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