Transcribed from the 1895 Jarrold and Sons edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library,
UK, for kindly allowing their copy to be used for this transcription.
“This is the condition of humanity; we are placed as it were in an
intellectual twilight where we discover but few things clearly, and
yet we see enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and more
discoveries.”—BOLINGBROKE.
Crying for the Light
or Fifty Years Ago
* * * * *
J Ewing Ritchie
Author of ‘East Anglia’
* * * * *
Vol 2
* * * * *
London: Jarrold and Sons
Warwick Lane E.C.
1895
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
CHAPTER PAGE
XI. THE STRUGGLES OF A SOUL 1
XII. IN LOW COMPANY 30
XIII. CONCERNING SAL 54
XIV. AN ENCOUNTER 73
XV. ELECTIONEERING 94
XVI. ELECTIONEERING AGAIN 114
XVII. QUIET TALKS 138
XVIII. THE IRISH PRASTE 176
XIX. WENTWORTH RETIRES 195
XX. A STORM BREWING 212
XXI. AN UNPLEASANT RENCONTRE 232
CHAPTER XI.
THE STRUGGLES OF A SOUL.
There comes to us all a time when we seek something for the heart to rely
on, to anchor to, when we see the hollowness of the world, the
deceitfulness of riches; how fleeting is all earthly pleasure, how great
is the need of spiritual strength, how, when the storm comes, we require
a shelter that can defy its utmost force. Out of the depths the heart of
man ever cries out for the living God. The actress Rose felt this as
much amid the glare of life and the triumphs of the stage as the monk in
his cloister or the hermit in his desert cell. Like all of us, in whom
the brute has not quenched the Divine light which lighteth everyone who
cometh into the world, she felt, as Wordsworth writes:
‘The world is too much with us, late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our power.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away a sordid boon.’
She felt, as we all must feel, that there is something more than this
feverish dream we call life—something greater and grander and more
enduring beyond. To her the heavens declared the glory of a God, and the
firmament showed forth His handiwork. To her day unto day uttered
speech, and night unto night showed forth knowledge. She had no wish to
shut out Divine speech. Her labour was how best to hear it, and most
quickly to obey. The history of humanity testifies to this one
all-pervading desire in ages most remote, in countries the most savage.
As the great Sir James Mackintosh wrote to Dr. Parr in 1799, after the
loss of his wife: ‘Governed by those feelings which have in every age and
region of the world actuated the human mind to seek relief, I find it in
the soothing hope and consolatory reflection that a benevolent wisdom
inflicts the chastisements, as well as bestows the enjoyments of human
life; that superintending goodness will one day enlighten the darkness
which surrounds our nature and hangs over our prospects; that this dreary
and wretched life is not the whole of man; that an animal so sagacious
and provident, and capable of such science and virtue, is not like the
beasts that perish; that there is a dwelling-place prepared for the
spirits of the just, and that the ways of God will yet be vindicated to
man.’ Our actress felt the same; she had, she felt, a soul to be saved,
a God to be loved, a heaven to be won.
But how? Ah! that was the question. Naturally she turned to the old
Church of Christendom, the Church that calls itself Catholic and
universal. She went to the priest; he showed her a bleeding Saviour, and
a burning, bottomless pit. She trembled as she stood in the old dim
cathedral, where no light of heaven ever came, where no voice of mercy
ever penetrated, where the whole air of the place was redolent of
priestcraft and artifice and sham.
‘You,’ screams the priest, ‘are all unjust, extortioners, adulterers,
dead in trespasses and sins. Give me money, and I will make it right
with the Almighty. Down on your marrow-bones, eat fish on a Friday,
count your beads, confess to me—a man no better than yourself—pay for
Masses. In my hand is the key to eternal joy; pay my fees, and the door
shall be unlocked, and you shall straightway go to paradise.’
Refuse, and he shows you an angry Jehovah, in His rage destroying a fair
world which He Himself had called into being and filled with life, and
sweeping millions into torments that never end. The sight is awful.
Happily, reason comes to the rescue, and the priest and the cathedral,
and the Mass and the music, the incense and wax lights, disappear.
Enter the State Church, not of the Romanist, but the Protestant, where
you are told you are made a child of God in baptism, where the cure of
souls is sold in the market-place, and where the Bishop, or overseer of
the Church, often is put into his high position because he is a relative
of a lord, or is a firm supporter of the Minister of the day. There is
no room for the anxious inquirer in a Church which rejoices in the
Athanasian Creed, and which regards all Free-Church life as schism. With
its pomp and wealth and power, with its well-paid clergy, in time past on
the side of the rich against the poor, of abuse and privilege against the
rights of the people and the progress of the nation, the Church has left
the masses whom it was paid to teach and save little better than heathen.
You ask, What has it to do with the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, the
carpenter’s son? What is it but an institution to give an air of
respectability to life, to confer a prestige on the church-goer, and to
lend an additional charm to a State ceremony? Is it not there
emphatically that, as a rule—to which there are splendid exceptions—
‘The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed;’
that is, if they need something more than a musical performance or a
conventional observance?
‘Do you mean to say,’ said the actress to a clergyman’s wife, ‘that you
can follow the psalms of the day, and ask God to crush your enemies and
make them perish for ever?’
‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘I always repeat them all. You know, one does not
believe exactly all one says. All you have to do is to give a general
assent.’
This was what the actress could not do. Her Bible was a constant
difficulty. She could believe it was the Word of God, but not all of it.
Its contradictions puzzled and perplexed her. Give it up, said her
worldly friends. Be happy in Agnosticism. Leave off thinking about the
hereafter and a God. Believe what you see and hear. Life is short; it
has not too much of joy in it. Be happy while you may.
In her distress she consulted a clergyman of the class more common now
than they were then, who reject the term Protestant, and whose aim is the
revival of what they call the Church Primitive and Apostolic.
‘You must be baptized,’ he said.
‘But I have been.’
‘Where?’
‘In a chapel.’
‘A mere form,’ was the reply. ‘Our Church teaches that man is made a
member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of
heaven, in and by holy baptism.’
‘I cannot see that.’
‘Then you are shut out, unless you are baptized, from the sacrament in
which the body and blood of Christ are given to every one who receives
the sacramental bread and wine.’
‘How do you prove that?’
‘Prove it: I don’t want to prove it. I fear you are in grievous error.
Your duty and that of everyone is to obey the Book of God: a book not to
be dealt with upon the same rules which are applicable to the works of
man.’
And then they parted; he stern and resolved, she sorrowful and sad; he
intimating something about it was a pity that people could not remain
satisfied with the station of life in which they were born, which did not
pour balm into a wounded soul. Happily for herself, however, she could
exclaim with Sir Thomas Browne, ‘As for those mazy mysteries in divinity
and airy subtleties in religion which have unhinged the minds of many,
they have never stretched the _pia mater_ of mine.’ But to gain this
position was a work of time.
With an aching heart, once more the actress sought a clergyman. He was a
Broad Churchman. There were no difficulties for him. In antiquated
forms, in vain repetitions, in decaying creeds, there were difficulties,
it might be; but one was not to bother one’s self about them. It was
true that one had to conform to outward form, but the spirit was greater
than the form. The time would come when the Church would burst its
bonds, but at present all they had to do was to make the best of a bad
situation. It seemed to her such church-worship was a sham. The man in
the pulpit, the man in the pew, alike ignored the dead creed, and instead
revelled in glib phraseology, in poetical nothings, in much-sounding
rhetoric and ecclesiastical show and ritual. The chief things were the
music, the millinery, and the show—the white-robed choristers, the dim
religious light.
Then she thought of her old training among the Dissenters, and went to a
chapel. She was staying at an old country mansion, when one Sunday
morning the gentlemen were going to have the usual smoke in the stables,
and examine the horses and the hounds, and to make a few bets about a
forthcoming race, and there was a smile of perfect horror as she
expressed her intention of going to the village meeting-house, while the
ladies were inexpressibly shocked. No one went to meeting; it was low.
One could not be received in society who was known to go to meeting.
‘I show myself once or twice in a year at church just to keep myself on
good terms with society,’ said the gentleman of the mansion.
The actress went to the chapel, as nowadays the meeting-house is termed.
It was as Gothic in style as it was possible to be. The singing was
good. The preacher was a man of culture, and was dressed as much like a
clergyman as was possible. The hearers were of the respectable middle
class; the working man was conspicuous by his absence. But, alas! it was
known the next Sunday that the quiet lady who had attended the previous
Sunday was an actress from town. She found every eye turned towards her.
There was quite a crowd to see her arrive and depart, and further
attendance was impossible.
When are we to have a rational change in the land? We have had a
Reformation that, incomplete as it was, freed us at any rate from the
worship of the Mass. When is our religion to be free of Church creeds—of
the Assembly Catechism—of the iron fetters of chapel trusts—of the
traditions of the elders—of the influence of the fables and traditions
and superstitions of the Middle Ages? When is a man to stand up in our
midst and honestly utter what he believes, careless of his ecclesiastical
superiors, of the frowns of deacons and elders? When are we to get rid
of conventional observances and conventional forms? There is no place of
worship in which it would be proper for me to enter without the
chimney-pot hat, or take a brown-paper parcel in my hand. If I did so, I
should be set down as little better than one of the wicked—as wicked as
if I were to read the _Weekly Dispatch_ on a Sunday, or spend an hour or
two in a museum or a picture-gallery. When are we to realize that the
Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath? Why are Churches
to be less tolerant than the Master, who invited all to come, and who
rebuked His ignorant disciples when they would have put obstacles in
their way? It is hard to think how many souls have been thus driven
away. You are an actress, said the Church to her; you must give up your
profession. She felt that was wrong; that on the stage she could be as
good a Christian as anywhere else. It was her happiness to believe in a
‘Father of all, in every age,
In every clime, adored—
By saint, by savage, or by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.’
Toleration is the great need of our day. But we need more: we need less
of prayer that is not worship; of hymnology that makes men utter on their
tongues what is rarely, if ever, in their hearts. We want more of
honesty in all our public services, to whatever denomination we belong.
We have far too much of indifference; too much of dogma; too much of
silly sentimentalism; too much mysticism; too much morbid faith. Our
missionaries often make converts, who are the worse, and not the better,
for the use of their primitive creeds. The shapeless block of wood,
hideously carved and fantastically ornamented, that I, in the sunlight,
may look upon with scorn, my brother, living in the dark places of the
earth, may look upon as the very highest type of his ideal god, and as
such he may gaze upon it with reverence, and worship it with awe. And
who am I that I may say that he is not the better for so doing? Who am I
that I am to laugh as my happy sister prays, or to deprive her of a faith
that ‘scorns delights and lives laborious days’? Would the savage be
less a savage had he not before him that type of a Divine ideal? Would
he be a better man if I were to blot that out of his being? Would that
make him less selfish, less cruel; more kindly in act, more ready to do
good? Would he be happier in the sunshine, braver in the battle and the
storm? Yes, it is more religious toleration that we need, though we
have, rather against the grain, ceased to burn heretics. And that comes
only as knowledge increases, and the torch of science throws its light
over the dark mysteries of Nature and her laws.
The difficulty with the actress was not faith, but the form; not with the
Spirit, but with its manifestation in so-called Christian churches and
among Christian men; not with the Divine idea, but its human expression.
And that is the giant Difficulty of our day. It is impossible for any
Church to realize its truest conceptions. It is in vain that finite man
seeks to grapple with the problem of the infinite. It is told of St.
Augustine, how once upon a time he was perplexed about the doctrine of
the Trinity while he was walking on the seashore. All at once he saw a
child filling a shell with water, and pouring it out on the sand. ‘What
are you doing?’ said the old saint. ‘Putting the sea into this hole,’
was the reply. The child’s answer was not lost on the saint if it made
him feel the main essence of Christianity is not a dogma, but a life.
The Church service day by day gets more ornate, more artificial, more of
a show, and men and women go to it as a theatre. But, any rate, it is
devotional so far as devotion is displayed in form, in the Free Churches,
as they are called, or, rather, love to call themselves, for freedom is
as much to be found in the Church service as in that of the chapel; the
pulpit and the man who fills it play a more important part. The vanity
which is in the heart of all of us more or less is gratified more than in
the Church service, which has a tendency to sink the man and to exalt the
function. The whole tone of the chapel service is personal. The man in
the pulpit is the great ‘I am.’ The deacons have more or less the same
spirit. Positively it is amusing: you enter before the time of
commencing worship. Presently a man ascends the pulpit stairs. Is he
the preacher? Oh no, he is only the man to carry up the Bible. Again
the vestry door opens, and in the conquering hero comes. A deacon
reverently follows. Is he going to assist? Not a bit of it. He merely
shuts the pulpit-door, and sinks back into his native insignificance.
The sermon over, then comes the collection. It seems, apparently, that
this is the great thing after all. I remember once going into a chapel;
the minister had a weak voice, I could not hear a word of the prayer or
the sermon. The only thing I did hear, and that was pronounced audibly
to be heard all over the place, was, ‘The collection will now be made.’
Organization is carried to excess, till it becomes weariness and
destructive of the spirit. What is wanted is something simpler. Listen
to the minister as he announces from the pulpit the engagements and
arrangements for the week; and as to the sermon, how often is it a
pamphlet, or an essay, or a newspaper leader! One feels also prayer is
too long and wearying, and that the personal element is somewhat
intrusive. It is there the Church has the advantage; the chapel-goer is
disgusted if the minister does not call on him, if the deacon does not
shake hands with him, if he himself has not some official standing as a
member of some committee or other. The poet tells us,
‘God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.’
Not so says the Evangelical; it is by means of our fussy activity and
mechanical organization that His wonders are performed. ‘It is,’
exclaims the Methodist, ‘a penny a week, a shilling a quarter, and
justification by faith.’ No wonder that there are good Christians who
never darken church or chapel doors. ‘It conduces much to piety,’ said
the late Earl Russell to his wife, ‘not to go to church sometimes.’ And
the actress was a Christian, godly, if not according to the godliness of
Little Bethel. I don’t know that she kept the Sabbath holy; she loved
that day to get away from town and the world, and to worship Him whose
temple is all space and whose Sabbath all time. In the Roman Catholic or
Protestant cathedral alike, she could worship, and from occasional
attendances she often returned refreshed, but she could identify herself
with no particular body. In the freer Churches of Christendom she would
enter, and could leave all the better for the service, even if the
preacher had, as preachers often do, proved unequal to her state of mind.
Here she listened to an essay logical and profound, which touched on no
matter of earthly interest, and was as vain and worthless as questions as
to how many angels could stand on the point of a needle, or what were the
songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself
among women. There a raw youth thumped the pulpit, as he complacently
dwelt on the doings of a God of whom his very idea was a caricature.
Then there were ingenious clerics who spoke upon the ‘little horn’ in
Daniel, and who, while ignorant of Cheapside and the City, could unfold
the Book of Revelation, and to whom the prophecies were as easy as A B C.
A good deal of what is commonly called good preaching was but to her an
idle dream as preachers painfully tried to realise the past, and talked
of distant lands, and worthy old patriarchs who had been dead thousands
of years, and grand old prophets, who though able forces in their own
times and amongst their own people, had little to do with the passions
and prejudices of the living present. Even when the preacher was
morbidly sentimental, as so many of them were—and that is why the men
stop away, or only attend to please their wives—or too prone to take for
granted fables which cannot stand a moment’s rational investigation,
even, though they were more or less common to the mythology of every
nation under the sun, poor Rose boldly faced the situation and sat it all
out, though for all practical purposes she felt that she might just as
well have listened to a lecture on the Digamma. One admits the force in
many cases of associated worship, the charm of the living voice, of a
good delivery, of a pleasing figure; and yet a man is not to be condemned
as one of the wicked because his pew is empty at times, because he reads
the Bible and says his prayers alone, because he is distracted by the
delivery of stale religious commonplace.
But the Free Churches, are not they the home of free thought? Are they
not leaders in religious reform? Alas! they all have their dogmas and
creeds to the believer in which they promise eternal life, while to the
unbeliever, no matter how honest he may be, or how pure in heart and
life, there is anathema maranatha. If the Church of England apes the
Church of Rome, what are we to say of the conventicle, with its
antiquated creed and its obsolete theology? Are they not still, in spite
of their boasted freedom, under the rule of St. Augustine and the monks?
Nor can it well be otherwise. You take a young man, ignorant of the
world, unversed in human nature; you shut him up in a college with others
as ignorant as himself. You teach him theological conundrums rather than
real life. Can such as they minister to a mind diseased? Am I to be
saved by listening to such as they? Ah, no!
‘In secret silence of the mind,
My heaven, and there my God, I find.’
It was so with Rose as she wandered drearily from one church door to
another, seeking rest and finding none. It was clear to her that there
was no room for her in the narrow circle of the Churches.
As long as you are an actress, as long as you get your living by
following the stage, said they all, you cannot be a church-member,
forgetting that the stage itself was, in a prior age, but the child of
the Church.
One day she tried the Quakers, but there the silence was too
oppressive—nor did she feel called upon to make herself singular by a
display of Quaker dress or Quaker speech.
One Sunday she was in Edinburgh, staying at the house of one of the
University professors. She had heard much of Scotch piety, and she
wanted to see what it was like. A grand scientific gathering was being
held, and the house was full of men of science. In the morning she went
to church. Again she was taken to church in the afternoon, very much
against the grain; but she was in Rome, and had to do as the Romans did.
In the evening there was a dinner-party. As they repaired to the
drawing-room, the lady of the house said:
‘It is very questionable whether we shall see any more of the gentlemen
to-night. If they rise from the table sober, they will come into the
drawing-room. If they take too much, they will go up by the backstairs
to bed.’
The lady of the house said this as if it were the most natural thing in
the world, but it shocked Rose to find that, in the city where the
Sabbath is observed more strictly than anywhere else, this was how the
Sabbath night was spent, and, naturally, she had little respect for the
piety which could attend church twice a day on the Sunday, and make the
Sunday night a convivial carouse.
What was she to do? She went to many a Congregational, or Baptist, or
Unitarian, or Episcopalian church in London, where she heard much that
was helpful to her spiritual life—much that it did her good to hear.
‘You can’t join my church,’ said a popular divine to her.
‘Why not?
‘Because you are an actress. My deacons would not hear of such a thing.’
‘Have you ever been to a theatre?’
‘Never!’ was the emphatic reply.
‘How, then, can you condemn that of which you are ignorant?’ asked the
actress.
‘Well,’ said the preacher, ‘I can go by popular report. Look at the
lives of the professionals. Was not Kean a drunkard? Did not the Duke
of So-and-so keep an actress? Did not So-and-so’—naming a popular
actor—‘run off with another man’s wife?’
‘What of that?’ said Rose. ‘I am told your predecessor in your very
chapel did the same.’
The preacher did not know what to say, except that there were black sheep
in all professions, and that there was a Judas even among the Apostles,
and it became them all to judge in charity of one another.
‘That is what I want of you,’ said the actress.
But the preacher did not respond to her appeal, and again she left the
church for the world.
Another day she tried the Methodists. Unfortunately, as she stepped in
they were singing:
‘And be the business of my life
To cry, “Behold the Lamb!”’
In that church she saw some Wesleyan tradesmen whom she knew. Was that
the business of their lives? Of course not. Man comes into the world to
get a living and to make the most of it. The secular life is not
superseded by the religious life—only adorned and purified by it.
‘You must give up your calling,’ said they all.
Indignantly she asked herself, Why? Her acting was her one talent. Was
one to hide it in a napkin? Certainly not, said common-sense, and for
once common-sense was right. Was she not doing good in her way, finding
people innocent amusement, and teaching them, as she repeated nightly the
great words of the great dramatist of our land, something of the wonder
and grandeur and pathos and mystery of life? Hers was not an art to be
despised. Hers was not a course of life to be abandoned at the command
of a bigot, be he Roman monk or Protestant preacher. There was a time
when the stage was the teacher of the people; why should it not be so
now? she asked herself. It was her resolve that it should be so, as far
as it was in her power. For as Tom Campbell wrote:
‘Ill can poetry express
Full many a tone of thought sublime;
And painting, mute and motionless,
Steals but one glance from Time.
But by the mighty Actor brought,
Illusion’s wedded triumphs come;
Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb.’
‘Ah!’ wrote Wentworth to her, ‘we need not despair of Divine mercy.
Christ is bigger and broader than the Church. You in your way, and I in
mine, have wandered far in search of such happiness as earth can give,
and found it to be of little worth, and the sects look on us as sinners,
because we refuse to bow to the image they have set up, or to utter their
Shibboleth. I know not that it matters much. I know not that it matters
anything at all. How can any man or any set of men pretend to have
penetrated the full meaning of Scripture, or that they can bid stand back
those as humble and patient in the pursuit of truth as themselves?’
One day when Robert Hall had been having a conversation with Sir James
Mackintosh, he told a friend: ‘Sir, it was the Euphrates pouring itself
into a teapot.’ If a great orator like Hall could say that of a
fellow-man, what can we say of such Divine revelation as comes to us
either by the experiences of actual life or by the world of nature around
us, or by the written Word which was and is Life? How can we grasp it?
How can we cut it up into dogmas and creeds? How can we say to any
brother man, Believe as I believe, or be damned? The Churches have tried
to do so and failed, even when they had at their back the terrors of
Inquisition or the sword of the Civil Magistrates. They are beginning to
understand that it is all up with priestcraft, and that the Church as it
exists to-day everywhere is in danger; that they cannot stop the onward
march of the people; that they cannot say to the waves of free thought,
‘Hitherto shall ye come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves
be stayed.’ It is a kindly light that leads on, and we cannot stop.
Take all the creeds, pile them one upon the top of another, and there is
still a void, for the finite cannot grasp the Infinite, and man cannot by
searching find out God. At the best we can but guess; at the best, and
may we ever be that, we are but children crying for the light. Here we
see through a glass darkly; let us humbly do our duty, and wait the time
when all mystery shall be unravelled, when we shall stand face to face,
when we shall know even as we are known.
Wentworth and Rose had resolved to become one in life, as they had been
in years of struggle and endeavour. As she rose she dragged him upward
and onward. God had come to him as his Father and his Friend. He was of
no Church. He needed the aid of no priest. He distrusted the emotional
sensationalism of what is called religious life. It had done little for
him in the past—only helped him to his fall. Church members he had found
no better than other men; church life just as worldly as that of the
wicked. It needed not that he should enter man’s churches to see in all
His glory and tenderness and love the Man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief; Him who had wept over impenitent Jerusalem, and had tears and pity
for such frail women as Mary the Magdalene; who had said as He walked the
crowded streets of Jerusalem, beneath the proud pillars of the Temple
itself: ‘Come unto Me all ye that are weary and are heavy-laden, and I
will give you rest’; the lustre of whose life and the music of whose
voice had bettered and brightened all time and space. It was no
Agnostic’s dream that had made Wentworth a new man, but a great spiritual
reality, of which he felt as sure as he did of his own existence, as he
wrote:
‘O Thou, the God of life and light,
In whom all heaven and earth unite,
Fain would I raise my humble voice
And with all people round rejoice.
‘I cannot see Thee as Thou art,
I only know Thee with the heart.
All language fails me when I try
To shadow forth Thy Deity.
‘I love, I worship, I adore—
Can man give less, can God ask more?
That love in life I would translate,
And freely trust Thee with my fate.’