SERMONS IN STONES.
The next afternoon was the last but one of my stay at D * * *. We were to
dine late, after sunset, and, before dinner, we went into the cathedral.
The choir had just finished practising. Certain exceedingly ill-looking
men, whose faces bespoke principally sensuality and self-conceit, and whose
function was that of praising God, on the sole qualification of good bass
and tenor voices, were coming chattering through the choir gates; and
behind them a group of small boys were suddenly transforming themselves
from angels into sinners, by tearing off their white surplices, and
pinching and poking each other noisily as they passed us, with as little
reverence as Voltaire himself could have desired.
I had often been in the cathedral before--indeed, we attended the service
daily, and I had been appalled, rather than astonished, by what I saw and
heard: the unintelligible service--the irreverent gabble of the choristers
and readers--the scanty congregation--the meagre portion of the vast
building which seemed to be turned to any use: but never more than that
evening, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, of that vast
desert nave, with its aisles and transepts--built for some purpose or other
now extinct. The whole place seemed to crush and sadden me; and I could not
re-echo Lillian's remark:
"How those pillars, rising story above story, and those lines of pointed
arches, all lead the eye heavenward! It is a beautiful notion, that about
pointed architecture being symbolic of Christianity."
"I ought to be very much ashamed of my stupidity," I answered; "but I
cannot feel that, though I believe I ought to do so. That vast groined
roof, with its enormous weight of hanging stone, seems to crush one--to
bar out the free sky above. Those pointed windows, too--how gloriously the
western sun is streaming through them! but their rich hues only dim and
deface his light. I can feel what you say, when I look at the cathedral on
the outside; there, indeed, every line sweeps the eye upward--carries it
from one pinnacle to another, each with less and less standing-ground, till
at the summit the building gradually vanishes in a point, and leaves the
spirit to wing its way, unsupported and alone, into the ether.
"Perhaps," I added, half bitterly, "these cathedrals may be true symbols
of the superstition which created them--on the outside, offering to
enfranchise the soul and raise it up to heaven; but when the dupes had
entered, giving them only a dark prison, and a crushing bondage, which
neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear."
"You may sneer at them, if you will, Mr. Locke," said Eleanor, in her
severe, abrupt way. "The working classes would have been badly off without
them. They were, in their day, the only democratic institution in the
world; and the only socialist one too. The only chance a poor man had of
rising by his worth, was by coming to the monastery. And bitterly the
working classes felt the want of them, when they fell. Your own Cobbett can
tell you that."
"Ah," said Lillian, "how different it must have been four hundred years
ago!--how solemn and picturesque those old monks must have looked, gliding
about the aisles!--and how magnificent the choir must have been, before all
the glass and carving, and that beautiful shrine of St. * * * *, blazing
with gold and jewels, were all plundered and defaced by those horrid
Puritans!"
"Say, reformer-squires," answered Eleanor; "for it was they who did the
thing; only it was found convenient, at the Restoration, to lay on
the people of the seventeenth century the iniquities which the
country-gentlemen committed in the sixteenth."
"Surely," I added, emboldened by her words, "if the monasteries were what
their admirers say, some method of restoring the good of the old system,
without its evil, ought to be found; and would be found, if it were not--"
I paused, recollecting whose guest I was.
"If it were not, I suppose," said Eleanor, "for those lazy, overfed,
bigoted hypocrites, the clergy. That, I presume, is the description of them
to which you have been most accustomed. Now, let me ask you one question.
Do you mean to condemn, just now, the Church as it was, or the Church as
it is, or the Church as it ought to be? Radicals have a habit of confusing
those three questions, as they have of confusing other things when it suits
them."
"Really," I said--for my blood was rising--"I do think that, with the
confessed enormous wealth of the clergy, the cathedral establishments
especially, they might do more for the people."
"Listen to me a little, Mr. Locke. The laity now-a-days take a pride in
speaking evil of the clergy, never seeing that if they are bad, the laity
have made them so. Why, what do you impute to them? Their worldliness,
their being like the world, like the laity round them--like you, in short?
Improve yourselves, and by so doing, if there is this sad tendency in the
clergy to imitate you, you will mend them; if you do not find that after
all, it is they who will have to mend you. 'As with the people, so with the
priest,' is the everlasting law. When, fifty years ago, all classes were
drunkards, from the statesman to the peasant, the clergy were drunken
also, but not half so bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with
covetousness and ambition; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but
not half so bad as the laity. The laity, and you working men especially,
are the dupes of frothy, insincere, official rant, as Mr. Carlyle would
call it, in Parliament, on the hustings, at every debating society and
Chartist meeting; and, therefore, the clergyman's sermons are apt to be
just what people like elsewhere, and what, therefore, they suppose people
will like there."
"If, then," I answered, "in spite of your opinions, you confess the clergy
to be so bad, why are you so angry with men of our opinions, if we do plot
sometimes a little against the Church?"
"I do not think you know what my opinions are, Mr. Locke. Did you not hear
me just now praising the monasteries, because they were socialist and
democratic? But why is the badness of the clergy any reason for pulling
down the Church? That is another of the confused irrationalities into which
you all allow yourselves to fall. What do you mean by crying shame on a man
for being a bad clergyman, if a good clergyman is not a good thing? If the
very idea of a clergyman, was abominable, as your Church-destroyers ought
to say, you ought to praise a man for being a bad one, and not acting out
this same abominable idea of priesthood. Your very outcry against the sins
of the clergy, shows that, even in your minds, a dim notion lies somewhere
that a clergyman's vocation is, in itself, a divine, a holy, a beneficent
one."
"I never looked at it in that light, certainly," said I, somewhat
staggered.
"Very likely not. One word more, for I may not have another opportunity
of speaking to you as I would on these matters. You working men complain
of the clergy for being bigoted and obscurantist, and hating the cause of
the people. Does not nine-tenths of the blame of that lie at your door? I
took up, the other day, at hazard, one of your favourite liberty-preaching
newspapers; and I saw books advertised in it, whose names no modest woman
should ever behold; doctrines and practices advocated in it from which
all the honesty, the decency, the common human feeling which is left in
the English mind, ought to revolt, and does revolt. You cannot deny it.
Your class has told the world that the cause of liberty, equality, and
fraternity, the cause which the working masses claim as theirs, identifies
itself with blasphemy and indecency, with the tyrannous persecutions of
trades-unions, with robbery, assassinations, vitriol-bottles, and midnight
incendiarism. And then you curse the clergy for taking you at your word!
Whatsoever they do, you attack them. If they believe you, and stand up for
common, morality, and for the truths which they know are all-important to
poor as well as rich, you call them bigots and persecutors; while if they
neglect, in any way, the very Christianity for believing which you insult
them, you turn round and call them hypocrites. Mark my words, Mr. Locke,
till you gain the respect and confidence of the clergy, you will never
rise. The day will come when you will find that the clergy are the only
class who can help you. Ah, you may shake your head. I warn you of it. They
were the only bulwark of the poor against the mediæval tyranny of Rank;
you will find them the only bulwark against the modern tyranny of Mammon."
I was on the point of entreating her to explain herself further, but at
that critical moment Lillian interposed.
"Now, stay your prophetic glances into the future; here come Lynedale and
papa." And in a moment, Eleanor's whole manner and countenance altered--the
petulant, wild unrest, the harsh, dictatorial tone vanished; and she
turned to meet her lover, with a look of tender, satisfied devotion, which
transfigured her whole face. It was most strange, the power he had over
her. His presence, even at a distance, seemed to fill her whole being
with rich quiet life. She watched him with folded hands, like a mystic
worshipper, waiting for the afflatus of the spirit; and, suspicious and
angry as I felt towards her, I could not help being drawn to her by this
revelation of depths of strong healthy feeling, of which her usual manner
gave so little sign.
This conversation thoroughly puzzled me; it showed me that there might be
two sides to the question of the people's cause, as well as to that of
others. It shook a little my faith in the infallibility of my own class,
to hear such severe animadversions on them, from a person who professed
herself as much a disciple of Carlyle as any working man; and who evidently
had no lack either of intellect to comprehend or boldness to speak out his
doctrines; who could praise the old monasteries for being democratic and
socialist, and spoke far more severely of the clergy than I could have
done--because she did not deal merely in trite words of abuse, but showed a
real analytic insight into the causes of their short-coming.
* * * * *
That same evening the conversation happened to turn on dress, of which Miss
Staunton spoke scornfully and disparagingly, as mere useless vanity and
frippery--an empty substitute for real beauty of person as well as the
higher beauty of mind. And I, emboldened by the courtesy with which I was
always called on to take my share in everything that was said or done,
ventured to object, humbly enough, to her notions.
"But is not beauty," I said, "in itself a good and blessed thing,
softening, refining, rejoicing the eyes of all who behold?" (And my eyes,
as I spoke, involuntary rested on Lillian's face--who saw it, and blushed.)
"Surely nothing which helps beauty is to be despised. And, without the
charm of dress, beauty, even that of expression, does not really do itself
justice. How many lovely and lovable faces there are, for instance,
among the working classes, which, if they had but the advantages which
ladies possess, might create delight, respect, chivalrous worship in the
beholder--but are now never appreciated, because they have not the same
fair means of displaying themselves which even the savage girl of the South
Sea Islands possesses!"
Lillian said it was so very true--she had really never thought of it
before--and somehow I gained courage to go on.
"Besides, dress is a sort of sacrament, if I may use the word--a sure sign
of the wearer's character; according as any one is orderly, or modest, or
tasteful, or joyous, or brilliant"--and I glanced again at Lillian--"those
excellences, or the want of them, are sure to show themselves, in the
colours they choose, and the cut of their garments. In the workroom, I and
a friend of mine used often to amuse ourselves over the clothes we were
making, by speculating from them on the sort of people the wearers were to
be; and I fancy we were not often wrong."
My cousin looked daggers at me, and for a moment I fancied I had committed
a dreadful mistake in mentioning my tailor-life. So I had in his eyes, but
not in those of the really well-bred persons round me.
"Oh, how very amusing it must have been! I think I shall turn milliner,
Eleanor, for the fun of divining every one's little failings from their
caps and gowns!"
"Go on, Mr. Locke," said the dean, who had seemed buried in the
"Transactions of the Royal Society." "The fact is novel, and I am more
obliged to any one who gives me that, than if he gave me a bank-note. The
money gets spent and done with; but I cannot spend the fact: it remains for
life as permanent capital, returning interest and compound interest _ad
infinitum_. By-the-by, tell me about those same workshops. I have heard
more about them than I like to believe true."
And I did tell him all about them; and spoke, my blood rising as I went on,
long and earnestly, perhaps eloquently. Now and then I got abashed, and
tried to stop; and then the dean informed me that I was speaking well and
sensibly, while Lillian entreated me to go on. She had never conceived
such things possible--it was as interesting as a novel, &c., &c.; and Miss
Staunton sat with compressed lips and frowning brow, apparently thinking of
nothing but her book, till I felt quite angry at her apathy--for such it
seemed to me to be.