The voyage out to America described in the last chapter included an
instance of the extraordinary behaviour of the Established Church at
sea, which deserves special mention as it is still repeated.
There is an offensive rule on board ships that the service on Sunday
shall be that of the Church of England, and that the preacher selected
shall be of that persuasion.
Several of the twelve ministers of religion among the passengers of the
_Bothnia_ in 1879 were distinguished preachers, whereas the clergyman
selected to preach to us was not at all distinguished, and made a sermon
which I, as an Englishman, was ashamed to hear delivered before an
audience of intelligent Americans. The preacher told a woful story of
loss of trade and distress in England, which gave the audience the idea
that John Bull was "up a tree." Were he up ever so high I would not have
told it to an alien audience.
The preacher said that these losses were owing to our sins--that is the
sins of Englishmen. The devotion of the American hearers was varied
with a smile at this announcement. It was their surpassing ingenuity and
rivalry in trade which had affected our exports for a time. Our chief
"sins" were uninventiveness and commercial incapacity, and the greater
wit and ingenuity of the audience were the actual punishment the
preacher was pleading against, and praying them to be contrite on
account of their own success. The minister described bad trade as a
punishment from God, as though God had made the rascally merchants who
took out shoddy calico and ruined the markets. It was not God that had
driven the best French and German artists and workmen into America,
where they have enriched its manufacturers with their skill and
industry, and enabled that country to compete with ours.
The preacher's text was as wide of any mark as his sermon. It asked the
question, "How can we sing in a strange land?" When we should arrive
there, there would hardly be a dozen of us in the vessel who would be
in a strange land; the great majority were going home--mostly commercial
reapers of an English harvest who were returning home rejoicing--bearing
their golden sheaves with them. Neither the sea nor the land were
strange to them. Many of them were as familiar with the Atlantic as
with the prairie. I sat at table by a Toronto dealer who had crossed
the ocean twenty-nine times. The congregation at sea formed a very poor
opinion of the discernment of the Established Church.
On the return voyage in the _Gallia_ we had another "burning" but not
"a shining light" of the Church of England to discourse. He was a young
man, and it required some assurance on his part to look into the eyes
of the intelligent Christians around him, who had three times his years,
experience, and knowledge, and lecture them upon matters of which he was
absolutely ignorant.
This clergyman enforced the old doctrine of severity in parental
discipline of the young, and on the wisdom of compelling children to
unquestioning obedience, and argued that submission to a higher will was
good for men during life. At least two-thirds of the congregation were
American, who regard parental severity as cruelty to the young, and
utterly uninstructive; and unquestioning obedience they hold to be
calamitous and demoralising education. They expect reasonable obedience,
and seek to obtain it by reason. Submission to a "higher will" as
applied to man, is submission to arbitrary authority against which the
whole polity of American life is a magnificent protest. The only higher
will they recognise in worldly affairs is the will of the people,
intelligently formed, impartially gathered, and constitutionally
recorded--facts of which the speaker had not the remotest idea.
Who can read this narrative of the ignorance and effrontery, nurtured
by the Established Church and obtruded on passengers at sea, without
a sense of patriotic humiliation that it is continued every Sunday in
every ship? It is thought dangerous to be wrecked and not to have taken
part in this pitiable exhibition.