CHAPTER VI

[197] But an unpretending writer, without a philosophy based on

inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles, must not

presume to indulge himself too much in generalities, but he must keep

close to the level ground of common fact, the only safe ground for

understandings without a scientific equipment. Therefore I am bound

to take, before concluding, some of the practical operations in which

my friends and countrymen are at this moment engaged, and [198] to

make these, if I can, show the truth of what I have advanced.

Probably I could hardly give a greater proof of my confessed

inexpertness in reasoning and arguing, than by taking, for my first

example of an operation of this kind, the proceedings for the

disestablishment of the Irish Church, which we are now witnessing.

It seems so clear that this is surely one of those operations for the

uprooting of a certain definite evil in which one's Liberal friends

engage, and have a right to complain and to get impatient and to

reproach one with delicate Conservative scepticism and cultivated

inaction if one does not lend a hand to help them. This does,

indeed, seem evident; and yet this operation comes so prominently

before us just at this moment,--it so challenges everybody's regard,-

-that one seems cowardly in blinking it. So let us venture to try

and see whether this conspicuous operation is one of those round

which we need to let our consciousness play freely and reveal what

manner of spirit we are of in doing it; or whether it is one which by

no means admits the application of this doctrine of ours, and one to

which we ought to lend a hand immediately.

[199] Now it seems plain that the present Church establishment in

Ireland is contrary to reason and justice, in so far as the Church of

a very small minority of the people there takes for itself all the

Church property of the Irish people. And one would think, that

property assigned for the purpose of providing for a people's

religious worship when that worship was one, the State should, when

that worship is split into several forms, apportion between those

several forms, with due regard to circumstances, taking account only

of great differences, which are likely to be lasting, and of

considerable communions, which are likely to represent profound and

widespread religious characteristics; and overlooking petty

differences, which have no serious reason for lasting, and

inconsiderable communions, which can hardly be taken to express any

broad and necessary religious lineaments of our common nature. This

is just in accordance with that maxim about the State which we have

more than once used: The State is of the religion of all its

citizens, without the fanaticism of any of them. Those who deny

this, either think so poorly of the State that they do not like to

see religion condescend to touch the State, or they think [200] so

poorly of religion that they do not like to see the State condescend

to touch religion; but no good statesman will easily think thus

unworthily either of the State or of religion, and our statesmen of

both parties were inclined, one may say, to follow the natural line

of the State's duty, and to make in Ireland some fair apportionment

of Church property between large and radically divided religious

communions in that country. But then it was discovered that in Great

Britain the national mind, as it is called, is grown averse to

endowments for religion and will make no new ones; and though this in

itself looks general and solemn enough, yet there were found

political philosophers, like Mr. Baxter and Mr. Charles Buxton, to

give it a look of more generality and more solemnity still, and to

elevate, by their dexterous command of powerful and beautiful

language, this supposed edict of the British national mind into a

sort of formula for expressing a great law of religious transition

and progress for all the world. But we, who, having no coherent

philosophy, must not let ourselves philosophise, only see that the

English and Scotch Nonconformists have a great horror of

establishments and endowments for [201] religion, which, they assert,

were forbidden by Christ when he said: "My kingdom is not of this

world;"+ and that the Nonconformists will be delighted to aid

statesmen in disestablishing any church, but will suffer none to be

established or endowed if they can help it. Then we see that the

Nonconformists make the strength of the Liberal majority in the House

of Commons, and that, therefore, the leading Liberal statesmen, to

get the support of the Nonconformists, forsake the notion of fairly

apportioning Church property in Ireland among the chief religious

communions, declare that the national mind has decided against new

endowments, and propose simply to disestablish and disendow the

present establishment in Ireland without establishing or endowing any

other. The actual power, in short, by virtue of which the Liberal

party in the House of Commons is now trying to disestablish the Irish

Church, is not the power of reason and justice, it is the power of

the Nonconformists' antipathy to Church establishments. Clearly it

is this; because Liberal statesmen, relying on the power of reason

and justice to help them, proposed something quite different from

what they now propose; and they proposed [202] what they now propose,

and talked of the decision of the national mind, because they had to

rely on the English and Scotch Nonconformists. And clearly the

Nonconformists are actuated by antipathy to establishments, not by

antipathy to the injustice and irrationality of the present

appropriation of Church property in Ireland; because Mr. Spurgeon, in

his eloquent and memorable letter, expressly avowed that he would

sooner leave things as they are in Ireland, that is, he would sooner

let the injustice and irrationality of the present appropriation

continue, than do anything to set up the Roman image, that is, than

give the Catholics their fair and reasonable share of Church

property. Most indisputably, therefore, we may affirm that the real

moving power by which the Liberal party are now operating the

overthrow of the Irish establishment is the antipathy of the

Nonconformists to Church establishments, and not the sense of reason

or justice, except so far as reason and justice may be contained in

this antipathy. And thus the matter stands at present.

Now surely we must all see many inconveniences in performing the

operation of uprooting this evil, [203] the Irish Church

establishment, in this particular way. As was said about industry

and freedom and gymnastics, we shall never awaken love and gratitude

by this mode of operation; for it is pursued, not in view of reason

and justice and human perfection and all that enkindles the

enthusiasm of men, but it is pursued in view of a certain stock

notion, or fetish, of the Nonconformists, which proscribes Church

establishments. And yet, evidently, one of the main benefits to be

got by operating on the Irish Church is to win the affections of the

Irish people. Besides this, an operation performed in virtue of a

mechanical rule, or fetish, like the supposed decision of the English

national mind against new endowments, does not easily inspire respect

in its adversaries, and make their opposition feeble and hardly to be

persisted in, as an operation evidently done in virtue of reason and

justice might. For reason and justice have in them something

persuasive and irresistible; but a fetish or mechanical maxim, like

this of the Nonconformists, has in it nothing at all to conciliate

either the affections or the understanding; nay, it provokes the

counter-employment of other fetishes or mechanical maxims [204] on

the opposite side, by which the confusion and hostility already

prevalent are heightened. Only in this way can be explained the

apparition of such fetishes as are beginning to be set up on the

Conservative side against the fetish of the Nonconformists:--The

Constitution in danger! The bulwarks of British freedom menaced!

The lamp of the Reformation put out! No Popery!--and so on. To

elevate these against an operation relying on reason and justice to

back it is not so easy, or so tempting to human infirmity, as to

elevate them against an operation relying on the Nonconformists'

antipathy to Church establishments to back it; for after all, No

Popery! is a rallying cry which touches the human spirit quite as

vitally as No Church establishments!--that is to say, neither the one

nor the other, in themselves, touch the human spirit vitally at all.

Ought the believers in action, then, to be so impatient with us, if

we say, that even for the sake of this operation of theirs itself and

its satisfactory accomplishment, it is more important to make our

consciousness play freely round the stock notion or habit on which

their operation relies for aid, than to [205] lend a hand to it

straight away? Clearly they ought not; because nothing is so

effectual for operating as reason and justice, and a free play of

thought will either disengage the reason and justice lying hid in the

Nonconformist fetish, and make them effectual, or else it will help

to get this fetish out of the way, and to let statesmen go freely

where reason and justice take them.

So, suppose we take this absolute rule, this mechanical maxim of Mr.

Spurgeon and the Nonconformists, that Church establishments are bad

things because Christ said: "My kingdom is not of this world."

Suppose we try and make our consciousness bathe and float this piece

of petrifaction,--for such it now is,--and bring it within the stream

of the vital movement of our thought, and into relation with the

whole intelligible law of things. An enemy and a disputant might

probably say that much machinery which Nonconformists themselves

employ, the Liberation Society which exists already, and the

Nonconformist Union which Mr. Spurgeon desires to see existing, come

within the scope of Christ's words as well as Church establishments.

This, however, is merely a negative and [206] contentious way of

dealing with the Nonconformist maxim; whereas what we desire is to

bring this maxim within the positive and vital movement of our

thought. We say, therefore, that Christ's words mean that his

religion is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, and not

a force of outward constraint acting on the body; and if the

Nonconformist maxim against Church establishments and Church

endowments has warrant given to it from what Christ thus meant, then

their maxim is good, even though their own practice in the matter of

the Liberation Society may be at variance with it.

And here we cannot but remember what we have formerly said about

religion, Miss Cobbe, and the British College of Health in the New

Road. In religion there are two parts, the part of thought and

speculation, and the part of worship and devotion. Christ certainly

meant his religion, as a force of inward persuasion acting on the

soul, to employ both parts as perfectly as possible. Now thought and

speculation is eminently an individual matter, and worship and

devotion is eminently a collective matter. It does not help me to

think a thing more clearly that thousands of other people are

thinking [207] the same; but it does help me to worship with more

emotion that thousands of other people are worshipping with me. The

consecration of common consent, antiquity, public establishment,

long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious

worship. "Just what makes worship impressive," says Joubert, "is its

publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its

observance universally and visibly holding its way through all the

details both of our outward and of our inward life." Worship,

therefore, should have in it as little as possible of what divides

us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act; as

Joubert says again: "The best prayers are those which have nothing

distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple

adoration." For, "The same devotion," as he says in another place,

"unites men far more than the same thought and knowledge." Thought

and knowledge, as we have said before, is eminently something

individual, and of our own; the more we possess it as strictly of our

own, the more power it has on us. Man worships best, therefore, with

the community; he philosophises best alone. So it seems that whoever

[208] would truly give effect to Christ's declaration that his

religion is a force of inward persuasion acting on the soul, would

leave our thought on the intellectual aspects of Christianity as

individual as possible, but would make Christian worship as

collective as possible. Worship, then, appears to be eminently a

matter for public and national establishment; for even Mr. Bright,

who, when he stands in Mr. Spurgeon's great Tabernacle is so ravished

with admiration, will hardly say that the great Tabernacle and its

worship are in themselves, as a temple and service of religion, so

impressive and affecting as the public and national Westminster

Abbey, or Notre Dame, with their worship. And when, very soon after

the great Tabernacle, one comes plump down to the mass of private and

individual establishments of religious worship, establishments

falling, like the British College of Health in the New Road,

conspicuously short of what a public and national establishment might

be, then one cannot but feel that Christ's command to make his

religion a force of persuasion to the soul, is, so far as one main

source of persuasion is concerned, altogether set at nought.

[209] But perhaps the Nonconformists worship so unimpressively

because they philosophise so keenly; and one part of religion, the

part of public national worship, they have subordinated to the other

part, the part of individual thought and knowledge? This, however,

their organisation in congregations forbids us to admit. They are

members of congregations, not isolated thinkers; and a true play of

individual thought is at least as much impeded by membership of a

small congregation as by membership of a great Church; thinking by

batches of fifties is to the full as fatal to free thought as

thinking by batches of thousands. Accordingly, we have had occasion

already to notice that Nonconformity does not at all differ from the

Established Church by having worthier or more philosophical ideas

about God and the ordering of the world than the Established Church

has; it has very much the same ideas about these as the Established

Church has, but it differs from the Established Church in that its

worship is a much less collective and national affair. So Mr.

Spurgeon and the Nonconformists seem to have misapprehended the true

meaning of Christ's words, My kingdom is not of this world; [210]

because, by these words, Christ meant that his religion was to work

on the soul; and of the two parts of the soul on which religion

works,--the thinking and speculative part, and the feeling and

imaginative part,--Nonconformity satisfies the first no better than

the Established Churches, which Christ by these words is supposed to

have condemned, satisfy it; and the second part it satisfies much

worse than the Established Churches. And thus the balance of

advantage seems to rest with the Established Churches; and they seem

to have apprehended and applied Christ's words, if not with perfect

adequacy, at least less inadequately than the Nonconformists.

Might it not, then, be urged with great force that the way to do

good, in presence of this operation for uprooting the Church

establishment in Ireland by the power of the Nonconformists'

antipathy to publicly establishing or endowing religious worship, is

not by lending a hand straight away to the operation, and

Hebraising,--that is, in this case, taking an uncritical

interpretation of certain Bible words as our absolute rule of

conduct,--with the Nonconformists. If may be very well for born

[211] Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal

statesmen to Hebraise is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal

hacks Hebraising, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative

Hellenism,--a state of moral indifferency without intellectual

ardour,--is even painful. And when, by our Hebraising, we neither do

what the better mind of statesmen prompted them to do, nor win the

affections of the people we want to conciliate, nor yet reduce the

opposition of our adversaries but rather heighten it, surely it may

be not unreasonable to Hellenise a little, to let our thought and

consciousness play freely about our proposed operation and its

motives, dissolve these motives if they are unsound, which certainly

they have some appearance, at any rate, of being, and create in their

stead, if they are, a set of sounder and more persuasive motives

conducting to a more solid operation. May not the man who promotes

this be giving the best help towards finding some lasting truth to

minister to the diseased spirit of his time, and does he really

deserve that the believers in action should grow impatient with him?

But now to take another operation which does [212] not at this moment

so excite people's feelings as the disestablishment of the Irish

Church, but which, I suppose, would also be called exactly one of

those operations of simple, practical, common-sense reform, aiming at

the removal of some particular abuse, and rigidly restricted to that

object, to which a Liberal ought to lend a hand, and deserves that

other Liberals should grow impatient with him if he does not. This

operation I had the great advantage of with my own ears hearing

discussed in the House of Commons, and recommended by a powerful

speech from that famous speaker, Mr. Bright; so that the effeminate

horror which, it is alleged, I have of practical reforms of this

kind, was put to a searching test; and if it survived, it must have,

one would think, some reason or other to support it, and can hardly

quite merit the stigma of its present name. The operation I mean was

that which the Real Estate Intestacy Bill aimed at accomplishing, and

the discussion on this bill I heard in the House of Commons. The

bill proposed, as every one knows, to prevent the land of a man who

dies intestate from going, as it goes now, to his eldest son, and was

thought, by its friends and by its enemies, to be a [213] step

towards abating the now almost exclusive possession of the land of

this country by the people whom we call the Barbarians. Mr. Bright,

and other speakers on his side, seemed to hold that there is a kind

of natural law or fitness of things which assigns to all a man's

children a right to equal shares in the enjoyment of his property

after his death; and that if, without depriving a man of an

Englishman's prime privilege of doing what he likes by making what

will he chooses, you provide that when he makes none his land shall

be divided among his family, then you give the sanction of the law to

the natural fitness of things, and inflict a sort of check on the

present violation of this by the Barbarians. It occurred to me, when

I saw Mr. Bright and his friends proceeding in this way, to ask

myself a question. If the almost exclusive possession of the land of

this country by the Barbarians is a bad thing, is this practical

operation of the Liberals, and the stock notion, on which it seems to

rest, about the right of children to share equally in the enjoyment

of their father's property after his death, the best and most

effective means of dealing with it? Or is it best [214] dealt with

by letting one's thought and consciousness play freely and naturally

upon the Barbarians, this Liberal operation, and the stock notion at

the bottom of it, and trying to get as near as we can to the

intelligible law of things as to each of them?

Now does any one, if he simply and naturally reads his consciousness,

discover that he has any rights at all? For my part, the deeper I go

in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it,

the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only

duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of

abstract reasoning, inferring that the obligations they are conscious

of towards others, others must be conscious of towards them, and not

from any direct witness of consciousness at all. But it is obvious

that the notion of a right, arrived at in this way, is likely to

stand as a formal and petrified thing, deceiving and misleading us;

and that the notions got directly from our consciousness ought to be

brought to bear upon it, and to control it. So it is unsafe and

misleading to say that our children have rights against us; what is

true and safe to say is, that we have duties towards our [215]

children. But who will find among these natural duties, set forth to

us by our consciousness, the obligation to leave to all our children

an equal share in the enjoyment of our property? or, though

consciousness tells us we ought to provide for our children's

welfare, whose consciousness tells him that the enjoyment of property

is in itself welfare? Whether our children's welfare is best served

by their all sharing equally in our property depends on circumstances

and on the state of the community in which we live. With this equal

sharing, society could not, for example, have organised itself afresh

out of the chaos left by the fall of the Roman Empire, and to have an

organised society to live in is more for a child's welfare than to

have an equal share of his father's property. So we see how little

convincing force the stock notion on which the Real Estate Intestacy

Bill was based,--the notion that in the nature and fitness of things

all a man's children have a right to an equal share in the enjoyment

of what he leaves,--really has; and how powerless, therefore, it must

of necessity be to persuade and win any one who has habits and

interests which disincline him to [216] it. On the other hand, the

practical operation proposed relies entirely, if it is to be

effectual in altering the present practice of the Barbarians, on the

power of truth and persuasiveness in the notion which it seeks to

consecrate; for it leaves to the Barbarians full liberty to continue

their present practice, to which all their habits and interests

incline them, unless the promulgation of a notion, which we have seen

to have no vital efficacy and hold upon our consciousness, shall

hinder them.

Are we really to adorn an operation of this kind, merely because it

proposes to do something, with all the favourable epithets of simple,

practical, common-sense, definite; to enlist on its side all the zeal

of the believers in action, and to call indifference to it a really

effeminate horror of useful reforms? It seems to me quite easy to

show that a free disinterested play of thought on the Barbarians and

their land-holding is a thousand times more really practical, a

thousand times more likely to lead to some effective result, than an

operation such as that of which we have been now speaking. For if,

casting aside the impediments of stock notions and mechanical action,

we try to find the intelligible law [217] of things respecting a

great land-owning class such as we have in this country, does not our

consciousness readily tell us that whether the perpetuation of such a

class is for its own real welfare and for the real welfare of the

community, depends on the actual circumstances of this class and of

the community? Does it not readily tell us that wealth, power, and

consideration are, and above all when inherited and not earned, in

themselves trying and dangerous things? as Bishop Wilson excellently

says: "Riches are almost always abused without a very extraordinary

grace." But this extraordinary grace was in great measure supplied

by the circumstances of the feudal epoch, out of which our land-

holding class, with its rules of inheritance, sprang. The labour and

contentions of a rude, nascent, and struggling society supplied it;

these perpetually were trying, chastising, and forming the class

whose predominance was then needed by society to give it points of

cohesion, and was not so harmful to themselves because they were thus

sharply tried and exercised. But in a luxurious, settled, and easy

society, where wealth offers the means of enjoyment a thousand times

more, and the temptation to abuse [218] them is thus made a thousand

times greater, the exercising discipline is at the same time taken

away, and the feudal class is left exposed to the full operation of

the natural law well put by the French moralist: Pouvoir sans savoir

est fort dangereux. And, for my part, when I regard the young people

of this class, it is above all by the trial and shipwreck made of

their own welfare by the circumstances in which they live that I am

struck; how far better it would have been for nine out of every ten

among them, if they had had their own way to make in the world, and

not been tried by a condition for which they had not the

extraordinary grace requisite!

This, I say, seems to be what a man's consciousness, simply

consulted, would tell him about the actual welfare of our Barbarians

themselves. Then, as to their actual effect upon the welfare of the

community, how can this be salutary, if a class which, by the very

possession of wealth, power and consideration, becomes a kind of

ideal or standard for the rest of the community, is tried by ease and

pleasure more than it can well bear, and almost irresistibly carried

away from excellence and strenuous virtue? This must certainly be

what [219] Solomon meant when he said: "As he who putteth a stone in

a sling, so is he that giveth honour to a fool."+ For any one can

perceive how this honouring of a false ideal, not of intelligence and

strenuous virtue, but of wealth and station, pleasure and ease, is as

a stone from a sling to kill in our great middle-class, in us who are

called Philistines, the desire before spoken of, which by nature for

ever carries all men towards that which is lovely; and to leave

instead of it only a blind deteriorating pursuit, for ourselves also,

of the false ideal. And in those among us Philistines whom this

desire does not wholly abandon, yet, having no excellent ideal set

forth to nourish and to steady it, it meets with that natural bent

for the bathos which together with this desire itself is implanted at

birth in the breast of man, and is by that force twisted awry, and

borne at random hither and thither, and at last flung upon those

grotesque and hideous forms of popular religion which the more

respectable part among us Philistines mistake for the true goal of

man's desire after all that is lovely. And for the Populace this

false idea is a stone which kills the desire before it can even

arise; so impossible and unattainable for [220] them do the

conditions of that which is lovely appear according to this ideal to

be made, so necessary to the reaching of them by the few seems the

falling short of them by the many. So that, perhaps, of the actual

vulgarity of our Philistines and brutality of our Populace, the

Barbarians and their feudal habits of succession, enduring out of

their due time and place, are involuntarily the cause in a great

degree; and they hurt the welfare of the rest of the community at the

same time that, as we have seen, they hurt their own.

But must not, now, the working in our minds of considerations like

these, to which culture, that is, the disinterested and active use of

reading, reflection, and observation, carries us, be really much more

effectual to the dissolution of feudal habits and rules of succession

in land than an operation like the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, and a

stock notion like that of the natural right of all a man's children

to an equal share in the enjoyment of his property; since we have

seen that this mechanical maxim is unsound, and that, if it is

unsound, the operation relying upon it cannot possibly be effective?

If truth and reason have, as we believe, any natural irresistible

effect on [221] the mind of man, it must. These considerations, when

culture has called them forth and given them free course in our

minds, will live and work. They will work gradually, no doubt, and

will not bring us ourselves to the front to sit in high place and put

them into effect; but so they will be all the more beneficial.

Everything teaches us how gradually nature would have all profound

changes brought about; and we can even see, too, where the absolute

abrupt stoppage of feudal habits has worked harm. And appealing to

the sense of truth and reason, these considerations will, without

doubt, touch and move all those of even the Barbarians themselves,

who are (as are some of us Philistines also, and some of the

Populace) beyond their fellows quick of feeling for truth and reason.

For indeed this is just one of the advantages of sweetness and light

over fire and strength, that sweetness and light make a feudal class

quietly and gradually drop its feudal habits because it sees them at

variance with truth and reason, while fire and strength tear them

passionately off it because it applauded Mr. Lowe when he called, or

was supposed to call, the working-class drunken and venal.

[222] But when once we have begun to recount the practical operations

by which our Liberal friends work for the removal of definite evils,

and in which if we do not join them they are apt to grow impatient

with us, how can we pass over that very interesting operation of this

kind,--the attempt to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's

sister? This operation, too, like that for abating the feudal

customs of succession in land, I have had the advantage of myself

seeing and hearing my Liberal friends labour at. I was lucky enough

to be present when Mr. Chambers, I think, brought forward in the

House of Commons his bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased

wife's sister, and I heard the speech which Mr. Chambers then made in

support of his bill. His first point was that God's law,--the name

he always gave to the Book of Leviticus,--did not really forbid a man

to marry his deceased wife's sister. God's law not forbidding it,

the Liberal maxim that a man's prime right and happiness is to do as

he likes ought at once to come into force, and to annul any such

check upon the assertion of personal liberty as the prohibition to

marry one's deceased wife's sister. A distinguished Liberal

supporter of Mr. Chambers, in [223] the debate which followed the

introduction of the bill, produced a formula of much beauty and

neatness for conveying in brief the Liberal notions on this head:

"Liberty," said he, "is the law of human life." And, therefore, the

moment it is ascertained that God's law, the Book of Leviticus, does

not stop the way, man's law, the law of liberty, asserts its right,

and makes us free to marry our deceased wife's sister.

And this exactly falls in with what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who may

almost be called the Colenso of love and marriage,--such a revolution

does he make in our ideas on these matters, just as Dr. Colenso does

in our ideas on religion,--tells us of the notions and proceedings of

our kinsmen in America. With that affinity of genius to the Hebrew

genius which we have already noticed, and with the strong belief of

our race that liberty is the law of human life, so far as a fixed,

perfect, and paramount rule of conscience, the Bible, does not

expressly control it, our American kinsmen go again, Mr. Hepworth

Dixon tells us, to their Bible, the Mormons to the patriarchs and the

Old Testament, Brother Noyes to St. Paul and the New, and having

never before read anything else but [224] their Bible, they now read

their Bible over again, and make all manner of great discoveries

there. All these discoveries are favourable to liberty, and in this

way is satisfied that double craving so characteristic of the

Philistine, and so eminently exemplified in that crowned Philistine,

Henry the Eighth,--the craving for forbidden fruit and the craving

for legality. Mr. Hepworth Dixon's eloquent writings give currency,

over here, to these important discoveries; so that now, as regards

love and marriage, we seem to be entering, with all our sails spread,

upon what Mr. Hepworth Dixon, its apostle and evangelist, calls a

Gothic Revival, but what one of the many newspapers that so greatly

admire Mr. Hepworth Dixon's lithe and sinewy style and form their own

style upon it, calls, by a yet bolder and more striking figure, "a

great sexual insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race." For this end

we have to avert our eyes from everything Hellenic and fanciful, and

to keep them steadily fixed upon the two cardinal points of the Bible

and liberty. And one of those practical operations in which the

Liberal party engage, and in which we are summoned to join them,

directs itself entirely, as we have seen, to these cardinal points,

[225] and may almost be regarded, perhaps, as a kind of first

instalment or public and parliamentary pledge of the great sexual

insurrection of our Anglo-Teutonic race.

But here, as elsewhere, what we seek is the Philistine's perfection,

the development of his best self, not mere liberty for his ordinary

self. And we no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim,

Liberty is the law of human life, than we allow it to the opposite

maxim, which is just as true, Renouncement is the law of human life.

For we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says, a

service; not a service to any stock maxim, but an elevation of our

best self, and a harmonising in subordination to this, and to the

idea of a perfected humanity, all the multitudinous, turbulent, and

blind impulses of our ordinary selves. Now, the Philistine's great

defect being a defect in delicacy of perception, to cultivate in him

this delicacy, to render it independent of external and mechanical

rule, and a law to itself, is what seems to make most for his

perfection, his true humanity. And his true humanity, and therefore

his happiness, appears to lie much more, so far as the relations of

love and [226] marriage are concerned, in becoming alive to the finer

shades of feeling which arise within these relations, in being able

to enter with tact and sympathy into the subtle instinctive

propensions and repugnances of the person with whose life his own

life is bound up, to make them his own, to direct and govern, in

harmony with them, the arbitrary range of his personal action, and

thus to enlarge his spiritual and intellectual life and liberty, than

in remaining insensible to these finer shades of feeling, this

delicate sympathy, in giving unchecked range, so far as he can, to

his mere personal action, in allowing no limits or government to this

except such as a mechanical external law imposes, and in thus really

narrowing, for the satisfaction of his ordinary self, his spiritual

and intellectual life and liberty.

Still more must this be so when his fixed eternal rule, his God's

law, is supplied to him from a source which is less fit, perhaps, to

supply final and absolute instructions on this particular topic of

love and marriage than on any other relation of human life. Bishop

Wilson, who is full of examples of that fruitful Hellenising within

the limits of Hebraism itself, of that renewing of the [227] stiff

and stark notions of Hebraism by turning upon them a stream of fresh

thought and consciousness, which we have already noticed in St.

Paul,--Bishop Wilson gives an admirable lesson to rigid Hebraisers,

like Mr. Chambers, asking themselves: Does God's law (that is, the

Book of Leviticus) forbid us to marry our wife's sister?--Does God's

law (that is, again, the Book of Leviticus) allow us to marry our

wife's sister?--when he says: "Christian duties are founded on

reason, not on the sovereign authority of God commanding what he

pleases; God cannot command us what is not fit to be believed or

done, all his commands being founded in the necessities of our

nature." And, immense as is our debt to the Hebrew race and its

genius, incomparable as is its authority on certain profoundly

important sides of our human nature, worthy as it is to be described

as having uttered, for those sides, the voice of the deepest

necessities of our nature, the statutes of the divine and eternal

order of things, the law of God,--who, that is not manacled and

hoodwinked by his Hebraism, can believe that, as to love and

marriage, our reason and the necessities of our humanity have their

true, [228] sufficient, and divine law expressed for them by the

voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews? Who, I

say, will believe, when he really considers the matter, that where

the feminine nature, the feminine ideal, and our relations to them,

are brought into question, the delicate and apprehensive genius of

the Indo-European race, the race which invented the Muses, and

chivalry, and the Madonna, is to find its last word on this question

in the institutions of a Semitic people, whose wisest king had seven

hundred wives and three hundred concubines?

If here again, therefore, we seem to minister better to the diseased

spirit of our time by leading it to think about the operation our

Liberal friends have in hand, than by lending a hand to this

operation ourselves, let us see, before we dismiss from our view the

practical operations of our Liberal friends, whether the same thing

does not hold good as to their celebrated industrial and economical

labours also. Their great work of this kind is, of course, their

free-trade policy. This policy, as having enabled the poor man to

eat untaxed bread, and as having wonderfully augmented trade, we

[229] are accustomed to speak of with a kind of solemnity; it is

chiefly on their having been our leaders in this policy that Mr.

Bright founds for himself and his friends the claim, so often

asserted by him, to be considered guides of the blind, teachers of

the ignorant, benefactors slowly and laboriously developing in the

Conservative party and in the country that which Mr. Bright is fond

of calling the growth of intelligence,--the object, as is well known,

of all the friends of culture also, and the great end and aim of the

culture that we preach. Now, having first saluted free-trade and its

doctors with all respect, let us see whether even here, too, our

Liberal friends do not pursue their operations in a mechanical way,

without reference to any firm intelligible law of things, to human

life as a whole, and human happiness; and whether it is not more for

our good, at this particular moment at any rate, if, instead of

worshipping free-trade with them Hebraistically, as a kind of fetish,

and helping them to pursue it as an end in and for itself, we turn

the free stream of our thought upon their treatment of it, and see

how this is related to the intelligible law of human life, and to

national well- [230] being and happiness. In short, suppose we

Hellenise a little with free-trade, as we Hellenised with the Real

Estate Intestacy Bill, and with the disestablishment of the Irish

Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to religious

establishments and endowments, and see whether what our reprovers

beautifully call ministering to the diseased spirit of our time is

best done by the Hellenising method of proceeding, or by the other.

But first let us understand how the policy of free-trade really

shapes itself for our Liberal friends, and how they practically

employ it as an instrument of national happiness and salvation. For

as we said that it seemed clearly right to prevent the Church

property of Ireland from being all taken for the benefit of the

Church of a small minority, so it seems clearly right that the poor

man should eat untaxed bread, and, generally, that restrictions and

regulations which, for the supposed benefit of some particular person

or class of persons, make the price of things artificially high here,

or artificially low there, and interfere with the natural flow of

trade and commerce, should be done away with. But in the policy of

our Liberal friends free-trade [231] means more than this, and is

specially valued as a stimulant to the production of wealth, as they

call it, and to the increase of the trade, business, and population

of the country. We have already seen how these things,--trade,

business, and population,--are mechanically pursued by us as ends

precious in themselves, and are worshipped as what we call fetishes;

and Mr. Bright, I have already said, when he wishes to give the

working-class a true sense of what makes glory and greatness, tells

it to look at the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the

manufactures it has produced. So to this idea of glory and greatness

the free-trade which our Liberal friends extol so solemnly and

devoutly has served,--to the increase of trade, business, and

population; and for this it is prized. Therefore, the untaxing of

the poor man's bread has, with this view of national happiness, been

used, not so much to make the existing poor man's bread cheaper or

more abundant, but rather to create more poor men to eat it; so that

we cannot precisely say that we have fewer poor men than we had

before free-trade, but we can say with truth that we have many more

centres of industry, as they are called, and much [232] more

business, population, and manufactures. And if we are sometimes a

little troubled by our multitude of poor men, yet we know the

increase of manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing

in itself, and our free-trade policy begets such an admirable

movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here,

while we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are quite

dazzled and borne away, and more and more industrial movement is

called for, and our social progress seems to become one triumphant

and enjoyable course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly,

outrunning the constable.

If, however, taking some other criterion of man's well-being than the

cities he has built and the manufactures he has produced, we persist

in thinking that our social progress would be happier if there were

not so many of us so very poor, and in busying ourselves with notions

of in some way or other adjusting the poor man and business one to

the other, and not multiplying the one and the other mechanically and

blindly, then our Liberal friends, the appointed doctors of free-

trade, take us up very sharply. "Art is long," says The Times, "and

life [233] is short; for the most part we settle things first and

understand them afterwards. Let us have as few theories as possible;

what is wanted is not the light of speculation. If nothing worked

well of which the theory was not perfectly understood, we should be

in sad confusion. The relations of labour and capital, we are told,

are not understood, yet trade and commerce, on the whole, work

satisfactorily." I quote from The Times of only the other day. But

thoughts like these, as I have often pointed out, are thoroughly

British thoughts, and we have been familiar with them for years.

Or, if we want more of a philosophy of the matter than this, our

free-trade friends have two axioms for us, axioms laid down by their

justly esteemed doctors, which they think ought to satisfy us

entirely. One is, that, other things being equal, the more

population increases, the more does production increase to keep pace

with it; because men by their numbers and contact call forth all

manner of activities and resources in one another and in nature,

which, when men are few and sparse, are never developed. The other

is, that, although population always tends to equal the means of

[234] subsistence, yet people's notions of what subsistence is

enlarge as civilisation advances, and take in a number of things

beyond the bare necessaries of life; and thus, therefore, is supplied

whatever check on population is needed. But the error of our friends

is just, perhaps, that they apply axioms of this sort as if they were

self-acting laws which will put themselves into operation without

trouble or planning on our part, if we will only pursue free-trade,

business, and population zealously and staunchly. Whereas the real

truth is, that, however the case might be under other circumstances,

yet in fact, as we now manage the matter, the enlarged conception of

what is included in subsistence does not operate to prevent the

bringing into the world of numbers of people who but just attain to

the barest necessaries of life or who even fail to attain to them;

while, again, though production may increase as population increases,

yet it seems that the production may be of such a kind, and so

related, or rather non-related, to population, that the population

may be little the better for it. For instance, with the increase of

population since Queen Elizabeth's time the production of silk-

stockings has wonderfully increased, and silk- [235] stockings have

become much cheaper and procurable in much greater abundance by many

more people, and tend perhaps, as population and manufactures

increase, to get cheaper and cheaper, and at last to become,

according to Bastiat's favourite image, a common free property of the

human race, like light and air. But bread and bacon have not become

much cheaper with the increase of population since Queen Elizabeth's

time, nor procurable in much greater abundance by many more people;

neither do they seem at all to promise to become, like light and air,

a common free property of the human race. And if bread and bacon

have not kept pace with our population, and we have many more people

in want of them now than in Queen Elizabeth's time, it seems vain to

tell us that silk-stockings have kept pace with our population, or

even more than kept pace with it, and that we are to get our comfort

out of that. In short, it turns out that our pursuit of free-trade,

as of so many other things, has been too mechanical. We fix upon

some object, which in this case is the production of wealth, and the

increase of manufactures, population, and commerce through free-

[236] trade, as a kind of one thing needful, or end in itself, and

then we pursue it staunchly and mechanically, and say that it is our

duty to pursue it staunchly and mechanically, not to see how it is

related to the whole intelligible law of things and to full human

perfection, or to treat it as the piece of machinery, of varying

value as its relations to the intelligible law of things vary, which

it really is.

So it is of no use to say to The Times, and to our Liberal friends

rejoicing in the possession of their talisman of free-trade, that

about one in nineteen of our population is a pauper, and that, this

being so, trade and commerce can hardly be said to prove by their

satisfactory working that it matters nothing whether the relations

between labour and capital are understood or not; nay, that we can

hardly be said not to be in sad confusion. For here comes in our

faith in the staunch mechanical pursuit of a fixed object, and covers

itself with that imposing and colossal necessitarianism of The Times

which we have before noticed. And this necessitarianism, taking for

granted that an increase in trade and population is a good in itself,

one of the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances of [237]

human happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the tide of trade and

business, which, on the whole, steadily mounts, are inevitable and

not to be quarrelled with. This firm philosophy I seek to call to

mind when I am in the East of London, whither my avocations often

lead me; and, indeed, to fortify myself against the depressing sights

which on these occasions assail us, I have transcribed from The Times

one strain of this kind, full of the finest economical doctrine, and

always carry it about with me. The passage is this:--

"The East End is the most commercial, the most industrial, the most

fluctuating region of the metropolis. It is always the first to

suffer; for it is the creature of prosperity, and falls to the ground

the instant there is no wind to bear it up. The whole of that region

is covered with huge docks, shipyards, manufactories, and a

wilderness of small houses, all full of life and happiness in brisk

times, but in dull times withered and lifeless, like the deserts we

read of in the East. Now their brief spring is over. There is no

one to blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!"

We must all agree that it is impossible that [238] anything can be

firmer than this, or show a surer faith in the working of free-trade,

as our Liberal friends understand and employ it.

But, if we still at all doubt whether the indefinite multiplication

of manufactories and small houses can be such an absolute good in

itself as to counterbalance the indefinite multiplication of poor

people, we shall learn that this multiplication of poor people, too,

is an absolute good in itself, and the result of divine and beautiful

laws. This is indeed a favourite thesis with our Philistine friends,

and I have already noticed the pride and gratitude with which they

receive certain articles in The Times, dilating in thankful and

solemn language on the majestic growth of our population. But I

prefer to quote now, on this topic, the words of an ingenious young

Scotch writer, Mr. Robert Buchanan, because he invests with so much

imagination and poetry this current idea of the blessed and even

divine character which the multiplying of population is supposed in

itself to have. "We move to multiplicity," says Mr. Robert Buchanan.

"If there is one quality which seems God's, and his exclusively, it

seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, [239] that passionate love of

distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added

seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment

of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never

enough. Life, life, life,--faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill

every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole

earth breeds, and God glories."

It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity

exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine,

and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him;

yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these

beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London,

and often read them there. They are quite in agreement with the

popular language one is accustomed to hear about children and large

families, which describes children as sent. And a line of poetry

which Mr. Robert Buchanan throws in presently after the poetical

prose I have quoted:--

'Tis the old story of the fig-leaf time--

this fine line, too, naturally connects itself, when one is in the

East of London, with the idea of God's [240] desire to swarm the

earth with beings; because the swarming of the earth with beings does

indeed, in the East of London, so seem to revive

. . . the old story of the fig-leaf time--

such a number of the people one meets there having hardly a rag to

cover them; and the more the swarming goes on, the more it promises

to revive this old story. And when the story is perfectly revived,

the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too,

no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces,

which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God's desire they should be, and

which every one must perceive they are not at present, but, on the

contrary, very miserable.

But to prevent all this philosophy and poetry from quite running away

with us, and making us think with The Times, and our practical

Liberal free-traders, and the British Philistines generally, that the

increase of small houses and manufactories, or the increase of

population, are absolute goods in themselves, to be mechanically

pursued, and to be worshipped like fetishes,--to prevent this, we

have got that notion of ours immoveably fixed, of which I [241] have

long ago spoken, the notion that culture, or the study of perfection,

leads us to conceive of no perfection as being real which is not a

general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have

to do. Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, that we

are indeed, as our religion says, members of one body, and if one

member suffer, all the members suffer with it; individual perfection

is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along

with us. "The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world,"

says the wise man. And to this effect that excellent and often

quoted guide of ours, Bishop Wilson, has some striking words:--"It is

not," says he, "so much our neighbour's interest as our own that we

love him." And again he says: "Our salvation does in some measure

depend upon that of others." And the author of the Imitation puts

the same thing admirably when he says:--"Obscurior etiam via ad

coelum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum coelorum quaerere

curabant,"+--the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection,

the harder that way is to find. So all our fellow-men, in the East

of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress

towards perfection, [242] if we ourselves really, as we profess, want

to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any

machinery, such as manufactures or population,--which are not, like

perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so,--

create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant

human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and

perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their

degradation and wretchedness. But evidently the conception of free-

trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which

they think they have found the secret of national prosperity,--

evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of

wealth, and the mere mechanical multiplying, for this end, of

manufactures and population, threatens to create for us, if it has

not created already, those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of

sunken people,--one pauper, at the present moment, for every nineteen

of us,--to the existence of which we are, as we have seen, absolutely

forbidden to reconcile ourselves, in spite of all that the philosophy

of The Times and the poetry of Mr. Robert Buchanan may say to

persuade us.

[243] And though Hebraism, following its best and highest instinct,--

identical, as we have seen, with that of Hellenism in its final aim,

the aim of perfection,--teaches us this very clearly; and though from

Hebraising counsellors,--the Bible, Bishop Wilson, the author of the

Imitation,--I have preferred (as well I may, for from this rock of

Hebraism we are all hewn!) to draw the texts which we use to bring

home to our minds this teaching; yet Hebraism seems powerless, almost

as powerless as our free-trading Liberal friends, to deal

efficaciously with our ever-accumulating masses of pauperism, and to

prevent their accumulating still more. Hebraism builds churches,

indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above

all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of The Times,

and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable; but with

regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to

the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as

our free-trading Liberal friends. Hebraism, with that mechanical and

misleading use of the letter of Scripture on which we have already

commented, is governed by such texts as: Be fruitful and multiply,+

the edict of [244] God's law, as Mr. Chambers would say; or by the

declaration of what he would call God's words in the Psalms, that the

man who has a great number of children is thereby made happy. And in

conjunction with such texts as these it is apt to place another text:

The poor shall never cease out of the land.+ Thus Hebraism is

conducted to nearly the same notion as the popular mind and as Mr.

Robert Buchanan, that children are sent, and that the divine nature

takes a delight in swarming the East End of London with paupers.

Only, when they are perishing in their helplessness and wretchedness,

it asserts the Christian duty of succouring them, instead of saying,

like The Times: "Now their brief spring is over; there is nobody to

blame for this; it is the result of Nature's simplest laws!" But,

like The Times, Hebraism despairs of any help from knowledge and says

that "what is wanted is not the light of speculation." I remember,

only the other day, a good man, looking with me upon a multitude of

children who were gathered before us in one of the most miserable

regions of London,--children eaten up with disease, half-sized, half-

fed, half-clothed, neglected by their parents, without health,

without [245] home, without hope,--said to me: "The one thing really

needful is to teach these little ones to succour one another, if only

with a cup of cold water; but now, from one end of the country to the

other, one hears nothing but the cry for knowledge, knowledge,

knowledge!" And yet surely, so long as these children are there in

these festering masses, without health, without home, without hope,

and so long as their multitude is perpetually swelling, charged with

misery they must still be for themselves, charged with misery they

must still be for us, whether they help one another with a cup of

cold water or no; and the knowledge how to prevent their accumulating

is necessary, even to give their moral life and growth a fair chance!

May we not, therefore, say, that neither the true Hebraism of this

good man, willing to spend and be spent for these sunken multitudes,

nor what I may call the spurious Hebraism of our free-trading Liberal

friends,--mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of

wealth and of the increase of manufactures and population, and

looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes

on,--avail us much here; and that here, again, what we [246] want is

Hellenism, the letting our consciousness play freely and simply upon

the facts before us, and listening to what it tells us of the

intelligible law of things as concerns them? And surely what it

tells us is, that a man's children are not really sent, any more than

the pictures upon his wall, or the horses in his stable, are sent;

and that to bring people into the world, when one cannot afford to

keep them and oneself decently and not too precariously, or to bring

more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is,

whatever The Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may say, by no means an

accomplishment of the divine will or a fulfilment of Nature's

simplest laws, but is just as wrong, just as contrary to reason and

the will of God, as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or

pictures, when he cannot afford them, or to have more of them than he

can afford; and that, in the one case as in the other, the larger the

scale on which the violation of reason's laws is practised, and the

longer it is persisted in, the greater must be the confusion and

final trouble. Surely no laudations of free-trade, no meetings of

bishops and clergy in the East End of London, no reading of papers

and reports, can tell [247] us anything about our social condition

which it more concerns us to know than that! and not only to know,

but habitually to have the knowledge present, and to act upon it as

one acts upon the knowledge that water wets and fire burns! And not

only the sunken populace of our great cities are concerned to know

it, and the pauper twentieth of our population; we Philistines of the

middle-class, too, are concerned to know it, and all who have to set

themselves to make progress in perfection.

But we all know it already! some one will say; it is the simplest law

of prudence. But how little reality must there be in our knowledge

of it; how little can we be putting it in practice; how little is it

likely to penetrate among the poor and struggling masses of our

population, and to better our condition, so long as an unintelligent

Hebraism of one sort keeps repeating as an absolute eternal word of

God the psalm-verse which says that the man who has a great many

children is happy; or an unintelligent Hebraism of another sort keeps

assigning as an absolute proof of national prosperity the multiplying

of manufactures and population! Surely, the one set of Hebraisers

have [248] to learn that their psalm-verse was composed at the

resettlement of Jerusalem after the Captivity, when the Jews of

Jerusalem were a handful, an undermanned garrison, and every child

was a blessing; and that the word of God, or the voice of the divine

order of things, declares the possession of a great many children to

be a blessing only when it really is so! And the other set of

Hebraisers, have they not to learn that if they call their private

acquaintances imprudent and unlucky, when, with no means of support

for them or with precarious means, they have a large family of

children, then they ought not to call the State well managed and

prosperous merely because its manufactures and its citizens multiply,

if the manufactures, which bring new citizens into existence just as

much as if they had actually begotten them, bring more of them into

existence than they can maintain, or are too precarious to go on

maintaining those whom for a while they maintained? Hellenism,

surely, or the habit of fixing our mind upon the intelligible law of

things, is most salutary if it makes us see that the only absolute

good, the only absolute and eternal object prescribed to us by God's

law, or the divine order of [249] things, is the progress towards

perfection,--our own progress towards it and the progress of

humanity. And therefore, for every individual man, and for every

society of men, the possession and multiplication of children, like

the possession and multiplication of horses and pictures, is to be

accounted good or bad, not in itself, but with reference to this

object and the progress towards it. And as no man is to be excused

in having horses or pictures, if his having them hinders his own or

others' progress towards perfection and makes them lead a servile and

ignoble life, so is no man to be excused for having children if his

having them makes him or others lead this. Plain thoughts of this

kind are surely the spontaneous product of our consciousness, when it

is allowed to play freely and disinterestedly upon the actual facts

of our social condition, and upon our stock notions and stock habits

in respect to it. Firmly grasped and simply uttered, they are more

likely, one cannot but think, to better that condition, and to

diminish our formidable rate of one pauper to every nineteen of us,

than is the Hebraising and mechanical pursuit of free-trade by our

Liberal friends.

So that, here as elsewhere, the practical operations [250] of our

Liberal friends, by which they set so much store, and in which they

invite us to join them and to show what Mr. Bright calls a

commendable interest, do not seem to us so practical for real good as

they think; and our Liberal friends seem to us themselves to need to

Hellenise, as we say, a little,--that is, to examine into the nature

of real good, and to listen to what their consciousness tells them

about it,--rather than to pursue with such heat and confidence their

present practical operations. And it is clear that they have no just

cause, so far as regards several operations of theirs which we have

canvassed, to reproach us with delicate Conservative scepticism; for

often by Hellenising we seem to subvert stock Conservative notions

and usages more effectually than they subvert them by Hebraising.

But, in truth, the free spontaneous play of consciousness with which

culture tries to float our stock habits of thinking and acting, is by

its very nature, as has been said, disinterested. Sometimes the

result of floating them may be agreeable to this party, sometimes to

that; now it may be unwelcome to our so-called Liberals, now to our

so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above all, to

float them, to [251] prevent their being stiff and stark pieces of

petrifaction any longer. It is mere Hebraising, if we stop short,

and refuse to let our consciousness play freely, whenever we or our

friends do not happen to like what it discovers to us. This is to

make the Liberal party, or the Conservative party, our one thing

needful, instead of human perfection; and we have seen what mischief

arises from making an even greater thing than the Liberal or the

Conservative party,--the predominance of the moral side in man,--our

one thing needful. But wherever the free play of our consciousness

leads us, we shall follow; believing that in this way we shall tend

to make good at all points what is wanting to us, and so shall be

brought nearer to our complete human perfection.

Thus we may often, perhaps, praise much that a so-called Liberal

thinks himself forbidden to praise, and yet blame much that a so-

called Conservative thinks himself forbidden to blame, because these

are both of them partisans, and no partisan can afford to be thus

disinterested. But we who are not partisans can afford it; and so,

after we have seen what Nonconformists lose by being locked up in

their New Road forms of religious institution, [252] we can let

ourselves see, on the other hand, how their ministers, in a time of

movement of ideas like our present time, are apt to be more exempt

than the ministers of a great Church establishment from that self-

confidence, and sense of superiority to such a movement, which are

natural to a powerful hierarchy; and which in Archdeacon Denison, for

instance, seem almost carried to such a pitch that they may become,

one cannot but fear, his spiritual ruin. But seeing this does not

dispose us, therefore, to lock up all the nation in forms of worship

of the New Road type; but it points us to the quite new ideal, of

combining grand and national forms of worship with an openness and

movement of mind not yet found in any hierarchy. So, again, if we

see what is called ritualism making conquests in our Puritan middle-

class, we may rejoice that portions of this class should have become

alive to the aesthetical weakness of their position, even although

they have not yet become alive to the intellectual weakness of it.

In Puritanism, on the other hand, we can respect that idea of dealing

sincerely with oneself, which is at once the great force of

Puritanism,--Puritanism's great superiority over all products, like

ritualism, of our Catholicising [253] tendencies,--and also an idea

rich in the latent seeds of intellectual promise. But we do this,

without on that account hiding from ourselves that Puritanism has by

Hebraising misapplied that idea, has as yet developed none or hardly

one of those seeds, and that its triumph at its present stage of

development would be baneful.

Everything, in short, confirms us in the doctrine, so unpalatable to

the believers in action, that our main business at the present moment

is not so much to work away at certain crude reforms of which we have

already the scheme in our own mind, as to create, through the help of

that culture which at the very outset we began by praising and

recommending, a frame of mind out of which really fruitful reforms

may with time grow. At any rate, we ourselves must put up with our

friends' impatience, and with their reproaches against cultivated

inaction, and must still decline to lend a hand to their practical

operations, until we, for our own part at least, have grown a little

clearer about the nature of real good, and have arrived nearer to a

condition of mind out of which really fruitful and solid operations

may spring.

In the meanwhile, since our Liberal friends keep [254] loudly and

resolutely assuring us that their actual operations at present are

fruitful and solid, let us in each case keep testing these operations

in the simple way we have indicated, by letting the natural stream of

our consciousness flow over them freely; and if they stand this test

successfully, then let us give them our commendable interest, but not

else. For example. Our Liberal friends assure us, at the very top

of their voices, that their present actual operation for the

disestablishment of the Irish Church is fruitful and solid. But what

if, on testing it, the truth appears to be, that the statesmen and

reasonable people of both parties wished for much the same thing,--

the fair apportionment of the church property of Ireland among the

principal religious bodies there; but that, behind the statesmen and

reasonable people, there was, on one side, a mass of Tory prejudice,

and, on the other, a mass of Nonconformist prejudice, to which such

an arrangement was unpalatable? Well, the natural way, one thinks,

would have been for the statesmen and reasonable people of both sides

to have united, and to have allayed and dissipated, so far as they

could, the resistance of their respective extremes, and where [255]

they could not, to have confronted it in concert. But we see that,

instead of this, Liberal statesmen waited to trip up their rivals, if

they proposed the arrangement which both knew to be reasonable, by

means of the prejudice of their own Nonconformist extreme; and then,

themselves proposing an arrangement to flatter this prejudice, made

the other arrangement, which they themselves knew to be reasonable,

out of the question; and drove their rivals in their turn to blow up

with all their might, in the hope of baffling them, a great fire,

among their own Tory extreme, of fierce prejudice and religious

bigotry,--a fire which, once kindled, may always very easily spread

further? If, I say, on testing the present operation of our Liberal

friends for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the truth about

it appears to be very much this, then, I think,--even with a

triumphant Liberal majority, and with our Liberal friends making

impassioned appeals to us to take a commendable interest in their

operation and them, and to rally round what Sir Henry Hoare (who may

be described, perhaps, as a Barbarian converted to Philistinism, as

I, on the other hand, seem to be a Philistine converted to culture)

finely calls the conscientiousness of a [256] Gladstone and the

intellect of a Bright,--it is rather our duty to abstain, and,

instead of lending a hand to the operation of our Liberal friends, to

do what we can to abate and dissolve the mass of prejudice, Tory or

Nonconformist, which makes so doubtfully begotten and equivocal an

operation as the present, producible and possible.

And so we bring to an end what we had to say in praise of culture,

and in evidence of its special utility for the circumstances in which

we find ourselves, and the confusion which environs us. Through

culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but even to

safety. Resolutely refusing to lend a hand to the imperfect

operations of our Liberal friends, disregarding their impatience,

taunts, and reproaches, firmly bent on trying to find in the

intelligible law of things a firmer and sounder basis for future

practice than any which we have at present, and believing this search

and discovery to be, for our generation and circumstances, of yet

more vital and pressing importance than practice itself, we

nevertheless may do [257] more, perhaps, we poor disparaged followers

of culture, to make the actual present, and the frame of society in

which we live, solid and seaworthy, than all which our bustling

politicians can do. For we have seen how much of our disorders and

perplexities is due to the disbelief, among the classes and

combinations of men, Barbarian or Philistine, which have hitherto

governed our society, in right reason, in a paramount best self; to

the inevitable decay and break-up of the organisations by which,

asserting and expressing in these organisations their ordinary self

only, they have so long ruled us; and to their irresolution, when the

society, which their conscience tells them they have made and still

manage not with right reason but with their ordinary self, is rudely

shaken, in offering resistance to its subverters. But for us,--who

believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating

and elevating our best self, in the progress of humanity towards

perfection,--for us the framework of society, that theatre on which

this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever

administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from the

tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, [258] we

steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy

and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and

without society there can be no human perfection.

With me, indeed, this rule of conduct is hereditary. I remember my

father, in one of his unpublished letters written more than forty

years ago, when the political and social state of the country was

gloomy and troubled, and there were riots in many places, goes on,

after strongly insisting on the badness and foolishness of the

government, and on the harm and dangerousness of our feudal and

aristocratical constitution of society, and ends thus: "As for

rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right

one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the

Tarpeian Rock!" And this opinion we can never forsake, however our

Liberal friends may think a little rioting, and what they call

popular demonstrations, useful sometimes to their own interests and

to the interests of the valuable practical operations they have in

hand, and however they may preach the right of an Englishman to be

left to do as far as possible what he likes, and the duty of his

government to indulge him and connive as much as [259] possible and

abstain from all harshness of repression. And even when they

artfully show us operations which are undoubtedly precious, such as

the abolition of the slave-trade, and ask us if, for their sake,

foolish and obstinate governments may not wholesomely be frightened

by a little disturbance, the good design in view and the difficulty

of overcoming opposition to it being considered,--still we say no,

and that monster processions in the streets and forcible irruptions

into the parks, even in professed support of this good design, ought

to be unflinchingly forbidden and repressed; and that far more is

lost than is gained by permitting them. Because a State in which law

is authoritative and sovereign, a firm and settled course of public

order, is requisite if man is to bring to maturity anything precious

and lasting now, or to found anything precious and lasting for the

future.

Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the

State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is

the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and

designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish. But as,

believing in right reason, and having faith in the progress of

humanity [260] towards perfection, and ever labouring for this end,

we grow to have clearer sight of the ideas of right reason, and of

the elements and helps of perfection, and come gradually to fill the

framework of the State with them, to fashion its internal composition

and all its laws and institutions conformably to them, and to make

the State more and more the expression, as we say, of our best self,

which is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and

ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and peaceful, and the

same for all mankind,--with what aversion shall we not then regard

anarchy, with what firmness shall we not check it, when there is so

much that is so precious which it will endanger! So that, for the

sake of the present, but far more for the sake of the future, the

lovers of culture are unswervingly and with a good conscience the

opposers of anarchy. And not as the Barbarians and Philistines,

whose honesty and whose sense of humour make them shrink, as we have

seen, from treating the State as too serious a thing, and from giving

it too much power;--for indeed the only State they know of, and think

they administer, is the expression of their ordinary self; and though

the headstrong and violent [261] extreme among them might gladly arm

this with full authority, yet their virtuous mean is, as we have

said, pricked in conscience at doing this, and so our Barbarian

Secretaries of State let the Park railings be broken down, and our

Philistine Alderman-Colonels let the London roughs rob and beat the

bystanders. But we, beholding in the State no expression of our

ordinary self, but even already, as it were, the appointed frame and

prepared vessel of our best self, and, for the future, our best

self's powerful, beneficent, and sacred expression and organ,--we are

willing and resolved, even now, to strengthen against anarchy the

trembling hands of our Barbarian Home Secretaries, and the feeble

knees of our Philistine Alderman-Colonels; and to tell them, that it

is not really in behalf of their own ordinary self that they are

called to protect the Park railings, and to suppress the London

roughs, but in behalf of the best self both of themselves and of all

of us in the future.

Nevertheless, though for resisting anarchy the lovers of culture may

prize and employ fire and strength, yet they must, at the same time,

bear constantly in mind that it is not at this moment true, what the

majority of people tell us, that the world [262] wants fire and

strength more than sweetness and light, and that things are for the

most part to be settled first and understood afterwards. We have

seen how much of our present perplexities and confusion this untrue

notion of the majority of people amongst us has caused, and tends to

perpetuate. Therefore the true business of the friends of culture

now is, to dissipate this false notion, to spread the belief in right

reason and in a firm intelligible law of things, and to get men to

allow their thought and consciousness to play on their stock notions

and habits disinterestedly and freely; to get men to try, in

preference to staunchly acting with imperfect knowledge, to obtain

some sounder basis of knowledge on which to act. This is what the

friends and lovers of culture have to do, however the believers in

action may grow impatient with us for saying so, and may insist on

our lending a hand to their practical operations, and showing a

commendable interest in them.

To this insistence we must indeed turn a deaf ear. But neither, on

the other hand, must the friends of culture expect to take the

believers in action by storm, or to be visibly and speedily

important, and to rule and cut a figure in the world. Aristotle

says, [263] that those for whom ideas and the pursuit of the

intelligible law of things can have much attraction, are principally

the young, filled with generous spirit and with a passion for

perfection; but the mass of mankind, he says, follow seeming goods

for real, bestowing hardly a thought upon true sweetness and light;--

"and to their lives," he adds mournfully, "who can give another and a

better rhythm?" But, although those chiefly attracted by sweetness

and light will probably always be the young and enthusiastic, and

culture must not hope to take the mass of mankind by storm, yet we

will not therefore, for our own day and for our own people, admit and

rest in the desponding sentence of Aristotle. For is not this the

right crown of the long discipline of Hebraism, and the due fruit of

mankind's centuries of painful schooling in self-conquest, and the

just reward, above all, of the strenuous energy of our own nation and

kindred in dealing honestly with itself and walking steadfastly

according to the best light it knows,--that, when in the fulness of

time it has reason and beauty offered to it, and the law of things as

they really are, it should at last walk by this true light with the

same staunchness [264] and zeal with which it formerly walked by its

imperfect light; and thus man's two great natural forces, Hebraism

and Hellenism, should no longer be dissociated and rival, but should

be a joint force of right thinking and strong doing to carry him on

towards perfection? This is what the lovers of culture may perhaps

dare to augur for such a nation as ours. Therefore, however great

the changes to be accomplished, and however dense the array of

Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we will neither despair on the

one hand, nor, on the other, threaten violent revolution and change.

But we will look forward cheerfully and hopefully to "a revolution,"

as the Duke of Wellington said, "by due course of law;" though not

exactly such laws as our Liberal friends are now, with their actual

lights, fond of offering us.

But if despondency and violence are both of them forbidden to the

believer in culture, yet neither, on the other hand, is public life

and direct political action much permitted to him. For it is his

business, as we have seen, to get the present believers in action,

and lovers of political talking and doing, to make a return upon

their own minds, scrutinise their stock notions and habits much more,

value their present [265] talking and doing much less; in order that,

by learning to think more clearly, they may come at last to act less

confusedly. But how shall we persuade our Barbarian to hold lightly

to his feudal usages; how shall we persuade our Nonconformist that

his time spent in agitating for the abolition of church-rates would

have been better spent in getting worthier ideas than churchmen have

of God and the ordering of the world, or his time spent in battling

for voluntaryism in education better spent in learning to value and

found a public and national culture; how shall we persuade, finally,

our Alderman-Colonel not to be content with sitting in the hall of

judgment or marching at the head of his men of war, without some

knowledge how to perform judgment and how to direct men of war,--how,

I say, shall we persuade all these of this, if our Alderman-Colonel

sees that we want to get his leading-staff and his scales of justice

for our own hands; or the Nonconformist, that we want for ourselves

his platform; or the Barbarian, that we want for ourselves his pre-

eminency and function? Certainly they will be less slow to believe,

as we want them to believe, that the intelligible law of things has

in itself something desirable and [266] precious, and that all place,

function, and bustle are hollow goods without it, if they see that we

can content ourselves with it, and find in it our satisfaction,

without making it an instrument to give us for ourselves place,

function, and bustle.

And although Mr. Sidgwick says that social usefulness really means

"losing oneself in a mass of disagreeable, hard, mechanical details,"

and though all the believers in action are fond of asserting the same

thing, yet, as to lose ourselves is not what we want, but to find the

intelligible law of things, this assertion too we shall not blindly

accept, but shall sift and try it a little first. And if we see that

because the believers in action, forgetting Goethe's maxim, "to act

is easy, to think is hard," imagine there is some wonderful virtue in

losing oneself in a mass of mechanical details, therefore they excuse

themselves from much thought about the clear ideas which ought to

govern these details, then we shall give our chief care and pains to

seeking out those ideas and to setting them forth; being persuaded,

that, if we have the ideas firm and clear, the mechanical details for

their execution will come a great deal more simply and easily than we

now [267] suppose. And even in education, where our Liberal friends

are now, with much zeal, bringing out their train of practical

operations and inviting all men to lend them a hand; and where, since

education is the road to culture, we might gladly lend them a hand

with their practical operations if we could lend them one anywhere;

yet, if we see that any German or Swiss or French law for education

rests on very clear ideas about the citizen's claim, in this matter,

upon the State, and the State's duty towards the citizen, but has its

mechanical details comparatively few and simple, while an English law

for the same concern is ruled by no clear idea about the citizen's

claim and the State's duty, but has, in compensation, a mass of

minute mechanical details about the number of members on a school-

committee, and how many shall be a quorum, and how they shall be

summoned, and how often they shall meet,--then we must conclude that

our nation stands in more need of clear ideas on the main matter than

of laboured details about the accessories of the matter, and that we

do more service by trying to help it to the ideas, than by lending it

a hand with the details. So while Mr. Samuel Morley and his friends

talk [268] of changing their policy on education, not for the sake of

modelling it on more sound ideas, but "for fear the management of

education should be taken out of their hands," we shall not much care

for taking the management out of their hands and getting it into

ours; but rather we shall try and make them perceive, that to model

education on sound ideas is of more importance than to have the

management of it in one's own hands ever so fully.

At this exciting juncture, then, while so many of the lovers of new

ideas, somewhat weary, as we too are, of the stock performances of

our Liberal friends upon the political stage, are disposed to rush

valiantly upon this public stage themselves, we cannot at all think

that for a wise lover of new ideas this stage is the right one.

Plenty of people there will be without us,--country gentlemen in

search of a club, demagogues in search of a tub, lawyers in search of

a place, industrialists in search of gentility,--who will come from

the east and from the west, and will sit down at that Thyesteän

banquet of clap-trap, which English public life for these many years

past has been. Because, so long as those old organisations, of which

we have seen [269] the insufficiency,--those expressions of our

ordinary self, Barbarian or Philistine,--have force anywhere, they

will have force in Parliament. There, the man whom the Barbarians

send, cannot but be impelled to please the Barbarians' ordinary self,

and their natural taste for the bathos; and the man whom the

Philistines send, cannot but be impelled to please those of the

Philistines. Parliamentary Conservatism will and must long mean

this, that the Barbarians should keep their heritage; and

Parliamentary Liberalism, that the Barbarians should pass away, as

they will pass away, and that into their heritage the Philistines

should enter. This seems, indeed, to be the true and authentic

promise of which our Liberal friends and Mr. Bright believe

themselves the heirs, and the goal of that great man's labours.

Presently, perhaps, Mr. Odger and Mr. Bradlaugh will be there with

their mission to oust both Barbarians and Philistines, and to get the

heritage for the Populace. We, on the other hand, are for giving the

heritage neither to the Barbarians nor to the Philistines, nor yet to

the Populace; but we are for the transformation of each and all of

these according to the law of perfection.

[270] Through the length and breadth of our nation a sense,--vague

and obscure as yet,--of weariness with the old organisations, of

desire for this transformation, works and grows. In the House of

Commons the old organisations must inevitably be most enduring and

strongest, the transformation must inevitably be longest in showing

itself; and it may truly be averred, therefore, that at the present

juncture the centre of movement is not in the House of Commons. It

is in the fermenting mind of the nation; and his is for the next

twenty years the real influence who can address himself to this.

Pericles was perhaps the most perfect public speaker who ever lived,

for he was the man who most perfectly combined thought and wisdom

with feeling and eloquence. Yet Plato brings in Alcibiades

declaring, that men went away from the oratory of Pericles, saying it

was very fine, it was very good, and afterwards thinking no more

about it; but they went away from hearing Socrates talk, he says,

with the point of what he had said sticking fast in their minds, and

they could not get rid of it. Socrates is poisoned and dead; but in

his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible

Socrates, [271] in that power of a disinterested play of

consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise

and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example,

and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who

leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and

who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the

present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert

with the vital working of men's minds, and more effectually

significant, than any House of Commons' orator, or practical operator

in politics.

Every one is now boasting of what he has done to educate men's minds

and to give things the course they are taking. Mr. Disraeli

educates, Mr. Bright educates, Mr. Beales educates. We, indeed,

pretend to educate no one, for we are still engaged in trying to

clear and educate ourselves. But we are sure that the endeavour to

reach, through culture, the firm intelligible law of things, we are

sure that the detaching ourselves from our stock notions and habits,

that a more free play of consciousness, an increased desire for

sweetness and light, and all the bent which we call [272]

Hellenising, is the master-impulse now of the life of our nation and

of humanity,--somewhat obscurely perhaps for this moment, but

decisively for the immediate future; and that those who work for this

are the sovereign educators. Docile echoes of the eternal voice,

pliant organs of the infinite will, they are going along with the

essential movement of the world; and this is their strength, and

their happy and divine fortune. For if the believers in action, who

are so impatient with us and call us effeminate, had had the same

fortune, they would, no doubt, have surpassed us in this sphere of

vital influence by all the superiority of their genius and energy

over ours. But now we go the way the world is going, while they

abolish the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists'

antipathy to establishments, or they enable a man to marry his

deceased wife's sister.

THE END.

NOTES

201. +John 18:36. "Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world:

if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that

I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from

hence." King James Bible.

219. +Proverbs 26:8. "As he that bindeth a stone in a sling, so is

he that giveth honour to a fool." King James Bible.

241. +Arnold refers to fourteenth-century priest Thomas à Kempis.

The Benham translation and a modern English translation of the

Imitatio are currently available from the College of St. Benedict at

Saint John's University Internet Theology Resources site. See also

the Benham text link.

243. +Genesis 1:21-22. "And God created great whales, and every

living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth

abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:

and God saw that

it was good. / And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and

multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in

the earth." King James Bible.

244. +Deuteronomy 15:11. "For the poor shall never cease out of the

land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand

wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land."