melancholy smile, "for I am myself, as it were, crushed between the
upper and nether millstone of contrary reports, for I suffer equal
obloquy--and no martyrdom is worse than that of continual obloquy--both
for being a Papist and a Puritan. You will suppose there must be some
strong reason why I, who value so many things among the Papists so much,
have not joined them myself. I should probably have escaped much
violent invective if I had done so. You are very young, and are placed
where you can see and judge of both parties. You possess sufficient
insight to try the spirits whether they be of God. Be not hasty to
decide, and before you decide to join the Romish communion, make a tour
abroad, and if you can, go to Rome itself. When I was in Italy and
Spain, I made all the inquiries and researches I could. I bought many
scarce and valuable books in the languages of those countries, in
collecting which I had a principal eye to those which treated on the
subjects of spiritual life, devotion, and religious retirement, but the
result of all was that I am now, and I shall die, as I believe and hope
shortly, in the Communion of the English Church. This day, as I
believe, the blessed Sacrament has been in the Church before our eyes,
and what can you or I desire more?"
The next morning before Inglesant left, Mr. Ferrar showed him his
foreign collections, his great treasure of rarities and of prints of the
best masters of that time, mostly relative to historical passages of the
Old and New Testaments. Inglesant dined with the family, of whom he
took leave with a full heart, saluting the ladies with the pleasant
familiarity which the manners of the time permitted. Mr. Ferrar went
with him to the borders of the parish, and gave him his blessing. They
never saw each other again, for two months afterwards Nicholas Ferrar
was in his grave.
*CHAPTER V.*
The next year of Inglesant's life contained several incidents which had
very important results. The first of these was the illness and death of
his father, which occurred shortly after Johnny's return to London. His
end was doubtless hastened by the perplexity and disappointment of many
of his political projects, for his life in many respects was a failure.
Though a rich man he had spent large sums in his political intrigues,
and the property he left was not large. His lands and all his money he
left to his eldest son, but he left Johnny some houses in the city,
which Inglesant was advised to sell. He therefore disposed of them to a
Parliament man, and deposited the money with a goldsmith to be ready in
case of need. The possession of this money made him an important
person, and he was advised to purchase a place about the Court, which,
with his interest with the Queen's advisers, would secure his success in
life. He endeavoured to act on this advice, but it was some time before
he was successful.
After his return to London Inglesant saw Mr. Crashaw two or three times,
when that gentleman was in London, and his conversation led him to think
more of the Roman Catholics than he had hitherto done, and inclined him
more and more to join them. Nothing would have recommended him so much
to the Queen as such a step, and his feelings and sympathies all led him
the same way. He was exceedingly disgusted with the conduct and
conversation of the Puritans, and the extreme lengths to which it was
evident they were endeavouring to drive the people. Most of his
friends, even those who were themselves sound Churchmen, looked
favourably on the Papists, and it was thought the height of ill breeding
to speak against them at Court. It is probable, therefore, that
Inglesant would have joined them openly but for two very opposite
causes. The one was his remembrance of the Sacrament at Little Gidding,
the other was the influence of his friend the Jesuit. The first of
these prevented that craving after the sacrifice of the Mass, which
doubtless is the strongest of all the motives which lead men to Rome;
the other was exerted several ways.
It was one of the political maxims of this man that he never, if
possible, allowed anything he had gained or any mode of influence he had
acquired to be lost or neglected, even though circumstances had rendered
it useless for the particular purpose for which he had at first intended
it. In the present case he had no intention of permitting all the care
and pains he had been at in Inglesant's education to be thrown away. It
is true the exact use to which he had intended to devote the talents he
had thus trained no longer existed, but this did not prevent his
appreciating the exquisite fitness of the instrument he had prepared for
such or similar use. Circumstances had occurred which in his far-seeing
policy made the Church of England scarcely worth gaining to the Catholic
side, but in proportion as the Church might cease to be one of the great
powers in the country, the Papists would step into its place: and in the
confused political struggles which he foresaw, the Jesuit anticipated
ample occupation for the peculiar properties of his pupil. In the event
of a struggle, the termination of which none could foresee, a qualified
agent would be required as much between the Papists and the popular
leaders as between the Catholics and the Royal and Church Party. Acting
on these principles, therefore, the Jesuit was far from losing sight of
Inglesant, or even neglecting him. So far indeed was he from doing so,
that he was acquainted with most that passed through his mind, and was
well aware of his increased attraction towards the Church to which he
himself belonged. Now for Inglesant to have become actively and
enthusiastically a Papist would at once have defeated all his plans for
him, and rendered him useless for the peculiar needs for which he had
been prepared. He would doubtless have gone abroad, and even if he had
not remained buried in some college on the Continent, he would have
returned merely as one of those mission priests (for doubtless he would
have taken orders) of whom the Jesuit had already more than he required.
It was even not desirable that he should associate exclusively with
Papists. He was already sufficiently known and his position understood
among them for the purposes of any future mission on which he might be
engaged; and it would be more to the purpose for him to extend his
acquaintance among Church of England people, and gain their confidence.
To this end the Jesuit thought proper to remove him from the immediate
attendance on the Queen, where he saw few except Papists, and to assist
in his endeavours to purchase a place about the King's person. In this
he was successful, and about the end of 1639 Inglesant purchased the
place of one of the Esquires of the Body who relinquished his place on
account of ill health. This post, which followed immediately after that
of the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, was looked upon as a very
important and influential one, and cost Inglesant a large sum of money
before he obtained it. He was, as we have seen, rather a favourite with
the King, who had noticed him more than once, and he began to be
regarded as a rising courtier whose friendship it would be well to keep.
When the Jesuit had seen him settled in his new post, he put in motion
another and still more powerful engine which he had prepared for
preventing his pupil from joining the Romish Church. He had himself
inculcated as much as possible a broad and philosophical method of
thought upon his pupil, but he was necessarily confined and obstructed
in this direction by his own position and supposed orthodoxy, and he was
therefore anxious to infuse into Inglesant's mind a larger element of
rational inquiry than in his sacred character it was possible for him to
accomplish without shocking his pupil's moral sense. If I have not
failed altogether in representing that pupil's character, it will have
been noticed that it was one of those which combine activity of thought
with great faculty of reverence and of submission to those powers to
which its fancy and taste are subordinated. These natures are
enthusiastic, though generally not supposed to be so, and though little
sign of it appears in their outward conduct; for the objects of their
enthusiasm being generally different from those which attract most men,
they are conscious that they have little sympathy to expect in their
pursuit of them, and this gives their enthusiasm a reserved and cautious
demeanour. They are not, however, blindly enthusiastic, but are never
satisfied till they have found some theory by which they are able to
reconcile in their own minds the widest results to which their activity
of thought has led them, with the submission and service which it is
their delight and choice to pay to such outward systems and authorities
as have pleased and attracted their taste. This theory consists
generally in some, at times half-formed, conception of the imperfect
dispensation in which men live, which makes obedience to authority, with
which the most exalted reason cannot entirely sympathise, becoming and
even necessary. This feeling more than anything else, gives to persons
of this nature a demeanour quite different from that of the ordinary
religious or political enthusiast, a demeanour seemingly cold and
indifferent, though courteous and even to some extent sympathetic, and
which causes the true fanatic to esteem them as little better than the
mere man of the world, or the minion of courtly power. The enthusiastic
part of his character had been fully cultivated in Inglesant, the
reasoning and philosophic part had been wakened and trained to some
extent by his readings in Plato under the direction of the Jesuit; it
remained now to be still more developed, whether to the ultimate
improvement of his character it would be hard to say.
The Jesuit took him one day into the city to Devonshire House, where,
inquiring for Mr. Hobbes, they were shown into a large handsome room
full of books, where a gentleman was sitting whose appearance struck
Inglesant very much. He was tall and very erect, with a square
mallet-shaped head and ample forehead. He wore a small red moustache,
that curled upward, and a small tuft of hair upon his chin. His eyes
were hazel and full of life and spirit, and when he spoke they shone
with lively light; when he was witty and laughed the lids closed over
them so that they could scarcely be seen, but when he was serious and in
earnest they expanded to their full orb, and penetrated, as it seemed,
to the farthest limit of thought. He was dressed in a coat of black
velvet lined with fur, and wore long boots of Spanish leather laced with
ribbon. When the first compliments were over, the Jesuit introduced
Inglesant to him as a young gentleman of promise, who would derive great
benefit from his acquaintance, and whose friendship he hoped might not
prove unacceptable to Mr. Hobbes.
Inglesant came often to Mr. Hobbes, whose conversation delighted him.
It frequently referred to the occurrences of the day, in which Mr.
Hobbes sided with the Government, having a great regard for the King
personally, as had Harrington afterwards, and most of the
philosophers--all their sympathies and theories being on the side of law
and strong government; but their discourse frequently went beyond this,
and embraced those questions of human existence which interest thinking
men. He soon found out Inglesant's tendency towards Catholicism, and
strongly dissuaded him from it.
"Your idea of the Catholic system," he said, "is a dream, and has no
real existence among the Papists. Your ideal is an exalted Platonic
manifestation of the divine existence diffused among men: the reality is
a system of mean trivial details, wearisome and disgusting to such men
as you are. Instead of the perfect communion with the Divine Light, such
as you seek, you will have before you and above you nothing but the
narrow conceptions of some ignorant priest to whom you must submit your
intellect. What freedom of thought or existence will remain to you when
you have fully accepted the article of transubstantiation, and truly
believe that the priest is able of a piece of bread to make absolutely
and unconditionally our Saviour's body, and thereby at the hour of death
to save your soul? Will it not have an effect upon you to make you
think him a god, and to stand in awe of him as of God Himself if He were
visibly present?"
"I suppose it would," said Inglesant.
"One of our divines of the English Church, writing much above their
wont--for they are much stronger in their lives than in their
writings--puts this very plainly in the matter of the judgment of the
priest in confession. 'Yet this extorted confession on Pain of
Damnation is not the stripping a man to his naked body, but the
stripping him of his body, that they may see his naked heart, and so, by
the force of this superstition, break into those secrets which it is the
only due privilege of Almighty God to be acquainted with, who is the
only rightful Searcher of hearts.' These men may well pretend to be
followers of Aristotle, who reason only from the names of things,
according to the scale of the Categories; but of those of the better
sort, as you and I take ourselves to be, who follow Plato, and found our
doctrine on the conceptions and ideas of things, we must ever submit to
be called heretics by them as a reproach, though we, doubtless, and not
they, are the true sacramentalists, that is, the seekers for the hidden
and the divine truth. It is for this reason that I take the Sacrament
in the English Church, which I call in England the Holy Church, and
believe that its statutes are the true Christian Faith."
"There seems to me," he went on after a pause, "something frightfully
grotesque about the Romish Church as a reality. Showing us on the one
side a mass of fooleries and ridiculous conceits and practices, at
which, but for the use of them, all men must needs stand amazed; such
rabble of impossible relics,--the hay that was in the manger, and more
than one tail of the ass on which Christ rode into Jerusalem, besides
hundreds which for common decency no man in any other case would so much
as name. To look on these, I say, on one side, and on the other to see
those frightful and intolerable cruelties, so detestable that they
cannot be named, by which thousands have been tormented by this holy and
pure Church, has something about it so grotesque and fantastic that it
seems to me sometimes more like some masque or dance of satyrs or devils
than the followers of our Saviour Christ."
"All this," said Inglesant, "I partly believe, yet I imagine that
something may be said upon the other side of the argument, and I should
suppose that there is not one of these doctrines and practices but what
has some shadow of truth in it, and sprang at first from the wellspring
of truth."
"Doubtless," said the philosopher, "there is nothing but has had its
origin in some conception of the truth, but are we 'for this cause,' as
that same divine says, 'also to forsake the Truth itself, and
devotionally prostrate ourselves to every evanescent and far-cast show
of Him--shadows of shadows--in infinite myriads of degenerations from
Him?' Surely not."
"What is truth?" said Inglesant; "who shall show us any good?"
"Truth," said the philosopher, "is that which we have been taught, that
which the civil government under which we live instructs us in and
directs us to believe. Our Saviour Christ came as the Messiah to
establish His kingdom on earth, and after Him the Apostles and Christian
Princes and Commonwealths have handed down His truth to us. This is our
only safe method of belief."
"But should we believe nothing of Christianity," said Inglesant, "unless
the civil government had taught it us?"
"How can you believe anything," said Hobbes, "unless you have first been
taught it? and in a Christian Commonwealth the civil government is the
vicar of Christ. I know the Jesuits," said Hobbes, "and they me; when I
was in France, some of them came to trouble me about something I had
said. I quieted them by promising to write a book upon them if they did
not let me be: what they seek is influence over the minds of men; to
gain this they will allow every vice of which man is capable. I could
prove it from their books. It is not for me, whom you scarcely know, to
say anything against a friend whom you have known so long; but, as I
understand you, your friend does not advise you to become a Papist. I
do not suppose, though possibly you may do so, that he has no other
object in view than your welfare. He has doubtless far-reaching reasons
of which we know nothing; nevertheless, be not distrustful of him, but
in this especially follow his advice. Shakespeare, the play-writer, says
'there's a divinity that shapes our ends,' or, I should say, the ends
that others work out for us, to His higher purpose. Let us have faith
in this beneficent Artist, and let Him accomplish His will on us."
"But this," said Inglesant, "is very different from what my reading and
experience in mystical religion has taught me. Is there then no medium
between the Divine Life and ourselves than that of the civil government?
This would seem to me most repulsive and contrary to experience."
"If you pretend to a direct revelation," said Hobbes with a smile, "I
have nothing to allege against it, but, to the rest of us, Christian
sovereigns are the supreme pastors and the only persons we now hear
speak from God. But because God giveth faith by means of teachers,
therefore I call hearing the immediate cause of faith. In a school
where many are taught, some profit, others profit not; the cause of
learning in them that profit is the Master, yet it cannot be thence
inferred that learning is not the gift of God. All good things proceed
from God, yet cannot all that have them say that they are inspired, for
that implies a gift supernatural and the immediate hand of God, which he
that pretends to, pretends to be a prophet."
"I am loth to believe what you say," said Inglesant; "I am no prophet,
yet I would willingly believe that God is speaking to me with an
immediate voice, nay, more, that I may enter into the very life that God
is leading, and partake of His nature. Also, what you now say seems to
me to contradict what you said before, that we should endeavour to found
our doctrine on the conceptions and ideas of things, which I take to
mean a following after divine truth: nor do I see why you take the
sacrament, as you say you do, except you expect some immediate
communication from God in it."
The philosopher smiled. "One may see you have been taught in the
Jesuits' college," he said, "and are a forward pupil and a close
reasoner. But what I have said concerning faith coming by hearing need
not prevent that afterwards God may convey other gifts to men by other
means. Yet I confess I am not a proficient in this divine knowledge or
life of which you speak; nor do I follow your master Plato very far into
the same conclusions which many profess to find in him. One disputant
grounds his knowledge upon the infallibility of the Church, and the
other on the testimony of the private spirit. The first we need not
discuss, but how do you know that your private spirit, that this divine
life within you, is any other than a belief grounded on the authority
and arguments of your teachers?"
Inglesant made no reply, which the philosopher perceiving, began to talk
of something else, and the other soon after took his leave. Hobbes's
doctrine was new to him, as it was to every one in that day, indeed, the
particular form it took was peculiar to Hobbes, and perished with him;
but the underlying materialism which in some form or other has presented
itself to the thinkers of every age, and which now for the first time
came before Inglesant's mind, was not without its effect. "How do I know
indeed," he said, "that this divine life within me is anything but an
opinion formed by what I have heard and read? How do I know that there
is any such thing as a divine life at all?"
Such thoughts as these, if they produced no other effect, yet gradually
lessened that eagerness in his mind towards divine things which had been
so strong since his visit to Little Gidding, and quite satisfied him to
defer at any rate any thoughts of joining the Church of Rome. But his
thoughts were turned into other channels by the events which were
occurring in the political world, and which began now to assume a very
exciting character.
*CHAPTER VI.*
On the 20th of August 1640 the King set out for York on his way to
Scotland, in some haste, and Inglesant accompanied or rather preceded
him, his duty being to provide apartments for the King. The King
advanced no farther than North Allerton, Lord Strafford being at
Darlington, and a large part of the army at Newburn-upon-Tyne, from
whence they retreated before the Scots almost without fighting. It was
at this time that Inglesant began to see more of the real state of
affairs among the leaders of the royal party, and became aware of the
real weakness of their position. He appears to have formed the opinion
that Lord Strafford, in spite of his great qualities, had failed
altogether in establishing himself on a firm and lasting footing of
power, and was deficient in those qualities of a statesman that ensure
success, and incapable of realising the necessities of the times. His
army, on which he relied, was disorganised, and totally without devotion
or enthusiasm. It melted away before the Scots, or fraternised with
them, and the trained bands and gentry who came in to the King's
standard and to the Earl, prefaced all their offers of service with
petitions for the redress of grievances and the calling together a
Parliament. Inglesant had already formed the opinion that the
Archbishop, who was now left at the head of affairs in London with the
Privy Council, and was vainly endeavouring to prevent the citizens from
sending up monster petitions to the King, was even more at variance with
the inevitable course of events, and more powerless to withstand them
than the Earl; and he appears to have written to his friend the Jesuit,
for his guidance, careful explanations of his own views on these
subjects. Father Hall, however, was not a man hastily to change his
course. He had belonged from the beginning to that section of the
popish party whose policy had been to support the High Church party
rather than to oppose it, and this policy was strengthened now that the
royal power itself began to be attacked. Whatever others of the popish
party might think, those with whom the Jesuit acted, and the party at
Rome which directed their conduct, were undeviating supporters of the
King, and were convinced that all advantage which the Papists might in
future achieve was dependent upon him. It is not apparent what action
the Jesuit was taking at this moment, probably he was contented to watch
the course of events; but this much is certain, that his efforts to
induce Churchmen to work with him were increased rather than diminished.