What’s an old letter but a rocket dark--
Once fired i’ the air and left without a spark
Of that which once, a fiery life within it,
Shot up to heaven, and faded in a minute?
But by the powdery smell and stick corroded,
You guess--how noisily it once exploded!
_Cupid’s Postbag_ .
I.
_To the Right Reverend the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells._
Right Reverend Sir,--We, the undersigned, churchwardens and
parishioners of the Church of St. Mary Flagellant, in the parish of
Fensea and diocese of Dells, feel it our duty to call your lordship’s
attention to the conduct of the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, vicar of Fensea
aforesaid. It is not without great hesitation that we have come to the
conclusion that some sort of an inquiry is necessary. For many months
past the parish pulpit has been scandalised by opinions which, coming
from the pulpit of a Christian church, have caused the greatest
astonishment and horror; but the affair reached its culmination last
Ascension Day, when the Vicar actually expressed his scepticism as to
many of the Christian miracles, and particularly as to the Resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ _in the flesh_. It is also reported, we believe
on good authority, that Mr. Bradley is the author of an obnoxious
article in an infidel publication, calling in question such facts as the
miraculous conversion of the Apostle Paul, treating other portions of
the gospel narrative as merely ‘Symbolical,’ and classing the Bible
as only one of many Holy Books with equal pretensions to Divine
inspiration. Privately we believe the Vicar of Fensea upholds opinions
even more extraordinary than these. It is for your lordship to decide,
therefore, whether he is a fit person to fill the sacred office of a
Christian minister, especially in these times, when Antichrist is busy
at work and the seeds of unbelief find such ready acceptance, especially
in the bosom of the young. Personally, we have no complaint against
the Vicar, who is well liked by many of his congregation, and is very
zealous in works of charity and almsgiving. But the pride of carnal
knowledge and the vanity of secular approbation have turned him
from that narrow path which leads to righteousness, into the howling
wilderness of heterodoxy, wherein, having wandered too far, no man may
again find his soul alive. We beseech your lordship to investigate this
matter without delay; and, with the assurance of our deepest respect
and reverence, we beg to subscribe ourselves, your lordship’s humble and
obedient servants,
Henry Summerhayes,
Ezekiel Marvel,
Walter Rochford,
Simpson Pepperback,
John Dove,
Tabitha Rayleigh, _spinster_,
_all of the parish of Fensea._
II.
_From the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells to the Rev. Ambrose Bradley,
Vicar of Fensea._
Darkdale, May 28.
Dear Mr. Bradley.--I have just received from some of the leading members
of your congregation a communication of an extraordinary nature, calling
in question, I regret to say, not merely your manner of conducting the
sacred service in the church of Fensea, but your very personal orthodoxy
in those matters which are the pillars of the Christian faith. I cannot
but think that there is some mistake, for I know by early experience how
ready churchgoers are, especially in the rural districts, to distort the
significance of a preacher’s verbal expressions on difficult points of
doctrine.
When you were first promoted to the living of Fensea, you were named to
me as a young man of unusual faith and zeal--perfer-vid, indeed, to a
fault; and I need not say that I had heard of you otherwise as one from
whom your university expected great things. That is only a few years
ago. What then has occurred to cause this sad misconception (I take
it for granted that it _is_ a misconception) on the part of your
parishioners? Perhaps, like many other young preachers of undoubted
attainments but limited experience, you have been trying your oratorical
wings too much in flights of a mystic philosophy and a poetical
rhetoric; and in the course of these flights have, as rhetoricians will,
alarmed your hearers unnecessarily. Assuming this for a moment, will you
pardon me for saying that there are two ways of preaching the gospel:
one subtle and mystical, which appeals only to those spirits who have
penetrated into the adytum of Christian theology; one cardinal and
rational, which deals only with the simple truths of Christian teaching,
and can be understood by the veriest child. Perhaps, indeed, of these
two ways, the latter one most commends itself to God. ‘For except a man
be born again,’ _&c_. Be that as it may, and certainly I have no wish to
undervalue the subtleties of Christian philosophy, let me impress upon
you that, where a congregation is childlike, unprepared, and as it
were uninstructed, no teaching can be too direct and simple. Such a
congregation asks for bread, not for precious stones of oratory; for
kindly promise, not for mystical speculation. That you have seriously
questioned, even in your own mind, any of the Divine truths of our
creed, as expressed in that Book which is a light and a Jaw unto men, I
will not for a moment believe; but I shall be glad to receive forthwith,
over your own signature, an assurance that my surmise is a correct one,
and that you will be careful in the future to give no further occasion
for misconception.--I am, my dear Mr. Bradley, yours,
W. H. Darkdale and Dells.
III.
_From the Rev. Ambrose Bradley to the Right Reverend the Bishop of
Darkdale and Dells._
Vicarage, May 31, 1880.
My Dear Bishop,--I am obliged to you for your kind though categorical
letter, to which I hasten to give you a reply. That certain members of
my congregation should have forwarded complaints concerning me does
not surprise me, seeing that they have already taken me to task on many
occasions and made my progress here difficult, if not disagreeable. But
I think you will agree with me that there is only one light by which
a Christian man, even a Christian clergyman, can consent to be
directed--the light of his own conscience and intellect, Divinely
implanted within him for his spiritual guidance.
I will be quite candid with you. You ask what has changed me since the
day when, zealous, and, as you say, ‘perfervid,’ I was promoted to this
ministry. The answer is simple. A deep and conscientious study of the
wonderful truths of Science, an eager and impassioned study of the
beautiful truths of Art.
I seem to see you raise your hands in horror. But if you will bear with
me a little while, perhaps I may convince you that what I have said is
not so horrible after all--nay, that it expresses a conviction which
exists at the present moment in the bosom of many Christian men.
The great question before the world just now, when the foundations of a
particular faith are fatally shaken, when Science denies that Christ
as we conceive Him ever was, and when Art bewails wildly that He should
ever have been, is whether the Christian religion can continue to exist
at all; whether, when a few more years have passed away, it will not
present to a modern mind the spectacle that paganism once presented to
a mediaeval mind. Now, of our leading Churchmen, not even you, my Lord
Bishop, I feel sure, deny that the Church is in danger, both through
attacks from without and through a kind of dry-rot within. Lyell and
others have demolished and made ridiculous the Mosaic cosmogony Strauss
and others have demolished, with more or less success, the Biblical and
Christian miracles. No sane man now seriously believes that the sun ever
stood still, or that an ass spoke in human speech, or that a multitude
of people were ever fed with a few loaves and fishes, or that any solid
human form ever walked on the liquid sea. With the old supernaturalism
has gone the old asceticism or other-worldliness. It is now pretty well
agreed that there are substantially beautiful things in this world which
have precedence over fancifully beautiful things in the other. The poets
have taught us the loveliness of Nature, the painters have shown us
the loveliness of Art. Meantime, what does the Church do? Instead of
accepting the new knowledge and the new beauty, instead of building
herself up anew on the debris of her shattered superstitions, she buries
her face in her own ashes, and utters a senile wail of protestation.
Instead of calling upon her children to face the storm, and to build up
new bulwarks against the rising wave of secularism, she commands them to
wail with her, or _to be silent_. Instead of perceiving that the priests
of Baal and Antichrist might readily be overthrown with the weapons
forged by their own hands, she cowers before them powerless, in all the
paralysis of superstition, in all the blind fatuity of prayer.
But let us look the facts in the face.
The teachers of the new knowledge have unroofed our Temple to the
heavens, but have not destroyed its foundations; they have overthrown
its brazen images, but have not touched its solid walls. Put the case in
other and stronger words. The God who thundered upon Sinai has vanished
into air and cloud, but the God of man’s heavenly aspiration is
wonderfully quickened and alive. The Bible of wrath and prophecy is cast
contemptuously aside, but the Bible of eternal poetry is imperishable,
its wild dreams and aspirations being crystallised in such literature
as cannot die. The historic personality of the gentle rounder of
Christianity becomes fainter and fainter as the ages advance; but, on
the other hand, brighter and fairer grows the Divine Ideal which rose
from the ashes of that godlike man. Men reject the old miracles, but
they at last accept a miracle of human idealism. In one word, though
Christianity has perished as a dogmatic faith, it survives as the
philosophic religion of the world.
This being so, how does it behove a Christian minister, eating the
Church’s bread, but fully alive to her mortal danger, to steer his
course?
Shall he, as so many do, continue to act in the nineteenth century as
he would have acted in the fifteenth, or indeed in any century up to the
Revolution? Shall he base his teaching on the certainty of miracles, on
the existence of supernaturalism, on the evil of the human heart, the
vanity of this world, and the certainty of rewards and punishments
in another? Shall he brandish the old hell fire, or scatter the old
heavenly manna?
I do not think so!
Knowing in his heart that these things are merely the cast-off epidermis
of a living and growing creed, he may, in perfect consciousness of God’s
approval, put aside the miraculous as unproven if not irrelevant; warn
the people against mere supernaturalism; proclaim with the apostles of
the Renaissance the glory and loveliness of _this_ world--its wondrous
scenes, its marvellous story as written on the rocks and in the stars,
its divine science, its literature, its poetry, and its art; and
treading all the fire of Hell beneath his feet, and denouncing the
threat of eternal wrath as a chimera, base his hope of immortality on
the moral aspirations that, irrespective of dogma, are common to all
mankind.
This I think he may do, and must do, if the Church is to endure.
Let him do this, and let only a tithe of his brethren imitate him in so
doing, and out of this nucleus of simple believers, as out of the
little Galilean band, may be renewed a faith that will redeem the world.
Questioned of such a faith, Science will reply--‘I have measured the
heavens and the earth, I have traced back the book of the universe page
by page and letter by letter, but I have found neither here nor yonder
any proof that God is _not;_ nay, beyond and behind and within all
phenomena, there abides one unknown quantity which you are quite free to
call--God.
Similarly questioned, Art will answer--‘Since you have rejected what was
so hideous, tested by the beauty of this world, and since you hold even
my work necessary and holy, I too will confess with you that I hunger
for something fairer and less perishable; and in token of that hunger,
of that restless dream, I will be your Church’s handmaid, and try to
renew her Temple and make it fair.’
The keystone of the Church is Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus of the
miracles, not Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, but Jesus Christ, the
Divine Ideal, the dream and glory of the human race. Not God who made
himself a man, but man who, by God’s inspiration, has been fashioned
unto the likeness of a God.
And what, as we behold him now, is this Divine Ideal--this man made God?
He is simply, as I conceive, the accumulated testimony of human
experience--of history, poetry, philosophy, science, and art--in favour
of a rational religion, the religion of earthly peace and heavenly love.
Built upon the groundwork of what, shorn of its miraculous pretensions,
was a gentle and perfect life, the Divine Ideal, or Ideal Person, began.
At first shadowy and almost sinister, then clearer and more beautiful;
then, descending through the ages, acquiring at every step some new
splendour of self-sacrifice, some new consecration of love or suffering,
from every heart that suffered patiently, from every soul that fed the
lamp of a celestial dream with the oil of sweet human love. And now,
far removed as is man himself from the archetypal ape, is the Christ of
modern Christendom, this spiritual Saviour of the world, from the
ghostly skeleton of the early martyrs, from the Crucified One of early
Christian art. The life of generations has gone to fashion him--all our
human experience has served to nourish him--gradually from age to age He
has drunk in the blood of suffering and the milk of knowledge, till He
stands supreme as we see him--not God, but man made God.
Does it matter so much, after all, whether we worship a person or an
idea, since, as I suggest, the Idea has become a Person, with all the
powers and privileges of divinity? Nay, who in this world is able,
even with the help of philosophy, to distinguish what _is_ from what
seems--the phenomenal from the real? So long as Our Lord exists as a
moral phenomenon, so long in other words as we can apprehend him as an
ideal of human life, Christ is not dead, and his resurrection is not
a dream. He walks the world. He remembers Greece and Rome, as well as
Galilee; He blesses the painter and the poet, as well as the preacher in
the Temple. He rejects nothing; He reads the rocks and the stars, and
He adds their gospel to his own; He cries to men of all creeds, as his
prototype cried to his disciples of yore, ‘Come unto me, all ye that are
heavy laden, and ye shall rest.’
Pardon me, my Lord Bishop, the desultory thoughts noted down in this
long letter. They perhaps give you some clue as to the sentiments
with which I pursue the Christian mission. You will doubtless think me
somewhat heterodox, but I have at least the courage of my opinions; and
on some such heterodoxy as mine--though on one, I hope, much broader
and wiser--it will soon be found necessary to reconstruct the Christian
Church, I am, my Lord Bishop, yours,
Ambrose Bradley.
IV.
_From the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells to the Rev. Ambrose Bradley,
Vicar of Fensea._
My Dear Sir,--I cannot express to you with what feelings of sorrow and
amazement I have read your terrible letter! I must see you personally at
once. My only hope now is that your communication represents a passing
aberration, rather than the normal condition of your mind. I shall be at
Darkdale on Saturday next, the 2nd. Will you make it convenient to be
in the town on that day, and to call upon me at about eleven in the
forenoon? I am,
W. M. Darkdale and Dells.