IS OF THE NATURE OF A SERMON.
During these two years the attitude of Thomas's mind changed much
towards society and its institutions. He may be said for the first time
to have become a religious man, and his religion was of the simpler and
more unsophisticated type which comes to a man who knows little of
dogma, but much of the contents of the Bible. That book was studied by
him as something fresh and altogether new on the lonely Sundays he
passed amongst the navvies. He took to it at first more because he had
no other book to read, but it laid hold of his imagination after a time,
and he began to test the world around him by the lofty morality of the
New Testament. In due course the thoughts that burned within him found
utterance and infected some of his fellow workmen. Almost before he was
aware a certain following gathered round him. They drew together in the
parlour of the inn, which most of the navvies frequented, and discussed
things political and religious on the Saturday and Sunday nights.
The wilder spirits soon nicknamed Thomas and his friends the Saints, and
he himself went by the sobriquet of Methody Tom; but, though jeered at
and sometimes cursed by the wilder sort, their influence spread, and
radical views of society were canvassed among these navvies with a
freedom that would have made parson and squire alike shiver with horror
had they known. But they did not know. How could they? Such creatures as
navvies were not, strictly speaking, human at all. They lived beyond the
pale, like the Irish ancestors of many among them, and were essentially
of the nature of wild beasts, for whom the policeman's baton or the
soldier's musket was the only available moral force.
No parson ever looked near that community of busy workers, whose strong
backed labour was swiftly altering the physical conditions of modern
civilisation, and calling a new world into being for squire and trader
alike. Nay, I am wrong. Thomas informed me that a parson did go astray
among the workmen in the cutting of which he had charge. A poor, deluded
young curate came round once distributing tracts. The fervour of a
yesterday's ordination was upon him, and shone in the rigorous cut of
his garments. He thought he might do the navvies good by the sight of
him, and bless them with his tracts. But his visit was a failure, and
his reception rough. Thomas declared that he felt sorry for the poor
fellow, and yet could not refrain from joining in the laugh at his
expense. One sturdy northerner, to whom he handed a tract, protested
loudly that he "hadn't done nothing to be summonsed for," and when the
curate blandly explained that it was a tract, he blessed his stars, and
swore that he "took the chap for one of the new peelers." Another was of
an opinion that "the parson had a mighty easy job of it," and suggested
his taking a turn at the pick; while one more blasphemous than the
rest, declared that he didn't know who the Lord Jesus might be, and
didn't care; but, in his opinion, it was d----d impudent of him to send
any of his flunkeys down their way "a spyin' and a pryin'." They chaffed
the poor man about his clothes; begged a yard or two of the tail of his
coat to mend their Sunday breeches with; explained how much better he
could walk in a short jacket; wanted to know why he wore a white
choker--and altogether made such a fool of the poor wretch that he soon
turned and fled, amid their jeers and laughter.
That was the only time they ever saw a parson of the Church during these
two years; and no doubt this poor curate felt that they were a reprobate
crew whom the Church did quite right to abandon to their fate. It is so
much pleasanter and easier to play at pietism amongst well-bred,
comfortable people "of good society" than to save souls. The sweet order
of a gorgeous ritual, the vanities of richly-embroidered garments,
squabbles about archaic rites as worthless as an Egyptian mummy--these
things are more valuable to the modern parson, and more pleasing in the
sight of his God, than the lives of such men as Wanless and his
fellow-labourers. For the parson's God is the God of the rich, to whom
gorgeous ritual and sensuous music are necessary as foretastes of the
blessedness of an aesthetic paradise.
So be it: far be it from me to question the taste of parson or parson's
following. They can go their own way, only it may be permitted to one to
point out that outside their charmed circle there are forces at work,
before the power of which their fair fabric may yet crumble and
disappear like sand heaps before the rushing tide. Thomas Wanless and
his friends were rude and unlettered, but they had definite ideas
enough, and a wild sense of justice. In their dim way they tried to fit
together the various parts of the human life that lay around them, and
failing to do so, as better than they have failed, they came to the
conclusion that they and their class were cheated by the rest.
Democracy, communism, subversive ideas of all kinds, therefore, found
currency among them, as in ever-growing volume they find currency now.
Imagine if you can these men trying to evolve the prototype of a modern
Lord Bishop, in lawn sleeves and pompous state, from the simple records
of the New Testament. Can you wonder at their failure in that instance,
or in many such like? Where could they find church or chapel that was no
respecter of persons? in which the possession of money and power was not
the ultimate test of true godliness? Is it astonishing that in placing
the ideal and actual side by side, these men should have come to the
conclusion that the actual was a fraud: that the whole basis of modern
society was corrupt?
Do not, I beseech you, pass lightly by the doings of these men, most
sublime Lord Bishops, most serene peers of the realm, smug buyers of
county votes. These ideas are spreading all around you. Few possessed
them fifty years ago among the agricultural poor; but there, as
elsewhere, democracy is getting educated, is awaking to the reality of
things, and will make its feelings known to you in a manner you little
dream of one of these days. Your Olympus will prove but a molehill when
the earth shakes with the onset of the millions on whose necks you have
sat all these ages. Titles are a mockery, hereditary dignities a
contempt, in the eyes of men who live face to face with the hard
realities of existence. A new life is abroad in the world. The
image-breaker is exalted above my Lord Bishop in all his glory of lawn
sleeves and piety in uniform by men like Wanless and his friends. They
want to know, not what part "my lord" professes to act, what creed this
or that snug Church dignitary chants or drones; but what his life is
worth? What are you? in short, is the question, not what you give
yourself out to be; and, depend upon it, if the answer is
unsatisfactory, you and your hypocrisies will disappear together.
Nothing struck me so forcibly in my intercourse with Wanless as the
extraordinary bitterness with which he spoke of the English Church. To
it he seemed in his later life to have transferred the greater part of
his hatred of the landed gentry. He viewed it as an organised blasphemy,
and worse than that, as the jailor, so to say, by whom the chains of a
miserable captivity had been rivetted for ages on the limbs of the
toiling poor. The ground for this attitude of mind on the part of the
labourer was easily discovered. He read his Bible much, and endeavoured
to fit its precepts and the example of its greatest characters to the
life around him, and of course he failed. The more he tried to bring
together the presentment of Christianity afforded by the modern Church
and teaching of the New Testament, the more he saw their divergencies.
This set him pondering, and he soon came to the conclusion that this
modern institution was not Christian at all, but Pagan. It was a
department of State, paid by the State, and employed by it for the
purpose of deluding the people into the belief that the existing order
of life was divinely appointed. How effectively it had done this work,
he said, let history show. The clergy had aided and abetted the gentry
in all their robberies of the people; it had been the instrument of many
flagrant thefts of endowments left for the education of the poor; there
never had been a reform proposed calculated to benefit the people that
had not been ardently opposed by this organised band of hypocrites, and
no class of the community was so habitually, so flagrantly selfish as
preachers. Take them all in all, Thomas Wanless declared, the people who
preached for a trade, be they dissenters or Anglican, gave him a lower
idea of human nature than any navvy he ever met. "Their trade makes them
bad," he often declared; "and I suppose I ought to pity the miserable
wretches, but they do so much mischief that I really cannot."
Once I recollect urging the commonplace argument that there were many
good men among them, but he caught me up short with--
"Yes, yes, I admit all that; but that proves nothing in favour of either
the Church or the parson's trade. These men would have been good
anywhere, as Papists, Mohamedans, or Hindus, just as certainly as in
church or chapel. It is their nature to, and they cannot help it. But
their very goodness is a curse to people, sir--yes, a curse, for they
prop up fabrics and institutions that but for them would long ago have
been too rotten to stand."
Thus it will be seen that Wanless, though in his way a profoundly
religious man, was in no sense a sectary. He was in fact ranged among
the iconoclasts. He sighed for a living faith, not a dead creed; and
were he living to-day he would certainly give his hearty support to that
band of men who wage war on the shams of modern creeds, who mock
unceasingly at the disgusting spectacle of men who call themselves
disciples of Christ wrangling over the cut and embroidery of garments,
and trying to make themselves martyrs for the sake of a candle or two.
The tractarian movement attracted Thomas's attention in a dim way, and
he was amused at the frightful din made by the conversions to Romanism
which accompanied that curious upheaval of mediaevalism. Not that he
understood much of the meaning of what was going on. It was not worth
discovering, he said; but he was amused over it, and roundly declared
that for this and all other ills of the Church there was but one
cure--to take away its money. "Let these parsons try living by faith,"
he would often exclaim. "If they believe in God as they say, why do they
not trust him for a living? Their proud stomachs would come down a bit
if they are just turned adrift in a body and let shift for themselves.
But Lord, what a howl they'll make if the people get up and say we'll
have no more of your mummeries, we want our money for a better purpose.
They won't think much about God then, I can tell you. It will be every
man for himself, and who can grab the most. I never have any patience
with parsons, never. They are bad from the beginning, bad all through,
self-deluders and misleaders of others at the best, and at the
worst--well, not much more except in degree."
"These are the mere ravings of an ignorant peasant," most readers will
exclaim. I do not deny that in a certain sense they may seem only that.
Yet look around and consider the signs of the times before you dismiss
these things as of no significance. What means the spread of secularism
amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for
religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most
ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their
brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not
admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny
the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a
power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it
betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who
now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The
churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly
respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings
of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a
corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation.
Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this
peasant. They are significant of many things--of a coming democracy that
will at least try to burn up the rottenness of our modern ultra
Pagan-civilization.
On other questions than those of Church and State the opinions of
Thomas Wanless were equally uncompromising, and, perhaps, equally
impracticable. His intelligence was far deeper than his reading, and
much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals,
was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better
book, but I am also free to admit that his too exclusive study of it
gave a quaint and sometimes impracticable turn to his conceptions that
may lead many to have a poor opinion of his wisdom.
On the land question, for example, he grew to be a kind of disciple of
Moses. He would have had the whole country parcelled out amongst the
people--each family enjoying the inalienable right to a certain bit of
the soil. The year of jubilee was also, in his eyes, a most merciful and
just provision for freeing the unfortunate, or the children of the
spendthrift, from the grasp of the usurer--always the most relentless of
men--and he often exclaimed--"How much better my lot would have been
to-day had a jubilee year brought back to me and mine the land my
grandfathers sacrificed in the stress of hard times." And not to land
only would he have applied this principle, but to all kinds of
indebtedness. "A limit of time should be fixed," he said, "beyond which
the debtor should be free from his debt, unless he had committed a
crime." The national debt itself he would have treated on this
principle; and few things excited his wrath more quickly than any
mention of the heavy burden which the consolidated debt continued to be
to the English people. In national matters he would have had no debt
remaining beyond 30 years, on the principle that it was a crime to cast
the burdens of the present on posterity. Freedom to borrow indefinitely
was in his eyes, moreover, the cause of much abominable robbery and
crime. Next to the Church, however, the object of his deepest hatred and
strongest contempt was modern kingship; and here again his inspiration
was drawn from the Bible. He told me that he often read Samuel's
description of the curse of kingship to his children on Sunday evenings,
with a view to make them proper Republicans; and his greatest interest
in modern history consisted in tracing the working of this curse in
England for the last 200 years. To this evil principle he declared that
we owed most of our social miseries, all our wars of aggression, our
national debt, our social corruptions, our bad land laws, our standing
army, and perhaps even our Established Church, with all its crop of
spiritual, moral, and social perversions.
It is easy to understand how a man holding opinions like these should
exercise a tremendous influence on the better class of his
fellow-workmen. To those who gathered about him in the evenings he was
never weary of enlarging on topics like these; and had the nature of the
work in hand kept the men permanently together, Thomas must in time have
appeared as the leader of a formidable school of democrats. But the
navvy is here to-day and gone to-morrow, and the seed which Thomas sowed
was scattered far and wide ere two years were over. The good he did is
therefore untraceable, yet doubtless his work bore fruit in ways and
places unseen, and in after days may have increased the receptivity of
the labouring poor after a fashion that the modern agitator thought due
wholly to his own exertions.
Over the wild Irishmen who formed the majority of the gangs on the line
Thomas never obtained any influence; and, in his opinion, they were
either a race of men bad from its very beginning, or whose nature had
been warped and debased by a long course of shameful tyranny and
deep-rooted habits of submission to degrading superstitions. However
produced, the Irish, in his esteem, were wretched creatures. They lacked
honesty and independence, and would beg like pariahs one hour from a man
whom they would treacherously murder the next in their drunken furies.
More than once he had the greatest difficulty in keeping clear of the
devastating fights with which these wild men of the west were in the
habit of finishing up their drunken revels, and once he, and the more
respectable men who followed him, had to arm themselves and help to
protect some villages in the neighbourhood of the line from being
stormed and sacked by a squad of Irishmen out for a spree. Life
surrounded by such elements was dreary at the best, and, good though the
wages might be, Thomas was not sorry when the job was finished, and the
way open for him to return once more to his own little cottage in
Ashbrook.