Then_"I Believe" and other essays

“...the Essays and Reviews debate Begins to tell on the

public mind, and Colenso’s views have weight.”

Plain people were taught to look on the Old Testament as a library of

Hebrew literature containing not only poetry and history, but romance.

When Colenso’s book first appeared, Matthew Arnold deprecated its

publication since it brought criticisms familiar to men of culture

before the notice of the public, without considering how the beliefs

of “the vulgar” might be upset.

The supercilious apostle of “sweetness and light,” himself contributed

largely in later years to the general confusion in men’s minds, and

the New Testament criticism has been introduced to the general public

by Mr. Arnold’s accomplished niece.

Our friend, the man in the street, was all unprepared!

What had he ever been taught of theology, the Divine word to man? In

his school-days, if his father was an income tax payer he probably had

a weekly lesson in “Divinity,” when he construed a few verses of the

Gospels in the Greek Testament, and showed up to his master, now and

then, a map of the journeying of the Apostle Paul in Asia Minor and

Eastern Europe. If his father expected him to be confirmed, in due

course, some lessons in the catechism were added for his benefit, but

prudent pedagogues took care not to endanger the popularity of a

school, whether public or private, by any definite teaching which

might be accused of being dogmatic. The head-master was probably a

person of unsuspected orthodoxy, with a possible deanery or bishopric

in view for his days of superannuation. His sermons in chapel used to

set a fine standard of conduct before the boys, and were gracefully

free from all mention of controversial questions. In due course they

were published with the title _Sermons at Yarrow_, and enterprising

parents turning over their pages would find little to criticize and

much to admire. The Cross, if presented at all in these publications,

was so bespangled with rhetorical jewellery that “Jews might kiss and

Infidels adore.” And the children of Israel as public-school boys were

never painfully conscious of any great difference between themselves

and their baptized companions. But unfortunately only a few of the

boys came under the civilizing instruction of the Chief. Bright young

athletes from Oxford and Cambridge, lured into the ranks of pedagogy

by their love of football and cricket, were the assistant-masters. A

regular salary with holiday for a fourth of the year, the prospect of

early marriage, and a remunerative boarding-house, attracted them to a

pleasant position, and they had no wish to rebel against the

time-table which made them teachers of “Divinity” for at least one

hour in the week. All educated people should be tolerably familiar

with a book so largely used in quotation as the Bible, and the

succession of the Kings of Israel and Judah could be used in

strengthening the memory, whilst the stories of “Jehu and those other

Johnnies you know” were by no means devoid of picturesque incident.

Greek Testament could also be made useful in the acquisition of a

vocabulary, or in a lesson showing the difference between classical

and vernacular Greek. “Of course we must leave the application of

these studies to conduct to _Home influence_,” the headmasters would

blandly observe, and between parent and pedagogue the teaching of the

Christian Faith fell neglected to the ground.

What chance had the boys so brought up, of forming any conception of

the essential truths of Religion? A superficial acquaintance with the

stories of Hebrew history, a perfunctory attendance at chapel, some

well-meant exhortations on the subject of temperance and chastity, as

the catechism was revived in their memories before they were brought

to be confirmed by the Bishop, and some ability “to translate and give

the context” of a few phrases from the Greek texts of the Gospels,

these were their intellectual religious equipment for a life of fierce

temptation from within and without. And when they encountered the

storm and stress of modern social life they found that the critics had

taken from them the old reverence of nursery days for “God’s Book,”

their school training had taught them only a rough code of honour, and

their chief restraint from any ignoble impulse was a feeling that to

do certain deeds was not “good form.”

A little lower down the social ladder the man in the street has fared

no better in his boyhood. In the public elementary schools he has had

a half-hour’s lesson in Scripture and catechism five days of the week,

and annually the Diocesan, or the School Board, Inspector came round

to ascertain whether the Syllabus of religious teaching had been duly

followed. But only when devout parish priests had a talent for

teaching and a love for boys and girls was any attempt made to give

children a _religion_, and even in this case not very much could be

done for those who left school for ever when they were twelve years

old.

A generation ago Lord Sherbrooke, on the extension of the franchise,

told his contemporaries that it was time to begin “to educate our

masters”--but we have not gone very far in our instruction of

Christian Sociology, though as yet we have not adopted the Utilitarian

basis of morals accepted by the French Republic, and endeavoured to

establish principles of duty towards man without any reference

whatever to a duty towards God.

Can any one be surprised if the plain man be perplexed when he is

called upon to decide questions of economy and morality without any

guiding principle? As a matter of fact he makes no such effort.

“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, for the day of the

Lord is near in the valley of decisions,” but the sun and the moon are

darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining. The puzzled popular

vote is but as the swing of the pendulum, first to this side, then to

the other. “These fellows have been no good, let us give the others a

show.”

Yet assuredly there is a principle which is guidance and strength if

only men could discern it. There are Teachers who can tell men of its

beneficent power, but they are as yet few in number, and their voices

are not sufficiently strong. When once these can get a hearing, men

welcome their evangel and find in it a guide of life.

I am persuaded that just as Bishop Butler, when he perused the preface

of his _Analogy_, had no prescience of the young fellow of Lincoln,

who was in a few years to give the Christian faith a fresh hold in the

hearts of the common people, who gladly heard him, so in our time many

of our Bishops seem unable to perceive the dawn of another “day of the

Lord.”

Indeed, it is our misfortune in England that Bishops are almost

necessarily bad leaders. We are told when an election to the Papacy is

imminent that this or that Cardinal is in the list of “Papabili”--a

possible Pope--so in like manner we may almost select amongst the

undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge our future diocesans. These are

men clever, shrewd, and hard-working, of estimable private character,

and not without some modest patrimony. Early entered in the race for

preferment, ambitious, and yet, _mirabile dictu_, devout, they are

endowed first of all with the true qualification for episcopacy, a

capacity for compromise and a pliant political mind. _Sic itur ad

astra_ the excellent curate or tutor, the courteous and accomplished

chaplain to the Bishop, the eloquent canon and ecclesiastical courtier

is consecrated and enthroned. Henceforward for the rest of his days he

must hurry from his study table, crowded with correspondence, to his

confirmations, his diocesan society meetings, and his weary,

humiliating attendance at the House of Lords. What wonder if Bishops

discourage new ventures of faith, who have no time for thinking, no

time for reading, and perhaps, sometimes, too little opportunity for

prayer!

And so we find them not unwilling to accommodate the Catholic Faith to

the popular prejudice of the moment, acquiescing in an undogmatic,

undenominational, more or less Christian creed. Popularity becomes the

very breath of their nostrils, and they proceed to hide in an

appendix to the Prayer-book, the hymn _Quicunque vult_.

Yet the discerning can see that now is no time for keeping in the

background the great truths of religion. Already men are being

prepared in many ways to receive them.

The Christian Faith in England is no longer hampered by certain

arbitrary axioms of the Puritan Divines. In the sixteenth century men

were almost compelled by the exigencies of the situation to discover

some Infallible authority which they could set up over against the

Infallibility of the Church of Rome, and they endeavoured to treat

Holy Scripture as though the great library of Jewish and Christian

writers contained a complete code of consistent legislation. A text

was a convincing argument for the Divine right of Kings, or for

binding them in chains, for the burning of witches or the destruction

of a shrine, and although in the two following centuries the

Protestant ministers taught men to modify this conception, and to

realize the difference between the Old Testament and the New, the

popular idea of Revelation allowed small scope for theological

inquiry. The biographies of our literary men of the Victorian period

have shown us how they were tempted to separate themselves from all

public communion with the Church, by their misgiving that the Church

was committed to an impossible position. Carlyle groaned for what he

called an “exit from Houndsditch,” some deliverance from the Rabbinic

interpretation and use of the Bible. Things are very different to-day,

as Henry Sidgwick says in a letter to Alfred Lord Tennyson published

by his son in a recent memoir. “The years pass, the struggle with what

Carlyle used to call ‘Hebrew old clothes’ is over, Freedom is won.”

And in the result a scientific criticism of the Old and New Testament

is found to be compatible with, and often a compulsion to an

acceptance of the Christian creed, not the creed of Calvin, or the

Westminster Confession, but the reasoned statement of Nicæa. The

student of physical science no longer believes that if he goes to

church he must be taken to accept the cosmogony of Genesis, and on his

side he no longer stumbles at the difficulty of miraculous events. He

knows too much about the influence of mind over matter to say that it

is impossible that Jesus Christ and His Apostles should have healed

the paralytic and made the blind to see and the deaf to hear. He is no

longer “cocksure” of his capability of drawing a line of division

between the organic and the inorganic. He can conceive of the

existence of spirits which can control and modify the ordinary laws

of life. He finds it probable that evolution is not exhausted when Man

has come into being, and can look forward to a spiritual existence

without suspecting himself of superstition. Sacraments, the union of

the spiritual with the material, seem to him to be in accordance with

the laws of the Universe, and he would never now-a-days stigmatize

them as “Magic.” However he may explain the methods by which cures

were wrought upon the afflicted, the scientific man of to-day would

not accuse St. Luke of falsehood because he tells us that, “God

wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his body

were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases

departed from them and the evil spirits went out of them.” Indeed the

man of science knows himself to be on the track of discoveries which

will show us secrets of personality and spiritual possession which

will banish for ever the absurd incredulity of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.

Who now-a-days would assert that “miracles do not happen,” when men

like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some few of these

laws of the Universe which give us these portents and signs? Who dares

to sneer at Parthenogenesis or repeat the slander of Celsus about the

Mother of God? Men only who have grown rusty in reposing on their past

reputations and cannot see that materialism as a philosophy is dead.

Day by day fresh evidence of the power of the spirit over matter

bursts upon us. A plea for “philosophic doubt” of Professor Huxley’s

infallibility is no longer necessary. The very distinction between

matter and spirit grows more and more difficult as science develops

analytical power. The minds of men are being prepared again to receive

that Supreme revelation which told of the wedding of the earth and

heaven, the taking of the Manhood into God.

In truth, this is the one principle which can give men guidance in the

tangled intricacy of modern life. It is necessary to salvation, _now_,

not hereafter only, to believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord

Jesus Christ.

For, first of all, men need to be saved from the apathy of despair.

They need some hope that there is an answer to the riddle of the

Universe. Let them once begin to feel that it _may_ be true that the

very God cares for His creatures and has made His love for them

manifest by taking to Himself the body, mind and spirit of man, and

joining for ever human nature to the Godhead, then through the

darkness comes a human voice saying--

“O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself.

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,

But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,

And thou must love Me who have died for thee.”

A man regains his self-respect when once he has escaped from the

paralyzing sense that his is only

“a life of nothings nothing worth

From that first nothing ere our birth

To that last nothing under earth.”

And there is only one starting-point for those who journey on this

quest of an answer to the enigma of life. They must resolutely abandon

the long travelled “_a priori_ road.” They must understand that the

science of to-day is not tied to any materialistic axioms, that

metaphysic cannot be ignored by the physician, and that no competent

scientist to-day would say of the Resurrection of Jesus on which

ultimately depends His claims to our adoration, “_That could not

happen_.” We know enough now of the laws of the Universe to know that

we do not know them all.

So some of us perceive that what is needed to-day is to arrest the

attention of the man in the street, to get him to perceive that

Christianity has much more to say for itself than he suspected, and

that Christian Philosophy will place in his hand a clue which will

guide him in the labyrinth of life.

“I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ

Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee

All questions in the earth and out of it.”

We must set men free from phrases and get them to think. It suits the

game of the party politician to pretend that ethics are easily

self-evident, and that there is a simple fundamental religion on which

all men are agreed; but there is a question which must be insistently

urged, and upon the answer to which all things depend, “What think ye

of Christ?”

Probably nothing has done more to alienate the man in the street from

religious observance than the hypocritical pretence that all men are

agreed about “simple Bible teaching.” He knows well enough that what

really matters is whether a man believes or not that God became man.

If ever the Labour Party should definitely declare for elementary

education without religious teaching it will be because the men whose

children attend the elementary schools know that they cannot read the

New Testament without asking, “Is it true?”

“Did Jesus Christ really die and rise again the third day according to

the Scriptures?” “Did Jesus Christ go up into heaven in the sight of

the apostles till a cloud received Him?” “Did Mary’s Son come to her

as other babies come?” “Was Joseph Jesus Christ’s real father?” Our

members of Parliament who have no leisure to know their own children,

who keep them in the nursery till it is time for them to go to the

Preparatory School, who leave their training to the governess and the

head-master, may talk about “the cruelty of the religious differences

which hinder the establishment of an efficient system of education for

the children of the State.” But the men and the mothers who live with

their children and talk to them about their lessons, know that a child

will insist upon an answer to its questions. A father of a family in

the artisan and labouring classes, if he be at all intelligent, loses

all respect for ministers of the Gospel who pretend that there is no

difficulty about the simple Gospel story, and losing his self-respect

for the men who have appointed themselves his teachers, he is tempted

to throw all theology aside. And if he ventures on this despairing

expedient he finds himself in mental confusion again over ethics

instead of theology, and there arises a prospect of anarchy and

disorder. Capital is timid, so enterprise is checked. Poverty

increases and riot follows, and it all ends, not now-a-days in the

Napoleonic “whiff of grape-shot,” but in the rattle of the maxim in

the streets and the desolation of a thousand homes.

The experience of all civilization is that you cannot separate

morality from religion. When the Romans lost their faith in the old

gods and became “undenominational,” civic virtue decayed. When the

genius of the Empire was set up for a universal Deity and men were

bidden as good citizens to burn their few grains of incense before the

statue of the reigning Emperor--the representative of an ordered and

moral state--we know what happened. You cannot make an abstraction

alive and deify Government. Laws, which have the sanction only of

expediency, do but furnish mankind with exercise in evasion.

Indefinite belief in the existence of “something not ourselves which

makes for righteousness” has no motive force, and though men may rub

on in some fashion or other by following ancient custom, and the law

of use and wont, this can only be done in quiet times. And ours are

not quiet times; indeed, the air is thick with principles which are

forcing themselves into expression. The principles of Nationality or

Cosmopolitanism, the comity of nations and the limits of destruction,

international trades unionism, and the laws of marriage are recurring

items upon the programme of every social science congress. All these

dark questions are forced upon the attentions of men, and never was

there greater need of some synthetic philosophy which may help us in

their exploration. Are we going to put Christianity aside and rule out

theology from our calculations?

I may quote the testimony of the late Sir Leslie Stephen here. Every

one knows that he held no brief to defend orthodoxy--

“To proclaim unsectarian Christianity is, in circuitous

language, to proclaim that Christianity is dead. The love of

Christ, as representing the ideal perfection of human nature,

may indeed be still a powerful motive, and powerful whatever

the view which we take of Christ’s character. The advocates of

the doctrine in its more intellectual form represent this

passion as the true essence of Christianity. They assert with

obvious sincerity of conviction that it is the leverage by

which alone the world can be moved. But, as they would

themselves admit, this conception would be preposterous if,

with Strauss, we regarded Christ as a mere human being. Our

regard for Him might differ in degree, but would not differ in

kind, from our regard for Socrates or for Pascal. It would be

impossible to consider it as an overmastering and all-powerful

influence. The old dilemma would be inevitable; he that loves

not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love Christ whom

he hath not seen? A mind untouched by the agonies and wrongs

which invest London hospitals and lanes with horror, could not

be moved by the sufferings of a single individual, however

holy, who died eighteen centuries ago.

“No; the essence of the belief is the belief in the Divinity of

Christ. But accept that belief; think for a moment of all that

implies, and you must admit that your Christianity becomes

dogmatic in the highest degree. Our conceptions of the world

and its meaning are more radically changed than our conceptions

of the material universe, when the sun instead of the earth

becomes its centre. _Every view of history, every theory of our

duty, must be radically transformed by contact with that

Stupendous Mystery._ Whether you accept or reject the special

tenets of the Athanasian Creed is an infinitesimal trifle. You

are bound to assume that every religion which does not take

this dogma into account is without true vital force. Infidels,

heathens, and Unitarians reject the single influence which

alone can mould our lives in conformity with the everlasting

laws of the universe. Of course, there are tricks of sleight of

hand by which the conclusion is evaded. It would be too long

and too trifling to attempt to expose them. Unsectarian

Christianity consists in shirking the difficulty without

meeting it, and trying hard to believe that the passion can

survive without its essential basis. It proclaims the love of

Christ as our motive, whilst it declines to make up its mind

whether Christ was God or man; or endeavours to escape a

categorical answer under a cloud of unsubstantial rhetoric. But

the difference between man and God is infinite, and no effusion

of superlatives will disguise the plain fact from honest

minds. To be a Christian in any real sense you must start from

a dogma of the most tremendous kind, and an undogmatic Creed is

as senseless as a statue without shape or a picture without

colour. Unsectarian means un-Christian.“--From _Freethinking

and Plainspeaking_ (pp. 122-4), by Leslie Stephen. (Longmans,

London.)

The considerations which seemed to compel the clearheaded author of

this extract to his own well-known intellectual position no longer

apply. In England, at any rate, the Church is not bound down to any

mechanical theory of the inspiration of the Bible, and accepts all the

discoveries of Modern Physical Science without misgiving. Such books

as the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Temple) gave us in his

Bampton Lectures have long ago shown the futility of attempting to map

out the exact terms of a reconciliation between the claims of science

and religion, but they have shown that religion and science are _not_

destructive and contradictory of each other.

“The same principles are found in each. The principle of evolution,

for instance, is as evident in the gradual development of religion as

in the age-long process by which the natural world was created; the

order and beauty and regular succession manifest in Nature can be

traced also in the spiritual universe. The revelation which was

formerly held to be violation of law is seen to be a revelation of

higher law. The great postulate of science, the uniformity of Nature,

is not infringed.”

We know now that there are laws of the Universe which, if we knew more

about them, would tell us how it was that a Virgin could conceive and

bear a Son. It is not to us an inconceivable superstition that “The

Son of Man” should have in His own person powers of which the

rudimentary signs can be traced in all humanity, manifesting

themselves from time to time. The day is long past when the

resurrection of Jesus Christ can be set aside as a “cunningly devised

fable.” No scientific man, who has not deliberately shut himself in an

hermetically sealed materialism would say to-day that “Miracles” do

not happen. It is a question of evidence.

And educated men know that there is a science of metaphysics, that

there is a science of psychology, that literary criticism is

scientific, that the age of a document can be decided, that cumulative

evidence cannot be ignored, and that simply to put aside the claims of

Christianity without examination is absurd.

But, as Sir Leslie Stephen shows, it is the Christianity of the

Catholic creed that matters, and it is this Christianity of which the

man in the street has need. It gives him a solution of those social

and ethical problems which he must solve, which he can only neglect at

the peril of natural degradation. For example, the position of women

depends upon our belief or disbelief that Christ was born of the

Virgin Mary. To say that monogamy is the natural evolution of

humanity, that chastity in the young unmarried man is a product of

civilization, that a high conception of a man’s duty to posterity will

keep him from harlotry, is simply to show ignorance of history, of

human nature, and of the world as it is. A man who talks now-a-days

about the respect of marriage being a Teutonic contribution to the

evolution of civilized society, is behind the times. We _know_ that

respect for women, and marriage held in honour, are the creations of

the Holy Catholic Church, which insists on the Incarnation of the Lord

Jesus Christ.

But the man in the street does not know these things. The discoveries

in science, whether physical or psychical, do not reach him. Technical

treatises are too strong meat for his intellectual digestion. The

pulpit does not appeal to him. At every baptism in the Church of

England the priest solemnly instructs the god-parents of the child,

“Ye shall call upon him to hear sermons,” but for the most part the

admonition is in vain. As a matter of fact, he picks up his religious

notions from the newspaper press. And the newspaper press is not now

controlled by men who have a distinct and definite belief in

Christianity. It depends upon Finance, and financiers have other

interests. The assertion of the Psalter, “Notus in Judæa” has been

changed now-a-days into an interrogation, and we ask, “In Jewry _is_

God known?” Let any man who has an intimate acquaintance with the

newspaper world run over in his mind the names of the great newspaper

proprietors, the editors of our journalistic press, the writers of

leading articles, the rising young journalists; and when he has

excepted a few Irishmen, who may happen to remain faithful to the

Roman Catholic Church, to which they owe their education, how many men

will he find who honestly believe the Nicene Creed, and are habitually

present on the first day of the week at the Breaking of the Bread?

The tone of the daily paper is tolerant. There is no rude hostility

displayed towards definite Christian doctrines, but the toleration is

politely contemptuous. “All wise men are of the same religion, and

what that religion is wise men do not say.”

It is true that in political matters the press has less power than it

used to have. A magnate of finance cannot now seriously affect public

opinion, though he may buy newspaper after newspaper, and sweep out

the editorial staff to supply their places with men of his own choice.

One wealthy wirepuller has other plutocrats to reckon with in

questions of party politics, and a newspaper man who is dismissed by

the proprietor of the _Tariff Reformer_ may find another editorial

chair placed at his disposal by the owner of _The Standard of Free

Trade_.

The man in the street looks out for a newspaper which may strengthen

his own party proclivities. He expects to find political questions

discussed, but so far as religion is concerned he accepts without

knowing it the current convention of the pressman, and imbibes a

semi-sceptical atmosphere without misgiving or suspicion.

And yet, as Sir Leslie Stephen saw, every theory of duty depends upon

Belief or Disbelief in the Divinity of Christ. We may talk of duty to

Society, duty to the Race, duty to Posterity, duty to Civilization;

but the plain man will recall the question of Sir Boyle Roche: “I do

not understand, Mr. Speaker, all this talk about our duty to

Posterity! What has Posterity ever done for us?”

You cannot control conduct by asserting that a man owes a debt to an

abstraction which you vivify by printing it with a capital letter,

and there remains always the question of the dying Lucretius--

“Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well.”

The problem, then, which we have to solve is--how to arrest the

attention of the average man to those Christian principles, of which

the acceptance or definite refusal will determine the course of

civilization during the next twenty years.

The mere assertion of authority will not suffice, and men are not

impressed in favour of Catholic doctrine simply by dignified ceremony

and Ritual. We have only to look across the English Channel to be

assured of this. Frenchmen have not been encouraged to study the

evidences of Christianity. Bishops and priests have only advertised

sceptical books by forbidding their perusal to the faithful; and as

the devout have been instructed to live by faith, but not how to give

a reason for the faith which is in them, in the result M. Viviani’s

atheistic rhetoric has been placarded at the cost of the State in

every commune throughout France.

We may consider, then, if there be any method by which the man who

does not read theological or scientific or philosophical books, the

man who has left off going to church, or gets no help from the

average sermon, the man who has no reverence for mere authority, may

be induced to consider the Christian Revelation as offering him a key

to those riddles of life which his civic responsibilities are

perpetually propounding.

Remember that his present condition may be roughly described as

consisting of religious haziness and moral laziness. The moral

laziness is being subjected to a series of rough shocks. He _must_

make up his mind about some questions of morality. The relation of the

sexes, the duties of property, the treatment of the subject savage,

the survival of the unfit, the ethics of commerce, the control of the

sale of alcohol, the education of children, these things he has to

decide and he will ultimately decide. But he is at present perplexed,

and his religious haziness is the reason of his perplexity. He perhaps

has not reached the conclusion of his contemporary in France, but he

is on the way to it. Those heavenly lights which M. Viviani declares

that his Government has extinguished still shine faintly for men in

England, though the mists obscure them.

Can we get men to look upwards for light, and instead of cursing the

ancient creed in a confused commination, to take Arthur Clough’s

advice--

“Ah! yet consider it again.”

I believe that there is a method, and as I mention it I am prepared

for derision from all the “chorus of irresponsible reviewers, the

irresponsible indolent reviewers.”

I believe that Fiction will find those that can be reached by no other

means. Fiction sometimes sets a man seeking for Fact.

Very diffidently and very reverently I may remind my contemporaries

that one, who has, at any rate, profoundly influenced the course of

history, whatever view we may take of His person, did not disdain this

method, “He taught them by parables.”

“Let me tell you a story.” Is there any age of mankind which does not

respond to the invitation and give audience? A story stilled the

tumult of the nursery in our earliest days, when heavy storms shook

the windows and the tedium of a long, wet afternoon had turned play

into fretfulness. A story beguiled us into interest when our History

lesson had seemed an arid futility in Fourth Form days, and our

magisterial enemies began to show themselves human after all when they

bade us read _The Last of the Barons_ as we were painfully plodding in

the Plantagenet period, and found the War of the Roses a very thorny

waste.

It is strange to turn over the pages of eminent evangelical sermons

of the early Victorian days and to notice how “Novel reading” is

denounced. Probably the worthy divines who fulminated against fiction

were thinking of their own boyhood, and the mischief which came to

them from Fielding and Richardson and Smollett surreptitiously

perused. Sir Anthony Absolute’s detestation of the circulating library

survived in some provincial circles even when Sir Walter Scott had

come to his own. The last forty years have altered things

considerably, and though some men may pretend to despise novels,

now-a-days they must take them into account. Wise and learned persons

began to prescribe them, not only as a vehicle for the exhibition of

wholesome but unattractive information, but as having a remedial value

of their own. “The intellectual anodyne of the nineteenth century,” I

remember that somebody called them--perhaps it was Sir Arthur Helps.

It came about that those who had a secret and timid predilection for

the story-book, but blushed a little if at Mudie’s counter they

ventured to ask for a novel, found that their ordinary reading of

Biography and Memoirs revealed some unsuspected sympathies of the

illustrious and wise. Who would have thought that Darwin devoured

novels and Dean Church did not disdain them, and that Mr. Gladstone

sat up all night to finish _John Inglesant_? The respectable

pater-familias has long ceased to proscribe novel reading, and the

most austere biographer no longer hides as a revelation of weakness

his hero’s literary divertisements. Finally, in this year of Grace

1906 we are boldly told that Archbishop Temple could stand an

examination in Miss Yonge’s novels, and on one occasion was heard

keenly discussing with Lord Rosebery the careers of the May family in

the _Daisy Chain_ as though they were living acquaintances. From being

recognized as a recreation the novel has developed into a power, and

Charles Dickens was a pioneer in its progress. It is the custom

amongst certain “superior persons” to sneer at the novel with a

purpose, and to suggest that authors attained remunerative results by

taking some subject which was already ripe for discussion and weaving

round it a web of fiction.

Undoubtedly there is danger to-day of such artifice, but I maintain

that the great reforms of the past century owed much to writers whose

purpose was perfectly innocent. Cardinal Newman has told us of the

literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, who turned men’s minds in the

direction of the Middle Ages.

“The general need,” he said, “of something deeper and more attractive

than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be said to have led to

his popularity; and by means of his popularity he reacted on his

readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting

before them visions, which when once seen are not easily forgotten,

and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might

afterwards be appealed to as first principles.”

If Cardinal Newman could thus maintain the value of Fiction in the

great ecclesiastical movement which has regenerated the Church of

England, I may claim without apology that the reform in Poor Law

Administration gained the attention of the public when Dickens made

“Bumbledom” ridiculous, and that the Court of Chancery was swept

cleaner by the breezes which were blowing from _Bleak House_. Let any

man run over in his mind the undoubted improvements in social matters

during the last fifty years, and it will be seen how Fiction has

assisted in their promotion. Did Charles Reade’s _Hard Cash_ do

nothing to arouse the attention of the public to the condition of the

insane? Did Sir Walter Besant’s novels turn no light on the sins of

the sweater, or Charles Kingsley’s _Alton Locke_ show no reason for

legalizing the Trade Union and the reform of the Law of Conspiracy?

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe may to-day be forgotten, but the southern

states of North America would not dispute the influence of Fiction

upon the public mind.

The fact is that men, who generally read nothing else but newspapers,

will read a good novel, and if the book brings before them principles

which they have hitherto neglected, they will very often consider

those principles again. It is necessary, however, that the novel shall

appeal to them as being a fair record of the present or the past. They

may as they read it be unable to pronounce on the thesis which is at

the back of the book, but they will be led to consider and discuss it

if the story, as a story, holds them. And it is here that the story

which has a genuine religious motive often fails. Most of the great

artists in fiction, when they have taken in hand a subject which is of

religious interest, have written in a spirit of detachment. George

Eliot’s _Romola_ is an example, and the result is that men are more

interested in Tito Melema than in Savonarola. Novels in which religion

is necessarily much in evidence have been written either by literary

artists who have studiously endeavoured to lay aside their own

personal convictions, or if the books have been written with a

distinctly religious purpose the hero and heroine have been

unconvincing, the people in the story have not been alive.

When Cardinal Newman had abandoned prematurely his hope of maintaining

the Catholic character of the Church of England, he did not disdain to

employ his pen in the production of a novel with a religious purpose;

but we are amazed to find that the exquisite grace of style which is

one of the charms of the _Apologia_ could not render Charles Riding

interesting, or the novel _Loss and Gain_, of which he is the hero,

readable.

It is perhaps dangerous to give another example from contemporary

fiction, but those who justly admire Mrs. Humphry Ward’s subtle

discernment of character and great and increasing mastery of form and

style, will not be inclined to dispute the opinion that when, in

_Robert Elsmere_, she undertook the defence of the modern Unitarian

position, her hero was hardly a “Man’s man.”

The reason is not far to seek. The average man knows too much of the

darker side of life; and the necessary effort made by the author of

religious novels to depict that of which they, fortunately for their

own souls, have had no experience, is not successful. Charles

Kingsley’s undergraduate days were perhaps not without knowledge of

the shadows, but he is happier in the Schools of Alexandria, or in the

spacious days of Great Elizabeth, than in a tale of modern life such

as _Two Years Ago_. His Broad Church Catholic teaching does not always

find its way to the man in the street, and Henry Kingsley, whose life

was so different from that of his illustrious clerical brother, has