PROTESTANT BALLADS.
Among my many fly-leaves, scattered by thousands from time to time in
handbills or in newspapers all over the world, those in which I have
praised Protestantism and denounced the dishonesty of our ecclesiastic
traitors have earned me the highest meed both of glory and shame from
partisan opponents. Ever since in my boyhood, under the ministerial
teaching of my rector, the celebrated Hugh M'Neile, at Albury for many
years, I closed with the Evangelical religion of the good old Low Church
type, I have by my life and writings excited against me the theological
hatred of High Church, and Broad Church, and No Church, and especially
of the Romanizers amongst our Established clergy. Sundry religious
newspapers and other periodicals, whose names I will not blazon by
recording, have systematically attacked and slandered me from early
manhood to this hour, and have diligently kept up my notoriety or fame
(it was stupid enough of them from their point of view) by quips and
cranks, as well as by more serious onslaughts, about which I am very
pachydermatous, albeit there are pasted down in my archive-books all the
paragraphs that have reached me. But, even as in hydraulics, the harder
you screw the greater the force, so with my combative nature, the more I
am attacked the more obstinately I resist. Hence the multitude and
variety of my polemical lucubrations,--mostly of a fragmentary character
as Sibylline leaves: some, however, appear in my "Ballads and Poems"
(among them a famous "Down with foreign priestcraft," circulated by
thousands in the Midlands by an unknown enthusiast),--and Ridgeway of
Piccadilly has published in pamphlet form my "Fifty Protestant Ballads
and Directorium," which originally appeared in the _Daily News_, and
_The Rock_: I have certainly written as many more, and among these one
which I will here reproduce as now very scarce, and lately of some
national importance: seeing that it was sent by my friend Admiral
Bedford Pim to every member of the two Houses of Legislature on the
Bradlaugh occasion, and was stated to have turned the tide of battle in
that celebrated case.
_"So Help Me, God!"_
"'So help me, God!' my heart at every turn
Of life's wide wilderness implores Thee still
To give all good, to rescue from all ill,
And grant me grace Thy presence to discern.
"'So help me, God!' I would not move a yard
Without my hand in Thine to be my guide,
Thy love to bless, Thy bounty to provide,
Thy fostering wing spread over me to guard.
"'So help me, God!' the motto of my life,
In every varied phase of chance and change,
So that nought happens here of sad or strange
But 'peace' is written on each frown of strife.
"For Thou dost help the man that honoureth Thee!
Ay, and Thy Christian-Israel of this land
That hitherto hath recognised Thy hand,
How blest above the nations still are we!
"Yet now our Senate schemes to spurn aside
(On false pretence of liberal brotherhood)
The Heavenly Father of our earthly good,
Because one atheist hath his God denied!
"What, shall this wrong be done? Must all of us
Groan under coming judgment for the sin
Of welcoming avowed blasphemers in
To vote with rulers who misgovern thus?
"So help us, God! it shall not: England's might
Stands in religion practised and profest;
For so alone by blessing is she blest,
Christian and Protestant in life and light."
To gratify an eminent friend who wished not to exclude Jews and
Mahometans from an open profession of godliness as they viewed the
question, I altered, in subsequent reprints, the last line, "Christian
and Protestant in life and light," to "Loving and fearing God in faith
and light:" though personally my sturdy Orangeism inclined to the
original. I will in this place give a remarkable extract in a letter to
me from Gladstone, to whom my faithfulness had appealed, exhorting him,
as I often have done, to be on the right side: we know how he quoted
Lucretius on the wrong: against which I wrote a strong protest in the
_Times_. I like not to show private letters,--but this is manifestly a
public one. He says: ... "I thank you for your note, and I can assure
you that I believe the promoters of the Affirmation Bill to be already
on the side you wish me to take, and its opponents to be engaged in
doing (unwittingly) serious injury to religious belief." It is strange
to see how much intellectual subtlety combined with interested
partisanship can be self-deceived, even in a man who believes himself
and is thought by others thoroughly conscientious.
Amongst other of my recent notorious ballads of the polemic sort, I
ought to name a famous couple--"The Nun's Appeal," and "Open the
Convents"--which were written at the request of Lord Alfred Churchill,
and given to Edith O'Gorman, the Escaped Nun (otherwise the excellent
and eloquent Mrs. Auffray), to aid her Protestant Lectures everywhere:
she has circulated them over the three kingdoms, and is now doing the
like in Australia and New Zealand.
In reply to some excellent members of the Romish Church, who have
publicly accused me of maligning holy women and sacred retreats, my
obvious answer is that I contend against the evil side both of nunneries
and monkeries, whilst I may fairly admit some good to be found in both.
My real protest is for liberty both to mind and body, and against
coercion of any kind, material or spiritual. Given perfect freedom, I
would not meddle with any one's honest convictions: "to a nunnery go" if
thou wilt; only let the resolve be revocable, not a doom for ever.