sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
conventionalism.
Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
its missionary character and became a mere educational
institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true
_articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of
reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the
Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most
likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power
remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that
"the tabernacle of God is with men."
One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that
all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what
the French call _faire son salut_:--
It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a
class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the
persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He
describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."
Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in
the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt
whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly
remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any
vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common
with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and
deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including
affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one
incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a
piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some
inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner
of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion,
is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh
by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade
before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down
sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor
who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler
forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably
because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler
creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit
with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his
means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of
their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another
happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither
understand nor regard his words, others would understand and
receive them. But a third class would receive them without
understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice
and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of
desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively
believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a
triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh
at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented
himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.
They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said
heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek,
indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion
those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them
spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would
certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might
easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of
actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an
earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but
hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible
treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their
Father in heaven.
We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which
is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work;
between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to
speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come,
which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where,
for the present, he leaves the subject:--
For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from
corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying
superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism
preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling
Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's
philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all
these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life
infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of
individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes
human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable
of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are
exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the
sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect
for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest
temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without
a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more
ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human
nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and
if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they
are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a
question whether mankind has gained on the whole....
But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is
_there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead
of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and
when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few
select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth's
surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an
age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured
for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years,
instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of
the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of
adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the
transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and
inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.
It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in
any completeness or all-sufficiency....
But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and
power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of
action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the
masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we
speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.
Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be
analysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New
Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal
Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the
indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of
precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the
same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers
were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in
the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was
done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly
accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that
which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech
which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively
the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can
explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be
enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No
man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded
together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard
the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from
God_.
And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those
which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such,
as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by
deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to
seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love,
about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about
points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even
positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less
widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well
as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem
to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with
the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from
complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has
been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains,
not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed,
_who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face
of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy,
it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a
historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable,
to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ,
as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was
meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church
to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from
us the reality of the wonders in which it began.
The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron
systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it
shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is,
in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in
the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of
Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but
depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have
misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not
understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the
writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest
among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a
writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest
and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save
and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of
it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of
hearts in the object for which He created it.
X
THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]
[12]
_Guardian_, 6th March 1889.
Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force
the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so,
using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect,
in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing
the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of
mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa
Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a
Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an
_Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than
usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human
questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry
argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed
abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a
weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs.
Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is
within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the
shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials
and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation
about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad.
Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience,
and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in
imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination;
and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there
is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when
all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let
them speak.
It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal,
undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what,
with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It
implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the
spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom
few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected
by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book
like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The
alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or
wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then
the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins.
Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged
into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he
thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and
silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he
thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that
he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in
the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he
had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book,
which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his
soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this
was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain
and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in
his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible,
far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to
him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to
all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more
knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to
stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he
thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given
him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning
reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never
doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds
himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere
which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial
in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only
he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going
on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of
Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that
the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further,
that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession
and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another;
the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman
secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere,
comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been,
which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or
indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old
Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the
moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a
Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what
can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more
of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than
any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper
"A New Reformation."
In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic
model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but
without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book.
_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism,
chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian
way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the
ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German
historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern
way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between
_bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and
estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless,
narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method
not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts
true life and character and human feeling and motives into the
personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These
books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of
their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and
meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as
regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a
wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised
ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A
New Reformation."
Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she
likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in
dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the
historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been
awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and
the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know,
in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of
telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from
age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to
Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features
remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting
it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.
It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of
cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which,
when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it
receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the
materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct
theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are
not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height
of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of
life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the
French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has
impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs.
Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test
of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all
there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of
great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is
bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been
the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say,
without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares'
nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has
made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of
its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and
variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so
eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever
theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last
lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important,
and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among
the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific,
political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober
thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left
to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only
scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a
factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind.
Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live,
and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without
restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring
assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an
account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible,
self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this
mysterious book is?