of cruelty and savagery to gloat over an easy prey. We forbear all
verbal criticism, then, and simply deny _in toto_ the truth of Mr.
Froude’s statement. It is so very wrong that we can only think he wrote
from his imagination—a weakness from which he suffers oftenest when he
wishes most to be effective. Had he searched the world he could not
have found a worse instance to prove his point than North Germany.
Prussia is the leading North German and Protestant state, and in
various passages Mr. Froude shows that he takes it as his beau-ideal of
a Protestant power. How stands Protestantism in Prussia to-day?
The indications for more than a quarter of a century past have been
that Protestantism in Prussia was little more than the shadow of a once
mighty name. These indications have become more marked of late years,
especially since the consolidation of the new German Empire. Earnest
German Protestants are continually deploring the fact; the press
proclaims it; the Protestant ministers avow it, and all the world knew
of it, save, apparently, Mr. Froude. “Protestantism in Prussia” formed
the subject of a letter from the Berlin correspondent of the London
_Times_ as recently as Sept. 7, 1877. His testimony on such a subject
could scarcely be called in question, but even if it could be the facts
narrated speak for themselves.
“Forty years ago,” he says, “the clergy of the Established
Church of this country, including the leading divines and the
members of the ecclesiastical government, almost to a man were
under the influence of free-thinking theories.
“It was the time when German criticism first undertook to
dissect the Bible. History seemed to have surpassed theology,
and divines had recourse to ‘interpreting’ what they thought
they could no longer maintain according to the letter. The
movement extended from the clergy to the educated classes,
gradually reaching the lower orders, and ultimately pervaded
the entire nation. At this juncture atheism sprang forward to
reap the harvest sown by latitudinarians. Then reaction set in.
The clergy reverted to orthodoxy, and their conversion to the
old faith happening to coincide with the return of the
government to political conservatism, subsequent to the
troublous period of 1848, the stricter principles embraced by
the cloth were systematically enforced by consistory and
school....
“The clergy turned orthodox twenty-five years ago; _the laity
did not_. The servants of the altar, having realized the
melancholy effect of opposite tenets, resolutely fell back upon
the ancient dogmas of Christianity; _the congregations declined
to follow suit_. Hence the few ‘liberal’ clergymen remaining
after the advent of the orthodox period had the consolation of
knowing themselves to be in accord, if not with their clerical
brethren, at least with the majority of the educated, and,
perhaps, even the uneducated, classes.”
He proceeds to mention various cases of prominent Lutheran clergymen
who denied the divinity of Christ, or other doctrines equally necessary
to be maintained by men professing to be Christians, and of the
unsuccessful attempts made to silence them. As the correspondent says
“irreverent liberal opinion on the case is well reflected in an article
in the Berlin _Volks-Zeitung_,” which is so instructive that we quote
it for the especial benefit of Mr. Froude:
“As long as Protestant clergymen are appointed by provincial
consistories officiating in behalf of the crown our
congregations will have to put up with any candidates that may
be forced upon them. They may, perhaps, be allowed to nominate
their pastors, but they will be impotent to exact the
confirmation of their choice from the ecclesiastical
authorities. Nor do we experience any particular curiosity as
to the result of the inquiry instituted against Herr Hossbach.
In matters of this delicate nature judicious evasions have been
too often resorted to by clever accused, and visibly favored by
ordained judges of the faith, for us to care much for the
result of the suit opened. A sort of fanciful and imaginative
prevarication has always flourished in theological debate, and
the old artifice, it is to be foreseen, will be employed with
fresh versatility in the present instance. Should the election
of Herr Hossbach be confirmed, the consistorial decree will be
garnished with so many ‘ifs’ and ‘althoughs’ that the brilliant
ray of truth will be dimmed by screening assumptions, like a
candle placed behind a colored glass. Similarly, should the
consistory decline to ratify the choice of the vestry, the
refusal is sure to be rendered palatable by the employment of
particularly mild and euphonious language. In either case the
triumph of the victorious party will be but half a triumph....
It is not a little remarkable that the Protestant Church in
this country should be kept under the control of superimposed
authorities, while Roman Catholics and Jews are free to preach
what they like. The power of the Catholic hierarchy has been
broken by the new laws. _Catholic clergymen deviating from the
approved doctrine of the Church are protected by the Government
from the persecution of their bishops. Catholic congregations
are positively urged and instigated to profit by the privileges
accorded them, and assert their independence against bishop and
priest._ Jewish rabbis, too, are free to disseminate any
doctrine without being responsible for their teaching to
spiritual or secular judges. Only Protestant congregations
enjoy the doubtful advantage of having the election of their
clergy controlled, and the candor of their clergy made the
theme of penal inquiry.... And yet Protestant congregations
have a ready means of escape at their disposal. Let them leave
the church, and they are free to elect whomsoever they may
choose as their minister. As it is, the indecision of the
congregations maintains the _status quo_ by forcing liberal
clergymen into the dogmatic straight-waistcoat of the
consistories.”
“In the above argument one important fact is overlooked,” says the
_Times_’ correspondent.
“Among the liberals opposed to the consistories there are many
atheists, but few sufficiently religious to care for reform.
Hence the course taken by the consistories may be resented, but
the preaching of the liberal clergy is not popular enough to
create a new denomination or to compel innovation within the
pale of the church. The fashionable metaphysical systems of
Germany are pessimist.”
A week previous to the date of this letter the Lutheran pastors held
their annual meeting at Berlin. The Rev. Dr. Grau, who is referred to
as “a distinguished professor of theology,” speaking of the task of the
clergy in modern times—certainly a most important subject for
consideration—said:
“These are serious times for the church. The protection of the
temporal power is no longer awarded to us to anything like the
extent it formerly was. _The great mass of the people is either
indifferent or openly hostile to doctrinal teaching._ Not a few
listen to those striving to combine Christ with Belial, and to
reconcile redeeming truth with modern science and culture.
_There are those who dream of a future church erected on the
ruins of the Lutheran establishment, which by these
enterprising neophytes is already regarded as dead and gone.”_
“The meeting,” observes the correspondent, “by passing the resolutions
proposed by Dr. Grau, endorsed the opinions of the principal speaker.”
And he adds:
“While giving this unmitigated verdict upon the state of
religion among the people, the meeting displayed open
antagonism to the leading authorities of the church. To the
orthodox pastors the sober and sedative policy pursued by the
Ober Kirchen Rath is a dereliction even more offensive than the
downright apostasy of the liberals. To render their opposition
intelligible the change that has recently supervened in high
quarters should be adverted to in a few words. Soon after his
accession to the throne the reigning sovereign, in his capacity
as _summus episcopus_, recommended a lenient treatment of
liberal views. Though himself strictly orthodox, as he has
repeatedly taken occasion to announce, the emperor is tolerant
in religion, and too much of a statesman to overlook the
undesirable consequences that must ensue from permanent warfare
between church and people. He therefore appointed a few
moderate liberals members of the supreme council, accorded an
extensive degree of self-government to the synods, at the
expense of his own episcopal prerogative, and finally
sanctioned civil marriage and ‘civil baptism,’ as registration
is sarcastically called in this country, to the intense
astonishment and dismay of the orthodox. The last two measures,
it is true, were aimed at the priests of the Roman Catholic
Church, who were to be deprived of the power of punishing those
of their flock siding with the state in the ecclesiastical war;
but, as the operation of the law could not be restricted to one
denomination, Protestants were made amenable to a measure
which, to the orthodox among them, was quite as objectionable
as to the believing adherents of the Pope. The supreme council
of the Protestant Church, having to approve these several
innovations adopted by the crown, gradually accustomed itself
to regard compromise and bland pacification as one of the
principal duties imposed upon it.”
The correspondent ends his letter thus:
“When all was over orthodoxy was at feud with the people as
well as with the authoritative guardians of the church. Yet
neither people nor guardians remonstrated. For opposite reasons
both were equally convinced they could afford to ignore the
charges made.”
So important was the letter that the London _Times_ made it the subject
of an editorial article, wherein it speaks of “the singular revival of
theological and ecclesiastical controversy, which is observable in all
directions,” having “at last reached the slumbering Protestantism of
Prussia.” It confesses that
“The state of things as described by our correspondent is
certainly a very anomalous one. The Prussian Protestant Church
has, of late years at least, had but little hold on the respect
and affections of the great majority of the people; they are at
best but indifferent to it when they are not actively hostile.
We are not concerned to investigate the causes of this lack of
popularity; we are content to take it as a fact manifest to all
who know the country and acknowledged by all observers alike.”
“German Protestantism _was_ a power and an influence,” it says,
“To which the modern world is deeply indebted, and with which,
now that ultramontanism is triumphant in the Church of Rome and
priestcraft is again striving in all quarters to exert its
sway, the friends of freedom and toleration can ill afford to
dispense. There is no more ominous sign in the history of an
established church than a divorce between intelligence and
orthodoxy. This is what, to all appearances, has happened in
Prussia.”
We could corroborate this by abundance of testimony from all quarters;
but surely the evidence here given is sufficient to convince any man of
the deplorable state of Protestantism in Prussia. Why Mr. Froude should
have chosen that country of all others for his Protestant paradise we
cannot conceive, unless on the ground that he is Mr. Froude. “The world
on one side, and Popery on the other,” he says, “are dividing the
practical control over life and conduct. North Germany, manful in word
and deed, sustains the fight against both enemies and carries the old
flag to victory. A few years ago another Thirty Years’ War was feared
for Germany. A single campaign sufficed to bring Austria on her knees.
_Protestantism, as expressed in the leadership of Prussia_, assumed the
direction of the German Confederation” (pp. 135–136).
And whither does this leadership tend? To the devil, if the London
_Times_, if Dr. Grau, if every observant man who has written or spoken
on this subject, is to be believed. The only religion in Prussia to-day
is the Catholic; Protestantism has yielded to atheism or nothingism.
The persecution has only proved and tempered the Catholic Church; not
even a strong and favoring government can infuse a faint breath of life
into the dead carcase of Prussian Protestantism. It is much the same
story all the world over. Mr. Froude sees clearly enough what is
coming. Protestantism as a religious power is dead. It has lost all
semblance of reality. It had no religious reality from the beginning.
It will still continue to be used as an agent by political schemers and
conspirators; but in the fight between religion and irreligion it is of
little worth. The fight is not here, but where Mr. Froude rightly
places it—between the irreligious world and Catholicity, which “are
dividing the practical control over life and conduct.”
And thus heresies die out; they expire of their own corruption. Their
very offspring rise up against them. Their children cry for bread and
they give them a stone. The fragments of truth on which they first
build are sooner or later crushed out by the great mass of falsehood.
The few good seeds are choked up by the harvest of the bad, and only
the ill weeds thrive, until all the space around them is desolate of
fruit or light or sweetness, or anything fair under heaven. Then comes
the husbandman in his own good time, and curses the barren fig-tree and
clears the desolate waste. It will be with Protestantism as it has been
with all the heresies; Christians will wonder, and the time would seem
not to be very far distant when they will wonder that Protestantism
ever should have been. It will go to its grave, the same wide grave
that has swallowed up heresy after heresy. Gnosticism, Arianism,
Pelagianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Protestantism, all the isms,
are children of the same family, live the same life, die the same
death. The everlasting church buries them all, and no man mourns their
loss.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A RAMBLE AFTER THE WAITS.
“CHRISTMAS comes but once a year,
So let us all be merry,”
saith the old song. And now, as the festal season draws nigh, everybody
seems bent on fulfilling the behest to the uttermost. The streets are
gay with lights and laughter; the shops are all a-glitter with precious
things; the markets are bursting with good cheer. The air vibrates with
a babble of merry voices, until the very stars seem to catch the
infection and twinkle a thought more brightly. The faces of those you
meet beam with joyous expectation; huge baskets on their arms, loaded
with good things for the morrow, jostle and thump you at every turn,
but no one dreams of being ill-natured on Christmas Eve; mysterious
bundles in each hand contain unimagined treasures for the little ones
at home. And hark! do you not catch a jingle of distant sleigh-bells, a
faint, far-off patter and scrunching of tiny hoofs upon the snow? It is
the good St. Nicholas setting out upon his merry round; it is Dasher
and Slasher and Prancer and Vixen scurrying like the wind over the
house-tops. And high over all—“the poor man’s music”—the merry, merry
bells of Yule, the solemn, the sacred bells, peal forth the tidings of
great joy. Is it not hard to conceive that the time should have been
when Christmas was not? impossible to conceive that any in a Christian
land should have wished to do away with it—should have been willing,
having had it, ever to forego a festival so fraught with all holy and
happy memories?
Yet once such men were found, and but little more than two centuries
ago. It was on the 24th day of December, 1652—day for ever to be marked
with the blackest of black stones, nay, with a bowlder of Plutonian
nigritude—that the British House of Commons, being moved thereto “by a
terrible remonstrance against Christmas day grounded upon divine
Scripture, wherein Christmas is called Antichrists masse, and those
masse-mongers and Papists who observe it,” and after much time “spent
in consultation about the abolition of Christmas day, passed order to
that effect, and resolved to sit upon the following day, which was
commonly called Christmas day.” Whether this latter resolution was
carried into effect we do not know. If so, let us hope that their
Christmas dinners disagreed with them horribly, and that the foul fiend
Nightmare kept hideous vigil by every Parliamentary pillow.
But think of such an atrocious sentiment being heard at all in
Westminster! How must the very echoes of the hall have shrunk from
repeating that monstrous proposition—how shuddered and fled away into
remotest corners and crevices as that
“Hideous hum
Ran through the arch’d roof in words deceiving”!
How must they have disbelieved their ears, and tossed the impious
utterance back and forth from one to another in agonized questioning,
growing feebler and fainter at each repulse, until their voices,
faltering through doubt into dismay, grew dumb with horror! How must
“Rufus’ Roaring Hall”[107] have roared again outright with rage and
grief over that strange, that unhallowed profanation! What wan phantoms
of old-time mummeries and maskings, what dusty and crumbling memories
of royal feast and junketing, must have hovered about the heads of
those audacious innovators, shrieking at them what unsyllabled
reproaches from voiceless lips, shaking at them what shadowy fingers of
entreaty or menace! And if the proverb about ill words and burning ears
be true, how those crop-ears must have tingled!
Within those very walls England’s kings for generations had kept their
Christmas-tide most royally with revelry and dance and wassail. There
Henry III. on New Year’s day, 1236, to celebrate the coronation of
Eleanor, his queen, entertained 6,000 of his poorer subjects of all
degrees; and there twelve years later, though he himself ate his
plum-pudding at Winchester, he was graciously pleased to bid his
treasurer “fill the king’s Great Hall from Christmas day to the Day of
Circumcision with poor people and feast them.” There, too, at a later
date Edward III. had for sauce to his Christmas turkey—not to mention
all sorts of cates and confections, tarts and pasties of most cunning
device, rare liquors and spiced wines—no less than two captive kings,
to wit, David of Scotland and John of France. Poor captive kings!
_Their_ turkey—though no doubt their princely entertainer was careful
to help them to the daintiest tidbits, and to see that they had plenty
of stuffing and cranberry sauce—must have been but a tasteless morsel,
and their sweetbreads bitter indeed. Another Scottish king, the first
James, of tuneful and unhappy memory, had even worse (pot) luck soon
after. Fate, and that hospitable _penchant_ of our English cousins in
the remoter centuries for quietly confiscating all stray Scotch princes
who fell in their way, as though they had been contraband of war, gave
him the enviable opportunity of eating no less than a score of
Christmas dinners on English soil. But he seems to have been left to
eat them alone or with his jailer in “bowery Windsor’s calm retreat” or
the less cheerful solitude of the Tower. It does not appear that either
the fourth or the fifth Henry, his enforced hosts, ever asked him to
put his royal Scotch legs under their royal English mahogany. Had
Richard II. been in the place of “the ingrate and cankered
Bolingbroke,” we may be sure that his northern guest would not have
been treated so shabbily. In his time Westminster and his two thousand
French cooks (shades of Lucullus! what an appetite he must have had,
and what a broiling and a baking and a basting must they have kept up
among them; the proverb of “busier than an English oven at Christmas”
had reason then, at least) were not long left idle; for it was their
sovereign’s jovial custom to keep open house in the holidays for as
many as ten thousand a day—a comfortable tableful. It was his motto
plainly to
“Be merry, for our time of stay is short.”
Such a device, however, the third Richard might have made his own with
still greater reason. That ill-used prince, who was no doubt a much
better fellow at bottom than it has pleased Master Shakspeare to
represent him—if Richmond had not been Queen Bess’ grandpapa, we should
like enough have had a different story and altogether less about humps
and barking dogs—made the most of a limited opportunity to show what he
could do in the way of holiday dinner-giving. The only two Christmases
he had to spend as king at Westminster—for him but a royal stage on his
way to a more permanent residence at Bosworth Field—he celebrated with
extraordinary magnificence, as became a prince “reigning,” says Philip
de Comines, “in greater splendor than any king of England for the last
hundred years.” On the second and last Christmas of his reign and life
the revelry was kept up till the Epiphany, when “the king himself,
wearing his crown, held a splendid feast in the Great Hall similar to
his coronation.” Wearing his crown, poor wretch! He seems to have felt
that his time was short for wearing it, and that he must put it to use
while he had it. Already, indeed, as he feasted, rapacious Fortune,
swooping implacable, was clawing it with skinny, insatiable claws,
estimating its value and the probable cost of altering it to fit
another wearer, and thinking how much better it would look on the long
head of her good friend Richmond, who had privately bespoken it. No
doubt some cold shadow of that awful, unseen presence fell across the
banquet-table and poisoned the royal porridge.
What need to tell over the long roll of Christmas jollities, whose
memory from those historic walls might have pleaded with or rebuked the
sour iconoclasts planning gloomily to put an end to all such for ever;
how even close-fisted Henry VII.—no fear of his losing a crown, if
gripping tight could keep it—feasted there the lord-mayor and aldermen
of London on the ninth Christmas of his reign, sitting down himself,
with his queen and court and the rest of the nobility and gentry, to
one hundred and twenty dishes served by as many knights, while the
mayor, who sat at a side-table, no doubt, had to his own share no fewer
than twenty-four dishes, followed, it is to be feared, if he ate them
all, by as many nightmares; how that meek and exemplary Christian
monarch, Henry VIII., “welcomed the coming, sped the parting” wife at
successive Christmas banquets of as much splendor as the spoils of
something over a thousand monasteries could furnish forth;[108] how
good Queen Bess, who had her own private reading of the doctrine “it is
more blessed to give than to receive,” sat in state there at this
festival season to accept the offerings of her loyal lieges, high and
low, gentle and simple, from prime minister to kitchen scullion, until
she was able to add to the terrors of death by having to leave behind
her something like three thousand dresses and some trunkfuls of jewels
in Christmas gifts; or what gorgeous revels and masques—Inigo Jones
(Inigo Marquis Would-be), Ben Jonson, and Master Henry Lawes (he of
“the tuneful and well-measured song”) thereto conspiring—made the
holidays joyous under James and Charles. Some ghostly savor of those
bygone banquets might, one would think, have made even Praise-God
Barebone’s mouth water, and melted his surly virtue into tolerance of
other folks’ cakes and ale—what virtue, however ascetic, could resist
the onslaught of two thousand French cooks? Some faint, far echo of all
these vanished jollities should have won the ear, if not the heart, of
the grimmest “saint” among them. Or if they were proof against the
blandishments of the world’s people, if they fled from the abominations
of Baal, could not their own George Wither move them to spare the
cheery, harmless frivolities, the merry pranks of Yule? Jovially as any
Cavalier, shamelessly as any Malignant of them all, he sings their
praises in his
“CHRISTMAS CAROL.