BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, _June 1880_.
MY DEAR MALLESON,--I have glanced at the proofs you send; and _can_ do
no more than glance, even if it seemed to me desirable that I should do
more,--which, after said glance, it does in no wise. Let me remind you
of what it is absolutely necessary that the readers of the book should
clearly understand--that I wrote these Letters at your request, to be
read and discussed at the meeting of a private society of clergymen. I
declined then to be present at the discussion, and I decline still. You
afterwards asked leave to print the Letters, to which I replied that
they were yours, for whatever use you saw good to make of them:
afterwards your plans expanded, while my own notion remained precisely
what it had been--that the discussion should have been private, and kept
within the limits of the society, and that its conclusions, if any,
should have been announced in a few pages of clear print, for the
parishioners' exclusive reading.
I am, of course, flattered by the wider course you have obtained for the
Letters, but am not in the slightest degree interested by the debate
upon them, nor by any religious debates whatever, undertaken without
serious conviction that there is a jot wrong in matters as they are, or
serious resolution to make them a tittle better. Which, so far as I can
read the minds of your correspondents, appears to me the substantial
state of them.
One thing I cannot pass without protest--the quantity of talk about the
writer of the Letters. What I am, or am not, is of no moment whatever to
the matters in hand. I observe with comfort, or at least with
complacency, that on the strength of a couple of hours' talk, at a time
when I was thinking chiefly of the weatherings of slate you were good
enough to show me above Goat's Water, you would have ventured to baptize
me in the little lake--as not a goat, but a sheep. The best I can be
sure of, myself, is that I am no wolf, and have never aspired to the
dignity even of a Dog of the Lord.
You told me, if I remember rightly, that one of the members of the
original meeting denounced me as an arch-heretic[39]--meaning,
doubtless, an arch-pagan; for a heretic, or sect-maker, is of all terms
of reproach the last that can be used of me. And I think he should have
been answered that it was precisely as an arch-pagan that I ventured to
request a more intelligible and more unanimous account of the Christian
Gospel from its preachers.
[39] Only a heretic!--ED.
If anything in the Letters offended those of you who hold me a brother,
surely it had been best to tell me between ourselves, or to tell it to
the Church, or to let me be Anathema Maranatha in peace,--in any case, I
must at present so abide, correcting only the mistakes about myself
which have led to graver ones about the things I wanted to speak of.[40]
[40] I may perhaps be pardoned for vindicating at least my
arithmetic, which, with Bishop Colenso, I rather pride myself upon.
One of your correspondents greatly doubts my having heard five
thousand assertors of evangelical principles (Catholic-absolvent or
Protestant-detergent are virtually the same). I am now sixty years
old, and for forty-five of them was in church at least once on the
Sunday,--say once a month also in afternoons,--and you have above
three thousand church services. When I am abroad I am often in
half-a-dozen churches in the course of a single day, and never lose
a chance of listening to anything that is going on. Add the
conversations pursued, not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend
person I can get to talk to me--from the Bishop of Strasburg (as
good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was
studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850--down to the simplest
travelling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be
sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid
numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his
more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries;
to which I can only answer, that as I do not live in town, nor set
up for a missionary myself, my spiritual advantages have certainly
not been great in that direction. I simply assert that of the few I
have known,--beginning with Mr. Spurgeon, under whom I sat with
much edification for a year or two,--I have not known any such
teaching as I speak of.
The most singular one, perhaps, in all the Letters is that of Mr. ----,
that I do not attach enough weight to antiquity. My reply to it is
partly written already, with reference to the wishes of some other of
your correspondents to know more of my reasons for finding fault with
the English Liturgy.
If people are taught to use the Liturgy rightly and reverently, it will
bring them all good; and for some thirty years of my life I used to read
it always through to my servant and myself, if we had no Protestant
church to go to, in Alpine or Italian villages. One can always tacitly
pray of it what one wants, and let the rest pass. But, as I have grown
older, and watched the decline in the Christian faith of all nations, I
have got more and more suspicious of the effect of this particular form
of words on the truthfulness of the English mind (now fast becoming a
salt which has lost his savour, and is fit only to be trodden under
foot of men). And during the last ten years, in which my position at
Oxford has compelled me to examine what authority there was for the code
of prayer, of which the University is now so ashamed that it no more
dares compel its youths so much as to hear, much less to utter it, I got
necessarily into the habit of always looking to the original forms of
the prayers of the fully developed Christian Church. Nor did I think it
a mere chance which placed in my own possession a manuscript of the
perfect Church service of the thirteenth century,[41] written by the
monks of the Sainte Chapelle for St. Louis; together with one of the
same date, written in England, probably for the Diocese of Lincoln;
adding some of the Collects, in which it corresponds with St. Louis's,
and the Latin hymns so much beloved by Dante, with the appointed music
for them.
[41] See Appendix.
And my wonder has been greater every hour, since I examined closely the
text of these and other early books, that in any state of declining, or
captive, energy, the Church of England should have contented itself with
a service which cast out, from beginning to end, all these intensely
spiritual and passionate utterances of chanted prayer (the whole body,
that is to say, of the authentic _Christian_ Psalms), and in adopting
what it timidly preserved of the Collects, mangled or blunted them down
to the exact degree which would make them either unintelligible or
inoffensive--so vague that everybody might use them, or so pointless
that nobody could be offended by them. For a special instance: The
prayer for "our bishops and curates, and all congregations committed to
their charge," is, in the Lincoln Service-book, "for our bishop, and all
congregations committed to _his_ charge." The change from singular to
plural seems a slight one. But it suffices to take the eyes of the
people off their own bishop into infinite space; to change a prayer
which was intended to be uttered in personal anxiety and affection, into
one for the general good of the Church, of which nobody could judge, and
for which nobody would particularly care; and, finally, to change a
prayer to which the answer, if given, would be visible, into one of
which nobody could tell whether it were answered or not.
In the Collects, the change, though verbally slight, is thus tremendous
in issue. But in the Litany--word and thought go all wild together. The
first prayer of the Litany in the Lincoln Service-book is for the Pope
and all ranks beneath him, implying a very noteworthy piece of
theology--that the Pope might err in religious matters, and that the
prayer of the humblest servant of God would be useful to him:--"Ut
Dompnum Apostolicum, et omnes gradus ecclesie in sancta religione
conservare digneris." Meaning that whatever errors particular persons
might, and must, fall into, they prayed God to keep the Pope right, and
the collective testimony and conduct of the ranks below him. Then
follows the prayer for their own bishop and _his_ flock--then for the
king and the princes (chief lords), that they (not all nations) might be
kept in concord--and then for _our_ bishops and abbots,--the Church of
England proper; every one of these petitions being direct, limited, and
personally heartfelt;--and then this lovely one for themselves:--
"Ut obsequium servitutis nostre rationabile facias."--"That thou wouldst
make the obedience of our service reasonable" ("which is your reasonable
service").[42]
[42] See in the Appendix for more of these beautiful prayers.--ED.
This glorious prayer is, I believe, accurately an "early English" one.
It is not in the St. Louis Litany, nor in a later elaborate French
fourteenth century one; but I find it softened in an Italian MS. of the
fifteenth century into "ut nosmet ipsos in tuo sancto servitio
confortare et conservare digneris,"--"that thou wouldst deign to keep
and comfort us ourselves in thy sacred service" (the comfort, observe,
being here asked for whether reasonable or not!); and in the best and
fullest French service-book I have, printed at Rouen in 1520, it
becomes, "ut congregationes omnium sanctorum in tuo sancto servitio
conservare digneris;" while victory as well as concord is asked for the
king and the princes,--thus leading the way to that for our own Queen's
victory over all her enemies, a prayer which might now be advisedly
altered into one that she--and in her, the monarchy of England--might
find more fidelity in their friends.
I give one more example of the corruption of our Prayer-Book, with
reference to the objections taken by some of your correspondents to the
distinction implied in my Letters between the Persons of the Father and
the Christ.
The "Memoria de Sancta Trinitate," in the St. Louis service-book, runs
thus:
"Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dedisti famulis tuis in confessione
vere fidei eterne Trinitatis gloriam agnoscere, et in potentia
majestatis adorare unitatem, quesumus ut ejus fidei firmitate ab omnibus
semper muniemur adversis. Qui vivis et regnas Deus, per omnia secula
seculorum. Amen."
"Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given to Thy servants, in
confession of true faith to recognize the glory of the Eternal Trinity,
and in the power of Majesty to pray to the Unity; we ask that by the
firmness of that faith we may be always defended from all adverse
things, who livest and reignest God through all ages. Amen."
Turning to our Collect, we find we have first slipped in the word "us"
before "Thy servants," and by that little insertion have slipped in the
squire and his jockey, and the public-house landlord--and any one else
who may chance to have been coaxed, swept, or threatened into church on
Trinity Sunday, and required the entire company of them to profess
themselves servants of God, and believers in the mystery of the Trinity.
And we think we have done God a service!
"Grace." Not a word about grace in the original. You don't believe by
having grace, but by having wit.
"To acknowledge." "Agnosco" is to recognize, not to acknowledge. To
_see_ that there are three lights in a chandelier is a great deal more
than to acknowledge that they are there.
"To worship." "Adorare" is to pray to, not to worship. You may worship a
mere magistrate; but you _pray_ to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The last sentence in the English is too horribly mutilated to be dealt
with in any patience. The meaning of the great old collect is that by
the shield of that faith we may quench all the fiery darts of the devil.
The English prayer means, if it means anything, "Please keep us in our
faith without our taking any trouble; and, besides, please don't let us
lose our money, nor catch cold."
"Who livest and reignest." Right; but how many of any extant or instant
congregations understand what the two words mean? That God is a living
God, not a dead Law; and that He is a reigning God, putting wrong things
to rights, and that, sooner or later, with a strong hand and a rod of
iron; and not at all with a soft sponge and warm water, washing
everybody as clean as a baby every Sunday morning, whatever dirty work
they may have been about all the week.
On which latter supposition your modern Liturgy, in so far as it has
supplemented instead of corrected the old one, has entirely modelled
itself,--producing in its first address to the congregation before the
Almighty precisely the faultfullest and foolishest piece of English
language that I know in the whole compass of English or American
literature. In the seventeen lines of it (as printed in my
old-fashioned, large-print prayer-book), there are seven times over two
words for one idea.
1. Acknowledge and confess.
2. Sins and wickedness.
3. Dissemble nor cloke.
4. Goodness and mercy.
5. Assemble and meet.
6. Requisite and necessary.
7. Pray and beseech.
There is, indeed, a shade of difference in some of these ideas for a
good scholar, none for a general congregation;[43] and what difference
they can guess at merely muddles their heads: to acknowledge sin is
indeed different from confessing it, but it cannot be done at a minute's
notice; and goodness is a different thing from mercy, but it is by no
means God's infinite goodness that forgives our badness, but that judges
it.
[43] The only explanation ever offered for this exuberant wordiness
is that if worshippers did not understand one term they would the
other, and in some cases, in the Exhortation and elsewhere, one
word is of Latin and the other of Saxon derivation.[44] But this is
surely a very feeble excuse for bad composition. Of a very
different kind is that beautiful climax which is reached in the
three admirably chosen pairs of words in the Prayer for the
Parliament, "peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and
piety."--EDITOR.
[44] The repetition of synonymous terms is of very frequent
occurrence in sixteenth century writing, as "for ever and aye,"
"Time and the hour ran through the roughest day" (Macbeth, i. 3).
"The faultfullest," I said, "and the foolishest." After using fourteen
words where seven would have done, what is it that the whole speech
gets said with its much speaking? This Morning Service of all England
begins with the assertion that the Scripture moveth us in sundry places
to confess our sins before God. _Does_ it so? Have your congregations
ever been referred to those sundry places? Or do they take the assertion
on trust, or remain under the impression that, unless with the advantage
of their own candour, God must remain ill-informed on the subject of
their sins?
"That we should not dissemble nor cloke them." _Can_ we then? Are these
grown-up congregations of the enlightened English Church in the
nineteenth century still so young in their nurseries that the "Thou,
God, seest me" is still not believed by them if they get under the bed?
Let us look up the sundry moving passages referred to.
(I suppose myself a simple lamb of the flock, and only able to use my
English Bible.)
I find in my concordance (confess and confession together) forty-two
occurrences of the word. Sixteen of these, including John's confession
that he was not the Christ, and the confession of the faithful fathers
that they were pilgrims on the earth, do indeed move us strongly to
confess Christ before men. Have you ever taught your congregations what
that confession means? They are ready enough to confess Him in church,
that is to say, in their own private synagogue. Will they in Parliament?
Will they in a ball-room? Will they in a shop? Sixteen of the texts are
to enforce their doing _that_.
The next most important one (1 Tim. vi. 13) refers to Christ's own good
confession, which I suppose was not of His sins, but of His obedience.
How many of your congregations can make any such kind of confession, or
wish to make it?
The eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth (1 Kings viii. 33, 2 Chron.
vi. 26, Heb. xiii. 15) speak of confessing thankfully that God is God
(and not a putrid plasma nor a theory of development), and the
twenty-first (Job xl. 14) speaks of God's own confession, that no doubt
we are the people, and that wisdom shall die with us, and on what
conditions He will make it.
There remain twenty-one texts which do speak of the confession of our
sins--very moving ones indeed--and Heaven grant that some day the
British public may be moved by them.
1. The first is Lev. v. 5, "He shall confess that he hath sinned _in
that thing_." And if you can get any soul of your congregation to say he
has sinned in _any_thing, he may do it in two words for one if he likes,
and it will yet be good liturgy.
2. The second is indeed general--Lev. xvi. 21: the command that the
whole nation should afflict its soul on the great day of atonement once
a year. The Church of England, I believe, enjoins no such unpleasant
ceremony. Her festivals are passed by her people often indeed in the
extinction of their souls, but by no means in their intentional
affliction.
3. The third, fourth, and fifth (Lev. xxvi. 40, Numb. v. 7, Nehem. i. 6)
refer all to national humiliation for definite idolatry, accompanied
with an entire abandonment of that idolatry, and of idolatrous persons.
How soon _that_ form of confession is likely to find a place in the
English congregations the defences of their main idol, mammon, in the
vilest and cruellest shape of it--usury--with which this book has been
defiled, show very sufficiently.
6. The sixth is Psalm xxxii. 5--virtually the whole of that psalm, which
does, indeed, entirely refer to the greater confession, once for all
opening the heart to God, which can be by no means done fifty-two times
a year, and which, once done, puts men into a state in which they will
never again say there is no health in them; nor that their hearts are
desperately wicked; but will obey for ever the instantly following
order, "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous, and shout for joy, all ye
that are true of heart."
7. The seventh is the one confession in which I can myself
share:--"After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the Lord
God of my fathers."
8. The eighth, James v. 16, tells us to confess our faults--not to God,
but "one to another"--a practice not favoured by English
catechumens--(by the way, what _do_ you all mean by "auricular"
confession--confession that can be heard? and is the Protestant
pleasanter form one that can't be?)
9. The ninth is that passage of St. John (i. 9), the favourite
evangelical text, which is read and preached by thousands of false
preachers every day, without once going on to read its great companion,
"Beloved, if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and
knoweth all things; but if our heart condemn us _not_, then have we
confidence toward God." Make your people understand the second text, and
they will understand the first. At present you leave them understanding
neither.
And the entire body of the remaining texts is summed in Joshua vii. 19
and Ezra x. 11, in which, whether it be Achan, with his Babylonish
garment, or the people of Israel, with their Babylonish lusts, the
meaning of confession is simply what it is to every brave boy, girl,
man, and woman, who knows the meaning of the word "honour" before God or
man--namely, to say what they have done wrong, and to take the
punishment of it (not to get it blanched over by any means), and to do
it no more--which is so far from being a tone of mind generally enforced
either by the English, or any other extant Liturgy, that, though all my
maids are exceedingly pious, and insist on the privilege of going to
church as a quite inviolable one, I think it a scarcely to be hoped for
crown and consummation of virtue in them that they should tell me when
they have broken a plate; and I should expect to be met only with looks
of indignation and astonishment if I ventured to ask one of them how she
had spent her Sunday afternoon.
"Without courage," said Sir Walter Scott, "there is no truth; and
without truth there is no virtue." The sentence would have been itself
more true if Sir Walter had written "candour" for "truth," for it is
possible to be true in insolence, or true in cruelty. But in looking
back from the ridges of the Hill Difficulty in my own past life, and in
all the vision that has been given me of the wanderings in the ways of
others--this, of all principles, has become to me surest--that the first
virtue to be required of man is frankness of heart and lip: and I
believe that every youth of sense and honour, putting himself to
faithful question, would feel that he had the devil for confessor, if he
had not his father or his friend.
That a clergyman should ever be so truly the friend of his parishioners
as to deserve their confidence from childhood upwards, may be flouted as
a sentimental ideal; but he is assuredly only their enemy in showing his
Lutheran detestation of the sale of indulgences by broadcasting these
gratis from his pulpit.
The inconvenience and unpleasantness of a catechism concerning itself
with the personal practice as well as the general theory of duty, are
indeed perfectly conceivable by me; yet I am not convinced that such
manner of catechism would therefore be less medicinal; and during the
past ten years it has often been matter of amazed thought with me, while
our President at Corpus read prayers to the chapel benches, what might
by this time have been the effect on the learning as well as the creed
of the University, if, forty years ago, our stern old Dean Gaisford, of
the House of Christ, instead of sending us to chapel as to the house of
correction, when we missed a lecture, had inquired, before he allowed us
to come to chapel at all, whether we were gamblers, harlot-mongers, or
in concealed and selfish debt.
I observe with extreme surprise in the preceding letters the
unconsciousness of some of your correspondents, that there ever was such
a thing as discipline in the Christian Church. Indeed, the last
wholesome instance of it I can remember was when my own great-great
uncle Maitland lifted Lady ---- from his altar rails, and led her back
to her seat before the congregation, when she offered to take the
Sacrament, being at enmity with her son.[45] But I believe a few hours
honestly spent by any clergyman on his Church history would show him
that the Church's confidence in her prayer has been always exactly
proportionate to the strictness of her discipline; that her present
fright at being caught praying by a chemist or an electrician, results
mainly from her having allowed her twos and threes gathered in the name
of Christ to become sixes and sevens gathered in the name of Belial;
and that therefore her now needfullest duty is to explain to her
stammering votaries, extremely doubtful as they are of the effect of
their supplications either on politics or the weather, that although
Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, he had them better
under command; and that while the effectual fervent prayer of a
righteous man availeth much, the formal and lukewarm one of an
iniquitous man availeth--much the other way.
[45] In some of the country districts of Scotland the right of the
Church to interfere with the lives of private individuals is still
exercised. Only two years ago, a wealthy gentleman farmer was
rebuked by the "Kirk Session" of the Dissenting Church to which he
belonged, for infidelity to his wife.
At the Scottish half-yearly Communion the ceremony of "fencing the
tables" used to be observed; that is, turning away all those whose
lives were supposed to have made them unfit to receive the
Sacrament.
Such an instruction, coupled with due explanation of the nature of
righteousness and iniquity, directed mainly to those who have the power
of both in their own hands, being makers of law, and holders of
property, would, without any further debate, bring about a very singular
change in the position and respectability of English clergymen.
How far they may at present be considered as merely the Squire's left
hand, bound to know nothing of what he is doing with his right, it is
for their own consciences to determine.
For instance, a friend wrote to me the other day, "Will you not come
here? You will see a noble duke destroying a village as old as the
Conquest, and driving out dozens of families whose names are in Domesday
Book, because, owing to the neglect of his ancestors and rackrenting for
a hundred years, the place has fallen out of repair, and the people are
poor, and may become paupers. A local paper ventured to tell the truth.
The duke's agent called on the editor, and threatened him with
destruction if he did not hold his tongue." The noble duke, doubtless,
has proper Protestant horror of auricular confession. But suppose,
instead of the local editor, the local parson had ventured to tell the
truth from his pulpit, and even to intimate to his Grace that he might
no longer receive the Body and Blood of the Lord at the altar of that
parish. The parson would scarcely--in these days--have been therefore
made bonfire of, and had a pretty martyr's memorial by Mr. Scott's
pupils; but he would have lighted a goodly light, nevertheless, in this
England of ours, whose pettifogging piety has now neither the courage to
deny a duke's grace in its church, nor to declare Christ's in its
Parliament.
Lastly. Several of your contributors, I observe, have rashly dipped
their feet in the brim of the water of that raging question of Usury;
and I cannot but express my extreme regret that you should yourself have
yielded to the temptation of expressing opinions which you have had no
leisure either to found or to test. My assertion, however, that the rich
lived mainly by robbing the poor, referred not to Usury, but to Rent;
and the facts respecting both these methods of extortion are perfectly
and indubitably ascertainable by any person who himself wishes to
ascertain them, and is able to take the necessary time and pains. I see
no sign, throughout the whole of these letters, of any wish whatever, on
the part of one of their writers, to ascertain the facts, but only to
defend practices which they hold to be convenient in the world, and are
afraid to blame in their congregations. Of the presumption with which
several of the writers utter their notions on the subject, I do not
think it would be right to speak farther, in an epilogue to which there
is no reply, in the terms which otherwise would have been deserved. In
their bearing on other topics, let me earnestly thank you (so far as my
own feelings may be permitted voice in the matter) for the attention
with which you have examined, and the courage with which you have
ratified, or at least endured, letters which could not but bear at first
the aspect of being written in a hostile--sometimes even in a mocking
spirit. That aspect is untrue, nor am I answerable for it: the things of
which I had to speak could not be shortly described but in terms which
might sound satirical; for all error, if frankly shown, is precisely
most ridiculous when it is most dangerous, and I have written no word
which is not chosen as the exactest for its occasion, whether it move
sigh or smile. In my earlier days I wrote much with the desire to
please, and the hope of influencing the reader. As I grow older and
older, I recognize the truth of the Preacher's saying, "Desire shall
fail, and the mourners go about the streets;" and I content myself with
saying, to whoso it may concern, that the thing is verily thus, whether
they will hear or whether they will forbear. No man more than I has ever
loved the places where God's honour dwells, or yielded truer allegiance
to the teaching of His evident servants. No man at this time grieves
more for the danger of the Church which supposes him her enemy, while
she whispers procrastinating _pax vobiscum_ in answer to the spurious
kiss of those who would fain toll curfew over the last fires of English
faith, and watch the sparrow find nest where she may lay her young,
around the altars of the Lord.
Ever affectionately yours,
J. RUSKIN.