No people, at the present day, can be explained by their national
religion. They do not feel responsible for it; it lies far outside of
them. Their loyalty to truth and their labor and expenditure rest on
real foundations, and not on a national church. And English life, it is
evident, does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, or the Articles, or
the Eucharist. It is with religion as with marriage. A youth marries
in haste; afterwards, when his mind is opened to the reason of the
conduct of life, he is asked, what he thinks of the institution of
marriage, and of the right relations of the sexes. 'I should have much
to say,' he might reply, 'if the question were open, but I have a wife
and children, and all question is closed for me.' In the barbarous days
of a nation, some cultus is formed or imported; altars are built, tithes
are paid, priests ordained. The education and expenditure of the
country take that direction, and when wealth, refinement, great men, and
ties to the world supervene, its prudent men say, why fight against
Fate, or lift these absurdities which are now mountainous? Better find
some niche or crevice in this mountain of stone which religious ages
have quarried and carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than attempt
anything ridiculously and dangerously above your strength, like removing
it.
In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, as to-day, in
front of Dundee Church tower, which is eight hundred years old, 'this
was built by another and a better race than any that now look on it.'
And, plainly, there has been great power of sentiment at work in this
island, of which these buildings are the proofs: as volcanic basalts
show the work of fire which has been extinguished for ages. England
felt the full heat of the Christianity which fermented Europe, and drew,
like the chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and culture.
The power of the religious sentiment put an end to human sacrifices,
checked appetite, inspired the crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants,
inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded
liberty, created the religious architecture,--York, Newstead,
Westminster, Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley, and Dundee,--works to
which the key is lost, with the sentiment which created them; inspired
the English Bible, the liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of
Richard of Devizes. The priest translated the Vulgate, and translated
the sanctities of old hagiology into English virtues on English ground.
It was a certain affirmative or aggressive state of the Caucasian races.
Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the Northern
savages exasperated Christianity into power. It lived by the love of the
people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he
found attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite from labor for
the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festivals. "The lord who
compelled his boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sunset on
Sunday, forfeited him altogether." The priest came out of the people,
and sympathized with his class. The church was the mediator, check, and
democratic principle in Europe. Latimer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham,
Antony Parsons, Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan, are the
democrats, as well as the saints of their times. The Catholic Church,
thrown on this toiling, serious people, has made in fourteen centuries a
massive system, close fitted to the manners and genius of the country,
at once domestical and stately. In the long time, it has blended with
everything in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a
zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of the year, every town and
market and headland and monument, and has coupled itself with the
almanac, that no court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod,
without some leave from the church. All maxims of prudence or shop or
farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence, its strength in the
agricultural districts. The distribution of land into parishes enforces
a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the gradation of the
clergy,--prelates for the rich, and curates for the poor,--with the fact
that a classical education has been secured to the clergyman, makes them
"the link which unites the sequestered peasantry with the intellectual
advancement of the age."[21]
[21] Wordsworth.
The English Church has many certificates to show, of humble effective
service in humanizing the people, in cheering and refining men, feeding,
healing, and educating. It has the seal of martyrs and confessors; the
noblest books; a sublime architecture; a ritual marked by the same
secular merits, nothing cheap or purchasable.
From this slow-grown church important reactions proceed; much for
culture, much for giving a direction to the nation's affection and will
to-day. The carved and pictured chapel--its entire surface animated
with image and emblem--made the parish-church a sort of book and Bible
to the people's eye.
Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the vernacular
tongue, it was the tutor and university of the people. In York minster,
on the day of the enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the
service of evening prayer read and chanted in the choir. It was strange
to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in
the morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York minster,
on the 13th January, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just fresh
from the Times newspaper and their wine; and listening with all the
devotion of national pride. That was binding old and new to some
purpose. The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of
civilization, for thus has the history of the world, been preserved, and
is preserved. Here in England every day a chapter of Genesis, and a
leader in the Times.
Another part of the same service on this occasion was not insignificant.
Handel's coronation anthem, _God save the King_, was played by Dr.
Camidge on the organ, with sublime effect. The minster and the music
were made for each other. It was a hint of the part the church plays as
a political engine. From his infancy, every Englishman is accustomed to
hear daily prayers for the queen, for the royal family, and the
Parliament, by name; and this lifelong consecration of these personages
cannot be without influence on his opinions.
The universities, also, are parcel of the ecclesiastical system, and
their first design is to form the clergy. Thus the clergy for a
thousand years have been the scholars of the nation.
The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and tradition
of its church; the liturgy, ceremony, architecture; the sober grace, the
good company, the connection with the throne, and with history, which
adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of more taste than
activity, the stability of the English nation is passionately enlisted
to its support, from its inextricable connection with the cause of
public order, with politics, and with the funds.
Good churches are not built by bad men; at least there must be probity
and enthusiasm somewhere in society. These minsters were neither built
nor filled by atheists. No church has had more learned, industrious, or
devoted men; plenty of "clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns,
would turn their backs on no man."[22] Their architecture still glows
with faith in immortality. Heats and genial periods arrive in history,
or, shall we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by which high tides are
caused in the human spirit, and great virtues and talents appear, as in
the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the nation was full of genius and piety.
[22] Fuller.
But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets; of the
Latimers, Mores, Cranmers; of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts; of the
Sherlocks, and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have
made it impossible that men like these should return or find a place in
their once sacred stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this church has
glided away to animate other activities; and they who come to the old
shrines find apes and players rustling the old garments.
The religion of England is part of good breeding. When you see on the
Continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel,
and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one
cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the
religion of a gentleman. So far is he from attaching any meaning to the
words, that he believes himself to have done almost the generous thing,
and that it is very condescending in him to pray to God. A great duke
said on the occasion of a victory, in the House of Lords, that he
thought the Almighty God had not been well used by them, and that it
would become their magnanimity, after so great successes, to take order
that a proper acknowledgment be made. It is the church of the gentry;
but it is not the church of the poor. The operatives do not own it, and
gentlemen lately testified in the House of Commons that in their lives
they never saw a poor man in a ragged coat inside a church.
The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous English
understanding shows how much wit and folly can agree in one brain.
Their religion is a quotation; their church is a doll; and any
examination is interdicted with screams of terror. In good company, you
expect them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; but they do not;
they are the vulgar.
The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in the nineteenth
century, do not respect power, but only performance; value ideas only
for an economic result. Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can
be an army chaplain: "Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good
sense, got the better of Methodism, which had appeared among the
soldiers, and once among the officers." They value a philosopher as
they value an apothecary who brings bark or a drench; and inspiration is
only some blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid.
I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a valve that can be
closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. The most sensible
and well-informed men possess the power of thinking just so far as the
bishop in religious matters, and as the chancellor of the exchequer in
politics. They talk with courage and logic, and show you magnificent
results; but the same men who have brought free-trade or geology to
their present standing, look grave and lofty, and shut down their valve,
as soon as the conversation approaches the English Church. After that,
you talk with a box-turtle.
The action of the university, both in what is taught, and in the spirit
of the place, is directed more on producing an English gentleman, than a
saint or a psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and extrudes a
philosopher. I do not know that there is more cabalism in the Anglican,
than in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified with the
aristocracy. They say, here, that, if you talk with a clergyman, you
are sure to find him well bred, informed, and candid, he entertains your
thought or your project with sympathy and praise. But if a second
clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: two together are
inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever it comes to action, the
clergyman invariably sides with his church.
The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms,
by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches is, 'By taste
are ye saved.' It keeps the old structures in repair, spends a world of
money in music and building; and in buying Pugin, and architectural
literature. It has a general good name for amenity and mildness. It is
not in ordinary a persecuting church; it is not inquisitorial, not even
inquisitive, is perfectly well bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper
occasions. If you let it alone, it will let you alone. But its instinct
is hostile to all change in politics, literature, or social arts. The
church has not been the founder of the London University, of the
Mechanics' Institutes, of the Free School, or whatever aims at diffusion
of knowledge. The Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against this
heresy, as Thomas Taylor.
The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion of England. The first
leaf of the New Testament it does not open. It believes in a Providence
which does not treat with levity a pound sterling. They are neither
transcendentalists nor Christians. They put up no Socratic prayer, much
less any saintly prayer for the queen's mind; ask neither for light nor
right, but say bluntly, "Grant her in health and wealth long to live."
And one traces this Jewish prayer in all English private history, from
the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of Devizes' Chronicle, to those
in the diaries of Sir Samuel Romilly, and of Haydon the painter.
"Abroad with my wife," writes Pepys piously, "the first time that ever I
rode in my own coach; which do make my heart rejoice and praise God, and
pray him to bless it to me, and continue it." The bill for the
naturalization of the Jews (in 1753) was resisted by petitions from all
parts of the kingdom, and by petition from the city of London,
reprobating this bill, as "tending extremely to the dishonor of the
Christian religion, and extremely injurious to the interests and
commerce of the kingdom in general, and of the city of London in
particular."
But they have not been able to congeal humanity by act of Parliament.
"The heavens journey still and sojourn not," and arts, wars,
discoveries, and opinion go onward at their own pace. The new age has
new desires, new enemies, new trades, new charities, and reads the
Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of French politics, the
steam-whistle, the hum of the mill, and the noise of embarking
emigrants, had quite put most of the old legends out of mind; so that
when you came to read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was
almost absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of old
costumes.
No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize a religion. It
is endogenous, like the skin, and other vital organs. A new statement
every day. The prophet and apostle knew this, and the non-conformist
confutes the conformists, by quoting the texts they must allow. It is
the condition of a religion, to require religion for its expositor.
Prophet and apostle can only be rightly understood by prophet and
apostle. The statesman knows that the religious element will not fail,
any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle; but it is in its nature
constructive, and will organize such a church as it wants. The wise
legislator will spend on temples, schools, libraries, colleges, but will
shun the enriching of priests. If, in any manner, he can leave the
election and paying of the priest to the people, he will do well. Like
the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of priests, and
create opportunity and expectation in the society, to run to meet
natural endowment, in this kind. But, when wealth accrues to a
chaplaincy, a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires moneyed men for its
stewards, who will give it another direction than to the mystics of
their day. Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily
work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was
bequeathed. The class certain to be excluded from all preferment are
the religious,--and driven to other churches;--which is nature's _vis
medicatrix_.
The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. This abuse
draws into the church the children of the nobility, and other unfit
persons, who have a taste for expense. Thus a bishop is only a
surpliced merchant. Through his lawn, I can see the bright buttons of
the shopman's coat glitter. A wealth like that of Durham makes almost a
premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech in the House of Commons on the
Irish elective franchise, said, "How will the reverend bishops of the
other house be able to express their due abhorrence of the crime of
perjury, who solemnly declare in the presence of God, that when they are
called upon to accept a living, perhaps of L4,000 a year, at that very
instant, they are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and
administration thereof, and for no other reason whatever?" The modes of
initiation are more damaging than custom-house oaths. The bishop is
elected by the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends
these gentlemen a _conge d'elire_, or leave to elect; but also sends
them the name of the person whom they are to elect. They go into the
cathedral, chant and pray, and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in
their choice; and, after these invocations, invariably find that the
dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommendations of the Queen.
But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with
conformists. But you, who are an honest man in other particulars, know,
that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point
also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you
meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits. Besides, this
succumbing has grave penalties. If you take in a lie, you must take in
all that belongs to it. England accepts this ornamented national
church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives the voice a
stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of the receivers.
The English Church, undermined by German criticism, had nothing left but
tradition, and was led logically back to Romanism. But that was an
element which only hot heads could breathe: in view of the educated
class, generally, it was not a fact to front the sun; and the alienation
of such men from the church became complete.
Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious persons are driven out of
the Established Church into sects, which instantly rise to credit, and
hold the Establishment in check. Nature has sharper remedies, also.
The English, abhorring change in all things, abhorring it most in
matters of religion, cling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully
given to cant. The English (and I wish it were confined to them, but 't
is a taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood in both hemispheres), the English
and the Americans cant beyond all other nations. The French relinquish
all that industry to them. What is so odious as the polite bows to God,
in our books and newspapers? The popular press is flagitious in the
exact measure of its sanctimony, and the religion of the day is a
theatrical Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property-man.
The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an
inexhaustible material. Dickens writes novels on Exeter Hall humanity.
Thackeray exposes the heartless high life. Nature revenges herself more
summarily by the heathenism of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury
calls the poor thieves together, and reads sermons to them, and they
call it 'gas.' George Borrow summons the Gypsies to hear his discourse
on the Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles' creed in
Romany. "When I had concluded," he says, "I looked around me. The
features of the assembly were twisted, and the eyes of all turned upon
me with a frightful squint: not an individual present but squinted; the
genteel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted:
the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all."
The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left
but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads
fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine
with him. False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a
lower class of mind and character into the clergy; and, when the
hierarchy is afraid of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of
tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but to quit a
church which is no longer one.
But the religion of England,--is it the Established Church? no; is it
the sects? no; they are only perpetuations of some private man's
dissent, and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a coach,
cheaper and more convenient, but really the same thing. Where dwells
the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or
thought, or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity
cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the
Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as
the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing,
gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret, which
perplexes them, and puts them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all
good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, _souffrir de tout le
monde et ne faire souffrir personne_, that divine secret has existed in
England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of
Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.