ages, the true and complete man feels a personal interest and
responsibility, a direct and entire relation to his Creator, that will not
suffer interference any more than genuine conjugal or parental ties. The
so-called progress of society has rendered its functions more complex, and
broken up this simple and natural identity between the offices of devotion
and those of paternity. It has not only made the priestly office distinct
and apart from domestic life, but shorn it of glory by the cumbrous
details of a hierarchy and badges of exclusiveness; and lessened its
sanctity by changing the grand and holy function of a spiritual medium and
expositor into a professional business and special pleading. What are
conventional preachers but the _employés_ of a sect? And so regarded, how
is it possible to rejoice 'in the plain presence of their dignity?' Called
upon by a thoroughly earnest soul in its deep perplexity and agonizing
bewilderment, what can they do but repeat the commonplaces of their
office? How instantly are they reduced to the level of other men, when
brought into contact with a human reality! The voice of true sympathy,
though from ignorant lips, the grasp of honest affection, though from
unconsecrated hands, yield more of the balm of consolation in such an
hour, because they are real, human, and therefore nearer to God, than the
technical representative of His truth. The essential mistake is, that
instead of regarding the man as something divine in essence and relation,
a perverse theology assigns that quality to the office. It is what is
grafted upon, not what is essential to, humanity, that is thus made the
nucleus of reverence and hope, whereas priesthood and manhood are
identical. The authority of the former is derived from the latter; by
virtue of being men we become priests--that is, servants--of the Most
High; and not through any miraculous anointing, laying on of hands,
courses of divinity, or rites of ordination. 'How,' says Carlyle, 'did
Christianity arise and spread abroad among men? Was it by institutions and
establishments and well-arranged systems of mechanism? Not so. On the
contrary, in all past and existing institutions for those ends, its divine
spirit has invariably been found to languish and decay. It arose in the
mystic deeps of man's soul; and spread abroad by the "preaching of the
word" by simple, altogether natural, and individual efforts; and flew like
hallowed fire from heart to heart, till all were purified and illuminated
by it.' Accordingly, if merely professional representatives of the church,
as such, hold a less influential position now than formerly, it is not
because the instinct of worship has died out in the human heart, nor
because men feel less than before the need of interpreters of the true,
the holy, and the beautiful; it is not that the mysteries of life are less
impressive, or its vicissitudes less constant, or its origin and end less
enveloped in sacred obscurity; but it is because more legitimate priests
have been found out of the church than in it; because that institution
and its ministers fail to meet adequately the wants of the religious
sentiment; and it has been discovered that the Invisible Spirit is more
easily found by the lonely seashore than in the magnificent cathedral;
that the mountain-top is an altar nearer to His throne than a chancel; and
that the rustle of forest-leaves and the moaning of the sea less disturb
the idea of His presence in the devout heart, than the monotonous chant of
the choir, or the conventional words of the preacher. We have but to
glance at the pictures of clerical life, so thickly scattered through the
memoirs and novels of the day, to realize the necessity of an eclectic
spirit in estimating the clerical character--whose highest manifestations
and most patent abuses seem entirely irrespective of sect. A Scotch
clergyman, writing, in 1763, of the society at Harrogate, 'made up of
half-pay officers and clergymen,' thus describes the latter: 'They are in
general--I mean the lower order--divided into bucks and prigs; of which
the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their
morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were
unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves
like gentlemen. The other division of them, the prigs, are truly not to be
endured, for they are but half-learned, are ignorant of the world,
narrow-minded, pedantic, and overbearing.'[42] Contrast with this estimate
of a class Victor Hugo's portrait of an individual in his _Provincial
Bishop_--'Monseigneur Bienvenu,' so called, instinctively, by the people:
'The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in him;
he was always busy in finding for himself and inspiring others with the
best way of sympathizing and solacing. The universe appeared to him like
disease. He auscultated suffering everywhere. The whole world was to this
good and rare priest a permanent subject of sadness seeking to be
consoled.'
The absolute need of separating in our minds the idea of the clerical man
as a natural development of humanity--a normal phase of character--from
the historical idea of the same personage, is at once evinced by the
immense distance between the lives, influence, and traits of the men who
have conspicuously borne the office of public religious teachers and
administrators in different sects, ages, and countries; as for instance,
Ximenes, Wolsey, Richelieu, Whitfield, Channing, George Herbert, and Dr.
Arnold; in position, habits, and relations to the world, how great the
contrast! And yet each represented to society, in a professional way, the
same principle; the former with all the pomp of hierarchal magnificence,
and all the influence of executive power, and the latter by the force of
patient usefulness, earnest simplicity, and individual moral energy.
Between Puritan and Pope, what infinite grades; between Jewish rabbi and
Scotch elder, how diverse is the traditional sanction; and how little
would a novice imagine that the bare walls and plain costume of a Friends'
meeting had the least of a common origin with the gorgeous decorations of
a minster! Thus do the passions, the tastes, and the very blood of races
and individuals modify the expression of the same instinct; worship is as
Protean in its forms as labour, diversion, _hygiène_, or any other human
need and activity. Philosophy reconciles us to the apparent incongruity,
and reveals beneath surplice, drab-coat, and silken robe, hearts that
pulsate to an identical measure.
The best writers have recognized the clerical tone of manners as
significant of the social condition of each period. Burnet thought more
highly of his _Pastoral Care_ than of his History; and Baxter's _Reformed
Pastor_ is an indirect but keen testimony to the decadence of the clergy.
Macaulay cites Fielding's parson. Sir Roger's chaplain in the _Spectator_,
Cowper's rebuke of the 'cassocked huntsmen,' the Stiggins of Dickens, and
Honeyman of Thackeray, are but a popular reflex of that deep sense of the
abuse of a profession which is the highest evidence of its normal
estimation. And the types of the vocation seem permanent. Every era has
its Whateley, its Lammenais, and its Spurgeon--or men in the church whose
gifts, tone, and mission essentially correspond with these. When George
Herbert abandoned court for clerical aspirations, a friend protested
against his choice 'as too mean an employment;' and yet so truly did he
illustrate the spiritual grandeur of his office that the chime which
called to prayer from the humble belfry of Bemerton, was recognized by the
country people as the 'saint's bell.' It was his holiness, and not his
attachment to the ritual year, that inspired his example while living, and
embalmed his memory; lowly kindnesses were 'music to him at midnight;'
charity was 'his only perfume;' to teach the ignorant, in his estimation,
'the greatest alms;' and a day well spent, 'the bridal of the earth and
sky;' his humanity, spiritualized by Christian faith and practice, so
essentially constituted him a priest that, 'about Salisbury,' writes his
brother, 'where he lived beneficed for many years, he was little less than
sainted.' He drew an ideal from his own soul, and for his own guidance, in
the _Country Parson_.
To the reverent mind that dares to exercise freely the prerogative of
thought, the constant blending of human infirmity with the method of
worship is painfully evident: the instinct itself, the sentiment--highest
in man--is thus 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;' what is
beautiful and true in the ceremonial, or the emblem, arrays itself to his
consciousness so as to intercept the holy beams that he would draw from
the altar. Let him obey the waves of accident, and pause at shrines by the
wayside; and according to circumstances will be the inspiration they
yield. Thus turning from the gay Parisian thoroughfare, at noonday, he may
pace the chaste aisles of the Madeleine, and feel his devotion stirred by
the solemn quietude, the few kneeling figures--perhaps by the dark
catafalque awaiting the dead in the centre of the spacious floor; and
then what to him is the doctrine of transubstantiation? Religious
architecture is speaking to his heart. The voices of the choristers at St.
George's Chapel, at Windsor, may touch his pious sensibility; but if his
thoughts revert to the ruddy dean, his good dinners, and indulgent life,
and the poor, toilsome vicars, which make the Establishment a reflection
of the world's diversity of condition--the pampered and the drudged; or,
if he notes the prayer that the Queen may be preserved 'in health and
_wealth_,' how sanctity ceases to invest the priest and the ritual, thus
typical of human vanity and selfishness! 'We know not,' wrote Jerrold,
'and we say it with grief, but with profound conviction of the necessity
of every man giving fullest utterance to his thoughts--we know not, in
this world of ours, in this social, out-of-door masquerade, a more dreary
shortcoming, a greater disappointment to the business and bosoms of men,
than the Established Church. Its essence is self-denial; its foundations
are in humility and poverty; its practice is self-aggrandizement and
money-getting.' Nor is the reverse of the picture, the contrast between
the high and low clergy, less inauspicious. 'A Christian bishop,' writes
Sydney Smith, 'proposes, in cold blood, to create a thousand livings of
one hundred and thirty pounds each,--to call into existence a thousand of
the most unhappy men on the face of the earth--the sons of the poor,
without hope, without the assistance of private fortune, chained to the
soil, ashamed to live with their inferiors, unfit for the society of the
better classes, and dragging about the English curse of poverty, without
the smallest hope that they can ever shake it off. Can any man of common
sense say that all these outward circumstances of the ministers of
religion have no bearing on religion itself?' On the other hand, what
divine significance to the pious soul, 'as through a zodiac moves the
ritual year,'--in the altar, the font, the choral service, the venerable
liturgy, the holy emblems and hallowed forms whereby this Church is
consecrated to the hearts of her devout children, and the reverence of
sympathetic intelligence.
Buckle, drawing broad inference from extensive and acute research,
unmodified by sympathetic observation, wrote an historical treatise, rich
in knowledge and philosophy, to prove that Spain and Scotland owe whatever
is hopeless and hampered in their intellectual development to the tyranny
of priests and preachers. It was a special plea, but it serves to
illustrate, with comprehensive emphasis, the antagonism between
Ecclesiasticism and Christianity; for, viewed individually, as a social
phenomenon, and not the mere exponent of an organization, the preacher or
teacher of the right, advocate of the true, representative of faith,
becomes a distinct and personal character, and is identified with
humanity. It is when the man and the function coalesce, and the former
transcends and spiritualizes the latter, that, in history and in life, all
that is great and gracious in the vocation is memorably vindicated. Under
this genuine aspect, Rousseau found his ideal of happiness in the life of
a village _curé_, Chateaubriand renewed the heartfelt claims of religion
in eloquently describing its primitive and legitimate benignities.
Mediæval ecclesiasticism commenced its purifying though inadequate ordeal
through the heroism of Savonarola at Florence and Sarpi at Venice. Current
literature, indeed, continually and clearly states the problem; and
illustrates the question with a frequency and a talent which indicate how
largely it occupies the popular mind. To discriminate between the
preacher's conventional office and his spiritual endowment,--between
Christianity as a sentiment and a dogma, between the religious and the
temporal authority, between the church as an institution and a faith, is
an emphatic mission of artist and author in our age. Witness the salient
discussions of the 'Roman question,' the pleas and protests of Gallican
and Ultramontane, the conservative zeal of the Puseyite and liberal
encroachments of the progressive clergy, and the picturesque or
psychological fictions which instruct and beguile modern readers.[43] Both
literature and life in modern times, while they attest the official
decadence of the clergy, as a political and theological organization,
still more significantly vindicate their normal influence as a social
power. 'Not as in the old times,' says a philosophical historian, in
allusion to the clergy of America, 'does the layman look upon them as the
cormorants and curses of society; they are his faithful advisers, his
honoured friends, under whose suggestion and supervision are instituted
educational establishments, colleges, hospitals--whatever can be of
benefit to men in this life, or secure to them happiness in the life to
come.'[44]
There are types of character that prophesy vocation; and we occasionally
see in families a gentle being, so disinterested, thoughtful, and above
the world in natural disposition, that he seems born to wear a surplice,
as one we can behold officiating at the altar by virtue of a certain
innate adaptation; and so there are men of strong affections, early
bereft, and thereby alienated from personal motives, and thus peculiarly
able to give an undivided heart to God and humanity; or, through a
singular moral experience, initiated more deeply than their fellows into
the arcana of truth, and hence justified in becoming her expositors. In
cases like these, a more than conventional reason for the faith that is in
them causes them to speak and act with an authority which is its own
sanction, and hence springs what is vital both in the life and the
literature of the visible church. Sacerdotal biography, the achievements
of the true reformer, the literary bequests of the genuine pulpit orator,
and the results of efficient parochial genius, attest the reality of such
characters; they are of Nature's ordaining, and sectarianism itself is
lost sight of in their universal and grateful recognition--as witness St.
Augustine, Fenelon, Luther, Wesley, Fox, and Frederick Robertson.
Landmarks in the history of our race, oases in the desert of theological
controversy, flowers in the garland of humanity, they 'vindicate the ways
of God to man,' and are the redeeming facts of ecclesiastical life. Above
the system they illustrate, beyond the limits they designate, and
providential exceptions to a general rule, we instinctively accept them as
holding a relation to the religious sentiment and the highest interests of
the world that only a profane imagination can associate with the
pretensions of the thousands who claim their fraternity. This idea of
asserting the human as consecrated and not usurped by the priestly, has
ever distinguished the veritable ecclesiastical heroes. Lammenais, when a
mere youth, was arrested for his eloquent advocacy of freedom and faith;
'we will show them,' he said of the civil tribunals, 'what kind of a _man_
a priest is.'
Dupuytren, the most celebrated French surgeon of his day, was destitute of
faith, and by his powerful mind and brusque hardihood overcame the
individuality of almost every one who approached him. One day a poor
_curé_ from some village near Paris called upon the great surgeon.
Dupuytren was struck with his manly beauty and noble presence, but
examined, with his usual nonchalance, the patient's neck, disfigured by a
horrible cancer. '_Avec cela, il faut mourir_,' said the surgeon. 'So I
thought,' calmly replied the priest; 'I expected the disease was fatal,
and only came to you to please my parishioners.' He then unfolded a bit of
paper and took from it a five-franc piece, which he handed to Dupuytren,
saying: 'Pardon, sir, the little fee, for we are poor.' The serene dignity
and holy self-possession of this man, about to die in the prime of his
life, impressed the stoical surgeon in spite of himself, though his manner
betrayed neither surprise nor interest. Before the _curé_ had descended
half the staircase, he was called back by a servant. 'If you choose to
try an operation,' said Dupuytren, 'go to the Hotel Dieu; I will see you
to-morrow.' 'It is my duty to make use of all means of recovery,' replied
the _curé_; 'I will go.' The next day, the surgeon cut away remorselessly
at the priest's neck, laying bare tendons and arteries. It was before the
days of chloroform, and, unsustained by any opiate, the poor _curé_
suffered with uncomplaining heroism. He did not even wince. Dupuytren
respected his courage; and every day lingered longer at his bedside, when
making the rounds of the hospital. In a few weeks the _curé_ recovered. A
year after the operation, he made his appearance in the _salon_ of the
great professor with a neat basket containing pears and chickens.
'Monsieur,' he said, 'it is the anniversary of the day when your skill
saved my life; accept this humble gift; the pears and chickens are better
than you can find in Paris; they are of my own raising.' Each succeeding
year, on the same day of the month, the honest priest brought his grateful
offering. At length Dupuytren was taken ill, and the physicians declared
his heart diseased. He shut himself up with his favourite nephew and
refused to see his friends. One day he wrote on a slip of paper, '_Le
medécin a besoin du curé_,' and sent it to the village priest, who quickly
obeyed the summons. He remained for hours in the dying surgeon's chamber;
and when he came forth, tears were in his eyes, and Dupuytren was no more.
How easy for the imagination to fill up this outline, which is all that
was vouchsafed to Parisian gossip.
Whoever has gone from Roman church or palace--his soul yet warm with the
radiant figures and divine expression of saints and martyrs as depicted by
the inspired hands of the Christian artists of the fifteenth century--into
the gloomy and damp catacombs, where the early disciples met in order to
enjoy 'freedom to worship God,' must have felt at once the solemn reality
and the beautiful triumph of faith, in its unperverted glow--on the one
hand nerving the believer to cheerful endurance, and on the other
kindling genius to noble toil; and, before this fresh conviction, how vain
appeared to him the mechanical rite and the cold response of conventional
worship! The truth is that the history of religion is like the history of
love; a natural and divine sentiment has been wrested into illegitimate
service; ambitious pretenders, like the wanton and the coquette, abuse to
selfish ends what should either be honourably let alone or sacredly
cherished. This process, at once so habitual and so intricate--working
through formulas, tradition, appeals to fear, the power of custom, the
imperative needs and the ignorant credulity of the multitude--has
gradually built up a partition between heaven and earth, obscured
spiritual facts, made vague and mystical the primitive relation of the
soul to the fatherhood of God, and thus induced either open scepticism or
artificial conformity. In painting, in music, in literature, in the
wonders of the universe, in the mysteries of life, and in human
consciousness, the sentiment asserts itself for ever; but to the genuine
man of to-day is allotted the ceaseless duty of keeping it apart from the
incrustations of form, the perversion of office, and the base uses of
ambition and avarice.
The lionism of the pulpit is another desecration. London and New York must
have their fashionable preachers as well as favourite _prima donnas_, and
the phenomena attending each are the same. Intellectual amusement,
exclusiveness, the _mode_, thus become identical with that which is their
essential opposite, and the meekness and sublimity of the religious
function is utterly lost in a frivolous glare and soulless vanity. The pew
itself is a satire on existent Christianity; the very organ-airs played in
the fashionable churches, by recalling the ball-room and the theatre, are
ironical; and to these how often the elegantly-worded commonplace of the
preacher is a fit accompaniment--so well likened, by a thoughtful writer,
to shovelling sand with a pitchfork! Thank Heaven, we have perpetually
the Vicar of Wakefield and Parson Adams to keep green the memories of
that genial simplicity and honest warmth of which modern refinement has
deprived the clerical man. They, at least, were not effigies. Heroism as
embodied in Knox, scholarship in Barrow, zeal in Doddridge, holy idealism
in Taylor, sacred eloquence in Hall and Chalmers, earnest aspiration in
Channing and Robertson,--these and like instances of a fine manly
endowment, give vitality to the preacher and significance to his
ministrations.