misunderstood. The kind of dulness of which I speak is not inconsistent
with a high degree, not only of practical, but even of mental, ability.
I know several people of very great intellectual power who are models
of dulness. Their memories are loaded with what is no doubt very
valuable information, and their conclusions are of the weightiest
character; but they have no vivid perception, no alertness, they are
not open to new ideas, they never say an interesting or a suggestive
thing; their presence is a load on the spirits of a lively party, their
very facial expression is a rebuke to all light-mindedness and
triviality. Sometimes these people are silent, and then to be in their
presence is like being in a thick mist; there is no outlook, no
enlivening prospect. Sometimes they are talkers; and I am not sure that
that is not even worse, because they generally discourse on their own
subjects with profound and serious conviction. They have no power of
conversation, because they are not interested in any one else's point
of view; they care no more who their companions are, than a pump cares
what sort of a vessel is put under it--they only demand that people
should listen in silence. I remember not long ago meeting one of the
species, in this case an antiquarian. He discoursed continuously, with
a hard eye, fixed as a rule upon the table, about the antiquities of
the neighbourhood. I was on one side of him, and was far too much
crushed to attempt resistance. I ate and drank mechanically; I said
"Yes" and "Very interesting" at intervals; and the only ray of hope
upon the horizon was that the hands of the clock upon the mantelpiece
did undoubtedly move, though they moved with leaden slowness. On the
other side of the savant was a lively talker, Matthews by name, who
grew very restive under the process. The great man had selected
Dorchester as his theme, because he had unhappily discovered that I had
recently visited it. My friend Matthews, who had been included in the
audience, made desperate attempts to escape; and once, seeing that I
was fairly grappled, began a conversation with his next neighbour. But
the antiquary was not to be put off. He stopped, and looked at Matthews
with a relentless eye. "Matthews," he said, "MATTHEWS!" raising his
voice. Matthews looked round. "I was saying that Dorchester was a very
interesting place." Matthews made no further attempt to escape, and
resigned himself to his fate.
Such men as the antiquary are certainly very happy people; they are
absorbed in their subject, and consider it to be of immense importance.
I suppose that their lives are, in a sense, well spent, and that the
world is in a way the gainer by their labours. My friend the antiquary
has certainly, according to his own account, proved that certain
ancient earthworks near Dorchester are of a date at least five hundred
years anterior to the received date. It took him a year or two to find
out, and I suppose that the human race has benefited in some way or
other by the conclusion; but, on the other hand, the antiquary seems to
miss all the best things of life. If life is an educative process,
people who have lived and loved, who have smiled and suffered, who have
perceived beautiful things, who have felt the rapturous and bewildering
mysteries of the world--well, they have learnt something of the mind of
God, and, when they close their eyes upon the world, take with them an
alert, a hopeful, an inquisitive, an ardent spirit, into whatever may
be the next act of the drama; but my friend the antiquary, when he
crosses the threshold of the unseen, when he is questioned as to what
has been his relation to life, will have seen and perceived, and learnt
nothing, except the date of the Dorchester earthworks, and similar
monuments of history.
And of all the shifting pageant of life, by far the most interesting
and exquisite part is our relations with the other souls who are bound
on the same pilgrimage. One desires ardently to know what other people
feel about it all--what their points of view are, what their motives
are, what are the data on which they form their opinions--so that to
cut off the discussion of other personalities, on ethical grounds, is
like any other stiff and Puritanical attempt to limit interests, to
circumscribe experience, to maim life. The criticism, then, or the
discussion, of other people is not so much a CAUSE of interest in life,
as a SIGN of it; it is no more to be suppressed by codes or edicts than
any other form of temperamental activity. It is no more necessary to
justify the habit, than it is necessary to give good reasons for eating
or for breathing; the only thing that it is advisable to do, is to lay
down certain rules about it, and prescribe certain methods of
practising it. The people who do not desire to discuss others, or who
disapprove of doing it, may be pronounced to be, as a rule, either
stupid, or egotistical, or Pharisaical; and sometimes they are all
three. The only principle to bear in mind is the principle of justice.
If a man discusses others spitefully or malevolently, with the sole
intention of either extracting amusement out of their foibles, or with
the still more odious intention of emphasizing his own virtues by
discovering the weakness of others, or with the cynical desire--which
is perhaps the lowest of all--of proving the whole business of human
life to be a vile and sordid spectacle, then he may be frankly
disapproved of, and if possible avoided; but if a man takes a generous
view of humanity, if he admires what is large and noble, if he gives
full credit for kindliness, strength, usefulness, vigour, sympathy,
then his humorous perception of faults and deficiencies, of whims and
mannerisms, of prejudices and unreasonablenesses, will have nothing
that is hard or bitter about it. For the truth is that, if we are sure
that a man is generous and just, his little mannerisms, his fads, his
ways, are what mostly endear him to us. The man of lavish liberality is
all the more lovable if he has an intense dislike to cutting the string
of a parcel, and loves to fill his drawers with little hanks of twine,
the untying of which stands for many wasted hours. If we know a man to
be simple-minded, forbearing, and conscientious, we like him all the
better when he tells for the fiftieth time an ancient story, prefacing
it by anxious inquiries, which are smilingly rebutted, as to whether
any of his hearers have ever heard the anecdote before.
But we must not let this tendency, to take a man in his entirety, to
love him as he is, carry us too far; we must be careful that the
foibles that endear him to us are in themselves innocent.
There is one particular form of priggishness, in this matter of
criticism of others, which is apt to beset literary people, and more
especially at a time when it seems to be considered by many writers
that the first duty of a critic--they would probably call him an artist
for the sake of the associations--is to get rid of all sense of right
and wrong. I was reading the other day a sensible and appreciative
review of Mr. Lucas's new biography of Charles Lamb. The reviewer
quoted with cordial praise Mr. Lucas's remark--referring, of course, to
the gin-and-water, which casts, I fear, in my own narrow view,
something of a sordid shadow over Lamb's otherwise innocent life--"A
man must be very secure in his own righteousness who would pass
condemnatory judgment upon Charles Lamb's only weakness." I do not
myself think this a sound criticism. We ought not to abstain from
condemning the weakness, we must abstain from condemning Charles Lamb.
His beautiful virtues, his tenderness, his extraordinary sweetness and
purity of nature, far outweigh this weakness. But what are we to do?
Are we to ignore, to condone, to praise the habit? Are we to think the
better of Charles Lamb and love him more because he tippled? Would he
not have been more lovable without it?
And the fact that one may be conscious of similar faults and moral
weaknesses, ought not to make one more, but less, indulgent to such a
fault when we see it in a beautiful nature. The fault in question is no
more in itself adorable, than it is in another man who does not possess
Lamb's genius.
We have a perfect right--nay, we do well--to condemn in others faults
which we frankly condemn in ourselves. It does not help on the world if
we go about everywhere slobbering with forgiveness and affection; it is
the most mawkish sentimentality to love people in such a way that we
condone grave faults in them; and to condone a fault because a man is
great, when we condemn it if he is not great, is only a species of
snobbishness. It is right to compassionate sinners, to find excuse for
the faults of every one but ourselves; but we ought not to love so
foolishly and irrationally, that we cannot even bring ourselves to wish
our hero's faults away.
I confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the
smallest matters connected with other people's lives and
idiosyncrasies. I cannot bear biographies of the dignified order, which
do not condescend to give what are called personal details, but confine
themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I have finished
reading such books I feel as if I had been reading The Statesman's
Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental picture of the
hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues, in frockcoat and
trousers, that decorate our London squares.
I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The subject
of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one
of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical
controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and
beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at
length: "How little," he wrote, "the sense of difference, and how
strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that
he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy
with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me,
so 'devoted' to my Nellie!"
That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of
proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations
that matter more than policies and statesmanship.
And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness
of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. If
we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in
policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim
our lives. We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we
may be sure of this--that it is not for nothing that we are set in the
midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of
tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and
the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things;
and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of
others' points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that
sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness.
If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition,
by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we
suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wilful
blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one
that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one's
own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-estimation, which shut out, as
by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.
XII
PRIESTS
I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less
intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean
necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with
whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly
persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike
men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome might have been,
with a kind of formal, almost hereditary, priesthood. And, on the other
hand, I have known more than one layman of distinctly priestly
character, priestly after the order of Melchizedek, who had not, I
suppose, received any religious consecration for his ministry, apart
from perhaps a kingly initiation.
The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself, however
humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between humanity and
God. He is conscious, if not of a mission, at least of a vocation, as
an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries; he would believe
that there are certain people in the world who are called to be
apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and to justify the
ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like Aaron, to make
atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation to God, a relation
which all do not share; and that this gives him, in a special sense,
something of the divine and fatherly relation to men. In the hands of a
perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested man, this may become a very
beautiful and tender thing. Such a man, from long and intimate
relations with humanity, will have a very deep knowledge of the human
heart. He will be surprised at no weakness or frailty; he will be
patient with all perverseness and obduracy; he will be endlessly
compassionate, because he will realize the strength and insistence of
temptation; he will be endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a
hundred times over, the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid
and desolate heart. He will have seen close at hand the transforming
power of faith, even in natures which have become the shuddering
victims of evil habit.
Such a priest as I describe had occasion once to interview a great
doctor about the terrible case of a woman of high social position who
had become the slave of drink. The doctor was a man of great force and
ability, and of unwearying devotion; but he was what would be called a
sceptic and a materialist. The priest asked if the case was hopeless;
the great doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Yes," he said,
"pathologically speaking, it is hopeless; there may be periods of
recovery, but the course that the case will normally run will be a
series of relapses, each more serious and of longer duration than the
last." "Is there no chance of recovery on any line that you could
suggest?" said the priest. The two looked at each other, both good men
and true. "Well," said the doctor after a pause, "this is more in your
line than mine; the only possible chance lies in the will, and that can
only be touched through an emotion. I have seen a religious emotion
successful, where everything else failed." The priest smiled and said,
"I suppose that would seem to you a species of delusion? You would not
admit that there was any reality behind it?" "Yes," said the doctor, "a
certain reality, no doubt; the emotional processes are at present
somewhat obscure from the scientific point of view: it is a forlorn
hope." "Yes," said the priest, "and it is thus the kind of task for
which I and those of my calling feel bound to volunteer."
Of course one of the difficulties that the priest has to struggle
against is his inheritance. If we trace back the vocation of the priest
to the earliest times, we find their progenitors connected with some of
the darkest and saddest things in human history. They are of the same
tribe as wizards and magicians, sorcerers and medicine-men, the
celebrators of cruel and unholy rites. The priests of Moloch, of
Chemosh, of Baal, are the dark and ancient ancestors of the same
vocation. All who have trafficked in the terrors of mankind, who have
gained power by trading on superstitious imaginings, who have professed
to propitiate wrathful and malignant spirits, to stand between men and
their dreadful Maker--all these have contributed their share to the
dark and sad burden which the priest has to bear. As soon as man,
rising out of pure savagery, began to have any conception of the laws
of nature, he found in himself a deep instinct for happiness, a terror
of suffering and death; yet, at the same time, he found himself set in
a world where afflictions seemed to be rained down upon humanity by
some mysterious, unseen, and awful power. Could man believe that God
wished him well, who racked him with cruel pain, sent plagues among his
cattle, swept away those whom he loved, destroyed his crops with hail
and thunderbolts, and at the end of all dragged him reluctant and
shuddering into the darkness, out of a world where so much was kind and
cheerful, and where, after all, it was sweet to live?
He turned in his despair to any one who could profess to hold out any
shield over him, who could claim to read the dreadful mind of God, and
to propitiate His mercy. Even then a demand created a supply. Men have
always loved power and influence; and so spirits of sterner and more
tenacious mould, who could perhaps despise the lesser terrors of
mankind, and who desired, above all things, to hold the destinies of
others in their hands, to make themselves felt, naturally seized the
opportunity of surrounding themselves with the awe and dignity that the
supposed possession of deeper knowledge and more recondite powers
offered them.
Then as the world broadened and widened, as reason began to extend its
sway, the work of the priest became more beneficent, and tended to
bless and hallow rather than to blast and curse. But still the
temptation remains a terribly strong one for men of a certain type, men
who can afford to despise the more material successes of the world, who
can merge their personal ambition in ambitions for an order and a
caste, still to claim to stand between man and God, to profess to
withhold His blessings, to grasp the keys of His mysteries, to save men
from the consequences of sin. As long as human terror exists, as long
as men fear suffering and darkness and death, they will turn to any one
who can profess to give them relief; and relief, too, will come; for
the essence of courage is, for many timid hearts, the dependence upon a
stronger will. And if a man can say, with a tranquil conviction, to a
suffering and terrified comrade, "There is no need to fear," the fear
loses half its terrors and half its sting.
Now, when religion of any kind becomes a part of the definite social
life of the world, there must of course be an order of ministers whose
business it is to preach it, and to bring it home to the minds of men.
Such men will be set apart by a solemn initiation to their office; the
more solemn the initiation is, the more faithful they will be. The
question rather is what extent of spiritual power such ministers may
claim. The essence of religious liberty is that men should feel that
there is nothing whatever that stands between themselves and God; that
they can approach God with perfect and simple access; that they can
speak to Him without concealment of their sins, and receive from Him
the comforting sense of the possibility of forgiveness. Of course the
sense of sin is a terribly complicated one, because it seems to be made
up partly of an inner sense of transgression, a sense of failure, a
consciousness that we have acted unworthily, meanly, miserably. Yet the
sense of sin follows many acts that are not in themselves necessarily
disastrous either to oneself or the community. Then there is a further
sense of sin, perhaps developed by long inheritance of instinct, which
seems to attend acts not in themselves sinful, but which menace the
security of society. For instance, there is nothing sinful in a man's
desiring to save himself, and in fact saving himself, from a sudden
danger. If a man leaps out of the way of a runaway cart, or throws
himself on the ground to avoid the accidental discharge of a gun, he
would never be blamed, nor would he blame himself, for any want of
courage. Yet if a man in a battle saves himself from death by flight,
he would regard himself, and be regarded by others, as having failed in
his duty, and he would be apt to feel a lifelong shame and remorse for
having yielded to the impulse. Again, the deliberate killing of another
human being in a fit of anger, however just, would be regarded by the
offender as a deeply sinful act, and he would not quarrel with the
justice of the sentence of death which would be meted out to him; but
when we transfer the same act to the region of war, which is
consecrated by the usage of society, a man who had slain a hundred
enemies would regard the fact with a certain complacency, and would not
be even encouraged by a minister of religion to repent of his hundred
heinous crimes upon his deathbed.
The sense, then, of sin is in a certain degree an artificial sense, and
would seem to consist partly of a deep and divine instinct which
arraigns the soul for acts, which may be in themselves trifling, but
which seem to possess the sinful quality; and partly of a conventional
instinct which considers certain things to be abominable, which are not
necessarily in themselves sinful, because it is the custom of the world
to consider them so.
And then to the philosopher there falls a darker tinge upon the whole
matter, when he considers that the evil impulses, to yield to which is
sin, are in themselves deliberately implanted in man by his Creator, or
at least not apparently eradicated; and that many of those whose whole
life has been darkened, embittered, and wrecked by sin, have incurred
their misery by yielding to tendencies which in themselves are, by
inheritance, practically irresistible.
What room is there, then, in these latter days, when reason and science
together have dispelled the darkness of superstition, have diminished
the possibility of miraculous occurrences, have laughed empirical
occultism out of the field, for the priest?
There is no room for him if there lingers in the depth of his mind any
taint of the temptation to serve his own ends, or to exalt himself or
his order, by trading on the fears of irrational and credulous
humanity. Against such priestcraft as this the true priest must array
himself, together with the scientist, the statesman, the physician.
Against all personal and priestly domination all lovers of liberty and
God must combine. Theirs is the sin of Simon Magus, the sin of Hophni,
the sin of Caiaphas; the sin that desires that men should still be
bound, in order that they may themselves win worship and honour. It is
the deadliest and vilest tyranny in the world.
But of the true priesthood there is more need than there ever was, as
the minds of men awaken to the truth; for in a world where there is so
much that is dark, men need to be constantly encouraged, reminded, even
rebuked. The true priest must leave the social conscience alone, and
entrust it to the hands of statesmen and officials. His concern must be
with the individual; he must endeavour to make men realize that
tranquillity and security of heart can only be won by victories over
self, that law is only a cumbrous and incomplete organization for
enforcing upon men a sense of equality; and he must show how far law
lags behind morality, and that a man may be legally respectable yet
morally abominable. The true priest must not obscure the oracles of
God; he must beware of, teaching that faith is an intricate
intellectual process. He must pare religion to the bone, and show that
the essence of it is a perfectly simple relation with God and
neighbour. He must not concern himself with policy or ceremony; he must
warn men against mistaking aesthetic impulse for the perception of
virtue; he must fight against precedent and tradition and custom; he
must realize that one point of union is more important than a hundred
points of difference. He must set himself against upholsteries and
uniforms, against formalities and rituals. He must abjure wealth and
position, in favour of humble kindliness and serviceableness. He must
have a sense of poetry and romance and beauty about life; where other
men are artists in words, in musical tones, in pigments or sculptured
stone, he must be an artist in virtue. He must be the friend and lover
of humble, inefficient, inarticulate, unpleasing persons; and he must
be able to show that there is a desirable quality of beauty in the most
sordid and commonplace action, if faithfully performed.