible) who 
 exclaimed : " Lord, I cannot believe ; help thou 
 mine unbelief." His cynicism seemed to me to 
 be the outcome of deliberate reason, and to have 
 become a second nature to him : and as such I 
 shall attempt to describe it. 
 
 " It is not desirable," says Bagehot, " to take 
 this world too much au serieux ; most persons 
 will not; and the one in a thousand who will, 
 should not." In other words, a man of that 
 abnormal type ought to make a conscious effort, 
 if not to become what the French call a farceur,
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 151 
 
 and what Bacon in his essay on Fortune calls 
 poco di matto, at least to avoid being righteous 
 over-much, and being over-wise. This was just 
 the sort of exhortation which Pattison needed, 
 which he knew that he needed, and which he 
 tried, not very successfully, to follow : he was, 
 as it were, an homme serieux malgre lui. 
 
 If I were .asked to what he owed this peculiarity 
 of temperament, I should say that it was partly 
 due to his retentiveness of memory, or rather to 
 his inability to forget. Darwin, in explaining 
 the genesis of morals among primitive men, 
 attributes much to the influence of memory. 
 When the best of our early ancestors saw a 
 neighbour suffering, they were haunted by 
 the recollection of what they themselves had 
 suffered. When they were tempted to do 
 wrong, they could not always banish the 
 thought of their own resentment when injured. 
 This importunateness of memory, arising under 
 different conditions and associated (as it often is) 
 with nervous weakness, contributes much both to 
 the merits and to the defects of such men as the 
 Rector : they cannot get rid of their former 
 selves. Of the many illustrations of my mean- 
 ing, the most obvious must suffice. When a 
 man labours to avert or to postpone a change 
 which he regards as hurtful or premature, it is 
 
 if
 
 152 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 hardly possible for him to avoid exaggerating 
 the evils of that change, and thus becoming an 
 alarmist. When another or the same man seeks 
 to evolve the energy needful for carrying out 
 some great reform or establishing a scientific 
 truth, it is perhaps impossible for him to avoid 
 greatly exaggerating the importance of his un- 
 dertaking, and thus becoming a strong optimist. 
 It is through this and other causes that nearly 
 every one of us oscillates between a modified 
 pessimism (or at least uneasiness about the future) 
 and a decided optimism ; and during these oscil- 
 lations an ordinary Philistine, however strong 
 his affirmations may be on either side, has an 
 enviable faculty of believing in himself. To 
 Pattison and his peers this convenient self-decep- 
 tion is impossible. Their Liberal zeal is checked 
 by the unwelcome memory of their fits of pessi- 
 mism, and their Conservative zeal by the memory 
 of their fits of optimism. No doubt, they are 
 thus preserved from much extravagance ; but 
 they tend, in the phraseology of Burns, to become 
 " tideless blooded." This word exactly expresses 
 Pattison' s chief fault, or rather his misfortune; 
 for it was his misfortune that states of feeling 
 which appear to ordinary men as a series of dis- 
 solving views, each distinct in itself, blended 
 themselves before his mind's-eye and made a sort
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 153 
 
 of blur.* Renan has said, "Presque tous nous 
 sommes doubles," and has somewhere maintained 
 the paradox : " Woe to the man who does not 
 contradict himself at least once a day."f In a 
 like spirit, Pattison, when reminded that some 
 principle or policy which he was upholding was 
 opposed to principles laid down in his writings, 
 used to exclaim jestingly, "It is more than five 
 minutes ago that I wrote that," or again, " Who 
 ever dreamt of reconciling practice and theory ?" 
 Yet, while thus professing indifference, he was 
 really anxious, perhaps over-anxious, to see prac- 
 tice and theory fitting one another like hand and 
 glove. To quote again from the writer who so 
 well illustrates this subject : " The man," says 
 Goethe, " who would do all that is expected of 
 him, must overrate himself a little perhaps more 
 
 * Since writing this, I have learnt that he once quoted the 
 following passage (from Lewes's Life of Goethe) in explanation 
 of his own character : " There is in men of active intellects, 
 and especially in men of imaginative, apprehensive intellects, 
 a fluctuation of motives keeping the volition in abeyance, 
 which practically amounts to weakness. This is the weak- 
 ness of imaginative men." This reminds one of Macaulay's 
 character of Halifax. 
 
 f Mr. Maurice notes " one important quality of Boswell. 
 He never stumbled at contradictions. Johnson often said 
 things directly inconsistent with each other. Most thought- 
 ful men who speak what they mean, and feel strongly at any 
 given time, do." 
 
 M 2
 
 154 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 than a little, if lie thinks about himself at all." 
 And, on the other hand, he who dwells constantly 
 on the seamy side of his own work, needs to be 
 reminded that there is just as seamy a side to the 
 work of others, or he will think himself the worsfc 
 sempster in the world. In the phrase of the 
 great Oxonian [Jowett], who was for forty 
 years the greatest teacher in the University, 
 such a man is too much " under the dominion of 
 logic." Pattison was under that dominion ; and, 
 when logical power, mnemonic power, and ner- 
 vous weakness are combined as they were in 
 him, they indicate a person to whom, not indeed 
 pecca fortiter, but pdQe ma^ety would be wholesome 
 advice : 
 
 " amara lento 
 
 Temperet risu ; nihil est ab omni 
 Pai'te beatum." 
 
 Such a man as we have described could hardly 
 fail to be given to paradoxes ; and', in fact, as we 
 have already intimated, Pattison revelled in them. 
 Sometimes he was paradoxically sceptical. I once 
 asked him whether it is not certain that we owe 
 much to the Catholic Church for the wisdom with 
 which in the Middle Ages she insisted on the 
 celibacy of the priests, as the only means of 
 securing their independence of the barons. " We 
 always say so," was his characteristic rejoinder,
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 155 
 
 " but I don't know on what evidence." On one 
 occasion, his paradoxical temper found vent in an 
 anti-Liberal ebullition worthy of Carlyle : "I 
 should like to see the anniversary of the day on 
 which Cromwell closed the door of the House of 
 Commons kept as the greatest day of our calen- 
 dar." This, however, seems to have represented 
 a passing phase of his opinions ; for I am assured 
 that he sometimes defended constitutional govern- 
 ment as the least unsatisfactory of all forms of 
 government. I once discussed with him the sin- 
 gular superiority, in point of ability, of the Liberal 
 to the Conservative party in the House of Com- 
 mons. " Yes," he observed, " the best thing about 
 parliamentary government is that it tends to bring 
 the ablest men to the front." 
 
 I spoke to him about the last patriarch of 
 Benthamism, Mr. George Norman, who, like his 
 friend, Mr. Grote, inclined to Conservatism in 
 his old age. Mr. Norman once said to me, " I 
 only wish that Gladstone would leave us without 
 organic changes for the next forty years " (a sen- 
 timent which sounds very like " Apres moi et 
 mon fils le deluge ") : and, on another occasion, 
 he made the gloomy prediction : " Sooner or later, 
 there must be a struggle between those who have 
 got and those who want, and I don't see how it is 
 to be settled except by the sword. But I sup-*
 
 156 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 pose that those ivlio have got will win." " True," 
 said Pattison, when this augury of ill was re- 
 peated to him ; " in the end those who have got 
 will win. But, in the meantime, everything will 
 have been lost which had been gained during the 
 half -century before ; and, soon after the civil strife 
 is settled, it will be ready to break out again." 
 
 The halting attitude which he was wont to 
 assume when confronted by wide generalizations, 
 may be illustrated by his view of the great prin- 
 ciple that representation ought to be coextensive 
 with taxation. It is plain that, as every one, 
 directly or indirectly, pays taxes, the principle, 
 pressed to its extreme conclusions, would give 
 manhood and womanhood, if not what may be 
 termed childhood, suffrage to every inhabitant, 
 civilized or uncivilized, of our entire Indian and 
 Colonial empire ; and that it would lead to the 
 parcelling out of the empire into equal electoral 
 districts. It will doubtless be objected that the 
 franchise should not be given to incompetent per- 
 sons. But, in truth, this qualification is an all- 
 important one. That, in strict theory, the fran- 
 chise ought to be given to every taxpayer, but 
 that, in practice, it should be withheld from unfit 
 persons, and that the present holders of power are 
 to be judges of their unfitness, this is a principle 
 'to which the highest Tory need not demur.
 
 SECOLLECTTONS OF PATTISON. 157 
 
 After we had touched on these points, Pattison 
 said thoughtfully : "In fact, it comes to this, 
 the principle will not bear examination." Never- 
 theless, he doubtless thought that the old Whigs 
 acted wisely in assuming the correctness of this 
 exaggerated ideal as a basis for carrying the 
 Reform Bill, and that future reformers will have 
 to follow their example. Indeed, he approvingly 
 quoted an Aristotelian maxim to the effect that, 
 when we would obtain a little from mankind, it 
 is often needful to ask for a great deal. 
 
 He brought a like spirit to bear on the ques- 
 tion of nationality. " The age of patriotism," he 
 said, " is passing away, and the age of cosmopo- 
 litanism is taking its place." Irish Home Rule 
 was not to his liking ; and he regarded the cry 
 " Egypt for the Egyptians " as, if not a reductio 
 ad absurdum, at least a natural sequel of the cry 
 " Ireland for the Irish." On my asking whether 
 he was not of opinion that the Irish Land Bill 
 was opposed to the principles of political economy, 
 as those principles used to be commonly under- 
 stood, he interrupted me by saying, " Of course, 
 it is confiscation." Yet he was not prepared to 
 deny that, in the present state of public opinion, 
 the Bill was inevitable. It should be added that 
 he regretted the sympathy shown by some Oxford 
 Liberals for Lord Beaconfield's foreign policy?
 
 158 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 In a word, he was a Whig, and not a 
 Jingo. 
 
 It may be instructive to observe that between 
 Pattison and Charles Austin there were many 
 points of comparison and a few of contrast. The 
 chief difference between them was, that Pattison 
 had far less political and patriotic enthusiasm 
 than Austin had. Austin (as his brother told me), 
 shortly before he died, went to a public meeting 
 at St. James's Hall, where the band suddenly 
 struck up the Marseillaise. He had long since 
 laid aside his juvenile sympathy with the French 
 Revolution ; yet, on hearing the old familiar strain, 
 he rose from his seat (old and infirm as he was), 
 and the tears came to his eyes. Personally I 
 never saw him thus give way to his feelings ; but 
 I remember his saying that he pitied the man 
 whose spirit was not stirred by the cry for 
 deliverance in the Persce : 
 
 *O TratSes 'E\Xr)v<av, ire, 
 fXcvOepovre TrarptS', IXfvOepovre St 
 TraiSas, 
 
 Pattison, so far as I could judge, had hardly a 
 spark of this patriotic zeal. His want of interest 
 in the politics of the day is well shown by a habit 
 of his, which is reported to me at first hand. He 
 never turned to the newspapers till 9 p.m., and
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 159 
 
 then chiefly from a sense of duty.* Generally, 
 instead of reading them himself, he would lie 
 down on his sofa, take out his watch, and shut his 
 eyes, while his niece looked down the columns, and 
 gave him the shortest possible epitome of the 
 Times. If she got through it in less than twenty 
 minutes, she was commended. But he liked to 
 hear, at least, the heading of everything ; and, if 
 any event was afterwards mentioned which she 
 had overlooked, he would say reproachfully, "I 
 suppose that was not in our copy." 
 
 We once talked over the romantic visit paid to 
 Greece by the statesman whom the Greeks called 
 6 <j)i\e\\r)v Kal 7repi(j)T)iM)s -TXaoVrtoj/. In the conversa- 
 tion, a passage from the Acharnians was applied 
 to the visit 
 
 , e/?poVra, vveKvna TTJV 'EAAaSa. 
 
 Pattison seemed pleased with the quotation, and 
 begged to hear it again. In referring to the 
 modern Pericles (scholar, orator, reformer), he 
 acknowledged that he had little sympathy with 
 him ; adding, " It is strange that he is the living 
 representative of the Liberal cause, the cause of 
 
 * He told a friend that he did not like to have the 
 news "hot" he preferred giving it time to cool. According 
 to Goethe, yon may often with advantage delay reading 
 newspapers, as to-morrow's news may correct to-day's.
 
 160 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 wisdom and righteousness throughout all time." 
 On my asking whether some share of the credit 
 was not due to the Conservative party on the 
 ground that it cunctando restituit rem, he merely 
 answered, " Sir Stafford Northcote is the repre- 
 sentative of everything which distinguishes Eng- 
 lishmen from Americans." This damning with 
 faint praise may prepare my readers for his having 
 said, in his half-jesting way, " Though I am 
 always abusing the Liberals, I call myself a 
 Liberal, and I am one." He expressed his regret 
 at the death of the Prince Consort by saying that 
 it was as great a misfortune as a ten-years' 
 innings of the Conservative party. He was told 
 of a very lukewarm Liberal who said that, so far 
 as the society is concerned, he would rather belong 
 to the Carlton than to the Reform Club. " He is quite 
 right," said the Rector ; " Reformers are gener- 
 ally so rough and rude. Of course, the Whigs of 
 Holland House were exceptions. But, as a general 
 rule, my advice is to live with the Tories and to vote 
 ivith the Whigs." A cynic might add that those 
 who purpose following this advice, would be wise 
 in taking full advantage of the Ballot, and not 
 letting their High Tory friends suspect that they 
 vote against them. 
 
 His Liberalism did not incline him to what is 
 called the Birmingham School. In reference to
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 161 
 
 an eminent writer and editor who has become a 
 strong Radical, he said : " He has taken so much 
 pains about I'art d'ecrire, that he has not left 
 himself time to acquire I'art de vivre. The two 
 arts are very different, and the one often unfits 
 a man for the other." I asked him whether De 
 Tocqueville had not stated too broadly that the 
 advent of democracy was inevitable. " Since 
 he died," answered the Rector, " everything 
 seems to be fulfilling his predictions. Nothing 
 can stop the movement. The more you give the 
 people, the more they will want." I called his 
 attention to an assertion of Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 to the effect, that the time will come when one 
 man will not be suffered to enjoy, without working, 
 that which another man works for without enjoy- 
 ing ; and I asked him whether such a state of 
 public opinion would not exclude domestic ser- 
 vice, and, indeed, all social inequalities. " I fear 
 it must be so," he replied. " Everything seems to 
 be tending to wards Socialism. I hate it." I asked 
 why, if so great an evil is approaching, he and 
 those who think with him do not try to stop it. 
 " Look there," he said, pointing to the sea at 
 Biarritz. " Just as men can construct moles and 
 breakwaters against the waves, so individuals can, 
 in some slight degree, modify passing events. 
 They are as powerless against the tide of history,
 
 162 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 as they are against the tide of the ocean. No ; 
 what is to be, will be, in spite of you and me." 
 
 It may be well to insert the epitome of a con- 
 versation which sets forth the Eector's manner of 
 dealing with this subject, though it shows him in 
 an unusual attitude an attitude of defence. I 
 reminded him that in one of his writings he had 
 expressed a view (seemingly shared by Hallam) 
 that Englishmen were, on the whole, better off in 
 the reign of George II. than either before or 
 since. He told me that he had been taken to task 
 for this assertion, but he seemed prepared to 
 defend it, and also to predict that England would 
 go on declining. I insisted that, in discussing 
 the question, we must start with the assumption 
 that there is more good than evil in life. " I 
 don't see," he exclaimed, " why I should assume 
 anything of the sort ; I think I shall take up the 
 view of Schopenhauer." I recalled to him some of 
 the conclusions that may be drawn from that 
 wildly anti-social theory such conclusions, for 
 instance, as the following : Ought not these very 
 numerous persons who say that they would not, if 
 they could, live their lives over again in other 
 words, that, so far as their experience goes, the 
 good of life is a minus quantity, ought not these 
 Schopenhauerites to rejoice instead of sorrowing 
 at the sight or news of a shipwreck ? " Well," he
 
 BECOLLECTIOJfS OP PATTISON. 163 
 
 said, " suppose I grant- tliat life is a good, what 
 has that to say to human progress ? " " For con- 
 venience of figures," I answered, "let us com- 
 pare the present time with a time when the popu- 
 lation of England was one-third of what it now is, 
 and let us suppose that the average Englishman 
 was twice as happy as now even on this extreme 
 supposition, the aggregate of happiness in England 
 would be half as great again now as then ; English- 
 men, in tripling their numbers, would have gained 
 more collectively than they have lost individually." 
 " Yes, yes," he said, with amused impatience, 
 " but this is not what is generally meant by pro- 
 gress." I never could draw him further than this 
 on the optimistic path. Indeed, he seemed gene- 
 rally half to expect, as the most eminent of 
 French critics half expects,* that, when reformers 
 have done their perfect work, the world, destitute 
 of variety and originality, will become a sort of 
 universal China a lubberland of lotos-eaters. 
 Nor could he fail to see the inferences that might 
 be drawn from such a prognostication. The la- 
 mented Max Midler expressed the opinion that 
 the classical languages and literatures paid for 
 their temporary splendour by their premature 
 
 Scherer Etudes, Vol. Y. pp 316, 317 (on Kenan), and 
 Vol vi. p. 64 (on Carlyle).
 
 164 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 decay. If it is likewise true that all civilization 
 tends to decay, analogy might warrant the con- 
 jecture that patriotic and philanthropic zealots 
 are, so to say, making the world live its life too 
 fast, and hurrying it on to its senile decrepitude. 
 If so, it is not a mere counsel of imperfection fitted 
 for men of the world, a mere concession to the 
 hardness of their hearts, but the highest Utili- 
 tarian ideal, that is embodied in the suggestion 
 of the philosophical Fitzjaines Stephen, that 
 perhaps " the respectable man . . . who led an 
 easy life will turn out to have been right after all, 
 and enthusiastic believers of all creeds to have 
 been quite wrong." I enunciate this violent 
 paradox, not as expressing the settled convictions 
 of any one, but as furnishing a sample of a class 
 of doubts which, more or less consciously, present 
 themselves to men like Pattison, and effectually 
 deprive them, if not of the enthusiasm of humanity, 
 at least of what may be termed the enthusiasm of 
 progress. 
 
 We have before stated that Pattison was not, as 
 indeed no one can be, a consistent pessimist. By 
 urging on education and other reforms, he showed 
 that he was practically a believer in progress. 
 Yet, even as a believer in progress, he was per- 
 plexed by ethical puzzles which differ from the 
 pessimistic ones, but are hardly less embarrass-
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 165 
 
 ing. He was amused or troubled amused as the 
 only alternative of being troubled by such a-Tropicu 
 as the following : Would not an ideal philanthro- 
 pist allow himself only the minimum of relaxation 
 that might be necessary for the greatest efficiency 
 of his work ? Would he not sell his gold watch 
 and take third-class railway tickets, so as to have 
 more money to spare for the Anti-Mendicity 
 Society and the Cancer Hospital ? Ought not the 
 passionate lover, before putting the momentous 
 question, to satisfy himself, not merely that he 
 has the means to support a family, but also that 
 the population of the world stands in need of an 
 increase ? Ought we not, when ill, to forsake the 
 medical Philistine who would treat us simply with 
 a view to our own cure, and to resort to the 
 nobler practitioner who would experiment on us 
 for the good of posterity ? To this last question, 
 Pattison laughingly objected that the " neigh- 
 bour " whom we are commanded to love as our- 
 selves, cannot mean the unborn ; but he knew 
 full well that to laugh was not to solve the riddle. 
 He knew also that these difficulties are increased 
 (or nullified) by a further one, which may be re- 
 garded as a phase of pessimism, though it repre- 
 sents a novel aspect of that Protean creed. Mill 
 insists that the Utilitarian principle should be 
 applied, not to man only, but to the entire sentient
 
 166 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 universe ; and certainly it is less easy to show that 
 the principle ought not to be so extended, than 
 that, if so extended, it might involve a reductio ad 
 euthanasiam. May it not be argued that, from 
 the philozoic point of view, the existence of the 
 human race is altogether a mishap? Does the 
 Unconstitutional Monarchy of Man minister to 
 " the greatest happiness of the greatest number " 
 of sentient beings (including earwigs and animal- 
 cules) ? "I never could see," said the Rector, 
 when dealing seriously with such questions, " any 
 way of disposing of extreme cases, except by 
 taking the matter at the other end, and asking : 
 What reason can you allege for the obligation of 
 self-sacrifice ? " Perhaps it was in consequence 
 of this fundamental doubt that he disliked, as he 
 informed me, to label himself a Utilitarian. His 
 friend, Henry Smith, told me that he also demurred 
 to the designation, and for a similar reason. But, 
 after all, the question is one of words. Charles 
 Austin, the Utilitarian par excellence, sometimes 
 avowed a logical scepticism as complete as Patti- 
 son's ; more often, he expressed an opinion dif- 
 ferent in appearance, but substantially the same. 
 Goethe has observed that a universal scepticism 
 always takes refuge in a qualified belief. And 
 thus there was, in fact, a latent scepticism in a 
 remark which Austin once made : "I know of no
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 167 
 
 olbiomcier : so we must take the conventional 
 estimate of what leads to pleasure or pain."* In 
 other words, we must not be too logical, but must 
 acquiesce in the moral standard of the good men 
 and women among whom we live. This, I repeat, 
 was Pattison's view ; and, if I describe his ethical 
 creed as Utilitarianism tempered by Pyrrhonism, 
 I must be understood to mean no more than this. 
 After all, if he was wrong, he was kept in coun- 
 tenance by the virtuous, nay, over-scrupulous 
 poet who was remarkable for what Bagehot has 
 called a " pleasant cynicism," and who gave a 
 cynical turn even to such pathetic self-revelations 
 as DipsychuSj Amours de Voyage, and In the Great 
 Metropolis. Mr. Jowett, too, in his strictures on 
 Casuistry, adopts a view similar to that of the 
 best of the Questioned Spirits, the Spirit who cut 
 ethical knots by exclaiming, 
 
 " I know not, I will do my duty " ; 
 and whose note was at times saddened into 
 
 " I know not, I must do as other men are doing." 
 
 * A similar view is very strongly expressed by Scherer, in 
 Etudes, VI., p. 213 (on Sterne), and in the introduction to 
 A-miel's Journal, pp. Ixvi., Lxvii. (" La vie exige des menage- 
 
 ments, j'allais dire des ruses L'art de vivre, c'est de 
 
 se faire une raison, de souscrire aux compromis, de se preter 
 
 aux fictions La vie ne supporte pas d'etre soiree de 
 
 [tout] pres. C'est une croute mince sur laquelle il faut 
 
 N
 
 168 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 The application of this principle may be shown 
 by an example. " Pattison," writes one who knew 
 him well, " was very fond of fishing, but he had 
 grave misgivings as to the moral character of the 
 amusement. He confessed to these, but I do not 
 know that he allowed them to interfere with his 
 practice." Likewise, Austin doubted the morality 
 of field sports, and yet he preserved game for his 
 guests. It is probable that both of these philoso- 
 phers were acting against what may be termed 
 their logical conscience ; but they were not, in any 
 ordinary sense of the word, unconscientious. The 
 worst that can be said about them is, that they 
 were of the marble of which sages are made, but 
 not of the gold of which saints are made. Might 
 they not have contended that they were merely 
 conforming to a custom likely to be considered 
 barbarous by a remote posterity, and that, if we 
 would conform to no custom likely to be so re- 
 garded, we (in St. Paul's phrase) " must needs go 
 out of the world " ? * 
 
 It will now be understood what I meant when I 
 represented the Rector's cynicism as wholly unlike 
 the vulgar cynicism of less analytical minds. 
 
 marcher sans appuyer ; dormer du talon dedans, vous ferez 
 an trou oii vous disparaitrez.") 
 
 * My view is further illustrated in Safe Studies, pp. 230 
 234. See also p. 287, note.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 169 
 
 From the premise, Omnia exeunt in abswrdwm, he 
 drew the conclusion, Omnia vanitas. He feared 
 moral and religious enthusiasm, for he knew not 
 whither it might lead. In the " Memoirs " he 
 remarks quaintly very quaintly for a clergyman 
 that " Keligion is a good servant, but a bad 
 master," which is the exact equivalent of Gloethe's 
 famous aphorism : " Religion is not an end, but a 
 means, to lead us through the purest tranquillity 
 of mind to the highest culture." In like manner, 
 he felt that Imperat aut servit recti mens conscia 
 unique. He was (to use his own phrase) " haunted 
 by the ideal, and baffled by philosophical perplexi- 
 ties," haunted and baffled all the more painfully, 
 because others, far inferior to him in intellect, 
 rose, through being unweighted by those per- 
 plexities, to a somewhat Pharisaical ideal be- 
 cause they, not having tasted of the Tree of 
 Knowledge, ate and condemned him for not eating 
 of the Tree of Life. This being duly considered, 
 it will be found that his sceptical, caustic, and 
 jaunty sayings generally leave in the mouth no 
 taste save that of a tonic bitter. We may, there- 
 fore, without scruple, give a few more examples 
 of the cynicism which so belonged to him that one 
 almost missed it if ever he laid it aside. 
 
 We will begin with an aphorism of his which 
 may have been suggested by Mill's well-known 
 
 N2
 
 170 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 statement that in England the upper classes for 
 the most part do not lie, and that the lower 
 classes, though almost habitually liars, are gene- 
 rally ashamed of lying. " Englishmen," said 
 Pattison, " lie as much as foreigners ; but En- 
 glishmen have a dim consciousness that they are 
 lying, while foreigners believe all the while that 
 they are telling the truth." This preferring of 
 conscious guilt to guilt born of self-deceit, will at 
 once recall Aristotle's comparison between a/cpaa-la 
 and aKo\.ao-la, and perhaps is not wholly unlike 
 St. Paul's comparison between doing wrong things 
 and having pleasure in them that do them. I re- 
 member asking Charles Austin if he did not think 
 that too much fuss was made when a late Bishop 
 of Durham appointed a highly respectable son-in- 
 law to a good living. Being in a paradoxical vein, 
 he answered: "What I mind is, not the thing 
 that was done, but the sanctimonious way in 
 which it was done. If Ben Stanley had done 
 anything of the kind, he would have written in 
 big letters in his diary, This is a job, and that 
 would not have been half as bad. I should not 
 hate Torquemada so much if I did not know that 
 he was thoroughly convinced that he was doing 
 his duty." Carlyle has paid Frederic the equivocal 
 compliment that, although he often deceived others, 
 he never deceived himself.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 171 
 
 Pattison was coaching an undergraduate in the 
 Eth ics. The pupil, perplexed by Aristotle's rea- 
 soning, embarrassed his teacher by his importunate 
 desire to understand it. At last Pattison said 
 tartly: "Never mind understanding it, only get 
 it up." The pupil was naturally hurt by this 
 unpleasant rebuke; which, however, probably 
 meant that the time was short, and that, if the 
 pupil insisted on discussing first principles, 
 instead of merely learning the answers which 
 would satisfy the examiners, he might be disap- 
 pointed in his degree, as Pattison himself had 
 been. Nevertheless, Pattison's impatience may 
 have been partly due to want of sympathy with 
 the subject. When I knew him, and when he 
 wrote his Memoirs, he was an Aristotelian. But 
 he was originally a Platonist, and it was only by 
 slow degrees that the influence of Oxford wrought 
 the change in him. Many years ago, when 
 speaking of the late Dr. Jeune as a successful 
 man of the world whom he disliked, he said, 
 "I divide men into those who love Plato and 
 those who do not ; Jeune, I am certain, does not." 
 
 "When a new edition of Shakespeare came out, 
 he said to a friend, " Instead of bringing out 
 these old plays, why don't the editors write new 
 ones?" My informant understood him to mean 
 that the prevalent Shakespearolatry is a mere
 
 172 EECOLLEOTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 delusion. If he really held this opinion, he had 
 given it up when he wrote his Life of Milton, 
 and when I knew him. He told me, however, 
 that he thought that there is much exaggeration 
 in the popular judgment on the subject, and that 
 the great excellence of Shakespeare is to be 
 sought in the beautiful passages that abound in 
 his plays, rather than in his power of delineating 
 character. He took greater delight in reading 
 the Sonnets than the Plays ; he found fault with 
 Romeo and Juliet, and even The Tempest was not 
 one of his favourites. Every old man, says 
 Goethe, is a King Lear. It is characteristic of 
 Pattison that he regarded King Lear and Pere 
 Goriot as superior in tragic interest to any other 
 modern works of fiction. 
 
 He certainly used odd language about poets. 
 In an article on Tennyson, I had contrasted the 
 poet with more mature thinkers. Pattison wrote 
 to me: "The phrase, 'more mature thinkers,* 
 implies that Tennyson is a thinker at all. Is he 
 so ? Is he not a poet, and are not poets and 
 thinkers incompatibles ?" This can only have 
 meant that a poet, qua poet, is not a thinker, and 
 that it would go hardly even with the greatest 
 poets if we subjected their reasoning to the severe 
 test which we apply to the reasoning of philoso- 
 phers. Hamlet's soliloquy assuredly could not 
 bear that test.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 173 
 
 " The religion of uneducated [unphilosophical] 
 persons is the same everywhere, and has been the 
 same since the foundation of the world." This 
 oracular sentence was addressed by Pattison to a 
 brother clergyman who, though a Broad Church- 
 man, was rather shocked by it. Its meaning (so 
 far as it has any) probably resembles that of 
 Charles Austin's favourite quotation the line in 
 which the Tory and orthodox Dryden affirms that 
 " priests of all religions are the same." 
 
 One is sometimes startled, after knowing one 
 corner of a great man's mind well, to find how 
 many corners there are of which one knew nothing. 
 In my intercourse with Pattison, I never sus- 
 pected that he took an interest in otter-hunting 
 and horse-racing. The latter taste is well illus- 
 trated by the following anecdote, communicated 
 to me by one of his pupils : 
 
 " The year of the great match between Voltigeur and Flying 
 Dutchman, he suddenly asked me, which horse would win. 
 I answered calmly : ' It depends on the state of the ground ; 
 the Dutchman is the faster horse, but, if the ground is heavy, 
 Voltigeur will win.' He seemed delighted with such an 
 answer from a ' slow ' man, but the question followed, ' How 
 did you learn that ?' ' Oh, I talked it over with the coach- 
 man on the box as I came up,' and his countenance fell." 
 
 During his lifetime I never dreamt that his 
 proficiency in croquet was such that he aspired to
 
 174 EECOLLEOTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 become Champion of all England. But I knew 
 that he took an interest in the game. This came 
 out in an odd way. On my mentioning the name 
 of a lady who is a strong advocate of Women's 
 Rights, he exclaimed eagerly, " I know something 
 
 of Miss . She was playing at croquet, and 
 
 I was acting as head of the side. When it was 
 her turn, I told her not to try to go through the 
 hoop, but merely to place her ball in front of it. 
 She replied stiffly, ' Thank you, I would rather 
 play my own game.' She tried to go through the 
 hoop, missed it, and the game was lost. I said to 
 myself, That girl has an undisciplined mind." 
 
 One evening, the Rector, as he was wishing me 
 good-night, told me rather mysteriously that he 
 was going the next day to call on the Editor of 
 the Times (Mr. Chenery). I asked whether he 
 thought him an able man. Not being in a com- 
 municative mood, he answered, " Do you know 
 that you are putting a very hard question ? It is 
 just as if you asked me well whether I think 
 Jupiter clever," and he laughed as he hurried 
 away. 
 
 He liked novel reading, and it was a sort of 
 affectation with him to seem to like it a great 
 deal (as might perhaps have been inferred from 
 the last sentence in the Life of Milton). Being 
 asked whether a former pupil, who was making
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 175 
 
 his mark in the world, kept up his taste for litera- 
 ture, he answered, " Yes, he reads all the novels 
 that come out, and lie remembers them too." He 
 declared (how seriously I know not) that he pre- 
 ferred contemporary French literature (including 
 novels) to contemporary English literature. Nor 
 was this the only respect in which he was wont 
 to depreciate the intellectual atmosphere of 
 England. A friend writes : 
 
 " He spoke once somewhat bitterly of the treatment of 
 public men, and men of energy, in England. He said, ' If a 
 man was a country squire and did nothing, just lived an 
 easy, good-tempered sportsman's life, all men spoke well of 
 him, and he was popular, and life was made pleasant for him; 
 immediately a man showed energy and worked, he was 
 thwarted, calumny begun, and he became unpopular. It 
 was so with statesmen, and so with the Bishops. The 
 Bishops who did nothing were liked; Wilberforce (then of 
 Oxford, about 1849-50), who showed some energy, was 
 calumniated and hated by many, and anything was believed 
 against him.' " 
 
 Was Pattison also thinking of the contrast between 
 the French admiration for Richelieu and the 
 English abhorrence of Strafford ? 
 
 A trifling incident may show how strong was 
 his antipathy to the narrow classical instruction 
 which used to form the chief staple of our public 
 school education. I had been talking about my 
 own school-time at Harrow. He turned round
 
 176 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 and asked abruptly, " Did you learn anything 
 there?" I hesitated. "Answer me, Yes or No. 
 Can you recall a single thing worth remembering 
 that you learnt during all the years that you 
 spent there ? " I replied that, owing to my extreme 
 short sight and consequent slowness in looking 
 out words in a dictionary, I was not a good 
 sample of a Harrow boy, but that some of my 
 schoolfellows certainly learnt much. " Yes," he 
 said, doubtfully, " perhaps you may be right." 
 
 He upbraided me in a sort of semi-banter, 
 because in the Fortnightly Review I praised 
 Charles Austin for continuing, when failing health 
 drove him from the Bar, to do what active work 
 he could as Chairman of Quarter Sessions. " Do 
 you know, I feel quite hurt by your saying this ? 
 Can you seriously mean that the 109 Trpa/m/co? 
 is superior to the /3/09 OeupyTiKos? I can hardly 
 conceive anything more dreadful than for such a 
 man as Austin to have wasted his time over the 
 drudgery of Quarter Sessions." This is pitched 
 in the same key as the opinion of Goethe, quoted 
 both by Hayward and by Pattison, that " a purely 
 poetical subject is as superior to a political one, 
 as the pure everlasting truth of Nature is to party 
 spirit." 
 
 I called the Rector's attention to a very Patti- 
 sonian confession of Sainte-Beuve, who seemed
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 177 
 
 to limit his moral aspirations to " un compost de 
 bonnes habitudes, de bonnes manieres, d'honnetes 
 precedes, reposant d'ordinaire sur un fonds plus 
 ou moins genereux, sur une nature plus ou moins 
 bien nee ;" and I asked him whether the last two 
 words mean well constituted (in the sense which 
 Mr. Galton deems so important) or well-born (as 
 opposed to risen from the ranks). He answered 
 that the latter was the meaning; and, after men- 
 tioning a very distinguished self-made man (lately 
 deceased), he put the query, " Could anything 
 have turned him into a gentleman ?" 
 
 After he had delivered his lecture at Bedford 
 College in 1883, I suggested that he should send 
 it to a new and struggling periodical with which 
 I knew that he warmly sympathized. He answered 
 that the application had already been made by 
 the editor : "It was asking me to make him a 
 present of 25, to which my /zeyaXoTrpeVeta was not 
 equal. I know I ought to be content with the 
 approval of the Dean of St. Paul's, who wrote to 
 me, ' Nothing so true and so real has been said 
 for a long time ' ; but I also remember the text, 
 El ev ra> aSifcy fjLaf4/j,a>va frurrol OVK eyevecrde, TO a\T]6ivov 
 T/5 vpiv TTia-revcrei ;" He therefore intended to send 
 the revised lecture to a popular magazine, but his 
 intention seems to have been relinquished through 
 failing health. This sounds very mercenary ; but,
 
 178 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 if lie had not been a eavrbv rt/iwpov/ievo? and a 
 KaTijyopwv, he would have said, and with substantial 
 truth, that his reason for declining the request 
 was a desire to exert an influence over the greatest 
 possible number of readers. I do not blame him 
 for thus writing to me in the cynical dialect, as he 
 knew that I should translate his words into the 
 vernacular. But it is certainly unfortunate that 
 he often used the same dialect, a dialect very open 
 to misconstruction, in addressing persons almost 
 certain to misconstrue it. 
 
 A former pupil of Pattison, an orthodox divine, 
 who, though very well off, continues to take an 
 active part in education, told me that the Rector 
 once said to him, " You are the most ungrateful 
 man in the world. Providence has given you the 
 opportunity of being idle, and you won't take 
 advantage of it." I am sorry that I never asked 
 Pattison whether, in giving this most uncharac- 
 teristic advice, he was not thinking of Gibbon's 
 paradox that the vices of the clergy are less 
 dangerous than their virtues whether, in fact, 
 he was not resorting to an " economy of truth" 
 in the hope of inducing his very ecclesiastical 
 friend to leave education alone. If this was not 
 his meaning, the admonition must have been one 
 of those counsels of imperfection to which I have 
 alluded. It is simply impossible that the advice
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 179 
 
 to seek delights and shun laborious days would be 
 given by the censor who has denounced the entire 
 generation of middle-aged Oxford dons as stricken 
 with intellectual palsy. His state of mind was, 
 perhaps, similar to Kenan's : " Tout en etant fort 
 applique, je me demande sans cesse si ce ne sont 
 pas les gens fri voles qui ont raison." I call atten- 
 tion to this passage, as it is about as good an 
 example as could be given of that importunateness 
 of memory and reflection which is (so to say) the 
 presiding demon of analytical thought. 
 
 The gospel of idleness is merely a part of the 
 gospel of self-indulgence ; and the grain of salt 
 which is needed to make the former gospel pala- 
 table, or even tolerable, must now be added for 
 the seasoning of the latter. If the following say- 
 ing of Pattison, the most cynical that I shall quote, 
 can be more or less satisfactorily interpreted, all 
 his cynical sayings can be so interpreted. In 
 Safe Studies, p. 187, I enunciate the truism that 
 husband and wife should comfort and sustain one 
 another in struggling for the good of all men. 
 In page 116, I quote with disapproval a strange 
 assertion of Montaigne, " He who abandons his 
 own healthful and pleasant life to serve others, 
 takes, in my opinion, a course that is wrong and 
 unnatural." Concerning these contradictory 
 maxims Pattison wrote : " In page 187, will you
 
 J80 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 stand to the words ' for the good of all men ' ? 
 Do you not much rather incline to endorse Mon- 
 taigne's opinion, p. 116, a refreshing passage, to 
 which I wish I had the reference in the original?" 
 in this frank avowal we seem to hear an echo of 
 the " Unjust Voice " in the Clouds : 
 
 /cei'ai yap, a> />t,pa/aov, ev T( 
 "Avecmv, rySovtov $' ocroui/ /xeXXets ai 
 
 ITcuStoVj yWaiKOJV, KOTTci/3(OV } ctyan/, TTOTWV, 
 
 KamH Tt trot tyv aiov, TOVTWV lav (TTeprjOrjg 
 
 Neph. 10715. 
 
 But, on the other hand, Pattison was often on 
 the side of the Just Voice, sometimes in an ex- 
 treme degree. I remember pleading for that 
 modified eccentricity, that social independence, 
 which was so dear to the heart of Mill. Pattison, 
 himself not the most conventional of men,* sur- 
 prised me by objecting, " Eccentricity seems to 
 me a form of egoism, and all egoism ought to 
 be discouraged." This little sermon of his may 
 help us to draw the sting from his Apology for 
 Montaigne. Let us observe that in that Apology 
 he uses the word " refreshing," which shows that 
 
 * For example : after lie had only once met Miss Swan- 
 wick, he (having, I suppose, chanced to dine in the neigh- 
 bourhood) sent up his card one evening between 9 and 10, 
 .and asked if she could receive him. She was glad to avail 
 herself of the opportunity to renew their classical discussions, 
 but was amused at the hour chosen by her untimely guest.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF FATTISON. 181 
 
 he stood in need of refreshment that, in fact 
 he relished Montaigne's aphorism as an anodyne 
 under an oppressive sense of the social martyrdom 
 to which ethical logic might lead. In practice, 
 no doubt, he would have differed from Mill in 
 assigning the limits of self-sacrifice ; but, theore- 
 tically, his paradoxical words perhaps mean no 
 more than Mill would have expressed by saying 
 that, in our present low state of civilization, we 
 cannot ignore the necessity of loving ourselves 
 and those near to us better than those more re- 
 mote. They certainly mean no more than Pro- 
 fessor Bain (on The Study of Character) has 
 expressed by saying that disinterestedness is " an 
 exception to the only sane principle of conduct, 
 which is, for every being to look to its own 
 pleasures and pains a brilliant exception, it is 
 true, something of the splendide mendax, but 
 never to be made the rule without even suicidal 
 consequences." 
 
 We may sum up our view of the Rector's 
 cynicism by affirming that he 
 
 " laughed that any one should weep 
 In this disjointed world for one wrong more." 
 
 Or, more shortly, we may say of him, as of Be- 
 rn ocritus, that he laughed to prevent weeping. 
 Mr. Greg has quaintly remarked that hardly any
 
 182 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 one can afford to keep a conscience, that is, a 
 strictly logical one. He might have maintained 
 that no one can afford such a luxury. Clough, 
 whose poetry the Eector (strange to say) did not 
 appreciate, puts the case yet more strongly : 
 
 " We cannot act without assuming x, 
 And at the same time y, its contradictory ; 
 Ergo, to act."* 
 
 To a sensitive nature like Pattison's, these 
 Antinomies of the Practical Reason are at times 
 not a curious enigma, but a painful reality. A 
 person thus constituted can enter into Scherer's 
 experience that Nous cotoyons I'abime, gare au 
 vertige. He has learnt that the strivings of his 
 abnormal conscience towards its goal often need, 
 not stimulating, but checking; and his cynical 
 utterances, harsh and unnatural in their tone, are 
 naught but the grating sound of the drag which 
 is put on the wheel. 
 
 In referring to the father of all sceptics, whose 
 treatise by means of a felicitous forgery has made 
 its way into the Canon of Scripture, Renan oddly 
 remarks : " La bonte du sceptique est la plus solide 
 de toutes ; elle repose sur un sentiment profond 
 
 * See also the fifth stanza of The Higher Courage. In The 
 Latest Decalogue, the contrast is marked between ideal and 
 conventional morality : 
 
 " Thou shalt not covet, but tradition 
 Approves all forms of competition."
 
 EECOLLECT10NS OP PATTISON. 183 
 
 de la verite supreme, Nil ezpedit."* I pointed 
 out this sentence to Pattison, who seemed to 
 regard it with something of approval. But he 
 would doubtless have admitted that the word 
 bonte must be referred rather to private than to 
 public virtue must be taken to denote not 
 heroism, but kindliness. So interpreted, the 
 words may be applied to Pattison himself. 
 Charles Austin was fond of a saying of Voltaire to 
 the effect that, if one would fain work for man- 
 kind, one must avoid being disgusted with man- 
 kind, and must therefore forbear seeing too much 
 of ordinary men and women. It is perhaps safer 
 to assert that some who devote their time and 
 sympathy to public objects, and all who thirst 
 after a wide popularity, impair their capacity for 
 contracting close friendships for making a few 
 men and women feel that they take a personal 
 
 * Again, in L'Antechrist, p. 101, he describes Ecclesiastes 
 as a " livre charmant, le sen! livre aimable qui ait ete com- 
 pose par un Juif ;" and adds (p. 102), " Nous ne comprenons 
 pas le galant homme sans un peu de scepticisme ; nous 
 aimons que I'homme vertueux dise de temps a autre, Vertu, 
 tu n'es quun mot." He goes on to say that the power of 
 smiling at one's own work is " la qnalite essentielle d'une 
 personne distinguee," and maintains that this quality was 
 strikingly exemplified in Christ. I wish that some reader 
 would inform me what saying or sayings of Christ, Renan 
 could possibly have had in his mind when he made this 
 startling assertion. 
 
 O
 
 184 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 interest in them. Pattison achieved this, though 
 he laboured under a great drawback. Study 
 engrossed much of his time and interest; and, 
 perhaps on that account, he was at the close of 
 his life lacking in power of sympathy. May it 
 not have been because his small disposable fund 
 of time and sympathy was seldom drawn upon for 
 mankind in the aggregate, that he had any time 
 or sympathy to spare for the few women and 
 fewer men whom he really valued ? At any rate, 
 his misanthropy, or rather his apliilanthropy , 
 freed him from that last infirmity of noble re- 
 formers intolerance of human frailty. Other 
 causes might be mentioned; but the foregoing 
 may serve to explain how it was that the Rector 
 enjoyed the privilege a privilege rarely vouch- 
 safed to such a hard student of inspiring the 
 few whom he admitted to his friendship with a 
 larger measure of, not admiration merely, but 
 affection. It may not be amiss to record a curious 
 instance of the enthusiasm which he once excited 
 in an unexpected quarter. One of his old pupils 
 writes : " For part of my time, Pattison's scout 
 was also mine. He was the only honest, manly, 
 true-hearted man as a college scout that I ever 
 knew, and he almost adored Pattison." One fact 
 may serve to explain the scout's devotion to his 
 master. Pattison strongly disapproved of the 
 complete separation which, in English households
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 185 
 
 especially, subsists between masters and servants. 
 When sociably inclined, he made spasmodic at- 
 tempts to break through the barrier. 
 
 It was with some surprise that I learnt at 
 Biarritz how unknown Pattison was, even by 
 name, to most of the travelling English. There 
 was something at once instructive and humbling 
 in the question that I heard asked, " Do you 
 know that there is a brother of Sister Dora in the 
 hotel ?"- implying that he was doomed to Lethe, 
 and that no one but his sister could rescue him 
 even for a short space (Juturnam misero sue- 
 cur r ere fratri). Being* consulted by an under- 
 graduate as to what he should do in the way of 
 study, Pattison startled his questioner by answer- 
 ing (in effect), " Take care of what you are, and 
 what you do will take care of itself." The world 
 is happily determined to apply this principle to 
 Pattison, to judge him, not by what he did, but 
 by what he was, and not to let him be written 
 down even by himself. One of his kinsfolk, who 
 had ample means of judging, assures me that his 
 disappointment in 1851 " weighed upon his 
 memory " far more during his last illness than it 
 had done for many years before. He had, in 
 fact, lived to become a mere 
 
 ov yap 877 rdS' ap^alov 8cfia?. 
 
 o 2
 
 186 BECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 This may partly explain the defects of his Memoirs; 
 for it is, I think, just as well as generous to refer 
 in great measure to his morbid condition the de- 
 plorable domestic and academic disclosures, and the 
 more deplorable exaggerations about Conington 
 which deface that unfortunate volume.* 
 
 " If 't be so, 
 
 Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged, 
 His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy." 
 
 The Rector was never very misanthropical when 
 talking to me ; perhaps he thought misanthropy 
 would not be good for me. Shortly after we 
 parted at Biarritz, he wrote about me to a lady 
 friend (the inscription is bilingual, being on a 
 post-card) : " Pray present my compliments to 
 our philosophe errant, and prevail upon him to se 
 
 * So far from becoming a bigoted Puseyite after his "con- 
 version," Conington was to the last very tolerant. I asked 
 him (in or about 1857) what he thought 1 of a contemptuous 
 attack on Mr. Congreve which had recently appeared in the 
 Times. He replied that he liked far better an article in the 
 Saturday Review, which, while differing from the great Posi- 
 tivist, treated him with consideration. On another occasion, 
 one of his Liberal friends (some of his friends were strong 
 Liberals) informed him in my presence that I had ventured 
 to tell that Tory assembly, the Oxford Union, that we owed 
 a debt of gratitude to Carlyle for importing into England a 
 taste for German theology. Conington merely looked at me 
 and said, with an amused smile, " Really, really." I have 
 elsewhere recorded his great admiration for Mill.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 187 
 
 detendre un peu plus, if he wishes to keep the 
 machine in good order." It may have been with 
 a like feeling of goodwill that, knowing or fancy- 
 ing that I am wont to take too grave and sad a 
 view of human life, he put (so to speak) into his 
 conversation with me little of the spirit of Timon 
 and much of the spirit of Montaigne ; just as 
 Horace infused into Odes addressed to the com- 
 rades of his youth a mild Epicureanism as an 
 antidote to Republican zeal. 
 
 Thirteen years ago, I asked a distinguished 
 Oxonian to tell me whom he thought the foremost 
 man in the University. " Jowett," he replied, 
 " has a touch of genius, which Pattison has not ; 
 otherwise, taking him all round, Pattison is the 
 first man in Oxford." I would venture to add 
 that (still perhaps excepting Mr. Jowett) he was 
 the first clergyman of our time. Not, of course, 
 that his tastes were those of his clerical brethren. 
 A Scotch book called Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World, which has had a " mad success " with old 
 maids, clergymen, and homoeopathic doctors, was 
 sent to him, perhaps in order to convert him. 
 Not relishing its author's naive attempt to keep 
 the newest wine in cracked bottles, and also to 
 found on the wholesale immorality of natural 
 forces analogies such as might more consistently 
 be used to defend the religion of Juggernaut than
 
 188 EECOLI ACTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 the religion of Jesus, he said drily to a friend, 
 " I don't think this book will suit us," and con- 
 temptuously threw it aside.* In talking with 
 him one day, I expressed surprise at the almost 
 universal obscurantism of the Bishops. " It is 
 quite natural," he said. " After a man has been 
 consecrated ten years, he loses all sympathy with 
 the modern spirit. No ; there is one exception. 
 Bishop Fraser sometimes sits next me at 
 luncheon at the Athengeum,f and asks simple 
 questions, just like a little boy, about evolution 
 and other modern speculations. This Bishop 
 really tries to keep pace with the modern spirit ; 
 but he is the only one." He, however, emphati- 
 cally pronounced Dean Stanley to be a " thorough 
 Liberal," a circumstance which seemed to sur- 
 prise him on account of the Dean's imaginative 
 and perhaps unscientific cast of mind. Pattison's 
 summary condemnation of the Anglican Bishops 
 was probably meant to be taken more or less in 
 jest. But he was speaking quite seriously when 
 
 * A writer in the Contemporary Review for March passes a 
 yet severer judgment on the book; he stigmatizes its author's 
 theory as " neither science nor theology, but a bastard Cal- 
 vinism of which Scotland ought to be ashamed." Is legiti- 
 mate Calvinism much better ? 
 
 t The Rector said that the library of the Athenjeum " is 
 the most delightful place in the world especially on a Sun- 
 day morning."
 
 BECOLLECT10NS OF PATTISON. 189 
 
 he pronounced a very similar judgment on a far 
 more formidable body of ecclesiastics. I asked 
 him whether he did not expect that, at no distant 
 period, some wise Pope and Cardinals will (by a 
 now familiar device) seek to disburden Catholicism 
 of the belief in hell whether, in fact, they will 
 not demonstrate that the Popes who sanctioned 
 that unsavoury doctrine were not speaking ex 
 cathedra, or were misreported, or that the ques- 
 tion lies beyond the province of Papal Infalli- 
 bility; or, at any rate, that Nullum tempus oc- 
 currit Deo (see 2 Peter iii., 8), and that every 
 expedient which is used to show that the numerous 
 plain texts which seem to predict the immediate 
 end of the world do not really mean what they 
 seem to mean, will equally show that the texts 
 and other Catholic authorities which seem to pre- 
 dict the endlessness of hell need not mean what 
 they seem to mean.* " No," replied he ; " Catho- 
 licism will not change. The Cardinals have no 
 conception whatever of the intellectual changes 
 going on in the world. They often show ability 
 in diplomatic matters, but in nothing else." Yet, 
 though untainted by the ecclesiastical virus, he 
 was to the last a clergyman in the best sense. 
 
 * Tillotson (Z.c.), after quoting Jonah iii. 10, to prove that 
 God may be better than his word, raises the delicious ques- 
 tion : Would he also be better than his oath (Ps. xcv. 11) ?
 
 190 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 He rather surprised a friend by making the broad 
 statement that mankind will never be able to dis- 
 pense with religious observances. He was there- 
 upon reminded that "never" is a far-reaching 
 word, and was asked whether he did not think 
 that, at some very remote epoch, the temptations 
 to crime may be so much lessened, and public 
 opinion may be so much better organized, that 
 morality will be able to stand on its own bottom. 
 t( I accept the correction," he answered frankly; 
 " such a time may come ; but, if it ever is to come, 
 it is now so extremely distant that we and our 
 children will only get into trouble by taking it 
 into practical consideration." 
 
 My readers may remember Pattison's observa- 
 tion that the idea of Deity has now been " defe- 
 cated to a pure transparency."* This queer 
 metaphor will serve as an introduction to his 
 views on the two foundation-stones of Natural 
 Theology. I asked him whether he j thought that 
 either Mr. Stopford Brooke or Mr. Voysey is 
 likely to have much permanent influence. He 
 answered in the negative ; in the present state of 
 opinion, most of those whose temperament leads 
 them to reject what Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. 
 Voysey agree in rejecting, will not accept what 
 
 * Quoted by Mr. Harrison, Nineteenth Century, Yol. xv., 
 p. 496.
 
 KECOLLEOTIONS OF PATTISON. 191 
 
 they agree in accepting. In short, the stream of 
 tendency is towards Agnosticism. I asked what 
 he thought of the logical strength of Agnosticism; 
 and, by way of drawing him out, I stated as 
 forcibly as I could the argument which Mr. Grote 
 the " rigid Atheist," as he was called in Ben- 
 thamite circles would certainly have used 
 against it. Mr. Grote would have insisted that 
 there is not a tittle of evidence to show that 
 fairies do not exist, and yet that, as soon as it 
 became manifest that there is no evidence to show 
 that they do exist, the case went against them by 
 default; we do not merely doubt their existence, 
 we deny it. In like manner, Mr. Grote applied 
 to all spiritual beings the maxim that Entia non 
 sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, and he 
 would have contended that, just as Unitarianism 
 has been called a feather bed to catch a falling 
 Christian, even so Agnosticism is a feather bed to 
 catch a falling Theist.* When I laid this reason- 
 
 * An eminent jurist [Fitzjames Stephen], after reading this 
 paragraph, asked me how we could possibly deny the exist- 
 ence of fairies. I answered that by the word " fairies " I mean 
 spiritual beings able and willing to act in a specified manner 
 on human affairs. If junkets mysteriously disappear, their 
 owner unhesitatingly attributes the disappearance to thieves, 
 mice, or some other natural agency ; in other words, he 
 denies that there exists any " fairy Mab " able and willing 
 to steal junkets. In like manner, we may confidently deny 
 that there exists a Spiritual Being who is able and willing
 
 192 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 ing before Pattison, I found to my amazement 
 that it was quite unfamiliar to him. In answer 
 to it, he merely quoted with approval the words 
 of a Greek sage (I think Protagoras) : Oeol el eurlv 
 rj el fjir} elcrlv aSr)\ov. 
 
 An Oxford contemporary and friend of Patti- 
 son's, the late Sir Benjamin Brodie, used to 
 quote approvingly a very similar passage from 
 Faust : 
 
 " Wer darf ilm nennen ? 
 Und wer bekennen : 
 Ich glaub' ihn ? 
 Wer empfinden 
 Und sich unterwinden 
 Zu sagen : Ich glaub' ihn nicht ?" 
 
 It may serve to throw light on the Rector's 
 state of mind, and perhaps, too, on the theological 
 tendencies of the University, if I advert for a 
 moment to Brodie's opinions on these subjects. 
 He called himself an A. L. (Advanced Liberal). 
 Like Pattison, he was sceptical about miracles. 
 In rebuking a friend whom he deemed too cre- 
 dulous, he exclaimed, " You'll tell me next that 
 you believe that the serpent climbed up the tree 
 and began talking to Eve." Yet he told me that 
 Comte's Positive Philosophy seemed to " throw a 
 wet blanket '' over him ; and he rather startled 
 
 to modify Natural Laws, even with a view to the prevention 
 of sin and sorrow.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATT1SON. 193 
 
 me by expressing regret at the line taken by 
 Professor Tyndall in the Belfast Address. He 
 insisted that Berkeley's Theory has never been 
 refuted (though I doubt whether the Bishop 
 would have acknowledged him as a disciple). 
 His meaning probably was that, while believing 
 in the absolute uniformity of Natural Laws, he 
 yet thought (as Mr. Komanes thinks) that the 
 ultimate causa causarum, the basis of phenomena, 
 may be Spiritual and Intelligent. " The real 
 puzzle is," he used to say, " how anything comes 
 to exist," anything whatever, either Mind or 
 Matter. He once expressed a belief or hope 
 that the course of Nature is directed by " Infinite 
 Wisdom " ; and, on being asked how he recon- 
 ciled Infinite Wisdom with the existence of evil, 
 he replied that we do not quite know what the 
 word " infinite " means. These opinions of the 
 late Professor of Chemistry are more optimistic 
 than those commonly expressed by Pattison ; but 
 they may illustrate them by pointing to a modus 
 vivendi seemingly the only one between Theism 
 and modern science. Though I could not per- 
 suade either Brodie or Pattison to expound their 
 views fully, I should conjecture that they were 
 something of this sort : 
 
 " Nature, indeed, is profoundly immoral ; 
 with reckless impartiality, she gives her sun-
 
 194 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISOtf. 
 
 strokes to the evil and to the good, and causes 
 her floods to descend on the just and on the un- 
 just. Yet it is this same immoral agent which, 
 by yielding suitable conditions, has led to the 
 evolution of all our moral sentiments, and 
 may lead to the evolution of yet higher moral 
 sentiments among posterity. For aught we know, 
 those moral sentiments could not have been 
 evolved by any less painful process." 
 
 Yet, though Pattison refused to acquiesce in 
 Grote's dogmatic negation, he relinquished a belief 
 which was till lately regarded as a necessary adjunct 
 of Theism, but which some disciples of Dr. Martineau 
 are now prepared to give up. I reminded him of 
 the havoc which the modern belief in the absolute 
 uniformity of Natural Law is making with the 
 older belief, the belief in supernatural interven- 
 tion ; and I asked him whether he did not feel a 
 difficulty in reconciling the modern belief with 
 the belief in the greatest of all 4 miracles, the 
 Miracle of Creation.* " Yes," he answered- 
 thoughtfully, " I suppose that Pantheism is the 
 only form of Theism which can be reconciled with 
 Evolution." Pantheism is an ugly word, and also 
 a very vague one. I imagine that, in using it, 
 
 * In my Safe Studies, pp. 390, 391, this argument is stated 
 more fully, almost in the words in which it wa addressed 
 to the Rector.
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 195 
 
 Pattison merely meant to express a view identical 
 with Goethe's : 
 
 " Was -war' em Grott, der nnr von aussen stiesse, 
 Im Kreis das All am Finger lanfen liesse, 
 Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zn hegen, 
 So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, 
 Kie Seine Kraft, nie Seinen Geist vermisst." 
 
 As in regard to Theism, so in regard to the 
 belief in immortality, Pattison (like Renan) de- 
 clined to deduce the negative conclusion which 
 some might have drawn from his premisses. He 
 spoke indeed differently at different times. Some- 
 times his view seemed to be a depressing one. 
 For instance, he once startled me with the query, 
 " Shall I have my library in heaven ?" a question 
 in reply to which I certainly was unable to give 
 more definite information than he himself pos- 
 sessed, but which somehow conveyed the notion 
 that he regarded a posthumous library and a 
 posthumous life as equally improbable, or at any 
 rate that he would find the latter tedious without 
 the former. So, again, in a touching and mourn- 
 ful letter which he wrote to me three weeks 
 before he died, he said, " I am approached very 
 near now to the ' fabulae Manes et domus exilis 
 Plutonia.' ' And we learn with pain that, as his 
 end drew near, the shadows became yet darker. 

 
 196 RECOLLECTIONS OP PATTISON. 
 
 But he would assuredly have maintained that his 
 real views were those which he held in the fulness 
 of health, though even in health a man of his 
 temperament may have forebodings that the ghost 
 of his old belief will haunt him in the last scene, 
 
 " Pale and pitiful now, but terrible then to the dying " ; 
 
 in other words, that posthumous fears will over- 
 whelm him in the sad hour when the impressions 
 of childhood are often relatively the strongest, 
 and when the nerves are so weakened and the 
 thoughts are so uncontrolled that even the 
 mightiest of spiritual reformers are tempted to 
 utter the cry of loneliness and despair, " My God, 
 my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? "* When 
 Pattison was at his best, his anticipations in re- 
 
 * Suppose an angel (or devil) were to offer us the choice 
 between painless annihilation and the necessity of drawing 
 from a prophetic lottery containing 1000 tickets marked 
 heaven and one ticket marked hell : most o 4 us, I conceive, 
 would prefer the euthanasian alternative to the risk, the 
 extremely small risk, of everlasting torments. And may 
 not a dying philosopher, whose nerves have been unstrung by 
 illness, be excused if he shudders at the very barest possibility 
 that the belief in posthumous discomfort, a belief held by 
 some persons as honest and as learned as he is, may be well 
 founded, and if he is tempted to follow the example of the 
 numerous penitents, from Cephalus to Littre, who at the 
 eleventh hour 
 
 " advertunt animos ad religionem, . . . 
 Aeternas quoniam pcenas in morte timendum est " ?
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 197 
 
 gard to immortality were such as might be re- 
 solved into the formula, Aut caelum aut nihil ; 
 he refused to close the door on religious hope. 
 Goethe has well said that Man is always more 
 anthropomorphic than he thinks. It is equally 
 true indeed, it is another aspect of the same 
 truth that Man is always more optimistic than 
 he thinks. And perhaps it was in consequence of 
 an irrepressible aspiration that a passage of Ten- 
 nyson which exactly expressed Pattison's own 
 relation to those whom he had loved and lost, 
 suggested itself, when the news of his death came, 
 to one at least of his sorrowing friends : : 
 
 " It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, 
 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
 And see the great Achilles whom we knew." 
 
 In conclusion, we will turn from this cheerless 
 subject to one or two of the Hector's criticisms 
 on life, which show him at his best. To a friend 
 who complained that old age made our pleasures 
 less numerous and less vivid, he answered, in a 
 spirit worthy of Cato Major : " What we lose in 
 the number and vividness of our pleasures, we 
 gain in Sidvoia : we set a juster value on those 
 which remain to us." 
 
 When I saw Charles Austin for the last time, 
 he was less of a pessimist than I had ever known 
 him ; and likewise to Pattison, just before his
 
 198 KECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 fatal illness began, there was vouchsafed a sort 
 of Indian summer. He was more cheerful than 
 usual, and yet he had a presentiment that his days 
 were numbered. " I never," he said, " felt life 
 to be so precious as now when it is ebbing 
 away."* He was talking to one whom he had 
 every reason to love and value ; so he laid aside 
 reserve and took a retrospect of his career. En- 
 larging on a topic which cannot but recall the 
 choice of Solomon, he gave reasons for thinking 
 that, if he had coveted wealth or worldly distinc- 
 tion, he might have secured either or both. But 
 he had preferred the path of knowledge. " I am 
 glad," he concluded, " that I made this choice ; 
 and, if with my present experience I could live 
 my life over again, I would lay it out on the same 
 lines." Adapting his Master's words, he might 
 have said: Unum est necessarium. Optimam 
 partem elegi, quae non anferetur a me. 
 
 * He was thns confirming from personal experience a saving 
 of Goethe's which he used often to quote : " Life resembles 
 the Sibylline book ; it becomes dearer the less there remains 
 of it." Does not this explain the anomaly, that some per- 
 manent invalids say that they would willingly live their lives 
 over again, while many strong persons foolishly declare that 
 they would not ? He who knows that his life is precarious, 
 feels that it is priceless.
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 199 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 "They also serve who only stand and wait." MILTON. 
 
 IN reference to the observations made in this article as to 
 the interest taken by Pattison in Amiel's Journal Intime, M. 
 Scherer published in the Times (June 2, 1885) the following 
 letter addressed by Pattison to himself : 
 
 "Richmond, Yorkshire, July 9, 1883. 
 
 " Dear Sir, It is so long since we met that I have felt 
 some hesitation as to addressing you by letter, lest in the 
 crowd of new faces and figures your memory should fail to 
 recognize me. 
 
 " The occasion of my writing is the Journal of Amiel, of 
 which you are the editor. I wish to convey to you, Sir, the 
 thanks of one at least of the public for giving the light to 
 this precious record of a unique experience. I say unique, 
 but I can vouch that there is in existence at least one other 
 soul which has lived through the same struggles, mental and 
 moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic description of the 
 " volonte qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante a se fournir 
 a elle-meme des motifs " of the repugnance for all action 
 the soul petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this 
 I recognise myself ! 
 
 " ' Celui qui a dechiff re le secret de la vie finie, qui en a 
 lu le mot, est sorti du rnonde des vivants, il est mort de fait.' 
 
 " I can feel forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to 
 myself ! 
 
 '' It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my ego- 
 tism upon you that 1 have ventured upon addressing yon. 
 As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a psychological revela- 
 tion will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty to the 
 editor to assure him that there are persons in the world 
 whose souls respond, in the depths of their inmost nature, to 
 
 P
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in the pages of 
 these remarkable confessions. 
 
 " Believe me to be, dear Sir, yours faithfully, 
 
 " MARK PATTISON." 
 
 I am tempted to follow M. Scherer's example by inserting 
 a letter written by Pattison to me on receipt of my " Safe 
 Studies." Having regard to the too friendly comments with 
 which it concludes, it is with much hesitation that I now give 
 it to the world. But the whole letter seems to me instructive 
 and characteristic of its author, and, as I have already quoted 
 its most paradoxical and cynical expressions it is perhaps fair 
 to show from the context that Pattison at times used language 
 far removed from paradox and cynicism. 
 
 " Lincoln College, Oxford, January 13, 1 884. 
 
 " My dear Sir, The literary event of the week has been yonr 
 book a stirring event to a sick man almost confined to his sofa. 
 I have been reading, reading for three days, and have gone 
 through the whole (except the Engadine), much of it more 
 than once. The level of the collected papers stands so high, 
 that I now regret the volume was not published for your 
 credit that is, since, as a collector, an unpublished volume is 
 five times as precious to me. The material aspect of the 
 book is worthy, in binding, paper, and .type, of its author. 
 But how could you give in to the American plan of cutting 
 down the margin ; a plan which makes it impossible to 
 have a book bound, when its cloth cover shall be used up ? 
 
 " If I may venture on a general remark, I should say that 
 the papers, as a whole, show a union which is very uncom- 
 mon, of two opposite qualities, viz., a dominant interest in 
 speculation of a wide and human character, with vast re- 
 sources in the memory, of single facts, incidents, or mots, of 
 famous men. How, with your eyesight, you ever compassed 
 such a range of reading, as is here brought to bi-ar at al) 
 points of your argument, must be matter of wondor. Ifc
 
 EECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 20 j. 
 
 seems as if you could draw at pleasure upon all literature, 
 from the Classics down to Robert Montgomery and Swin- 
 burne. In this respect, I desiderate references in the foot- 
 notes to the sources, that one might have the great pleasure 
 of turning out the citations in their original place. But no 
 doubt it would have been difficult for you, where you are, 
 destitute of books, to have supplied these in many cases. 
 Had I been in health I could have revelled in a notice, 
 through many columns of the Academy ; but, in my present 
 condition, it is not possible for me to undertake any literary 
 work, even of the lightest kind. If I now venture upon 
 making some small notes upon single passages, you must not 
 suppose that I am setting up to correct you, but am only 
 desirous to show "with what attention I have read you. In 
 page 12, I feel a slight difficulty with the sentence which 
 begins with the words, ' As the confusion.' The two ' its ' 
 must be relative to the noun ' confusion ' ; then, what is the 
 opinion meant in the concluding words of the sentence ? 
 In page 27, I am brought up by Grote saying that the 
 ' Geocentric theory was once as firmly held as ' Grote surely 
 could not mean that firmly held is the smallest evidence of 
 truth ? The transmutation of metals and the powers of 
 witches were equally firmly held ; and we believe, or accept, 
 the Heliocentric theory on its own evidence, and because the 
 Geocentric theory has been proved* to be false, and not be- 
 
 In what sense " proved " ? In scientific matters, the very 
 few experts of each generation form their own judgment 
 indeed, but form it in accordance with the canons of evidence 
 which are deemed conclusive in that generation. The very 
 numerous inexperts, if they are sensible, follow the judgment 
 of the experts : they follow it, however, not as infallible, bat 
 as less likely to be wrong than the judgment of any one else. 
 This is true of the nineteenth century as well as of th 
 sixteenth. [L. A. T.]
 
 202 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 
 
 cause it is firmly and universally held. Tn page 187, will you 
 stand to the words of the bottom line, 'for the good of all 
 men ' ? Do you not much rather incline to endorse Mon- 
 taigne's opinion, quoted in page 116, a refreshing passage, 
 to which I wish I had the reference in the original ? In 
 page 194, would not Disraeli's mot have gained in effect by 
 giving it to him by name ? In page 172, Chevalier Ramsay 
 is injured by the prefix ' A certain ' ; he was a very well- 
 known man iL. his day, just before or contemporary with 
 Hume, and his books were the popular books of his day, 
 especially ' Les Voyages de Cyprus,' an imitation of Tele- 
 machus, which was translated into all the languages on the 
 Continent. He had an Oxford D.C.L. conferred upoa him, 
 but probably more in consideration of his Jacobitism he 
 was at one time tutor in the Pretender's family than his 
 literary repute. All that is related of Grote is most inter- 
 esting ; but I cannot forgive him for stigmatizing Paley as 
 disingenuous, one of the most honest clergymen of the period. 
 In page 209 the phrase ' more mature thinkers ' implies that 
 Tennyson is a thinker at all. Is he so ? Is he not a poet, 
 and are not poet and thinker incompatibles ? In page 165, 
 any young Curate or Priest who pronounced the Benediction 
 over the head of his Bishop would be committing a gross 
 breach of clerical etiquette. In page 180, did you notice 
 that you were speaking of the Quarterly Review as a con- 
 temporary, though I suppose you intended to discard in 
 what are now ' Studies ' the original form of article ? In 
 page 223, ' the saying of a great orator ' (who ?) of the House 
 of Lords that it is ' not made for perpetuity,' had already 
 appeared on page 175. 
 
 " By this time I must have tired your patience with my 
 trivial remarks, of which I hope you will take as little 
 notice as they deserve. I have had to explain to everyone, 
 to whom I have shown the book, the meaning of the title 
 ' Safe.' It is, I say, a vox praegnans, immo gravida, e cujus 
 inu proles altera, prodigiosa, periculosa, damnosa, exitura
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON. 203 
 
 tit! As for those people whose feet were cold because they 
 washed them, it is no doubt quite true, but then they 
 washed them in warm water ; had they bathed them every 
 morning in cold water, they would have been as warm as 
 the dirty man's. That is a melancholy sentence with which 
 your preface concludes. Though it is by no means my view 
 that a man should be always producing books, or putting his 
 thoughts in print, yet he cannot renounce a life which has 
 hitherto been one of moral and philosophical discussion, 
 without falling to a lower grade in the rational scale. For 
 my part, I cannot expect ever to see you again ; and I must 
 be content with here recording my experience that your 
 conversation was to me more stimulating than that of any 
 man I ever met. With kind regards, 
 
 " Believe me to be, 
 
 *' Sincerely yours, 
 
 " MARK PATTISON." 
 
 Even the far too friendly expression of opinion in the con- 
 cluding sentence has a biographical value as testifying to 
 its author's sympathetic kindliness a quality for which, 
 among men at least, he had little credit. In reply, I ven- 
 tured to point out what seemed to me one or two oversights. 
 For example, I explained that, when I spoke of a young 
 Curate pronouncing the Benediction in the presence of an 
 Archbishop, I was assuming the Archbishop not to be 
 taking any part in the service, but merely to be one of the 
 congregation. I touched also on private matters ; and at 
 last, with real emotion, I thanked Pattison for all his kind- 
 ness and bade him farewell 
 
 . . . spar gens fares et funcitts inani 
 Munere.
 
 APPENDIX IL 
 
 ME. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 (Reprinted from the "Journal of Education" for December, i8Sf t 
 with Additions and Sequel.)
 
 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 " There are only two true religions : one which worships, without 
 any symbol, the Holy that is within us and around us ; another which 
 represents it by the most beautiful of symbols. Every other religion 
 ia idolatry." GOETHE. 
 
 Mr. G-EORGE J. ROMANES, while engaged in col- 
 lecting materials for a forthcoming work on the 
 Evolution of Man, drew up and distributed ex- 
 tensively the following minute and searching 
 interrogations. It has seemed to me that my 
 friends, and possibly others, will be interested 
 in reading a full and candid confessio fidei on a 
 subject which is generally avoided the personal 
 view of death. 
 
 1. Do yon regard the prospect of your own death (A) with 
 indifference, (B) with dislike, (C) with dread, or (D) with 
 inexpressible horror ? 
 
 2. If you entertain any fear of death at all, is the cause 
 of it (A) prospect of bodily suffering only, (B) dread of the 
 unknown, (C) idea of loneliness and separation from, friends, 
 or (D), in addition to all or any of these, a peculiar horror 
 of an indescribable kind ? 
 
 3. Is the state of your belief with regard to a future life 
 that of (A) virtual conviction that there is a future life, 
 
 (B) suspended judgment inclining towards such belief, 
 
 (C) suspended judgment inclining against such belief, or 
 
 (D) virtual conviction that there is no such life ? 
 
 4,-*-Is your religious belief, if any, (A) of a vivid order, 
 
 Q
 
 208 MR. KOMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 or (B) without much practical influence on your life and 
 conduct ? 
 
 5. Is your temperament naturally of (A) a courageous, 
 or (B) of a timid order, as regards the prospect of bodily pain 
 or mental distress ? 
 
 6. More generally, do you regard your own disposition as 
 (A) strong, determined, and self-reliant ; (B) nervous, 
 shrinking, and despondent ; or (C) medium in this respect ? 
 
 7. Should you say that in your character the intellectual 
 or the emotional predominates ? Does your intellect incline 
 to abstract or concrete ways of thought ? Is it theoretical, 
 practical, or both ? Are your emotions of the tender or heroic 
 order, or both ? Are your tastes in any way artistic, and, if 
 so, in what way ? And with what strength ? 
 
 8. What is your age or occupation ? Can you trace any 
 change in your feelings with regard to death as having taken 
 place during the course of your life ? 
 
 9. If ever you have been in danger of death, what were 
 the circumstances, and what your feelings ? 
 
 10. Remarks. 
 
 Es sagen r s aller Orten 
 
 Alle Herzen unter dem himmlischen Tage, 
 Jedes in seiner Sprache ; 
 Warum nicht ich in der meinen ? FAUST. 
 
 As my experiences are very peculiar, and are 
 indicated in a veiled form in my writings, I hope 
 I may be excused if I make frequent reference to 
 those writings, and at the same time withdraw 
 the veil. This remark applies especially to my 
 Recollections of Pattison. In seeking to ex- 
 plain his cynicism, I have used myself as a key, 
 insomuch that the general reflections contained in
 
 ME. BOMANES'S CATECHISM. 209 
 
 the part between pages 25 and 69* give a rather 
 minute autobiography. There is, however, the 
 difference between his case and mine, that my 
 ideal has always been stoical rather than saintly, 
 and that, happily for me, no troubles have em- 
 bittered my life like those that embittered his. 
 
 1 and 2. When I am well, I regard the pros- 
 pect of being dead with feelings bordering on in- 
 difference. But I feel a great dread of the bodily 
 suffering of dying, and a still greater dread (as 
 my temperament is extremely nervous) of my 
 nerves becoming unstrung, and of my then being 
 unmanned by the prospect of the unknown 
 (Pattison, p. 78, especially footnote). The dread 
 of " loneliness and separation from friends" affects 
 me in regard to their death, not mine. As a child, 
 I used to let spiders and wasps crawl about me ; 
 but I always felt a repugnance to touching any 
 dead animal. 
 
 3. " II y a un esoterisme inevitable, pnisque la culture 
 critique, scientifique, philosophique n'est a la portee que d'une 
 minorite. La foi nouvelle devra trouver ses symboles. Pour 
 le moment, elle fait plut6taux amespieuses 1'effet profane. . . . 
 L'illusion n'est-elle pas indispensable ? n'est-ce pas le precede 
 providentiel de 1'education ? " AMIEL. 
 
 In dealing with this question, I propose to 
 
 * This corresponds to the part between pp. 143 and 187 
 in Stones of Stumbling, second edition. As many of my frtends 
 have my Pattison in the separate form, I shall hereafter refer 
 to it in that form. 
 
 Q2
 
 210 ME. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 inquire whether the conception of a future life is 
 not being gradually modified so as to suit the 
 needs of a scientific age. Two centuries ago, the 
 eminently devout author of Religio Medici felt a 
 difficulty in believing in the Judgment Day as 
 commonly understood. It must be owned that 
 this difficulty is increased by modern astronomy ; 
 for the apostolic belief in a sudden, immediate, and 
 supernatural Second Advent, to be followed by a 
 reign of the saints on earth, is hard to reconcile 
 with the scientific belief in the future extinction, 
 by a slow, natural process, of all life on our planet. 
 In short, at least one early Christian doctrine is 
 virtually assailed by Tennyson, in his regretful 
 lines : 
 
 " Many an ^Bon moulded earth, before her highest, man, 
 
 was born, 
 
 Many an ^Eon too may pass when earth is manless and 
 forlorn." 
 
 This change of opinion may explain my seeming 
 paradox when I say that I am sometimes em- 
 barrassed by the present meaning of the term 
 " future life." What are the conditions of that 
 life, and what sort of Ego is to survive ? One 
 scholar represents heaven as consisting 
 
 " Of sexless souls, ideal choirs, 
 * Unuttered voices, wordless strains." 
 
 Another (the author of The Kernel and the Husk)
 
 ME. BOMANES'S CATECHISM. 211 
 
 after premising that the three lowest senses (smell, 
 taste, and touch) are already banished from heaven, 
 insists that sight and hearing must be banished 
 too ; but that withal the capacity of loving will be 
 preserved. If we still retain our mental faculties, 
 is there not a fear that, after a few billions of 
 years, we shall grow tired of this very unearthly 
 and inconceivable mode of existence ? Or, again, 
 if death annihilates the senses, will it leave the 
 emotions unimpaired ? In other words, if 
 (as Dr. Maudsley, and even Professor Huxley, 
 maintain) mind is a " function of brain," is it 
 not as hard to suppose the individual mind 
 surviving the decomposition of the brain, as to 
 suppose, I will not say fire burning after the 
 exhaustion of its fuel, but the eyesight continuing 
 after the destruction of the optic nerve ? In 
 fact, is not modern scientific opinion tending 
 towards the conclusion of Lucretius that, even as 
 trees cannot live in the sky, nor fishes in the 
 fields, 
 
 " Sic animi natura nequit sine corpore oriri 
 Sola, neque a nervis et sanguine longiter esse " ? 
 
 It is perhaps needless to dwell on the difficulty of 
 conceding a soul to Bushmen, and denying one to 
 our semi-human ancestors, to gorillas, to. jelly 
 fish ; or on the difficulty of expecting that our
 
 212 ME. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 posthumous selves will be better able to remember 
 our present selves, than we are to remember our 
 antenatal selves. I will, however, remark that the 
 latter difficulty reaches further than at first sight 
 appears. According to the philosophy of Lucretius,* 
 it follows from the law of chances that the particles 
 of matter which now compose my body may, at 
 some inconceivably remote period, fall again into 
 shape, and constitute another living man ; but 
 this alter ego will not be a revival of my present 
 self, for he will not remember my present self. 
 That is to say, the power of recollection, the 
 repetentia nostri, is a necessary condition of per- 
 sonal identity. f Yet this necessary condition, this 
 condition which alone prevented the apostle of 
 annihilation from believing literally in the Resur- 
 
 * Lucretius III., 847861. 
 
 f Clough, in his fifth Sonnet, On the Thought of Death, 
 suggests that some dim hope might be drawn from a yet 
 stranger hypothesis the hypothesis apparently that, by the 
 operation of natural laws through countless ages, worlds will 
 be made and unmade, until, at last, Alter ab integro seclorum 
 nascitur ordo. According to this weird supposition, there 
 will haply be another England (an exact counterpart of the 
 present), another Victorian Jubilee, and another Mr. Romanes 
 perplexing our future namesakes with his Mortuary Cate- 
 chism ! Assuming the principles of Evolution, together with 
 infinite time and the subjection of volition to law, few mathe- 
 maticians would pronounce the recurrence of such a cycle to 
 be quite incredible ; but where will be the repetentia 
 nostri i
 
 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 213 
 
 rection of the Body, Tennyson, in The Two Voices, 
 is prepared to throw overboard : 
 
 " Some draught of Lethe might await 
 The slipping thro' from state to state." 
 
 Indeed, if I rightly interpret the preceding stanza, 
 
 " It may be that no life is found, 
 Which only to one engine bound 
 Falls off, but cycles always round" 
 
 the poet has for a moment found himself on a 
 standpoint not wholly unlike the Epicurean one. 
 A few examples will serve to show the sort of 
 influence that such considerations as the above 
 are exercising over Liberal Christians. An eminent 
 Broad Church clergyman, writing to me about The 
 Service of Man, says, " The religion of a people 
 stands in a definite relation to its culture," and 
 adds the remark (in which I heartily agree) that 
 it is generally safer to let science and criticism 
 work the needful changes in the national creed, 
 than to attempt an iconoclastic subversion. 
 Another Liberal divine tells me that he is little 
 troubled by the mistakes which seem to be con- 
 tained in the conversations reported in the Gospels; 
 for he looks forward to a future revelation which 
 will modify and complete Christianity, as Chris- 
 tianity has modified Judaism. Fourteen years 
 ago, when I was writing my article on Tennyson's 
 social philosophy, I talked the matter over with
 
 214 ME. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 Principal Tulloch. He called my attention to the 
 doubts expressed by the poet as to whether 
 Christianity is intended to be the ultimate phase 
 of religious belief. I asked whether he was re- 
 ferring to the mention of " the Christ that is to 
 be," and to the statement that " our little systems " 
 of religion are but " broken lights," and that " they 
 have their day and cease to be." He replied that, 
 besides these passages, there are others that 
 convey the same impression. My own comments 
 on this topic have been made elsewhere.* I will 
 now merely observe that, though 1 have no sym- 
 pathy with the critic who satirised the " demi- 
 semi- Christianity " of In Memoriam, I cannot but 
 feel that the difference is fundamental between 
 those who regard the value of religious dogmas as 
 absolute and permanent, and those who regard it 
 as merely relative and temporary. In fact, the 
 difference is closely connected with the gradual 
 transition (noticed by Pattison in his Assize 
 Sermon) from the subordination of morality to re- 
 ligion, to the subordination of religion to morality. 
 The less orthodox view has lately been upheld 
 with rare honesty and courage by Canon 
 Fremantle, who goes the length of maintaining 
 that statements about God and the soul are mostly 
 to be understood in a " literary," not a scientific 
 * Safe Studies, pp. 204^210.
 
 MR. BOMANESV CATECHISM. 215 
 
 or even a " quasi-scientific " sense. To those 
 who censure such a symbolical exegesis as un- 
 candid, I answer that the beginning of Genesis 
 is commonly explained in a manner which, fifty 
 years ago, would have been thought blasphemous ; 
 and all that enlightened Conservatives desire is 
 that the same mode of interpretation which 
 clergyman after clergyman applies to the first two 
 chapters of the Bible should also be applied to the 
 last two that a spiritual, as opposed to a 
 materialistic, conception should be extended from 
 the past Paradise of Adam to the future Paradise 
 of God. Let me add that such writers as Arthur 
 Stanley, when speaking of the beatitude of heaven, 
 decline to make any confident assertions about 
 it, save that it involves Rest in God and post- 
 humous influence for good. I lately asked a 
 very learned and not unorthodox clergyman, 
 whether this tendency to throw posthumous per- 
 sonality into the background, and to regard heaven 
 as union with God, did not seem to him a striking 
 peculiarity of our time. " Substantially," he re- 
 plied, " this has always been the creed of Christian 
 mystics, whether Catholic or Protestant."* The 
 assertion surprised me; but perhaps, when one 
 reflects on it, it throws light on the state of mind 
 
 * Compare the poem called A Sea-change (Safe Studies, 
 p. 413).
 
 216 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 winch. Christian self-abnegation, carried to its 
 furthest point, tends to produce. " The end and 
 aim of our life," says Kingsley, "is not happiness, 
 but goodness. If goodness comes first, then 
 happiness may come after ; but, if not, something 
 better than happiness may come, even blessed- 
 ness." The remark clearly applies to the com- 
 parative value of happiness and blessedness, or 
 rather of enjoyment and blessedness (these two 
 being parts or modes of happiness), beyond the 
 grave. Faciam voluntatem tuam, sicut in terra, 
 et in caelo, might serve as a counterpart to the 
 most comprehensive petition in the Lord's Prayer, 
 and ought to satisfy, and is beginning to satisfy, 
 our spiritual needs. Hence it appears that, as 
 culture advances, our conception of heaven slowly 
 changes its character ; the notion of enjoyment 
 fades into the notion of blessedness. For while, 
 on the one hand, biology obscures our belief in 
 posthumous enjoyment, spiritual religion, on the 
 other hand, sets little value on enjoyment and 
 great value on blessedness. Thus it is in such 
 ideals as the blessedness of self-devotion, and as 
 the Present Heaven of the Fourth Gospel, that a 
 bond of sympathy is found between religious 
 natures otherwise the most opposed.* Amem te 
 
 * Tauler, the fourteenth century mystic, after quoting the 
 remarkable saying of Jesus (a saying all the more remarkable
 
 MK. ROMANES'S CATECHISM 217 
 
 plus quamme, neque me nisi propter te, are words 
 which express the aspirations of the greatest of 
 Christian mystics; they also express the aspirations 
 of Comte, whose favourite motto they were. " Ye 
 are dead," says St. Paul, " and your life is hid with 
 Christ in God." In the same spirit, a Neo-Christian 
 might apostrophize the wise and good who have 
 passed away : "Ye are not dead, for your life is hid 
 with Christ in God." To each of them he might 
 apply (in a spiritual sense) the words addressed by 
 Beatrice to Dante : 
 
 " Sarai meco senza fine cive 
 Di quella Roma onde Cristo e Romano." 
 
 The most extreme view of the ultimate tendency 
 of spiritual Christianity is embodied in a passage 
 by James Hinton (a spiritual Christian if ever 
 there was one) : 
 
 " Surely the desire of personal immortality is not truly a 
 noble or worthy attitude of humanity. At least, it is not the 
 highest. Granted it \vas an advance in humanity to attain 
 to it, but may it not be a greater to give it up ? Man rose 
 to it from less, from indifference ; he should give it up for 
 more, for self-sacrifice." 
 
 Personally, in spite of logic, and as an aid to my 
 spiritual life, I try to maintain a beatific vision 
 
 because reported by a Synoptist), " The kingdom of God is 
 within you," asks : " If, now, the being and essence of our 
 soul is in heaven, and God is in it, what is to blame that we 
 have not this heaven here, and do not know God ? "
 
 218 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 which from the nature of the case is such that, if 
 it be an illusion, I shall never be undeceived. Let 
 me add that, in thus walking by faith., I am follow- 
 ing the example of Clough, who, while admitting 
 that " wishes vain appear," yet, on the strength of 
 those wishes, determines to believe in a vague 
 something, a something in which posthumous 
 usefulness is seemingly the chief ingredient : 
 
 " Ah yet, when all is thought and said, 
 The heart still overrules the head ; 
 Still what we hope we must believe, 
 And what is given us, receive ; 
 
 Must still believe, for still we hope 
 That, in a world of larger scope, 
 What here is faithfully begun 
 Will be completed, not undone." 
 
 It is, I suppose, in this limited sense the sense of 
 being not logical overmuch nor overwise that 
 Goethe understands his sweeping proposition, 
 
 Wen Gott betriigt, ist wohl betrogen. 
 
 Elsewhere he says that " Only what is fruitful is 
 true"; * that the art of living consists in "turning 
 the problems of life into postulates " ; and that 
 " Man must in some sort cling to the belief that 
 the unknowable is knowable, otherwise specu- 
 
 * This and some other sayings of Goethe recall Keats's 
 lines : 
 
 " .Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
 
 ME. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 219 
 
 lation would cease ; " or rather, there would 
 be no modus vivendi for philosophers with the 
 vast majority of good men and women. (Patti- 
 son, p. 79.) 
 
 4. " On ne brise pas avec le passe sans y laisser le meilleur 
 de soi. . . . Le mythe et le rite sont 1'alliage a la fois des- 
 nonorant et indispensable, sans lequel le metal serait trop 
 pur pour servir aux usages des homines." SCHERER. 
 
 I call myself a philosophical Anglican. Stan- 
 ley's very remarkable exposition of the Apostle's 
 Creed (in Christian Institutions) has hardly 
 a sentence which I should wish to see altered. 
 Also, I have long since been so far a Hobbist as to 
 think that most men, and (perhaps) all women, need 
 religious observances (Pattison, p. 72), and that a 
 philosopher's creed consists, not of the extreme 
 conclusions to which his principles might lead, 
 but of the sentiments and symbols with which he 
 clothes his aspirations after the ideal, and which 
 connect him with the poetry of the past and the 
 present modes of thought of the religious world. 
 "Entre tous ceux qui croient a 1'ideal," says 
 Renan, " quelles que soient leurs apparentes 
 divergences, il n'y a qu'une difference dans la 
 maniere de parler." Our notions about man's 
 origin and destiny are merely symbolical and 
 relative ; and, in dealing with such questions, I, 
 as an Englishman, choose Liberal Anglicanism as
 
 220 ME. ROMANES'S CATEUHISM. 
 
 the most helpful and edifying of the seemingly 
 conflicting, but really harmonious, answers that 
 are given by the good men and women in the many 
 mansions of our Father's house. This very 
 spiritualised religion has no very direct or con- 
 scious influence on my life; but, of course, the 
 fact of belonging to a Christian community has 
 a great indirect influence. 
 
 5. I am very sensitive to pain. In my youth 
 I suffered much from nervous weakness due 
 wholly to physical causes, and have always been 
 obliged to take great care of my health. 
 
 6. Owing to my nervous temperament, I 
 am unreasonably pained if my friends disapprove 
 of my opinions and conduct. But, being aware 
 of this weakness, I struggle against it. Friends 
 have sometimes said that I am one of the 
 most cheerful persons they ever met. They 
 saw me, I suspect, under favourable circum- 
 stances. 
 
 7. My mind is abnormally analytical. It in- 
 clines to abstract ways of thought. It is strictly 
 theoretical; but the consciousness of this one- 
 sidedness throws me on my guard and makes me 
 willing to take advice, and I thus become to a 
 certain extent practical. Doctors say that I am the
 
 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 221 
 
 best patient they ever had. My temperament is 
 not heroic, but inclined to a stoical love of justice. 
 I am " the one in a thousand " who, according to 
 Bagehot (Pattison, p. 32), takes the world too 
 much au serieux; and, indeed, the pages 32 36 
 in Pattison are strictly autobiographical. In 
 pages 46 to 51, I have tried to show the steps 
 by which I have come, if not to a mild form of 
 Pyrrhonism, at least to ethical views closely allied 
 to those of Edmond Scherer (quoted in Pattison, 
 p. 49, foot-note). When unwell, I am troubled 
 rather than amused by such ethical puzzles as 
 those mentioned in pp. 47, 48, and by others 
 equally grave (Stones of Stumbling, p. 20). In con- 
 sequence of this abnormal tendency, or rather of 
 the need of struggling against it, I am by degrees 
 caring less and less for Juvenal, and even 
 Lucretius, and more and more for Horace. And, 
 if I am sometimes afraid of becoming too partial 
 to works written more or less in a Horatian spirit 
 such works as Erasmus's Laus Stultitiae I 
 console myself with the thought that, although 
 Luther was a far greater man than Erasmus, a 
 nation with one Luther and fifty Erasmuses would 
 be in less imminent danger of a revolution than a 
 nation with one Erasmus and fifty Luthers. 
 
 I feel very strong sympathies, though only with 
 comparatively few persons. I am much affected
 
 222 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 by the painful in fiction. I have vowed never 
 again to see " Othello " acted, and I much dislike 
 even reading it. I feel each year an increasing 
 need of the sympathy of good women (Pattison, 
 pp. 16, 17).* I do not know one tune from another, 
 and (perhaps owing to my eyesight) care little 
 about pictures. But I am fond of poetry, and 
 I am especially fascinated by the music of Shelley. 
 My ear is fastidious about the cadence of sentences 
 in prose. 
 
 8. Forty -nine. --Anthropology, including 
 Gynaecology (Pattison, p. 22). As a writer, I am 
 thoroughly handicapped by the causes mentioned 
 in the preface to Safe Studies. I am thus 
 constrained to concentrate my efforts on an end 
 which seems to me too limited and self -regarding, 
 but which Goethe extols as the sum and sub- 
 stance of all wisdom : 
 
 Die Welt zu kennen tmd sie nicht verachten. 
 
 Pattison called me a " philosophe errant " (p. 68, 
 to end of paragraph). In my Calvinistic boyhood, 
 
 * A traveller in Egypt tells me that, among the random 
 inscriptions with which tourists have defaced the monuments 
 of antiquity, only one struck him as at all witty. A French- 
 man had scrawled on one of the tombs of the kings, at 
 Thebes, " La vie est un desert" ; to which was added, by a 
 later hand, " et la femme le chanieau."
 
 MB. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 223 
 
 though I was thoroughly in earnest, I had not 
 much spiritual enthusiasm. Still less was I 
 animated by the hope of what may be called the 
 honours and rewards of other-worldliness a 
 patent of posthumous nobility and a pension from 
 the funds of eternity. On the contrary, as I 
 vainly endeavoured to love the Author of Hell, 
 I expected to become one of its inmates (" they 
 that love Thee not Must burn eternally "). I 
 am less afraid of death now than I then was ! 
 (Stones of Stumbling, pp. 39, 40.) 
 
 9. I never have been in serious danger. 
 Though sometimes very unwell, I have not spent 
 a day indoors for twenty-six years. 
 
 10. " Le ciel n'a rien de local, et n'est antre chose que 
 1'nnion avec Dieu et avec tons lea etres bons et grands." 
 RENAN. 
 
 It is instructive to observe that Reuss and 
 others give to the word " materialism " a meaning 
 the opposite of its popular one ; they use the word 
 to denote belief in a material kingdom of God. 
 Even Stanley has employed the word in this sense. 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold rarely, if ever, employs it in 
 any other sense ; he even stretches the term 
 " materialism of the Apocalypse" so as seemingly 
 to make it cover the belief in any conceivable 
 form of posthumous joy or sorrow. Possibly this
 
 224 ME. BOMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 novel use of the term may be connected with 
 the fact that some philosophers, and even 
 divines,* are unable to accept the popular doetrine 
 in its literal sense ; and, I will add, they are not un- 
 able only, but unwilling. For such unwillingness 
 two reasons may be given. In Safe Studies (bottom 
 of p. 389) I have hinted at the difficulty of believing 
 that the Universe will ever be exempt from 
 evil. More recently, Mr. Froude (in Oceand) has 
 expressed a similar fear : " If the Devil had been 
 capable of redemption, he wouldhavebeen redeemed 
 before he had been allowed to do so much mischief." 
 Now, if Evil is to last as long as Good, the popular 
 doctrine becomes simply appalling. Bee-fanciers 
 use a net-work of wire with holes just big enough 
 to let the working bees into the hive, and just 
 small enough to exclude the drones. It is very 
 hard to devise a philosophical net-work which will 
 let in even a minimum of posthumous hope, and 
 yet keep out even a minimum' of posthumous 
 
 * See the extremely spiritualised account of Christ's con- 
 tinual presence in the Church, in Stanley's Christian Insti- 
 tutions, pp. 37, 38. Stanley insists that one's best and 
 inmost self is not the mere conscious Ego, and confirms his 
 opinion by the weighty text, " The flesh profiteth nothing, 
 the words that I speak uiito you they are spirit and they are 
 life."
 
 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 225 
 
 fear ;* and even a very small fear of " boundless 
 worse " is enough to poison a very ample hope of 
 " boundless better " (Partisan, p. 78, foot-note). 
 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen hints that God may 
 be a Being of limited benevolence, or at least of 
 limited philanthropy. From this unpleasing 
 hypothesis might it not follow that we may, here 
 and hereafter, be made to suffer for the welfare of 
 other beings, higher and more numerous than we 
 are; and that this welfare may be of a kind 
 which we can no more fathom than a guinea-pig 
 
 * The doubt as to whether Ahriman will be less 
 
 able to hold his own in the next world than in 
 
 this, is expressed by Clough in the melancholy 
 lines : 
 
 " Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the 
 
 battle, 
 Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes 
 
 with them ? 
 Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous 
 
 pinions of angels 
 Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their 
 
 labour 
 And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and 
 
 burning moisture 
 Wiped from the generous eyes ? Or do they linger, 
 
 unhappy, 
 Pining, and haunting the grave of their by-gone hope and 
 
 endeavour ? 
 Whither depart the brave ? God knows ; 1 certainly do 
 
 not." 
 
 R 2
 
 226 MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 
 
 can appreciate the far-sighted beneficence that 
 dooms him to vivisection ? Or, to put a less 
 extreme case, even the sanguine Goethe dreaded 
 the prospect of perpetual ennui. After all, is not 
 the Nox est perpetua una dormienda of Catullus 
 less dispiriting than the Pallidula, rigida, nudula 
 of Hadrian ? 
 
 And this brings me to my second point. 
 The spiritual conception of heaven, as neither 
 more nor less than union with Grod, -is not 
 really depressing if taken in its entirety. The 
 same may be said even of the negations of 
 Lucretius, as he himself has well pointed out. 
 But, practically, it is hard to think of the loss of 
 personal consciousness without thinking also that 
 we shall be personally conscious of the loss. Even 
 Pattison spoke with dismay of being deprived of 
 his library by death, as if he expected after death 
 to feel the deprivation. An aged kinswoman of 
 mine expressed dread of being buried in a damp 
 family- vault ; whereupon a privileged butler broke 
 in with the remark, " Indeed, ma'am, you needn't 
 be the least afraid ; I was down there myself the 
 other day, and it's quite dry and comfortable." 
 The old servant was right. If his mistress was 
 afraid of posthumous rheumatism, it was wise to 
 tell her that her resting-place would be dry. The 
 same principle holds in regard to more serious con-
 
 MB. ROMANES'S CATECHISM. 227 
 
 solations * Unconscious or impersonal blessed- 
 ness, if presented to the imagination without being 
 foreshortened, is seen wholly out of perspective ; it 
 seems like consciousness of unconsciousness, or 
 rather of impotence a sort of perpetual night- 
 mare. And thus, if it is impossible to help trying 
 to conceive the inconceivable, the least misleading 
 course may be to think and speak in metaphor, so 
 that our heaven may be defined a state of blessed- 
 ness symbolised as a place of enjoyment. 
 
 * See Matthew Arnold's Sonnet on The East End, which 
 concludes with the line : 
 
 " Thon mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." 
 
 Perhaps it is in a sense not wholly unlike this that Renan 
 makes the broad, if not cynical, assertion: " La religion n'est 
 pas senlement philosophic, elle est art ; il ne faut done pas lui 
 demander d'etre tropraisonnable." Does he mean that religion 
 is no more than a politic gilding of morality and a poetic 
 gilding of the tomb ? I am tempted to add the name of another 
 very able writer who seems to value the hope of a future life 
 chiefly as giving a higher pulsation to the present life. It 
 would be an exaggeration, but a pardonable one, to extract 
 from Marius the Epicurean the moral, "Let us dream of 
 immortality, for to-morrow we die."
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLIdSMi 
 
 A SEQUEL. 
 
 " TJngefalir sagt das der Pfarrer auch, 
 Nur mit ein bischen andern Worten." 
 
 Faust. 
 
 AFTER I had replied to Mr. Romanes's Catechism, 
 my attention was called to Mr. Mivart's most 
 interesting and surprising article on The Catholic 
 Church and Biblical Criticism,* an article which 
 may serve to explain the Neochristian tone of my 
 answers. To my amazement, I find that portions 
 of those answers, and the chief arguments in my 
 Divine Economy of Truth, are in accordance with 
 the latest phase of Catholic orthodoxy. Mr. 
 Mivart courageously exhorts his fellow- Catholics 
 to lay aside all dogmatic bias in dealing with the 
 results of Biblical criticism. He does not, indeed, 
 commit himself to all the conclusions of such 
 writers as Colenso and Kuenen ; but he quotes 
 those conclusions with sympathy, and thinks 
 that " there can be little doubt that, in the main, 
 
 * Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.
 
 NEOCHRISTIAN1TY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 229 
 
 they represent the truth." Among the opinions 
 that he thus quotes are the following : " The 
 account, as we read it, of the deliverance from 
 the Egyptian captivity is unhistorical, although 
 it is not doubted that Moses existed and did lead 
 the Israelites from Egypt. But it is not deemed 
 probable that a line of the Bible was written by 
 him," (what then, I would ask, becomes of the 
 popular view of the Decalogue ?) " and the whole 
 Levitical legislation is regarded as an invention 
 which dates from the Babylonian Captivity and 
 times more recent." The year of Jubilee " was 
 utterly unpractical, and was never practised." 
 The first chapter of Genesis was written after 
 the Captivity. The story of Jacob wrestling with 
 God is " gross mythology " (is not, I ask, the 
 belief in eternal punishment yet grosser?). "When 
 I was a boy, at Oscott, I was taught that the 
 book of Jonah was only a parable." " It is thought 
 to be in the highest degree unlikely that Abraham, 
 Isaac, or Jacob ever really existed, and no passage 
 of the history of any one of them is of the 
 slightest historical value in the old sense ; though, 
 of course, every old writing has historical value 
 in some sense. Similarly, Daniel, dating, as it 
 has long been concluded to do, only from about 
 B.C. 164, is, of course, thought quite untrustworthy, 
 and little more than a mass of fiction." " "Who,
 
 230 NEOCHEISTIANITT AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 
 
 in the sixteenth century, would have deemed it 
 possible for the Church to allow that her doctrines 
 concerning the Biblical narrative of the creation 
 of Adam, and the miraculous formation of Eve 
 from his rib, could accord with a belief that the 
 ribs of both Adam and Eve were formed by 
 natural generation in the womb of some non- 
 human animal ? Yet we have lived to witness 
 this event." " If any Scripture narrative is de- 
 tailed and distinct, it is that of the Deluge, which 
 is also referred to in the New Testament. Never- 
 theless, no one now, of any account, even pro- 
 fesses to believe the truth of the narrative we 
 read, although it may be based on a tradition of 
 some considerable local inundation." The author 
 adds, in a foot-note : " I well recollect dining at 
 a priest's house (in or about 1870), when one of 
 the party, the late accomplished Mr. Richard 
 Simpson, of Clapham (a most piqus Catholic and 
 weekly communicant), expressed some ordinary 
 scientific views on the subject of the Deluge. A 
 startled auditor asked anxiously, ' But is not, 
 then, the account in the Bible of the deluge true?' 
 To which Mr. Simpson replied, 'True! of course 
 it is true. There was a local inundation, and 
 some of the sacerdotal caste saved themselves in 
 a punt, with their cocks and hens/ ' 
 
 I forbear to inquire in what relation Mr. Mivart
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITT AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 231 
 
 stands towards Biblical criticism as applied to the 
 New Testament. It is enough, for my present 
 purpose, to observe that Christ always assumed 
 the Scriptural narratives to be in the literal sense 
 accurate. In proof of my assertion, I will remind 
 my readers of the reference in the Gospels to the 
 gift which Moses commanded, and to the abomi- 
 nation of desolation spoken of by Daniel the 
 prophet. To the same effect are such texts as 
 the following : " As it was in the days of Noe, 
 so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man." 
 "Remember Lot's wife." " Your father Abraham 
 rejoiced to see my day." " Had ye believed 
 Moses, ye would have believed me ; for he wrote 
 of me." " If they hear not Moses and the pro- 
 phets, neither will they be persuaded though one 
 rose from the dead." It is manifest that the 
 general view expressed in these and other passages 
 is utterly opposed to the conclusions of Biblical 
 critics, which are slowly leavening the educated 
 world, and which Ganon Fremantle and Mr. 
 Mivart have quoted with substantial approval. 
 The fact is, that enlightened Christians, whether 
 Catholic or Protestant, are beginning to learn 
 that their religion must adjust itself to the new 
 conditions, and must rest rather on the spirit 
 than on the letter of their Master's teaching. In 
 short, we must needs admit that errors are to be
 
 232 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 
 
 found in the words, even in the plainest words, 
 of Christ, as reported by the Evangelists.* This 
 admission impairs, to say the least, the import- 
 ance of the obscure text " Thou art Peter, 
 and upon this rock I will build my Church." 
 On what foundation, then, does the Papacy rest ? 
 Whatever answer Mr. Mivart might give to this 
 question, it seems to follow from his principles 
 that the Catholic Church is a tree which must be 
 judged by its fruits that she must stand or fall 
 with her internal evidence, must be assailed and 
 defended on Utilitarian grounds. And I am 
 bound to add that, on those grounds, her case is, 
 in many respects, a strong one, stronger than that 
 of most Protestant sects, both because of her 
 authority and universality, and also because she 
 is less directly and obviously committed than they 
 are to the belief in Scriptural infallibility. f Mr. 
 
 * See Stones of Stumbling, pp. 90103. As an eminent living 
 ecclesiastic has expressed it, the story of Jonah rests on the 
 authority of the Incarnate God. Let me remind my readers 
 that I am not calling in question the doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion. Orthodox divines, such as Jeremy Taylor and Frederick 
 Robertson (Stones of Stumbling, p. 114), admitted that Christ, 
 as a Man, might have been deceived. 
 
 t Is Scherer right in maintaining that mythology and 
 ritual are needful supports of religion ? If so, criticism, by 
 weakening the first of these props, forces religion to lean 
 heavily on the second. This may explain why Catholicism 
 and Ritualism are suddenly renewing their strength.
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 233 
 
 Mivart insists that she will retain her jurisdiction 
 over faith and morals. But, in regard to the latter, 
 he is careful to point out that Popes and councils 
 wrongly condemned usury ; and even in regard to 
 the former he admits that the Councils of Trent 
 and of the Vatican took an exaggerated view of 
 Biblical inspiration. 
 
 " Little by little," he says, " the invincible advance of 
 historical, as of other, Science permeates and transforms the 
 whole Catholic body, and ultimately reacts upon its supreme 
 head. While the general sentiment of Catholics remains 
 unchanged, the Holy See remains, as a rule, sympathetically 
 unaltering in its action. But it follows with attention, 
 though slowly and warily, the course of scientific thought 
 and investigation. It cannot be expected to anticipate, by 
 positive pronouncements, what is greatly in advance of 
 general Catholic opinion. I have what seems to me suffi- 
 cient evidence that broad views are not in disfavour at the 
 Vatican, though sudden or abrupt action is neither to be 
 expected nor desired. It is amply sufficient if a gradual 
 change in the knowledge, the ideas, and the convictions of 
 the Catholic body in due time overcomes a natural reluctance 
 to forsake a beaten path, and, by degrees, induces conformity 
 to a new environment. The slow, silent, indirect action of 
 public opinion does in time infallibly produce its effect ; and 
 if, now and again, authority has yielded unduly to retro- 
 grade and obstructive influences, yet, as experience has 
 shown us with respect to Copernicanism, it may end by 
 thoroughly adopting what was at first resisted and denounced. 
 No doubt it may astonish and vex some persons to be told 
 that he who is officially the leader allows himself to be led. 
 But he does so by a wise prescience, which is the ordinary 
 characteristic of the supreme Pontiff." 
 
 Eleven years ago, in Italy, a devout Catholic
 
 234 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 
 
 said to me, of Pius IX., "In private, he is a 
 gossiping old woman; but, for all that, as a Pope, 
 he is infallible." Catholics seem now prepared to 
 admit that the intellectual and moral infirmities 
 of the Pope may affect even his public decrees, at 
 least in regard to all matters that admit of veri- 
 fication. Moreover, even the province in which 
 he is held to be infallible the province of matters 
 unverifiable, and yet knowable will seem to his 
 educated followers to be continually lessening, 
 insomuch that they will be more and more 
 troubled by the question, If he tells us of 
 earthly things and we believe not, how can we 
 believe when he tells us of heavenly things?* To 
 speak more precisely, does not the entire phe- 
 nomenal world fall within the domain of the 
 verifiable ? And, as to things that lie above and 
 beyond that world, how can we hope to conceive 
 them with human faculties, or to express them, 
 save metaphorically and relatively, by means of 
 the earth-born analogies of human language 
 immortalia mortali sermone notare ? Is there, 
 then, a single religious question on which the 
 
 * I wonder whether, during the long misgovernment of 
 the Papal States, pious Catholics were ever embarrassed 
 by the text "If a man know not how to rule his 
 own house, how shall he take care of the Church of 
 God ? "
 
 NEOCHRISTIAMITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 235 
 
 Holy See is the unerring exponent of abso- 
 lute truth? Be this as it may, the passage 
 above quoted from Mr. Mivart amounts to 
 an admission that the Pope is becoming, 
 in his relation to the Church, less and less 
 like the rudder of a ship, and more and more 
 like the tail of a kite ; or (to use an apter illus- 
 tration), less of an Absolute and more of a Con- 
 stitutional Sovereign. What, then, are likely to 
 be his lasting prerogatives ? As an outsider, 
 I, of course, speculate on the subject with extreme 
 diffidence. But I venture to sugg'est that (on the 
 hypothesis) he will retain complete control over 
 ceremonies and discipline ; he will also pronounce, 
 on matters of faith, decisions which the Catholic 
 masses will accept as permanently and literally 
 accurate ; while Catholic philosophers will con- 
 sider them, if not as mere symbols and broken 
 lights, at least as liable to revision by his suc- 
 cessors. 
 
 A very distinguished Catholic, writing to me 
 last year, mildly intimated a hope that his Church 
 would hereafter modify its views on eternal 
 punishment ; but added that, at present, he could 
 " see no footstep in that direction." This 
 whispered protest is full of promise. One is 
 tempted to infer from it that the time may come 
 when (to put the matter somewhat brutally) an
 
 236 NEOCHIUSTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLICISM. 
 
 ordinary Catholic will say, " The Pope bids me 
 accept this or that doctrine, so I accept it " ; 
 whereas an intellectual Catholic will say (or 
 think), " As I value religious unity, I will not 
 curse what the Pope hath not cursed ; but I know 
 he is wrong, and future Popes will agree with 
 me." Such an application of Amiel's esoterisme 
 inevitable * is open to grave and very obvious 
 objections. But, at any rate, let us hope that 
 Catholics are beginning to look upon religious 
 truth as relative, and religious knowledge as pro- 
 gressive. This, after all, is the fundamental 
 point, and is especially desired by those who fear 
 that religious evolution may be going on too fast, 
 und who believe that a cultus is needful to almost 
 every one ; and that, in the process (so to say) of 
 Ecclesiastical Selection, an advantage will be 
 enjoyed by the Church which is surrounded by 
 the brightest halo of antiquity, and which can 
 unite the greatest number of educated and unedu- 
 cated minds by a common symbol. The en- 
 lightened defenders of the faith, who think and 
 feel thus, cannot but hope that the Catholic 
 
 * See the mottoes prefixed to my answers 3 and 4, in pre- 
 ceding article. A lady of orthodox tendencies, who was 
 fresh, from the perusal of Literature and Dogma, suddenly 
 exclaimed, when reading p. 49 of Mr. Mivart's article, 
 " Why, this is Matthew Arnold over again ! "
 
 NEOCHRISTIANITY AND NEOCATHOLTCISM. 237 
 
 Church will now show that wisdom which has 
 distinguished her in the chief crises of her long 
 career. She took a great step when she consented 
 to apply the principle of E pur si muove to our 
 planet. She will take a greater step if she applies 
 it to her own religious teaching. By thus taking 
 part in the onward movement, she will give reality 
 to an assertion which has little in common with 
 sundry well-known utterances of Pius IX., but 
 which is quoted approvingly by Mr. Mivart the 
 tolerant and wisely catholic assertion that " this 
 is a time of drawing together of all religions and 
 philosophies, and of the rapid growth of a universal 
 religious consciousness with the development of 
 human introspection. We see, on all sides of us, 
 that ceaseless, in visible magic of thought thought 
 profoundly scientific, and no less profoundly spiri- 
 tual which is casting its net over all religions." 
 In this grouping together of " all religions," is 
 it not implied that the difference between the 
 great and good religions of the world, however 
 prodigious in degree, is a difference in degree 
 rather than in kind ?
 
 TRANSLATIONS OF GREEK, LATIN, GERMAN, AND 
 ITALIAN SENTENCES. 
 
 PREFACE TO FIEST EDITION. 
 
 Page 
 V. TeAetW 
 
 But solid food is for full-grown men. 
 
 calidd juventd, 
 
 in my hot youth. 
 
 TEXT. 
 1 . K/oeurcrov 
 
 Better to die outright 
 Than to be miserable all one's days. 
 
 6. Nequicquam 
 
 Wise Providence in vain 
 Has interposed the estranging main, 
 If impious ships presume to leap 
 Across the barriers of the .deep. 
 
 19. invalidi 
 
 the happiness of the invalid is the concern of the 
 invalid. 
 
 30. lestimmt 
 
 ordained in God's counsels. 
 
 32. ! genus 
 
 Unhappy race of mortals to assign 
 Such crimes, such rage, to attributes divine I 
 Self -torturers, what agonies your creed 
 For us and for our progeny did breed !
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 239 
 
 33. Ut puto, 
 
 I think I am being made a god. 
 
 34. for tern animum, 
 
 a brave heart that knows not fear of death. 
 
 39. ille crucem 
 
 one gets a cross for guerdon, one a crown. 
 
 41. Beati 
 
 The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will behold 
 the punishment of the damned to add a zest to their 
 bliss. 
 
 43. argumentum igneum, 
 
 appeal to fire by way of argument. 
 
 49. strepitus 
 
 roar of whelming Acheron. 
 
 50. Carpe diem, 
 
 Enjoy to-day. 
 
 Memento mori, 
 
 Think of death. 
 
 52. Siforet 
 
 Democritus, restored to earth, would laugh. 
 
 54. Beati 
 
 Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord. 
 
 64. Aa/i7rcunv 
 
 constantly burned by torches, they are vexed with 
 everlasting punishments. 
 
 66. O p.?) an 
 
 Words will not fright the man who fears not deeds. 
 
 67. to to caelo 
 
 by the whole extent of heaven and of hell. 
 
 69. mox illos 
 
 their destined fate awaits them ere long at the hand 
 of a greater foe. 
 
 S
 
 240 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 72. Ingentem 
 
 They weld a mighty shield to quench all the darts 
 of the Latins. 
 
 73. a Judceis, 
 
 hy Jews, for Jews, among Jews. 
 
 non nisi 
 
 is only conquered by obeying her. 
 
 74. Lnperium 
 
 I have given a limitless empire. 
 
 75. e/c TOV crrd/iaTos (rou 
 
 out of thy own mouth I will judge thee. 
 
 76. immortalia 
 
 we convey immortal truths in the language of mortals. 
 
 79. Deusfallit 
 
 God deceives through another. 
 
 OiSev OIO/AOU 
 
 I think it makes no difference whether we speak of 
 Jupiter (i.e., God) as the Highest, or of Zeus, or 
 Adonaius, or Sahaoth. 
 
 80. Deusfallit 
 
 God deceives directly. 
 
 at this place there is a hole in the sky. 
 
 Hie est 
 
 This is Jerusalem : I have set her in the centre of 
 the nations, and I have set the countries round about 
 her. 
 
 8 1 . oo"(ra 
 
 All that with mortal men is reckoned a shame and 
 
 dishonour, 
 Theft and adulterous lust and lies and deceit of one's 
 
 neighbour.
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 241 
 
 83. aTran/s 
 
 God is not averse to just deceit. 
 
 84. ocrta iravovpyeiv, 
 
 to commit a righteous crime. 
 
 85. splendide mendax, 
 
 grand in her falsehood. 
 
 86. quod non 
 
 What fails to prove the less proves the greater. 
 
 88. Numquid 
 
 Was Paul crucified for you ? Or were ye baptised 
 in the name of Paul ? 
 
 89. aiwvtov 
 
 " eternal " for " hrief " or " none at all." 
 
 90. Oyu.oto)S 
 
 Equally blasphemous are those who hold that gods 
 are born with those that say they can die. 
 
 91. cadit qu&stio, 
 
 there is an end of the question. 
 
 95. esto Christus 
 
 though Christ did not grow in habitual, yet he did 
 grow in actual and practical, grace and wisdom 
 
 97. nanum 
 
 he called Atlas a dwarf, the ^Ethiopian a swan. 
 
 supra grammaticam, 
 
 superior to grammar. 
 
 102. Deo 
 
 To please God by a lie. 
 
 104. TTpGirov j^evSos, 
 
 the original falsehood. 
 
 105. KaKayycAros O^T/, 
 
 the bad tidings of woe. 
 
 106. Malunt 
 
 They had rather err with Christ than be right with us.
 
 242 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 106. Amicus 
 
 We love Christ, but we love truth more. 
 
 108. KpflTTOV - 
 
 it is better to choose a falsehood than a real evil. 
 
 110. a.p.f.pa.1 
 
 But future time is a wiser witness. For a mortal it 
 is fitting to speak fair things concerning the deities, 
 for the risk is less. 
 
 They breathed into me a divine voice that I might 
 unfold both the future and the past. 
 
 111. AOKCCOV 
 
 Thinking that the messengers sent to consult the 
 oracle were not telling the truth. 
 
 113. Incredibile est, 
 
 It is incredible that God would have spoken to the 
 people in words that would deceive them. 
 
 Incredibilim est, 
 
 It is more incredible that God will employ punish- 
 ments against the people by which they will be 
 tortured. 
 
 115. Quid enim 
 
 For what ideas can be more remote, or wider apart, 
 or more contradictory than what is mortal and what 
 is immortal and eternal ? 
 
 125. Hand ignota loquor, 
 
 I speak what I know. 
 
 127. OlKOVO/Al'ttS - 
 
 the economy of salvation. 
 
 128. experimenta fidei^ 
 
 trials of faith. 
 
 131. Sivos 
 
 Hurly-burly is king and has expelled Zeus.
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 243 
 
 131. Usque adeo 
 
 So tyrannously is poor mortality down-trodden by 
 an unseen power. 
 
 132. Salve, 
 
 Hail, land of Saturn, mighty mother thou 
 Of fruits and mighty heroes ! 
 
 135. Vir sum, 
 
 I am a man, and count nothing feminine foreign to me. 
 
 157. Scurrantis 
 
 " An appearance of toadyism " and "Clownish and 
 incultured bluntness." 
 
 138. Em rationale, 
 
 "A rational being," the definition not of "man" 
 (Mensch], but of " the man " (Mann). 
 
 Video 
 
 I see the worse and commend it, but I follow the 
 better. (An inversion of Ovid's " I see the better and 
 follow the worse.") 
 
 139. cum pleno salino, 
 
 with a full salt-cellar. 
 
 laudando pr&cipere, 
 
 to admonish while praising. 
 
 141. OUK aya&ov 
 
 It is not good for many to bear rule. 
 
 143. CKWV 
 
 unwillingly willing. 
 
 146. tfXocro(f)fLV 
 
 to live the philosopher's life without effeminacy. 
 (Pericles' description of the Athenian character.) 
 
 148. Stantes 
 
 Our feet were in thy courts, Jerusalem ! 
 
 151. poco di matto, 
 
 a little of the fool.
 
 244 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 154. pecca fortiter, 
 sin boldly. 
 
 learn to be frivolous. 
 
 amara lento 
 
 and with a careless laugh 
 The bitter potion quaff, 
 Since none, not e'en the happiest, 
 Is absolutely blest. 
 
 158. *O Traces 
 
 Sons of Greece, arise ! 
 Arise and liberate your fatherland, 
 Your sons, your wives, the temples of your Gods ! 
 
 159. 6 ^tAe'AAijv 
 
 The Philhellenic famous Gladstone. 
 
 Olympian Pericles 
 Thundered and lightened and confounded Greece. 
 
 160. cunctando 
 
 by delaying restored the State. 
 
 165. a.Tropiai, 
 
 knotty questions. 
 
 169. Omnia exeunt 
 
 All things end in absurdity. All is vanity. 
 
 Imperat 
 
 Conscientiousness is in all cases either the master or 
 the servant. 
 
 170. a.Kpa<Tia 
 
 "incontinence" and "licentiousness." 
 
 176. /3lOS TTpOLKTlKOS - 
 
 the practical life . . . the theoretical life.
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 245 
 
 i 
 
 '77. 
 
 magnificence. 
 
 E> ~ j? i 
 t ev TCO uo(KO) 
 
 If ye were not faithful in the unrighteous mammon, 
 who will commit to your trust the true riches ? 
 
 178. eavrov Tifjuopov/j-evos 
 
 a self-tormenter ... a self -accuser. 
 
 180. 2,Ktif/ai 
 
 Consider, boy, what sober-living means, 
 How many pleasures you will miss thereby 
 Wine, women, dalliance, dicing, luxuries 
 Is life worth living if you lack all these ? 
 
 183. Nil expedit^ 
 
 Nothing matters. 
 
 185. Juturnam 
 
 That Juturna should rescue her poor brother. 
 
 aO\iov 
 
 a shadow of myself, 
 Not he in sooth who once was (Edipus. 
 
 189. Nullum tempua 
 
 God is independent of time and opportunity. 
 
 191. Entia 
 
 Existences are not to be unnecessarily multiplied. 
 
 192. col 
 
 "Whether there are or are not gods is doubtful. 
 
 Wer darf 
 
 Who dares Him name ? 
 Who dares proclaim : 
 Him I believe ? 
 Who that can feel 
 His heart dare steel 
 To say : I disbelieve ?
 
 246 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 195. Was war' ein Gott, 
 
 What were a God, self-centred, free from change, 
 Who watched the universe around him range ? 
 Nay, interfused He permeates the whole. 
 Nature the hody, God is nature's soul. 
 Thus all that in Him lives and moves and is 
 No instant can His quickening spirit miss. 
 
 196. advertunt 
 
 they turn their minds to religion, 
 Since there is fear of eternal punishment in death. 
 
 197. Aut caelum aut nihil, 
 
 Either heaven or nothing. 
 
 Siavoia, 
 
 intelligence. 
 
 198. Uhum 
 
 One thing is needful. I have chosen the better 
 part, which shall not be taken from me. 
 
 202. vox prcegnans, 
 
 a pregnant utterance, big with consequences, from 
 whose womb will issue a second progeny, portentous, 
 perilous, damnable. 
 
 203. spar g ens flores 
 
 scattering flowers and paying a vain tribute of respect. 
 
 208. JEs sagen's 
 
 So say 
 
 All hearts in every clime beneath the sky ; 
 Each in his several way ; 
 And why not I in mine ? 
 
 211. Sic animi 
 
 Thus mind cannot exist without a body, 
 An entity divorced from nerves and blood. 
 
 212. alter ego, 
 
 second self.
 
 TRANSLATIONS. 247 
 
 212. repetentia nostri, 
 
 the re-collecting of ourselves. 
 
 Alter ab integro 
 
 " The -world's great age begins anew." Shelley. 
 
 216. Fadam 
 
 I will do thy will in heaven as on earth. 
 
 Amem 
 
 May I love thee more than myself, and myself only 
 for thy sake. 
 
 217. Sarai 
 
 Thou shalt be with me for ever a citizen of that 
 Rome of which Christ is a Roman. 
 
 218. Wen Gott 
 
 "Whom God deceives is well deceived. 
 
 222. Die Welt 
 
 To know the world and not despise it. 
 
 226. Nox est 
 
 We must sleep through one never-ending night. 
 
 Pallidula, 
 
 Poor pallid, shivering, naked soul. 
 
 228. TTngefahr 
 
 His Reverence says almost the same, 
 Only he uses slightly different words. 
 
 234. immortalia 
 
 to describe immortal things in mortal language. 
 
 237. E pur si muove, 
 
 A.nd yet it moves. 
 
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