“I BELIEVE”
I
“I BELIEVE”
“_Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision_.”
When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father’s study,
and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some
amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any
rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced
their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a
few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid
flavour of Bishop Butler’s advertisement, prefixed to the First
Edition of his _Analogy_, at an early age, and I have thought lately
that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly
modified the mental attitude.
Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was
shortly to be “Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,”
says about his literary contemporaries--
“It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it
is now at length discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they
treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among
all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world.”
Perhaps the difference between the times of George the Second and
Edward the Seventh may be best discerned in the status and calibre of
the popular penmen who in either age have found, or furnished
amusement in a tilt against the Catholic Faith.
The man in the street, as we know him, did not exist in the eighteenth
century. He is the predominant person to-day, and he requires the
services of able authors to assure him of immunity, when he is
inclined to frolic away from chastity or integrity, much as did the
county members who pocketed the bribes of Sir Robert Walpole and
prated of patriotism.
Fortunately for society the man in the street is a very decent fellow,
and generally finds out before long that Wisdom’s ways are ways of
pleasantness. A man may enjoy posing as an agnostic when he wants an
excuse for--as the negro said--“doing what he dam please,” but when he
takes to himself a wife, and children are born to him, a certain
anxiety as to the continuity and perpetuation of these relationships
begins to show itself. A man who has lost a little child, or waited in
agonizing suspense to hear the physician’s verdict, when sickness
overshadows his home, discovers that he needs something beyond
negations, something that will bring life and immortality to light
again within his soul.
Moreover, the man in the street finds it necessary to come to some
decision on other problems of existence. He is a citizen and must
needs exercise his enfranchisement and give his vote at an election
now and again. He must help to decide whether the State shall ignore
religion and establish a system of ethical education, of which the
ultimate sanction is social convenience, or maintain the thesis that
Creed and Character are mutually inter-dependent.
As he pays his poor rate wrathfully, or with resignation, its annual
increase reminds him of the necessity of curing or eliminating the
unfit. When he reads of Belgian and Prussian colonial enterprise, or
ponders on the perplexing problem of the Black Belt which the Southern
States must solve, he is compelled to consider whether it is true
that “God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all
the face of the earth,” or whether this shall be accounted as another
of the delusions of Saul of Tarsus whom Governor Festus found to be
mad.
Indeed, our friend, the man in the street, when he becomes a family
man, without any pretensions to be a man of family, very often finds
himself face to face with other problems. Shall he simply sing with
the Psalmist “Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are
the young children. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them,” or shall he be guided by the gloss of a modern interpreter who
maintains that the oriental quiver was designed to hold but two or
three arrows at most?
Even when the plain man confines his interests to his business and
seeks relaxations in “sport” alone, endeavouring to evade the puzzles
of politics and avoid all theologized inquiry, he cannot escape from
ethical consideration. Professionalism in athletics and questions of
betting and bribery contend with his conviction that there is
something which ennobles man in running and striving for mastery, and
it is futile to curse the bookmaker when his clients are so many, his
occupation so lucrative.
The average man gets little guidance from pulpit or press. It is dull
work reading sermons, even if sermons came in his way. From time to
time some eloquent bishop or canon is reported in the Monday morning
papers, but journalists know that the publication of a summary with,
in the case of a few of the preachers, some epigrams or denunciations,
is all that can be permitted or expected. These may arouse the
attention to the existence of evils, but give no guiding principle for
their cure.
The habit of attendance at some place of worship is easily abandoned
in the days of bachelor freedom, and rarely regained in maturer years.
Men for the most part find the preacher unconvincing. The usual
audience does not desire discussion of difficulties. When the honest
instinct of devotional worship is gratified by common praise and
prayer, the people who regularly go to church, elderly, and orthodox
in their own way, resent a demand upon their intellectual exertion,
and the Northern farmer of Tennyson hardly misrepresents them, “I
thought he said what he ought to ha’ said and I comed away.” The great
Nonconformist societies may, in some congregations, give a larger
latitude to the preacher, but his freedom is rather in the direction
of divinity than of ethics. Mr. Rockefeller is a prominent pillar of
Protestantism in the States, and Mr. Jabez Balfour, in another
congregation at Croydon, apparently knew no qualms of conscience
before his actual conviction, which was public, of sin.
There is an old proverb which tells us that “A man is either a fool or
a philosopher at forty”--and, though proverbs are often only venerable
prejudices in disguise, it is true that a man, who has attained his
eighth lustrum and is of average ability, generally has come to
certain definite conclusions as to the rudimentary laws of health. He
knows enough about his body to avoid fatal errors in diet, and has
learned the necessity of exercise and fresh air. But when he is called
upon, as a member of the body politic, to decide questions of ethics
on which the sanitation of society must depend, he feels himself at a
loss. To many people it will seem a hard saying that a man must be
either a fool or a philosopher at forty, but long ere he has reached
that age he will have encountered problems of philosophy which it is
impossible to shirk if he is to do his duty as a free man.
St. Paul, it is true, when writing to a Christian Community in Asia
Minor, bids them “beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy.”
And the unfortunate habit of Bible Christians, of tearing a text from
a treatise and making it into a precept, has thrown a sort of
discredit upon philosophic thinking, while the mass of mankind will
always prefer rules to principles of conduct. But in vain do we
clamour against intellectual complications which are the inevitable
endowment of these days. Life is necessarily intricate, subtle and
anxious, and Democracy has made of each man a ruler and governor in
his degree. Is it possible to point to a single principle which shall
be a motive and a standard of duty, which shall establish a synthetic
method after the ruthless analysis of the later Victorian days?
How searching that analysis has been! Fifty years ago the man in the
street might rarely read the Bible, but he had a tolerably assured
conviction that the Bible was infallible, however resolutely he might
refuse its interpretation by an infallible church.