[Greek: genetheto to thelema sou, hos en ourano, kai epi ges.]
_Fiat voluntas tua sicut in coelo et in terra._
BRANTWOOD, _9th August, 1879_.
I was reading the second chapter of Malachi this morning by chance, and
wondering how many clergymen ever read it, and took to heart the
"commandment for _them_."
For they are always ready enough to call themselves priests (though they
know themselves to be nothing of the sort), whenever there is any
dignity to be got out of the title; but, whenever there is any good,
hot scolding or unpleasant advice given them by the prophets, in that
self-assumed character of theirs, they are as ready to quit it as ever
Dionysus his lion-skin, when he finds the character of Herakles
inconvenient.
"Ye have wearied the Lord with your words;" (yes, and some of His people
too, in your time), "yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied Him? When ye
say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He
delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?"
How many, again and again I wonder, of the lively young ecclesiastics
supplied to the increasing demand of our west ends of flourishing Cities
of the Plain, ever consider what sort of sin it is for which God (unless
they lay it to heart) will "curse their blessings, and spread dung upon
their faces;" or have understood, even in the dimmest manner, what part
_they_ had taken, and were taking, in "corrupting the covenant of the
Lord with Levi, and causing many to stumble at the Law."
Perhaps the most subtle and unconscious way in which the religious
teachers upon whom the ends of the world are come, have done this, is in
never telling their people the meaning of the clause in the Lord's
Prayer, which, of all others, their most earnest hearers have oftenest
on their lips: "Thy will be done." They allow their people to use it as
if their Father's will were always to kill their babies, or do something
unpleasant to them; and following comfort and wealth, instead of
explaining to them that the first and intensest article of their
Father's will was their own sanctification; and that the one only path
to national prosperity and to domestic peace, was to understand what the
will of the Lord was, and to do all they could to get it done. Whereas
one would think, by the tone of the eagerest preachers nowadays, that
they held their blessed office to be that, not of showing men how to do
their Father's will on earth, but how to get to heaven without doing any
of it either here or there!
I say, especially, the most eager preachers; for nearly the whole
Missionary body (with the hottest Evangelistic sect of the English
Church) is at this moment composed of men who think the Gospel they are
to carry to mend the world with, forsooth, is that, "If any man sin, he
hath an Advocate with the Father;" while I have never yet, in my own
experience, met either with a Missionary or a Town Bishop who so much
as professed himself "to understand what the will of the Lord" was, far
less to teach anybody else to do it; and for fifty preachers, yes, and
fifty hundreds whom I have heard proclaiming the Mediator of the New
Testament, that "they which were called might receive the promise of
eternal inheritance," I have never yet heard so much as _one_ heartily
proclaiming against all those "deceivers with vain words" (Eph. v. 6),
that "no covetous person which is an idolater, hath _any_ inheritance in
the kingdom of Christ, or of God;" and on myself personally and publicly
challenging the Bishops of England generally, and by name the Bishop of
Manchester, to say whether usury was, or was not, according to the will
of God, I have received no answer from any one of them.[8]
[8] Fors Clavigera, Letter lxxxii., p. 323.
_13th August._
I have allowed myself, in the beginning of this letter, to dwell on the
equivocal use of the word "Priest" in the English Church (see
"Christopher Harvey," Grosart's edition, p. 38), because the assumption
of the mediatorial, in defect of the pastoral, office by the clergy
fulfils itself, naturally and always, in their pretending to absolve the
sinner from his punishment, instead of purging him from his sin; and
practically, in their general patronage and encouragement of all the
iniquity of the world, by steadily preaching away the penalties of it.
So that the great cities of the earth, which ought to be the places set
on its hills, with the Temple of the Lord in the midst of them, to which
the tribes should go up,--centres to the Kingdoms and Provinces of
Honour, Virtue, and the Knowledge of the law of God,--have become,
instead, loathsome centres of fornication and covetousness--the smoke of
their sin going up into the face of heaven like the furnace of Sodom,
and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and the
souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano
whose ashes broke out in blains upon man and upon beast.
And in the midst of them, their freshly-set-up steeples ring the crowd
to a weekly prayer that the rest of their lives may be pure and holy,
while they have not the slightest intention of purifying, sanctifying,
or changing their lives in any the smallest particular; and their clergy
gather, each into himself, the curious dual power, and Janus-faced
majesty in mischief, of the prophet that prophesies falsely, and the
priest that bears rule by his means.
And the people love to have it so.
BRANTWOOD, _12th August_.
I am very glad of your little note from Brighton. I thought it needless
to send the two letters there, which you will find at home; and they
pretty nearly end all _I_ want to say; for the remaining clauses of the
prayer touch on things too high for me. But I will send you one
concluding letter about them.